Thanks, Nyar! That’s the best counter I’ve heard for the complexity argument. Will be unashamedly thieving it from you!
2 Likes
You get credit 3 times, and then I claim it for my own… ‘It’s so complex, how could it not have happened naturally.’
3 Likes
As another type of complexity, consider the common house cat.
Hemingway had a cat with an accidental small mutation that produced 6 toes, and now there are many cats in Key West that have 6 toes. They are even a minor status symbol when people have a cat “descended from Hemingway’s original cats.”
Please see below:
These cats have a survival advantage (ie: an imagined connection with Ernest Hemingway), so they spread the mutation.
I would even guess that a 6 toed cat would be a more efficient hunter due to the extra claw, and might be better able to climb.
Creationists should take note . . . but I doubt they will.
And of course, all this is before we take into account, that the usual suspects among the mythology fanboys are frequently completely ignorant of how the word “random” is used in rigorous scientific circles.
You can safely assume that most of them have never heard of either probability distributions or Markov chain processes.
5 Likes
Okay, I just got called stupid. I had no idea what a Marklovian progression of gyvian like processes could possibly mean so I had to look the damn thig up. Being a bit of an existentialist I really enjoyed the read. It’s probably a concept that I will remember and begin misusing all over the fucking place.
4 Likes
Google and Wikipedia help me look a little less ignorant, watch:
A Markov chain or Markov process is a stochastic model describing a sequence of possible events in which the probability of each event depends only on the state attained in the previous event. Informally, this may be thought of as, "What happens next depends only on the state of affairs now.
3 Likes
An important point to remember being this.
If there exist multiple pathways leading to a given node in a Markov chain process, then yes, a probability is assigned to each pathway, on the basis that we have limited information telling us in advance which pathway will be chosen in any given iteration.
But, each pathway itself represents a testable natural process, involving a well-defined set of entities and interactions, and a well-defined outcome.
The probability aspect arises because multiple such processes generate the same outcome, and we lack the audit trail telling us which choice actually took place in the past . We therefore have to treat the system as governed by a probability distribution, and modelled as a Markov chain process, in order to makes sense of incomplete data.
But again, doing so directly implies that we are taking observational data into account, observational data that informs us that a given event actually took place.
As a corollary, the usual tiresome ex recto apologetic fabrications from the usual suspects, involving witless caricatures of scientific postulates such “happened by accident for no reason”, don’t even rise to the level of competence required to be worthy of a point of view, in any properly constituted arena of discourse. Said collapsed apologetic soufflés don’t deserve to be dignified with being treated as genuine critique, they’re little more than encephalitic dribblings.
5 Likes
Nice… We all landed on the Atheist button but from completely different panths. It is philosophically attested to!
3 Likes
I don’t see any value in discussing “credentials” or certification. It’s not your acceptance that I seek either. Seeking to discuss me the person rather than the arguments and views that I espouse is all that should matter here. Insofar as certification goes, I think Prof. Noam Chomsky says it best:
“In my own professional work I have touched on a variety of different fields. I’ve done my work in mathematical linguistics, for example, without any professional credentials in mathematics; in this subject I am completely self-taught, and not very well taught. But I’ve often been invited by universities to speak on mathematical linguistics at mathematics seminars and colloquia. No one has ever asked me whether I have the appropriate credentials to speak on these subjects; the mathematicians couldn’t care less. What they want to know is what I have to say. No one has ever objected to my right to speak, asking whether I have a doctor’s degree in mathematics, or whether I have taken advanced courses in the subject. That would never have entered their minds. They want to know whether I am right or wrong, whether the subject is interesting or not, whether better approaches are possible—the discussion dealt with the subject, not with my right to discuss it.”
1 Like
Why do you want to discuss me? Ahh, of course, a diversionary tactic! (see my prior post above, specifically my quote of Chomsky).
1 Like
Bear in mind I was suspended from the site for some six months, my silence prior to today was something I had no choice in.
Let me explain something, all evidence is interpreted and people holding different worldviews often interpret the same thing in different ways.
Therefore what are we to do if you and I interpret something differently? You might argue that it implies or even proves X yet I might argue that it proves something else, Y - what are we to do?
What does the presence of the universe imply to you? How did you reason in order to develop your answer?
1 Like
I seriously doubt that you are a working scientist.
If you have evidence that something is different from the scientific consensus, then that’s fine. I’ve disagreed with the common consensus in my line of work as a paramedic, as I’ve argued that Black people shouldn’t be treated with a different standard of care from White people when it comes to specific medical problems.
The crutch is the strength of your arguments and the quality of your evidence.
You should be aware of common and subtle fallacies, such as the straw man argument, poisoning the well, the “No true Scotsman” fallacy, the false dilemma, the argument from ignorance fallacy, the cherry-picking fallacy, the argument from authority fallacy, the Texas sharpshooter fallacy, the false dichotomy, the excluded middle fallacy (closely related to false dichotomy), the ad hominen fallacy, and–of course–the slippery slope fallacy.
Also, brush up on Occam’s Razor, and keep in mind that what is asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence.
If your argument respects these principles, then it’s important.
Otherwise, you’re a crackpot.
And please keep in mind that I have very little use for “faith” (at least in how religious people use the term), as it was science that found cures and vaccines for disease, it was science that made large scale food production possible, and so forth.
Science has “cured” more human misery than religion ever did. For thousands of years, religion had its chance, and fell short.
2 Likes
Of course you don’t….
