Venom
Babylon Candle
- Joined
- Feb 10, 2008
- Messages
- 2,126
- MBTI Type
- INTJ
- Enneagram
- 1w9
- Instinctual Variant
- sp/sx
The fact that humans develop primitive gills as embryos kinda sealed the deal for me.
chromosome 2 did it for me:
why the fuck would we have vestigial ape telomeres and a vestigal ape centromere?
The linked author admits his own ignorance, and he is right to believe that we cannot infer that God exists from ignorance. But this sword cuts both ways, and neither can he infer that his own metaphysical assumptions are true. For all he knows, increased knowledge of the physical world may increase the improbability of abiogenisis and any form of macro evolution.
I dont agree with the "nobody knows...therefore its 50:50 at this point". His "admitted ignorance" is related to the flaws in calculating odds for something that doesnt have to be as particular of a structure as some people think. The "ignorance" is referring to how some people go off making calculations with the assumption that life had to evolve in one shot from a very particular 4 nucleotide DNA (or RNA) code. Calculating the odds of one person winning the lottery is a lot different than calculating the odds that SOMEBODY wins the lottery.
http://www.infidels.org/library/modern/richard_carrier/addendaB.html said:For in fact, his calculation makes a variety of assumptions which negate the use of this number for that purpose: first, for the first life we want to examine the minimum self-replicating protein, not the "medium" one; second, this only gives us the number of different arrangements, and billions upon billions of those arrangements could be viable self-replicators, not just one of them; third, he presumes a four-nucleotide DNA code, even when there is no reason why life had to be coded that way (there are other coding systems known in nature, and scientists are inventing new life forms based on others, cf. op. cit. n. 1a), and alien life may exist which is coded with a different four nucleotides, or more or less than four, and so on, so that the odds of life forming cannot be derived from the expectation that ours is the only possible molecular arrangement; and fourth, this is just the number of arrangements of coding nucleotides in one gene, but for all we know life began much simpler than this, and later developed a coding system through symbiosis and natural selection. That last point is particularly important, since all that is needed to get life going is anything that replicates, and four-bit coded DNA is not the only feasible molecule that might do that--a much simpler RNA code could have been the starting point [1b].
all these statistics about 747's arising from nowhere are inherently flawed. they make assumptions about 747's arising all at once and they make assumptions about the odds of a "particular 747" (rather than the many possible life forms that could of happened).
Owl said:And this points to one of the limits of science. Science, like religion, does not examine its own assumptions, and, as the author makes clear, it's these assumptions that will shape how one answers the question of origins. Philosophy is the discipline devoted to the critical examination of assumptions, and so the question of origins ultimately lies within the domain of philosophy.
the only limit to science is that it lacks the component simplicity of math and is more ambiguous than pure logic. That isn't to say that we dont make mistakes with science (we do). What it says is that the method of science is pretty high up there on methods that lead to human knowledge.
Can you really deny that in this very moment you are experiencing something? No. Experiences are the foundation of knowledge. In the sense that when I say something like: "Owl has a cat", we can investigate such a prediction by gathering experiences that either confirm or deny such a statement. This is why one persons experience of the paranormal doesnt mean much against science. Science represents MANY "experiences" where there is repeatability and convergence on the idea that there is no paranormal.
the assumption: experiences are real (there is no reason to believe in a cartesian demon), is an assumption most sane people are pretty comfortable with.
If we are really going to question the "assumptions of science" and the "method" of science, then the following lays it out in plain sight:
Science has been CONVERGING and becoming more consistent in its findings in the past 1000 years. Religion on the hand has only been DIVERGING. What does this tell you?