Discussion between Dcleve and Matthew

user80226

12:48

Copying and pasting @Dcleve's original answer:

The best answer I can offer is that there are actually very few credible philosophers or scientists who argue that the designed nature of our universe "provides crystal-clear evidence of design, leaving everyone without excuse". The most prominent conservative Christian theologian to address this question is Alvin Plantinga, and he argued in God and Other Minds, examining the traditional arguments both for and against God’s existence, concluding that all fall well below the standard of compelling proof. What Plantinga came up with instead, i…

Copying and pasting @Philomath's original answer:

Granted that human beings are a product of design, an argument could be that the design of our anatomy is flawed and therefore incompatible with a presumably perfect God. Some examples: the narrow female pelvic birth canal, the potential for problematic wisdom teeth, the inability to synthesize vitamin C, the blind spot in the eye due to the optic nerve placement, and the recurrent back pain vulnerability due to the spine's structure in upright posture.

Matthew

15:20

@ToddWilcox How do you maintain that separation? Say, for the sake of argument, that a miracle occurs. If "science" is excluded from allowing miracles, then, when trying to explain what happened, "science" will necessarily come up with the wrong answer(s). If Creation was a miracle, as Scripture contends, then this "science" can't help but come up with hopelessly incorrect explanations.

Thus, while it's one thing to say that science only studies the non-miraculous, the moment you start avoiding any evidence that a miracle happened, you've invoked the Holmesian fallacy.

@prosfilaes ...and you're arguing in circles again. There may be 10k layers in a lake. That doesn't establish that every single layer is exactly equal to one year. Depending on what else is happening, you might get many in a year, or none. Same with tree rings. Ice layers are even worse; they typically do not correspond to years. You are waving your hands so you can ignore anything that indicates the world is not billions of years old.

@user80226 That has to be one of the most asinine arguments I've seen, because it completely disregards the very basis of Christianity. (Plus, I'll repeat again, the eye is not badly designed. Ask Baden and Nilsson, or Ribak. Ask Cell, NIH, Smithsonian or Science Daily. AFAIK these are all atheist sources.)

Also ask why so many biologists reject Common Descent, or are fed up with the despicable methods by which the party line is enforced.

Matthew

15:41

Another source: Kröger and Biehlmaier. The only people that accept that argument as valid are people that can't be bothered to check if it's been refuted. (BTW, when is the last time you heard that the human appendix is "vestigial"?)

Todd Wilcox

@Matthew I’ve never read any science books or articles or otherwise studied or learned any science that requires that miracles never happen. Is it possible someone has deceived you about the nature of science? The number of excellent scientists who also deeply believe in religion and have faith is large enough that we should feel that all conflict between the two is manufactured.

Matthew

@ToddWilcox Really? You've obviously never run into Billions and Billions of Demons (I say "run into" because I haven't read the whole book, but there's a particular, very famous quote...). Or the work of Lyell. Or the work of Darwin. I've run into many, many people that demand that science operate as if there is no God.

Todd Wilcox

@Matthew People might demand that there’s no god, but I’m not aware of any scientific theories, results, or experiments that are only valid if there are no gods. Science as a system of thought and a body of knowledge is not always accurately represented by those who study and use it. Just like the Bible is not always accurately represented by those who claim to believe.

Matthew

15:57

@ToddWilcox That's not what I'm claiming. There are scientific hypotheses that exist in order to avoid miracles, and are accepted as credible because of a bias toward rejecting miracles. Common Descent, for example, has all manner of problems, but it's the only viable game in town that doesn't require a Designer. Same with Big Bang.

...and billions of years are accepted not because it's the best interpretation, but because the alternative is thousands of years, a global Flood, and most definitely a Designer.

Todd Wilcox

@Matthew I’m not aware of any aspect of big bang theory or cosmology that fails if there are one or more gods. Maybe the Big Bang itself is a miracle. Same with speciation by natural selection. Not “requiring” a god (not 100% sure what you mean by that) is different from requiring no gods.

