Hypothesis 2
iaoua iaoua
recently I asked if a hypothesis that life came about as the result of
natural processes qualifies as a scientific hypothesis. I used the
word theory instead of hypothesis and was pulled up for this. Other
than that no real objections to the hypothesis qualifying were raised
other than the obvious lack of a formal definition of what is meant by
'natural'. Without getting too technical about things I felt the
implication was clearly that the hypothesis entailed natural processes
of known behaviours of the universe in terms of observations and
generalisations made in the areas of Physics and Chemistry and even
allowing for such behaviours which we may not yet understand
completely but not implying any supernatural being breaking the normal
behaviour of the universe or even implying that the behaviour was
anomalous.
All in all no objections were raised against such a sense of the
hypothesis and so I can only conclude that the various attempts at
nitpicking were indicative that nobody has any real problems with such
a hypothesis as qualifying as a scientific hypothesis as long as we
are willing to polish it up and make it more precise and formal.
So, then the converse question arises. If the hypothesis that life
came about as the result of natural processes qualifies as a
scientific hypothesis then why would the inverse of the hypothesis not
be equally as testable. i.e. why does the theory 'that life did not
come about as the result of natural processes' not qualify as a
scientific hypothesis? It occurs to me that to maintain that the one
qualifies and the other does not is an exercise in logical futility as
the two hypotheses are inverses of each other and therefore equally
testable. In fact to formulate the first version of the hypothesis
implies that if testing fails then the inverse is the conclusion we
would naturally be led to.
JC
Ilas
83aa-e3c...@gc3g2000vbb.googlegroups.com:
> Hi all,
>
> <crap snipped>
Stop trying to play games. You aren't anywhere near as clever as you think
you are, certainly not clever enough to try your games with people who have
seen it all a thousand times. We all know what you think you're going to
achieve with your ever so polite posts, and nobody is fooled by your sudden
conversion from a dishonest utter arsehole to an innocent and reasonable
truth seeker.
iaoua iaoua
> iaoua iaoua <iaoua.ia...@gmail.com> wrote in news:iaoua-af1ec6fc-ee5d-4b81-
> 83aa-e3cdb80b9...@gc3g2000vbb.googlegroups.com:
>
> > Hi all,
>
> > <crap snipped>
>
> Stop trying to play games. You aren't anywhere near as clever as you think
> you are, certainly not clever enough to try your games with people who have
> seen it all a thousand times. We all know what you think you're going to
> achieve with your ever so polite posts, and nobody is fooled by your sudden
> conversion from a dishonest utter arsehole to an innocent and reasonable
> truth seeker.
Just answer the question!
JC
iaoua iaoua
> iaoua iaoua <iaoua.ia...@gmail.com> wrote in news:iaoua-af1ec6fc-ee5d-4b81-
> 83aa-e3cdb80b9...@gc3g2000vbb.googlegroups.com:
>
>
> > <crap snipped>
>
> Stop trying to play games. You aren't anywhere near as clever as you think
> you are, certainly not clever enough to try your games with people who have
> seen it all a thousand times. We all know what you think you're going to
> achieve with your ever so polite posts, and nobody is fooled by your sudden
> conversion from a dishonest utter arsehole to an innocent and reasonable
> truth seeker.
For the record, the only thing I am likely to achieve in a place like
this is gratuitous slanderous and downright offensive responses like
yours. Come back when you've learned what the word science means son.
JC
Bill
> Hi all,
>
> recently I asked if a hypothesis that life came about as the result of
> natural processes qualifies as a scientific hypothesis.
I don't think it does qualify as a scientific hypothesis. It is not
specific enough to be testable. A more specific hypothesis might be,
for example, "an early step in the development of life was
polymerization of amino acids trapped on clay." With that you might be
headed in the direction of getting specific enough to be testable.
Another hypothesis might be, "a supernatural being created life." See
if you can think of a way to test that one.
Tim Anderson
Why is this science stuff so difficult to understand?
Science is the practice of locating natural causes for observed,
natural phenomena. Applying the method to test for unnatural causes
for observed, natural phenomena is, well, something, but it isn't
science.
I am baffled how one could construct a scientific test for the
existence of an unnatural cause. What criteria would the experimenter
use to judge success?
Ilas
986b-4a2...@d22g2000yqn.googlegroups.com:
> Why is this science stuff so difficult to understand?
>
> Science is the practice of locating natural causes for observed,
> natural phenomena. Applying the method to test for unnatural causes
> for observed, natural phenomena is, well, something, but it isn't
> science.
>
> I am baffled how one could construct a scientific test for the
> existence of an unnatural cause. What criteria would the experimenter
> use to judge success?
Essentially, it's god of the gaps. Don't have an accepted theory of
abiogenesis via natural processes yet? Must have been supernatural, must
have been god, must have been my god. He's not said it yet, but that's
where he's heading.
Tim Anderson
>
> Essentially, it's god of the gaps. Don't have an accepted theory of
> abiogenesis via natural processes yet? Must have been supernatural, must
> have been god, must have been my god. He's not said it yet, but that's
> where he's heading.
Well given the confusion between converse and inverse in the original
post, it appears that god not only lurks in the gaps, but has
difficulty with predicate logic (which perhaps explains the prevalence
of poor design on the part of the gapmeister).
Ernest Major
<nob...@this.address.com> writes
(what is and isn't science), and trying to trick people into agreeing
that supernatural abiogenesis is a scientific hypothesis.
--
alias Ernest Major
Tim Anderson
> In message <Xns9F1C5EE9A534Filasthisaddr...@69.16.176.253>, Ilas
> <nob...@this.address.com> writes
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> >Tim Anderson <timothya1...@gmail.com> wrote in news:e5bc4779-c2b9-4671-
> >986b-4a237d143...@d22g2000yqn.googlegroups.com:
>
> >> Why is this science stuff so difficult to understand?
>
> >> Science is the practice of locating natural causes for observed,
> >> natural phenomena. Applying the method to test for unnatural causes
> >> for observed, natural phenomena is, well, something, but it isn't
> >> science.
>
> >> I am baffled how one could construct a scientific test for the
> >> existence of an unnatural cause. What criteria would the experimenter
> >> use to judge success?
>
> >Essentially, it's god of the gaps. Don't have an accepted theory of
> >abiogenesis via natural processes yet? Must have been supernatural, must
> >have been god, must have been my god. He's not said it yet, but that's
> >where he's heading.
>
> I thought he was trying to do an end run round the demarcation problem
> (what is and isn't science), and trying to trick people into agreeing
> that supernatural abiogenesis is a scientific hypothesis.
> --
> alias Ernest Major
Difficult to do an unnatural-cause end run when the path runs slap
bang into the Vertical Cliff of Naturalism.
Mike Dworetsky
> On Jul 8, 12:47 pm, iaoua iaoua <iaoua.ia...@gmail.com> wrote:
>> Hi all,
>>
>> recently I asked if a hypothesis that life came about as the result
>> of natural processes qualifies as a scientific hypothesis.
>
> I don't think it does qualify as a scientific hypothesis. It is not
> specific enough to be testable. A more specific hypothesis might be,
> for example, "an early step in the development of life was
> polymerization of amino acids trapped on clay." With that you might be
> headed in the direction of getting specific enough to be testable.
That's a very good point. Hypothesis testing has to involve some specific
model or proposal, not some sweeping generality. Formal hypothesis testing
involves framing a "null hypothesis" which can be statistically tested,
e.g., "Is this apparent cluster of galaxies genuine, or some sort of chance
grouping?" The null hypothesis would be "chance grouping" and various
statistical tests could put a chi-square or other parameter on a numerical
basis.
Other hypotheses you could test for abiogenesis might involve whether some
sort of membrane or "cell wall" could form naturally as a result of
chemistry, for example.
>
> Another hypothesis might be, "a supernatural being created life." See
> if you can think of a way to test that one.
Vowel guy suggested "Die and ask God" but that seems rather extreme and
leads to no published accounts of the experiments that others might
replicate, plus immediate curtailment of a career in research. Besides,
"Nullius in verba" means that no authority's claims should be taken as fact
without testing them. And that includes you-know-who. After all, none of
His work was peer-reviewed, He experimented on human subjects without signed
release forms or ethics-committee consent, and when He did not like the
outcome of one experiment He destroyed all the experimental subjects except
for a small number.
[snippage]
--
Mike Dworetsky
(Remove pants sp*mbl*ck to reply)
Ilas
news:xs5TdRJ6...@meden.invalid:
Yes, could be that too. Then it would be that it's therefore 50:50, and on
we go from there. Whatever it is, it's just another creationist with his
ever so clever leading questions and redifinitions.
Ernest Major
<509cba9a-276d-408b...@e7g2000vbw.googlegroups.com>, Tim
Anderson <timoth...@gmail.com> writes
but I don't think that science necessarily excludes the supernatural;
what it excludes is unconstrained and unpredictable causes. It should
have no problem handling a supernatural agency which behaves in a
constrained and regular fashion. (But many people would demote such an
agency to the status of natural.)
--
alias Ernest Major
Arkalen
> Hi all,
>
> recently I asked if a hypothesis that life came about as the result of
> natural processes qualifies as a scientific hypothesis. I used the
> word theory instead of hypothesis and was pulled up for this. Other
> than that no real objections to the hypothesis qualifying were raised
> other than the obvious lack of a formal definition of what is meant by
> 'natural'. Without getting too technical about things I felt the
> implication was clearly that the hypothesis entailed natural processes
> of known behaviours of the universe in terms of observations and
> generalisations made in the areas of Physics and Chemistry and even
> allowing for such behaviours which we may not yet understand
> completely but not implying any supernatural being breaking the normal
> behaviour of the universe or even implying that the behaviour was
> anomalous.
>
> All in all no objections were raised against such a sense of the
> hypothesis and so I can only conclude that the various attempts at
> nitpicking were indicative that nobody has any real problems with such
> a hypothesis as qualifying as a scientific hypothesis as long as we
> are willing to polish it up and make it more precise and formal.
That polishing up isn't aesthetic, James. A theory needs a mechanism and
testable predictions. If you're too vague you hide the mechanism and you
make it impossible to make testable predictions. Hence, a too-vague
statement cannot be a scientific theory.
