John Dub

I haven’t found a help site for this brand of forums. I know with YouTubes, make sure you include the “s” in https. Otherwise, it seems like the software either recognizes it’s a video or not.

Genus you said,

Humans have been erroneously ascribing attributes to God since our ancestors first looked up at the sky or experienced their first frightening thunderstorm.

That’s a judgment, not an observation. For it to be an observation, you would have to know the attributes of God then compare them to what humans have ascribed to God. Then you…[Read more]

Humans have been erroneously ascribing attributes to God since our ancestors first looked up at the sky or experienced their first frightening thunderstorm.

I appreciate the conversation Genus, but we may have reached the apogee of it. Although you have some very modern, enlightened views of the concept of God, you still are holding on to the idea…[Read more]

CC, you quoted thatoneguy. I already told him that is flawed logic.

I’m trying to figure out why that’s happening or if someone is being childishly vindictive

If a member flags something for moderation, that is included in the email that I get. But these latest ones just have a generic message. I’m hoping to hear something from our higher level moderators and admins.

I was hoping it was you. Have you been clearing the flags?

It’s no to your requirement Sherlock but what you asked for is not science. If that’s science, then we couldn’t know where planets came from or much of anything.

…substantiated with scientific philosophy, based on the fairly normal empirical assumption that it is the structure of my brain which imbues what I call ‘me’ with consciousness

There’s no connection from the brain being associated with consciousness to a universal consciousness. That “substantiates” nothing. Logic problem, bomb.

https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/How_do_you_know%3F_Were_you_there%3F#Dear_Emma_B

But its just supposition, until you can perform an experiment where we have eyless life and then after a time fully formed eyes it is supposition.

Okay, hopefully I don’t get fired for spending this much time on the forum today, because this whole discussion was pointless. We covered these problems with epistemology a long time ago, or you could…[Read more]

I do hope that wasn’t a rule violation!

No, just an observation.

Because you are using “information” in a way that doesn’t fit. If indeed new information was being programmed into life like I program a computer, then yes, that would be an indication of design. If a bird didn’t know how to eat a seed, then suddenly did with no other mechanism that could be observed, then you might have some data to build on. But…[Read more]

But Dawkins is a bozo, you are probably easily impressed.

On your report card today I will note that you were doing so well for about 4 hours. Then you ran out of arguments and started saying a prominent evolutionary biologist with a lifetime of work is a “pop science writer”. You have to have some knowledge of science if you want to write about…[Read more]

But the building blocks have not grown. It’s still ACT and G. They have combined in different ways and they came to be by combining other simpler things in different ways, but they haven’t “grown”. In your analogy of a black box, you’ve just made bigger boxes. That’s not a growth of information, it’s just bigger storage units. Guanine is no…[Read more]

Have examples of irreducible complexity be brought forth?

No. I think he is too smart to bring up anything specific because he knows the arguments have been countered already. It would just be a link war at that point, and he’d lose. He sticks to concepts, claiming “irreducible complexity” is a thing and knocking down any attempt to get him to be…[Read more]

What a stunning strawman! Nowhere in this forum have I ever claimed that “science can explain nothing” nowhere.

And we’re back to word games. Thought we were getting somewhere, but I’m pretty sure you are just mixing ID with solipsism and then defining and redefining words to make it sound like there is more there.

Scientific theories ALWAYS assume the prior existence of physical material and laws of nature, unless you do assume that you cannot construct an explanation but as soon as you do assume that you assume the existence of the very thing you sought to explain, that is not an explanation.

That is the definition of a scientific explanation, it’s an i…[Read more]

information does not so far as I am aware spontaneously grow without intelligence being involved somewhere

You’re right. Information growth would indicate an intention, a problem solving of some kind. But DNA is just a copy. It doesn’t grow, it doesn’t even replicate perfectly, it has very slight changes. Most of those changes aren’t for the…[Read more]

If we insist that everything must be explicable in terms of science then by definition we can never comprehend something that might exist yet is not subject to science, laws etc.

Could we just get this down to one term so I don’t have to keep responding to different words? I didn’t insist on everything being explicable in terms of science, u…[Read more]