Religion is science?

Creationism, Evolution, and other science issues

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Willum
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Religion is science?

Post #1

Post by Willum »

As we find out more, we refine our theories, I think this is agreeable.

So let's roll back the clock.
Isn't it reasonable the first scientific theories were that a father-like figure created lightning and made the crops grow?
That guided our fortunes,just like when we were children?

Then as we learn more, we need to explain less with mommy and daddy gods? and more and more with fundamental particles and evolution?

Aren't gods just a psychologically driven scientific model to describe non-psychological phenomenon?

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Re: Religion is science?

Post #61

Post by Guy Threepwood »

[Replying to post 59 by DrNoGods]

I assume you are making a joke there as the dinosaurs did not disappear because a rock was dropped onto them. It was the after effects of reduced sunlight from the atmospheric aerosols blasted up from the impact, subsequent cooling and loss of vegetation for the herbivores to eat, loss of herbivores for the carnivores to eat, etc. that ultimately combined over hundreds of generations to eventually wiped them out. Emissions from the Deccan Traps may have contributed as well.
Well yes, and I've heard some theorize that the real clincher was the ignition of hydrocarbons, without which the dinosaurs might have survived to make a comeback.. Nobody knows for sure.

But you take my point, this was an example of chaotic destruction, not demonstrating how ToE could explain the origin of species.
Random mutations ... combined with natural selection. You can't leave out the natural selection part and just claim that the whole process is "random chaotic errors" (although that sounds more ridiculous and dramatic). The evidence for this process is the entire body of observation that supports ToE and has confirmed it beyond a reasonable doubt, and is contained in literally hundreds of thousands of peer-reviewed journal articles and the huge number of books and (now) web articles that summarize all of this observational data. It is one of the most studied and documented process in all of science.
natural selection of what?

I certainly do leave out 'natural selection' as an 'explanation', because that goes entirely without saying: that a significantly superior design will tend to out perform, out last and hence be reproduced in greater numbers than an inferior one?

that's why there are more Ford Mustangs on the road today than Ford Pinto's is it not?- it's an absolute given and does absolutely nothing to account for how the superior designs arise in the first place.

So taking natural selection as a given, the arrival of the new design to be selected is THE question, which ToE answers with 'pure blind luck'- that's just not good enough

And we don't see it in lab experiments, direct experimentation, computer models or the fossil record. This key part of the theory has been squeezed at both ends- because #1 the sophistication of information systems in DNA has gone far beyond the wildest dreams of Victorian age naturalists, and #2: in the information age we know how difficult it is to create even the simplest systems 'accidentally'

The process from single-celled organism to dinosaur took over 3 billion years, which is enough time for small, incremental changes to ultimately lead to simple, multicellular organisms like sponges, then to hundreds of thousands of progressively more complicated and structured organisms that led to the appearance of fishes, amphibians and reptiles like dinosaurs and many other tetrapods. There are many summaries of current knowledge of this process, such as these very common ones (and their references) just to list a few:

^ well that was the theory, & that's why slow incremental change is fundamental to ToE,' for it cannot progress by great leaps' and so explosive events were assumed to be 'artifacts of an incomplete record'....

One of the tip-offs that 'a handful of immutable laws' was insufficient to account for the development of the physical universe, was similarly that it (post BB theory) did not creep along in slow incremental predictable mechanisms, but in very distinct, explosive, crucially timed and balanced stages- this requires, in some form, extra information input to guide these events.
Are you claiming that none of this information qualifies as evidence? A full-up eye structure can realistically evolve from a simple eye patch in just a few hundred thousand years:
Classical physics could be measured, tested, repeated, simulated to far higher degree than evolution- which is a far more inherently speculative theory. I don't consider any of that speculation 'overwhelming evidence' - certainly not for ToE

The eye is one good example of 'irreducible complexity', which I think that article does a good job of pointing out!
mutations combined with natural selection can produce an incredible variety of life forms as the fossil record shows.
^ circular reasoning.. where is the evidence that this is what actually happened? anything observable, testable, measurable?
People have tried to discredit ToE since it was first proposed, particularly religious people who see it as a threat to the infallibility of their holy books which claim that humans are special creatures created in the image of their god figure, and not "just another animal." But the cumulative evidence for ToE (and human evolution from great apes) is just too overwhelming. It would be interesting to see stats on the percentage of anti-evolutionists who don't believe ToE mainly because it shows that modern humans evolved from apes, and the percentage who don't believe ToE because they don't think there is evidence for it (independent of the human issue specifically).
We began this debate (I think) talking about how people clung to static models and rejected notions of a beginning- because that appeared to support a theistic model. That's not a scientific method, that's just bias.

