Doesn't really work when it's a quote from someone opposed to Darwinism, as opposed to Christians advocating their own beliefs.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Weikart

Richard Weikart ... is a senior fellow for the Center for Science and Culture of the Discovery Institute.

Hitler clearly didn't understand evolution via natural selection. Hint: genocide isn't natural selection. Keep pushing amateurish, long-discredited creationist arguments though Wortfish, it makes my earlier point beautifully.

Wortfish wrote:

Rumraket wrote:

Wortfish wrote:

Sendraks wrote:

Ah, so it could be construed as being anti-semitic, if you actually go out of your way to make it so. Which if you're in the business of dishonestly trying to take offence at something, rather than understand the point being made, I suppose one would engage in such idiocy.

You tend to find that atheist supremacists quite often have racist proclivities.

christians.jpg

You've been sold a typical christian conservative lie, a particular favorite of proven habitual liar and conservative nutbag Dinesh D'Shitsauce.

You know that this entire line of reasoning has been thoroughly debunked in contemporary scholarship, right? I suggest you read The Christian Delusion by John Loftus, particularly the chapter "Atheism was not the cause of the Holocaust", which also utterly debunks the claim that atheism (And Darwinism) was the cause of communist gulags and the like (in addition to actually proving how many of the communist exterminations had help from the church), and with pages of documentation of pre-Darwinian christian racialist literature.

Anyway, the chapter concludes with this ironic little list:

Hitler's Policies: ........................................ Martin Luther:......Darwin:
Burning Jewish Synagogues............................... Yes...................No
Destroying Jewish Homes..................................Yes...................No
Destroying Sacred Jewish Books.......................... Yes...................No
Forbidding Rabbis to teach................................ Yes..................No
Abolishing Safe Conduct.................................... Yes..................No
Confiscating Jewish property...............................Yes..................No
Forcing Jews into Labor.....................................Yes..................No
Citing god as part of the reason for Anti-Judaism......Yes..................No

Not to mention the COMPLETELY OBVIOUS fact that just because the "natural" condition for life in the wild is one of a struggle between the more or less reproductively fit, that observation in itself does not provide a sufficient precondition for the ASSUMPTION that this is how things SHOULD be or that we should tailor the structure of society as such. It simply doesn't follow.

Only a historical ignoramus can entertain the idea that racist ideologies could not have found some philosophical or scientific rationalization without Darwinian evolution.

Ah, it's in tray time again ...

Wortfish wrote:

Calilasseia wrote:
A rationally intelligible universe only needs to behave in accordance with principles that can be elucidated by a suitably inquiring entity with a working brain. Those principles need have nothng to do with an invisible magic man. All that is needed, is for testable natural processes to exist, and I emphasise natural here.

There is no reason why the universe should conform with physical principles that are rationally comprehensible.

Ahem ... you are aware that the origins of the laws of physics is itself a topic being investigated by physicists?

A sample paper covering this topic is this one ...

Where Did The Laws Of Physics Come From? by Victor J. Stenger

Victor J. Stenger wrote:Abstract

The laws of physics are constrained so that they select out no preferred coordinate system or reference frame. This is called the principle of covariance. This principle can be further generalized to include the coordinates in the abstract space of the functions used to formulate those laws. This is called global gauge invariance. When this symmetry applies independently at every point in space-time, it is called local gauge invariance. These symmetries are almost all that are needed to derive most of the familiar laws the law of physics, including classical mechanics, the great conservation laws, quantum mechanics, special and general relativity, and electromagnetism. Those structures that do not follow directly from coordinate invariance result from spontaneously broken symmetries.

The paper continues with the following insight:

Victor J. Stenger wrote:1.0 Introduction

Most laypeople think of the laws of physics as something like the Ten Commandments—rules governing the behavior of matter imposed by some great lawgiver in the sky. However, no stone tablet has ever been found upon which such laws were either naturally or supernaturally inscribed. On the contrary, the laws of physics are human inventions—mathematical formulas that quantitatively describe the results of observations and measurements. These formulas are first inferred from and then tested against observations. If they hold up, they are eventually reformulated as part of general and universal theories that are derived from a minimum number of assumed fundamental principles. Very often, a "law" will turn out to be nothing more than a circular definition, such as Ohm's law which says that the voltage is proportional to the current in a resistor, where a resistor is defined as a device that obeys Ohm's law.

Since the time of Copernicus and Galileo it has been realized that the laws of physics should not single out any particular space-time reference frame, although a distinction between inertial and noninertial frames was maintained in Newtonian physics. That distinction was removed in 1916 by Einstein who formulated his general theory of relativity in a covariant way. That is, the form of Einstein's equations is the same in all reference frames, inertial or noninertial.

