Evolution Demonstrated In A Laboratory

[Elixir]

It's the individuals I'm talking about, those who try to claim science counters the idea of God existing,

Can you name and/or quote this individual(s)?
Science is a methodology and is totally ambivalent about gods. It doesn’t counter (falsify) anything, evidence does. Falsifying a tri-Omni magical creator is not possible in principle, so it’s a mystery why you’re talking about scientists countering gods.
Scientists are people. Some are theists. Some are not.

 

[steve_bank]

Learner - honestly, why would you even want to try and counter science? Just accept it and claim that’s how your god intended it. I certainly wouldn’t mind if you did. You know, that’s how Christian scientists deal with this. To claim otherwise is to diminish your very god’s abilities.

Hyzer, science isn't an opposition to God! I'm not going against science. It's the individuals I'm talking about, those who try to claim science counters the idea of God existing, which interestingly varies between individuals depending on their particular concept of God. It's been stated by some posters which l agree with - the sensible fact that some things are not possible to test.

That is a Christian narrative, science is out to destroy my relgion!

Like everybody else scientists range from atheist to Christian to Jewish to Muslim to any number of beliefs.

What IS done is people use science to refute specific claims made by mostly creationists. Young Earth Creationism. Fiath healing.

What has been argued on the forum for decades and I assume elsewhere on the et is the proofs of god offered by theists.

I doubt evolutionary scientists think they are on a mission to disprove religious faith.

On a science show the late Steheen Gould said who has the time to worry about religion? You should read his paperbacks.

I read a book Guide For The Perplexed by a Jew Moses Maimonides circa 1100. He wrote way back then that when interpretation of scripture conflicts with science interpretation of scripture has to change.

The Koran translation I read was from the early 1900s. In his commentary the translator said there is no conflict between science and relgion , they deal with different areas.

It is the Christians who get crazy when science conflicts with beliefs.

There is no pope of science, science is not a monolithic group with an ideology for or against religion. It is individuals working alone or in groups on an idea.

 

[steve_bank]

Sigh....

I have said many times given an ifinite unverse with no begihiing and end there is no need for any god or creator. The universe has always existed and always will.

I base that concussion based on causality, conservation of mass, and conservation of energy for which there has been no experimental exceptions.

If you abandon causality then you can imagine aything like a god winking the universe into existence from nothing.

Of course origins of the universe are no more provable scientifically than a god hypothesis.

My intro thermodynamics text said the Laws Of Thermodynaics are not provable but that no exceptions have been observed.

Depends on how you define the word “prove”.

Mt teccnical work made me fussy about what constutes proof.

The BB is a good theory, but does not prove the BB actually happened. And, the BB starts with a set of theoretical initial conditions without explaining where the conditions came from.

There is mo way to prove my belief in an infinite always was always will be universe. My conclusion is based on supposition based on conservation, I reject the idea of something from and to non existence.

Some take science and especially cosmology as the 'gospel truth', I do not.

 

[Shadowy Man]

Sigh....

I have said many times given an ifinite unverse with no begihiing and end there is no need for any god or creator. The universe has always existed and always will.

I base that concussion based on causality, conservation of mass, and conservation of energy for which there has been no experimental exceptions.

If you abandon causality then you can imagine aything like a god winking the universe into existence from nothing.

Of course origins of the universe are no more provable scientifically than a god hypothesis.

My intro thermodynamics text said the Laws Of Thermodynaics are not provable but that no exceptions have been observed.

Depends on how you define the word “prove”.

Mt teccnical work made me fussy about what constutes proof.

At the risk of a derail, how do you define "proof"?

The BB is a good theory, but does not prove the BB actually happened. And, the BB starts with a set of theoretical initial conditions without explaining where the conditions came from.

"actually happened" is an interesting term. And not really something that we may either get well defined or even understand. Similarly to this current discussion about evolution v. abiogenesis, the Big Bang Theory, as it pertains to the understanding of the change of the universe from a hot, dense state to its current state, is a perfectly useful scientific theory without necessarily being able to explain the source of the initial conditions.

There is mo way to prove my belief in an infinite always was always will be universe. My conclusion is based on supposition based on conservation, I reject the idea of something from and to non existence.

