The Atheist Premise...

[houndawg]

We do? How do we know those rocks didn't evolve like that?

Organic/inorganic. Apples/oranges, John-o.

Would it be better if I showed something man made that was made of plastic? That way both would be organic.

The point is that it really does take a HUGE leap of faith to be absolutely convinced that something like the hawk depicted arose through natural processes and chance without some kind of intelligence influencing the process.

We, as intelligent beings, cannot even generate a living single celled organism from materials that were previously entirely non living.

Not really, John. What it takes is a hard look at the evidence for evolution.

[Chizzang]

It's nothing new but it's just contemplating the existence around you and the probability. You can see an example of the thought process by Christian Apologist Oxford mathematician John Lennox at http://www.focus.org.uk/lennox.php" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;. He provides a lot of examples of incomprehensibly long odds, but I'll pick one on the odds of having even one planet in the universe capable of sustaining life:

Astrophysicist Hugh Ross[7] lists many such parameters that have to be fine-tuned for life to be possible, and makes a rough but conservative calculation that the chance of one such planet existing in the universe is about 1 in 10 to the 30th power.

I had to write out "...to the 30th power" and thereby slightly change the quote because I don't see a way to to superscripts. But anyway we're talking about an astronomically small chance of even that one thing necessary in the chain of events required to have happened. And there are many, many other astronomically low probability things in the chain of events that had to have happened. Countless things.

There are counter arguments such as the one at http://experimentalmath.info/blog/2009/ ... nd-others/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;. But I don't think they are convincing. The author of that article, for example, says that creationists/intelligent design adherents calculate a probability of one particular thing happening at one chance in 10 to the 183rd power and it's really more one chance in 10 to the 33rd power.

I don't know if changing that particular chance to one in 10 to the 33rd power is enough to "...neutralize the probability based argument against evolution..." or not. I'd have to read the reference. But it doesn't change my outlook either way because 1) that one event that has one chance in 10 to the 33rd power of happening is just one of many low probability events that would have to have happened and 2) he's only talking about evolution. Before you could have evolution you had to have had the universe unfold in certain ways, have that planet that had only a one in 10 to the 30th power of existing, and have life arise from non living materials on that planet to begin with before it could be sustained then evolve.

The convention is to reject chance as an explanation when the probability is <=0.05. As as a qualitative matter I think the probability of the physical laws interacting with chance to result in what we see around us is a whole lot smaller than that. A WHOLE lot smaller.

I am accustomed to screening things through that lens of probability. The first thing to do with data is test it to see if its characteristics can be reasonably explained by chance. Then if the conclusion is that they can't reasonably be explained by chance, with the cutoff point being p = 0.05, one starts looking for explanations for what DID cause those characteristics. And when I look at the existence around me I just don't see it as reasonably explained by chance interacting with the physical laws.

Does that prove the existence of "God?" No. Even being 100% sure that something can't be explained by chance does not confirm what it IS. But, really, it's just not correct to say there is "no evidence" that would make one consider the possibility of an intelligence behind the way things are. Something that guided the process.

I don't know if Lennox correctly represented how one atheist mathematician/astronomer reacted to his realization of the probability associated with one characteristic of the universe necessary for the existence of life. But the way he describes it in the first article linked above is this:

Hoyle later confessed that nothing had shaken his atheism as much as this discovery. Even this degree of fine-tuning was enough to persuade him that it looked as if ‘a superintellect has monkeyed with physics as well as with chemistry and biology,’ and that ‘there are no blind forces in nature worth talking about.’"

I'm sure the guy remained an atheist. But that's the effect I'm talking about.

But Johnny you fall into the same trap
You point the mathematics at a system we can observe and then say... Wow that's unlikely, look at the crazy numbers it would take over the billions of years (all things we can't even begin to comprehend)

and you never point the Numbers at the likelihood of God being like Santa Clause (because there aren't enough zero's in the universe to calculate that)

So Yes, Pointing the Mathematics at Genetic Mutation creates some mind boggling numbers
Now point those numbers at the Creationists pet notions

Evolution we can observe / Regardless of how crazy the numbers are

[houndawg]

It's nothing new but it's just contemplating the existence around you and the probability. You can see an example of the thought process by Christian Apologist Oxford mathematician John Lennox at http://www.focus.org.uk/lennox.php" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;. He provides a lot of examples of incomprehensibly long odds, but I'll pick one on the odds of having even one planet in the universe capable of sustaining life:



I had to write out "...to the 30th power" and thereby slightly change the quote because I don't see a way to to superscripts. But anyway we're talking about an astronomically small chance of even that one thing necessary in the chain of events required to have happened. And there are many, many other astronomically low probability things in the chain of events that had to have happened. Countless things.

There are counter arguments such as the one at http://experimentalmath.info/blog/2009/ ... nd-others/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;. But I don't think they are convincing. The author of that article, for example, says that creationists/intelligent design adherents calculate a probability of one particular thing happening at one chance in 10 to the 183rd power and it's really more one chance in 10 to the 33rd power.

I don't know if changing that particular chance to one in 10 to the 33rd power is enough to "...neutralize the probability based argument against evolution..." or not. I'd have to read the reference. But it doesn't change my outlook either way because 1) that one event that has one chance in 10 to the 33rd power of happening is just one of many low probability events that would have to have happened and 2) he's only talking about evolution. Before you could have evolution you had to have had the universe unfold in certain ways, have that planet that had only a one in 10 to the 30th power of existing, and have life arise from non living materials on that planet to begin with before it could be sustained then evolve.

The convention is to reject chance as an explanation when the probability is <=0.05. As as a qualitative matter I think the probability of the physical laws interacting with chance to result in what we see around us is a whole lot smaller than that. A WHOLE lot smaller.

I am accustomed to screening things through that lens of probability. The first thing to do with data is test it to see if its characteristics can be reasonably explained by chance. Then if the conclusion is that they can't reasonably be explained by chance, with the cutoff point being p = 0.05, one starts looking for explanations for what DID cause those characteristics. And when I look at the existence around me I just don't see it as reasonably explained by chance interacting with the physical laws.

Does that prove the existence of "God?" No. Even being 100% sure that something can't be explained by chance does not confirm what it IS. But, really, it's just not correct to say there is "no evidence" that would make one consider the possibility of an intelligence behind the way things are. Something that guided the process.

I don't know if Lennox correctly represented how one atheist mathematician/astronomer reacted to his realization of the probability associated with one characteristic of the universe necessary for the existence of life. But the way he describes it in the first article linked above is this:



I'm sure the guy remained an atheist. But that's the effect I'm talking about.

But Johnny you fall into the same trap
You point the mathematics at a system we can observe and then say... Wow that's unlikely, look at the crazy numbers it would take over the billions of years (all things we can't even begin to comprehend)

and you never point the Numbers at the likelihood of God being like Santa Clause (because there aren't enough zero's in the universe to calculate that)

So Yes, Pointing the Mathematics at Genetic Mutation creates some mind boggling numbers
Now point those numbers at the Creationists pet notions

Evolution we can observe / Regardless of how crazy the numbers are

JSO.

Knows his fundamentalism is phony but desperately seeks to validate it with "science". You're spending too much time with your buddies over on Stormfront, John. They do the same thing trying to validate their white supremacy stuff.