As this experience showed, physicists are highly constrained in the way they may formulate the laws of physics. Not only must they agree with the data, the equations that are used to describe that data should not be written in such a way as to specify a privileged coordinate system or reference frame. This principle of covariance generalizes other notions such as the Copernican and cosmological principles and the principle of Galilean relativity. The application of this principle is not a matter of choice; centuries of observations have shown that to do otherwise produces calculations that disagree with the data in some reference frames.

In 1918, Noether showed that coordinate independence was more than just a constraint on the mathematical form of physical laws.[1] She proved that some of the most important physics principles are, in fact, nothing more than tautologies that follow from space-time coordinate independence: energy conservation arises from time translation invariance, linear momentum conservation comes from space translation invariance, and angular momentum conservation is a consequence of space rotation invariance. These conserved quantities were simply the mathematical generators of the corresponding symmetry transformation.

As the twentieth century progressed, invariance or symmetry principles became an increasingly dominant idea in physics. Not only were space-time coordinate symmetries built into theories, the notion of coordinate independence was extended to the abstract spaces physicists use to represent the other degrees of freedom of systems. Rotational symmetry was also applied to the space of quantum state vectors, resulting in derived properties of spin, isospin, charge, baryon number, and other observables that agreed with measurements.

Charge conservation, for example, was found to follow from the invariance of the Schrödinger equation to changes in the phase of the complex wave function. And then, a remarkable discovery was made. It was found that the Schrödinger equation could be made invariant to a local phase change in the wave function, that is, a change in phase that varies from point to point in space-time, provided that vector and scalar potentials were added. The potentials turned out to be exactly those that give the classical electric and magnetic fields. This local quantum phase symmetry was precisely related to the local classical gauge symmetry of electrodynamics. Maxwell's equations were derived from a single principle—local phase invariance.

So, according to this exposition by Stenger, the nature of the laws of physics is determined by independence of coordinate system. In short, it doesn't matter what coordinate system one chooses, observations should be consistent across those different coordinate systems. Emmy Noether took this one step further with her now-famous theorem, which couples actions and potentials to symmetries, as explained in the bolded paragraph above.

Of course, those who, like myself, understand the mathematics of coordinate transformations, regard this as eminently sensible. The trouble is, of course, that in order to behold the full flowering of Noether's Theorem, one has to delve fairly deep into tensor analysis, which is an intimidating discipline even for the mathematically astute. Entities and phenomena start to become seriously weird, if one violates the principle of independence from choice of coordinate system, which is why much effort was expended in the early days of tensor analysis, to establish proper, coordinate-independent operators for such operations as differentiation. However, once the requsite underlying basics are understood, the emergence of symmetry and the coupling thereto of physical processes, along with the existence of relevantly defined invariants, follows naturally.

For those who need this, I stress that an invarant is a quantity that obeys a much stricter definition than a mere constant. An entity can be a constant in a given coordinate system, but may change if one moves to a new coordinate system. An invariant, on the other hand, retains the same value in all possible coordinate systems, a much stricter and much more powerful constraint. Technically, an invariant is a zero-order tensor, and hence obeys the transformation laws for a zero-order tensor, which is, quite simply:

A = A'

where A is the zero-order tensor in one coordinate system, and A' is the zero-order tensor in another coordinate system.

The trouble starts, from the standpoint of comprehension, when one moves to tensors of order other than zero, which have rather more intricate transformation laws, involving Jacobian matrices. However, those transformation laws are a natural outcome of the need for independence of coordinate system. However, the fun part is that when this essential principle is generalised, and transferred to more abstract coordinate spaces, a veritable cornucopia of physically useful results tumble out of the investigations into those abstract spaces. Schrödinger's Equation was merely one such product, the product of applying coordinate independence to Hilbert spaces.

I'll leave the applicability of group theory to all of this, to someone with superior expertise.

But, the principle I opened this post with remains in place, namely, that physicists are seeking to understand the origin of the laws of physics, and moreover, seeking to do so without reference to imaginary mythological entities. The mere fact that the above paper on its own, demonstrates a working framework for so doing, tells those of us who paid attention in class, that imaginary mythological entities are superfluous to requirements and irrelevant.

Moving on ...

Wortfish wrote:A hypothetical creator-less universe would more likely be unstable and unpredictable since there would be no providential guidance or direction.

Crap. Oh wait, the above paper demonstrates that the moment symmetries exist, stable physical laws arise from those symmetries.

I'll have fun watching you try and tell us all that Emmy Noether was wrong.

Wortfish wrote:The rational intelligibility of the universe only makes sense if the universe has been designed and created by a supreme mathematical mind who created the laws and constants of Nature in order for everything to work in harmony and with order.

Bollocks. Once again, Emmy Noether stuffed this pretension of yours down the toilet over 100 years ago.