Sure. There's no reason why anyone, including scientists, can't have opinions about things that aren't necessarily currently scientifically proven. In fact, often these opinions are the genesis of scientific theories and only later do they get proven (or not).

Some take science and especially cosmology as the 'gospel truth', I do not.

Nor should you. Nor should anyone who understands the purpose and role of scientific inquiry in society.

 

[bilby]

Learner - honestly, why would you even want to try and counter science? Just accept it and claim that’s how your god intended it. I certainly wouldn’t mind if you did. You know, that’s how Christian scientists deal with this. To claim otherwise is to diminish your very god’s abilities.

Hyzer, science isn't an opposition to God! I'm not going against science. It's the individuals I'm talking about, those who try to claim science counters the idea of God existing, which interestingly varies between individuals depending on their particular concept of God. It's been stated by some posters which l agree with - the sensible fact that some things are not possible to test.

Science by definition and in practice studies the natural world. Any definition and attributes of a god that are stated by the god proponents as being supernatural are of no concern of scientists and not subject to study. Any god that is proposed that interacts with the natural world, then those actions can be investigated. Thus far the 'god-participating-directly' claims have not passed any test or investigation.

And we have arrived at a theoretical framework that tells us that any currently unknown interactions with matter must either occur on scales too large to effect individual humans, or at energies individual humans cannot survive.

So there are four (and only four) possibilities:

1) No supernatural events influence humans.

2) Supernatural influences must affect every human simultaneously and identically, as these influences occur only at huge (ie Solar System sized) scales.

3) Supernatural influences must impart at least sufficient energy to the humans involved to completely atomise that human, and likely a fairly large area around him.

4) Our understanding of fundamental physics is so wildly wrong that almost none of our modern technology should work at all.

We observe that option 4 is not the case.

We likewise observe that, when newly conceived humans arise, or human deaths occur, the arrival or departure of the soul doesn't level the building in which that event happens. That rules out option 3.

And we observe that neither conception nor death occur to all humans on Earth simultaneously, thereby ruling out option 2.

So, we must conclude, there cannot be any kind of supernatural soul, nor personal deity, that interacts with the material bodies of humans, in ways that we couldn't easily have detected by now.

It turns out (perhaps surprisingly), that one of the facts about reality that is possible to test, is the non-existence of souls; And that another such fact is the impossibility of divine intervention in individual human lives.

Nobody set out to prove this; Nobody was even thinking about theology or gods when this result became inescapable. It's a slightly surprising characteristic of matter - that it has very few interactions at what humans consider to be moderate energy densities. And it's a surprising but inevitable consequence of mass-energy equivalence, that no further (currently unknown) interactions can exist in that moderate energy density domain, without these being obvious in particle accelerator experiments.

That doesn't, of course, rule out all of religious belief. Just most of it, and all of the important tenets of all the largest religions in history, including all of the Abrahamic faiths.

And it doesn't rule out unknown interactions with matter; We certainly don't know everything. But we know enough about stuff that's bigger than atoms and smaller than solar systems, to be able to say with certainty that it doesn't interact with anything currently unknown.

Last I checked, humans are bigger than atoms, and smaller than solar systems.

 

[Bomb#20]

Hyzer, science isn't an opposition to God! I'm not going against science. It's the individuals I'm talking about, those who try to claim science counters the idea of God existing, which interestingly varies between individuals depending on their particular concept of God. It's been stated by some posters which l agree with - the sensible fact that some things are not possible to test.

Science by definition and in practice studies the natural world. Any definition and attributes of a god that are stated by the god proponents as being supernatural are of no concern of scientists and not subject to study. Any god that is proposed that interacts with the natural world, then those actions can be investigated. Thus far the 'god-participating-directly' claims have not passed any test or investigation.

And we have arrived at a theoretical framework that tells us that any currently unknown interactions with matter must either occur on scales too large to effect individual humans, or at energies individual humans cannot survive.

So there are four (and only four) possibilities:

1) No supernatural events influence humans.

2) Supernatural influences must affect every human simultaneously and identically, as these influences occur only at huge (ie Solar System sized) scales.

3) Supernatural influences must impart at least sufficient energy to the humans involved to completely atomise that human, and likely a fairly large area around him.

4) Our understanding of fundamental physics is so wildly wrong that almost none of our modern technology should work at all.

We observe that option 4 is not the case.
...

