Re: Anti-religious


Herman Rubin wrote:
In article <2006Mar7.094335@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>, <moshes@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Don Levey <Don_SCJM@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> writes:
moshes@xxxxxxxxxxxxx writes:
"Dan Kimmel" <daniel.kimmel@xxxxxxx> writes:
<moshes@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
"Steve Goldfarb" <slg@xxxxxxxxx> writes:

ROTFLOL! Sure science confronts you with how little you realy
understand. That's why anyone who dares to _question_ the _Theory_
of Evolution is immediately branded as a quack, a fundamentalist,
or worse. Tell me another one.

C'mon, Moshe, you're better than that.

Says who?

Says me, for one.

Thanks.

Evolution is not a "theory" in the sense you're pretending it is.

It's probably not even that good a theory either but that's the word
_they_ use.

Probably? If you've got a scientific basis for questioning it,
then by all means come out with it.

Did you ever see the _numbers_? There have been papers written by
mathematicians about the "chances" of it happening by itself. There's
hardly room on the paper for all the zeroes before the first
significant digit. But those papers don't get publicized. Because
people are afraid of being branded a "fundy".

Those figures are all wrong; they assume that the final
result is due to random collection, not evolution. Even
done correctly, the probability that the final result is
what we have now is extremely small, but that is
irrelevant. Did nature put our ears where they are so
we could wear glasses?

Many of the chemicals for life are found in meteors, placed
there by the inexorable workings of chemistry. It is not
random. There are places were sheer randomness occurs; the
RNA decodings of nuclear DNA and mitochondrial DNA are
different, and apparently arbitrary. The question is not
what are the odds that our exact genetic code should be what
we find, but that some comparable code would occur, and this
removes hundreds of those leading zeros.

If you take the septillions of molecules of water, H20, in
a glass, by "chance" you would expect about 1/3 of them to
be HOH and 2/3 to be HHO. If you investigate, you will find
ALL of them to be HOH, and the whole encyclopedia would not
have room for all the zeros. The laws of chemistry hold, not
the laws of chance.
--

I agree with that reasoning. A simpler exmaple is asking "what is the
probability that i'm here right now typing this". The answer is 100%,
it's already happened, I didn't predict it.

I recall somebody tried to counter prof natan aviezer using a similar
argument, which prof deals with in his book 'fossils and faith'. I
can't remember the context of the fallacy, but in that instance , it
was the skeptic that used that fallacious argument, misunderstanding
[the philosophy behind] probability.

The other argument which you used is v. good too, How is our mutation
better than others.There are a multitude of useful mutations any one of
which could occur. Though also a multitude of useless ones. It's
difficult to work out a probability there. + it betrays the first
issue about predicting something after it's happened.

However, it si my undersatnding that physicists today, say that the
universe exists with ceratin conditions at a precise equilibrium that
supports life. Everything is just rigtht mathematically and if one
thing was off, it wouldn't support life.
I wouldn't ay what are the chances of that - since it has already
happened, though perhaps one can.
But they seem to be arguing that of all the possible values for the
universe's conditions, very few are useful to supporting human life.
And this shows that the universe was created for us. I'm sure hawkings
said that the universe was created for us, in a peoples' TV program.

Though I think that's philosophically problematic, 'cos it could be
that the universe was created and we evolved to fit the universe.
Therefore, it's wrong to conclude that the universe was created for us,
given that data.

I believe it was created for us, but based on jewish tradition.

.

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