>
> So, then the converse question arises. If the hypothesis that life
> came about as the result of natural processes qualifies as a
> scientific hypothesis then why would the inverse of the hypothesis not
> be equally as testable. i.e. why does the theory 'that life did not
> come about as the result of natural processes' not qualify as a
> scientific hypothesis?
Does it make practicable testable predictions? It doesn't look to me as
if it's precise enough to either.
> It occurs to me that to maintain that the one
> qualifies and the other does not is an exercise in logical futility as
> the two hypotheses are inverses of each other and therefore equally
> testable. In fact to formulate the first version of the hypothesis
> implies that if testing fails then the inverse is the conclusion we
> would naturally be led to.
Yeah, if we had a test for "natural" and it failed we'd be led to
"non-natural". That's what ID is all about. The problem is finding a
test for "natural". Nobody's ever come up with one. Why ? Because it's
too vague ! Excessive vagueness is a real problem ! And a fatal one.
Tim Anderson
> Anderson <timothya1...@gmail.com> writes
Hang about - quantum events are unpredictable (though they may be
constrained). Surely you wouldn't rule QM out of the scientific fold?
Tim Anderson
wrote:
>
> Vowel guy suggested "Die and ask God" but that seems rather extreme and
> leads to no published accounts of the experiments that others might
> replicate, plus immediate curtailment of a career in research. Besides,
> "Nullius in verba" means that no authority's claims should be taken as fact
> without testing them. And that includes you-know-who. After all, none of
> His work was peer-reviewed, He experimented on human subjects without signed
> release forms or ethics-committee consent, and when He did not like the
> outcome of one experiment He destroyed all the experimental subjects except
> for a small number.
Seems to me this would still fail the test of science. It is an aspect
of science that it involves publication of the test for scrutiny by
other scientists. Hence "Die and Ask God" might reveal something
interesting to the scientist involved, but it is hard to see how
publication can occur without invoking yet another unnatural cause.
Apparently it is turtles all the way down.
Ernest Major
<446a9465-222e-412f...@w4g2000yqm.googlegroups.com>, Tim
Anderson <timoth...@gmail.com> writes
words. An ensemble of quantum events is predictable.
--
alias Ernest Major
alextangent
It's a crap question. Hence the lack of answers.
Tim Anderson
I agree - quantum events conform to a pattern (are "constrained") en
masse, but not individually. Despite that we cannot predict the
behaviour of an individual quantum event in advance, nevertheless, the
science predicts the general behaviour of quantum events with
phenomenal accuracy. Hence we welcome the theory into the realm of
science.
alextangent
> Hi all,
>
> recently I asked if a hypothesis that life came about as the result of
> natural processes qualifies as a scientific hypothesis. I used the
> word theory instead of hypothesis and was pulled up for this. Other
> than that no real objections to the hypothesis qualifying were raised
> other than the obvious lack of a formal definition of what is meant by
> 'natural'. Without getting too technical about things I felt the
> implication was clearly that the hypothesis entailed natural processes
> of known behaviours of the universe in terms of observations and
> generalisations made in the areas of Physics and Chemistry and even
> allowing for such behaviours which we may not yet understand
> completely but not implying any supernatural being breaking the normal
> behaviour of the universe or even implying that the behaviour was
> anomalous.
Problem. You *are going to have to get more technical, since the
description you give isn't right in many areas. For instance, "which
we may not yet understand completely but not implying any supernatural
being breaking the normal behaviour of the universe" just doesn't make
sense. See below.
>
> All in all no objections were raised against such a sense of the
> hypothesis and so I can only conclude that the various attempts at
> nitpicking were indicative that nobody has any real problems with such
> a hypothesis as qualifying as a scientific hypothesis as long as we
> are willing to polish it up and make it more precise and formal.
>
> So, then the converse question arises. If the hypothesis that life
> came about as the result of natural processes qualifies as a
> scientific hypothesis then why would the inverse of the hypothesis not
> be equally as testable. i.e. why does the theory 'that life did not
> come about as the result of natural processes' not qualify as a
> scientific hypothesis? It occurs to me that to maintain that the one
> qualifies and the other does not is an exercise in logical futility as
> the two hypotheses are inverses of each other and therefore equally
> testable. In fact to formulate the first version of the hypothesis
> implies that if testing fails then the inverse is the conclusion we
> would naturally be led to.
>
> JC
Think of quantum effects in terms of classical physics. Does that
qualify as "breaking the normal behaviour of the universe"? If no,
then we add it to a list of facts that our current theory doesn't
explain, and develop testable hypotheses to see if we need to extend
or replace it. If yes, then we're stuck, since we have observed
something that our current theory can't explain, yet we're unwilling
to add it to our list of facts or develop new hypotheses to test. You
would have us conclude that it was supernatural; yet since it was
observed, it must (by definition) be "normal behaviour of the
universe" and we would not be scientists if we did this. By
definition.
You also assume that it is possible to state two hypotheses that are
"the inverses of each other". It's not possible to do this if both
hypotheses are testable. That last statement may require you to think
a bit.
Arkalen
Besides there are tons of events we can't predict individually - or
absolutely. They're what statistics and probability were invented for.
Statistical and probabilistic relationships absolutely can be tested, it
just takes more work. And the nice thing is that the residual
uncertainty we get (which we would always get anyway) is quantified.
Tim Anderson
An analysis of variance, in other words. Which was my only experience
of trying to interpret the variation of the real world.
Why should that be more exciting and interesting than a priori
assumptions of goddidit? Perhaps because when it works, you have
discovered something new and wonderful.
Ron O
It depends on the specificity. Non specific and general hypotheses
aren't really testable. You pretty much have to be able to state the
problem so that someone can come up with some positive way to test
it. There has to be something to verify. The type of negative
arguments that the creationists are stuck with isn't any type of
verification that is worth much. You have to state the problem in
such a way as to make it possible to determine that.
"I don't know the answer." isn't a valid test of much of anything.
Look at your attempt to claim equivalence of creationism with
abiogenesis. Where is "I don't know" going to help you differentiate
the two. Don't you have to go with what we already know to consider
the two options? You have to be able to fill some holes and not just
point them out. When has the god of the gaps argument ever resulted
in anything? Isn't there a 100% failure rate for that type of
negative argument? Whenever we have been able to fill such a gap, has
it ever been filled by some god?
The 100% failure rate is one of the reasons why a lot of scientists
define science to exclude those types of arguments. Until there is a
counter example they are pretty safe in doing so. None of their
experimental methods have to change. None of their results are
compromised. It is a useful definition because it keeps the
incompetent from wasting a lot of time on things that likely will not
work, and that have never worked in the past. Most scientists do not
have to be reminded about this.
How are you going to counter the 100% failure rate of your type of
hypothesis in order to claim that it should be considered to be a
scientific hypothesis?
This does not mean that scientists cannot develop hypotheses about the
unknown, but real scientists do not give up and go with a non answer
before they ever start. How do you think that science progresses?
Someone comes up with an idea and figures out some way to figure out
if the idea is worth anything. They don't just say "I don't know
this, so god is the answer." Creationists have to figure out a way to
learn more about how some god fits into nature. Just finding some
hole to stuff the god into has never resulted in anything worth much.
Just counter the 100% failure rate and you will have a mass of
followers. Why can't you go to any creation science or intelligent
design sites and find a list of verifiable "god did it" scientific
explanations? Shouldn't you have, at least, one success before you
claim equivalence for such notions? What does the 100% failure rate
tell you about the worth of your type of hypothesis? We are talking
about a failure rate that has held up throughout the history of
science. Why do the seasons change? Who pulls the sun and moon
across the sky? Who is the cause of disease? Who is responsible for
those complex babies? etc. etc. So who cares about who made the first
lifeform? Even using the broadest definition of science such a
hypothesis is about the lowest ranking type of hypothesis there is.
Even an untestable hypothesis with an unknown failure rate would rank
above one with a 100% failure rate.
Ron Okimoto
iaoua iaoua
Define natural. The main pattern I see in nature is that life comes
from life.
JC
iaoua iaoua
I think your version is too specific for the point being made. One
could generalise to hypothesise that early stages in the development
of life were driven by chemical reactions that in no way undermine our
current understanding of such processes. The reverse hypothesis would
be the opposite. No need to bring God into the equation.
JC
iaoua iaoua
> Tim Anderson <timothya1...@gmail.com> wrote in news:e5bc4779-c2b9-4671-
> 986b-4a237d143...@d22g2000yqn.googlegroups.com:
>
>
> > Science is the practice of locating natural causes for observed,
> > natural phenomena. Applying the method to test for unnatural causes
> > for observed, natural phenomena is, well, something, but it isn't
> > science.
>
> > I am baffled how one could construct a scientific test for the
> > existence of an unnatural cause. What criteria would the experimenter
> > use to judge success?
>
> Essentially, it's god of the gaps. Don't have an accepted theory of
> abiogenesis via natural processes yet? Must have been supernatural, must
> have been god, must have been my god. He's not said it yet, but that's
> where he's heading.
Ilas. For quite some time you have been playing the part of the
educated. It would be nice if at some point you could give a response
that was indicative of such. Please do present to us your preferred
theory of how life came about by chemical processes. I am sincerely
intrigued.
JC
iaoua iaoua
> In message <Xns9F1C5EE9A534Filasthisaddr...@69.16.176.253>, Ilas
> <nob...@this.address.com> writes
>
>
>
> >Tim Anderson <timothya1...@gmail.com> wrote in news:e5bc4779-c2b9-4671-
> >986b-4a237d143...@d22g2000yqn.googlegroups.com:
>
>
> >> Science is the practice of locating natural causes for observed,
> >> natural phenomena. Applying the method to test for unnatural causes
> >> for observed, natural phenomena is, well, something, but it isn't
> >> science.
>
> >> I am baffled how one could construct a scientific test for the
> >> existence of an unnatural cause. What criteria would the experimenter
> >> use to judge success?
>
> >Essentially, it's god of the gaps. Don't have an accepted theory of
> >abiogenesis via natural processes yet? Must have been supernatural, must
> >have been god, must have been my god. He's not said it yet, but that's
> >where he's heading.
>
> I thought he was trying to do an end run round the demarcation problem
> (what is and isn't science), and trying to trick people into agreeing
> that supernatural abiogenesis is a scientific hypothesis.