Wortfish wrote:

Indeed, every scientific paper in existence points to the conclusion that your merely asserted mythological magic man is superfluous to requirements and irrelevant.

As Newton put it, gravity explains how the planets move around the Sun (without a need for God as an explanation), but gravity itself requires God for its existence.

I refer you to Emmy Noether again ...

Wortfish wrote:

As for "fine tuning", this is a myth. All that has happened, is that the laws of physics permitted our existence, and the relevant physically permitted interactions facilitating our existence took place. That it it. If the 10 km bolide that precipitated the K-T extinction event 65 millon years ago hadn't collided with Earth, the same nonsense about "fine tuning" could now be being uttered by reptiles worshipping a reptile god. Which would be just as imaginary as yours.

The physical constants and mass relationships need not be what they are actually measured to be. The fact that they are life-permitting is a major problem for the atheist.

Poppycock. Once again, if they weren't life-permitting, we wouldn't be around to argue the toss. We're here because the relevant interactions permitted our existence. Like every other supernaturalist, you have it backwards. Those physical principles weren't put there specifically to produce us, we just happened to be one of the products of the natural evolution thereof. Stop paddling in Douglas Adams' Puddle.

Wortfish wrote:

Likewise, "irreducible complexity", far from being a "problem" for evolutionary biology, was demonstrated to be a natural outcome of evolutionary processes by Hermann Joseph Müller, six decades before Behe tried to misrepresent it in pursuit of a bastardised mash-up of creationist drivel.

I am afraid irreducible complexity has been demonstrated with respect to the minimal number of genes required to support the simplest organism: http://www.pnas.org/content/103/2/425

Congratulations on misunderstanding that paper totally. That paper ask the question "what is the minimum number of genes required for a functioning organism?", which is an entirely separate question from whether or not those genes have become intertwined, which is the issue Müller addressed when he provided a proper, rigorous analysis of "irreducible complexity" back in 1918.

Come back when you've paid attention in the relevant elementary classes.

Wortfish wrote:

I, as an atheist, don't have a "problem" here, because all I need to do is pay attention to actual professional scientists and their output. Said output detonates a nuclear depth charge under the pretentions of creationists and other mythology fanboys. On the other hand, it's those creationists and mythology fanboys that have a big problem, taking the form that observational reality pisses all over the assertions of their favourite mythology. The desperation to cling to said mythology on their part, is make starkly apparent, by the fact that propagandists for said mythology have to peddle demonstrable lies about the relevant science, in order to keep the corpse of their masturbation fantasies trundling on its castors, in the pretence that it's alive.

Scientists have done a pretty good job at showing how complex, marvellous and mathematically structured the world is.

And guess what? They did it without referring once to your sad mythology. Indeed, those same scientists demonstrated that the universe is far grander in scale, far more interesting, and far more requiring of diligent labour to understand, than the vision thereof presented in the worthless mythology you cling to. Which couldn't even teach us about bacteria.

Wortfish wrote:This comports much more with a theistic worldview that an atheistic one.

Bollocks. What part of "the scientific picture of the universe makes your mythology look sad by comparison" did you fail to register?

Once again, your mythology was written by an assortment of pre-scientific life forms who thought that they had to set fire to small furry animals to please an invisible magic man, and were incapable of counting correctly the number of legs that an insect possesses, a feat that an astute modern five year old can perform without difficulty.

Even more telling, American news outlets have been providing us, on a regular basis, with reports of the results of treating this mythology as superior to modern science. Courtesy of various wingnuts who think that asking their invisible magic man to dispel "demons" is going to work better at curing diseases than modern medicine. Guess what? Those news reports all feature dead children, who died because their parents preferred retarded mediaeval bullshit to working medicine. Children who died of eminently treatable conditions, such as pneumonia (curable with antibiotics) or diabetes (manageable with insulin injections).

If your mythology was something other than the product of the rectal passages of people whose comprehension of the world was only marginally better than a baboon's, those children would not be dead. Furthermore, your mythology would be part of mainstream medicine. But it isn't, because, wait for it, it doesn't fucking work.

Wortfish wrote:

The mythology you're clinging to, was written by ignorant, piss-stained nomads who were too stupid to count correctly the number of legs that an insect possesses.

That could be construed as being anti-semitic.

Bollocks. Because, wait for it, parallel charges can be laid at the door of every pre-scientific mythology and its authors. What part of this elementary concept did you fail to understand when I wrote this? It's not just your precious mythology that's a steaming heap of shite, they ALL are. Though of course, given your fixation with one particular mythology, I can understand why you wouldn't bother with the generalisation.

