Okay, and those guesses are based on the scrutiny of experimentation, observation, mathematical formulation, etc.
Can all the assorted gods posited by folks be tested using the same scrutiny? Can some of them?
Then why did you lie and describe scientific theories like species evolution as an “educated guess”?
Here again then is a simple definition of a scientific theory:
“A scientific theory is an explanation of an aspect of the natural world and universe that can be (or a fortiori, that has been) repeatedly tested and corroborated in accordance with the scientific method, using accepted protocols of observation, measurement, and evaluation of results. Where possible, some theories are tested under controlled conditions in an experiment. In circumstances not amenable to experimental testing, theories are evaluated through principles of abductive reasoning. Established scientific theories have withstood rigorous scrutiny and embody scientific knowledge.”
It does not in any way describe an “educated guess”, if you knew this, then you must have been lying?
That’s a lie…
I can only assume you don;t know what the word fact means as well then. a fact is something that is known or proven to be true, if science knows something to be true, then by definition it is a scientific fact. Our knowledge my be incomplete of course or even very rarely entirely wrong, this does not mean it is not a fact, though theists funnily often wrongly interpret the phrase scientific fact as if it is immutable, but nothing in science is ever immutable, it is one of the methods greatest strengths, it’s inbuilt design enabling it to go where the objective evidence leads, and admit of an error and correct it’s thinking accordingly. Unlike religions of course which having asserted they are the bearers of immutable truths form a deity, must then cling ridiculously to archaic creation myths, by denying scientific facts like species evolution, as of course you are doing here. your projection is ironically amusing though, but I have seen to many creationists make this identical erroneous claim.
Another lie, I already explained that one need not make a contrary claim in order to disbelieve your claim goddidit, as you have demonstrated no objective evidence, why not actually read and address what is written, it might at least indicate a desire for honest debate on your part.
You presented no evidence that the universe is finely tuned, just a bare assertion using a circular reasoning fallacy, do you even read posts before responding?
Telling me someone is a crackpot because they happen to be Christian does not allow you to pass Go and collect $200.00. What you’re required to do is to effectively contradict what he or she said. But you can’t do that; right? You can’t because other sources have printed scientific articles that say exactly what Lee Strobel said.
See my reply to this previously failed argument at Post 41.
Assigning letters is how one writes something, dear oh dear. You didnlt address your fallacy again, or my point about science being descriptive and not proscriptive. I can see why you’d like to dodge those points of course, and simply repeat you claim, but it’s like watching a small child hide its face, as if this means they can’t be seen, and protects them from the row they know is coming.
Nope, straw man fallacy, I have made no such claim. The “code” was created by humans to explain something, the something it describes is objectively real, but the explanation is a human creation, like all language. And we FYi we create language by assigning letters and creating words. Perhaps you imagine language exists independently of human thought as well? That’s rather amusing.
Seminal work. What a laugh.
Charles Darwin claimed in his science fiction book Origin of Species that future generations would find fossils to fill in the gaps and thereby provide evidence that creatures evolved from something completely different from what they started off as. Admitted four pro-evolution paleontologists, Ernst Mayr and Stephen Gould and David Kitts and Niles Eldridge:
“What one actually found was nothing but discontinuities: All species are separated from each other by bridgeless gaps; intermediates between species are not observed . . . The problem was even more serious at the level of the higher categories.” (Mayr, E., Animal Species and Evolution, 1982, p. 524.)
“All paleontologists know that the fossil record contains precious little in the way of intermediate forms; transitions between major groups are characteristically abrupt. Gradualists usually extract themselves from this dilemma by invoking the extreme imperfection of the fossil record.” (Gould, Stephen J. The Panda’s Thumb , 1980, p. 189.)
“Despite the bright promise - that paleontology provides a means of ‘seeing’ evolution, it has presented some nasty difficulties for evolutionists the most notorious of which is the presence of ‘gaps’ in the fossil record. Evolution requires intermediate forms between species and paleontology does not provide them. The gaps must therefore be a contingent feature of the record.” (Kitts, David B., “Paleontology and Evolutionary Theory,” Evolution, vol. 28, 1974, p. 467.)
