Mod Idea: Simulating surfaces -> Borg Technology -> Twinkie Physics -> Worldviews

[Krsqk]

The decay and production of C-14 should reach an equilibrium after ~30,000 years. However, recent research indicates that it hasn't yet reached that point yet. Why?

Because of the law of Conservation of Angular Momentum, objects thrown off from a spinning mass will retain the direction of their parent in orbit and revolution (i.e., clockwise objects result in clockwise spinning and orbiting objects). Why then do several moons in our solar system alone rotate "backwards" and one moon orbit its planet backwards, if the Big Bang threw off all the matter originally?

Why are the oldest living organisms (trees) found in the world only ~5,000 years old?

Why isn't the ocean saltier? At the current rate of "salting," it would have been fresh water only a few thousand years ago.

Why isn't the earth's magnetic field weaker? It's steadily decreasing in strength. Or on the other hand, how did life survive when it was so much stronger? Too strong, and it would prohibit life.

Why do many moons in our solar system still have magnetic fields? They should have cooled off inside after several billion years, and the molten core is necessary for a magnetic field?

How accurate can interstellar measurements be? The base of our triangle used for parallax is 16 light-minutes, and we're somehow accurate out to millions or billions of light-years? The angle at the tip of the triangle for a star 1 light-year away is .017. For 100 light-years away, it's .00017, and so on. 100 light-years is like two people 16 inches apart trying to measure ~800 miles away--the room for error is immense.

[Phoenix-D]

I really shouldn't read threads I said I'm not going to participate in.

"Because of the law of Conservation of Angular Momentum, objects thrown off from a spinning mass will retain the direction of their parent in orbit and revolution (i.e., clockwise objects result in clockwise spinning and orbiting objects). Why then do several moons in our solar system alone rotate "backwards" and one moon orbit its planet backwards, if the Big Bang threw off all the matter originally?"

Because the monentum and angle didn't come from that explosion. It came from a -later- event. If the moon in question is a captured one, that is simply the orbit it stablized in.

"Why are the oldest living organisms (trees) found in the world only ~5,000 years old?"

Because surviving for that long is extremely difficult. Why do humans live less than that? Because before that they get killed by something.

"Why isn't the earth's magnetic field weaker? It's steadily decreasing in strength. Or on the other hand, how did life survive when it was so much stronger? Too strong, and it would prohibit life."

IIRC exactly how the field is generated isn't understood. However when rocks solidify they take on properties of any field they are exposed to (it's strength and direction). Rocks have been found with a weaker magnetic field and a stronger one, as well as a completely reversed one. The field apparently weakens gradually, then flips directions and strengthens again.

Phoenix-D

[Fyron]

Now forces sound more like the Force. I get the idea that the answer for anything dealing with stellar evolution, etc, is "It's always been there." Doesn't sound too scientific (i.e., verifiable) to me. Sounds more like a belief or faith.

No, they sound nothing like the Force. The Force sounds more like religious mumbo-jumbo than any natural laws. Again, give me a time machine, and then we can go back in time until we see if there was a beginning, or if it is continuous. That is really the only way to prove beyond a doubt what happened that long ago in the past.

I defy you to tell me what was in the primordial goo or what the conditions on earth were like. That's unverifiable. To come up with some soup in a laboratory, hook up a spark plug, come out with some amino acids, and then assume that you somehow must have hit on the combination that existed is unscientific. To say, "Well, it must have existed--after all, here we are!" is so far from logic that it's not worth debunking. Also, there is a world of difference between organic molecules and life. The "simplest" cell is orders of magnitudes more complex than the most complex organic molecule. (I know. Given enough time and the random chances of enough of the right molecules landing in the right places in this worldwide primordial goo...)

The "simplest cell" is made of organic molecules. But, the first organism-like things were not full cells.

There is a world of difference between continued production of organic molecules and cellular reproduction.

Not that much of one.

Hume's argument stretches the premises beyond their logical extension, by cleverly wording the design argument. No creationist would say that man's creation and God's creation are like results from like effects. If the universe is without edge and without center (as is commonly said), then God would have created an infinite creation. Man never comes close to infinite creation. In fact, man never comes close to the complexity found in "simple" organisms. Given enough time and chance, though, I'm sure we could come up with something.

A number of your arguments sure sound like the Design Argument to me.