Your line of argument doesn't make any sense. You're pretty much taking for granted that any hypothetical god-candidate would have to interact with humans using some force/particle/field that's pretty much like the ones we already know about. Why on earth would any theist/deist/agnostic grant that premise?

In the first place, if our understanding of fundamental physics is wildly wrong, how the bejesus can you possibly infer that almost none of our modern technology should work at all? You would need a correct understanding of fundamental physics in order to figure out what our modern technology "should" do. Maybe what it "should" do is almost always exactly what we think it does. You might as well claim that if our modern 1895 understanding of fundamental physics is wildly wrong then none of our modern naval guns should hit their targets.

In the second place, our understanding of fundamental physics is wildly wrong and we've just gotten accustomed to putting up with it. Modern physics does not actually provide a method for calculating the probability of an observation; what it provides is a framework for a person to use to think about what might happen. "It is the man, not the method, that solves the problem." Our current understanding of modern physics says the wavefunction of a system always evolves according to one of two laws, the Dirac Equation or the Born Rule, but it does not specify the conditions for applying one law or the other. That is left to each theoretician's human judgment to decide. A god-candidate could be intervening to collapse wavefunctions right and left based on its desired results and/or whims, and we'd never have noticed.

In the third place, our understanding of fundamental physics only ever offers us probabilities, not certainties. When a wavefunction collapses it goes one way or the other with some frequency, but physics has nothing to say about whether it goes this way this time or this way next time. If a god-candidate has the ability to control which way the collapse happens but wants to remain undetected, all it needs to do is leave the choice to its random number generator 99.9999% of the time and only use its joystick at the rare moments when it cares about the outcome.

And in the fourth place, no understanding of fundamental physics can ever have any way to know that it is fundamental. There could always be another level of reality underneath. So we can never rule out the possibility that we're in a simulation. No matter what we observe, maybe there's a god-candidate who can control-Z the program, load the core image into the debugger, poke around, assign new values to a few variables, and then tell the simulation to continue. Or maybe the simulator copies core images to long-term storage every so often, and when the simulation evolves in an undesired direction the god-candidate simply restores the last recorded state, reseeds the random number generator, and tries a new path. Maybe that's the true meaning of "Jesus Saves."

 

[bilby]

You're pretty much taking for granted that any hypothetical god-candidate would have to interact with humans using some force/particle/field that's pretty much like the ones we already know about.

Yes.

Because our theoretical physics says that the ones we know about cannot interact with any unknown ones.

Of course, our theoretical physics could be totally wrong. That's my option 4; Your objection here seems to be that my other three options don't include option 4, which is an odd objection to make.

The rest of your post amounts to the claim that idiots might suggest that we are completely wrong, but everything we base on our (wrong) physics just works anyway, by pure luck.

Yes, they probably will. Idiots argue all kinds of crazy shit. Why should anyone listen to them?

Regardless of unknown details of such quantum scale phenomena as wave-function collapse, at the macroscopic scale of individual human beings, or of individual human brains, or even of individual human neurons, the aggregate physics is fully and completely understood, and the possibility of our thoughts being influenced by, or influencing, an unknown "soul", without producing easily detectable traces of that interaction, are zero.

There are plenty of things we don't know. Whether or not souls are a possibility turns out not to be one of those unknowns.

If, in order to save our souls, we need to hypothesise that reality itself doesn't exist (eg we live in a simulation that can be reset by its operator), then we literally know nothing about reality, and can't even have this (or any) conversation, if for no other reason than that the conversation itself is nonexistent.

We can destroy any unpleasant idea (such as the non-existence of souls), by taking the anti-solipsistic approach: I cannot know that I think, therefore maybe I'm not.

Sadly, doing so also destroys the entire rest of the universe, ourselves included, which seems like an excessive price to pay.

 

[Shadowy Man]

You might as well claim that if our modern 1895 understanding of fundamental physics is wildly wrong then none of our modern naval guns should hit their targets.

Are you suggesting that in 1895 the understanding of mechanics relevant to naval guns was wildly wrong?

I couldn’t quite follow your argument so I apologize if I am misunderstanding it.

