Hoover Institute video on Mathematical Challenges to Darwin's Theory

[gnostic]

For YEC there needs to be some hard science to show a young earth etc, but for ID it seems to be a matter of looking at what science has discovered and showing that alternative explanations fit the facts better. I don't think that the evidence for God needs to fit any scientific box to be good evidence however unless empiricism is the only way to show something to exist.

Regardless whether you believe in God being the Creator for YEC or for OEC, there are zero evidence for God.

God - as well as all other deities from other religions - only exist in the beliefs of people, and that acceptance of their respective beliefs, require “faith”, not physical evidence.

When scientists proposed models (such as those given in hypotheses or theories) for any natural phenomena or physical phenomena, these models must be “falsifiable”.

What most creationists don’t seem to understand, they don’t understand what Falsifiability mean, nor why models require to be falsifiable.

Falsifiability mean that any model and any concept must be potentially ”testable”, and eventually “tested”. And the only ways to objectively test hypothesis or theory are with observations of natural or physical evidence, through evidence and / or experiments.

The tests don’t just verify a model, but MORE IMPORTANTLY REFUTE weak or incorrect model.

God or Creator cannot be tested; you cannot observe or detect, or measure any deity, including the God of the Bible.

God is not only “not physical”, he is not natural (hence supernatural). Sciences only seek evidence that are either physical or natural.

To date, there have been no evidence of any supernatural entities (eg spirits, deities, angels, demons, jinns, fairies, etc) of any supernatural events (eg miracles, divine creation, being judged for afterlife, etc).

Even, when you were to factor out God, you can still show that Genesis and the Bible to be either wrong or inaccurate.

For instance, creationists of the YEC variety, believe that the Earth was created about 6000 years ago.

There are many evidence that refute the Young Earth Creationism for examples:

• Fossilization are extremely slow process, and you won’t find any fully fossilize animal or human remains less than 10,000 years. It often taken much longer for fossilization to occur. Fossils of earlier mammals, marine animals and dinosaur, all predated YEC’s 6000 years. Even earlier fossils of Homo sapiens about 200,000 years.
• There are numbers of cities that exist before 6000 years, eg Jericho (or Tell es Sultan), Damascus, Eridu, including a couple of cities in Mesopotamia that are mentioned in Genesis 10, like the earliest settlement in Uruk (Erech) about 7000 years ago, and Nineveh about 8000 years ago.
• Excluding the moon, the largest object that can be observed in the night sky was Andromeda Galaxy, first identified and described by Abd al-Rahman al-Sufi, a Persian astronomer in 964 CE. Al-Sufi should not be able to see Andromeda, as it is over 2 million light years from Earth. Andromeda should not exist if we are to believe the universe is only 6000 years old.

 

[metis]

Are you talking about the first skull? That of our ancient fishy ancestor or the evolution of ape skulls? I had the feeling that he meant the ancient fishy ones.

I know more about the evolution of ape skulls since that was in my training, but I would think that the same probably is true with fish. How the first skull emerged I simply do not know.

 

[Subduction Zone]

I know more about the evolution of ape skulls since that was in my training, but I would think that the same probably is true with fish. How the first skull emerged I simply do not know.

It was his silly 3 or 4% skull.claim that made me think he meant the original skull. But who knows? Ray Comfort has used arguments where he thought that both sexes of the original dog had to evolve eyesight on their own.

 

[Subduction Zone]

Regardless whether you believe in God being the Creator for YEC or for OEC, there are zero evidence for God.

God - as well as all other deities from other religions - only exist in the beliefs of people, and that acceptance of their respective beliefs, require “faith”, not physical evidence.

When scientists proposed models (such as those given in hypotheses or theories) for any natural phenomena or physical phenomena, these models must be “falsifiable”.

What most creationists don’t seem to understand, they don’t understand what Falsifiability mean, nor why models require to be falsifiable.

Falsifiability mean that any model and any concept must be potentially ”testable”, and eventually “tested”. And the only ways to objectively test hypothesis or theory are with observations of natural or physical evidence, through evidence and / or experiments.

