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Narrator
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24 Jan 2015, 7:46 pm

Oldavid wrote:
You bods can get as sanctimonious as you like; it will not make me forget or ignore all the natural science and philosophy I've been practically obsessed with for many years... ever since I was logically forced, kicking and screaming, into the exact opposite journey Narrator describes of himself.

Yes, it was an emotional journey for me too... the kicking and screaming - metaphorically of course. And yet, though we have been on the same journey and arriving at opposite ends of the debate, which of us has been proven to consistently make subjective assumptions?

In my journey, David, the biggest lesson I learned was not about the veracity of the information. It was that I am vulnerable to my own subjectivity. I was not open to being wrong. So in that sense also, you and I have arrived at opposite ends.


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25 Jan 2015, 6:23 pm

David I see you appear to be ignoring my request. Can I assume that providing specific evidence which back up your claims is too hard a task for you?


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26 Jan 2015, 9:00 pm

DentArthurDent wrote:
David I see you appear to be ignoring my request. Can I assume that providing specific evidence which back up your claims is too hard a task for you?
Once again... what kind of "evidence" would you accept?



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26 Jan 2015, 9:20 pm

Narrator wrote:
Yes, it was an emotional journey for me too... the kicking and screaming - metaphorically of course. And yet, though we have been on the same journey and arriving at opposite ends of the debate, which of us has been proven to consistently make subjective assumptions?

In my journey, David, the biggest lesson I learned was not about the veracity of the information. It was that I am vulnerable to my own subjectivity. I was not open to being wrong. So in that sense also, you and I have arrived at opposite ends.
"Kicking and screaming" is an hyperbole. More realistically, for someone with my kind of personality disorders, I spent a couple of years just being more unsociable than usual. If I wasn't reading I was thinking... connecting the dots.

I had been thoroughly saturated in the materialistic sales-pitch all through High School and University doing Physics, chemistry and biology. I knew all the blurb and was an enthusiastic apostle of the nonsense. Then I began to find that the "science" was impossible nonscience concocted to conform to an ideological prejudice.

More below.



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26 Jan 2015, 9:34 pm

Oldavid wrote:
More realistically, for someone with my kind of personality disorders, I spent a couple of years just being more unsociable than usual. If I wasn't reading I was thinking... connecting the dots.

Once again.. a similarity of journey.. though I've been on that "more unsociable" "connecting the dots" train now for a dozen years or more. My poor wife...


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26 Jan 2015, 10:50 pm

Narrator wrote:
Oldavid wrote:
More realistically, for someone with my kind of personality disorders, I spent a couple of years just being more unsociable than usual. If I wasn't reading I was thinking... connecting the dots.

Once again.. a similarity of journey.. though I've been on that "more unsociable" "connecting the dots" train now for a dozen years or more. My poor wife...
I'm talking 40 years or more.



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26 Jan 2015, 11:05 pm

Janissy wrote:
The sun provides energy. I don't know why you call that "mere" since it does provide the energy that powers all life on earth. And all life on Earth proceeds entropically consuming energy from the Sun and dissipating it in accordance with thermodynamic laws.

http://physics.gmu.edu/~roerter/EvolutionEntropy.htm

Quote:
The second law of thermodynamics (the law of increase of entropy) is sometimes used as an argument against evolution. Evolution, the argument goes, is a decrease of entropy, because it involves things getting more organized over time, while the second law says that things get more disordered over time. So evolution violates the second law.

There are many things wrong with this argument, and it has been discussed ad infinitum. A summary of the arguments on both sides can be found on the links at www.talkorigins.org/faqs/thermo.html. These discussions never seem to involve any numerical calculations. This is unfortunate, since a very simple calculation shows that it is physically impossible for evolution to violate the second law of thermodynamics.
This is just plain false. It is a lie intended to deceive those that want to be deceived.
Quote:
It is important to note that the earth is not an isolated system: it receives energy from the sun, and radiates energy back into space. The second law doesn't claim that the entropy of any part of a system increases: if it did, ice would never form and vapor would never condense, since both of those processes involve a decrease of entropy. Rather, the second law says that the total entropy of the whole system must increase. Any decrease of entropy (like the water freezing into ice cubes in your freezer) must be compensated by an increase in entropy elsewhere (the heat released into your kitchen by the refrigerator).
Entropy says that you can't put an iceblock into your kettle to release heat (there's plenty of heat in an ice block... it's a long way from 0degC to -273degC) and boil the kettle to make a cup of tea.