Oh and by the way, before you try peddling this shite, watch this in full:



Sample quotes from the above video include:

"For those of you who believe it was, for you Christians, let me tell you that you do not understand the Jewish people. We Jews understand that it did not take place in seven days, and that's because we know what we're good at. What we're really good at is bullshit" (Start of video)

"The reason that the God of the Old Testament is a prick, was because the Old Testament is designed, as a book, to get the Jews to straighten up and fucking fly right, because they were out of control. They were ten hairs away from being baboons. And that's the point when I do that in the South, that you can hear the veritable fucking pin drop. Figure it out, ok? You watch Jerry Springer. That's what we're like now, imagine what they were like then! They needed rules, they needed to know that marriage takes place between a man and a woman, because they were wandering into camp with camels going on and LOVE! I don't give a shit what you are, you can't marry a snapping turtle, asshole!" (4:13 onwards)

Anti-semitic? Oh wait, that's Lewis Black saying those things above, and he's Jewish. So you can stuff your fake accusations where the sun doesn't shine.

Wortfish wrote:

These nomads were incapable of even fantasising about entire classes of entities and phenomena, that have since been alighted upon by scientists, and placed by those scientists into precise, quantitative and usefully predictive bodies of knowledge. The authors of your sad mythology were incapable of even fantasising about, for example, bacteria. We had to wait until scientists invented microscopes and discovered said bacteria. Prior to this, and prior to the subsequent discovery by scientists such as Pasteur and Koch, that some of these bacteria were causative agents of disease, fanboys of your sad little mythology were convinced that diseases were the product of "demons". We still have idiots clinging to this mediaeval gibberish today among the more spaced-out fundamentalist nutjobs who prefer mythology to fact. This shouldn't even be a debate any more, given the rampant success of science based medicine. It's a measure of how utterly palsied the whole business of religion is, that adherents thereto are still entertaining ideas that were tossed into the bin of history decades, or in some cases, centuries ago.

This is a strawman argument.

No it isn't, because, wait for it, a good number of the wingnuts who treat this mythology as fact, and who want to force the rest of us to conform to its strictures, regard said mythology as historically and scientifically accurate. Among the worst and most egregious offenders in this regard are creationists, who insist that the fantasy scenarios contained within this mythology were something other than bad fiction. Henry Morris is but one particularly prominent example of the trend. Except that the same book they regard in this manner, made no mention of countless subsequent scientific discoveries.

Oh, and if you want to try and argue that this mythology was intended for moral guidance, not as a science or history textbook, then why is it littered with assertions about the physical universe and the contents thereof, that scientists would later discover to be wrong? Assertion inserted in a manner plainly intended by the authors to be regarded as true and factual, resulting in doubt being cast not only upon those assertions, but upon the other, ethical assertions that were purportedly, according to this apologetics, the central focus of that mythology? Why not concentrate upon ethical assertions and leave the fatuous cosmological fantasies out?

Quite simply, the idea that this mess is the product of a fantastically gifted super-being, is laughable. Even elementary students of pedagogy could put together something better if they applied some effort to the project.

Wortfish wrote:People don't invent gods and religion because of infections by bacteria. The ancients treated infection with garlic and honey that do a lot less harm than the overuse of antibiotics.

How many of those people lived? Do we have any reliable mortality statistics here?

Oh, and there are plenty of people who went on to enjoy decent lifespans as a result of being saved from death by antibiotics in the past. My brother was one of them, saved from near certain death by the administration of streptomycin to treat his fulminating tuberculosis as a baby. He went on to live to be 65.

Wortfish wrote:

Your crap has been demonstrated time and again to be precisely that - crap. I suggest you head off to somewhere like CARM, where the contents of your soiled intellectual nappies will be savoured as something other than steaming faeces.

I am as much a rationalist and skeptic as anyone else here.

Poppycock. Regurgitating well-known and well-documented creationist bullshit, that has been exposed as such time and time again, isn't "scepticism".

Wortfish wrote:I am just skeptical of atheistic claims.

Bollocks. All you're doing here is parroting the usual tired canards.

Wortfish wrote:You should question your own non-belief more.

Says the person who thinks an invisible magic man fro mythology is real.

Oh, and here's a clue for you. I regard belief itself as worthless.

Wortfish wrote:I was an atheist, but could no longer deny the enormous evidence for a creator.

Oh no, not this tiresome trope again .... yawn. Which is just as sordidly disreputable as the rest of your parroted assertions from the creationist playbook.

Wortfish wrote:
There is no reason why the universe should conform with physical principles that are rationally comprehensible.

Those laws are merely descriptions of the universe. All of the physical laws and laws of logic simply describe the universe as we see it, nothing more.

A hypothetical creator-less universe would more likely be unstable and unpredictable since there would be no providential guidance or direction.

