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Pope abolishes limbo
by The Daily Telegraph, Waterstone's
Thanks to Mark Richards for the link.
Reposted from:
http://www.news.com.au/dailytelegraph/story/0,,21595208-5001028,00.html
THE Vatican has determined that limbo does not exist, opening the gates of heaven to babies who die unbaptised, a member of a high-level theological commission.
"The many factors that we have considered ... give serious theological and liturgical grounds for hope that unbaptised infants who die will be saved," says a document published by the US magazine Origins with the approval of Pope Benedict XVI.
The medieval concept of limbo as a place where unbaptised infants spend eternity but without communion with God seems to reflect an "unduly restrictive view of salvation," the document says.
The thought that stillborn babies, for example, would be relegated to a kind of no-man's-land in the afterlife tormented generations of Catholic families.
The idea of limbo - from the Latin for "edge" - was meant to address the paradox that unbaptised babies could not go to heaven because their original sin had not been expunged, but nor should they go to purgatory or hell.
In 1984, when Benedict headed the Vatican's doctrinal enforcement body as Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, he said he was "personally" in favour of scrapping the 13th-century notion, which he termed a mere "hypothesis."
He has approved the document drafted by the International Theological Commission, the panel's secretary told reporters, adding however that its conclusions were not to be considered Roman Catholic Church dogma.
A member of the panel, Dijon (France) Archbishop Roland Minnerath, said the 41-page document was completed several weeks ago after deliberations that began in November 2005.
"We cannot know with certainty what will happen" when an unbaptised baby dies, said panel member Paul McPartlan.
"But we have good grounds to hope that God in his mercy and love looks after these children and brings them to salvation," he said, quoted by the Catholic News Service.
Fake Picture. (Thanks to Peter & Susan Monro)
RELATED:
http://richarddawkins.net/article,187,Do-The-Limbo,BBC
Reposted from:
http://www.news.com.au/dailytelegraph/story/0,,21595208-5001028,00.html
THE Vatican has determined that limbo does not exist, opening the gates of heaven to babies who die unbaptised, a member of a high-level theological commission.
"The many factors that we have considered ... give serious theological and liturgical grounds for hope that unbaptised infants who die will be saved," says a document published by the US magazine Origins with the approval of Pope Benedict XVI.
The medieval concept of limbo as a place where unbaptised infants spend eternity but without communion with God seems to reflect an "unduly restrictive view of salvation," the document says.
The thought that stillborn babies, for example, would be relegated to a kind of no-man's-land in the afterlife tormented generations of Catholic families.
The idea of limbo - from the Latin for "edge" - was meant to address the paradox that unbaptised babies could not go to heaven because their original sin had not been expunged, but nor should they go to purgatory or hell.
In 1984, when Benedict headed the Vatican's doctrinal enforcement body as Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, he said he was "personally" in favour of scrapping the 13th-century notion, which he termed a mere "hypothesis."
He has approved the document drafted by the International Theological Commission, the panel's secretary told reporters, adding however that its conclusions were not to be considered Roman Catholic Church dogma.
A member of the panel, Dijon (France) Archbishop Roland Minnerath, said the 41-page document was completed several weeks ago after deliberations that began in November 2005.
"We cannot know with certainty what will happen" when an unbaptised baby dies, said panel member Paul McPartlan.
"But we have good grounds to hope that God in his mercy and love looks after these children and brings them to salvation," he said, quoted by the Catholic News Service.
Fake Picture. (Thanks to Peter & Susan Monro)
RELATED:
http://richarddawkins.net/article,187,Do-The-Limbo,BBC
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Posted: Monday, April 23, 2007 | PermalinkComments 101 - 150 of 180 |
Reload Comments | Back to Top | Page Numbers102. Comment #34262 by BAEOZ on April 23, 2007 at 4:52 pm
"A creationist would argue that there is no gap in the fossil record because it represents the result of a catastrophic global flood about 4,500 years ago."Can you explain how the fossil record, goes from simplest organisms to most complex organisms as we ascend in the rock strata and that man is only seen at the very top? If it was desposited in a great flood, wouldn't be all mixed up? Humans don't float well, compared to other organisms, wouldn't they be in lower strata? And how did all the plants survive this great flood? They didn't hitch a lift on the arc, and aren't very aquatic....
Other Comments by BAEOZ
103. Comment #34263 by BAEOZ on April 23, 2007 at 4:53 pm
When I say most complex, I'll get shot down, I should say more recent/evolved. D'oh! Other Comments by BAEOZ
104. Comment #34266 by oldskeptic on April 23, 2007 at 5:07 pm
It seems that Devloved doesn't write much of his overlong screeds himselfPertaining to his comment 34066
There are many other examples that could be cited in nature which require the most delicate of balancings in order for the stars, planets, life, and mankind to exist.
Before concluding this section, we will consider but one more: the distance that the moon is from the earth. If it were much closer, it would crash into our planet, if much farther away, it would move off into space.
If it were much closer, the tides that the moon causes on the earth would become dangerously larger. Ocean waves would sweep across low-lying sections of the continents. Resultant friction would heat the oceans, destroying the delicate thermal balance needed for life on earth.
A more distant moon would reduce tidal action, making the oceans more sluggish. Stagnant water would endanger marine life, yet it is that very marine life that produces the oxygen that we breath. (We receive more of our oxygen from ocean plants than from land plants.) Why is the moon so exactly positioned in the sky overhead? Who placed it there? It surely did not rush by like a speeding train, then decide to pause, and carefully enter that balanced orbit.
http://www.pathlights.com/ce_encyclopedia/Encyclopedia/01-ma10.htm
Whether describing tides, proton mass, or the earth's position in the solar system, is not a grand design present from the very beginning? These phenomena don't mutate or change with time. The negative response of secular science to new evidence of design is interesting in that it shows the extremes to which man will go to maintain a belief in the random origin of all things. It has even been proposed that there really is an infinite number of universes, each with a completely different set of physical properties. According to such thinking, our particular universe just happens to have conditions suitable for human life, and that is why we are here to enjoy it! Of course, there is no way to detect any "other" universes or comprehend their underlying principles.
www.answersingenesis.org/Docs/399.asp
Most of the rest was a long quote that he at least managed to attribute to Dawkins.
Oldskeptic.
Other Comments by oldskeptic
105. Comment #34267 by Rtambree on April 23, 2007 at 5:07 pm
102. Comment #34262 by BAEOZFloods & fossils...
That's easy - the mammals could all climb to higher ground as the floodwaters rose and therefore they're the last to be fossilised. The humans could climb the highest and are therefore found in the highest position in the fossil beds. The dinosaurs were slow movers and became among the first of the large animals to be fossilised.
There's always a religious explanation in response to anything you throw up. You can't possibly combat the full range of logical fallacies they'll deploy against you: differential thresholds of evidence, confirmation bias, hyper-active pattern recognition, loose metaphorical scriptural interpretations, etc, etc.
Don't get sucked into the belief that you can engage them with rational arguments. It's a waste of time.
You've got to admire their creativity though, in dodging inconvenient facts.
Other Comments by Rtambree
106. Comment #34270 by denoir on April 23, 2007 at 5:19 pm
devolved:Instead of wasting our time and your own time with pseudoscientific articles, please focus on the basics that many posters patiently covered in this thread.
If you wish to learn about pseudogenes, you can find the basics in plenty of places. Wikipedia can be a good starting point and it has some references:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pseudogene
Even that relatively short text should allow you to think for yourself and discover how flawed the article that you posted is.
I'm not going to respond to it, because I know how this game works: If I list you the errors in it, you'll dig up another pseudoscientific article and ask: "What about this?". And for every two seconds that it takes you to click on a random link on a creationist website, you'll waste half an hour of my life. You would not learn anything but infinitely worse you'll prevent me from doing something meaningful instead.
A bit off-topic but to make something meaningful of this post:
Speaking of pseudogenes, did you know that all animals in varying degrees are walking biological warfare labs? It turns out that a large portion of our junk DNA (pseudogenes) and hence a significant portion of our DNA consists of inactive retroviruses.
We have tens of thousands of them - all deactivated and accumulated during our past in battles that the viruses lost. They, in the ordinary virus way, managed to insert their DNA into our ancestors' genome only to be discovered and shut down. Inactive they posed no threat but were subsequently replicated with the genome where they can still be found today.