The tests don’t just verify a model, but MORE IMPORTANTLY REFUTE weak or incorrect model.

God or Creator cannot be tested; you cannot observe or detect, or measure any deity, including the God of the Bible.

God is not only “not physical”, he is not natural (hence supernatural). Sciences only seek evidence that are either physical or natural.

To date, there have been no evidence of any supernatural entities (eg spirits, deities, angels, demons, jinns, fairies, etc) of any supernatural events (eg miracles, divine creation, being judged for afterlife, etc).

Even, when you were to factor out God, you can still show that Genesis and the Bible to be either wrong or inaccurate.

For instance, creationists of the YEC variety, believe that the Earth was created about 6000 years ago.

There are many evidence that refute the Young Earth Creationism for examples:

• Fossilization are extremely slow process, and you won’t find any fully fossilize animal or human remains less than 10,000 years. It often taken much longer for fossilization to occur. Fossils of earlier mammals, marine animals and dinosaur, all predated YEC’s 6000 years. Even earlier fossils of Homo sapiens about 200,000 years.
• There are numbers of cities that exist before 6000 years, eg Jericho (or Tell es Sultan), Damascus, Eridu, including a couple of cities in Mesopotamia that are mentioned in Genesis 10, like the earliest settlement in Uruk (Erech) about 7000 years ago, and Nineveh about 8000 years ago.
• Excluding the moon, the largest object that can be observed in the night sky was Andromeda Galaxy, first identified and described by Abd al-Rahman al-Sufi, a Persian astronomer in 964 CE. Al-Sufi should not be able to see Andromeda, as it is over 2 million light years from Earth. Andromeda should not exist if we are to believe the universe is only 6000 years old.

YEC beliefs were originally refuted by early Christian geologists. It can be shown that for very fine, well sorted strata that there is a maximum rate of deposition. Flood deposits are poorly sorted. Time is a large factor in sorting. To get shale it takes a offshore, deeper environment. One that is not subject to local storms or fluctuating currents. It is what is left over after the larger sediments have settled out. Limestone does not build up quickly either. Coral reefs will grow at millimeters a year at best. Even coarser sandstone takes time to deposit if it is well sorted. And then there are the rare layers where the annual deposits can be seen by eye and counted. YECs should check out the Green River Formation with its six million years of continual annual deposits. Or if one believes the Flood myth and that sedimentary rocks came from it there is the Castile Formation in Texas. It has only 260,000 layers, but they are evaporites series. That would mean that the Flood dried up 260,000 times.

Permian Castile Varved Evaporite Sequence, West Texas and New Mexico | GSA Bulletin | GeoScienceWorld

 

[F1fan]

Looking at various evolution sites you find common quotes like ....

The basic algorithm for evolution is :
Struggles for existence plus randomly mutated genes = natural selection (over thousands or millions of years).

Random mutation is described as....
Step 1, mutation, is random. Mutations don’t arise in order to fill a current “need” of the organism. They are blind and they lack foresight, so they also can’t anticipate future needs. In this sense, they can reasonably be described as random. They can also be thought of as “random” in the sense that they are not automatically helpful; a new mutation may turn out to be beneficial or harmful or neutral.

That's right. All we lay people should do in these debates is cite what experts in the various sciences report. If our opinions differ from what experts report (like for religious reasons) we are likely wrong about science.

You are describing the complexity of a human skull today. A man and woman make a baby with a skull. How does that explain single - multi cell life evolving 19% of a skull maybe 4/5/6/700 million years ago? The devil is always in the detail.

Because you are not being clear about what you mean by 19% of a skull. Do you mean 19% thickness so that it is very thin and not effective to protect a brain? Or do you mean like a broken light bulb where the top 81% is missing? In that case a brain would have no protection at all, and an animal would likely not live very long. I don't know where you conjure this line of questioning. Legitimate questions still have to be based on facts and knowledge to be answerable, you can't invent irrational questions and expect an answer.

