The actual outcome alone tells you nothing about whether or not life would have been possible without your alleged fine-tuning. Hence your own appeal to an 'if' game: "life is here ... it exists...and it could not have existed if not for the fine-tuned aspects of the universe..."
Suppose the Resurrection was proven false, what would explain the Gospels?
- Thread starter Whatsisface
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Martin23233
Active member
You assume that the dinosaurs have some conscious mind....or free will... or even a vote in the matter. And yes, you can't have mass extinctions w/o mass life.... so your point is silly. Both can exist. just saying that death exists does nothing to refute that life exists ( it just proves it)... you can't even begin to play your 'destruction of all known life' game if life did not exist..... and known science shows that it was through a fine tuned process whereby it started.
Martin23233
Active member
Like you.. i rely on what science tells us and science points to the fine tuned universe had to be exactly a certain way for life as we know it to have a chance to form. (even our planet is an example of such). Could some other 'type' of life formed if things had changed.... possibly? just one of those 'if' games we would have to put faith in.
I didn't mention free will, and you've given no reason for thinking the dinosaurs were unconscious automatons. The point you are missing is that if the universe is fine-tuned for life then it is also fine-tuned for extinction and genocide. So either the universe was created by an immoral monster, or it is instead just what we see - a place that is at best indifferent to the well-being of living beings, who struggle to hold onto life in whatever tiny corners of the cosmos where life is even possible. But there is a bigger problem with the fine-tuning argument, revealed by a question I asked earlier: Do you understand the difference between logical and nomological possibility?
Right, so we both get to appeal to other possibilities in explaining the reality we see. You're already 'playing the 'if' game, so we get to as well.
Whatsisface
Well-known member
Yes, of course it is. It is a detail neglected by God that undermines the meaning of fine tuning. What do you think fine tuning means? If our immediate environment kills us, which it does and in great numbers and in horrific ways, then our immediate environment hasn't been fine tuned for life,
Your rhetoric betrays you. If you were confident in your position you wouldn't resort to it, but would confidently and calmly present facts. As it is, your credibility is inversley proportional to your braggadocio.
This is shockingly naive. An inference alone isn't proof, and all you have is circumstance and inference, you most certainly do not have proof. It's perfectly possible that the universal constants are as they are because they couldn't be any other way. Thank goodness science doesn't progress on your terms, else it wouldn't get anywhere with your lazy standards of evidence.
Sorry, but none of this gets away from my point. In fact it supports it. Life is here, but for most of it it has been hard. One small but very significant example is childbirth. In times gone by before modern medicine childbirth was very dangerous for the mother and child. This is not an example of fine tuning for life. An omnipotent God could "fine tune" it so childbirth wasn't so dangerous. As it is things run as if nature alone were the only game in town.
Whatsisface
Well-known member
Laughable. Really? Do you really think this? We don't believe things true because we can't disprove them, but rather because we can. It can't be disproved that there's an underground alien civilisation living on Mars, but how much credibility should we give to the notion because of it?
Yawn.
Algor
Well-known member
If so, you have conceded the point, and demonstrated that by your own criteria the idea is unfalsifiable. Sloppy sloppy sloppy....The question is, which is more important to you: your idea of falsifiability, or your new toy of fine tuning. By your criteria, you can’t call both valid science.
So we are both quite clear that you once posted that there are 100s of scientists.
And yet last time you pretended I was misrepresenting you when I said that. Do you not remember that?
Here is your accusation again:
wrong again.. my post clearly stated Thousands (not 100) but maybe you did not read it ... figures...
do you often misrepresent other's posts? if so why do you misrepresent what others clearly post?
An accusation you clearly know is wrong. And yet I see no apology for your it.
Instead, all I see is you saying I am lying again. Lying about what? Who knows. Where is your evidence? Who knows. This is creationism, where making up false accusations against your opponents is standard procedure.
What more evidence do we need that creationism is wrong?
I originally said I would not address this until you had answered various questions on creationism, but I think at this point you and I both know you lack the ability to answer any of those questions. No reflection on you personally, that is the nature of creationism - just a load of hot air with no actual substance.
So okay, front-loading vs co-option. Not really much of a competition. There is a huge amount of research been done on co-option and consequently with have a huge amount of evidence to support it, and, well, front-loading has diddly squat.
As evolution is real science, there are a lot of papers on this that make interesting reading. All the papers I cite here are from the last twenty years. Think about what research has been done published in creationism in that time. As far as I know, the answer is zero. Yes, books have been published, but not research. And I strongly suspect those books will cite very few - if any - papers from 2000 onwards.
Here is a great one from 2008.