We can even date them by measuring degradation in the sequences. DNA really tells us a very interesting story.
Other Comments by denoir
107. Comment #34272 by BAEOZ on April 23, 2007 at 5:26 pm
Hey Rtambree, I agree with you that it's pointless, but I get frustrated with this ignorance as knowledge BS and sometimes argue in vain against it. It's a failing I know, I'd love to have a better weapon to combat this mindless bunk.Although I'd like to see how a human could climb higher than more agile land animals, or fish and other aquatic life that swim. Shouldn't they be able to swim long after mankind has succumbed to the water that drowned whatever peaks he was able to scale? Why aren't trilobytes higher than man in the strata? Where are the plesiosaurs that swam after man? Maybe they did! That explains the Loch Ness Monster, next myth please....
Other Comments by BAEOZ
108. Comment #34273 by ScienceBreath on April 23, 2007 at 5:28 pm
devolved, you're just not getting it. Science does not provide certainties: all scientific theories are provisional until they are disproven. Your disappointment that science does not provide certainty tells me more about your ignorance of science than about an inherent problem with science.However, your most egregious gaff is to think that poking around looking for incomplete scientific explanations is somehow support for your creationist beliefs--it isn't. Until you realise that, no one is going to take you seriously.
Finally, I find you rather disingenuous. Your missives often start with a plea for understanding and yet it's clear that you have no real interest in resolving your "issues". Your question about information exposed you as a creation apologist rather than an honest broker looking for help.
Other Comments by ScienceBreath
109. Comment #34355 by Patrick McArdle on April 23, 2007 at 9:31 pm
Thomas Paine noted how wonderfully inventive those Romans could be:"They [the authors of Christian doctrine] promised him [Satan] ALL the Jews, ALL the Turks [i.e., Muslims] by anticipation, nine-tenths of the world beside, and Mahomet [Mohammad] into the bargain. After this, who could doubt the bountifulness of the Christian Mythology?" (The Age of Reason, p. 17)
He also noted the arbitrary and capricious nature of their doctrines:
"When the Christian Mythologists established their system, they collected all of the writings they could find, and managed them as they pleased. It is a matter altogether of uncertainty to us whether such of the writings as now appear under the name of the Old and New Testament are in the same state in which those collectors say they found them, or whether they added, altered, abridged, or dressed them up.
"Be this as it may, they decided by VOTE which of the books out of the collection they had made should be the WORD OF GOD, and which should not." (pp. 20-21)
As often, Mr. Dawkins himself has the last word:
"What impresses me about the Catholic mythology is partly its tasteless kitsch but mostly the airy nonchalance with which these people make up the details as they go along. It is just shamelessly invented." (The God Delusion, p. 35)
Other Comments by Patrick McArdle
110. Comment #34375 by devolved on April 23, 2007 at 10:49 pm
'Over the past 30 to 40 years a number of new strains of food poisoning bacteria have evolved. That is before the 1970s or thereabouts, they did not exist (or were at least unknown)—now they are a threat to food safety. The evolution of these bacteria has been traced to the transfer of genetic information (toxin genes or acid resistance genes etc.) from one type of bacteria to another. And it is a similar situation for all the observed cases of evolution including mutations. They all involve either transfer of existing (i.e. created) genetic information from one to another or the loss of some pre-existing (created) genetic information.'Published in Chemistry in Australia April 2007, pp. 19–20. Ashton, J
You can all dodge the question till the cows come home but without scientific evidence of a mechanism for adding new genetic information the evolutionary hypothesis is just that.
As for damming people's views because they're not your own what can I say? If you can't refute scientists who argue scientifically against you you have a problem.
Other Comments by devolved
111. Comment #34390 by Spinoza on April 24, 2007 at 12:17 am
[quote]You can all dodge the question till the cows come home but without scientific evidence of a mechanism for adding new genetic information the evolutionary hypothesis is just that.[/quote]What the hell do you think heterosexual procreation does?
Other Comments by Spinoza
112. Comment #34395 by Shuggy on April 24, 2007 at 12:32 am
97. Comment #34235 by devolved on April 23, 2007 at 3:15 pmwhy is luck a more plausible basis for life than an intelligent creator?
Because
"any creative intelligence of sufficient complexity to design anything, comes into existence only as the end product of an extended process of gradual evolution."
- TGD, p31
If not, then how?
Other Comments by Shuggy
113. Comment #34408 by Robert Maynard on April 24, 2007 at 1:48 am
devolved,Let me ask why is luck a more plausible basis for life than an intelligent creator? It's definitely preferable if you are an atheist. But what if you don't believe in luck? I'm not being flippant.Well, it is more plausible because luck is simply an affectation applied to probablistic outcomes. Be fully aware that I am not speaking of luck in any mystical or karmic sense (and I imagine no other atheist would either) - luck is not something people need to have faith in - luck is merely how we can describe being the benefactor of probability.
Again, it takes no faith to assert that a coin-toss tournament with 100,000 people will end with someone who has won at least 15 coin tosses in a row. This is a statement of fact. Without any evidence that one may be "skilled" at calling coin tosses, we are free to describe the highly improbable 'feat' of winning 15 coin tosses as "lucky" without introducing any mysticism.
For the very same reasons as the coin tossing tournament I mentioned, instances of probability (luck/chance) are not only plausible causes for events which cannot be explained with qualitative selection, they're probable, and observable!
On the other hand, intelligent creators of new information are hard to come by outside of our own species, so we don't have much reason to take the hypothesis seriously. This may change.. but I'll bet your "immortal soul" that it won't. :P
Without scientific evidence of a mechanism for adding new genetic information the evolutionary hypothesis is just that.I'm sorry, but "mechanism" just isn't a very good word for describing unintended events, which is precisely what genotypic mutations are. (Edit: Billysands listed several kinds of ways in which such alterations can occur, on page 2)
Scientists already have a fairly extensive understanding of the mechanisms of duplication involved in reproduction, there are small mountains of literature on the topic, and anyone with the briefest reading on the topic could tell you that it is errors in these copying mechanisms which produce variation. So.. I'm just not sure what you're looking for. :|
Other Comments by Robert Maynard
114. Comment #34410 by scottishgeologist on April 24, 2007 at 2:00 am
devolved wrote:"Published in Chemistry in Australia April 2007, pp. 19–20. Ashton, J"
There is already controversy over this article. It is NOT peer-reviewed. This guy Ashton is a YEC 6 day AiG type.
Ashton uses Francis Collins for support. (Director of the National Human Genome Research Institute)Collins is also a Christian who believes in "theistic evolution" as opposed to the YEC school of wingnuttery.
Collins point about YEC / 6 day creationism is that:
'If the tenets of young-earth creationism were true, basically all the sciences of geology, cosmology, and biology would utterly collapse. It would be the same as saying 2 plus 2 is actually 5. The tragedy of young-earth creationism is that it takes a relatively recent and extreme view of Genesis, applies to it an unjustified scientific gloss, and then asks sincere and well-meaning seekers to swallow this whole, despite the massive discordance with decades of scientific evidence from multiple disciplines. Is it any wonder that many sadly turn away from faith concluding that they cannot believe in a God who calls for an abandonment of logic and reason?'
In other words those that subscribe to this sort of pish are ridiculous and are actually dangerous to faith. A large number of theists ARE evolutionists. (No doubt they are heading off to hell by the truck load...)
So when a YEC / 6 day nutjob like Ashton writes a non -peer reviewed article , which is little more than an opinion column, it carries no weight whatsoever.
The biggest problem with this sorry incident is when a scientific journal publishes this sort of stuff. It damages the credibiity of the journal in question.
You would think these people would learn after that flawed study into prayer and fertility that appeared in the Journal of Reproductive Medicine. You can read about it here:
http://www.randi.org/jr/070904that.html#1
Peer reviewed journals represent the absolute cutting edge of scientific knowledge - when this sort of nonsense appears it damages the entire scientific community.
Editors, take care will you?