> --
> alias Ernest Major
And so you think that baseless accusations of deceit do a lot to bring
our two cultures closer together do you? A hypothesis cannot exist
without its opposite also existing. This is the very basics of logic.
Deal with it!!!
JC
iaoua iaoua
It predicts that no matter how hard you try you will never be able to
create life from a reaction in a lab. Guess what! Observations reflect
thus.
JC
iaoua iaoua
Well that rules out the hypothesis that life came about by natural
causes then! Everybody! The idea that life came about as the result of
a natural chemical reaction has officially been declared unscientific.
JC
Bill
Not good enough. You need to hypothesize WHICH specific chemical
reactions you think were involved otherwise your hypothesis is
untestable.
>
> JC- Sembunyikan teks kutipan -
>
> - Perlihatkan teks kutipan -
alextangent
That's so wrong, it's just... Please give an example of a hypothesis
and its opposite. Complete with tests (since they're not hypotheses
without them).
>
> JC
Ilas
b072-2a2...@w4g2000yqm.googlegroups.com:
> It predicts that no matter how hard you try you will never be able to
> create life from a reaction in a lab. Guess what! Observations reflect
> thus.
Ooh, ooh! I've spotted a gap in current knowledge!! Quick, get god in there
now!
Ernest Major
<iaoua-199b4145-464e-4...@j15g2000yqf.googlegroups.com>
, iaoua iaoua <iaoua...@gmail.com> writes
>On Jul 8, 10:00 am, Ernest Major <{$t...@meden.demon.co.uk> wrote:
>> In message <Xns9F1C5EE9A534Filasthisaddr...@69.16.176.253>, Ilas
>> <nob...@this.address.com> writes
>>
>>
>>
>> >Tim Anderson <timothya1...@gmail.com> wrote in news:e5bc4779-c2b9-4671-
>> >986b-4a237d143...@d22g2000yqn.googlegroups.com:
>>
>> >> Why is this science stuff so difficult to understand?
>>
>> >> Science is the practice of locating natural causes for observed,
>> >> natural phenomena. Applying the method to test for unnatural causes
>> >> for observed, natural phenomena is, well, something, but it isn't
>> >> science.
>>
>> >> I am baffled how one could construct a scientific test for the
>> >> existence of an unnatural cause. What criteria would the experimenter
>> >> use to judge success?
>>
>> >Essentially, it's god of the gaps. Don't have an accepted theory of
>> >abiogenesis via natural processes yet? Must have been supernatural, must
>> >have been god, must have been my god. He's not said it yet, but that's
>> >where he's heading.
>>
>> I thought he was trying to do an end run round the demarcation problem
>> (what is and isn't science), and trying to trick people into agreeing
>> that supernatural abiogenesis is a scientific hypothesis.
>> --
>> alias Ernest Major
>
>And so you think that baseless accusations of deceit do a lot to bring
You could have waited more than 3 minutes before providing evidence to
the contrary. ("The idea that life came about as the result of a natural
chemical reaction has officially been declared unscientific.")
>our two cultures closer together do you?
Deal with the beam in your own eye.
> A hypothesis cannot exist
>without its opposite also existing. This is the very basics of logic.
>Deal with it!!!
Non-sequitur.
>
>JC
>
--
alias Ernest Major
Ilas
com:
> And so you think that baseless accusations of deceit do a lot to bring
> our two cultures closer together do you? A hypothesis cannot exist
> without its opposite also existing. This is the very basics of logic.
> Deal with it!!!
You haven't produced any hypothesis in the first place, so there is no
"opposite". You've tried to, and I think you believe you have, but you
haven't.
By the way, this is simply a variation of, I think, creationist claim
number 1246 (can anyone check that number? It might be claim 1426). Put
simply, if you disprove the current theory of evolution, then creationism
must be true (because, for some reason, creationists seem incapable of
understanding that disproof of a well established theory does not
constitute proof of a wild guess). OK, you're trying it with abiogenesis,
so 1 point for attempting to be original. Minus 10 points for doing it so
hopelessly though.
wiki trix
> came about as the result of natural processes qualifies as a
> scientific hypothesis then why would the inverse of the hypothesis not
> be equally as testable. i.e. why does the theory 'that life did not
> come about as the result of natural processes' not qualify as a
> scientific hypothesis? It occurs to me that to maintain that the one
> qualifies and the other does not is an exercise in logical futility as
> the two hypotheses are inverses of each other and therefore equally
> testable. In fact to formulate the first version of the hypothesis
> implies that if testing fails then the inverse is the conclusion we
> would naturally be led to.
Regarding your notion: "If the hypothesis that life came about as the
result of natural processes qualifies as a scientific hypothesis then
why would the inverse of the hypothesis not be equally as testable"...
Firstly, of all, I think you mean "converse" rather than "inverse".
The inverse of "life came about as the result of natural processes"
would be "natural processes came about as the result of life", and
would not be "life came about as the result of unnatural processes ".
Secondly, I think you mean "scientific theory" rather than "scientific
hypothesis", but I quibble.
Thirdly, you seem to be saying that if any hypothesis qualifies then
the converse hypothesis must also qualify. However, falsifiability of
a hypothesis does not imply anything about the falsifiability of a
converse hypothesis.
Fourthly, I do not agree with your premise "the hypothesis that life
came about as the result of natural processes qualifies as a testable
scientific hypothesis". A reasonable assumption, but not a testable
scientific hypothesis.
Arkalen
"Rules out" ? Just because it's untestable doesn't mean it's false. It
just means it's untestable. For a mundane hypothesis it can be left at
that; for a scientific hypothesis one usually tries to *make* it
testable. By "polishing it up". See why that isn't an optional step?
> Everybody! The idea that life came about as the result of
> a natural chemical reaction has officially been declared unscientific.
Exactly.
Note that "not a scientific theory" doesn't mean "wrong". It just means
"not a scientific theory".
Arkalen
True. Then again, those observations reflect just as well the
predictions of the "create life in a lab is really, really hard"
hypothesis. Or the "life requires conditions that occurred on the
primordial Earth but can't be reproduced in modern labs" hypothesis. Or
even just the "life requires conditions that occurred on the primordial
Earth but haven't been reproduced in modern labs because they're not
well-understood yet" hypothesis.
We need a test that validates your hypothesis and that can't be
explained just as well by those alternative, more parsimonious hypotheses.
iaoua iaoua
You see you keep on making the same fundamental mistake when you say
'you would have us conclude...'. Science isn't about making
conclusions. It is about making the set of congruent hypotheses ever
smaller by designing experiments which eliminate hypotheses.
The simple fact is this. Either life came about as a result of
chemical reactions which do not break our current understanding or
they didn't. There really is no in between ground. To accept the one
possibility you must also accept the other. Whether it was God or not
is not an essential part of the theory and faith in God is more likely
to be a conclusion drawn from completely different experiences
altogether.
JC
iaoua iaoua
On the contrary. That life came about as the result of chemical
reaction is testable. There is only a limited number of ways chemicals
can react. Just start brute forcing it if you believe it possible. The
more you brute force reactants and conditions the more possibilities
you will be able to eliminate. My hypothesis is that no matter how
hard you try you will never find the reactants and conditions needed
to create life. I hypothesise that the reason you will not be able to
find such a successful combination is because such a combination does
not exist given our universe. This is a testable hypothesis. All you
have to do is find one combination that works to prove me wrong.
JC
wiki trix
> chemical reactions which do not break our current understanding or
> they didn't. There really is no in between ground. To accept the one
> possibility you must also accept the other. Whether it was God or not
> is not an essential part of the theory and faith in God is more likely
> to be a conclusion drawn from completely different experiences
> altogether.
Regarding "life came about as a result of chemical reactions which do
not break our current understanding or they didn't."...
Our current understanding of chemical reactions is not complete... and
I doubt that all the chemical reactions that caused "life to come
about" were limited to just those that we currently understand. It is
just stupid to imply that.
wiki trix
>
> - Show quoted text -
Yes, there is a limited number of ways chemicals can react. However,
brute force enumeration would take a super computer simulation a
trillion or more years to sift through it. Don't hold your breath.
Wait. On second thought, do.
Arkalen
Not practicably, which is the issue.
> There is only a limited number of ways chemicals
> can react.
And we don't know that number, or the list of all possible chemical
reactions. Do you ?
> Just start brute forcing it if you believe it possible.
That would take more time and money than is humanly possible, and even
then we might not succeed - we don't know that all chemical reactions
are possible in the Universe are possible in an environment we can
reproduce on Earth.
> The
> more you brute force reactants and conditions the more possibilities
> you will be able to eliminate.
Given the time and resources we have as humans we'll never be able to
eliminate a number of possibilities that's anything close to significant
compared to the total number of possible chemical reactions.
> My hypothesis is that no matter how
> hard you try you will never find the reactants and conditions needed
> to create life.
That's nice. And in infinity years you can come and tell us whether you
were right or not. If you managed to get your hands on infinity
resources that is, and if humankind survived that long.
> I hypothesise that the reason you will not be able to
> find such a successful combination is because such a combination does
> not exist given our universe. This is a testable hypothesis.
Not practicably. Science requires hypotheses that CAN be tested, not
"that could be tested, in the abstract, if we lived on Parallel Earth,
where everyone is immortal and has access to everything in the Universe".
John Stockwell
> Hi all,
>
> recently I asked if a hypothesis that life came about as the result of
> natural processes qualifies as a scientific hypothesis.
Because we know of nor can we define "non-natural processes"
then the statement may only mean "life originated from some process
that we can model and understand". Yes, of course, that is the
basic assumption of all of scientific research---that phenomena
operate by processes that we may at some future time understand.
Otherwise, there would be no point in doing science. That is not
an hypothesis, it is part of the epistemological underpinnings of
science.
> I used the
> word theory instead of hypothesis and was pulled up for this. Other
> than that no real objections to the hypothesis qualifying were raised
> other than the obvious lack of a formal definition of what is meant by
> 'natural'.
People who use 'natural" in this context want to play this against
"supernatural" notions of some variety. Yet, from a scientific
perspective
"supernatural" seems not to be defined.
