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Two arguments that give the creationists the upper hand.
Testlund:
Ok, thanks once again Shvarz for that link. Found some other videos like 'Evolution made easy', which explains the step by step from the evolving of the first molecules to the living cell. Makes some sense though I can't grasp it completely in my mind. Fascinating stuff.
Sorry, Endy, but that link was too overwelming. I prefer pictures.
I spent the whole night watching videos from both sides and came to the conclusion that the creationists are a dangerous bunch. Some of them are more crazy than others.
Still, there might be some divine force somewhere in all this, but nobody has a clue what that is.
I still believe that in a complete nothingness there can't appear something, unless nothingness in itself is a force...umm...which it can't be. So something strange is going on behind the universe and I think it's equally wrong to say 'there is no God' as saying 'there is a God'.
So I'm probably going to stand in the middle looking for answers as I always have.
EricL:
--- Quote from: Testlund ---I still believe that in a complete nothingness there can't appear something, unless nothingness in itself is a force...umm...which it can't be. So something strange is going on behind the universe and I think it's equally wrong to say 'there is no God' as saying 'there is a God'.
--- End quote ---
No offense Testlund, but this is exactly what I find so amazing. Why do otherwise smart people such as yourself make such wild and flawed leaps in logic when it comes to weighing the probability of supernaturalism? That there are mysteries in the universe, things we don't understand completely yet, that is no reason to give such high credence to the probabliity there is something supernatural behind them, much less one of the millions of specific tales of supernaturalism some organized religion purports is the answer. To do so when there is incredibly compelling evidence to the contrary is a complete dismissal of rationality. It's like saying you don't know what keeps airplanes in the air, so that somehow makes it equally probable that it may be the Bernoulli effect or it may be legions of invisible pink fairies that hold it up. There is no evidence that pink fairies exist and mountains of evidence that they do not, so only the irrational would claim the probability of either is somehow on par. Same with the rest of supernaturalism.
Why is it that people who seek to understand the origin of the universe or life or whatever rarely try looking for the actual answers? Why don't they explore astrophysics or partical phsycis or string theory or Dark Matter? My guess is that they just don't want to work that hard, which makes them suckers for the easy answers.
Whether something can appear out of nothing, that is a scientific question. It can be answerred scientifically. If that's what keeps you up at night, by all means seek the answer. But to look for it in supernaturalism, well, you might as well just say the pink fairies did it. A more rational answer you won't find down that road.
Testlund:
Well, as I've mensioned before I have been a non-believer most of my life, agnostic even, because of the overwhelming amount of evidence. But I'm just not sure about that anymore, because there are some things that are too much to be a random coincidence. For instance a medium that tells too much truth about people that have lived before, which he couldn't possibly guess. People can guess some things, and I've seen some fake mediums doing the guessing game, giving blurry answears that can be interpreted whatever you want to believe and how they've been exposed. But when a medium tells the truth about everything.
I have a couple of links here to some things that are quite remarkable. The first is a link to a medium that has published a book which has been written by spirits using his hand:
http://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/webbi...0Spirit%20World
Here's a link to another PDF about a laboratory experiment where they managed to heal mice with sceptical trainees.
www.liebertonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1089/acm.2007.7032
Now before you puke on it already, give it a try. It's too much to read for one evening though.
Maybe the guy wroting that book was high on something. Maybe the laboratory experiment is just a hoax. Maybe the guys that explains how moleculs evolve into living cells didn't actually confirm that in their laboratory. Just made it up to get research money, like some other scientists done about other stuff. We can't be sure if we haven't been there and watched the experiments. So take it for what it's worth.
So what I believe at the moment is evolution doesn't need the hand of God. But there MIGHT be a spirit world and there MIGHT be a God.
shvarz:
--- Quote ---Why do otherwise smart people such as yourself make such wild and flawed leaps in logic when it comes to weighing the probability of supernaturalism?
--- End quote ---
I had a post on this on my LJ, but it's in russian, so I'll translate here:
I think it's a general feature of human brain - it sucks at weighing probabilities and estimating trends. I think it has been evolutionary selected and I'm not kidding. A large part of being human is being able to find patterns and trends in the surrounding world. Early on (and probably later) humans that could find patterns and trends in the world were more successful - they could plan for the future, they could faster establish cause-and-effect relationships and so on. Evolutionarily it is better to find a non-existing cause than to miss a real one. As a result our brain is hard-wired into finding causes everywhere, even where none exist. That's why scientists came up with statistics - to make sure that their brains were not tricking them into finding patterns where none exist.
In the case of supernatural our brain feels a huge emptiness in the way world is organized. World exists, therefore there HAD to be a cause for its existence. The fact that modern science is so complicated makes it almost impossible for people to judge its quality. Their logic is similar to this blond joke:
"- What are the chances that today on your way to work you'll be eaten by a dinosaur?
- It's 50/50 - either you will or you won't."
EricL:
--- Quote from: shvarz ---I think it's a general feature of human brain - it sucks at weighing probabilities and estimating trends. I think it has been evolutionary selected and I'm not kidding.
--- End quote ---
I agree with you. So does Daniel Dennett. He terms the assignment of identity and intentions to such things as the weather as assigning "Intentional Stance". It's easy to imagine that evolution would favor the ability to outguess non-human entities such as lions and gazzelles. It's hardly far-fetched to imagine that adaptation overexecuting and extending that to things without intentions - the wind, the rain, a forest fire, having your mate fall out of a tree. I can totally see how evolution would favor brains whcih overassigned identity and intentions. As you say, it beats the hell out of underassigning.
It's not just humans by the way. BF Skinner did a famous experiment with piegons in the 50's. He had a feeding machine deliver food at random times. Very quickly, the piegons starting doing amazingly elaborate dances, replicating whatever they happened to be doing the last time the machine deliverred food in an attempt to induce it to feed them. Like us, their brains are wired to see cause and effect everywhere, even where none exists.
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