Where did I say this? I'm wondering what allowed intermediate forms to live with partially developed 1) circulatory systems, 2) respiratory systems, 3) transportation systems, 4) digestive systems, etc. For that matter, if the "super-carp" is better, why do we have carp today? If each step up is better by definition, we should have run out of lower forms quite some time ago. The answer, of course, is random chance.

You said it continuously. Not explicitly, but implicitly.

All 4 of those systems exist in ALL LIFEFORMS. Single-celled organisms have all of them. They are not as complex as in animals and such, but they are there. As organisms started becoming multicellular, the cells started to become more specialized. Then, you eventually got macroscopic organisms that have what you would call "1) circulatory systems, 2) respiratory systems, 3) transportation systems, 4) digestive systems". There was never such a thing as a lion with no circulatory system. That is just absurd. All of those became more complex as the organisms became more complex.

Not all carp evolve into other creatures. Only some do. Each step up is not necessarily absolutely better, it is different. Sometimes it is better, sometimes equal, sometimes worse.

First, you missed the point of the question. The entire system needs to be present to function. How did species with one or two parts survive before the rest of the system developed? Random chance saw to it that it all worked out.

THEY DIDNT! All parts evolved simultaneously.

How did it happen that DNA and RNA both happened in the same cell (all surviving cells, actually), with DNA in an incredible double-helix, and DNA unwound itself and unzipped, and an RNA molecule snuggled up to it and made a copy, and the DNA then zipped back up and rewound. Random chance?

The first organisms did not have as complex DNA as exists in the modern day.

Typo. What is so scientific about the idea of hydrogen becoming human? In other words, life from unlife. What about the experiments of Redi and Pasteur? Are they bogus? Or didn't they have enough time (or just bad chance)?

I have already explained how life comes from "unlife", as you put it.

Your verifiable, testable, provable scientific explanations included "random" or "chance" at least ten times. In fact, we're to believe that everything in biological evolution (not to mention planetary, stellar, and elemental evolution) is the amazing result of random chances. I believe in a supernatural (i.e., non-verifiable, non-scientific) miraculous creation of the universe and everything in it. You believe in a materialistic, statistical miracle of such proportions based on so many unverifiable, unsubstantiated assumptions that I'd be ashamed to admit it.

Sigh...

[Will]

Just a comment...

Originally posted by Krsqk:
No, belief isn't a switch, but it is a choice. Either you choose to believe in God, or you choose to believe in evolution.

Ummm, I'm pretty sure you didn't mean to word it like that. I know quite a few people who tell me they believe in some god (most of them the Christian God), and that they believe evolution happens. I know a few people that believe in several gods, not just one. So, as you typed it, that statement is utterly and completely wrong

As for the whole evolution/randomness thing... I have come to believe that the reason so many people cannot accept it is because humans in general have a hard time grasping the concept of how large the universe is, and how long the time is it's actually been in existance. Probably doesn't help that, from what we understand of the mind, subconsiously, we don't recognize anything larger than 4 (I was suprised when I heard about this, but I did some quick testing on myself. If you flash cards with varying numbers of items on it, very quickly, you can tell if there are 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, or more than 4 items on it with accuracy. Pinpointing in the more than 4 catagory is very inaccurate.). So, consiously, the numbers we understand are lots of Groups of 4 added together, and at some point, this breaks down.
Think of one million dollars. "Wow, that's a lot of money." But, if you have one million dollars right in front of you, in one dollar bills, the reaction would be more like "WOW! That's a LOT of money!"

And back to the actual point: it is hard for humans to believe the randomness behind evolution and other theories (BTW, another digression... for scientists, a theory is something that has been continually substantiated by facts, while a hypothesis more acurately describes what "lay" people term a theory. The "Theory of Evolution" is more accurately the "Theory of Microevolution", as this has been substantiated several times. Macroevolution is infered from this, but as it is difficult to prove this within a human lifespan, it would still be classified a hypothesis).
Hmmm... back to the point again... it is hard to believe the randomness behind these theories because in order for that randomness to give the results, it would require the processes going on in a very, very large number of places, over a very, very large amount of time. Since we can't really fundamentally understand numbers greater than 4, we must rely on abstractions to understand what is happening. For religious people, the abstraction is god(s) of some sort(s). For scientific people, the abstraction is a universe that is amazingly, mind-bogglingly huge, we can't even begin to grasp it, and if we actually did, it would probably kill the graspee (read The Restaurant at the End of the Universe, chapter 10... The Total Perspective Vortex). So, just accept that the Universe is "one heck of a big place" and work on that assumption

Hopefully all of that made some sort of sense...