Matthew

@ToddWilcox Again, that's not the claim. Big Bang has problems, period. Same with Common Descent (please don't play bait-and-switch). Certainly if they were plausible in the first place, they'd be plausible with the addition of a "god" that isn't doing much.

The problem isn't that BB or CD exclude are incompatible with "a god" (though, to be fair, they do contradict what the True God has revealed, and they do exist in order to deny that same God, or at least to marginalize Him into irrelevancy). The problem is that the alternative explanations require God, and are therefore rejected, despite being better fits for the available evidence.

terdon

16:33

For what it's worth, I had a look at the Jeansen Testing the Predictions of the Young-Earth Y Chromosome paper, which cites a previous work by the same author. I admit I stopped reading when I read the following paragraph which shows the authors simply do not understand what they are doing:

> Because of the pairing of the Y chromosome with the X chromosome, the Y chromosome exists in an effectively haploid state. Consequently, to calculate sequence coverage for the Y chromosome, we took the reported whole-genome sequencing coverage and divided it by 2.

That is nonsense! You cannot divide the average coverage of the entire genome in two and assume that this is the average coverage of a specific region. Never mind that this also ignores the pseudoautosomal regions of chrY, the whole premise is deeply flawed.

This also shows they simply do not understand how sequencing works and how coverage is calculated. Which renders the entire analysis pointless. Even if we ignore the fact that they (literally) tried to extrapolate values by taking a screenshot of a figure and analyzing that:

> We extracted the father-son SNV differences from the Figure 4c Y chromosome tree of Maretty et al. (2017) as follows: First, a screenshot was taken from the published pdf containing Figure 4c, and the screenshot included the associated scale bar of “50 mutations” (see Supplemental fig. 1). (The raw sequence data for the Y chromosomes is restricted access.) After electronically expanding the screenshot to a large size (while keeping the proportions constant), we located the 17 pairs with the shortest distances between them, to identify the 17 father-son pairs.

user80226

@terdon This discussion may be of your interest too: chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/156073/…

terdon

17:03

thanks

prosfilaes

18:11

@Matthew That doesn't mean every single layer is exactly equal to one year. But they're trying to figure out the C14 levels, so they try and figure out what each layer is equal to, where you just throw up your hands and claim it's useless. Dendrochronology on Wikipedia has a whole section about how they deal with problems in tree rings.

Matthew

@prosfilaes I didn't say it's useless, I said the interpretation is wrong. Especially when ¹⁴C dating is used to establish dendrochronology that's used to calibrate ¹⁴C dating. (And especially when the resulting ¹⁴C calibration is preferred over recorded history and archaeological evidence.)

prosfilaes

18:38

@Matthew But that's not what you said; you said it was "That doesn't establish that every single layer is exactly equal to one year." Nothing acknowledging that they know that and have worked hard to compensate for that. And again, you don't care about the age of tools in prehistoric Ireland, you're happy to dismiss and go on.

@Matthew Miracles are hard. Last Thursdayism is a notorious thought experiment; if the world was created as is last Thursday, how could we know? If God created the world 6,000 years ago with all the evidence of being billions of years old, how could we know?

Matthew

@prosfilaes But all of it is based on circular reasoning. There's an a priori belief that the timeline is X. All dating mechanisms are calibrated based on that, so of course the end result is the claim that they support X. Substitute Y, however, and suddenly everything supports Y.

@prosfilaes First, the evidence isn't "billions of years". Second, God left us a record.

prosfilaes

On the other hand, if the Young-Earth creationists are right, and God didn't try to deceive us, then I would expect the answers to come out to about 6,000 years. There'd be no fossil record of extinct creatures, there'd be no stars that seem to be billions of years away, there'd be no radioactive decay consistent with billions of years.

Matthew

@prosfilaes Uh... sorry, have you read Genesis? Chapters 6-8, especially? (Or at least heard of the Flood?)

prosfilaes

@Matthew All of it is based on circular reasoning, of course. Kelvin figured the age of the earth was 100 million years, but the Scientific Illuminati thought that 4.5 billion years sounded better. We've counted up tree rings, and carefully matched them all up, and that could come out to anything. Why, trees in the past could have been putting on 12 rings a year, year after year, and it's only our circular reasoning that doesn't get us to conclude that.