If fundamental problems with Darwinism seemed to support the concept of God, I have no bias against this whatsoever, are you conceding that you do?

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Re: Religion is science?

Post #62

Post by DrNoGods »

[Replying to post 60 by Guy Threepwood]
So taking natural selection as a given, the arrival of the new design to be selected is THE question, which ToE answers with 'pure blind luck'- that's just not good enough.


But you ARE ignoring natural selection as it works in ToE, and repeating that "new designs" simply arrive by dumb luck and chance. Look at the example of the evolution of an eye in the paper I linked ... that is a much better example of how things work than comparing a mustang to a pinto.

If a random, by chance, mutation happened about 1 billion years ago that provided some sort of sensitivity to visible light in molecules near the skin surface in some kind of early worm, that would provide no benefit if the worm lived entirely in the dark. But if the worm lived above the surface for part of its day then there may be an advantage to being able to sense light in order to get more energy from the sun, or possibly find more food if getting to a sunlit spot happened to also put the worm more often in the vicinity of its food source (another bug of some type).

This advantage would eventually, after enough time and generations, result in a population of worms that all had this area of light sensiitive molecules because it was beneficial. Then some of these worms may develop another random mutation that fosters a better organization of light sensitive molecules, or possibly more sensitive ones, or anything that might improve on the ability to take advantage of the capacity to sense when the worm is in sunlight, and when it is not. This doesn't have to be planned by some intelligent designer ... and such a mutation may never happen or it might take a million years to happen. But once it does, if it does, and it confers an advantage however small, it can become fixed in the population and you have the first instance of a "light patch." The paper described how this could then evolve into an eye over a few hundred thousand years.

It is natural selection that drives the process because having some sensitivity to light is an advantage to survival and reproduction. It if weren't, worms that had the initial mutation would not preferentially out-reproduce and out-survive the rest of the population, so would not come to dominate and the feature would not become fixed in the population. There is no "plan" for this kind of thing to happen ... it is just that a beneficial mutation can eventually become fixed in the population and eventually all the worms have eye patches, which can further improve if additional mutations are such that some new characteristic appears (eg. concentration into an area of the body that is most often exposed to sunlight). It is the repeated cycle of this kind of thing, driven by natural selection (ie. beneficial mutations remain, deleterious ones don't) that creates the observed adaptation within a species (what anti-evolutionists call "micro" evolution which they seem happy to accept), as well as new species (so-called "macro" evolution), which is nothing more than an extended series of "micro" events that result in sufficient change for humans to classify something as a new species.
And we don't see it in lab experiments, direct experimentation, computer models or the fossil record. This key part of the theory has been squeezed at both ends- because #1 the sophistication of information systems in DNA has gone far beyond the wildest dreams of Victorian age naturalists, and #2: in the information age we know how difficult it is to create even the simplest systems 'accidentally'


We certainly do see this in nature, and in the fossil record. The Victorian age naturalists had no idea what DNA was or how heredity worked, what mutations were, etc. It wasn't until Oswald Avery proved that DNA was the "transforming substance" in 1944 that anyone had any clue how heredity worked, and 9 years later in 1953 before Watson and Crick worked out the molecular structure of DNA and suggested that the ordering of the base pairs had something to do with how transcription worked (genes to proteins). So roughly 100 years after Darwin, and of course Victorian age naturalists had no ability to imagine this kind of chemistry in their wildest dreams as they were a century behind the discovery.
If fundamental problems with Darwinism seemed to support the concept of God, I have no bias against this whatsoever, are you conceding that you do?


I don't see any fundamental problems with modern Darwinism, and certainly no evidence from any field of study that supports the existence of gods of any kind (that includes any of the tens of thousands of gods that humans have invented). But if anyone or anything ever produces any real evidence for a god then I would be happy to accept that they exist (or at least that one). But this has never been done and I don't think it ever will. Gods are human inventions, entirely, without a shred of evidence for their existence. All people can do, and all they have ever done, is propose various god beings to explain things they could not understand, or to provide a false hope that there is something after death, and things of that sort. But no god being has ever been observed in any way, shape or form, and science has continued to close the gaps on things where gods were initially invented as an explanation. But hope springs eternal.
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Re: Religion is science?

Post #63

Post by Guy Threepwood »

[Replying to post 61 by DrNoGods]

Thanks as always for the detailed and thoughtful response! I don't mean to be flippant with the short reply- but rather to take this one step at a time:

From your link:

"We let the evolutionary sequence start with a patch
of light-sensitive cells"


So what hypothetical evolutionary advantage would this provide?

