How is there reality without God?

[EarthScienceguy]

Neils Bohr
"No Phenomenon is a phenomenon until it is an observed phenomenon." Or another way to say this is that a tree does not fall in a forest unless it is observed.

The only way for there to be an objective reality is if God is the constant observer everywhere.

Physicist John Archibald Wheeler: "It is wrong to think of the past as 'already existing' in all detail. The 'past' is theory. The past has no existence except as it is recorded in the present."

God is everywhere so He can observe everywhere and produce objective reality.

[William]

[Replying to JoeyKnothead in post #270]

If all consciousness were eliminated throughout the entire universe, would it fail to exist?

Cart before horse.

It is a slightly different question to the problem because it relies upon what consciousness has already acknowledges as existing.

The answer would still be 'yes' because if consciousness were eliminated, there would be no fundamental thing in which to say "yes the universe still exists without consciousness" as the universe cannot - of itself - say that it exists...unless it were conscious.

It strikes me as a bit of hubris to think only consciousness matters in this questioning of reality.

It is not a case of being 'proud' to be consciousness [re the personality] but of accepting the uniqueness of a thing being conscious. Self acceptance. Acknowledgment of consciousness as a fundamental necessity to any existence, existing.

On a generic scale, that amounts to this:

Musing on the idea of Sentient Earth re the problems of the world

[Purple Knight]

Nope. We had a colleague who dipped his toe into manipulating data to get his preferred answers. He was very quickly found out by his peers (we can usually recognize that sort of thing when we see it), reported, fired, and discredited.

This system relies on most people being honest when the motive is in the other direction. No wonder that certain fields are already corrupt. Don't get me wrong, you have a stable equilibrium and you should be able to preserve it unless someone shakes the jar hard.

However, if I was called on to guess which equilibrium would eventually result, I would guess the irreversible one.

[Jose Fly]

This system relies on most people being honest when the motive is in the other direction.

I hope you understand that when it comes to science, I'm going to go with my 25+ years of experience over your say-so....every time.

[Purple Knight]

This system relies on most people being honest when the motive is in the other direction.

I hope you understand that when it comes to science, I'm going to go with my 25+ years of experience over your say-so....every time.

And you should go with what you have seen. Never ever let someone tell you that your experience is just wrong.

I'm not saying your field is corrupt. I believe your field is fine. I'm saying people have a right to think it is, because they do not have that experience. Remember, I'm on your side but I'm arguing that from the perspective of those who aren't, the way they see things makes sense.

Do be mindful of those fields that have already fallen because corporatism booped them hard enough to switch to the second equilibrium, and once it does it's not going to recover.

[Jose Fly]

And you should go with what you have seen. Never ever let someone tell you that your experience is just wrong.

Of course.

I'm saying people have a right to think it is, because they do not have that experience. Remember, I'm on your side but I'm arguing that from the perspective of those who aren't, the way they see things makes sense.

So the people who don't know anything about a field of science are justified in believing it's corrupt? I'd think the more reasonable position would be for them to go with "Since I don't know anything about it, I can't say". A little humility goes a long way.

Do be mindful of those fields that have already fallen because corporatism booped them hard enough to switch to the second equilibrium, and once it does it's not going to recover.

Ok.

[Purple Knight]

So the people who don't know anything about a field of science are justified in believing it's corrupt?

Yes if the profit motive predicts that. Just as you and I are ten billion percent justified believing AiG is non-scientifically sniffing for only the conclusions it likes despite not being members.

[Jose Fly]

Yes if the profit motive predicts that.

How do they know such a thing exists in that field, if they don't know anything about that field?

Just as you and I are ten billion percent justified believing AiG is non-scientifically sniffing for only the conclusions it likes despite not being members.

No, that's not the same at all. AiG says quite overtly that they only accept conclusions that agree with their religious beliefs. For that to be equivalent to what we're discussing in science, a scientific organization would have to show an agreement all employees must sign, that (just as overtly) says something like "all conclusions must further our profits".

Absent that, and coupled with not knowing anything about the field, the person is merely assuming without evidence.

[Purple Knight]

Yes if the profit motive predicts that.

How do they know such a thing exists in that field, if they don't know anything about that field?

Because it exists in every industry in the capitalist world.

No, that's not the same at all. AiG says quite overtly that they only accept conclusions that agree with their religious beliefs. For that to be equivalent to what we're discussing in science, a scientific organization would have to show an agreement all employees must sign, that (just as overtly) says something like "all conclusions must further our profits".

Absent that, and coupled with not knowing anything about the field, the person is merely assuming without evidence.

They're just being silly by outing themselves. They're discrediting themselves. Suppose they did what every other dishonest organisation does, and hid their dishonesty? I wouldn't have a problem still assuming that if they (and only they) get the religious conclusion every time, they're probably going for that. I don't argue against the people pointing out that all the organisations that get these conclusions are religious ones, hmm, isn't that odd. Yes it is odd and it's okay to notice that.

[Jose Fly]

Because it exists in every industry in the capitalist world.

Not in mine. Thus, anyone who blindly assumes such a thing about me and my colleagues is sorely mistaken.

They're just being silly by outing themselves. They're discrediting themselves.

Not to their target audience they aren't. Fundamentalist Christians see that sort of thing and it makes them love AiG all the more.

Suppose they did what every other dishonest organisation does, and hid their dishonesty?

If all this dishonesty is hidden, how do you know it exists?