Matthew

Why shouldn't stars be far away? Why shouldn't radioactive decay have occurred? (On that subject... there is a ton of evidence that it occurred rapidly.)

prosfilaes

18:50

@Matthew You mean the part where Noah took two creatures of every type on the ark? So there should be no extinct creatures, at least not due to the flood. There certainly shouldn't be a huge collection of extinct dinosaurs that couldn't have all lived at the same time, a bunch of top predators in the ocean (and the question of what this flood did to the ocean is another one), etc.

Matthew

@prosfilaes No extinct land creatures due to the Flood. Can you prove there aren't? How would you prove they went extinct in the Flood and not shortly after? (How do you prove that "a huge collection of extinct dinosaurs [...] couldn't have all lived at the same time"?)

prosfilaes

Again, everyone working on radioactive decay just tossed all their facts in the trash on the orders of the Scientific Illuminati. It was a big discovery, and no one knew how it could be used to study the history of the earth, but this idea of uniform radioactive decay had to be crushed down.

Matthew

@prosfilaes Uh... if you know how much creative interpretation is involved in "radiometric dating", I don't think you'd be saying that sarcastically.

There are plenty of decades-old rocks "dated" to millions of years. Plenty of samples from the same strata that give wildly different dates. Not to mention ¹⁴C in practically everything that contains carbon.

prosfilaes

And again, I should prove how Noah's ark worked so you can critique it. Perhaps you can explain how you get T-Rex on a boot and keep it alive all that time, and then dump all the creatures out on Mount Ararat and managed to get the Christmas Island blue-tailed skink into just one small island halfway around the world. Explain why all (non-avian) dinosaurs are gone.

Explain something, instead of just trashing everyone else's work. Your ideas are not the default truth.

Matthew

@prosfilaes Or perhaps you could bother to do the research to know that these questions have been answered. How big is a juvenile T-rex, incidentally? How much does it need to eat if it's hibernating?

If you're going to say something's impossible, is it unreasonable for me to expect you're familiar with the claims how it is possible? Follow your own advice; explain why the existing explanations are inadequate, don't just trash them. Your ideas are not the default truth.

Dinosaurs are extinct through some combination of hunting (lots of records of that) and not being able to survive in the post-Flood climate. You may recall there have been ice ages?

Todd Wilcox

19:16

@Matthew Are you claiming "There are scientific hypotheses that exist in order to avoid miracles"? That's the claim I'm questioning, so when you say "that's not what I'm claiming," it sounds like you think I'm responding to something that I don't think I'm responding to. I think I'm responding to "There are scientific hypotheses that exist in order to avoid miracles". Can you give an example of a hypothesis that in your mind exists to "avoid miracles"?

Matthew

@ToddWilcox A hypothesis can exist in order to explain something without resorting to a supernatural explanation, yes. That's not the same thing as said hypothesis conflicting with the existence of the supernatural, which is what you seem to be arguing.

Todd Wilcox

Like, I don't see how the Big Bang theory exists to "avoid miracles". AFAIK it exists for the reason of having a history of the universe that both extends as far back as possible and also is consistent with observed phenomena, like the red shift and cosmic background radiation.

@Matthew I missed the example of a "scientific hypothesis that exist(s) in order to avoid miracles". Im not aware of any aspect of scientific thought as being motivated by "avoiding miracles". What are you talking about here?

Matthew

@ToddWilcox ...but the competing explanation, which also explains red shift (not sure about CMB specifically, but it isn't incompatible with CMB), involves a miracle. UCD explicitly exists to explain life without a Designer.

Uniformitarianism also exists specifically to deny the Flood. (And has all sorts of problems.)

Todd Wilcox

Also quoting you: ' I question the validity of conclusions based on the presupposition that "there is no God", yes.' What is a conclusion that in your mind is based on the presumption that there is no god?