>Without getting too technical about things I felt the
> implication was clearly that the hypothesis entailed natural processes
> of known behaviours of the universe in terms of observations and
> generalisations made in the areas of Physics and Chemistry and even
> allowing for such behaviours which we may not yet understand
> completely but not implying any supernatural being breaking the normal
> behaviour of the universe or even implying that the behaviour was
> anomalous.
We don't have to know how life originated to say that our mode of
investigation is to try to understand the processes by which live
operates
and to try to infer how life may have originated through
investigations
involving chemistry. Science is about processes. We don't know how
biology originated yet. The issue is not to "prove that natural
processes
did that" but to understand the chemical pathways by which life may
have originated.
>
> All in all no objections were raised against such a sense of the
> hypothesis and so I can only conclude that the various attempts at
> nitpicking were indicative that nobody has any real problems with such
> a hypothesis as qualifying as a scientific hypothesis as long as we
> are willing to polish it up and make it more precise and formal.
>
> So, then the converse question arises. If the hypothesis that life
> came about as the result of natural processes qualifies as a
> scientific hypothesis then why would the inverse of the hypothesis not
> be equally as testable. i.e. why does the theory 'that life did not
> come about as the result of natural processes' not qualify as a
> scientific hypothesis? It occurs to me that to maintain that the one
> qualifies and the other does not is an exercise in logical futility as
> the two hypotheses are inverses of each other and therefore equally
> testable. In fact to formulate the first version of the hypothesis
> implies that if testing fails then the inverse is the conclusion we
> would naturally be led to.
No. Essentially you are making the mistakes that all religious
apologeticists make, which is to assert a strawman based on a false
dichotomy and then attempt to demolish that strawman.
In this case, there is no difference between "natural" and
"supernatural"
because neither term is defined in a way that will allow phenomena
as being classified as one or the other. Indeed, all claims of the
supernatural seem to be either unsubstantiated spurrious claims, or
are
ordinary phenomena interpreted in a context of "entities".
If you are pursuing natural theology, then you are applying
explanations
based on the identifying causal agencies. In your case, you want to
identify an entity that generated life. That entity is either "God"
or
"Nature".
If you are doing science, then
you are interested in modeling processes and testing the results of
those models against observations of phenomena. That is where
Darwin made the most important contribution to biology. He took it
out of the hands of the natural theologians and put it in the hands
of scientists.
>
> JC
-John
Steven L.
"iaoua iaoua" <iaoua...@gmail.com> wrote in message
news:iaoua-af1ec6fc-ee5d-4...@gc3g2000vbb.googlegroups.com:
> So, then the converse question arises. If the hypothesis that life
> came about as the result of natural processes qualifies as a
> scientific hypothesis then why would the inverse of the hypothesis not
> be equally as testable.
The claim that life came about as the result of natural processes is one
special case of a more general principle: That *all* natural phenomena
have causes that are in principle testable. And that's an *axiom* of
science--a basic assumption on which the practice of science rests.
Let's not get hung up on the word "natural."
Science admits only of things that are in principle testable, either to
help validate them or to help refute them.
An assertion that life on Earth was designed (Intelligent Design) would
be scientific, *if* the Designer were a natural being, such as
ultra-advanced space aliens who created life on Earth for their own
purposes. It's testable because we can imagine contacting those aliens
someday. And then we could get evidence of what they did.
An assertion that life on Earth was designed by a supernatural being who
is defined to be ineffable and undetectable is not science.
A borderline case are those real-world "ghostbusters," paranormal
investigators who keep trying to find evidence for ghosts. They go to
ghost sightings with cameras and radiation detectors, they take
photographs and measurements, etc. Clearly they don't consider ghosts
ineffable and undetectable. If these investigators were successful (and
so far they aren't), and if their evidence stood up to peer review, then
we would be forced to conclude that ghosts are somehow a part of our
world. At least when they're interacting with it.
So if you or any creationists want to claim that life was designed by
God, then I will insist on the same right as the ghostbusters: Let's
assemble a team of scientists to either find unambiguous evidence for
God, or to contact God and record the event in an objective way.
Because if you want to bring God into science, then God is no longer off
limits to experimentation and investigation.
-- Steven L.
Steven L.
"Tim Anderson" <timoth...@gmail.com> wrote in message
news:e5bc4779-c2b9-4671...@d22g2000yqn.googlegroups.com:
> Why is this science stuff so difficult to understand?
>
> Science is the practice of locating natural causes for observed,
> natural phenomena. Applying the method to test for unnatural causes
> for observed, natural phenomena is, well, something, but it isn't
> science.
>
> I am baffled how one could construct a scientific test for the
> existence of an unnatural cause. What criteria would the experimenter
> use to judge success?
The reason this is such a problem for some people of faith,
is that the God of the Bible *did real things* in the real world that
were certainly testable. Some of those things were even spectacular.
God parted the Red Sea. He leveled Sodom and Gomorrah. He sent plagues
to Egypt. God talked to Abraham and Moses. Jesus cured the blind and
the lame. God would announce his intentions in advance--and then those
things happened.
The Hebrews of the Bible didn't consider God to be this ineffable being,
beyond human experience. He was a god who interacted with them all the
time, sometimes on a personal level.
The problem is that God seems to have stopped doing such feats anymore.
Too bad. He's left us with no way to test and verify His existence,
just at a time when science has advanced to the point that it is capable
of doing that.
-- Steven L.
Richard Harter
<iaoua...@gmail.com> wrote:
[snip]
>You see you keep on making the same fundamental mistake when you say
>'you would have us conclude...'. Science isn't about making
>conclusions. It is about making the set of congruent hypotheses ever
>smaller by designing experiments which eliminate hypotheses.
This, perhaps, is one of the more remarkable fundamental
misunderstandings of the nature of Science that I have ever seen. As
the famous quote says, it is not even wrong.
>
>The simple fact is this. Either life came about as a result of
>chemical reactions which do not break our current understanding or
>they didn't. There really is no in between ground.
This, on the other hand, is wrong. There is also the possiblity that
life came about by chemical reactions that do break our current
understanding. It is quite possible that our "current understanding"
is incorrect - Science produces reliable knowledge but not certainty.
[snip]
Kermit
Here's what we mean by "test" in science.
If X is true, then it will have certain results. If we do not observe
those
results, and they would be observable if they did happen, then X is
not true.
Note that this is not very useful if 'not X' would lead to the same
results.
So... what observable (in principle) results would we expect if
supernatural processes were responsible for the appearance of life?(1)
(1) Which, by the way, is not the same thing as evolution.
Kermit
iaoua iaoua
Oh really! You happen to be speaking to somebody who holds an MSc in
High Performance Computing and has worked on supercomputers and
parallelising simulations in particular. And as such I'm very
interested how you came to such an estimation of the time needed.
Please don't forget that as the key ingredients and rough proportions
of a living cell are well known there are a number of useful
limitations you could apply to such a brute force technique that would
drastically reduce the time taken.
In any case, the simulation proves nothing. Not unless your algorithm
is flawless. The algo could only serve to produce a shortlist of
reactions it judges worth trying. You would need to try them in the
lab. So get going. Until you have proved it wrong the hypothesis I
presented has a rightful place in the family of non falsified
hypotheses.
JC
iaoua iaoua
> "iaoua iaoua" <iaoua.ia...@gmail.com> wrote in message
There you go. Making that classic mistake. Why do you have to go an
bring God into it. The hypothesis is natural versus not. Should
experimentation lead us to conclude that natural, in the sense of what
we see as natural now, was not a possible cause then God or a miracle
is not the only natural conclusion. Some may like to posit that the
laws of physics were somehow different at that time. Such a
possibility could furnish many interesting research questions.
You see your problem is that you allow your definition of what is
scientific and what is not to be biased that anything that you
perceive as leading to God as an answer. It is experience with God
that lead you to faith in God. Not a scientific knowledge that life
could not have come about under the present understanding of physical
laws. The latter just provides food for thought. Not scientific proof.
In any case, God is not an undetectable entity. As all those who have
found him have found out. Such is testable. Such is repeatable. But it
takes a leap of faith to do so. So, if you want to play the scientist,
then take the leap of faith. Until you've conducted the experiment how
can you conclude he does not exist?
JC
iaoua iaoua
You misworded the question. You should have asked what we would expect
to see if life did not come about by natural processes. Well, in
answer, I would expect to see that life only comes from the
reproductive process of preexisting life and not to spontaneously just
appear as the result of a reaction not involving some preexisting
lifeform. And what do I see?
How long should I wait for the converse hypothesis to prove true?
JC
iaoua iaoua
> On Fri, 8 Jul 2011 06:24:01 -0700 (PDT), iaoua iaoua
>
And anybody who understands English and simple logic can quite plainly
see that such is a subset of the second possibility. Nothing you have
said was not covered in the two possibilities presented.
JC
> [snip]
iaoua iaoua
This seems to be a stark reversal of your position that you just need
to supply enough energy and every reaction is possible.
> > The
> > more you brute force reactants and conditions the more possibilities
> > you will be able to eliminate.
>
> Given the time and resources we have as humans we'll never be able to
> eliminate a number of possibilities that's anything close to significant
> compared to the total number of possible chemical reactions.
>
You could at least start trying. Your failures could make you start
realising stuff about how chemistry really works and what the
difference between a feasible reaction and a non feasible one is. For
example, you might very quickly find that's it's not all just about
supplying enough energy.
> > My hypothesis is that no matter how
> > hard you try you will never find the reactants and conditions needed
> > to create life.
>
> That's nice. And in infinity years you can come and tell us whether you
> were right or not. If you managed to get your hands on infinity
> resources that is, and if humankind survived that long.
>
The point is that until you produce one counter example the hypothesis
is upheld.
> > I hypothesise that the reason you will not be able to
> > find such a successful combination is because such a combination does
> > not exist given our universe. This is a testable hypothesis.
>
> Not practicably. Science requires hypotheses that CAN be tested, not
> "that could be tested, in the abstract, if we lived on Parallel Earth,
> where everyone is immortal and has access to everything in the Universe".
>
So then, by your definition, the hypothesis that life was the result
of a chemical reaction is no longer a scientific hypothesis because it
cannot be tested in your view of the world.