So I'm curious why you didn't do a Google search and find an explanation of how hard skulls evolved. I did, and the information is available for free. It's right there. Experts report their findings, and this question of yours is answered. Yet you are dragging it out in debate like it is a mystery. Hard skulls began as cartilage covering nervous systems. If you notice animal spinal cords are also encased in bones that are in interlocking pieces from skulls. Bone is noticably harder than cartilage, and offers better protection from incidents.

My daughter has been a midwife for fifteen years, she delivered our great grand daughter a few days ago. We have many conversations about birth.

She likely understands how poorly designed the human reproductive system is for the safety of childbirth.

 

[Eric Hyom]

No, you're confusing intelligence used to create an
experiment with the functioning of the experiment
itself, which employs no intelligent intervention.
I recommend reading up on evolutionary algorithms.
You'll see that the process is entirely stochastic.

There are computer programmes to create random shapes. If you asked the computer to create something random, would it come up with anything useful that had antenna qualities? You are not allowed to give it any clues.

How can you programme a computer to comply with random mutation?
Step 1, mutation, is random. Mutations don’t arise in order to fill a current “need” of the organism. They are blind and they lack foresight, so they also can’t anticipate future needs. In this sense, they can reasonably be described as random. They can also be thought of as “random” in the sense that they are not automatically helpful; a new mutation may turn out to be beneficial or harmful or neutral.

Single cell life would not know what an ancient fishy skull looked like, similar problem.

With design, the devil is always in the detail.

 

[F1fan]

Single - multi cell life existed happily for about the first three billion years, and life was happy without eyes, skulls, ribs, etc.

Three billion years? Were they really happy? Let's hear from their therapist.

What you can test, is say a pack of dogs with various traits. If you are selective with breeding, you can have a good idea of the outcome.

If you want a pug and not a wolf, then you breed to get a pug so you aren't stuck with a wolf. Of course wolves are still around because organisms branch off as they evolve in select environments, and dog breeds are deliberatelu separted and selcted for various desired traits.

This is pretty basic and understandable. Darwin's finches are understandable What you cant test, is how the skull, ribs, muscles, eyes etc, evolved in incremental steps from single cell life.

But science does explain how life evolved from single cell, to multi-cell, to more and more complex organisms over time.

We are here today, we can witness the variety of life, it had to happen somehow. If you want to say it happened by natural causes, then science needs to be more convincing.

Creationists are never convinced because they have decided their religioius view is correct, and not due to evidence and reasoning.

The question I have if we humans are designed deliberately is why are so many children born with defects, and even cancers? Why are these part of the design of some children if deliberate? The random lottery of life, the rolling of dice in genes expression in animal reproduction makes more sense. When theists drag their God into discussions ablout evolution and design then they have to explain these moral problems, why did the God do this to some children?

 

[Revoltingest]

There are computer programmes to create random shapes. If you asked the computer to create something random, would it come up with anything useful that had antenna qualities? You are not allowed to give it any clues.

I recommend reading the link I provided earlier.
The process is not random. But random changes
are generated in each generation, which are then
evaluated & selected by the fitness function.
The result is non-random.
Are you familiar with the idea of a stochastic process,
eg, the emergent property of the ideal gas law from
random molecule motion?

 

[SkepticThinker]

Death is the greatest imperfection and we will all die of something. If there is no god, then that becomes the end of the story for us. If there is a God, then God can raise us to a greater good life after death.

Suffering is hard to deal with, and when we see people suffer, we tend to care more about them. I watched my mum suffer with multiple sclerosis for about thirty years. She gradually lost the use of both legs, then both hands and spent the last fifteen years of her life only able to move her head from side to side. she had a gentle faith in God, and somehow found the strength to live with her disability with kindness and a smile. She is the strongest and kindest person I will ever know, she taught me how to live with suffering by her life. She will now be at peace with God.

I've watched many loved ones suffer. I could not, for the life of me, conclude that there is some loving God behind it. I can't imagine any loving parent treating their children so horribly.
I would never do that to anyone I love.

The world we find ourselves in is the exact world I would expect to see if there were no loving creator behind it.