Other Comments by scottishgeologist
115. Comment #34417 by Lee Harrison on April 24, 2007 at 2:20 am
I notice that Devolved has chosen not to take up my challenge to display some intellectual courage and honesty (see comment 34253 - the last one on the previous page). Instead all I'm seeing is another simplistic 'challenge' gleaned from a fellow creationist, a sarcastic restatement of a question that has already been thoroughly answered and, considering that this is coming from an almost-certainly Christian, an utterly perverse statement about damning people of different views.
Oh well...
Other Comments by Lee Harrison
116. Comment #34425 by Quetzalcoatl on April 24, 2007 at 2:46 am
Re comment 34375: devolved-You can all dodge the question till the cows come home but without scientific evidence of a mechanism for adding new genetic information the evolutionary hypothesis is just that.
Look at comment 53 on this thread, Billy provided loads of mechanisms for you. If you want more detail, I think Pandasthumb.org did some articles on them within the last few months.
Other Comments by Quetzalcoatl
117. Comment #34434 by BillySands on April 24, 2007 at 3:51 am
Does antone else find it funny that Devolved claims not to know about pseudogenes but is using them as "evidence" againt evolution. There is so much wrong in that article he links to, but I wont waste my time on it, because he is clearly not interested. He can find articles on pseudogenes on the net if he is really interested.You can all dodge the question till the cows come home but without scientific evidence of a mechanism for adding new genetic information the evolutionary hypothesis is just that.
He really is not listening is he? By the way, sometimes, one base change is all it takes for the development of drug resistance, and evolution often loses "information" too - such as olfactory receptors, haemoglobin in ice fish, whole biosynthetic pathways in parasites (and the "fossil" genes remain decaying in the genome). He clearly does not understand evolution.
If he is a christian, perhaps he could explain why he believes the bible? It is afterall full of failed prophecies, non prophecies and absurdities, historical inaccuracies, contraditions and bad moral teachings. Oh yeah, and Pagans came up with christianity first. Could it be a "delusion" that allows him to believe this stuff and deny evolution.
He should watch some of the evolution links etc here and make his own mind up and not site Creation ministries International who cleary state on their website that they are predisposed to defend the bible no matter what - nice rational starting point - NOT!
BTW see if you can work out what is wrong with this statement from the begining of the article.
Creationist scientists (including me) generally assume that God would not create purposeless genes in different primates, and that God did not independently disable the same genes in humans and nonhuman primates during the Curse.
In addition to the obvious problems, I wonder how this guy explains the facy that there is a great deal of variation in the human genome (Ask a forensic scientist) or that some of us contain forms of genes that will cause disease - or even predispose us to particular behavioural responses - bad news for those who believe in absolute free will.
I suspect that you haven't even read the article and are just throwing creationist propaganda at us. Why did you not read about processed pseudogenes first? Why did you just ask us to read something you dont understand. Why not approach it from the other way first. It is after all mormal to be familiar with the facts before you attempt to offer an alternative. To help you, go find out about bovine seminal ribonuclease - a a processed and converted pseudogene pseudo gene. (I didn't plan this, but I,ve just noticed that I have duplicated AND mutated my pseudogene - see how easy it is!)
Posiedon (Alan?)
I saw her first :-)
Other Comments by BillySands
118. Comment #34473 by denoir on April 24, 2007 at 7:12 am
scottishgeologist:The biggest problem with this sorry incident is when a scientific journal publishes this sort of stuff. It damages the credibiity of the journal in question.
You would think these people would learn after that flawed study into prayer and fertility that appeared in the Journal of Reproductive Medicine. You can read about it here:
http://www.randi.org/jr/070904that.html#1
Peer reviewed journals represent the absolute cutting edge of scientific knowledge - when this sort of nonsense appears it damages the entire scientific community.
Unfortunately it is not entirely uncommon for complete nonsense to pass a peer review and be published. Medical journals are especially bad at the filtering.
The important thing to remember however that a scientific theory is only considered solid once it has been experimentally supported many times over and when you can start building other theories based on it. Science is the whole confirmed body of knowledge, and not the most recent discoveries. In fact, if you open an issue of Nature - the most über-peer reviewed journal in the world, you'd find that a decade later half of the articles that were published were actually dead wrong. Getting something published is just the first small step. It's just putting it out there - the verdict comes later.
Given how bad journal peer reviews can be, I'm actually surprised that no creationists papers have slipped through.
Other Comments by denoir
119. Comment #34518 by ridelo on April 24, 2007 at 10:28 am
And what about Hitler? If he was aborted he would now be in heaven. Just bad luck?Other Comments by ridelo
120. Comment #34524 by Mr. Mark on April 24, 2007 at 10:52 am
I wonder if the RC church was in the practice of selling indulgences to parents to get their kids out of limbo...and if so, are they ready to offer refunds with interest to those who paid for such indulgences?Other Comments by Mr. Mark
121. Comment #34568 by Shuggy on April 24, 2007 at 2:27 pm
ridelo asked:And what about Hitler? If he was aborted he would now be in heaven. Just bad luck?
What a fascinatingly confused question! It seems to be based on the answer to an old one (whose punchline was "Congratulations! You have just aborted Beethoven!") which was "Or Hitler!"
Does this mean:
- "If the foetal Hitler had been aborted, he never would have grown up to be Der Fuhrer, but would have gone to Heaven (and not Limbo), and it's bad luck he wasn't"? or
- "The foetal Hitler had an evil soul that did not deserve to go to heaven, but, bad luck, now we know there's no Limbo, he would"?
Other Comments by Shuggy
122. Comment #34570 by Shuggy on April 24, 2007 at 2:32 pm
There was a cartoon in the New Yorker after Vatican II, showing a demon asking Satan "Hey Boss, what are we going to do with all the people who ate meat on a Friday?"Now there can be a parallel one, an angel asking God "Hey Boss, where are we going to put all the babies from Limbo?"
Other Comments by Shuggy
123. Comment #34631 by devolved on April 24, 2007 at 6:24 pm
Comment #34390 by Spinoza on April 24, 2007 at 12:17 am"[quote]You can all dodge the question till the cows come home but without scientific evidence of a mechanism for adding new genetic information the evolutionary hypothesis is just that.[/quote]
What the hell do you think heterosexual procreation does?"
We'll we'd both agree on the answer. It creates babies. But unfortunately you've missed the point.
Let me give you an analogy. Imagine taking two pages, one from a history book and one from a geography book, and then putting them side by side into a photo copier. You'd end up with an identical copy.
Babies are genetic copies of their parents. The parents create a new life and they also create more of the same genetic information. Yes there's more information but it's more of the same. There isn't any new, that is different information.
The word evolution is used in two distinct ways.
First is the 'General Theory of Evolution' (GTE) defined as 'the theory that all the living forms in the world have arisen from a single source which itself came from an inorganic form.'
Second evolution is defined as a change in features over time. This is a much more limited use of the word evolution and is accepted by everyone.
If evolution is true in the first way then there has to be a process that progressively increases the amount of genetic information over time. So to take just one example. If you believe in the GTE, at some point in history there was a living creature that had no genetic information for a lung. But somehow sufficient information increases led to the development of a lung that now is an organ in the baby.
I've received several suggestions of examples of genetic information increases occuring in operational science (the stuff that's going on today and involves all the rigours of science - observable, testable, repeatable and falsifiable experiments).
I'm genuinely trying to look at this question from both sides, that is those whose presuppositions lead them to believe in the GTE and those whose presuppositions lead them to believe in creation by an intelligent creator.
The difficulty of course is that when I find myself out of my depth scientifically I have to look at arguments of scientists who draw diametrically opposed conclusions from identical evidence. It ain't easy!
Other Comments by devolved
124. Comment #34659 by carlptr on April 24, 2007 at 8:11 pm
I am glad that the Vatican has finally hit the nail on the head with something really relevant. The whole world has been anxiously waiting for this to be sorted out. We can all now focus our attention on the second rate issues of famine in Africa, the climate change and environmental degradation, terrorism brought about by religious des-education and fanaticism and all the rest which are clearly too trivial to concern the religious enlightment.Other Comments by carlptr
125. Comment #34727 by BillySands on April 25, 2007 at 2:30 am
DevolvedI am trying to give you the benefit of the doubt here. Regarding lungs (and the rest of evolution) You don't suddenly go from no lungs to lungs. It is a gradual process. I suggest sean b carrol's book the making of the fittest for explanations and evidence on how "information" increases. You can also radically change body shape by altering or changing the expression of HOX genes - go look them up! There is one gene (Alx-4)that when part is lost in dogs gives them a whole new claw - altered "information" - again, another example of loss of information causing change, so please drop this you need more information to increase complexity fallacy.