No need. There's a concept called emergence that simply makes this claim false.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emergence

In philosophy, systems theory, science, and art, emergence occurs when "the whole is greater than the sum of the parts," meaning the whole has properties its parts do not have. These properties come about because of interactions among the parts.

Emergence plays a central role in theories of integrative levels and of complex systems. For instance, the phenomenon of life as studied in biology is an emergent property of chemistry, and psychological phenomena emerge from the neurobiological phenomena of living things.

In philosophy, theories that emphasize emergent properties have been called emergentism. Almost all accounts of emergentism include a form of epistemic or ontological irreducibility to the lower levels.

but gravity itself requires God for its existence.

Goddit explains everything by explaining absolutely nothing. This merely an argument from ignorance. It's better to say 'I don't know', rather than make up answers.

The physical constants and mass relationships need not be what they are actually measured to be.

Those 'physical constants and mass relationships', are not what you think they are. They're not super strict; they are mostly ranges. In fact, we could exist without the weak nuclear force.
https://www.space.com/19522-alien-plane ... ition.html

The new definition isn't radically different from the old one. For example, in our own solar system, the boundaries of the habitable zone have shifted from between 0.95 astronomical units (AU, or the distance between Earth and the sun) and 1.67 AU, to the new range of 0.99 AU to 1.7 AU.

https://www.sciencenews.org/article/alt ... ce-physics

Not all fundamental forces are created equal. An alternate universe that lacks the weak nuclear force — one of the four fundamental forces that govern all matter in our universe — could still form galaxies, stars, planets and perhaps life, according to calculations published online January 18 at arXiv.org.

The fact that they are life-permitting is a major problem for the atheist.

Again, saying goddit does not explain anything. All you're doing is giving me a story. You need to show that this explains anything.

Scientists have done a pretty good job at showing how complex, marvellous and mathematically structured the world is. This comports much more with a theistic worldview that an atheistic one.

This is mere assertions from indoctrination and wishful thinking. The universe that we know of seems to come from the whim of a careless god, then a one that cares about our wellbeing.

That could be construed as being anti-semitic.

Any more than saying that Hitler was white can be construed as anti-white? You're crbulity is dropping by the secound.

[quote
This is a strawman argument. People don't invent gods and religion because of infections by bacteria. The ancients treated infection with garlic and honey that do a lot less harm than the overuse of antibiotics.
[/quote]

He's simply that the ancients made gods to explain things they didn't know. You're much of the same.

I was an atheist, but could no longer deny the enormous evidence for a creator.

which must be taken on faith, since there is no good reason to believe it. The evidence for your creator is simply interpreted and an assumed conclusion.

Wortfish wrote:Of course, this "debate" would not be necessary if we the same process of eye evolution were still going on today. Simply pointing to the eye of a Nautilus, and claiming it is a precursor to a modern vertebrate eye, just isn't good enough.

That old canard again. "If apes evolved from monkeys, why are there still monkeys?" or Dear Science: "Why aren’t apes evolving into humans?"

How come a chimpanzee never had a human baby?

Wrong pricks.

Wortfish wrote:It might be helpful to think of making a universe like baking a cake. You have to have the right ingredients, in the right proportions and cooked together for the right amout of time. In the same way, the universe needs to have the right amount of matter, dark matter, anti-matter etc...and then there are things like the mass ratios of proton to neutrons and protons to electrons. As with baking a cake, if these are a fraction off, everything can go wrong. If you add too much yeast, you could end up with alcohol, too little and you nothing will rise. If the difference between the mass of the proton and the neutron was a tiny bit more or less than it actually is, the universe would be unstable, and it would not support any kind of life.

If the universe was different, it would be different in exactly the way it would be different, and that particular way it would be different would be just one among an uncountable number of ways it could be different, and so we are left with the same problem no matter what kind of universe we are looking at.
No matter the combination of forces and constants you can think of, that will be that one particular set, and considering how many ways it could have been different from what it is, the odds could always be said to be incredibly against it.

If your argument can be applied to any possible circumstance it isn't an argument of any worth.

Also, by implication, you are affirming a materialist basis of life. What allows you to live and think and exist are the physical forces and interactions of the material world. Yet simultaneously with this vacuous argument from probabilities of the physical universe we know, you would turn around and probably argue that the basis of mind and consciousness is some nebulous immaterial concept not constrained on or dependent on that very same thing. Which makes one wonder why we have brains made of mostly water and carbon atoms if our thinking isn't done by a physical entity. Not to mention your whole having your cake and eating it too.