We certainly do see this in nature
sorry to be stubborn, but what sort of evolution do we directly observe in nature? what's a good example of this 'appearance of a superior design' something actually directly scientifically observed taking place, in your opinion? as opposed to merely theorized I mean


I don't see any fundamental problems with modern Darwinism, and certainly no evidence from any field of study that supports the existence of gods of any kind (that includes any of the tens of thousands of gods that humans have invented). But if anyone or anything ever produces any real evidence for a god then I would be happy to accept that they exist (or at least that one). But this has never been done and I don't think it ever will. Gods are human inventions, entirely, without a shred of evidence for their existence. All people can do, and all they have ever done, is propose various god beings to explain things they could not understand, or to provide a false hope that there is something after death, and things of that sort. But no god being has ever been observed in any way, shape or form, and science has continued to close the gaps on things where gods were initially invented as an explanation. But hope springs eternal.

And presumably Hoyle was of a similar opinion, was it a good idea to apply this opinion to science?

To put this another way, when static/eternal, steady state, big crunch and other models posited to 'close the gaps on God' were debunked beyond most reasonable doubt... were their proponents forced to fall to their knees, and accept all the theistic implications they had complained about?

Of course not, God was merely substituted for an infinite probability machine to provide all the necessary information input (aka the multiverse). And that's fine, whatever it takes to sweeten the pill and let science progress is fine by me. Belief in God remained, as should be, a matter of personal faith, right?

Same with Darwinism, moving beyond the classical model of a handful of immutable laws + lots of time and space and random interaction... to a 21st C information driven mechanism (like the rest of reality)- does not require you to believe in God. It may require you to believe the information was supplied by an infinite probability machine, but that's no leap of faith not already taken for physics.

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Post #64

Post by blackstart »

Response to Post 62(Guy Threepwood)
To put this another way, when static/eternal, steady state, big crunch and other models posited to 'close the gaps on God' were debunked beyond most reasonable doubt... were their proponents forced to fall to their knees, and accept all the theistic implications they had complained about?

Of course not, God was merely substituted for an infinite probability machine to provide all the necessary information input (aka the multiverse). And that's fine, whatever it takes to sweeten the pill and let science progress is fine by me. Belief in God remained, as should be, a matter of personal faith, right?
I see no reason at all that they should be 'forced to fall to their knees' as you put it. Science is open to, and indeed thrives on the idea that it goes where the evidence leads, so any hypothesis can be modified or even rejected in the light of new evidence. This is one reason why science has a better chance of approaching any objective(or at least intersubjective) truths about the natural world than, for instance, theology.

I would suggest that science has little to say on the subject of gods because science deals with the natural world and the idea of gods seems inextricably linked to the supernatural. As such, and in the absence of any methodology which can ascertain the objective existence of any god, I think that you are quite correct in your last sentence in this quote. Belief in any god is a matter of personal faith. So, in other words, true for you, but not necessarily for me.

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Post #65

Post by Guy Threepwood »

blackstart wrote: Response to Post 62(Guy Threepwood)
To put this another way, when static/eternal, steady state, big crunch and other models posited to 'close the gaps on God' were debunked beyond most reasonable doubt... were their proponents forced to fall to their knees, and accept all the theistic implications they had complained about?

Of course not, God was merely substituted for an infinite probability machine to provide all the necessary information input (aka the multiverse). And that's fine, whatever it takes to sweeten the pill and let science progress is fine by me. Belief in God remained, as should be, a matter of personal faith, right?
I see no reason at all that they should be 'forced to fall to their knees' as you put it. Science is open to, and indeed thrives on the idea that it goes where the evidence leads, so any hypothesis can be modified or even rejected in the light of new evidence. This is one reason why science has a better chance of approaching any objective(or at least intersubjective) truths about the natural world than, for instance, theology.
I think we agree then, likewise science has proven to be the better guide to reality than atheism or materialism- as in the above examples. If a truth happens to seem to support God, it should not be rejected for it.
I would suggest that science has little to say on the subject of gods because science deals with the natural world and the idea of gods seems inextricably linked to the supernatural. As such, and in the absence of any methodology which can ascertain the objective existence of any god, I think that you are quite correct in your last sentence in this quote. Belief in any god is a matter of personal faith. So, in other words, true for you, but not necessarily for me.
And again, this is all true for atheism also, right? which is why (I think we agree) we should separate our personal beliefs from the science.

But to do this, a person needs to acknowledge their belief as such.

'Blind faith is faith which does not recognize itself'

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Re: Religion is science?

Post #66

Post by DrNoGods »

[Replying to post 62 by Guy Threepwood]
So what hypothetical evolutionary advantage would this provide?


