Physician, heal thyself.
“Argument from incredulity, also known as argument from personal incredulity, appeal to common sense, or the divine fallacy,[1] is a fallacy in informal logic. It asserts that a proposition must be false because it contradicts one’s personal expectations or beliefs, or is difficult to imagine.”
No. I did not say that all biological complexity has evolved, but that it does evolve. Changes in complex biological systems can be observed experimentally. They do undergo evolution. The fact that DNA copying is not perfect means that kinds of organisms do change over time.
Although some YEC and ID uncritically attack evolution, most admit that some change occurs. They are trying to say “Evolution can go so far, but no further.” But the fact that evolutionary change does happen makes it difficult to reasonably say how far it can go. Claims that evolution cannot explain a particular biological feature are very unlikely to be true. Claims that it looks to me like there might be a gap here are more reasonable.
I just love this. It says so much about you.
I don’t know why I bothered to write it.
So you have no incredulity. Fine.
You know Wiki just tells you what you want to hear, because it was written by people of the same mind set.
You rely too much on sources. They also think as you do.
Richard
I don’t base arguments on my incredulity because it isn’t logical to do so.
All you have offered us is illogical arguments and “because I say so”. That’s not a compelling reason to accept a claim as true. If you want people to take your IC argument seriously you are going to need evidence.
I am sorry, but you have lost all credibility at least in my eyes.
How anyone can claim they have lost the sense they were born with is beyond me (Yes incredulous!). To (virtually) anyone else it would be considered the height of insult. It basically means that you have no sense of reality.
You keep asking for proof of something that cannot happen. That is a proof of your lack of common sense. It is the logical fallacy you are claiming of me.
I do not need your approval of IC. It is an established concept. The trouble is, you have shown that you do not accept the meaning as relevant to evolution. That, again, is common sense. Instead you change the meaning to allow evolution to proceed.
Richard
You haven’t produced any evidence demonstrating that IC systems can’t evolve. All you can provide is “because I say so”.
I am asking for evidence, not proof. Asking for evidence is not a logical fallacy.
If you have no evidence, then there is no reason to take your claims seriously.
Repeating a stupid request does not make it valid.
You are a broken record
Richard
Calling it stupid does not make it stupid.
“What can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence.”–Christopher Hitchens
No, in logic. I learned about the inverse, converse, and contrapositive not in math but on the high school debate team. To make an error on any one of those was to lose the debate unless the other team was woefully incompetent.
And yet they do – this transfer/change of function isn’t a “get out”, it’s an observed phenomenon.
No, only you are. The only “goal” in evolution is “see what works”.
Interestingly, Einstein famously fell into this error – which sort of says that anyone who does is in prestigious company.
And just as with assessing the potential meanders of a river in a flood plain, the tool essential for judging that “how far” is mathematics.
No. If the meaning is changed, it is changed to fit observation.
Actually he’s claiming “because Wikipedia says so” (even though he has to modify the definition to do so).
That is a bare faced lie. I changed nothing.
What you understood is another matter.
Richard
Edit. I suggest you look again and work out what is being supposed.
Hint: it is not the validation of the theory.
If you are referring to “God does not play dice”, I would agree with you on that one. Einstein got a few things wrong, but he was also willing to admit his errors. Interestingly enough, Einstein considered his cosmological constant to be one of his greatest mistakes, but it ends up being a pretty good description of Dark Energy.
Just for fun, I used my novice level coding skills to write a python script that starts with the letter "a “ and either changes a letter at a random location to a random letter or adds a random letter to a random location in the word. I didn’t include deletion of letters because I was curious what would happen if you just select for length. I allowed the word to mutate for 100,000 generations, and I repeated it 10 times. I used the word list from nltk package which is 236,000+ words large, so it is exceedingly lax for what counts as a word. If a mutated word was in the approved word list it was kept and passed on to the next generation for mutation.
Results:
a --> chromyl
a --> scratchy
a --> nodous
a --> densen
a --> asprout
a --> urdee
a --> dreamsily
a --> moistly
a --> cantion
a --> austral
For what it’s worth.
Homework assignment: one page essay in which each of those words is used at least once! (Without merely listing any of them).
Back to regular programming now!
Out of curiosity what was the purpose of this exercise? Was it to prove anything? Or was it just a sort of dig at word games.
Richard
I wonder what would happen if you selected less harshly for word length and then allowed for deletions. Maybe prefer the longer word 3/4 of the time. That should still allow for a trend to longer words, but it might stop it from getting stuck on words that don’t have many options the same length or one letter longer.
Deliberately exposing my ignorance here to make sure your point is obvious:
Is the point of your Python script to provide an analogous example of the way random mutations in reproduction may result in offspring that may (or may not) contain features that are irreducibly complex but not quite fully or properly functioning?
The results of your script are:
Am I close to getting your point?
This example has been bugging me for days. The example of a hotel fountain is not analogous to reproduction in biology.
Hotels do not reproduce, do not have genetic material that mutates leading to differences in the resulting hotels, cannot over generation experience alterations which may lead to anything. Because they do not reproduce.
On the other hand, living things change from generation to generation. However the propensity to change during the process of reproduction has become a feature of living things, I can’t say. But if God is involved in the development of the variety of living things, it makes sense that it would be in the development of this system of constant change, which allows living things constantly to be altering, improving their chances of survival in their ever altering environments.
It makes sense to me that He would allow this system of His to do it’s thing. I certainly would never attempt to equate my view with science, seek to make organizations for it, try to demonstrate it in lectures, attempt to use it as an apologetic for God or Christianity, try to disuade people from accepting science or attempt to foster doubt in science, or the like. That would be silly at best and pretentious. Worse, it could encourage distrust of science in general leading to … well, just look around.
And that is where you are different. Scientists think that they can say, and do!
One of the underpinning parts of my discussions with scientists is precisely this point. They think that they know it all, or at least enough to assert what happened. They seem unwilling to consider that there might be other unseen factors involved, God being the most obvious, but, of course beyond scientific identity.
If God did “light the blue touchpaper and retire immediately” He must (IMHO) have retained some sort of guarantee that His designs would appear. IOW there would be hidden controls and mechanisms that science either has not, or cannot see. Instead science claims “Natural Selection” as the guiding force.
The problem being that one of the backbones of my complaints is morality, which, again, is not within the remit of science
I won’t bore you with repetitions of things posted elsewhere.
Richard
“Let your conversation be always full of grace, seasoned with salt, so that you may know how to answer everyone.” -Colossians 4:6
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