I wouldn't have a problem still assuming that if they (and only they) get the religious conclusion every time, they're probably going for that. I don't argue against the people pointing out that all the organisations that get these conclusions are religious ones, hmm, isn't that odd. Yes it is odd and it's okay to notice that.

Okey doke.

[EarthScienceguy]

[Replying to The Barbarian in post #0]

As I showed you, that would depend on many different things. It's like asking how long it would take water to run down a mountain. But do you see why a 1% difference would require you to determine how long 0.5% change takes? This is important. Think about it.

Since you like to bring up hemoglobin as an example let's look at your hemoglobin example.

There are three alleles for human blood types ABO. A and B are dominant and O is recessive, a point that you continually seem to overlook.

But here is the problem with your evolutionary fairytale.

• Results
  We have analysed two male Neandertals that were retrieved under controlled conditions at the El Sidron site in Asturias (Spain) and that appeared to be almost free of modern human DNA contamination. We find a human specific diagnostic deletion for blood group O (O01 haplotype) in both Neandertal individuals. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2629777/

• Conclusion
  These results suggest that the genetic change responsible for the O blood group in humans predates the human and Neandertal divergence. A potential selective event associated with the emergence of the O allele may have therefore occurred after humans separated from their common ancestor with chimpanzees and before the human-Neandertal population divergence. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2629777/

So the genetic change in humans for blood type O started with the Neandertals. Neandertals could mate with modern humans so they would be considered the same kind of human as is living today by creationists. Evolutionist theories have to change like the wind because they are always being refuted so who knows what they believe and what they believe today will change tomorrow.

If there was a mutation to produce this blood type O in humans then it would be an almost "neutral" mutation because there does not appear to be any deleterious effects or selective advantage over the other two blood types.

• For example, if a mutation that gave blood type O were actually 1 percent more beneficial than type A, it would take 100,000 generations to fix this mutation in the modern human population from a beginning population of 10,000 people. C. Patterson, Evolution (Ithaca, NY: Comstock Publishing Associates, 1999); J.C. Sanford, Genetic Entropy & the Mystery of the Genome, 2nd ed. (Lima, NY: Elim, 2005)

The larger the population at the time of the mutation, the longer it will take for fixation and the less likely the mutation will ever be fixed.

60% of all people living today have the O allele, regardless of where they may be in the world. it is by far the most common blood allele in the world. Transcending all races and ethnic groups. (E.C. Minkoff, Evolutionary Biology (Menlo Park, CA: Addison Wesley, 1983); E.W. Sinnot et al., Principles of Genetics, 5th ed. (New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1958)) That means one of two things. Adam and Eve when they were created had all three alleles AB and O, or Neandertals, and modern humans have been on the earth for over 2 million years.

There are three alleles for the human ABO gene. There are many different versions (alleles) of the hemoglobin gene, each coding for a slightly different beta-globin protein. Not sure if anyone has published a definitive list of the known alleles. I assume we can agree that hemoglobin is an essential molecule, right? This alone is devastating for YE beliefs. As you know, if we all descended from one pair of humans 10,000 years ago, this would be a lot of mutation for an essential gene. If you rely on scientific data, the last common ancestor of all humans living today, lived about 150,000 years ago. Still, that would be a mutation which survived to spread in the population every 3,000 years. Lots of other genes are like that. Most of our genes have dozens of alleles. We have about 30,000 functional genes, so do the math. If the average number of alleles is as little as 10, we are left with about 2 a year that end up spreading through the population.

Not at all. This is exactly what would be expected to happen after the tower of Babel and the human population were scattered across the earth. Each little group of humans would have its characteristic polymorphisms that could then be used to identify their ethnic groups. Their polymorphism is not fixed in the entire population but they are part of specific ethnic groups that are associated with specific regions of the world. It would be more of a problem for YC if this was not the case.

Biblical creationists have a mechanism for this diversity. And notice that most of the genetic diversity in humans that we find is according to ethnicity. Which corresponds to the geographical locations where small groups of humans settled after the tower of Babel.

It is actually the evolutionary fairy tale that has trouble providing a mechanism for all of the facts.

From your link:
“At first glance, what we found seemed to contradict established theory that initial mutations are entirely random and that only natural selection determines which mutations are observed in organisms,” said Detlef Weigel, scientific director at Max Planck Institute and senior author on the study.

Delef is mistaken there. Natural selection does not cause mutations:

The Luria–Delbrück experiment (1943) (also called the Fluctuation Test) demonstrated that in bacteria, genetic mutations arise in the absence of selective pressure rather than being a response to it. Thus, it concluded Darwin's theory of natural selection acting on random mutations applies to bacteria as well as to more complex organisms. Max Delbrück and Salvador Luria won the 1969 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in part for this work.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luria%E2% ... experiment

Genetics, Volume 136, Issue 3, 1 March 1994
Luria-Delbrück fluctuation experiments: design and analysis.
Abstract
Luria and Delbrück, in a seminal paper, introduced fluctuation analysis primarily as a means to elucidate the timing of mutation in relation to the imposition of selective conditions. Their work, and subsequently that of LEA and COULSON, established also a basis for measuring the frequency of mutational events.

Yea, about your belief that mutations are random. Sorry to break it to you but evolution had to change again. I told you earlier that evolution changes with the wind. "New study provides first evidence of non-random mutations in DNA; posting.php?mode=post_reply&post_num=247&f=17&p=1108338"

So now Haldane's dilemma is even more of a dilemma because of the length of time it would take to have a nonlethal mutation in one of these areas.
See above. Reality, again.

You mean the reality of having many different bottlenecks at the same time is not reality. It sounds like reality to me.