The ability to detect when in sunlight and when not? That could be a huge benefit to any organism, even single-celled simple ones (it obviously would be a huge benefit to a modern, cold-blooded animal who needs the find the sun to maintain energy levels). Imaagine a bunch of single-celled, early organisms of some sort living at the surface of a small pond that is partially in shade at parts of the day. If these organisms also needed energy from the sun to survive (or it could be a primitive plant ... most plants require solar energy directly for photosynthesis). then there would be an obvious advantage of being able to not only detect the sunlit portions of their environment, but also to get there. If they had the ability for neither, the ones that would survive would be the ones that just happened to get to the sunlit areas via wind blowing them, or currents, etc. The ones that got stuck in unlit sections would die.

So there is clearly an advantage of being in the sunlit section of the pond. If a mutation produced a light sensitive group of proteins because the gene that generated that protein was changed by the mutation, this might allow the organism to "know" when it was in sunlight because maybe it physically warms up due to the absorption of the photons. Or maybe the protein is involved in the chemical or electrical signaling within the organism that creates an effect. But in any case, there is now a mechanism for a different response when in sunlight, and when not. But there is no way to get there, so another series of mutatations may form, a few thousand years later, or a million years later, that creates a small extension that can wiggle and cause the organism to move in the water in some directional way (ie. the beginning of a flagellum). Now the organism has both an ability to detect sunlight in a crude way, as well as some ability to get there. These would confer huge advantages over the same organism that could not detect sunlight, or move of its own accord. And the process can continue and repeat for all kinds of different scenarios where beneficial functions are favored by natural selection and new body parts arise.
sorry to be stubborn, but what sort of evolution do we directly observe in nature? what's a good example of this 'appearance of a superior design' something actually directly scientifically observed taking place, in your opinion? as opposed to merely theorized I mean


Obviously we can observe artificial selection from just looking at all the dogs humans have bred (or corn, etc.). Nature does the same thing if there is a natural selection benefit that drives the changes, rather than someone wanting a labradoodle or a bigger ear of corn. What nature "wants" are the changes that result in a better chance of survival and reproduction. As for examples, there are many. Why are some antibiotics no longer effective? It's because the bacteria they attack have evolved a resistance to the antibiotic and no longer are killed by it. That is evolution in action, within just a human lifetime. Certain flu strains are another example. Homo erectus to Homo sapien is another ... via evolution of a larger and more complex brain which is the primary physical evolutionary benefit Homo sapiens have over Homo erectus and the other earlier hominids.
To put this another way, when static/eternal, steady state, big crunch and other models posited to 'close the gaps on God' were debunked beyond most reasonable doubt... were their proponents forced to fall to their knees, and accept all the theistic implications they had complained about?


These models of the universe were hypotheses, and have been replaced by the current "best" hypothesis called the Big Bang model. I expect the proponents did not fall to their knees for any reason, but simply accepted that these earlier models were wrong and a better one was now available. If the Big Bang model is ultimately proven to be wrong there will be another one to supplant it. You can't say the same for the heliocentric model of the solar system, for example, which is not going to be supplanted by some other model because the observational evidence for the heliocentric model is far too convincing to ignore ... just like the theory of evolution. Certain details may be modified (eg. the correct orbital mechanics of Mercury had to await general relativity to explain its precession of the perihelion), but the heliocentric model has far too much evidence to support it to expect it to ever change in its basic description.

Science adapts as new information becomes available. My first personal experience with that was in 1985 when I'd just finished my Ph.D and started work in a group who build high-altitude balloon and aircraft laser-based instruments to measure gases in the upper troposphere and stratosphere. Just one year before, the "ozone hole" was discovered and freaked everyone out (and most were initially convinced that the British scientists doing ground-based measurements of the ozone column from Antarctica, Joesph Farman , Brian Gardiner, and Jonathan Shanklin, were hitting the sauce a little too much). In 1985-86, three prominent hypotheses arose to explain what was going on, and they were very different (one purely dynamical, one mostly chemical, and one a combination of the two (by Susan Solomon from NOAA, which turned out to be correct). Each proponent was convinced that their model was correct.

So NASA, who funded our group and many others, decided to send everyone and everything down to the Ross Ice Shelf in Antarctica and measure everything possible, then dump all of this data onto the "bloody theoreticians" as my (British) group leader called the people who built the atmospheric models. It took less than 3 months to reveal the mechanism for the ozone hole and it was crystal clear. Everything fell into place and the two "losing" models were simply dropped and their proponents accepted what was too clear to ignore or argue. The last objection was that the TOMS (Total Ozone Mapping Spectrometer) satellite had not seen this ozone "hole" developing and it had been flying long before 1984. If the hole had been there prior to 1984, TOMS should have seen it. When that situation was looked into, they found that the on-board processing code had some logic that said if the ozone values are below a certain number, don't transmit that data down in the processed data because it is obviously garbage. Fortunately, they did downlink the raw data and were able to then go back and reprocess it, and indeed the ozone hole was there prior to 1984 and at that point the whole mystery was solved and everything was consistent.