“He [Darwin] prophesied that future generations of paleontologists would fill in these gaps by diligent search…It has become abundantly clear that the fossil record will not confirm this part of Darwin’s predictions. Nor is the problem a miserably poor record. The fossil record simply shows that this prediction was wrong.” (Eldridge, Niles, The Myths of Human Evolution, 1984, pp.45-46.)
Now, deal with that. Let’s see you run around in circles, trying to explain away what I just quoted above.
Species evolution is a fallacy. There is no evidence in the fossils record to support the claim that species evolved into anything other than what they started off as. I just got through quoting several famous atheists who happened to be paleontologists, and all four of them had to eat crow when they could not find evidence to take Darwin’s book Origin of Species from the realm of science fiction to one of scientific fact.
Since atheism isn’t a religion, your cheap jibe fails just as you do.
Oh, those two scientific papers destroying the “fine tuning” myth overcame said myth some time ago.
Garbage. Tne authors of the two paper I cited are genuine tenured physicists. No True Scotsman fallacy much?
As for your bullshit about peer review, which along with all your other infantile lies IS bullshit, it’s thenexact opposite of the creationist style rubber stamping exercise you misrepresent it as. Peer reviewers are selected to be ruthless with errors.
But do keep talking out of your arse, It might provide a few minutes of weak amusement here until your duplicity leads to your inevitable exit stage left.
Now you’re pretending that you don’t understand what I mean when I say humans did not write the DNA code. I’m referring to the authoring of the DNA code when I say it wasn’t written by humans.
Since you now are resorting to semantics out of desperation, let me spell it out so that we can bring an end to your pretense: You know perfectly well that humans did not author aka initially write the DNA code. Translating something into words of another language does not equate to authoring it. That’s the reason why scientists (including those that are pro-evolution) have said the DNA code is the most sophisticated code known to man.
Atheism is religion according to the U.S. Supreme Court ruling in Torcaso v. Watkins (1961).
In the court transcript, the justices wrote with reference to the atheist who lost the lawsuit in the lower courts in defense of his Atheist Religious rights and then turned around and appealed to the highest court in the land:
"Appellant was appointed by the Governor of Maryland to the office of Notary Public; but he was denied a commission because he would not declare his belief in God, as required by the Maryland Constitution. Claiming that this requirement violated his rights under the First and Fourteenth Amendments, he sued in a state court to compel issuance of his commission; but relief was denied. The State Court of Appeals affirmed, holding that the state constitutional provision is self-executing without need for implementing legislation and requires declaration of a belief in God as a qualification for office. Held: This Maryland test for public office cannot be enforced against appellant, because it unconstitutionally invades his freedom of belief and religion guaranteed by the First Amendment and protected by the Fourteenth Amendment from infringement by the States. Pp. 489-496.
And don’t waste your time arguing that non-belief in a god or Gods is not religion, because there are several religions listed in the court transcript of that same lawsuit where the adherents do not believe in a God or gods. Buddhism, for example.
@NeutralZone, please define what you mean by religion.
Or is this going to be another of my questions / requests for clarification you ignore?
You are being relentlessly dishonest with these straw men, nowhere in @Nyarlathotep’s post did he remotely suggest he was a crackpot because he was a Christian. though of course there are axiomatically Christians who also happen to be crackpots.
FYI does he have any qualifications or expertise in biology?
“Strobel was born in Arlington Heights, Illinois. He received a journalism degree from the University of Missouri and a Master of Studies in Law degree from Yale Law School.”
Oh dear…
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NeutralZone said:
You are giving me too much credit. I’m not the one who came up with the definition for “religion” by a long stretch.
Below is a dictionary that gives definition. There are other dictionaries on the internet that have similar definitions
DEFINITION OF “RELIGION”:
re•li•gion (rĭ-lĭjən)
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n.
1 a. The belief in and reverence for a supernatural power or powers, regarded as creating and governing the universe: respect for religion.
b. A particular variety of such belief, especially when organized into a system of doctrine and practice: the world’s many religions.
c. A set of beliefs, values, and practices based on the teachings of a spiritual leader.
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The life or condition of a person in a religious order: a widow who went into religion and became a nun.
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A cause, principle, or activity pursued with zeal or conscientious devotion: a person for whom art became a religion.
Notice definition #3 above.