It gets even worse once we start considering the origin of life and evolution, which ultimately are dependent on the physical forces and constants. Here you would argue those two concepts (origin and evolution of life) effectively amount to physical impossibilities. What a weird and confused God you are advocating. One that would create a universe mostly inhospitable to life, so than he can then intervene in it and create physical life in this universe that only allows life to exist but not originate or evolve, on the surfaces of infinitesimally small spheroids of mostly rocky minerals bathed in radiation, then allows 99.97% of it to go extinct over the course of 4 billion years so he must continously intervene to create more and more and force evolution to happen with magical spells because it just can't by itself and then finally several hundred thousand years after the orchestrated origin of the human species that can't even think (because apparently those physical laws aren't up to that either, so again why a big energy consuming brain?) and needs a magically conjured up immaterial soul to even function, he decides to reveal himself in fleshy form by walking around on a lake and doing stage magic with bread and wine.

Call me skeptical.

Wortfish wrote:The only way the universe is ordered and life-permitting is because, as with a well-baked cake, there has been some intelligent input.

The same could be claimed just as baselessly as you just did for any imaginable combination of physical forces and constants. It will always be the case that it would have been incredibly unlikely that the universe, if the forces and constant would have been picked at random from some colossal ensemble of possibilities, to end up like they did, no matter how they turned out.

Wortfish wrote:Creation requires a Creator...that was true back in 2018BC as it is in 2018 CE.

Then by calling it "creation" you are comitting the fallacy of begging the question. You need to establish that it IS a creation first. But that is the very question we are debating, and you can't settle that just by employing a label. I could just as well call it uncreated, and then that would carry just as much force and authority. But that too would be silly since the facts of the matter aren't settled by semantics.

Why do I have to explain this to creationists? How is this not instantly obvious to everyone? You can't just label something and then because you think the label has entailments, think that you have somehow managed to demonstrate the truth of the conclusion you seek. I could call you a murderer, would that make you one? C'mon.

THINK.

Besides, Our God is a Mighty God! If he wanted us to breath interstellar hydrogen and eat cosmic rays he'd just poof us into doing that. He can do anything, because he's omnipotent. He'd fine tune US.

Calilasseia wrote:
But, the principle I opened this post with remains in place, namely, that physicists are seeking to understand the origin of the laws of physics, and moreover, seeking to do so without reference to imaginary mythological entities. The mere fact that the above paper on its own, demonstrates a working framework for so doing, tells those of us who paid attention in class, that imaginary mythological entities are superfluous to requirements and irrelevant.

Yes, thank you for that extraordinary digression. Except that we aren't actually talking about any laws of physics, but rather the ones governing THIS universe, not some possible universe with its own coordinate system and symmertries as you put it. The laws of physics, to define them, describe the behaviour of matter and energy and this is, in turn, derived from the inherent properties of matter, such as the specific size and mass of particles relative to each other for which there is no explanation offered by physics because physics depends on their particular properties.

Crap. Oh wait, the above paper demonstrates that the moment symmetries exist, stable physical laws arise from those symmetries. I'll have fun watching you try and tell us all that Emmy Noether was wrong.

Again, we are not talking about ANY old physical principles but rather those that govern this universe.. Even if there were stable physical laws governing a universe, this does not mean the universe would itself would be stable. All it would mean is that the laws themselves were not in a state of change even if matter itself was in a state of chaos and disorder. The reason that this universe is not unstable and unpredictable is because its parameters have been perfectly established.

Bollocks. Once again, Emmy Noether stuffed this pretension of yours down the toilet over 100 years ago.

So you claim.
.

Poppycock. Once again, if they weren't life-permitting, we wouldn't be around to argue the toss. We're here because the relevant interactions permitted our existence. Like every other supernaturalist, you have it backwards. Those physical principles weren't put there specifically to produce us, we just happened to be one of the products of the natural evolution thereof. Stop paddling in Douglas Adams' Puddle.

But we are here. And it seems this is the only reality we can observe. It does not make sense to think that all these life-permitting conditions would exist without the input of an intelligent designer of the universe. It's just common sense.

Congratulations on misunderstanding that paper totally. That paper ask the question "what is the minimum number of genes required for a functioning organism?", which is an entirely separate question from whether or not those genes have become intertwined, which is the issue Müller addressed when he provided a proper, rigorous analysis of "irreducible complexity" back in 1918. Come back when you've paid attention in the relevant elementary classes.

It seems that there is a minimum number of genes beyond which we cannot reduce for cellular life to be viable. If you remove one of them, the system break down...the very definition of IC: there is an irreducible (i.e. minimal) number of genes.

And guess what? They did it without referring once to your sad mythology. Indeed, those same scientists demonstrated that the universe is far grander in scale, far more interesting, and far more requiring of diligent labour to understand, than the vision thereof presented in the worthless mythology you cling to. Which couldn't even teach us about bacteria.

Religion is about man's relationship to God, not his relationship to his ecological environment. The Bible is not an encylcopedia.