This kind of scenario is common in science, and when more and more data become available that all supports a particular hypothesis, it becomes accepted as the consensus. It doesn't matter what one guy like Hoyle may think about it ... one person's opinion doesn't mean anything.
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Replying to post 64 by Guy Threepwood

Post #67

Post by blackstart »

think we agree then, likewise science has proven to be the better guide to reality than atheism or materialism- as in the above examples. If a truth happens to seem to support God, it should not be rejected for it.

And again, this is all true for atheism also, right? which is why (I think we agree) we should separate our personal beliefs from the science.

But to do this, a person needs to acknowledge their belief as such.

'Blind faith is faith which does not recognize itself'
Glad we agree then. As I said before science produces evidence related to the natural world, and if evidence was to accrue in support of the idea of God then, of course, one wouldn't reject it. It would simply mean that God would be accepted, at least provisionally, as a natural phenomenon. However, due to the professed supernatural nature of God,(according to His supporters) this would seem to remain highly unlikely.

I agree wholeheartedly that any personal beliefs and attitudes should be separated from science for very obvious reasons.

The OED defines atheism as:
Disbelief or lack of belief in the existence of God or gods.
With this definition in mind, I would suggest that I am an atheist.

If you count non-belief in something as a belief then far be it from me to dissuade you, but to me that makes no sense at all. For me, a lack of belief means an absence of belief and I refuse to be put into some sort of Procrustean bed of another's choosing.

There is not much more I can add except to say that my basis for being an atheist is that I see no evidence for the existence of God(s) whatever. I am of course quite prepared to change my views if that evidence is forthcoming.


I think I would probably suggest that blind faith is faith with no real understanding.

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Post #68

Post by kcplusdc@yahoo.com »

I do believe that God and science exist in harmony, The truth is into the truth.
As far as religion= which one
One thing I like about the bible is that it says to test the prophets, look for fruit, wisdom is everywhere, very scientific advice.
Be fair and of good measure, talking about weights and measures often in proverbs.
Truth. Balance.
Seems like evidence based ideas...

Science was an ugly horse for along time, many religions would be considered pre science.
They would be out.

Additionally how would you differentiate between science that just happened to be in there and ones that where reaching around for explanation and where attempts at early scientific thought.

Many religions real creepy kill switch stuff. More fear than science.

I like the idea, I imagine some entanglement has occured. Major religions tend to deal with an inward self aware state, truth and love, enlightenment..
It's a salad with religion.

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Re: Religion is science?

Post #69

Post by Goat »

Guy Threepwood wrote:
Bust Nak wrote:
Guy Threepwood wrote: We all have beliefs, setting them aside and being truly objective is difficult enough right?
Not for me it isn't.
To separate a belief though, you have to first recognize it as one. Many atheists explicitly insist that their position is merely a 'lack of belief' i.e. a 'default truth'- requiring no explanation itself- a.k.a superstition!
That sounds like a belief to me. The default position does not need explanation, you need reason to move beyond the default. Why would you believe that to be a superstition?

Exactly- you make my point clearly. Declaring a belief the 'default truth' without need of explanation, applies to not walking under a ladder.- blind faith.

I could frame my belief in exactly the same way if I wanted to:

As an 'a-naturalist', I make no positive assertions about the nature of the universe, I simply refuse to believe in naturalistic explanations (reverting to the obvious default meanwhile)

i.e. claiming a belief a 'default truth' does not change the belief, it only attempts to shift the burden of proof away from itself, avoid having to defend it, why would you want to do that?
However, when it comes to the 'natural world', we do have evidence beyond the basic belief. We have the evidence of our senses, we have predictions that can and have been tested that are consistent with a 'natural world', and we have a proper definition for it that our observations are consistent with what is found.
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Re: Religion is science?

Post #70

Post by 〷_Altruism_〷 »

[Replying to post 1 by Willum]

In my opinion, Christianity, or even religion as a whole is far from a science. It's a faith.

"Science" is just how we classify things that appear blatantly in front of us, not what a book told you to believe. It appears to me that science is looking into the sky and seeing clouds, naming those clouds, and then putting them into groups. On the surface, Christianity may appear a science, as it is a way that people understand things beyond their comprehension. Science does this as well, but in a different way.

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