I'll just sit here and watch you squirm your way out of that one. It's
so much fun watching you tie yourself in knots over what is and is not
scientific in your very narrow view of the world.
JC
alextangent
You happen to be speaking to a group that includes chemists,
biologists and physicists. And computer scientists, who can recognize
a paper on hash algorithms when they see one.
> And as such I'm very
> interested how you came to such an estimation of the time needed.
> Please don't forget that as the key ingredients and rough proportions
> of a living cell are well known there are a number of useful
> limitations you could apply to such a brute force technique that would
> drastically reduce the time taken.
>
> In any case, the simulation proves nothing. Not unless your algorithm
> is flawless. The algo could only serve to produce a shortlist of
> reactions it judges worth trying. You would need to try them in the
> lab. So get going. Until you have proved it wrong the hypothesis I
> presented has a rightful place in the family of non falsified
> hypotheses.
You mean non-falsifiable. And it isn't a hypothesis for that very
reason; the test is a non-test.
Scientific method be damned. You're just making this stuff up as you
go along, aren't you?
>
> JC
Perseus
>
there is also a different point.
That a scientific hypothesis is falsifiable means that can be proven
false sometime in the future.
That concept invokes the possibility that any piece human knowledge
can be declared wrong. This is quite the opposite case of the
religious dogma, witch are declared as truth now and that never can be
wrong. For it is considered the wisdom of god, or the words of god
that is eternal.
The case of science is different, for any piece of present human
knowledge can look good just now to our present understanding. But in
the future, with a better knowledge on every field of physics and
chemistry, we would be able to see that some statements of science
today are wrong.
Perseus
Mark Isaak
> Hi all,
>
> recently I asked if a hypothesis that life came about as the result of
> natural processes qualifies as a scientific hypothesis. I used the word
> theory instead of hypothesis and was pulled up for this. Other than
> that no real objections to the hypothesis qualifying were raised other
> than the obvious lack of a formal definition of what is meant by
> 'natural'. Without getting too technical about things I felt the
> implication was clearly that the hypothesis entailed natural processes
> of known behaviours of the universe in terms of observations and
> generalisations made in the areas of Physics and Chemistry and even
> allowing for such behaviours which we may not yet understand completely
> but not implying any supernatural being breaking the normal behaviour
> of the universe or even implying that the behaviour was anomalous.
All scientific discoveries have been discoveries of supernatural
phenomena, because all discoveries have been, by definition, of things
that, in one way or another, were not known behaviors of the universe.
Either that, or you need to go into a whole lot more detail about how we
can tell whether something is supernatural or not.
--
Mark Isaak eciton (at) earthlink (dot) net
"It is certain, from experience, that the smallest grain of natural
honesty and benevolence has more effect on men's conduct, than the most
pompous views suggested by theological theories and systems." - D. Hume
RAM
> In any case, God is not an undetectable entity.
Your God is by scientific standards is an "undetectable entity" unless
he presents himself materially.
> As all those who have
> found him have found out.
Those who have cannot use such Graceful knowledge for science. Your
deductive logic is specious when it comes to the inductive
requirements of science for objective measures of phenomena.
> Such is testable.
Provide the scientific protocol for an objective test.
> Such is repeatable.
No it is not scientifically. It is culturally. But so are "witches."
> But it
> takes a leap of faith to do so.
Not to be a scientist. That leap is discordant and took you out of
science.
> So, if you want to play the scientist,
> then take the leap of faith.
No scientist will ever be able to take or need to take a "leap of
faith" when they a constrained to objective measures of phenomena.
> Until you've conducted the experiment how
> can you conclude he does not exist?
Your specious logic is not an "experiment" scientific or otherwise
that demonstrates the existence of your God.
Indeed, it is tiresome repetition of "leap of faith" testifying heard
in numerous fundamentalist churches.
One could hope with all your posts you could make a better argument
than this. And you wonder why so many posters dismiss you as just
another self important creationist.
>
> JC
Chris
<iaoua...@gmail.com> wrote:
[snip]
>
>On the contrary. That life came about as the result of chemical
>reaction is testable. There is only a limited number of ways chemicals
>can react. Just start brute forcing it if you believe it possible. The
>more you brute force reactants and conditions the more possibilities
>you will be able to eliminate. My hypothesis is that no matter how
>hard you try you will never find the reactants and conditions needed
>to create life. I hypothesise that the reason you will not be able to
Your guess/wish you mean, you do not give details as to why the
chemical route is insufficient. Doesn't qualify as a hypothesis.
>find such a successful combination is because such a combination does
>not exist given our universe. This is a testable hypothesis. All you
>have to do is find one combination that works to prove me wrong.
>
>JC
I expect at least a few of us will live to see someone succeed, the
goal posts will move shortly before that, I bet. Life is chemistry,
there is no reason to think life cannot come from no life just because
you haven't seens it personally.
Chris
<iaoua...@gmail.com> wrote:
[snip]
>
>Oh really! You happen to be speaking to somebody who holds an MSc in
>High Performance Computing and has worked on supercomputers and
>parallelising simulations in particular. And as such I'm very
>interested how you came to such an estimation of the time needed.
>Please don't forget that as the key ingredients and rough proportions
>of a living cell are well known there are a number of useful
>limitations you could apply to such a brute force technique that would
>drastically reduce the time taken.
What do the characteristic of a living cell have to do with it?
Oh wait, are you saying you think that abiogenesis is about fully
formed cells *poofing* into existence? lol, try Googling hurricane in
a junkyard at the talk origin archives. lol
>In any case, the simulation proves nothing. Not unless your algorithm
>is flawless. The algo could only serve to produce a shortlist of
>reactions it judges worth trying. You would need to try them in the
>lab. So get going. Until you have proved it wrong the hypothesis I
>presented has a rightful place in the family of non falsified
>hypotheses.
>
>JC
What hypothesis? That you don't believe something that complicated
could happen without help? Google argument from incredulity.
chris thompson
wrote:
> On Fri, 8 Jul 2011 06:28:52 -0700 (PDT), iaoua iaoua
>
No way! You can never produce organic molecules from inorganic
starters. Just look at urea! Oh, wait...
(the other) Chris
Arkalen
That is not my position. "Thermodynamically allowed" and "possible"
aren't the same. Moreover, even a possible reaction won't necessarily
happen in a humanly possible time, or at a humanly possible cost. So I
fail to see how that would change a thing even if you were right.
>
>>> The
>>> more you brute force reactants and conditions the more possibilities
>>> you will be able to eliminate.
>>
>> Given the time and resources we have as humans we'll never be able to
>> eliminate a number of possibilities that's anything close to significant
>> compared to the total number of possible chemical reactions.
>>
>
> You could at least start trying.
We already have. Ever since the Miller-Urey experiments, research into
chemical reactions that might have had something to do with abiogenesis
is ongoing.
> Your failures could make you start
> realising stuff about how chemistry really works and what the
> difference between a feasible reaction and a non feasible one is.
I don't know what you mean by "feasible", but again : "thermodynamically
allowed" != "possible".
> For
> example, you might very quickly find that's it's not all just about
> supplying enough energy.
I don't know how many times I have to tell you that I don't think that
"supplying enough energy" will make a reaction happen. If a reaction is
thermodynamically possible but kinetically disfavored, or if there's a
mechanical obstacle, the reaction won't happen.
>
>>> My hypothesis is that no matter how
>>> hard you try you will never find the reactants and conditions needed
>>> to create life.
>>
>> That's nice. And in infinity years you can come and tell us whether you
>> were right or not. If you managed to get your hands on infinity
>> resources that is, and if humankind survived that long.
>>
>
> The point is that until you produce one counter example the hypothesis
> is upheld.
No it's not. A hypothesis can only be said to be "upheld" by a test once
the test is completed. The one you proposed hasn't been completed yet,
and won't be in your lifetime, and is unlikely to be in humanity's lifetime.
You need to come up with another test, one that can be completed by
humans, with humanly acquirable resources, and in a humanly manageable
amount of time. If you can't then you can't say your hypothesis is
scientifically testable. That doesn't mean it's false. It just means it
isn't science as yet. Hey, it's in illustrious company : string theory
is in that boat too.
>
>>> I hypothesise that the reason you will not be able to
>>> find such a successful combination is because such a combination does
>>> not exist given our universe. This is a testable hypothesis.
>>
>> Not practicably. Science requires hypotheses that CAN be tested, not
>> "that could be tested, in the abstract, if we lived on Parallel Earth,
>> where everyone is immortal and has access to everything in the Universe".
>>
>
> So then, by your definition, the hypothesis that life was the result
> of a chemical reaction is no longer a scientific hypothesis because it
> cannot be tested in your view of the world.
Exactly.
Are you surprised ? I never said it was a scientific hypothesis. In fact
IIRC I said it *wasn't* a scientific hypothesis. As did pretty much
everyone else who answered when you asked if we thought it was. Although
there is more wiggle room in the word "hypothesis" than "theory" so
everyone might not agree, I'm perfectly happy to follow the definition
we've come to and say "abiogenesis was the result of a chemical
reaction" isn't a scientific hypothesis.
A scientific hypothesis applied to abiogenesis would be something like:
"The reduction of Ferric ions in hydrothermal vents allows the
spontaneous emergence of a metabolic pathway similar to that of a kind
of bacteria". Or "a solution of inorganic molecules subjected to
electric shocks will end up containing organic molecules". Or "A bunch
of nucleic acids in water will self-assemble into DNA". Or "a bunch of
phospholipids in water will self-assemble into cell-membrane-like spheres"
Those are all scientific hypotheses that can be tested. Some even have,
and were confirmed or falsified. We are not even close to having a
scientific hypothesis of how life came to be yet; we can just nibble at
the edges at the moment.
Richard Harter
<iaoua...@gmail.com> wrote:
>On Jul 8, 5:10 pm, c...@tiac.net (Richard Harter) wrote:
>> On Fri, 8 Jul 2011 06:24:01 -0700 (PDT), iaoua iaoua
[snip]
>>
>> >The simple fact is this. Either life came about as a result of
>> >chemical reactions which do not break our current understanding or
>> >they didn't. There really is no in between ground.
>>
>> This, on the other hand, is wrong. There is also the possiblity that
>> life came about by chemical reactions that do break our current
>> understanding. It is quite possible that our "current understanding"
>> is incorrect - Science produces reliable knowledge but not certainty.