Matthew

@ToddWilcox Big Bang. Common Descent. Earth being billions of years old.

Todd Wilcox

19:24

@Matthew Can you explain why you think any one of those hypotheses requires that there be no god or gods?

Matthew

THEY DON'T!

Todd Wilcox

Oh. That's exactly my point

So we agree.

Matthew

The reason they're considered most plausible is because explanations that require/imply a deity are rejected on the basis of requiring/implying a deity.

Todd Wilcox

So then why did you mention 'conclusions based on the presupposition that "there is no God"'?

Matthew

If you don't start with the premise "there is no God", BB/CD are not the most plausible explanations.

Todd Wilcox

19:26

@Matthew "The reason they're considered most plausible is because explanations that require/imply a deity are rejected on the basis of requiring/implying a deity" I think you'd have to attribute these thoughts to specific people, because not all scientists think the same way. Plausibility of a theory is not necessarily related to implausibility of competing theories.

@Matthew 'The reason they're considered most plausible is because explanations that require/imply a deity are rejected on the basis of requiring/implying a deity' - In what way(s)? Their plausibility isn't based as much on initial assumptions as it is on consistency with observations.

Matthew

@ToddWilcox There's... a lot of politics and other shenanigans involved in the general case. Lyell and Darwin, however, definitely had "take God out of the picture" as a motivation.

Todd Wilcox

@Matthew Ok, I'm with you on saying Darwin and some scientists worked to refute the existence of gods, but those are people doing people things. Those goals are not inherent in the nature of scientific thought in general. Those goals are related to those specific people.

Matthew

@ToddWilcox They're... somewhat consistent with observations. But they have lots of problems that are overlooked, and the only viable competing hypotheses (which are at least or more consistent with observations) either require or strongly suggest a deity.

@ToddWilcox On that note, do you actually believe "people doing people things" (i.e. politics) doesn't play a role in science?

Todd Wilcox

"viable competing hypotheses either require or strongly suggest a deity." AFAIK, creationist theories don't do any better job of matching observations. Maybe that's my ignorance. I'm not aware of any religious texts that explain red shift and CMB.

Matthew

@ToddWilcox As I said, I don't know about the CMB specifically. Red shift has to do with the expansion of space, I believe?

Todd Wilcox

19:32

@Matthew Of course politics plays a role in science, but devaluing science because of the politics of some scientists is similar to devaluing all religion because a few priests molested children. The value of faith in society is not destroyed by any finite number of bad actions of faithful people and the value of science in society is not destroyed by any finite number of bad actions by any scientific people.

@Matthew Ok I want to take a step back a moment because are you questioning the validity of cosmological theories like the Big Bang hypothesis while also not being aware of what exactly the cosmic background radiation or the red shift of galaxies are? I'd like to suggest working to fully understand anything before you spent a lot of time refuting it.

Matthew

@ToddWilcox No, I'm saying I'm not aware of any Creationist models that specifically seek to explain the CMB. (Which is more uniform than BB predicts, so saying BB "explains" it is something of a stretch.) My recollection is that expansion is usually cited as the cause of red shift, which seems consistent with what I know about Doppler effect. Yes, I'm asking you to check my understanding; is that unreasonable?

I'm also not saying BB doesn't fit observations at all. I'm saying it has problems. The Horizon Problem. Lack of Pop3 stars. Very distant galaxies not looking "younger". Lack of observed star formation. Highly contested feasibility of star formation models.

There are other, more localized issues that I won't try to enumerate.

Todd Wilcox

@Matthew I'm pretty sure all scientific theories have problems

Matthew

@ToddWilcox Sure. Creationist models aren't immune either. The question is, which model better fits the available evidence? Adding "the model doesn't refer to a deity" as a decision criteria isn't valid.

Todd Wilcox

What's very interesting about science is how despite the ubiquitous problems of scientific theories, we can still apply the theories effectively to achieve goals. For example, our understanding of electromagnetism is not 100% complete and perfect, but it's good enough for use to be able to create a global, digital, information network

Our understanding of orbital mechanics has infamous gaps, but we still are able to land people on the moon and return them safely to earth.