Odd wrote:
Let me do it again: take a "closed system": (say a test tube) containing all the chemicals that make up a typical rabbit and supply energy from outside that system (shaking, electrical sparks, heat, light, and any other kind of EMR you like) and you claim that it will spontaneously turn itself into a typical live rabbit if you wait long enough.
All right, scratch the rabbit. You'll get exactly the same result with the simplest live organism (say a minimum virus) even a protein or amino acid will spontaneously decompose outside a live thing.

Quote:
Can you wait 4 billion years? And keep adding energy? And make it a very big test tube so that pre-mammalian forms of life can evolve prior? What you are describing is a take on the Miller Urey experiment, discussed to death in the other thread. And that experiment did indeed produce amino acids.
And the MUX had rather ingenious traps in place to immediately isolate any amino acids etc. so that they wouldn't decompose in the very artfully constructed conditions that produced them.[/quote]

Odd wrote:
However, we ordinary people who are "unenlightened" with nonscience ideological esoterica would confidently predict, with our intuitive grasp of entropy, that if you take a perfectly live, healthy typical rabbit and put it into your "closed system" and give it the treatment you will very smartly get a very dead rabbit that will eventually degrade into the simplest, lowest energy and order, chemical components.

Obviously not "empirical evidence" because I didn't do the experiment under your nose... maybe you should do it yourself.


Quote:
If you seal a rabbit in a flask (after first killing all bacteria on and in it) it will die and dissolve. In a closed system. With no energy added. But this is not analogous to earth. Earth isn't a closed system.
I didn't say a closed system without any energy added. I said that you could add whatever energy you like to the otherwise closed system.
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Can you wait 4 billion years? And keep adding energy? And make it a very big test tube so that pre-mammalian forms of life can evolve prior?
You don't even realise what you're saying. You are essentially saying that something that is demonstrably impossible becomes, not just possible, but a certain outcome if you just wait an impossibly long time. And you call that science??? It has absolutely nothing to do with observation, measurement, deduction or induction, experiment etc. etc.

It reminds me of Julian Huxley when he was selling this fanciful stuff about 100 years ago. He told his audience the infinitesimally small chance/probability/possibility of even one simple protein forming spontaneously in nature and said: “It's impossible! Yet it has happened because here we are!! !” “Science”??! ! Pure nonsense to sell an impossible superstition!

And later the same Huxley, in the preface he wrote to someone else's nonscience book, explained that we must believe this materialistic view because it affords a moral autonomy particularly in matters of sexual morality or ethics. Something that Narrator has tacitly admitted elsewhere in our arguments. Huxley went on to say that Materialism must be “true” because the alternative is “unthinkable”. Woohoo!! ! Nonscience at it's inimitable best!

I was so astonished at Huxley's candour that I transcribed the entire preface by longhand into a notebook about 40 years ago. Needless to say I can't quote directly from it because I wouldn't know where to find it now.

Anyhow, I might find this “discussion” an interesting challenge to see how long I can retain some sanity in a wonderland of unreason, but I've done it several times before so there's no curiosity about what the next challenge or adventure might be... I've seen them all.

I can only hope that if there have been some readers of this exchange with a functional and reasonably analytical mind they might have food for thought and enough links to start their own investigation.

I have better things to take up my time.



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27 Jan 2015, 12:14 am

Oldavid wrote:
Narrator wrote:
Oldavid wrote:
More realistically, for someone with my kind of personality disorders, I spent a couple of years just being more unsociable than usual. If I wasn't reading I was thinking... connecting the dots.

Once again.. a similarity of journey.. though I've been on that "more unsociable" "connecting the dots" train now for a dozen years or more. My poor wife...
I'm talking 40 years or more.

About the same for me, but the seclusion escalated with the Internet, giving me wonderful access to more than books alone. And it escalated again once I began debating issues online in the late 90's.

Younger folks won't know how different things were before the Internet.


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27 Jan 2015, 12:22 am

It looks like we've got a misunderstanding of the laws of thermodynamics and an argument from incredulity here (regarding the proteins, etc.).