The Concept of Co-option: Why Evolution Often Looks Miraculous - Evolution: Education and Outreach
Darwin believed that evolution generally occurred through a series of small, gradual changes. This proposal was counter-intuitive to many people because it seemed likely that “transitional” forms would not survive. Darwin, and later Cuènot, recognized that this problem was easily solved if...
evolution-outreach.biomedcentral.com
I will quote from the the abstract to highlight that co-option was something Darwin proposed, so the idea is as old as the theory of evolution. Of course, we now have a vast amount of data that confirms it.
...Darwin, and later Cuènot, recognized that this problem was easily solved if characters that had evolved for one reason changed their function at a later time with little to no concurrent structural modification, at least initially. In other words, traits that had evolved under one set of conditions were co-opted to serve a different function under a second set of conditions. This meant that organisms carried with them in the structures of their genes, proteins, morphological, physiological, and behavioral characters the potential for rapid evolutionary change, so rapid, indeed, that the process looked miraculous and Lamarckian. ...
The paper says this, with regards to limbs.
Overall then, did limbs and lungs evolve as an adaptation to living on land, as was once believed? The answer is No, these characters existed before vertebrates moved onto land, and may have served a variety of functions, including life as an ambush predator, supporting the body while raising the head up and out of the water to breathe air, and maneuvering through vegetation-rich waters. Was the existence of limbs and lungs in aquatic species a critical prerequisite to the quantum leap from an aquatic to a terrestrial existence? The answer to this question is a resounding Yes, without the co-option of these characters vertebrates may never have made that leap: limbs that were once used to maneuver through tangled aquatic habitats, to rest and move along the bottom of shallow estuary, river, and stream margins were co-opted to serve a new function: support and movement on land.
To be sure, there are still questions about the evolution of the HOX gene. However, in real science, this is an area of active research. See for example this short article in Nature from 2014.
The Evolution of Body Plans: A TALE of two proteins | Accumulating Glitches
An ancient story about the genes that lay out our bodies, and how they evolved.
www.nature.com
The team took a direct approach to answering this question: test the N. vectensis genes in well-established bilaterian model systems, namely the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster and the African clawed frog, Xenopus laevis. Despite differences in the genetic sequence, the sea anemone Hox and TALE genes were able to fill in for their Drosophila counterparts in flies lacking those genes, and a mis-expressed N. vectensis gene even turned the fly's antenna into a leg. Likewise, an anemone TALE gene was good enough to activate the expression of several patterning genes in Xenopus embryos. Finally, the researchers included a negative control; TALE genes from the unicellular amoeba Acanthamoeba castellanii weren't able to form a complex with Hox and activate downstream genes. In the authors' words, this work "underlines that the evolution of the TALE partners enabled the interaction network with Hox proteins and hence new functions to emerge during eukaryote evolution."
So what about eyes? The first paper I presented discusses in some detail crystallins; proteins in the lens of the eye. This is a topic that is especially well researched. Just imagine being able to say that about anything in creationism! As if.
This paper is from 2002.
Two classes of crystallins, the α and the βγ families, are found in all vertebrate lenses and were probably present in the ancestral vertebrate eye. The common theme uniting the two families of lens-specific crystallins found throughout vertebrate
eyes is that proteins involved with cellular stress responses have been co-opted to serve refractive functions in the lens. In this tissue, proteins must remain stable for long periods (i.e., the animal’s lifetime) in an avascular, non-innervated environment that in many animals is exposed to high light levels. It has been speculated that functions involved with cellular stress responses and protein stability may
have been pivotal in their original evolutionary recruitment in the lens.
With regards to light sensitive proteins in the eye, we have this paper from 2009:
Eye evolution: common use and independent recruitment of genetic components
Animal eyes can vary in complexity ranging from a single photoreceptor cell shaded by a pigment cell to elaborate arrays of these basic units, which allow image formation in compound eyes of insects or camera-type eyes of vertebrates. The evolution of ...
www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
The first step of photoreception is mediated by light-sensitive transmembrane proteins containing retinal chromophore, generally termed rhodopsins. They have been found in most groups of organisms including archeal prokaryotes (Blanck & Oesterhelt 1987), unicellular eukaryotes (Nagel et al. 2002), fungi (Bieszke et al. 1999) and metazoa. The functions of rhodopsins in these organisms vary from photon-driven ionic pumps in prokaryotes (Blanck & Oesterhelt 1987), sensory molecules in fungi, to a light-gated ion channel in the eyespot of green algae (Spudich et al. 2000; Nagel et al. 2002).
Take a look at figure 1, which gives an excellent graphical representation of the evolutionary process.
The overall message here is that there is a huge amount of evidence for co-option in a wide variety of biological systems, and scientists are doing more and more research, giving us a better and better understanding of it. Every day we know more about co-option in biology.
All of this fits perfectly with evolution, of course. The reason for that is because evolution actually happened.
The reason you cannot hope to address even a tiny fraction of the topics we are discussing is that creation is wrong.
This is so far detached from reality it is laughable.