Matthew

@ToddWilcox Interestingly, electromagnetism and orbital mechanics don't have competing hypotheses that invoke a deity. 🙂 Nor, for that matter, do they deal with explaining historical events.

Todd Wilcox

19:44

The theory of relativity is one of the most complete and consistent theories I'm aware of. Regardless of whatever problems there may be with it, it does have an amazing success in predicting how clocks in GPS satellites have to run at a different rate in order for GPS to work.

So every time anyone successfully navigates to their destination using GPS, they own their arrival to Einstein.

Matthew

Ignoring the crackpots that think Earth is "flat", when's the last time you heard of someone disagreeing with electromagnetism or orbital mechanics? Or even relativity? (Einstein believed in God, incidentally.)

Todd Wilcox

My point is saying a theory has problems isn't really a powerful assertion.

Matthew

@ToddWilcox ...so we should still be using the Copernican model? After all, it had problems, despite kind-of sort-of fitting observations.

Todd Wilcox

@Matthew Both electromagnetism and orbital mechanics are crucial ingredients in cosmology and astrophysics, so if you're coming after the Big Bang, you're talking about electromagnetism, orbital mechanics, relativity, and other branches of science. They all work together.

Matthew

In what way is orbital mechanics hindered if Big Bang is an incorrect model?

Todd Wilcox

19:50

I don't really understanding the question but how mass behaves in the presence of gravity is one link between the history of the universe and the present of the universe

In other words, any theories about the history of the universe that are inconsistent with how the universe behaves today would be suspect for that alone, unless there are companion theories to explain why the what we observe in the universe would behave differently today from in the past.

Matthew

@ToddWilcox In what way is Creationism "inconsistent with how the universe behaves today" that lacks "companion theories to explain why the what we observe in the universe would behave differently today from in the past"?

Todd Wilcox

@Matthew Sorry I wasn't trying to claim that it is

I'm not here to make any statements about creationism. Just trying to understand your statements about science

Matthew

@ToddWilcox The way I see it (trying to reply directly as simply as possible), there are two competing paradigms; BB+CD, and Creationism. As far as I can tell, Creationism is the superior model, i.e. fits observations better than BB+CD. Despite which, it isn't well regarded. Its implication of a Deity seems to have much to do with its (lack of) acceptance.

There's also a lot of politics involved, e.g. ID is more in line with Creationism, and gets similar treatment despite not making outright theological claims. (But it has the same objection; it implies a Designer.)

Todd Wilcox

@Matthew My personal take is that creationism and related theories about the nature and behavior of the universe have not shown to predict the same kinds of outcomes that scientific theories do. For example, there isn't a day-to-day process or technology like GPS that has been made possible by religious explanations of the nature of the universe

Matthew

@ToddWilcox No, just many such processes made possible by people that believe in God, and in many cases, were Creationists. Name a day-to-day process made possible by belief in BB or CD?

Todd Wilcox

20:05

Like, I'm not personally aware of insights we've gained about the current universe based on creationist theories

Matthew

@ToddWilcox en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lake_Missoula 🙂

Todd Wilcox

Its not reasonable to try to separate General Relativity from cosmology, so it's not that BB makes GPS possible but GR in part makes sense of both BB and GPS

Matthew

...but that depends on what constitutes an "insight". Is knowing that God Created you, personally not insightful? Many believers would say "yes". If you disagree with the premise, then you're also going to disagree with the conclusions, so of course you won't have any "insights" as a result.

@ToddWilcox I think you're missing the point. BB uses but does not contribute to GR. It brings no value to the table that isn't self-referential. (Just as you "see" no insights from Creationism, because many are likewise self-referential.)

Although I'd disagree with the "no insights" claim. Creationism rightly predicted unexpected magnetic fields and maximum intensities thereof. It correctly predicted that JWST wouldn't find "young" stars/galaxies. It makes many accurate predictions regarding Natural Selection. It makes many accurate statements about geology. It's predicted various archaeological findings.