3 Likes
We Experiment, and use independent verification. DUH! If it is actual evidence, it can stand up to experimentation and independent verification. A is A, A is not non A, A is either A or it is not A. It’s really simple.
You don’t get to have your own facts and evidence.
4 Likes
I believe you, you also haven’t understood @CyberLN’s point in asking the question, and you seem unable to grasp that while credentials alone are not sufficient to judge an argument, they do have relevance when the argument presented flies in the face of, oh I don’t know, a global scientific consensus say.
Indeed, which is why methods like science and logic are the best we have, as part of those methods is to remove exactly such subjective bias. Religions on the other hand have spent millennia championing closed minded subjective bias, they call it faith.
I am going to need more, though I can tell you it does not imply an unevidenced creator deity, using inexplicable magic. In fact it doesn’t imply anything for which no objective evidence can be demonstrated, it is amusing though to see religious apologists come here, and pretend they started with the existence of the universe and then inferred a deity created it, when the truth of their posts demonstrates they started with the belief, and are bending or discarding all facts to fit that unevidenced belief.
What objective evidence can you demonstrate for any deity or deities?
It starts there, if you’ve got nothing then I remain incredulous, as that is the criteria I set for belief, and the reason for that is that I care more about whether a belief is valid, than the belief itself. Once you attach an importance to a belief, as you and all theists I have met do, then closed minded bias is inevitable.
So you put no store in what biblical scholars say then? Only I have lost track of the apologists who come here, and invoke the collective subjective beliefs about the unevidenced claims for magic in the bible of biblical “scholars”, as if an expert on the Harry Potter Novels is in a better position to judge the existence of magic and wizards than anyone else.
2 Likes
Why would the presence of the universe imply anything more than ‘the presence of the universe.’ It’s there. I can see it, Touch it. Sense it. That’s it. That is absolutely all it implies. If you actually think about it, even asking 'Where did it come from, is a biased question." I am making the assumption, without any warrant at all, that it came from somewhere. I have to base that on my own experience and not on anything to do with ‘it.’ All I know, is that from my limited perception, ‘It is there.’ (I might be wrong in many ways.) It implies - there is something there.
1 Like
Judging from his claims, I doubt he has even a basic grasp of how the methods of science work. If he thinks all evidence is subjectively interpreted, which implies that all evidence is equally valid-invalid, and science is of no more use at validating ideas than a ouija board.
Does he really think we wont notice his bias in dismissing the expertise and credentials when it suits, then invoking it when he needs it? I’d bet every penny I have he goes to see a doctor when he is sick, now does he really imagine anyone here would believe he wouldn’t raise any eyebrow at finding out that doctor has zero qualifications and is self taught?
1 Like
I agree with your points.
However, in fairness to his issues with credentials . . . there have often been times and occasions when I was considered a crackpot when I challenged physicians and administrators on commonly held ideas in my field of emergency medical service, and I’ve been professionally sanctioned for being aggressive about my position.
As an example, please consider the following:
- Marijuana is a gateway drug that eventually leads a user into heroin addiction.
- Rastafarianism often regards weed as a sacrement in their faith.
- Rastafarians cultivate dreadlocks for religious reasons (like Jewish payess sidecurls).
- A majority of Rastafarians are from Jamaica.
- Minorities are over-represented in the population of homeless drug addicts.
- Morphine is a mainstay of care and a life-saving drug when someone is having a heart attack.
- Morphine is chemically similar to heroin.
So, if I ran on a White executive who was having symptoms of a heart attack, then I gave him morphine and all was well.
If–however–I ran an emergency call on a Black man with a Jamaican accent and dreadlocks who was having the same symptoms, then I would get in trouble for giving him morphine because I was going to turn him into a heroin addict.
After all, if we have to consider race when discussing things like sickle cell anemia, then I should use common sense and treat people like individuals when using other medications . . . such as morphine.
So, it’s just common sense.
There are people who challenge my perceptions of what was done and said, so please see below:
My point in bringing up this situation is that one can argue that I am similar to Sherlock-Holmes in some ways. Please see below:
- I’m assuming that I “know better” than everyone else in my field.
- I don’t have the education or credentials to challenge physicians on their own turf, as I did not go to medical school.
- My insistance that there is no difference between Black people and White people when using morphine is based on faith and unproven assumptions.
- I have no common sense.
Conclusion: I am a dangerous crackpot who shouldn’t be trusted to give morphine to patients, so my value as a paramedic is questionable.
This means that a part of me actually has a very small amount of sympathy (and open-mindedness) for the religious crackpot (such as the Creationist), as I was in a somewhat similar situation.
If anyone wants to fact-check my claims, please see below:
I would also get into trouble when I ask the question: “Who is a Black person?”
If you see below, these stunningly beautiful women are twins born from a biracial marriage:
If I had to transport them as patients on my ambulance (I sometimes transported two patients after, say, a car accident), then how do I document race on my run report? And do they get different types of care if they have a similar medical issue?
By asking these questions, I was viewed in a way that is similar to the way that we view Quim and Sherlock on this forum.
Added later after further thought: I possibly have even more in common with Sherlock than I like to admit, as a part of my issue with morphine and Black people comes from a religious influence in my upbringing. This is because a common Jewish value is that the phrase “I was following orders” is not an excuse to do something that is wrong.
2 Likes
I tried pot once, and now I am addicted to heroin. I use it every chance I get.
3 Likes
How is that working out for you?
1 Like