Darwin / Dawkins Revisited,

[Khandro]

I put this brilliant 4 way discussion in 'Science' & got only 2 responses, one from 'smarty pants' & the other from an atheist, both dismissive.

If anyone is interested & has an open mind together with an attention span of more that 2 minutes you can see it by going here;

https://www.theanswerbank.co.uk/Science/Question1838029.html

[naomi24]

In fairness, khandro, a viewer requires an attention span of rather more than a two minutes to watch your video. It’s almost an hour and a half long.

Additionally, an open mind is an enquiring mind but the only question the creationist theory raises is ‘Where is your evidence for God?’, so it’s stymied from the off.

[Radagast]

When this lot tried to get Intelligent Design taught as an alternative to evolution, someone suggested that they should also teach an alternative to gravity called Intelligent Falling.

[Khandro]

Radagast; //When this lot tried to get Intelligent Design taught as an alternative to evolution, someone suggested that they should also teach an alternative to gravity called Intelligent Falling.//

Your "someone" must have been a cretin. Nobody, either in this discussion or elsewhere, as far as I know, has suggested that an intelligence underlying the universe negates evolutionary principles.

And gravity could in fact be defined as 'intelligent falling' in an intelligent universe. Watch the video & learn that though Isaac Newton discovered the law of gravity he didn't know what it was & neither does anyone today know what it is beyond its existence

The truth is, Newton could describe gravity, but he didn't know how it worked. “Gravity must be caused by an agent acting constantly according to certain laws,” he asserted.

[piggynose]

I think khandro most people on AB are quite dismissive of anything coming from YouTube, thanks(imho) to a lot of carp about the COVID.
But i for one will try to have a look today.

[Khandro]

piggynose, please do & comment.

[ClareTG0ld]

First of all, it's not a question of attention span, it's a question of choosing what to devote it to. And IDT debates just aren't worth the time, because they all end up saying much the same thing, and their conclusions are all fairly easily refuted. Since this has been done already, there's not really a need to go through the same exercise all over again.

// “Gravity must be caused by an agent acting constantly according to certain laws,” [Newton] asserted. //

Newton believed in a God of some kind, so it it's clearly possible, or even likely, that the "agent" he meant here was some god-like creature. But I remember some snarky TV presenter explaining that the God Newton believed in was some sort of mathematical genius, with a respect and appreciation for physical laws -- "a God not unlike Newton himself", as the presenter went on to say. But it's a selective quote at best. You can find scientists who profess a belief in a God; you can find scientists whose views are nuanced, but might best be described as agnostic; you can find scientists who are atheists. See eg https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2009/11/05/scientists-and-belief/ , where you can see that the rate of religious belief among scientists is lower than the general population at the time, although still significant. You'd have to ask those religious scientists what their views are precisely, but I feel safe in saying that most of them would ague that their scientific and religious wok are in a sense "decoupled" -- perhaps, for example, they might be motivated to understand God through His works, but at the end of the day their scientific work is self-contained.

All that was a rather longer preamble than I wanted, because my other point is that it can be dangerous to interpret too literally scientific language, when its intended use might well be figurative. Taking Newton's "agent" for example, it's important to at the very least include the second part of the quote:

"...but whether this Agent be material or immaterial, I
have left to the consideration of my readers..."

This leaves open the possibility that the "agent" is some unknown physical phenomenon, eg a hitherto-undiscovered particle like a graviton; and even the "immaterial" doesn't necessarily mean a supernatural overseer "God".

But another, non-religious, example I had of this imprecision in language catching people out would be the so-called "observer effect" in Quantum Mechanics, the phenomenon whereby the state of a quantum system is "decided" only after the system is observed, eg is Schrodinger's cat alive or dead? The problem is that it's commonly-held that an "observer" is specifically a conscious entity, and sometimes even specifically a *human* conscious entity, leading to nonsense like this:

// The crucial feature of atomic physics is that the human observer is not only necessary to observe the properties of an object, but is necessary even to define these properties. // [Fritjof Capra, The Tao of Physics)

Apparently, Capra spoke to Heisenberg several times in preparing the book, and claimed that Heisenberg was basically in agreement with him. If so, he ought perhaps to have been aware of Heisenberg's own quote:

//... the introduction of the observer must not be misunderstood to imply that some kind of subjective features are to be brought into the description of nature...it does not matter whether the observer is an apparatus or a human being ... //

All of this is to say that it's a mistake to interpret the words of scientists without a proper appreciation of the mathematical and physical concepts they're talking about. It's incidentally also a mistake to set too much stock in appeals to authorities. Newton said a lot of things; not all of them were worth listening to.

[ClareTG0ld]

Perhaps it would be better put as "Newton said a lot of things, but the mere fact that it was he who said them doesn't make them any less vulnerable to criticism." Great minds are often wrong -- more often than they're right, most likely! Although we don't as often get to see their failures, making them sometimes appear infallible.

Regardless of the precise way you put it, though, appeals to authority without an inherent understanding of the material are particularly dangerous as an argument.