I didn’t tell you that, this is a fabrication on your part. I’m not willing to have further interaction with you until you remove that falsehood about me. I’ll check back tomorrow to see how you’ve done. If you are doubling down, this is goodbye. I figure the first time you strawman me, it is your fault; the 2nd time it will be my fault; and that isn’t going to happen. Please retract it so we can continue with 0 strawmen between us.
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You sound like an idiot. To have something fine-tuned you need someone to fine-tune it. You have nothing of the kind. What you have are natural processes that occur over time.
You have no idea at all what the parameters for life are. Not even our life. Adaptation occurs over time. You have no idea what the human body may have adapted to over the process of evolution. Currently, we have adapted to the environment in which we find ourselves.
Live survives in the conditions in which it finds itself… (reference extremophiles).
DARWIN? Darwin died in 1882. WTF are you on about? What do you think Darwin said that was wrong? No, less fit species can not survive. That is not possible. Your comment demonstrates you do not understand what “Survival of the fittest” actually means. Only those species best adapted to their environment survive. (Weakness has nothing to do with being fit to the environment in which a species finds itself.) You’re making an alliteration fallacy.
DARWIN lived over 140 years ago. We now have over 140 years of research and development have been added to Darwin’s theory of “Evolution by means of Natural Selection.” Darwin did not discover evolution or natural selection. He built on theories that came before him. Evolution was not Darwin’s idea. Darwin expanded on one of the “MECHANISMS” of evolution. He gave concrete examples of "Natural Selection.’ Change in the frequency of a species over time. He specifically introduced "Ring Species. (A FACT) He demonstrated, Evolution is a FACT.
On the Origin of Species were neither original nor scientific, but rather had their roots in Pagan materialism. The essential “Darwinian” axiom of chance evolution by random change and “survival of the fittest ” was broadly suggested by ancient Greek philosophers. Even the more refined concept of “natural selection ,” which is often viewed as a unique contribution of Darwin, was clearly expressed by many others as early as 100 years before the 1859 publication of Origin of Species .
The French astronomer and mathematician Pierre de Maupertuis (1698–1759) is generally credited with being among the first to have developed an essentially modern theory of evolution, which included a process of random change (mutation) and natural selection. In his book Essaie de Cosmologie he said,
Chance, one might say, turned out a vast number of individuals; a small proportion of these were organized in such a manner that the animals’ organs could satisfy their needs. A much greater number showed neither adaptation nor order; these last have all perished. Thus the species which we see today are but a small part of all those that a blind destiny has produced.
Maupertuis was a very outspoken atheist who used his evolutionary speculation involving “blind destiny” and “chance” in an attempt to refute the necessity for a sovereign God and purposeful design in nature.
Of course, you are too caught up in your ignorance to know any of this.
Your ‘fine-tuned universe’ is not much different than an astrology believer looking out at the planets and believing he sees patterns and then asserting those patterns influence our lives. Your myopic perception does not allow you to see things as they are. You have an agenda and you are unwilling to explore beyond what you think you already know.
How unfortunate for you.
Do some reading. The fine-tuning argument is just dumb.
https://www.reddit.com/r/DebateReligion/comments/12cg9t8/refuting_the_finetuning_argument/
I shan’t even feign surprise this has gone unanswered, peddling the pseudoscientific subjective religious beliefs of someone, who has zero qualifications or expertise in the science of biology or evolution,. Yes, I can see why someone would want to ignore me pointing this out.
No, you are though the one who is dishonestly peddling atheism as a religion, using a false equivalence fallacy, based on a secondary and very different definition of the word. Do you really imagine this dishonesty is your own invention? Sorry to disavow you of that, but this kind of dishonesty abounds in religious apologetics.
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Ah, another lie, scientific ideas that contain logical fallacies would not obviously become accepted scientific theories. It’s still amusing you think you can bluff, especially with this type of schoolground “no you are” response. Doubly ironic given your arguments have been demonstrated to be relentlessly irrational, as they use multiple known logical fallacies, all of which you have dishonestly ignored here, to try and lie and claim an accepted scientific theory in good standing is fallacious.