>
>And anybody who understands English and simple logic can quite plainly
>see that such is a subset of the second possibility. Nothing you have
>said was not covered in the two possibilities presented.
Point taken. I note though that your phrasing was ambiguous. The
issue is the antecedent for "they". "Life" in the first sentence is
singular. The apparent antecdent is "chemical reactions" - agreement
in number, you know. So your paragraph parses out to:
"The simple fact is this. Either life came about as a result of
chemical reactions which do not break our current understanding or
as a result of chemical reactions which do break our current
understanding. There really is no in between ground."
This reduces to:
"The simple fact is this. Life came about as a result of chemical
reactions."
This may not have been what you meant to write.
John Stockwell
> On Jul 8, 4:00�ｿｽpm, "Steven L." <sdlit...@earthlink.net> wrote:
>
>
>
> > "iaoua iaoua" <iaoua.ia...@gmail.com> wrote in message
>
> >news:iaoua-af1ec6fc-ee5d-4...@gc3g2000vbb.googlegroups.com:
>
> > > So, then the converse question arises. If the hypothesis that life
> > > came about as the result of natural processes qualifies as a
> > > scientific hypothesis then why would the inverse of the hypothesis not
> > > be equally as testable.
>
> > The claim that life came about as the result of natural processes is one
> > have causes that are in principle testable. �ｿｽAnd that's an *axiom* of
> > science--a basic assumption on which the practice of science rests.
>
> > Let's not get hung up on the word "natural."
> > Science admits only of things that are in principle testable, either to
> > help validate them or to help refute them.
>
> > An assertion that life on Earth was designed (Intelligent Design) would
> > be scientific, *if* the Designer were a natural being, such as
> > ultra-advanced space aliens who created life on Earth for their own
> > someday. �ｿｽAnd then we could get evidence of what they did.
>
> > An assertion that life on Earth was designed by a supernatural being who
> > is defined to be ineffable and undetectable is not science.
>
> > A borderline case are those real-world "ghostbusters," paranormal
> > ghost sightings with cameras and radiation detectors, they take
> > ineffable and undetectable. �ｿｽIf these investigators were successful (and
> > so far they aren't), and if their evidence stood up to peer review, then
> > we would be forced to conclude that ghosts are somehow a part of our
>
> > So if you or any creationists want to claim that life was designed by
> > assemble a team of scientists to either find unambiguous evidence for
> > Because if you want to bring God into science, then God is no longer off
> > limits to experimentation and investigation.
>
> > -- Steven L.
>
> There you go. Making that classic mistake. Why do you have to go an
> bring God into it. The hypothesis is natural versus not. Should
> experimentation lead us to conclude that natural, in the sense of what
> we see as natural now, was not a possible cause then God or a miracle
> is not the only natural conclusion. Some may like to posit that the
> laws of physics were somehow different at that time. Such a
> possibility could furnish many interesting research questions.
What is "non-natural"?
Ron O
You have one problem. There isn't a single chemical reaction that
occurs in lifeforms that is chemically impossible. No energy
barriers, no violations of any thermodynamic laws. So what you have
to do is something a lot more difficult to do. You have to figure out
what the impossible combinations are and why they are impossible. No
one has ever been able to do this. Enzymes in lifeforms only
facilitate chemical reactions. They cannot make impossible reactions
possible. Look it up. So if you see a chemical reaction in some
lifeform you know that it is possible outside of a lifeform. Just
because no one can figure out how to do it, doesn't matter. Remember
the god of the gaps and the 100% failure rate. There are reactions
that build one on another, but you have to figure out a way to stop
them from doing that, when existing lifeforms do it.
Really, how are you going to counter the 100% failure rate of your god
of the gaps explanations. We know that all the chemical reactions in
lifeforms are possible because they are if you observe them to occur
in lifeforms. This has been determined over and over and is just
generalization of known laws. Name a single counter example. You
can't because there are none known, or the chemical laws would be
rewritten.
Ron Okimoto
*Hemidactylus*
[plonk]
iaoua iaoua
I meant not yet falisified. Not non-falsifiable. It would take only
one counter example to falsify. If you maintain a strong position that
non-falsifiable hypotheses are not adequate then the theory that 'life
came about by a chemical process' is disqualified as this version
truly is nonfalsifiable as we have no mechanism of reproducing the
experiment. And yet each specific version of a hypothesis on the
origin of life makes this non falsifiable assumption implicitly. And
so by your own words such hypotheses lack a concrete foundation.
> Scientific method be damned. You're just making this stuff up as you
> go along, aren't you?
>
No! I didn't pull your tongue. You said it yourself. By your own words
your condemned your own position.
JC
>
>
>
>
> > JC
iaoua iaoua
The experiment necessary is as stands. Your refusal to carry it out is
not indicative of good scientific method. To make conclusions while
refusing to carry out experiments that provide evidence to the
contrary is a public declaration that you would rather keep your
blinkers on.
JC
iaoua iaoua
wrote:
> On Fri, 8 Jul 2011 09:35:08 -0700 (PDT), iaoua iaoua
>
>
> [snip]
>
>
>
> >Oh really! You happen to be speaking to somebody who holds an MSc in
> >High Performance Computing and has worked on supercomputers and
> >parallelising simulations in particular. And as such I'm very
> >interested how you came to such an estimation of the time needed.
> >Please don't forget that as the key ingredients and rough proportions
> >of a living cell are well known there are a number of useful
> >limitations you could apply to such a brute force technique that would
> >drastically reduce the time taken.
>
> What do the characteristic of a living cell have to do with it?
> Oh wait, are you saying you think that abiogenesis is about fully
> formed cells *poofing* into existence? lol, try Googling hurricane in
> a junkyard at the talk origin archives. lol
>
I think you've missed the point. If our objective is to consider how a
cake came into existence, no matter how many intermediate stages, it
is still a jolly good idea to know what a cake is roughly made of.
JC
iaoua iaoua
wrote:
> On Fri, 8 Jul 2011 06:28:52 -0700 (PDT), iaoua iaoua
>
This is your fundamental problem. You think its all a battle between
one community and another. Changing of hypotheses is good scientific
practice. And yet you label it goalpost shifting because of your flame
war mentality. This does not reflect an attitude desirous of
discovering truth. It reflects an attitude desirous of proving a
point. i.e. flame war mentality.
JC
iaoua iaoua
You see, just because you start to play the game of not making a
hypothesis explicit does not mean intelligent people cannot still see
that this your underlying assumption. It is clearly a trivial exercise
to see that the underlying assumption in all that you have said in
these last paragraphs in the one you have officially declared to be
non scientific 'that life came about by natural processes'.
It is also perhaps worthy of note that you current position now
disqualifies a number of other hypotheses from being scientific. Like
the hypothesis that today's great variety of life came about from the
evolution of some simple single celled reproducing common ancestor. By
your definition we can only accept more precise testable hypotheses
such as ones that test aspects of the behaviour of DNA etc.
JC
iaoua iaoua
OK. I see the point you are trying to make albeit with good
intentions. However, your assumption is clearly demonstrably wrong.
The reactions you are referring to happen because they are part of a
complex system which makes them possible. In other words they require
the preexistence of all elements of this system. i.e. without they
cannot happen. The problem is how did this system come about. The two
conflicting hypotheses are natural versus not.
If I wanted to prove the natural I would start by trying to
spontaneously produce DNA rather than proteins. However then we soon
get into a chicken and the egg problem don't we.
JC
Garamond Lethe
Nope. It would take far, far longer than that.
> Oh really! You happen to be speaking to somebody who holds an MSc in
> High Performance Computing and has worked on supercomputers and
> parallelising simulations in particular.
Publish anything in the field? I have.
What molecular dynamics simulation do you use and how fast does it go?
> And as such I'm very interested
> how you came to such an estimation of the time needed.
I collaborated with Case Western on parallelizing a lattice chemical
simulation that was to be used for abiogenesis work. During the design
phase we looked at the best rates for molecular dynamics codes. If I'm
remembering correctly, for a few hundred atoms they had just crossed the
threshold of microseconds per day and were closing on on milliseconds per
day.
Parallelizing this kind of code has its own problems.
Kumar, S. et al. "Achieving strong scaling with NAMD on Blue Gene/L",
Parallel and Distributed Processing Symposium, 2006. IPDPS 2006.
Being able to simulate a single cell is simply a matter of chaining
processors together (I remember calculating that you'd need about 1000
Blue Gene machines to do it.) The problem comes when you need to speed
up the rate. If you're poking along at a millisecond of simulated time
per day of real time, you're going to be limited in the kind of reactions
you're able to simulate.
> Please don't
> forget that as the key ingredients and rough proportions of a living
> cell are well known there are a number of useful limitations you could
> apply to such a brute force technique that would drastically reduce the
> time taken.
Such as?
(Nevermind. You're bluffing.)
>
> In any case, the simulation proves nothing.
For example, it can't prove that you *don't* own me ten million dollars.
> Not unless your algorithm is
> flawless. The algo could only serve to produce a shortlist of reactions
> it judges worth trying. You would need to try them in the lab. So get
> going. Until you have proved it wrong the hypothesis I presented has a
> rightful place in the family of non falsified hypotheses.
We're already going. Our star undergrad got accepted to grad school at
Case and I hope Livermore can direct some funding his way.
>
> JC
alextangent
> On Fri, 08 Jul 2011 09:35:08 -0700, iaoua iaoua wrote:
[snip]
>
> > Oh really! You happen to be speaking to somebody who holds an MSc in
> > High Performance Computing and has worked on supercomputers and
> > parallelising simulations in particular.
>
> Publish anything in the field? �I have.
>
Here's his paper from Edinburgh.
http://www2.epcc.ed.ac.uk/msc/dissertations/dissertations-0809/James_Read.pdf
; "Attempts to parallelise Giza++ have had some success but no
consideration has been made of serial optimisations." A small section
(3 pages or so) on paralellisation, not very well explained; the bulk
is code and he seems to have used some kind of map-reduce on up to
(gasp!) 5 processors.
[snip]
alextangent
As is your hypothesis that "life came about by supernatural
processes", since we have no mechanism for reproducing the
experiment.