[Peter Pedant]

clara-bell
do not feed the troll.

the God Newton believed in was some sort of mathematical genius, with a respect and appreciation for physical laws -- "a God not unlike Newton himself",

well this is open to debate and answer
really?
yeah he gave up physics ( or natural philosophy as he called it) and devoted his later life to study of the OT Bible and what the numbers signified. 7 was a favourite

Newton was a numerologist - does that mean he liked numbers?
No it means that he conceived ( without evidence, but he was gonna get it!) that the dimensions mentioned in the Bible ( Temple: seven cubits etc) had theological significance.

this explains why no one is interested in his theological thought.
But it is there ! Like Leibnitz, every bit of paper he wrote on ( 1680) was collected.

the point in your post ( which I really regard as wasted breath dear lady) is that terms then, may not have the meaning they have now

"agent" springs to mind....

I dont think for example the comment of the little Fluff - "Newton modelled god on himself. "- but I have no intention of reading newton's notes ( and books) on it to find out

[Peter Pedant]

oh and physics ( physic ) was medicine ( throw physic to the dogs - Mrs Macb)
and what we call physics now was Natural Philosophy.

Actually we DO know what Newton was thinking about gravity
Someone was sent up from London to ask him

Altho we KNOW newton and Liebnitz thought of calculus around May 1676 ( we have the docs see above) Newton wanted to show precedence and pretended hem hem that he used it for gravity 1666

He didnt - the calcs didnt work as he had the wrong figure for the mass of the earth

whether or not the apple went plonk
he thought about a falling object and then carried out a 'gedanken experiment' - thx to Einstein - what about an object from a house. What about an object falling from the tallest tree.

so why not the moon - well it was, ( subject to the agent) but the force was keeping it in a circular motion.

I strongly object to Newton being mentioned in the same thread as that crud-head Behe

[Peter Pedant]

Newton was aware that it would need an inverse square law
but kept it to himself.
Hooke ( ut tensio sic vis, that one) suggested an inverse square law to newton and he rather poo-pooed it.

so thereafter Hooke went around saying " and of course I gave the idea to Mr Newton"

[Radagast]

Michael Behe claimed originally that irreducibly complex systems couldn't evolve. This was an attempt to show "that an intelligence underlying the universe negates evolutionary principles."

[Khandro]

Radagast: //Michael Behe claimed originally that irreducibly complex systems couldn't evolve. This was an attempt to show "that an intelligence underlying the universe negates evolutionary principles."//

Yes we know that, but he didn't reject evolution in its entirety. Look up his thesis on the complexity of blood-clotting, he's saying that it couldn't have happened incrementally in the Darwinian sense.

[Zacs-Master]

'one from 'smarty pants' & the other from an atheist, both dismissive'

'Your "someone" must have been a cretin'

Great way to engender a sensible debate, Khandro.

Maybe your own confrontational style is why no one joined in your other post.

I look forward to your answers to ClareT's points.

[Radagast]

I'm pretty sure the blood clotting issue was dealt with at Dover vs Kitzmiller ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kitzmiller_v._Dover_Area_School_District ) where Behe admitted on the witness stand that by his definition of science, astrology would qualify.

[ClareTG0ld]

I'm generally not comfortable with matters scientific being discussed in a legal setting. Still, it is amusing that, when pressed, pseudoscientists often end up conceding, under oath, that their theories are crackpottery, or are unsupported, or don't conform to any useful definition of science, etc.; or, even, that their own work doesn't support the interpretations often put on it.

The overarching problem with IDT is that it amounts, in effect, to "giving up" on finding any material explanation. I don't deny that many things in this world appear to defy "natural" origins. But, to the extent that's true, this is because of two things:

1. We don't yet understand these things nearly well enough to make a judgement on how impossible they are; history, if it has shown us nothing else, has shown that most things deemed mystical *do* have such an explanation after all;

2. But, in the long run, there will *always* be unanswered questions about life, the universe, how we got here, etc etc. This is the beauty of science: it will never finish. But the other beauty is that the questions that will go unanswered, most likely, haven't even been asked yet, and things that we regard as a mystery today might be seen as trivialities in future.

[piggynose]

Nothing personal khandro but i don't think I'll join this little debate, as i feel I'm out of my depth!

[Khandro]

Radagast, The court case you quote overthrows the teaching of ID as an ALTERNATIVE to evolution. It isn't, & neither have I nor Behe ever said it was.

[Radagast]

Ok.

https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-d&q=intelligent+design&;si=AMnBZoGw0UgZfJkF6N3OluWJRaM8O7U3NrkH0nV_5j9Ll0KdyegS2DL1Afj0PdP_ORDA5-bIXHjJsuO4RP0EmOPLaJzyrAf5B5SA5wf7yaTrrK594GIJYU_sPztYoC83e8iTOFPLx0U5&expnd=1&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwi-vODogY7_AhWkTEEAHWI-C9MQ2v4IegQIDxAO&biw=1366&bih=624

[mibn2cweus]

//The overarching problem with IDT is that it amounts, in effect, to "giving up" on finding any material explanation.//

All of the 'explanations' for 'gods' I've been given, invariably amount to, "I don't know how, therefore, my God exists."