I have to agree with everyone else her, you dont understand what you are talking about. Babies are not copies of their parents. Go read some proper books and then come back. I also doubt that you ever believed in evolution. I certainly did when I was a christian - as do many christians, so please also drop the preconception fallacy as well. Go check the ken miller video on this site - he is a catholic and really hates intelligent design theory. Simon conway morris (anglican) and your friend Behe also believes in evolution, only behe erroneously thinks some things are too complex to have evolved - Ken Miller rips this idea appart. So, now we have disposed of preconceptions, are you going to give Richard Dawkins your money? - bet you dont.
I dont really see much point continueing this discussion now, because all you are doing is throwing propaganda our way. That CMI article really was bad. Were you actually convinced by it?
Other Comments by BillySands
126. Comment #34773 by Robert Maynard on April 25, 2007 at 7:34 am
devolved..at some point in history there was a living creature that had no genetic information for a lung. But somehow sufficient information increases led to the development of a lung..Again, you should read more books on genetics - I can't claim to be an expert on the matter, but I'll put it this way - it's one thing to say that the first organism did not have lungs like we do today, nor did it have a mouth, or intestines - but it certainly did have mechanisms for taking in energy from the environment, converting it for its own use, and excreting waste product - self-replication isn't free. It is a mistake to talk about the lung as a physiological structure - it carries out a function which has to have been present in one form or another since the very first lifeforms.
Then again, it's also a mistake to keep using phrases like "increases in information" - not only because it misrepresents the way genotypes affect phenotypes (more genes != more information; more genes != more complex organism; more genes != linear, naive notions of 'improvement'); it also re-enforces a semantic divide between actual scientists - who do not use these loaded terms because they are well aware that "EVOLUTION DOES NOT WORK THAT WAY" - and non-scientists, who use acronyms like GTE to refer to evolution. :|
Seeing you did not use your latest comment to respond to my criticisms of your understanding of luck and the anthropic principle, am I foolish to hope we may have made some progress on that issue?
Other Comments by Robert Maynard
127. Comment #34847 by PrimeFactor on April 25, 2007 at 12:44 pm
The version I read of this article said that the former pope had ordered "a study on Limbo," which absolutely cracked me up. Sort of like, "Call the experts! We are doing a study on dragons!"What exactly were they claiming to STUDY? I mean, the limbo thing isn't even in their official rule book. They made up the "problem" of the unbaptised babies, then pretended to be merciful heroes by "fixing" it.
Reminds me of a three-year-old I used to know who would run over ants with her tricycle, then put a bandaid on the pavement over their squashed bodies.
Other Comments by PrimeFactor
128. Comment #34851 by ghostbuster on April 25, 2007 at 1:02 pm
Now, if they could only abolish Popes.Other Comments by ghostbuster
129. Comment #34921 by Shuggy on April 25, 2007 at 3:10 pm
I don't know why I'm getting into the "debate" on evolution with devolved here on the page about Limbo, but,First is the 'General Theory of Evolution' (GTE) defined as 'the theory that all the living forms in the world have arisen from a single source which itself came from an inorganic form.'I've never heard of "the GTE" before. Who defined that? Who says it happened only once? We are now fairly sure that eucaryotes are a symbiosis. Is there any consensus that the components have a single origin?
Second evolution is defined as a change in features over time. This is a much more limited use of the word evolution and is accepted by everyone.You reckon? Only accepted by creationists within (undefined) "kinds". One of Darwin's many contributions was the realisation that there are no fundamental barriers between species (only reproductive barriers that evolved, usually after some physical separation), something creationists still deny.
Other Comments by Shuggy
130. Comment #34934 by devolved on April 25, 2007 at 3:48 pm
"Well, it is more plausible because luck is simply an affectation applied to probablistic outcomes. Be fully aware that I am not speaking of luck in any mystical or karmic sense (and I imagine no other atheist would either) - luck is not something people need to have faith in - luck is merely how we can describe being the benefactor of probability."I am profoundly grateful for this post because it gets to the heart of the matter.
Every one of us sees the world through a 'worldview' or 'paradigm'. Our views on science, religion, economics, history and all else are underpinned by presuppositions and your post is a superb example so thank you. (The philosopher of science Karl Popper wrote extensively on this and a Google search will quickly take us to our favourite encyclopaedia).
Now your comment to me is based on a presupposition that I can express this way:
A I live in an amazingly complex and huge universe. I'm so lucky.
B Because I am an atheist I presuppose that nothing could have been created by
an intelligent creator because there is no supernatural.
C Therefore it must have happened as a result of luck etc.
If I were to accept your presupposition it would be akin to playing dice with someone who had loaded the dice in their favour, or phoning into a TV quiz after the competition had been decided.
Let me now express another worldview based upon a different presupposition:
A I live in an amazingly complex and huge universe. I'm so lucky.
B Because I do not discount the possibility of supernatural intelligence
I remain open to the idea of a super intelligent creator.
C Therefore I believe that life may have been created supernaturally.
Now I am as repulsed as you by the sight (and sound) of religious fundamentalists pouring out venomous and profoundly hateful stuff. I am equally repulsed by atheist fundamentalists who do exactly the same thing. I find some of the posts on this website profoundly offensive.
The physical evidence we all look at does not of itself prove* either a universe etc created solely by naturalistic processes, or a universe etc created by supernatural means. (* I use the word 'prove' here in the sense of overwhelming evidence in favour of one worldview over another).
Finally I have had many suggestions that I read books. I love reading and thoroughly enjoyed reading 'The God Delusion' a few months ago. It seems to me axiomatic (a presupposition I grant you) that we need to examine other people's ideas with some care before dismissing them.
So let me leave you all with a recommendation too. David Robertson has written a short but very well argued book called 'The Dawkins Letters'. It only costs £4.99 and the ISBN is 978 184 550 2614. Why read the book? It commends and praises what is good and points out the shortcomings and mistakes. Robertson is a Christian but not a creationist.
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131. Comment #34948 by BillySands on April 25, 2007 at 4:32 pm
DevolvedI have read robertsons letters. I find them exceptionally poor as do many others - he has had his own thread on this site and has been torn to shreds.
Again you are not listening. I had presuppositions as a christian. The overwhelming weight of evidence for evolution was something I was convinced in as a christian. I am now open minded and lack those christian presuppositions, so drop the amateur psychology. Evolution is testable. You can make predictions - and they are confirmed. For example, we have one less pair of chromosomes than other primate species. How do we explain this? We can hypothesise that there could have been a fusion of two chromosomes in our recent past. We can test this by sequencing them. Chromosomes only have areas called telomeres on there ends. It turns out human chromosome 2 has internal telomeric sequences - hence 2 chromosomes fused to form no. 2 If the hypothesis failed we would have no alternative other than to reject it. Where is the preconception here.
The problem also is that you do not consider the supernatural to be meerly a possibility (as any honest atheist will agree) you make a leap that you cant justify and assert that it is THE ultimate explanation for everything. Infact, evolution works very well with out any need for the supernatural.
Other Comments by BillySands
132. Comment #34996 by Robert Maynard on April 25, 2007 at 9:59 pm
A I live in an amazingly complex and huge universe. I'm so lucky.This is not exactly accurate.
B Because I am an atheist I presuppose that nothing could have been created by
an intelligent creator because there is no supernatural.
C Therefore it must have happened as a result of luck etc.
I will agree that there is room for a chicken-egg style dispute over whether my belief in scientific naturalism (let alone anyone elses) preceded my atheism or the other way around - Were I to seriously reflect on where I am now, I would probably be very willing to concede that indifference to spirituality may have preceded my interest in science/reason, which informs and strengthens my skepticism. Even so, perhaps presupposition is not as suitable a description as "a strong hunch", which has is in turn become supported by evidence.
I am sure that for many others, it has been the opposite, with atheism being an almost unavoidable consequence of their scientific worldview, and so it is inaccurate to use the paraphrase "I presuppose this because I am an atheist," rather than, for example "I am an atheist because it makes sense, given what I know. I simply cannot will myself into considering a proposition for which there is no evidence."