It predicted all humans being "one race", which is actually very contradictory to what Darwin predicted.

Todd Wilcox

I did say "personally". I don't read creationist articles, journals, or books, so I was not exposed to any predictions made by creationists

Todd Wilcox

20:27

I'm not sure if "predict" that humans are one "race" makes sense to me. Surely creationists are humans and therefore wouldn't be predicting things about the nature of humanity, they might be analyzing the nature of humanity though.

Matthew

@ToddWilcox Let me see if I can quantify that. In technical terms, Creationism would predict that all sophonts (at least on Earth) would be biologically capable of hybridization. Whereas Darwin predicted that some humans would become more ape-like and the gulf between them and others would widen, theoretically becoming unbridgeable.

...and mainstream science is indeed finding that all humans are more similar than dissimilar.

So... not really a prediction about "the nature of humanity", but about (human) biology.

...which reminds me of other predictions: that "junk" DNA will turn out to be purposeful, and that "vestigial" organs probably aren't. (Although ID also predicts redundancy, which allows for "unnecessary" organs and happens to be one of those things CD has a hard time explaining.)

Appendix? Tonsils? Spleen? "Tailbone"? Whale "hip" bones? All claimed at some point to be vestigial, but in fact aren't.

llama

@Matthew So taken together, creationism, and its variant with the branding filed off, predict that vestigial organs might or might not exist?

Matthew

20:44

@llama I think the most pedantic phrasing would be "(the majority of) organs claimed to be vestigial will turn out to have function". Creationism allows for redundant organs, but CD expects to find a lot more of them.

Todd Wilcox

Wait. Has anyone ever claimed the spleen is "vestigial"?

Matthew

@ToddWilcox Honestly, I'm not sure. I came across a heading recently that was something about 'discovering the spleen's function', but didn't read the article. That example might be erroneous.

That said, answersresearchjournal.org/spleen-important-organ and perhaps pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7286668 suggest that, yes, at some point the spleen was regarded (at least by some) as vestigial.

Similarly, I don't know if the coccyx is claimed to be "vestigial" per se, but is claimed to be left over from an ancestor with a tail. However, since it has a definite and important current function, that claim is suspect.

Todd Wilcox

Oh interesting. Yes for about 100 years European and American physicians did not know the function of the spleen and often assumed it had no function

I was surprised because the spleen is SO critical it's hard to relate to thinking it's useless.

prosfilaes

22:59

@Matthew "there are two competing paradigms; BB+CD, and Creationism." That's what young-earth creationists want you to believe. Old earth creationists have another idea. Some Hindus believe the world is millions of years old, created out of parts of Brahma. Fred Hoyle and Chandra Wickramasinghe talk about panspermia, tjere

There's theories of a static universe, etc.

"It predicted all humans being "one race", which is actually very contradictory to what Darwin predicted." That's nonsense. Races is a concept driven in the West by Christians, Christians who enslaved Black people and were quite clear about other people's racial inferiority. Jefferson Davis said "We recognize the negro as God and God's Book and God's Laws, in nature, tell us to recognize him. Our inferior, fitted expressly for servitude."

@Matthew "Dinosaurs are extinct through some combination of hunting (lots of records of that) and not being able to survive in the post-Flood climate. You may recall there have been ice ages?" That's convenient. We can look at all the animals in the jungles alive now, but somehow every single member of the dinosaurs went extinct.

@Matthew "How much does it need to eat if it's hibernating?" Okay, so magic happened; most creatures, including the largest, can't hibernate. So we start getting into things like how do we know there was an ark? Noah and family could have had whatever fake memories implanted into them. That's the problem with magic; you're telling me this story happened one way, but once we start letting exceptions from reality happen, anything could have happened.

@Matthew en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lake_Missoula isn't real. You've spent pages telling me it isn't real. It can't be real; 15,000 to 13,000 years ago is before the world existed. By the way, ice ages aren't real. You can't just say that anything science says about history you like is correct, just shoved into your time period. You have to go out and measure these things.

Transcript for

Discussion between Dcleve and Matthew