 

[Eric Hyom]

I recommend reading the link I provided earlier.
The process is not random. But random changes
are generated in each generation, which are then
evaluated & selected by the fitness function.
The result is non-random.

The devil is always in the detail.
We know how to breed pugs or wolves, so we understand how selection works. But you do need a pack of pugs and wolves to start from. What did single cell life have to work with?

It was very clever how computer programmers used this idea to evolve abstract shapes. I read through your link, and it could not work if you removed intelligent planning and design. When you linked a number of complex shapes together as found in a car engine, the algorithms fail. A skeletal system is more complex than a car engine. We have been making engines for a long time. How would you set evolutionary algorithms to make a robotic version of ourselves? To design a skull, vertebrae rib cage, muscles, ligaments and tendons. A further problem would be passing the information onto a next generation.

Taken from your link,

• Genetic algorithms do not scale well with complexity. That is, where the number of elements which are exposed to mutation is large there is often an exponential increase in search space size. This makes it extremely difficult to use the technique on problems such as designing an engine, a house or a plane[citation needed]. In order to make such problems tractable to evolutionary search, they must be broken down into the simplest representation possible. Hence we typically see evolutionary algorithms encoding designs for fan blades instead of engines, building shapes instead of detailed construction plans, and airfoils instead of whole aircraft designs. The second problem of complexity is the issue of how to protect parts that have evolved to represent good solutions from further destructive mutation, particularly when their fitness assessment requires them to combine well with other parts.

 

[Revoltingest]

The devil is always in the detail.
We know how to breed pugs or wolves, so we understand how selection works. But you do need a pack of pugs and wolves to start from. What did single cell life have to work with?

Your question should lead you to study the
subject. For me to answer it would be far
beyond the scope of a thread on the internet.

It was very clever how computer programmers used this idea to evolve abstract shapes.

"Abstract" is the wrong word. The shapes would
appear so to someone unfamiliar with sophisticated
function, but the reality is different.

I read through your link, and it could not work if you removed intelligent planning and design.

That's an erroneous opinion, defeated by
the fact that genetic algorithms work in
the real world.

When you linked a number of complex shapes together as found in a car engine, the algorithms fail. A skeletal system is more complex than a car engine. We have been making engines for a long time. How would you set evolutionary algorithms to make a robotic version of ourselves? To design a skull, vertebrae rib cage, muscles, ligaments and tendons. A further problem would be passing the information onto a next generation.

Taken from your link,

• Genetic algorithms do not scale well with complexity. That is, where the number of elements which are exposed to mutation is large there is often an exponential increase in search space size. This makes it extremely difficult to use the technique on problems such as designing an engine, a house or a plane[citation needed]. In order to make such problems tractable to evolutionary search, they must be broken down into the simplest representation possible. Hence we typically see evolutionary algorithms encoding designs for fan blades instead of engines, building shapes instead of detailed construction plans, and airfoils instead of whole aircraft designs. The second problem of complexity is the issue of how to protect parts that have evolved to represent good solutions from further destructive mutation, particularly when their fitness assessment requires them to combine well with other parts.

Scaling issues decrease with increased
computing power & more generations.

 

[Jose Fly]

Math is a conceptual paradigm that we impose on reality to try and understand it's inter-relationships. It can't tell us anything about pre-existence that isn't imaginary because pre-existence is itself purely imaginary. You think because it's "math" it's somehow more scientific, and therefor you believe in it. Because you believe in science. (I.e., you believe that your belief in science is more "right" than anything anyone else might believe in.) But the credibility that you give to science and against philosophy, or art, or religion is just your own bias. As all of these methods are basically just our using imagination, logic, and experience to speculate about something we cannot even comprehend.