I think the main reason to 'presuppose' the non-existence of supernatural phenomena, and assert that non-natural explanations are useless, is not only because it is quite rational to assume that "impossible things never happen" (impossible here defined as concepts or phenomena incompatible with physical laws), but also because there is still a dearth of experimental evidence (ie. none) for the existence of any non-natural phenomena. When so many scientists - many of them eager to find positive results - try and fail to observe anything paranormal.. well.. it doesn't rule it out entirely, but I mean, certainly there has to be a point when we stop taking it seriously, right?
The fact that the very notion of supernatural creation finds its origins in an era synonymous with almost total ignorance of the natural world is, for me, an adequate reason to not take it seriously, right from the start. The main reason the idea continues to flourish is almost certainly not because it has any merit, it's because we uncritically embrace the cultural traditions of that era generation after generation, without reviewing the accompanying claims.
If it can be reasonably concluded that the people who originally made these claims simply did not know what they were talking about in regards to the natural world (which I think has been pretty fairly demonstrated), is it really intellectually dishonest to "presuppose" that these ideas, devised to account for the natural world, are just as ignorant as the people who originally saw them as necessary? The burden is on those who believe in the principle of supernatural creation, in the twenty-first century, to demonstrate that it is any less absurd than the various creation myths which gave it credence in the first place. If we jettison the cultural esteem granted to creationism and examine it as a hypothesis, the scientific method will literally shred any model which isn't significantly vague and diluted to accomodate scientific consensus. No young-universe/earth model can defend itself against the implications of the speed of light or geochronology, without sounding like somebody on a bad mushroom trip ("Dude.. what if like, God was a total prankster, and totally just created streams of photons in transit, to simulate an external Universe that doesn't actually exist! And planted exacting amounts of decay product in geological strata so it looked like it had been deposited over hundreds of millions of years - but actually didn't! Because he totally could.." "Dude, you just blew my friggin' mind!").
Why bother desperately supporting the essential principles of a really old (and irrational) idea with no evidence, despite already stripping off all of its stupidest characteristics, just because we can't completely disprove it (and it happens to be cherished by billions of people)?
Other Comments by Robert Maynard
133. Comment #35140 by hightrekker on April 26, 2007 at 10:23 am
A quick summary----No More Limbo for Bimbo
Apr 21, 2007
Limbo, the Catholic answer to where unbaptized babies go when they die, has gone the way of other antiquated notions such as geocentrism, the belief that the sun and all the planets revolve around the earth.
A Vatican committe, authorized by Pope Benedict XVI [Ratzinger], spent years determining where little babies go when they die, coming to the conclusion, in its 41-page report, that it's Heaven.
Conservative Catholics are protesting the decision, fearing that parents will delay their children's christenings. They fear it would also encourage abortion, as Catholic activists often tell women considering abortions that their fetuses will not go to Heaven.
The Vatican decision is in line with the church's growing vision of a feto-centric universe.
* "Bimbo" is Italian for baby.
Posted by: miss_poppy on Apr 21
Other Comments by hightrekker
134. Comment #35144 by alurex46 on April 26, 2007 at 10:36 am
How cool that the pope can just change the rules like that. Madness.
Other Comments by alurex46
135. Comment #35205 by devolved on April 26, 2007 at 2:59 pm
Response to Robert Maynard (and others)The 'General Theory of Evolution' (GTE) was defined by the evolutionist Gerald Kerkut as 'the theory that all the living forms in the world have arisen from a single source which itself came from an inorganic form.'
Kerkut, G.A., Implications of Evolution, Pergamon, Oxford, UK, p. 157, 1960.
[Gerald A. Kerkut or G. A. Kerkut (1927 - 2004) was a noted British zoologist and physiologist. He attended the University of Cambridge from 1945 to 1952 and earned a doctorate in zoology. He went on to establish the Department of Physiology and Biochemistry at University of Southampton where he remained throughout his career. He became Professor of Physiology and Biochemistry in 1966 and went on to become the Dean of Science, Chairman of the School of Biochemical and Physiological Sciences and Head of the Department of Neurophysiology.]
You asked me to respond to your Anthropic Principle posts.
I might ask which of the many variations you think is the best. It's clear that every variation is hugely controversial and is claimed by scientists with differing presuppositions to support their own positions.
I spent some time looking at various websites. You might care to look at this one: http://www.physics.sfsu.edu/~lwilliam/sota/anth/anthropic_principle_index.html
The author displays a seemingly rare ability to see the arguments from all sides and concludes with the comment: "In the end, I suppose, it's just a matter of personal preference which theory, the God hypothesis or one of the Many Worlds cosmologies, you choose to believe in, for now."
I like the ending 'for now'. There are at least three possibilities and I'm confident that each will choose the option that confirms his own presuppositions. They are:
1. History will come to and end and all will stand before Christ
2. We'll never know the answer
3. Scientists will find convincing proof
I also note that the odds are rather longer than some (posting comments on this website) appear to suggest. Fred Hoyle calculated the odds against a simple functioning protein molecule originating by chance in some primordial soup as being the same as if you filled the whole solar system shoulder-to-shoulder with blind men and their Rubik's cubes, then expected them all to get the right solution at the same time. (Source: Fred Hoyle, 'The Big Bang in Astronomy', New Scientist, Vol.92, No. 1280, 1981, p. 527)
I want to respond to your comments about presuppositions.
I absolutely agree that scientists often start with a strong hunch and end up with good supporting evidence. However we need to travel backwards a bit (logically speaking).
You have a presupposition (that is a starting belief which is itself unprovable, thus based on faith) that there is no supernatural. Whether there is a realm of the supernatural or not, science cannot say. Science concerns itself only with the natural realm. If there is a supernatural, it comprises, by definition, phenomena beyond the readily observable and testable things of the natural realm.
I'd like to move on to your comment: "Again, you should read more books on genetics - I can't claim to be an expert on the matter, but I'll put it this way - it's one thing to say that the first organism did not have lungs like we do today, nor did it have a mouth, or intestines - but it certainly did have mechanisms for taking in energy from the environment, converting it for its own use, and excreting waste product - self-replication isn't free. It is a mistake to talk about the lung as a physiological structure - it carries out a function which has to have been present in one form or another since the very first life forms."
At some point in time we both agree that there were no life forms on our planet. Are you really claiming that the first life form "certainly did have mechanisms for taking in energy from the environment, converting it for its own use, and excreting waste product"? That's an extraordinary statement but I assume you didn't actually mean that.
However I still have to ask by what process we get from life in its first manifestation (skipping the step from an inorganic form*) to the vastly complex human being.
[*You might want to look at the follow paper though:
www.iscid.org/papers/Mullan_PrimitiveCell_112302.pdf]
It's not only creationists who doubt neo-Darwinian evolution. For example Dr Christian Schwabe from the Medical University of South Carolina (Dept. of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology), wrote: 'Control genes like homeotic genes may be the target of mutations that would conceivably change phenotypes, but one must remember that, the more central one makes changes in a complex system, the more severe the peripheral consequences become. … Homeotic changes induced in Drosophila genes have led only to monstrosities, and most experimenters do not expect to see a bee arise from their Drosophila constructs.'
(Mini Review: Schwabe, C., 1994. Theoretical limitations of molecular phylogenetics and the evolution of relaxins. Comp. Biochem. Physiol.107B:167–177).
In the search for a decisive answer to how the GTE explains ever more complex life it's not unusual to read press releases like this one:
'Biologists at the University of California, San Diego have uncovered the first genetic evidence that explains how large-scale alterations to body plans were accomplished during the early evolution of animals…. The achievement is a landmark in evolutionary biology, not only because it shows how new animal body plans could arise from a simple genetic mutation, but because it effectively answers a major criticism creationists had long leveled against evolution—the absence of a genetic mechanism that could permit animals to introduce radical new body designs.'
Ronshaugen, M, McGinnis, N, and McGinnis, W. Nature advance online publication, 6 February 2002 (DOI 10.1038/nature716)
Here's the counter from Dr David DeWitt (a biochemist and neuroscientist)
"Evolutionary biologists believe that the six-legged insect body plan evolved from crustacean-like ancestors (including creatures like shrimp) that lost the large number of legs.1 Such a radical change would require mutation(s) that result in the suppression of leg development. McGinnis and coworkers believed that they found the mutation and the gene responsible for this change. However, careful examination of their efforts reveals that the situation is much more complicated.