Bollocks. What part of "the scientific picture of the universe makes your mythology look sad by comparison" did you fail to register? Once again, your mythology was written by an assortment of pre-scientific life forms who thought that they had to set fire to small furry animals to please an invisible magic man, and were incapable of counting correctly the number of legs that an insect possesses, a feat that an astute modern five year old can perform without difficulty.

Science informs us that there are trillions of galaxies each with hundreds of billions of stars. All this shows is that the Creator is more magnificent than ever. And we still don't know the "dark" material he made to get galaxies to form.

Even more telling, American news outlets have been providing us, on a regular basis, with reports of the results of treating this mythology as superior to modern science. Courtesy of various wingnuts who think that asking their invisible magic man to dispel "demons" is going to work better at curing diseases than modern medicine. Guess what? Those news reports all feature dead children, who died because their parents preferred retarded mediaeval bullshit to working medicine. Children who died of eminently treatable conditions, such as pneumonia (curable with antibiotics) or diabetes (manageable with insulin injections).

Psychosomatic medicine is helping to cure millions. We all need to exorcise the demons in our head to feel well. Many people Jesus really healed the sick by making them believe they would be cured by divine grace and their faith in God.

If your mythology was something other than the product of the rectal passages of people whose comprehension of the world was only marginally better than a baboon's, those children would not be dead. Furthermore, your mythology would be part of mainstream medicine. But it isn't, because, wait for it, it doesn't fucking work.

As antibiotics become increasingly useless because of overuse, many people are indeed turning to spiritual healing and energy medicine. I didn't hear about anyone dying because of a prayer, but pharmaceutical drugs are killing large numbers: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25355584

Bollocks. Because, wait for it, parallel charges can be laid at the door of every pre-scientific mythology and its authors. What part of this elementary concept did you fail to understand when I wrote this? It's not just your precious mythology that's a steaming heap of shite, they ALL are. Though of course, given your fixation with one particular mythology, I can understand why you wouldn't bother with the generalisation.

Calling the Jewish religion is not anti-semitic. But calling any people a bunch of "piss-stained nomads" is 100% racist, pure and simple. If I called Jews or gypsies this, I could be prosecuted for hate speech.

Anti-semitic? Oh wait, that's Lewis Black saying those things above, and he's Jewish. So you can stuff your fake accusations where the sun doesn't shine.

Never heard of a self-hating Jew?

No it isn't, because, wait for it, a good number of the wingnuts who treat this mythology as fact, and who want to force the rest of us to conform to its strictures, regard said mythology as historically and scientifically accurate. Among the worst and most egregious offenders in this regard are creationists, who insist that the fantasy scenarios contained within this mythology were something other than bad fiction. Henry Morris is but one particularly prominent example of the trend. Except that the same book they regard in this manner, made no mention of countless subsequent scientific discoveries. Oh, and if you want to try and argue that this mythology was intended for moral guidance, not as a science or history textbook, then why is it littered with assertions about the physical universe and the contents thereof, that scientists would later discover to be wrong? Assertion inserted in a manner plainly intended by the authors to be regarded as true and factual, resulting in doubt being cast not only upon those assertions, but upon the other, ethical assertions that were purportedly, according to this apologetics, the central focus of that mythology? Why not concentrate upon ethical assertions and leave the fatuous cosmological fantasies out?

The Bible is a work of theology, not of science or even of history. Jesus talked in parables. It doesn't matter whether there really was a "Good Samaritan" or a "tree of the knowledge of good and evil" in Genesis. The lesson we learn from it is the important part, and has inspired humanity for centuries.

Quite simply, the idea that this mess is the product of a fantastically gifted super-being, is laughable. Even elementary students of pedagogy could put together something better if they applied some effort to the project.

Scripture is claimed to be inspired by God rather than written by him.

Oh, and here's a clue for you. I regard belief itself as worthless.

Worthless to you, maybe, but not to many who benefit and find meaning in their believing. And have you questioned whether your own opinions themselves are worth anything?

Wortfish wrote:
But we are here. And it seems this is the only reality we can observe. It does not make sense to think that all these life-permitting conditions would exist without the input of an intelligent designer of the universe.

You have no basis whatsoever to make this claim. There isn't any reason to think that the universe is as it is because of some entity's design, it's entirely possible that it just happened to be that way, or that it could be no other way. You simply don't have the tiniest shred of evidence for your position, anyone who isn't crippled by your glaring presuppositions can see your vapid assertions for exactly what they are: wishful thinking.

It's just common sense.

That is the usual fallback when one doesn't have any actual reason or evidence for something they want to claim is true by fiat. No evidence, no thanks.

Wortfish wrote:
Yes, thank you for that extraordinary digression. Except that we aren't actually talking about any laws of physics, but rather the ones governing THIS universe, not some possible universe with its own coordinate system and symmertries as you put it.