The fact that you think spending hours studying the math would somehow lend validity to those speculations serves only to exemplify this bias. It's like asking "did you spend many hours studying the myths about pre-existence?" As if doing that will somehow make one's speculations more likely to be "right". But it won't. This is a mystery that we cannot unlock from 'this end'. From within the experience of existing. All we can do is imagine the possibilities and speculate on what they would mean if they are true. You can do that using math all you like. Just as anyone else can do it using mythology, or philosophy, or religion, or even art. These are all methods that we humans commonly use to try and understand our experience of existence. But they are all going to be equally limited when we try to understand this impossible idea of pre-existence, or supra-existence.

I can't explain this mystery any more than your cosmologists and their math can. Because none of us can. My point is that the mystery exists. And it is based on the very real implication that there is or was something more and other than what we currently experience as and call existence. And this opens the door for all kinds of imagined possibilities; from God to quantum singularities.

... And all the blind biases that go with them.

LOL....all that because I merely asked how much you've looked into big bang models and the mathematical basis for a singularity?

I'll take your reply as a tacit admission that you haven't spent much time looking into either, which means your depictions of them aren't really worth much, no different than someone saying all sorts of things about the Bible even though they've never read it.

You could have just said "I've not really studied either very much" and we could have proceeded from there. But obviously my simple question touched a nerve, so......here we are.

 

[Subduction Zone]

There are computer programmes to create random shapes. If you asked the computer to create something random, would it come up with anything useful that had antenna qualities? You are not allowed to give it any clues.

How can you programme a computer to comply with random mutation?
Step 1, mutation, is random. Mutations don’t arise in order to fill a current “need” of the organism. They are blind and they lack foresight, so they also can’t anticipate future needs. In this sense, they can reasonably be described as random. They can also be thought of as “random” in the sense that they are not automatically helpful; a new mutation may turn out to be beneficial or harmful or neutral.

Single cell life would not know what an ancient fishy skull looked like, similar problem.

With design, the devil is always in the detail.

Of course it is allowed to give it clues. That is what natural selection does in nature. When the computer generates two different shapes the one that works better can be selected. That is what natural selection does in nature.

Let's say that one is designing a wing using this method. One could start with a flat board. Allow its tilt and its shape to be randomly changed in small ways. Make two wings. Then mount the changing wings in a wind tunnel and see which ones work better. Keep that one and make two more based upon it with small random changes. Repeat.

It won't take long and you will have a very efficient wing for the wind speed that the wind tunnel made.

The only "intelligence" was in the design of the method. Not of the wing. That designs itself.

 

[F1fan]

The devil is always in the detail.
We know how to breed pugs or wolves, so we understand how selection works. But you do need a pack of pugs and wolves to start from.

False. There were no pugs UNTIL humans selected certain traits from existing canines.

History Of Dogs: Do Pugs Really Come From Wolves?

What did single cell life have to work with?

Their own genetic code. Genes can mutate as they replicate and this creates a different coding for the material to form. Genes can fold and increase their information. This is all due to organiisms existing in a dynamtic environment.

 

[Jose Fly]

Single cell life would not know what an ancient fishy skull looked like, similar problem.

With design, the devil is always in the detail.

Why in the world do you think the first skull would have arisen in single-celled organisms?

 

[Subduction Zone]

The devil is always in the detail.
We know how to breed pugs or wolves, so we understand how selection works. But you do need a pack of pugs and wolves to start from. What did single cell life have to work with?

It was very clever how computer programmers used this idea to evolve abstract shapes. I read through your link, and it could not work if you removed intelligent planning and design. When you linked a number of complex shapes together as found in a car engine, the algorithms fail. A skeletal system is more complex than a car engine. We have been making engines for a long time. How would you set evolutionary algorithms to make a robotic version of ourselves? To design a skull, vertebrae rib cage, muscles, ligaments and tendons. A further problem would be passing the information onto a next generation.

Taken from your link,

• Genetic algorithms do not scale well with complexity. That is, where the number of elements which are exposed to mutation is large there is often an exponential increase in search space size. This makes it extremely difficult to use the technique on problems such as designing an engine, a house or a plane[citation needed]. In order to make such problems tractable to evolutionary search, they must be broken down into the simplest representation possible. Hence we typically see evolutionary algorithms encoding designs for fan blades instead of engines, building shapes instead of detailed construction plans, and airfoils instead of whole aircraft designs. The second problem of complexity is the issue of how to protect parts that have evolved to represent good solutions from further destructive mutation, particularly when their fitness assessment requires them to combine well with other parts.