The scientists were investigating Ubx, a Hox gene which suppresses leg development in flies. Hox genes are master control switches that control the body plan. Specific Hox genes may control where the head forms, where limbs form, or a tail or even wings. These master switches work like circuit breakers and either turn on or turn off an array of other genes. Hox genes can be expressed in abnormal locations and either prevent development of structures or promote their development in very unusual places. For example Pax-6 expression controls the development of eyes. A fly with abnormal expression could form an eye on a leg, the antenna or even abdomen.
The researchers found that the Ubx gene from a fly completely prevented leg development while the same gene from Artemia, a brine shrimp, only suppressed leg development 15%. They then mutated the Artemia Ubx gene and found that this version was much more effective at blocking leg formation. They postulated that such a mutation probably occurred in the crustaceans that were the ancestors of six-legged insects.
The fact that scientists can significantly alter the body plan does not prove macro-evolution nor does it refute creation. Successful macro-evolution requires the addition of NEW information and NEW genes that produce NEW proteins that are found in NEW organs and systems.
For example, a single mutation that might prevent legs from forming is much different from a mutation that produces legs in the first place. Making a leg would require a large number of different genes present simultaneously. Moreover, where do the wings come from? Just because an organism loses a few legs doesn't convert a shrimp-like creature into a fly. Since crustaceans don't have wings, where does the information come from to make wings in flies?
Having the wings themselves is not even enough. Researchers in another study have found that the subcellular location of metabolic enzymes is important for the functional muscle contraction required for flight. Indeed, the metabolic enzymes must be in very close proximity with the cytoskeletal proteins that are involved in muscle contraction. If the enzymes are not in the exact location in which they are needed within the cell, the flies cannot fly. This study bears out the fact that 'the presence of active enzymes in the cell is not sufficient for muscle function; colocalization of the enzymes is required.' It also '…requires a highly organized cellular system.'
Therefore, changes in body plan—no matter how dramatic—do not automatically prove macro-evolution. Losing structures, or misplacing their development, should not be equated with the increased information that is needed to form novel structures and cellular systems."
No doubt someone will claim this counter is rubbish without proving any argument and that will say volumes about them and nothing about the quest for honest answers.
Other Comments by devolved
136. Comment #35373 by BillySands on April 27, 2007 at 2:41 am
Ok, Devolved. You dont understand a word of what you said! (or did you lie earlier?) Your response is clearly one of denial. How can you be claiming to seek the truth when you have gone to great length to find a poor rebbuttal of evolution and then just copied and posted it.Why did you ignore my comment on Alx-4? That is a mutation that causes an extra claw on dogs.
Also, explain the fact that we dont have a functioal gene for ascorbic acid synthesis (other close relatives do) But we contain the decaying remains of that gene (we lost it through mutation - because we sont need it - out diet provides enough). Explain a simmilar situation where ice fish only contain decaying relics of their haemoglobin genes.
What about chicken mutants that occasionally have teeth? or snakes with hips or 4 finned dolphins? http://www.metro.co.uk/news/article.html?in_article_id=23906&in_page_id=34
You are also going to have to explain the logical sequence of the fossil record now - good luck!
oh and read this http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/comdesc/
You asked for a mechanisms, and you seem to ignore them - give us a mechanism for creation - go on!
The fossil record corroborates evolution - that makes the theory strong. - where is your evidence of creation? Further discussion is dependant on you providing one
We have debated before - haven't we
Other Comments by BillySands
137. Comment #35379 by BaronOchs on April 27, 2007 at 3:02 am
If creationists find it hard to accept an algorithmic process given a few billion years could create the complexity of life, how can they convince themselves a simple deluge of water given merely 40 days could account for such a multitude of geological intricacies? Not least massacring all those creatures and arranging their bones (or fossils, and please explain how they fossilised in such a short space of time!) into neat strata! Other Comments by BaronOchs
138. Comment #35380 by Quetzalcoatl on April 27, 2007 at 3:06 am
They don't have to explain it. God did it. End of discussion. You should know better. Other Comments by Quetzalcoatl
139. Comment #35382 by BillySands on April 27, 2007 at 3:26 am
Not least massacring all those creatures and arranging their bones (or fossils, and please explain how they fossilised in such a short space of time!) into neat strata!
And different Habitats in succession - eg coral reef, coalforest, coralreeef, coal forest, lava flow, sand dune, coral reef - etc.
They don't have to explain it. God did it. End of discussion.
Exactly. This guy wants a mechanism, is given one and ignores it. So if he wants a mechanism as proof, then why does he not have one for god? - simple really he is in denial of reason because it threatens his primitive world view.
Other Comments by BillySands
140. Comment #35386 by Quetzalcoatl on April 27, 2007 at 3:42 am
I read something recently where one of the proponents of ID in America was asked for detail about the theory, and he essentially said something along the lines of "Evolution is a theory of ridiculous detail, and I will not stoop to that level by applying that to ID, when that's not what the theory is about".Says it all, really.
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141. Comment #35413 by BillySands on April 27, 2007 at 5:02 am
I really like the fact that you can swap mouse and fruit fly Hox genes (which differ in sequence) and still get mice and fruit flies. So you dont need a specific sequence to make a mouse or fly - God must really be trying to confuse us. Other Comments by BillySands
142. Comment #35421 by Robert Maynard on April 27, 2007 at 5:40 am
Okay, thanks for that clarification of GTE. After reading the encyclopaedia anybody can edit, from which you took that description of Kerkut, it looks like the General and Special Theories of Evolution are real terms, similar to the distinction of micro- and macro-evolution, which have also gone in and out of vogue in the literature. Shuggy and I must both concede that you were correct - GTE is a real term, from the 1960s, used by a scientist to describe evolutionary theory in a book, which we hadn't come across anywhere else.It did worry me a bit when Wikipedia suggested Kerkut's book "Implications of Evolution", which contains the GTE and STE descriptions, is used as a go-to book for quote mining by creationists.. but I'm sure it's a co-incidence you brought it up. You are just an honestly curious guy.
I might ask which of the many variations you think is the best. It's clear that every variation is hugely controversial and is claimed by scientists with differing presuppositions to support their own positions.I don't think that's clear at all - it is a pretty straightforward principle. It can be conflated by philosophical waffling (see Final and Participatory Anthropic Principles), but that doesn't reflect on its original logic.
I see less of an instrumental than a semantic difference between the main variants. Carter's original strong and weak do just fine - the strong is just an extrapolation of the weak. Barrow and Tipler's versions sound like cosmological determinism. I definitely don't agree with the page in that link you gave, where it states that Many Worlds cosmologies are considered a refutation of the anthropic principle - the theorised existence of non-observable universes doesn't do anything to refute the anthropic principle. I will just go ahead and describe my interpretation of the anthropic principle again (only this time, as a conversation!)
The anthropic principle asks us "What kind of Universe could we possibly observe, if not one which is capable of producing observers?"
We can only reasonably answer, "None, I suppose."
To which the anthropic principle responds. "Right, so what did you expect? How the heck could we possibly observe a Universe which precluded our ability to develop?"
"We couldn't do that, actually."
"So why is it surprising that we are here, as opposed to someplace else?"
"I guess it isn't."
Fred Hoyle calculated the odds against a simple functioning protein molecule originating by chance in some primordial soup as being the same as if you filled the whole solar system shoulder-to-shoulder with blind men and their Rubik's cubes, then expected them all to get the right solution at the same time.Amazing, except that Fred Hoyle was wrong! :D
Everybody's favourite zoologist has already dismantled Hoyle's Boeing analogy and variants in books like "Climbing Mount Improbable", however this has mostly been through use of instructive analogy. The details of the mistakes in his calculation are discussed in detail in this TalkOrigins piece.