We do, however, have other, alternative hypotheses that we can test
based on chemical processes. For instance; is it possible to create
organic molecules from inorganic constituents and energy? The big
questions are rarely answered in a single step; it's small incremental
steps that make up the vast bulk of science.
>
> > Scientific method be damned. You're just making this stuff up as you
> > go along, aren't you?
>
> No! I didn't pull your tongue. You said it yourself. By your own words
> your condemned your own position.
I have a hypothesis. You're making this stuff up as you go along. I
found it amusing that you suggested dieing as a test in some other
thread. Now you claim that if we have no mechanism of reproducing the
experiment that it disqualifies the hypothesis. Are you now proposing
resurrection to meet the repeatability qualification?
Arkalen
As I've said, several times, "non scientific" doesn't mean "false".
There might be a question of whether it would mean "false" in a world
were science has answered all the questions it's currently trying to
answer, but in our current world where science is a work in progress
"non scientific" and "false" are NOT THE SAME THING AT ALL.
> It is also perhaps worthy of note that you current position now
> disqualifies a number of other hypotheses from being scientific. Like
> the hypothesis that today's great variety of life came about from the
> evolution of some simple single celled reproducing common ancestor.
Why is that not scientific ? As far as I can tell it's testable, and
practicably too - we just need to see if the nested hierarchy of
multicellular life (which points to common descent) goes back as far as
unicellular organisms.
That can be done through genetic analysis and well-accepted phylogenetic
methods.
The only way in which this is not true is if a nested hierarchy doesn't
point to an inheritance pattern, but I haven't yet seen anyone propose
an alternative. Random distribution can yield a nested hierarchy with a
measurable probability (which is why we only accept inheritance when
that probability is negligible), and design can yield the appearance of
a nested hierarchy but that implies that the appearance of a nested
hierarchy was the designer's main objective; there's no other purpose
such a pattern could serve.
The last time we talked about this you didn't propose an alternative to
those three. It isn't even clear you understood what a nested hierarchy
is and why it implies what it does. It isn't about *similarities*
between life form. It's about the *pattern* of *similarities and
differences*.
> By
> your definition we can only accept more precise testable hypotheses
> such as ones that test aspects of the behaviour of DNA etc.
By my definition we can only accept precise testable hypotheses indeed.
But you seem to have trouble telling which hypotheses are practicably
testable and which aren't.
Arkalen
What experiment is that? A leap of faith? Would you mind explaining the
experimental method for that, I'd love to try and carry it out.
Arkalen
I don't think changing one's mind is goalpost switching. I don't even
think that switching from one argument to another when the former has
proved invalid or hard to defend is goalpost switching. The problem of
goalpost switching is when it makes it unclear what one's position is,
so that one can camouflage the flaws in that position by pretending that
the refutations to one argument really applied to another argument which
they don't actually apply to, making them apparently invalid.
In other words, I think it's goalpost switching when you change your
mind, or switch arguments, *without marking it clearly*, *without
acknowledging that one's previous point of view or argument failed*.
Which you have done, repeatedly and from the beginning. I think half my
posts in the abiogenesis thread involve explaining goalpost switching to
you and pointing out that you were engaging in it; I'm surprised you're
only confronting the idea now.
That is bad behavior.
Ron O
And you are stuck with the fact that these systems were not always in
place and that they would have evolved over time. We can look at
these systems and see evidence of things like gene duplication. This
is when one gene is in multiple copies (the gene duplicates) and one
copy changes and starts doing something else. This was one of the
mechanisms proposed to increase the number and complexity of the
chemical reactions that life can do. We can see the process of gene
duplication in the current genomes of organisms. In fact it was found
to be present at a much higher rate than anyone had thought. We can
also find genes that are obvioiusly more closely related to each other
than other copies. There is a family tree of genes where you can see
that some have more recently duplicated than others. Look up
melanocortin receptors. This is a family of genes within a much
larger family of genes called G protein coupled receptors. Just the
melanocortin genes have evolved to do such different tasks as control
melanin pigment production in your skin and hair to telling you when
you are humgry and should be looking for some food. These functions
did not evolve all at once. We can see how all 5 of the melanocortin
receptors are related to each other and determine that there was an
order to their evolution (when they duplicated).
This is what you are up aganist. No one believes that everything in a
lifeform had to come together all at once except the creationists. It
is just common sense that lifeforms evolved over a long period of time
because we not only have the fossil record, but we have the evidence
in the genes themselves. With some of the genes we are lucky enough
to see the order of creation. Take the melanocortins again. It looks
like MC1R and MC3R and MC4R existed in the ancestors of the progenitor
of all vertebrates. What we have found out is that the common
ancestor of all vertebrates doubled their chromosome number and became
tetraploid (4 copies of all genes intead of 2 copies). This is a
means of speciation that we still observe today when we look into
recent speciation events. The duplicate of the MC1R gene was lost by
some chance accident, but the duplicates of MC3R and MC4R are now
labeled MCR2 and MCR5. We know that they are related not just by
their sequence, but by the other genes that are found around these
genes in the same region of the chromosome. So many sections of genes
around the genome of vertebrates show this same duplication pattern
that we are pretty sure that the ancestor of all vertebrates was a
tetrapoloid. A lot of these extra genes have been lost over time, but
a lot started to do other things. So real science not only has
evidence of evolution, but we have an order to the evolution of some
of the chemical processes in the organism. If you look at the
melanocortin family it sort of looks like you first had either the
MC1R or MC3R-MC4R genes and you might have had a duplication event
where the copies found themselves on different chromosomes. Possibly
a much earlier doubling of the chromosome sets. Then you had the MC3R
and MC4R duplication where just a portion of the genome was duplicated
and left the two near each other. Today these three genes do very
different things. MC1R is expressed in melanocytes and controls
pigment production (useful for protection against the sun and probably
camouflage) and MC4R is expressed in the brain and controls your
appetite while MC3R is also expressed in the brain, but controls your
metabolism. Then there was the chromosomal duplication event that
resulted in the ancestor of all vertebrates where MC2R and MC5R are
found on another chromosome (derived from MC3R and MC4R), but
surrounded by other genes similar to the genes around MC3R and MC4R so
it looks like the whole chromosome was duplicated. It isn't just for
the melanocortins but for a lot of genes on a lot of chromosomes so we
think that it is a pretty sure bet that we are looking ad evidence for
having a tetraploid ancestor of all vertebrates.
So you are stuck. It looks like the system did not have to go into
place all at once, so you have to do something even harder than your
tornado through a junkyard useless type of assembly idea. You have to
find some way to make it impossible for the parts to evolve to work
together. No one has ever been able to do this, and like I indicate
the only evidence we can find is that the parts did assemble over
time.
>
> If I wanted to prove the natural I would start by trying to
> spontaneously produce DNA rather than proteins. However then we soon
> get into a chicken and the egg problem don't we.
>
> JC
Well, it is baby steps for science. What were the initial conditions
when DNA evolved? No one knows. If you have an idea you can test it
out and try to get others to agree with you. DNA was likely not the
original genetic material and we can already get amino acid
polymerization to form peptides and amino acids can form when you have
the right precursors present, they can even be found in space dust and
meteorites. It is likely the case that we had catalytic self
replicating molecules before DNA began to be synthesized in crude
lifeforms. Beats me what the first self replicating molecules were
made of. Like I said if you have a good idea put it forward and try
to get someone to help you out in testing it. Just saying that it is
impossible is just another god of the gaps argument. Science doesn't
know everything, and there is no reason that science would be required
to know everything before we figure out something. Put gene
duplication of the melanocortin receptors into your creation model and
see how it fits. That is what a real scientist would do.
Remember I said that abiogenesis was among the weakest of sciences,
but what do you have going for your type of creationism compared to
what we already know about how lifeforms evolved? There is a reason
why the more savvy of the ID perps do not deny that common descent is
a fact of nature. They only claim that their designer had to tweak
the process from time to time, but essentially life unfolded as
science has demonstrated it to have unfolded. You have to face that
same evidence and deal with it without denial and god of the gaps
arguments. Use what we already know and develop your creation model
and get back to us.
Ron Okimoto
Garamond Lethe
Interesting. That's a perfectly reasonable MS thesis, although I don't
see the connection to high-performance computing.
To be fair, here's (most of) my work.
RAM
First, it is not an experiment. It is nothing more or less than
mentally attempting to imagine a religious entity.
Second, it is standard fundamentalist religious strategy to request
some non-believer to imagine their God as a savior of the non-
believers soul. Your specious experiment is not new it is an old
religious practice.
Third, it has not one damn thing to do with scientific methods. This
shows your ignorance of science. No science except pseudo-science
requires anyone to imagine some non-material entity in order to gain
insight into material nature.
Fourth there is no evidence that emerges from this specious experiment
that allows for any conclusions about material nature.
You have said you wished to engage in a reasoned dialog with others
and expected others to do the same. You have not. You did not
respond to one point of my post.
Here again are the critical points:
> > > In any case, God is not an undetectable entity.
>
> > Your God is by scientific standards is an "undetectable entity" unless
> > he presents himself materially.
>
> > > As all those who have
> > > found him have found out.
>
> > Those who have cannot use such Graceful knowledge for science. Your
> > deductive logic is specious when it comes to the inductive
> > requirements of science for objective measures of phenomena.
>
> > > Such is testable.
>
> > Provide the scientific protocol for an objective test.
>
> > > Such is repeatable.
>
> > No it is not scientifically. It is culturally. But so are "witches."
You clearly avoided these critiques. Why? Because you know it is
correct.
Yet, instead you reasserted your same confused attempt at justifying
(and proselytizing) your religious vision. The real person with
blinkers on is you.
You rather consistently make use of the common life distorting
creationist defense mechanism of "willful ignorance." You refuse to
learn what science is and why others critiques of your numerous
specious arguments are correct.
One can only conclude this is all about you and not about reasoned
dialog.
Steven L.
