Science a Major Reason ‘Nones’ are Skeptical of Christianity

" Extrapolation refers to estimating an unknown value based on extending a known sequence of values or facts. To extrapolate is to infer something not explicitly stated from existing information. Interpolation is the act of estimating a value within two known values that exist within a sequence of values."

Extrapolation and interpolation are two different things.

So now you reject the scientific method. You are saying that you reject the process of predicting what observations should be made if a theory is true, and then running tests to see if those predictions are borne out.

So we can’t use fossils. Can’t use DNA. We can’t even use the scientific method.

So what are you asking for?

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Ah, there ya go: Exhibit A.

“That stuff is for the poor rubes who are too gullible and unsophisticated not to be hoodwinked by the scammers and the shysters.”

And what was that catchy phrase again - “Lying for Jesus!”

That is an incredible statement. One wonders how you can conclude such a thing. I am not aware of any atmospheric phenomena that are enabled and controlled by encoded memory. Are there any?

You must know that when someone puts a battery in a wristwatch, it is natural law itself that is keeping the time. If this is your standard of evidence, it could certainly explain why you are “unconvinced” by any evidence for an act of intelligence prior to humanity. All the intelligence would need to do is organize a system that follows inexorable law – or as Polanyi would say, “to harness the laws of inanimate nature” in an arrangement that is ”irreducible to those laws”.

Given the fact that this seems to encompass virtually any discernable act of intelligence – from the use of language to the launching of rocket ships into space – the test itself becomes rather meaningless. May I ask question? Acknowledging the overwhelming commonality of all living things on Earth, have you ever asked what is fundamentally required for Darwinian evolution to even exist? If so, what did you do with that knowledge?

A thought occured to me last night.

If Genetic code conforms to a mathematical construct it must follow a mathematical law? I wonder what the (mathematical) chances are of such a thing occurring? There is order in chaos. Perhaps we have stumbled upon @St.Roymond 's Divine-o-meter?

It is, after all, one of the most basic reasons for believing in God.

Richard

That is not the scientific method.

The scientific method is based on observable data, not mathematical constructs. I am not saying that mathematical construct are not part of science, but they are not impiracle data.

I have never said that

I didn’t actually say that either. Only that DNA comparisons are not conclusive. Your view colours your interpretations.

A little less certainty?

ToE is a work in progress, rather than a done deal.

Richard

I’m fairly sure that T wasn’t making a comparison between the mechanisms that control weather and the mechanisms that control evolution. They are very different domains indeed! The comparison being made is that neither one inserts “God” as one of the mechanisms to account for. And people seem just fine with that where meteorology is concerned, but suddenly have a problem with it when it comes to biology.

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That was a point in my History of Science course that made us all go, “Um, what?!?”

A great deal of science is based on extrapolation; volcanology and glaciology used to be seriously dependent on extrapolation but have grown less so over the years.

A weather forecast is extrapolation.

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We are meant to work out the meaning. and for that you to be internally coherent. the understanding comes from that. If one accepts a meaning that is not coherent with reality, but wishful thinking, ones faith is in Santa, not God.

Fair enough.

Nor should they.

Have you considered that such situations might pop up because, unlike the weather, evolution is enabled and controlled by the presence of a system of encoded memory. Have you ever considered what is required for encoded memory to exist and be perpetuated in a physical system over the course of time?

The well-documented history and science behind that question might give you some good insight as to why there are people who question the idea that evolution can be understood using the same dynamic equations as, say, meteorology … which I believe is exactly the idea that T_aquaticus was attempting to promote by his statement.

That starts with being faithful to the original language, not inserting something else.

Both function on information, the only difference is how the information is conveyed.

Calling DNA “encoded memory” is no more accurate than calling a geological column in a river canyon “encoded memory” – they’re both physical systems that govern behavior.

The same? Well, equations for quantum physics have turned out to be useful for predicting cloud formations and the behavior of waves, but just because some equations can jump disciplines doesn’t mean they all will. But similar ones? It turns out that there are equations which describe both the behavior of glaciers and certain tectonic activity, but the overlap is limited because they systems aren’t as similar as all that. So it wouldn’t be surprising if equations similar to those for meteorology might apply to aspects of evolution – and I say “aspects” because evolution has a lot more complexity to it than meteorology.

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St. Roymond, not to be too blunt, but it is abundantly clear from your comments that you have little to no grasp on the terms, concepts, history, or sciences at play in this conversation.