"The fact that scientists can significantly alter the body plan does not prove macro-evolution nor does it refute creation. Successful macro-evolution requires the addition of NEW information and NEW genes that produce NEW proteins that are found in NEW organs and systems."Man, I remember a time when macroevolution was defined as "significant morphological changes". What will they say when scientists do produce research demonstrating "NEW" genes producing "NEW" proteins? (this has already happened, depending on how you define "new")
Will they say "Oh no, macroevolution is defined as instantaneous speciation in a single generation. Macroevolution has never been observed! It's the Darwinists dirty secret - which you can read about in my new book." In any case, the challenge is quite dishonest. Specifically, I have to ask.
On what grounds does modification to a gene not make it "new"?
Where are new genes supposed to come from, if not other genes? (please don't waste your time countering with "Well then where did the first one come from?" - we do not know exactly, but what we do know is that sex cells are not a prebiotic soup viable for the coalescence of organic structures from a non-organic environment)
It doesn't take a genius to figure out that if all life has a common ancestor, all genes will have a common ancestor. This is what the theory predicts, and this is what the data reports. New genes come from old genes. Ultimately this would mean that every single gene in existence is an amazingly distorted (and advanced) ancestor of an original gene. If modification of a duplicated gene does not count (in DeWitt's opinion) as "new", there is only one gene in the world, and only one species. An eerily beautiful way of looking at it, but utterly useless, for descriptive purposes.
Seriously, please define "new" for us. Feel free to copy and paste DeWitt's definition, if he provides one.
Does anyone else (specifically devolved) want to continue this discussion in a forum thread, as opposed to.. an article on Catholic Limbo? At least then I could get e-mail updates so I knew when to waste time writing stupidly long replies.
Other Comments by Robert Maynard
143. Comment #35424 by BillySands on April 27, 2007 at 5:48 am
Does anyone else (specifically devolved) want to continue this discussion in a forum thread, as opposed to.. an article on Catholic Limbo? At least then I could get e-mail updates so I knew when to waste time writing stupidly long replies.
I will only continue when he proposes a mechanism for creation that can be tested. I think he is just here to deny evolution takes place. He has ignored the evigdence presented so far and just gone quote mining
Other Comments by BillySands
144. Comment #35425 by Luis_Cayetano on April 27, 2007 at 5:51 am
Devolved, you're talking nonsense. You seem to think that evolution is not a well-established scientific theory on the basis that:""Natural selection… needs some luck to get it (life) started. Maybe a few later gaps in the evolutionary story also need major infusions of luck…" (p141 The God Deluion).
So I discover that far from being a scientific certainty (and I will donate £1000 to a charity of your choice if you can find me one proof that doesn't depend on presupposition) that evolution is a belief system."
How does this make it a "belief system" if there is an abundance of evidence in its favour? How is something needing luck supposed to be a point against it having happened, AFTER it's been demonstrated to have happened? That's like saying that someone didn't win the lottery after they won it, simply because luck was involved. Honestly, you're fretting over nothing here. OF COURSE natural selection needed some luck to get started (and is none the worse for that) because there had to have been an entity that got the game rolling, an entity that exhibited certain characteristics that made it suitable for natural selection to act upon. Perhaps such an entity is exceedingly improbable, but it only had to appear once for evolution to proceed. Once it did get rolling, all else followed, and here we are talking about it.
Other Comments by Luis_Cayetano
145. Comment #35437 by Luis_Cayetano on April 27, 2007 at 6:37 am
Devolved, you should also look into:1) SINES and LINES
2) the laryngeal nerve
3) the flounder fish Bothus lunatus
4) the Chinese feathered theropods
5) lactose tolerance in human beings
6) biological mimicry, parasitism and disease vectors
7) convergent evolution of placental and marsupial fauna
8) fossils of legged whales, with the sequence of cetaceans becoming progressively more and more like modern whales
9) K and r selection theory, a cornerstone of ecology
10) conflicts of interest between the sexes (which make perfect sense from an evolutionary perspective of genes "striving" to make the most of the levers of power at their disposal, but is difficult to reconcile with the notion of conscious, intelligent design, unless the designer was just trying to mess with our minds, in which case he wasn't incompetent but just evil)
11) the cane toad Bufo marinus and its evolution of longer legs on the western front of its expansion in Australia
12) Read "Climbing Mount Improbable", especially the chapter on the eye (also available as a separate booklet called "The Forty-fold Path to Enlightenment")
13) the use of natural selection models in fisheries
14) viral malevolence, dependent upon how readily viruses can infect new hosts
15) accumulated fossil genes associated with olfaction in our genomes, but with clear functional homologues in other mammals
It's exceedingly difficult to take seriously the notion that a deity could have been mucking around for 3 billion years before hitting upon us. Really, who was this designer trying to impress by leaving things scattered all through the strata, and making life LOOK as though it had evolved?
Other Comments by Luis_Cayetano
146. Comment #35459 by Lee Harrison on April 27, 2007 at 8:19 am
Billy Sands wrote:
I will only continue when he proposes a mechanism for creation that can be tested. I think he is just here to deny evolution takes place. He has ignored the evidence presented so far and just gone quote mining
Hear hear Billy! There's no point to feeding trolls - food just reminds them how hungry they are.
And Richard - if this 'conversation' is to continue, I agree with you that it should be reposted in the forums - where all can see it and be amused/appalled by trollish unwillingness to give an inch of the space under that bridge.
Other Comments by Lee Harrison
147. Comment #35479 by Robert Maynard on April 27, 2007 at 9:57 am
Also,Are you really claiming that the first life form "certainly did have mechanisms for taking in energy from the environment, converting it for its own use, and excreting waste product"? That's an extraordinary statement but I assume you didn't actually mean that.It would be an even more extraordinary statement to claim that the first lifeform spontaneously made copies of itself without the need for energy, silly!
No, you assumed wrong, I meant what I said (though I appreciate the cautious gesture).
Be aware firstly that a "mechanism for receiving energy" does not necessitate physical structures, nor does it imply any degree of intentionality. If we're talking about the simplest of postulated early 'life forms' (and we are), a psuedomembrane allowing for the passive diffusion of energy-rich chemicals into protein sites is a mechanism for receiving and excreting energy. When distinctions between the internal and external environments are hazy enough (as abiogenesis theory suggests) taking energy from an environment is literally unavoidable.
The more specialised mechanisms for actively intaking respiratory chemicals evolved so that the other increasingly competetive survival mechanisms of generation after generation of organisms would have the energy economy to keep going. Keeping this in mind, it isn't hard to visualise the incremental evolution of surface-exposing, then tubular, then inter-connected tubular, then chambered, and finally diverse lung-like structures, in organisms that need more and more oxygen to survive. The same is true for mouth-like structures, eyes, limbs, neurons, anything! The origin of the information involved is far less of a mystery when one accepts that the simplest of gene-modifications (resulting in any phenotypic changes) have differential fitness, and the selective pressures in every single generation constitutes a 'step in the right direction' in terms of having useful information to survive, which is ..exactly what evolution is about.
As far as ignoring trolls and not wasting our lives on them, I'm happy to keep replying.. it's like playing Sudoku, sharpens the mind. :P
Other Comments by Robert Maynard
148. Comment #35657 by BillySands on April 28, 2007 at 6:03 am
Good luck Robert,This guy just wishes to deny. Here is another piece of ignorance quoted in that last post
For example, a single mutation that might prevent legs from forming is much different from a mutation that produces legs in the first place. Making a leg would require a large number of different genes present simultaneously. Moreover, where do the wings come from? Just because an organism loses a few legs doesn't convert a shrimp-like creature into a fly. Since crustaceans don't have wings, where does the information come from to make wings in flies?
As well as Alx-4 (which has been ignored A mutation called bithorax which gives flies an extra pair of wings.
Then we have this guy spouting rubbish about enzymes in muscle - the standard creationist misrepresentation that something must suddenly form if a fully functional moden way from nothing. They ignore preadaptation and selection.
Be prepared for denial and the arguement of infinite regress - like i say, good luck to you.
You are of course right about continuing this discussion for the benefit of those willing to consider evidence
Other Comments by BillySands
149. Comment #35715 by devolved on April 28, 2007 at 1:58 pm
I've learned a lot in the last week by exchanging ideas with you all and I sense that we'll end up going round in circles soon so I'd like to summarise where I've got to in response to the debate.First, the Anthropic Principle is a superb example of presuppositional logic at work. The idea was formulated to try and explain the paradox of an 'uncreated' universe being so finely tuned. If you presuppose that the universe could only have come into existence by entirely naturalistic means you have to defend by faith a principle incapable of any disproof. Armed with such faith it becomes possible to dismiss a Nobel Prize winning astronomer as 'wrong'! How do you know he was wrong? What was the logical flaw in his reasoning?