[Fyron]

Made perfect sense to me.

[dogscoff]

When my kids go to school I want them to learn all about how the Frost Giant Ymir was formed in the great void Ginnugagap, and that Odin (son of Bor, son of Buri who was formed in a block of ice and freed by the mystical cow Audhumla) slew him and made from his body the Earth (Midgard)...

The Norse creation myth.

[dogscoff]

I don't want religion taught in public schools. I also don't

I take it that's in response to my Last post. Sorry, I was being facetious...

[Krsqk]

Maybe we should take the morning/afternoon to settle down a little. I think we're all getting a little antsy. I'll check back around 7 or 8 EST.

[E. Albright]

Originally posted by Krsqk:

quote:

---

[...] Where did God come from?

God, by definition, is uncreated. I'm not saying that's scientific (i.e., proveable).

---

Ahem. If it's possible to posit an uncreated God, it's possible to posit other uncreated things. Thus, I can (and will) posit that the universe is uncreated/undesigned, thus eliminating the need for a uncreated/undesigned creator/designer. St. Tom's causal chains can't stand up to Occam's razor. I'm not saying that's scientific, but I don't have to, 'cause I'm agnostic in terms of universal creation (i.e., I hold that certain truth in this regard is ultimately unknowable). And I know that in this sort of debate a declaration of any form of agnosticism is generally viewed right up there with declarations that "I'm rubber and you're glue...", but there you go.

Originally posted by Krsqk:
If I said, "Such and such happened at such a time, and it happened thus and so," I'd expect you to take what I said at face value. If I said, "Let me tell you a story with a moral; here it is," I'd expect you to understand what I meant. That's the literal interpretation of the Bible.

If you don't take the Bible literally, you get to decide what you want to take or not take. It puts man as the determining factor for what's supposed to be God's Word. What did God mean if He doesn't mean what He says?

Problem: you make it sound as though language has one, unambiguous meaning. Heh. Speaking as a student of computer science whose interests run towards natural language processing, I find your suggestion amusing. Speaking as a student of philosophy whose interests run towards phenomenology and philosophy of language, I find your suggestion troubling. But most forcefully, speaking as a student of literary criticism who never quite got over his fondness for deconstruction (tho' I probably shouldn't admit that in polite company), I find your suggestion unsupportable.

Comprehension of language (written or otherwise) is interpretation. It is not "comprehension" in the pure sense in which the word is commonly used. I will admit that there is a strong tendency, particularly in the US, to view language as precise, but hélas, it just is not so. Language is an approximation based on current socially accepted norms. Which are neither universal nor static. If I order a hot dog, I expect to get a hot dog. But there's no reason I couldn't recieve a kraut dog, if in this community everyone knows that when you ask for a hot dog, you mean a hot dog with kraut. 500 years ago (or so), "meat" in English meant "foodstuff", not "the flesh of an animal".

So tell me, how can you avoid interpreting language? The answer is, you can't; you can at best strive for consistent interpretation. This sort of reasoning is the basis for W. V. O. Quine's "On the Reasons for Indeterminacy of Translation" (Journal of Philosophy 1970; unfortunately, I couldn't find an Online Version of it). Extracting meaning from language is approximation and assumption; it is not and cannot be viewed as a matter of certainty or precision. Thus, anyone who speaks of "literally" interpreting a book is doomed to speak wrongly.

What the above is to say is that your above statement, "What did God mean if He doesn't mean what He says?", is in fact a misleading rhetorical question, because it implys that one can't possibly ask "What did God mean if He does mean what He says?", and one unfortunately can (and must). As reading any book, even the Bible, is ultimately an act of interpretive guesswork, man is necessarily the determining factor for what's supposed to be God's Word...

Originally posted by Imperator Fyron:
2. Do your answers show more or less faith than the person who says, "God must have designed it"?

They show no faith. They show scientific understanding and learning.

I.F., you're absolutely right. Your answers show no faith. They show scientific understanding and learning.

I.F., you're absolutely wrong. Your answers show as much or more faith than the person who says, "God must have designed it".

I.F., you're either right or wrong depending on how I choose to interpret "faith".

(Okay, that Last bit was really more addressed to Krsqk, but still...)

E. Albright

[Edit: Yow. Sorry about the length on this...]

[ December 12, 2002, 17:51: Message edited by: E. Albright ]

[Suicide Junkie]

[Edit: Yow. Sorry about the length on this...]

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