I doubt anyone else has failed to notice, but this latest duplicity also doesn’t explain why you lied, and claimed scientific theories were “educated guesses” when even the most basic definition of the phrase demonstrates you were (yet again) lying. What does it infer about your beliefs that you are so relentlessly dishonest.
Ah, you’re going to repeat this lie without addressing the link I provided above, demonstrating the mendacity of the claim when you first made it, quelle surprise.
Here’s another link demonstrating that your claim is creationist propaganda, and not any part of mainstream science.
“Fossils provide important evidence for evolution and the adaptation of plants and animals to their environments. Fossil evidence provides a record of how creatures evolved and how this process can be represented by a ‘tree of life’, showing that all species are related to each other.”
HERE is a list of links for peer reviewed or scholarly articles for the fossil evidence for species evolution…
Again, it’s just too funny that you think you can bluff in this way, as if we don’t know the truth. I guess that works in a religious setting, as people are often indoctrinated as children to accept it uncritically.
Still trying to bluff I see, here’s a clue for you, scientific ideas are not determined based on subjective religious beliefs, so citing atheists or theists is a dead giveaway, a sort of appeal to authority fallacy. If you want to know how ludicrous the claim is then “Project Steve” is a pretty good response by mainstream science to such creationist lies and propaganda.
"NCSE’s “Project Steve” is a tongue-in-cheek parody of a long-standing creationist tradition of amassing lists of “scientists who doubt evolution” or “scientists who dissent from Darwinism.”
Creationists draw up these lists to try to convince the public that evolution is somehow being rejected by scientists, that it is a “theory in crisis.” Not everyone realizes that this claim is unfounded. NCSE has been asked numerous times to compile a list of thousands of scientists affirming the validity of the theory of evolution. Although we easily could have done so, we have resisted. We did not wish to mislead the public into thinking that scientific issues are decided by who has the longer list of scientists!
Project Steve pokes fun at this practice and, because “Steves” are only about 1% of scientists, it also makes the point that tens of thousands of scientists support evolution. And it honors the late Stephen Jay Gould, evolutionary biologist, NCSE supporter, and friend.
We’d like to think that after Project Steve, we’ll have seen the last of bogus “scientists doubting evolution” lists, but it’s probably too much to ask. We hope that when such lists are proposed, reporters and other citizens will ask, “How many Steves are on your list!?”
*"As of 2014, nearly all (around 98%) of the scientific community accepts evolution as the dominant scientific theory of biological diversity[1] with, as of 2009, some 87% accepting that evolution occurs due to natural processes, such as natural selection.[2] Scientific associations have strongly rebutted and refuted the challenges to evolution proposed by intelligent design proponents.
Several publications discuss the subject of acceptance,[15][16] including a document produced by the United States National Academy of Sciences."*
As I said earlier, and of course @NeutralZone ignored, atheism is almost universal among elite biologists, the people best placed to determine if anything in that field of science evidenced a deity. He obviously is reticent to address this fact, as it exposes his creationist lies about species evolution.
Ironically evolution has absolutely nothing to do with my atheism, another fact I explained and that @NeutralZone seems keen to ignore.
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But it must have something to do with your patience as your interlocutor squirms all over the frigging planet and you corral him back, onto the path of logical discourse. (Over and over and over again.)
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Apart from the fact that speciation events have been replicated in the laboratory (though our duplicitous creationist will obstinately refuse to accept this), the following thought recently sprang to mind, as to why creationists post so much drivel about speciation and that term they love to masturbate over, “macroevolution”.
Because they’ve been spooning up the “kinds” nonsense that’s one of the more risible features of their favourite Bronze Age mythology, the idea that an organism can be a member of more than one clade is utterly alien to them. As a consequence of the requisite infantile thinking (more unary in this case than binary), they think that the formation of a new clade via a speciation event, means that the members thereof have “changed into something else”, instead of being a definable subset of the ancestral clades in question. It’s as if Linnaeus and his taxonomy never existed for these people, except, perhaps, as a prop for their mistaken prescriptive view of the world as dispensed to them via the mythology they salivate over.
The fact that Linnaeus based his entire taxonomic system upon relatedness of living organisms , is one they move to sweep under the carpet as quickly as possible, all the better to abuse said taxonomic system wholesale to prop up their childish fantasies, via the usual duplicitous ex recto apologetic fabrications.