I have been where you are, so allow me to offer you some friendly advice. As you are probably aware, in the early 1900’s, the key scientists of the time just knew there had to be some source of mass information inside the cell; telling the cell how to be what it is, how to reproduce itself – how to specify itself among the alternatives. They simply didn’t know what it was or how it worked. Here I’d like to offer you the names of two particular men in science. The first is Erin Schrödinger. Schrödinger is of course the Nobel-winning quantum physicist who wrote the book “What is Life: The Physical Aspect of the Living Cell” in 1944 – a book that Sir Roger Penrose dubbed “among the most influential scientific writings of the 20th century”. In that book Schrödinger proposed the idea of a “code script” as the source of heredity among living things. His use of the words “code-script” is thought to be one of the first times that the source of heredity was widely described as an encoded form of information. Both Francis Crick and James Watson read Schrödinger ‘s book, and they both credit him with the inspiration that would lead them to their famous discoveries in DNA nine years later. The second scientist I would draw your attention to is Sydney Brenner, the Nobel-winning biologist who was very much in the thick of things when Crick and Watson first discovered the code-bearing structure of DNA in 1953. In fact, even before the first paper announcing their enormous discoveries was published, Brenner had already been advised of the developments and had quickly traveled to Cambridge to meet with the two men and discuss their details. Further, Crick and Brenner collaborated together in 1961 to demonstrate that the physical token of memory in DNA (the codon) was indeed just three bases long, and it was Brenner himself who named Crick’s famous “Adapter Hypothesis” of 1955.

Here is my advice to you: When Brenner saw Crick and Watson’s model of DNA at Cambridge he began to understand a significant problem with Schrodinger’s earlier ideas about the transmission of heredity among living things. He would soon become acquainted with the more obscure ideas of another distinguished pioneer in science, and he began to see that Schrodinger’s ideas were indeed wrong while the other man’s predictions would be fully confirmed by physical evidence in 1955. In fact, he came to call this problem “Schrödinger’s Error”.

I am suggesting that you take your time and discover for yourself why Brenner conceived of “Schrödinger Error” – what was correct and what was incorrect.

If you undertake this task, you will likely add several other key names to Schrödinger, Crick, and Brenner; names such as Von Neumann, Turing, Hoagland, Zamecnik, and others, some going back even to the days of Darwin. If you are successful in this journey, you are very likely to forever prevent yourself from making the kinds of uninformed statements you made in your previous post.

I would attempt to inform you of the issues myself, but I am quite certain from your general demeanor that you would fight the history and science all along the way – and I just have no interest in taking on an exercise in futility.

Isn’t that called population genetics?

Odd that faculty at Cal Tech consider’s Schrödinger’s book still relevant and important. referring to its ideas as " are central to modern biological enquiry".
https://www.cell.com/cell-systems/pdf/S2405-4712(21)00199-X.pdf

And from reading about Brenner, he called one small detail of Schrödinger’s book “wrong” that John von Neumann got right – and given what was known at the time, either one could have been correct.

That said, I can’t find anything in your post that actually addresses anything in mine.

I only “fight all the way” against idiocy.

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I don’t see how defining words in such a way changes the facts. Semantics doesn’t change the fact that both are natural explanations for natural phenomena.

Would you use that same argument for intelligently designed weather? If not, then how would it apply to evolution?

For Darwinian evolution to exist you need imperfect replicators competing for limited resources.

In the case of complex life (i.e. multicellular eukaryotes) with vertical inheritance, we can make some predictions about what we should see in the data if they share common ancestry. That prediction is a nested hierarchy. What do we see in life? A nested hierarchy, both at the level of morphology and in DNA sequences. We see exactly what we should see if life evolved.

Have you ever thought about this?

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The DNA sequences of genomes is not observable, empirical data? The morphology of fossils is not observable, empirical data?

If you object to the use of math to construct hypotheses and analyze data, then you reject almost all of science.

You claimed that fossils are just fooling us.

Your first sentence is contradicted by your second.

You are asking for just the opposite. You are asking for the conclusive evidence for evolution.

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The problem is that you are focused on semantics and rhetoric. Scientists are focused on data.

We see organisms reproducing all of the time, and it happens naturally. We see multicellular organisms developing from a single cell, and it happens naturally. We see organisms passing on their genomes with some differences here and there, and it happens naturally.

These natural processes will leave fingerprints in the morphology and genomes of species, and we can look for those fingerprints in the data. Using names like “encoded memory” is completely irrelevant to the actual work scientists do. It’s just semantics and rhetoric. It doesn’t help us understand the patterns in the data.

Maths is used after the formulation, not as the formulation. Maths may be part of the formulation but it does not create it… Can’t; you see the difference?

It is not the observation or obtaining the visible data that is being queried, it is the way you are using and anylizing that data.

Why should nature conform to a mathematical construct, especially if the process is supposedly random?

Richard

What are you calling the formulation?

Why should planets follow orbits according to Einstein’s equations?

Why should gases behave as predicted by the ideal gas laws?

Why should gases behave predictably if gases are randomly colliding molecules?

Why should randomly decaying isotopes follow a predictable first order curve?

Richard, welcome to science. As it turns out, stochastic processes produce predictable results all of the time in nature.

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That is a good question that many people have thought deeply about, but do note that randomness and chaos are subjects of mathematical analysis and description. Some of the most precise values known in physics are probabilities.

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Is he asking why the cosmos makes sense?

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