Yes. we do not have many millions of years and the ability to test all variations at the same time. That is why this approach has to be limited. It still shows that variation and a form of natural selection will "design" something very efficiently. Without any intelligence. Are you grasping at straws? It looks that way.

 

[Hockeycowboy]

A Gish is good enough to fool
the gisher
But how clever is that.

Only to a fool.
Why? Do you think it’s clever?
Facts are facts, whether you want to deal with them or not.

 

[Subduction Zone]

Only to a fool.
Why? Do you think it’s clever?
Facts are facts, whether you want to deal with them or not.

She was right. Do you know why the "fine tuning argument" fails?

 

[Brian2]

Merely fitting the facts isn't enuf. An alternative
theory must be useful, ie, to make predictions
that can be tested, & possibly be disproven.
The mechanism of evolution has survived
such tests. ID has not even been tested.

I don't see anything wrong with the mechanism of evolution up to a point.

 

[Brian2]

Regardless whether you believe in God being the Creator for YEC or for OEC, there are zero evidence for God.

God - as well as all other deities from other religions - only exist in the beliefs of people, and that acceptance of their respective beliefs, require “faith”, not physical evidence.

When scientists proposed models (such as those given in hypotheses or theories) for any natural phenomena or physical phenomena, these models must be “falsifiable”.

What most creationists don’t seem to understand, they don’t understand what Falsifiability mean, nor why models require to be falsifiable.

Falsifiability mean that any model and any concept must be potentially ”testable”, and eventually “tested”. And the only ways to objectively test hypothesis or theory are with observations of natural or physical evidence, through evidence and / or experiments.

The tests don’t just verify a model, but MORE IMPORTANTLY REFUTE weak or incorrect model.

God or Creator cannot be tested; you cannot observe or detect, or measure any deity, including the God of the Bible.

God is not only “not physical”, he is not natural (hence supernatural). Sciences only seek evidence that are either physical or natural.

To date, there have been no evidence of any supernatural entities (eg spirits, deities, angels, demons, jinns, fairies, etc) of any supernatural events (eg miracles, divine creation, being judged for afterlife, etc).

Even, when you were to factor out God, you can still show that Genesis and the Bible to be either wrong or inaccurate.

For instance, creationists of the YEC variety, believe that the Earth was created about 6000 years ago.

There are many evidence that refute the Young Earth Creationism for examples:

• Fossilization are extremely slow process, and you won’t find any fully fossilize animal or human remains less than 10,000 years. It often taken much longer for fossilization to occur. Fossils of earlier mammals, marine animals and dinosaur, all predated YEC’s 6000 years. Even earlier fossils of Homo sapiens about 200,000 years.
• There are numbers of cities that exist before 6000 years, eg Jericho (or Tell es Sultan), Damascus, Eridu, including a couple of cities in Mesopotamia that are mentioned in Genesis 10, like the earliest settlement in Uruk (Erech) about 7000 years ago, and Nineveh about 8000 years ago.
• Excluding the moon, the largest object that can be observed in the night sky was Andromeda Galaxy, first identified and described by Abd al-Rahman al-Sufi, a Persian astronomer in 964 CE. Al-Sufi should not be able to see Andromeda, as it is over 2 million light years from Earth. Andromeda should not exist if we are to believe the universe is only 6000 years old.

So we disagree about whether there is evidence for God or not. I think evidence goes beyond what science might be able to use as evidence.
IMO the genetic coding indicates an intelligence behind it for example. This is evidence but maybe not the sort of evidence that science can use.
I would also say that Genesis creation is pretty close to agreeing with what science has found and that evolution can fit in with Genesis. But of course it is not a science text book and I usually run into a brick wall when I try to explain how I understand it to people.
That would leave the poetic understanding and the creation myth approach which many Christians use.