Indeed, Linnaeus himself famously regarded humans and chimpanzees as being sufficiently closely related, to warrant their placement in the same taxonomic Genus, and only declined to act upon this idea because of religious interference in his scientific work. Linnaeus lamented about this in a letter written to fellow taxonomist Johann Georg Gmelin, a letter that’s now in the public domain over at the Linnaean Correspondence website, that was originally hosted by his alma mater, the University of Uppsala. If memory serves, I’ve already covered that letter here in other posts on this forum, which was, of course, written fully 62 years before Darwin was born, rendering creationist obsession with the latter even more absurd than it was before taking Linnaeus’s letter into account.
Quite simply, creationists pretend, in typical mendacious fashion, that Linnaeus never intended clades to be nested (a blatant falsehood), or that Linnaeus never regarded organisms as related via shared anatomy (another blatant falsehood). Instead, driven by their fixation upon the “kinds” drivel and the static species fallacy arising therefrom, they conjure up this caricature view of speciation as being some sort of isolation of new clades from all that went before.
This despite the fact that, one, Linnaeus again regarded living organisms as related via shared anatomy (how he would have loved modern phylogenetics, even where it forced a rearrangement of his taxa), and that post-Darwin, cladogenesis is manifestly and explicitly grounded in inheritance, a concept even the pathetic Bronze Age mythology creationists masturbate over accepts. That mythology wouldn’t have devoted column inches to genealogy, if there hadn’t been at least some recognition of the importance of inheritance (which of course has also been the historico-political basis for ruling dynasties).
Inconsistent as always, creationists toss not only biological and scientific fact aside in order to cling to the tinselly holograms concocted in the broken televisions in their heads, but also toss aside concepts that their own favourite mythology treats as important. Said inconsistency, of course, also extends to that mythology, with the cretinous guff about genetics being controlled by coloured sticks residing within its pages, a piece of hilarity that I urge everyone to savour to the schadenfreude maximum, because it deserves to have the piss taken out of it regally. If ever there was a part of the mythology in question that made fundamentalist hyper-literalism ridiculous, that part of Genesis is almost as strong a contender as the whole diseased fairy tale that is the “global flood”.
But that point I make, about the farcically cretinous view of cladogenesis creationists have fabricated, cannot be over-emphasised. In adopting this warped view of total isolation of clades, they ignore the evidence provided by inheritance within their own families, that offspring don’t “become something else” just because they’re genetically distinct from their parents. The patriarchal nonsense about women having to change family names upon marriage, instituted for socio-political reasons unrelated to biological fact, probably exerts an influence here as well.
There is,of course, one other matter to consider here. Just because humans have recognised certain clades as being distinctive enough to warrant their own class names, such as “cat” or “dog”, does not make those class names prescriptive at all, merely descriptive. That the fossil record informs us, for example, that recognisable cats did not exist until about 40 million years ago or thereabouts, does not mean that the requisite less specialised ancestors “changed into something else”. It simply means that those ancestors gave rise to offspring that acquired new features, making the requisite new cat clade a distinctive subset of its less specialised ancestors, distinctive enough for humans to provide them with their own distinguishing label
Indeed, even our colloquial taxonomies, let alone scientific ones, are only ever descriptive, never prescriptive. The failure to recognise this elementary fact is merely one symptom of a dangerous mental malaise, that arises from being indoctrinated into treating a prescriptive mythology uncritically as fact.
Of course, I expect the usual mix of duplicitous ex recto apologetic fabrications and snide condescension from the expected quarter, but I’ve been brushing that off from inept discoursive amateurs for nearly 15 years, and don’t expect any of them to trouble me unduly in the future.
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If you go back and read what I actually wrote you’ll see that I asked what YOU mean by it.
I also asked what the attributes are of a legitimate scientist are.
I also asked you:
I also asked you:
Having a discussion with you about very specific things (like the existence of any gods, or the scientific method, etc.) is, at least for me, an exercise in futility as you avoid answering direct questions or fail to read the words folks actually write. You’ve said you’ve been debating folks who identify as atheist for a number of years. Based on how you have conducted yourself here, I can only surmise you have done so (and will likely continue to do so) poorly.
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