"Ernest Major" <{$to$}@meden.demon.co.uk> wrote in message
news:m8EWJmKP...@meden.invalid:
> In message
> <509cba9a-276d-408b...@e7g2000vbw.googlegroups.com>, Tim
> Anderson <timoth...@gmail.com> writes
> >On Jul 8, 7:00 pm, Ernest Major <{$t...@meden.demon.co.uk> wrote:
> >> In message <Xns9F1C5EE9A534Filasthisaddr...@69.16.176.253>, Ilas
> >> <nob...@this.address.com> writes
> >>
> >>
> >>
> >>
> >>
> >>
> >>
> >> >Tim Anderson <timothya1...@gmail.com> wrote in news:e5bc4779-c2b9-4671-
> >> >986b-4a237d143...@d22g2000yqn.googlegroups.com:
> >>
> >> >> Why is this science stuff so difficult to understand?
> >>
> >> >> Science is the practice of locating natural causes for observed,
> >> >> natural phenomena. Applying the method to test for unnatural causes
> >> >> for observed, natural phenomena is, well, something, but it isn't
> >> >> science.
> >>
> >> >> I am baffled how one could construct a scientific test for the
> >> >> existence of an unnatural cause. What criteria would the experimenter
> >> >> use to judge success?
> >>
> >> >Essentially, it's god of the gaps. Don't have an accepted theory of
> >> >abiogenesis via natural processes yet? Must have been supernatural, must
> >> >have been god, must have been my god. He's not said it yet, but that's
> >> >where he's heading.
> >>
> >> I thought he was trying to do an end run round the demarcation problem
> >> (what is and isn't science), and trying to trick people into agreeing
> >> that supernatural abiogenesis is a scientific hypothesis.
> >> --
> >> alias Ernest Major
> >
> >Difficult to do an unnatural-cause end run when the path runs slap
> >bang into the Vertical Cliff of Naturalism.
> >
> One runs into another demarcation problem (what is and isn't natural),
> but I don't think that science necessarily excludes the supernatural;
> what it excludes is unconstrained and unpredictable causes. It should
> have no problem handling a supernatural agency which behaves in a
> constrained and regular fashion. (But many people would demote such an
> agency to the status of natural.)
One example is Extra-Sensory Perception (ESP), and its variants like
precognition.
If there were people who in controlled experiments tested consistently
well on ESP tests, then ESP could be a natural phenomenon after all. At
least it would be worth further scientific investigation.
-- Steven L.
Steven L.
"iaoua iaoua" <iaoua...@gmail.com> wrote in message
news:iaoua-dfab3ac5-79b7-4...@w4g2000yqm.googlegroups.com:
> On Jul 8, 10:31 am, Arkalen <skiz...@yahoo.com> wrote:
> > (2011/07/08 14:47), iaoua iaoua wrote:
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
> > > Hi all,
> >
> > > recently I asked if a hypothesis that life came about as the result of
> > > natural processes qualifies as a scientific hypothesis. I used the
> > > word theory instead of hypothesis and was pulled up for this. Other
> > > than that no real objections to the hypothesis qualifying were raised
> > > other than the obvious lack of a formal definition of what is meant by
> > > 'natural'. Without getting too technical about things I felt the
> > > implication was clearly that the hypothesis entailed natural processes
> > > of known behaviours of the universe in terms of observations and
> > > generalisations made in the areas of Physics and Chemistry and even
> > > allowing for such behaviours which we may not yet understand
> > > completely but not implying any supernatural being breaking the normal
> > > behaviour of the universe or even implying that the behaviour was
> > > anomalous.
> >
> > > All in all no objections were raised against such a sense of the
> > > hypothesis and so I can only conclude that the various attempts at
> > > nitpicking were indicative that nobody has any real problems with such
> > > a hypothesis as qualifying as a scientific hypothesis as long as we
> > > are willing to polish it up and make it more precise and formal.
> >
> > That polishing up isn't aesthetic, James. A theory needs a mechanism and
> > testable predictions. If you're too vague you hide the mechanism and you
> > make it impossible to make testable predictions. Hence, a too-vague
> > statement cannot be a scientific theory.
> >
> >
> >
> > > So, then the converse question arises. If the hypothesis that life
> > > came about as the result of natural processes qualifies as a
> > > scientific hypothesis then why would the inverse of the hypothesis not
> > > be equally as testable. i.e. why does the theory 'that life did not
> > > come about as the result of natural processes' not qualify as a
> > > scientific hypothesis?
> >
> > Does it make practicable testable predictions? It doesn't look to me as
> > if it's precise enough to either.
> >
>
> It predicts that no matter how hard you try you will never be able to
> create life from a reaction in a lab. Guess what! Observations reflect
> thus.
Can't prove a negative.
They might be able to do it next year, or next decade, or next century.
There was a time when folks thought that organic compounds that were
produced by life could "never" be synthesized artificially. Ever since
Wohler synthesized urea in 1828, we've been synthesizing the chemicals
of life ever since.
If a few years from now, scientists did announce such a breakthrough in
artificial life, would that change your views on naturalism?
That's sort of a standard question we have for creationists and ID
proponents: Can you suggest an experiment or test that, if successful,
would mean that your theory is wrong?
-- Steven L.
Steven L.
> There you go. Making that classic mistake. Why do you have to go an
> bring God into it.
It is not *I* who makes that mistake. See below:
> The hypothesis is natural versus not. Should
> experimentation lead us to conclude that natural, in the sense of what
> we see as natural now, was not a possible cause then God or a miracle
> is not the only natural conclusion. Some may like to posit that the
> laws of physics were somehow different at that time. Such a
> possibility could furnish many interesting research questions.
>
> You see your problem is that you allow your definition of what is
> scientific and what is not to be biased that anything that you
> perceive as leading to God as an answer. It is experience with God
> that lead you to faith in God. Not a scientific knowledge that life
> could not have come about under the present understanding of physical
> laws. The latter just provides food for thought. Not scientific proof.
Now THAT is a different story.
If a critic of the Theory of Evolution or of the abiogenesis hypothesis
just claimed that he still wasn't convinced by the evidence offered in
support of those propositions--and that's all--that would be OK. At
that point, he's still being scientific, whether he's right or wrong.
But that's not what a lot of those critics do. They are postulating
supernatural origin as the alleged *null hypothesis* for evolution and
abiogenesis--the only alternative to naturalism. That is, they think
that if they can show that evidence for evolution is sufficiently
flawed, then the diversity of life we see around us "must have had"
supernatural causes.
Henry Morris, who pioneered modern American creationism, said that "If
life could not have arisen naturally, then it must have arisen
supernaturally." That was his basic thesis: If you can't explain some
phenomenon naturally, then it must have happened supernaturally.
And the more modern form is called "Intelligent Design Theory", in which
evolution is deemed an inadequate explanation *and therefore* some
Intelligent Designer must have had a role in it. It's not called
"Limits to Evolution," which would just be a critique of evolution.
It's called "Intelligent Design," in which they assert the existence and
role of an Intelligent Designer simply from their critique of evolution.
From posts you've made in the past, I gathered that was your position
too. Either I misread you, or your thinking on this has changed of late.
If Michael Behe (he of Intelligent Design Theory) had just written a
book in which he was critical of the evidence for evolution, and he
concluded that "Evolution is a plausible-sounding theory, but one for
which the evidence remains insufficient"--then his work wouldn't be
anywhere near as controversial. It was his leaping to conclusions--the
evidence for evolution is insufficient (he asserts) *and therefore* an
Intelligent Designer "must have" had something to do with life on
Earth--that made his claims controversial.
The same thing is true in other fields. If someone wrote a book
entitled "Mysterious Sky Sightings in History," in which he reviewed
mysterious sky sightings down through the ages, that would be one thing.
But what they usually do is take such a manuscript and give it the
title and conclusion "UFOs Are Real," which is a totally unjustified
conclusion.
-- Steven L.
Steven L.
news:928f7dba-475c-470c...@em7g2000vbb.googlegroups.com:
> > There you go. Making that classic mistake. Why do you have to go an
> > bring God into it. The hypothesis is natural versus not. Should
> > experimentation lead us to conclude that natural, in the sense of what
> > we see as natural now, was not a possible cause then God or a miracle
> > is not the only natural conclusion. Some may like to posit that the
> > laws of physics were somehow different at that time. Such a
> > possibility could furnish many interesting research questions.
>
> What is "non-natural"?
Does not obey natural laws. (i.e., laws of physics, laws of chemistry,
etc.)
That's implicit in conceiving of God as omnipotent.
-- Steven L.
Mark Isaak
> On Jul 8, 7:28 pm, Chris <chris.donotspa...@denney.donotspamme.org>
> wrote:
>> I expect at least a few of us will live to see someone succeed, the
>> goal posts will move shortly before that, I bet. Life is chemistry,
>> there is no reason to think life cannot come from no life just because
>> you haven't seens it personally.
>
> This is your fundamental problem. You think its all a battle between
> one community and another.
You are not a community.
--
Mark Isaak eciton (at) earthlink (dot) net
"It is certain, from experience, that the smallest grain of natural
honesty and benevolence has more effect on men's conduct, than the most
pompous views suggested by theological theories and systems." - D. Hume
Mark Isaak
> [...] You should have asked what we would expect to
> see if life did not come about by natural processes. Well, in answer, I
> would expect to see that life only comes from the reproductive process
> of preexisting life and not to spontaneously just appear as the result
> of a reaction not involving some preexisting lifeform.
Which is exactly what we expect to see, also, if life came about by
far-from-trivial natural processes.
> How long should I wait for the converse hypothesis to prove true?
Barring a major economic collapse, I would guess 50-100 years.
Robert Grumbine
> On Fri, 08 Jul 2011 23:00:05 -0700, iaoua iaoua wrote:
>
>> On Jul 8, 7:28 pm, Chris <chris.donotspa...@denney.donotspamme.org>
>> wrote:
>>> I expect at least a few of us will live to see someone succeed, the
>>> goal posts will move shortly before that, I bet. Life is chemistry,
>>> there is no reason to think life cannot come from no life just because
>>> you haven't seens it personally.
>>
>> This is your fundamental problem. You think its all a battle between
>> one community and another.
>
> You are not a community.
A community of billions. Just start counting those intestinal flora.
--
Robert Grumbine http://moregrumbinescience.blogspot.com/ Science blog
Sagredo (Galileo Galilei) "You present these recondite matters with too much
evidence and ease; this great facility makes them less appreciated than they
would be had they been presented in a more abstruse manner." Two New Sciences