If there are logical flaws in the paragraph above point out the flaws using logic. "I reject what you say because it doesn't conform with my beliefs" is not a logical argument.
The Anthropic Principle also leads inexorably to science fiction tales of multi-verses where Dr Dawkins has a green moustache. Perhaps in one universe he's the Archbishop of Canterbury instead of the Archbishop of Atheism.
Second, is the presupposition that scientists who do not accept your presuppositions are pseudo-scientists. You can only claim that the evidence overwhelmingly supports the evolutionary hypothesis if you rigorously exclude the scientific work of those who don't agree with your paradigm. In this realm 'peer review' means only accepting papers that conform to the evolutionary hypothesis and systematically rejecting those that don't on philosophical grounds.
Once the unscientific presupposition of naturalism is excluded the claim that the evidence overwhelmingly supports the evolutionary hypothesis is highly questionable.
I wonder if any of you has ever critiqued a scientific paper written by a non-evolutionist and faulted it on scientific grounds? I'd love to see such a critique. Again "It's rubbish" or "I've read it and it's very poor" hardly qualifies.
I wonder if evolutionist Richard Lewontin of Harvard speaks for you when he said, "Even if all the data point to an intelligent designer, such an hypothesis is excluded from science because it is not naturalistic." (Todd, S.C., correspondence to Nature 401(6752):423, 30 Sept. 1999.)
Finally and easily the most important to me is the question of how genetic information increases. No scientist can do science in the past so I deliberately asked for scientific proof in the present.
There's been a plethora of posts to the effect 'what about the hox?', or 'please explain how they fossilised in such a short space of time!) into neat strata!' I'm pleased to be challenged.
How does a frog get fossilised? There are two possibilities (let's assume the frogs are dead). Using uniformitarian beliefs put in on the ground and wait a few thousand years for it to get covered up. Use catatastrophic beliefs and it gets near instant burial and preservation.
It's worth knowing the Doctor's view, "Bodies or bones may survive for our attention, having somehow escaped that of hyenas, burying beetles and bacteria. ….and under exceptionally lucky circumstances, soft parts too, occasionally become petrified as stone fossils that last for hundreds of millions of years." The Ancestor's Tale p16
Now the great thing is that we don't have to speculate what might have happened millions of years ago because we can do real operational, that is observable science where real experiments are carried out, and carried out again and again and shown to be true or false. There's excellent scientific evidence that a fossil can form within the span of a human lifetime.
And what about the claim that mutations are the answer? I was challenged, "Evolution is testable. You can make predictions - and they are confirmed. For example, we have one less pair of chromosomes than other primate species. How do we explain this? We can hypothesise that there could have been a fusion of two chromosomes in our recent past. We can test this by sequencing them. Chromosomes only have areas called telomeres on there ends. It turns out human chromosome 2 has internal telomeric sequences - hence 2 chromosomes fused to form no. 2 If the hypothesis failed we would have no alternative other than to reject it. Where is the preconception here."
Well here's a scientists response, "In fact human chromosome 2 does not match the two small ape chromosomes it is claimed to have fused from. There are significant differences, and what similarities there are have been highly exaggerated by those making the claim.
Incidentally, it is not the case that a correct prediction proves a theory. Even if human chromosome 2 did look just how one would expect if it were to have came about via joining of two smaller chimp chromosomes, to suggest that this proves that it came about this way is to commit a logical fallacy, the fallacy of verified prediction. In fact similarities between different kinds of creatures is evidence of a common Designer, not common ancestry—see the attached notes on homology."
Needless to say the scientist offered and provided much, much more including the notes mentioned above.
"Why did you ignore my comment on Alx-4? That is a mutation that causes an extra claw on dogs." For the simple reason that more claws is no evidence of new information. If I bought two copies of 'The God Delusion' instead of one I'd have the same stuff twice over. If you used a photocopier to make a copy of a document and it malfunctioned and printed two copies, you would not conclude that you had created new information by this accident. It is like this with the extra organs that sometimes appear on animals (and plants). There is no new information created, so it has nothing to do with evolution!
In a recent paper, evolutionist Dr George Gabor Miklos summed it up nicely when he said: 'We can go on examining natural variation at all levels ... as well as hypothesising about speciation events in bed bugs, bears and brachiopods until the planet reaches oblivion, but we still only end up with bed bugs, brachiopods and bears. None of these body plans will transform into rotifers, roundworms or rhynchocoels.'
[George L. Gabor Miklos, 'Emergence of organisational complexities during metazoan evolution: perspectives from molecular biology, palaeontology and neo-Darwinism', Mem. Assoc. Australas. Palaeontols15, 1993, p. 25]
So how do I decide? I dare to use logic and ask questions and am rewarded with abuse, character assassination, lies and snide comments but no evidence, just assertions of it. So who is doing bad science and covering it up with bad manners and bad language?
Other Comments by devolved
150. Comment #35812 by Tim Marsh on April 29, 2007 at 12:07 am
devolved, it's clear you have quite the passion for invoking the concept of 'presuppositions'. You're convinced that the fact that the scientific paradigm and a theistic paradigm both rely on 'different presuppositions', implies that the scientific paradigm and the theistic paradigm both rely on 'different and equal' presuppositions. This is your fundamental mistake, as it is desperately untrue. Aside from the core assumptions of reliable phenomenology that we all have to make to interact with the world, the basic schism of presuppositions between scientific and theistic paradigms is as follows:
The Scientific Paradigm - Things that are immaterial, incorporeal, 'impossible' by the apparant mechanisms of physics, do not exist, at least not in a testable sense useful for making explanations.
Theistic Paradigms - Events, interventions, and agents, that are supernatural, entirely speculative, untestable and impossible by the apparant mechanisms of physics, do potentially exist and can be used in forming explanations.
I will grant you that these are both presuppositions, which in essence are equally arbitrary as either one tends to be made before the consideration of evidence. The issue is, are they equally useful? Certainly not!
The former forms the basis of problem-solving inquiries, dealing exclusively in the observable, conservatively conscious of their own ability to be disproved. Essentially every useful technological and medical breakthrough in history is the result of this method.
The latter, however, has an inherent problem, in that crediting unknown and unknowable values in explanations is essentially an infinite sphere of freedom. As there are no criteria for judging the merit of one non-disprovable supernatural assertion over another, all are equally valid, and equally invalid. Hence why assertions of celestial teapots, invisible pink unicorns and flying spagetti monsters are useful in demonstrating that just because an idea can be articulated, doesn't make it credible.
More importantly, the allowance of supernatural elements in explanation does not allow for any reasonable point of excess. As soon as one accepts that supernatural intervention is acceptable in the explanation of somethings origins or function, one does not need to go any further. As soon as the supernatural is invoked, explaining stops, and this in and of itself should make it abundantly clear that supernatural 'explanations' do not, in fact, explain anything. They just 'happen', apparently, through a process that we have no access to, and should stop looking for.
There is an undeniable historical trend of theistic explanations taking place only in times of ignorance, to later be found incorrect and replaced by material explanations. Nowadays, in defence of personal stakes in theistic beliefs, 'explanations' dependant on supernatural agents reappear at any point where doubt or incredulity can be inserted into existing scientific accounts. It is not only bad science, but simple intellectual dishonesty.
As for your account of the anthropic principle, its superiority over supernatural-design theories is based not only in its plain and simple logic in predicting observations (which you seem to miss, still, despite having it repeatedly spelled-out), but also in how it does not need to postulate anything that is (for lack of a better word) impossible, in order to explain our proximity to a low-probability situation.
Other Comments by Tim Marsh
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101. Comment #34257 by Fishpeddler on April 23, 2007 at 4:46 pm
"Who says the current wee babes in Limbo will be let out....just think of the queue at the gates of heaven...."
Let's see... they are all probably quite lonely and scared and hungry and crying their asses off, so that means they will most likely end up in whatever coffee shop or movie theater I'm trying to relax in.
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