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27 Jan 2015, 12:42 am

Oldavid wrote:
And later the same Huxley, in the preface he wrote to someone else's nonscience book, explained that we must believe this materialistic view because it affords a moral autonomy particularly in matters of sexual morality or ethics. Something that Narrator has tacitly admitted elsewhere in our arguments. Huxley went on to say that Materialism must be “true” because the alternative is “unthinkable”. Woohoo!! ! Nonscience at it's inimitable best!

Admitted? You make it sound like a guilty pleasure. :lol:

Horse or cart, chicken or egg, what I've "tacitly" and overtly said is that religious morals are a human imposition, a straight jacket of someone else's rules. I also said that when I gave away religion, my beliefs and actions began to have greater moral integrity.

Turning away from religion does not bankrupt anyone's morals or ethics.
Or do you think it does, David?


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27 Jan 2015, 12:48 am

Yes science has a large degree of a human element in it. People aren't perfect therefore science isn't perfect. Of course people will take this and go off on a tangent about how faulty science is. For the most part pure science is a good thing, it's the best way we can understand the physical world. Hopefully one day we can develop objective AI's that can conduct progress for us so it loses its subjective human element.



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27 Jan 2015, 5:09 pm

Oldavid wrote:
And the MUX had rather ingenious traps in place to immediately isolate any amino acids etc. so that they wouldn't decompose in the very artfully constructed conditions that produced them.


As usual you oversimplify and ignore recent findings
Miller Urey

National centre for science eduaction

As to your question regarding "what evidence will I accept" Simply really. Produce peer reviewed calculations which show the energy throughput from the Sun, the earths core, and the earths rotation are not enough to balance the effect of entropy and therefore prove that evolution could not have occurred.


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27 Jan 2015, 8:36 pm

Janissy wrote:
Can you wait 4 billion years? And keep adding energy? And make it a very big test tube so that pre-mammalian forms of life can evolve prior?


David wrote:
You don't even realise what you're saying. You are essentially saying that something that is demonstrably impossible becomes, not just possible, but a certain outcome if you just wait an impossibly long time. And you call that science??? It has absolutely nothing to do with observation, measurement, deduction or induction, experiment


You took me literally. I should have seen that coming. :?

I didn't mean that any human would extend the Miller-Urey experiment to 4 billion years. I was trying to make an analogy to the actual earth but that didn't come across. :oops:

But in a sense....yes. Things that are impossible over years or even centuries or millenia do become possible with much bigger time scales. There is a theme in your dismissals of science (which you call "nom-science" but it isn't). This theme is not appreciating very large scales. Something that is impossible in the time scales of a human life (the time scale of an experiment, including extended experiments ) becomes possible when your time scale is billions of years. Likewise you are not appreciating just how much energy the sun beams to earth.



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28 Jan 2015, 4:19 am

Narrator wrote:
Horse or cart, chicken or egg, what I've "tacitly" and overtly said is that religious morals are a human imposition, a straight jacket of someone else's rules.
Assuming that morals "evolve" out of nothing like everything else, of course.
Quote:
I also said that when I gave away religion, my beliefs and actions began to have greater moral integrity.
Only according to the "judgement" of your runaway ego.

Turning away from religion does not bankrupt anyone's morals or ethics.
Or do you think it does, David?[/quote] It necessarily reduces morals to a matter of temporary convenience.



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28 Jan 2015, 4:35 am

DentArthurDent wrote:
As to your question regarding "what evidence will I accept" Simply really. Produce peer reviewed calculations which show the energy throughput from the Sun, the earths core, and the earths rotation are not enough to balance the effect of entropy and therefore prove that evolution could not have occurred.
I have been at pains to point out that the mere addition of energy does not produce order any more than a bomb (a great release of energy) will produce order in the home. Order always implies the intellect to conceive it, the will to want it, and the power to implement it.

"Peer reviewed" "calculations" in this context are only collaborated nonsense designed to fool the most gullible egotists.



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28 Jan 2015, 4:38 am

Janissy wrote:
I didn't mean that any human would extend the Miller-Urey experiment to 4 billion years. I was trying to make an analogy to the actual earth but that didn't come across. :oops:

But in a sense....yes. Things that are impossible over years or even centuries or millenia do become possible with much bigger time scales. There is a theme in your dismissals of science (which you call "nom-science" but it isn't). This theme is not appreciating very large scales. Something that is impossible in the time scales of a human life (the time scale of an experiment, including extended experiments ) becomes possible when your time scale is billions of years. Likewise you are not appreciating just how much energy the sun beams to earth.
Prove it.