There is exactly one question of yours that I have said I would answer when you stop dodging, and even that has now been answered, even though your dodging has now been turned up to eleven.
Last time around, starting in this post, I discussed ten topics, which I carefully divided up with big headings so it would be abundantly clear when you inevitably dodged them. Here they are:
- What does falsifiable mean?
- The Pattern of Differences in Cytochrome-C
- The Evolution of Eyes
- The Vitamin C Pseudogene
- Abundance of Evidence
- Dogs are Descended From Wolves
- A Proof in Maths Does Not Prove Science
- Hundreds and Thousands
- Questions Creationism Cannot Answer
- Not Even Cytochrome-c
THREE you have, well, not addressed, but at least responded to. The other SEVEN you do not even bother to respond to. And for those three, you responded by deflecting to the one question I had not answered. Well, it has now been answered. Are you going to go back and actually respond to any of the above?
No.
You cannot.
You are out of your depth here, and you know it. You do not even know the basics like what falsifiable means.
As you get every more desperate your posts get ever more rude, and you make up more and more false accusations - and so clearly false that I wonder if your plan is to get banned so you have an excuse for leaving the discussion.
Heaven forbid you could admit you were wrong.
Martin23233
Active member
I get your point "tell that to the" dinos... but they likely would not grasp it....their cognitive abilities show they lacked much. (unlike us humans ...well most of us). the problem you have with your argument against a fine-tuned universe/planet is that your premise actually proves life exists in order for your conclusion that life ends too.... your attempt at showing that life ends... must somehow invalidate the fine tuned universe where life arose (specifically our planet).
Next you try your best attempt at a false dichotomy: "either the universe was created by an immoral monster, or it is instead just what we see..."
easily shot down as lacking anything resembling reason or even logic. You clearly make assumptions that you have no chance of ever proving ... (an 'indifferent' place/universe)...things that you assume to be true but can't show to be true...just because a meteor struck the earth and ended many species... is not a moral nor an indifferent position. It is just an opinion you hold that best suits your current knowledge.
Fine tuning is generally accepted... unless one ignores the science behind it.
Martin23233
Active member
How is pointing out the science behind a fine-tuned universe/planet playing any 'if' game? Unlike you.. i will state the facts as they are currently ... and not rely on 'if' , supposed... possibly... could be... maybe .....etc.... (I hope 'we' understand that much)
Of course you rely on 'if'. I quoted you doing so. Do you think you can make the fine-tuning argument without appealing to any counterfactual/hypothetical scenarios or using the word 'if'?
Algor
Well-known member
Science? How are you going to falsify your “fine tuning” argument, by your own criteria? Try it. Go on. See the problems yet, Martin? Still think it’s wonderful?
You've missed the point of my argument. The existence of life does not alone get you fine-tuning. That countless species can be arbitrarily wiped out by a meteor shows that either the universe was created by a genocidal monster, or that the universe is blind and indifferent to whether or not life has managed to find a foothold.
It's not a false dichotomy when you can't offer a third option. And I haven't even given you my main argument against fine-tuning yet, as you didn't answer my question: Do you understand the difference between logical and nomological possibility? (3rd time asking)
Martin23233
Active member
how silly of a comment. you must assume that God controls when a person starts a forest fire. It is pretty much impossible for you to consider any detail of God's creation to be of neglect.... it is clearly just an assertion by you that can't be backed up....but if you were intellectually honest.....and wanted to really know if God was undermining the meaning of fine tuning then you first must understand God (or gods in your case). The Old Testament is loaded with God-directed life ending events... it only proves that life was present...and in order for it to be present a very specific and certain progression of steps were required.
The scientific facts are easily searchable ... but probably not as easily understood or accepted by some.
what is clearly naïve is your inability to understand why life has not been detected on Mercury.... or why intelligent life is nowhere to be found on Mars.... or the moon... it takes scientifically proven steps before life can even have the conditions to form and flourish. you should try reading more...and spewing less.
Wow... your intelligence in this matter is just so lacking in an astonishing way. So YOU seem to set your brain/belief in childbirth being so difficult to prove life is not 'Fine tune"-ed. too funny you seem to lack the comprehension about what it means then. Fine tuned means a series of steps that must all occur for life to exist. it says nothing about the quality of life that exists. You seem to be hung up on trying to define the quality of life (and hence are proving the abundance and existence of life) . How's them apples? do you get the difference? Fine Tuning is not about the quality of life...just like most good socialists believe that if all can suffer then all can be equal...it does not work like that.... that only addresses the quality of life and not the fact that life exists.
Martin23233
Active member
and now you see how silly it is to believe that not finding mermaid proves evolution true. just too easy to walk you into that one.
- “The time has come,” he said. “The kingdom of God has come near. Repent and believe the good news!”
Mark 1:15
Why do you keep strawmanning like this? Would your God approve of such blatant dishonesty?