No, we very much are talking about any laws of physics because, as has already been pointed out in this thread, the laws of physics are simply our interpretation of how things work.

Wortfish wrote:As antibiotics become increasingly useless because of overuse, many people are indeed turning to spiritual healing and energy medicine. I didn't hear about anyone dying because of a prayer, but pharmaceutical drugs are killing large numbers: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25355584

We haven't heard about prayer, spiritual healing and energy medicine saving anyone.

Wortfish wrote:Science informs us that there are trillions of galaxies each with hundreds of billions of stars. All this shows is that the Creator is more magnificent than ever. And we still don't know the "dark" material he made to get galaxies to form.

A creator so magnificent he made the universe overwhelmingly hostile to us. Heck, even the majority planet we live on is hostile to us.

A creator so magnificent he made the universe overwhelmingly hostile to us.

And the scale of things is so immense that we can't even get our heads around how totally insignificant and seemingly irrelevant in the grand scheme of things our little solar system is. Even the ability to travel at the speed of light would be totally useless for exploration of anything but our own doorstep. All we can do is look at a hint of what the outer universe looked like millions to billions of years ago.

People, often children, die from prayer all the time.

Some jurisdictions even, gasp, allow the prosecution of those who rely of faith rather than medicine and kill by neglect.

Please cut the hand-wringing and special pleading. It's sickening.

zulumoose wrote:

A creator so magnificent he made the universe overwhelmingly hostile to us.

And the scale of things is so immense that we can't even get our heads around how totally insignificant and seemingly irrelevant in the grand scheme of things our little solar system is. Even the ability to travel at the speed of light would be totally useless for exploration of anything but our own doorstep. All we can do is look at a hint of what the outer universe looked like millions to billions of years ago.

And never mind stretching our minds to think of a multiverse. Theists can never look beyond our planet. In fact their holy books dont go past the Middle East. So they end up stretching the descriptions of the Middle East to cover the rest of the planet which of course never fits which is why theology was started as someone had to think of fairy stories to make it fit. The xtians had their orbs to keep stars in their place while muslims had pillars to support heaven. In both belief systems the Earth was the centre of the Universe which still for many is the way they see it today.

The idea that we are a very insignificant planet going around a low class star is beyond their comprehension. The idea that there exists more stars than all the sand on the beaches of the Earth (Carl Sagan) is completely mind blowing.

Theists can never look beyond our planet. In fact their holy books dont go past the Middle East.

I know what you mean, but theists is too general a term for this, you are being specific to mainstream Abrahamic faiths. You only have to go as far as the Mormons to escape the middle east in their literature, never mind theists from other areas of the world and perhaps the most far reaching, Scientologists.

zulumoose wrote:

Theists can never look beyond our planet. In fact their holy books dont go past the Middle East.

I know what you mean, but theists is too general a term for this, you are being specific to mainstream Abrahamic faiths. You only have to go as far as the Mormons to escape the middle east in their literature, never mind theists from other areas of the world and perhaps the most far reaching, Scientologists.

I dont consider scientology a religion. That is only a tax dodge. Mormonism is based on abrahamic faiths as all the 40,000 different cults and belief systems. Some add and take away but basically it is all the same. Jesus only walked in one place and was crucified in one place.

Mormonism is based on abrahamic faiths as all the 40,000 different cults and belief systems. Some add and take away but basically it is all the same. Jesus only walked in one place and was crucified in one place.

Mormonism makes very specific claims about things that have happened and will happen in America, and elsewhere.

From the Wikipedia page:-

The book described itself as a chronicle of an early Israelite diaspora, integrating with the pre-existing indigenous peoples of the Americas, written by a people called the Nephites. According to The Book of Mormon, Lehi's family left Jerusalem at the urging of God c. 600 BC, and later sailed to the Americas c. 589 BC. The Nephites are described as descendants of Nephi, the fourth son of the prophet Lehi. The Nephites are portrayed as having a belief in Christ hundreds of years before his birth.

According to Mormon scripture, the Earth's creation was not ex nihilo, but organized from existing matter. The Earth is just one of many inhabited worlds, and there are many governing heavenly bodies, including the planet or star Kolob, which is said to be nearest the throne of God.

Much of the Mormon belief system is geographically oriented around the North and South American continents. Mormons believe that the people of the Book of Mormon lived in the western hemisphere, that Christ appeared in the western hemisphere after his death and resurrection, that the true faith was restored in Upstate New York by Joseph Smith, that the Garden of Eden was located in North America, and that the New Jerusalem would be built in Missouri.

Central characters are still Jesus and god. So Smith wrote a few extra fairy tales it is basically a xtian religion just one of the 40,000.

Mormonism is fairly split as well.
List of denominations in the Latter Day Saint movement
It is as complicated as any other "church":