 

[Cheerful Charlie]

It's the individuals I'm talking about, those who try to claim science counters the idea of God existing,

Can you name and/or quote this individual(s)?
Science is a methodology and is totally ambivalent about gods. It doesn’t counter (falsify) anything, evidence does. Falsifying a tri-Omni magical creator is not possible in principle, so it’s a mystery why you’re talking about scientists countering gods.
Scientists are people. Some are theists. Some are not.

Faith Versus Fact: Why Science and Religion Are Incompatible by Jerry A. Coyne

Science is based on empitical evidence. Religion lacks that.

 

[steve_bank]

BallistIcs is Newtonian mechanics. Still is.

Sold state electronics is quantum mechanics. The atomic model of an atom with particles in discrete orbits has been superseded.

Newtonian is now considered a limiting case of relativistic mechanics where v << C.

 

[Cheerful Charlie]

Even Newtonian physics is being redefined as a special case. Google MOND. Modified Newtonian Dynamics. Explaing the state of theobservable Universe by invoking dark matter is running into serious difficulries. MOND looks like it might be the better theory.

 

[Jarhyn]

You're pretty much taking for granted that any hypothetical god-candidate would have to interact with humans using some force/particle/field that's pretty much like the ones we already know about.

Yes.

Because our theoretical physics says that the ones we know about cannot interact with any unknown ones.

Of course, our theoretical physics could be totally wrong. That's my option 4; Your objection here seems to be that my other three options don't include option 4, which is an odd objection to make.

The rest of your post amounts to the claim that idiots might suggest that we are completely wrong, but everything we base on our (wrong) physics just works anyway, by pure luck.

Yes, they probably will. Idiots argue all kinds of crazy shit. Why should anyone listen to them?

Regardless of unknown details of such quantum scale phenomena as wave-function collapse, at the macroscopic scale of individual human beings, or of individual human brains, or even of individual human neurons, the aggregate physics is fully and completely understood, and the possibility of our thoughts being influenced by, or influencing, an unknown "soul", without producing easily detectable traces of that interaction, are zero.

There are plenty of things we don't know. Whether or not souls are a possibility turns out not to be one of those unknowns.

If, in order to save our souls, we need to hypothesise that reality itself doesn't exist (eg we live in a simulation that can be reset by its operator), then we literally know nothing about reality, and can't even have this (or any) conversation, if for no other reason than that the conversation itself is nonexistent.

We can destroy any unpleasant idea (such as the non-existence of souls), by taking the anti-solipsistic approach: I cannot know that I think, therefore maybe I'm not.

Sadly, doing so also destroys the entire rest of the universe, ourselves included, which seems like an excessive price to pay.

Bilby, let's imagine for a moment you are in a video game. The video game has a set of rules and nothing you can see can violate them. They are absolute laws which have never been broken and every interaction you have ever seen obeys those rules.

Now, let's for a moment say that the rules you see are that bits only flip states according to a fixed set of interactions confined to a few sets of "class behaviors" and so on.

What is being proposed here is that a creator of said video game can stop the game, use a side channel memory hacker to alter the class state in a volatile way not beholden to the rules of the simulation, and even access simulations, systems, where that information has been expressed.

IF there is a God, THEN this is a simulation, and the laws of physics such as we understand them would be quite a bit more mutable than we give credit, because they would exist in something capable of side-channel modification, even if we can't directly access the side channel ourselves.

I don't expect that it is, and I don't expect that it isn't, but dead to rights, our understanding of our laws of physics are so much "DFHack*" from not mattering.

One of the more important aspects to me is that most of the people I know who would do something like creating a universe simulation are not going to let out a disappointed zealot who feels betrayed for having an imperfect "God".

*DFHack is a game memory modification suite hooked into the rendering engine of Dwarf Fortress. By acting as a pass-through layer it gains access to the DF memory space to claim mutexes, inject queues, and ultimately hook the process so that the system can be put on pause and the system state can be modified outside normal the function of the simulation.

 

[steve_bank]

Even Newtonian physics is being redefined as a special case. Google MOND. Modified Newtonian Dynamics. Explaing the state of theobservable Universe by invoking dark matter is running into serious difficulries. MOND looks like it might be the better theory.

Well, physicists have to find something to do.

 

[Cheerful Charlie]

Like figuring out how the Universe really works.

 

[Bomb#20]

You might as well claim that if our modern 1895 understanding of fundamental physics is wildly wrong then none of our modern naval guns should hit their targets.

Are you suggesting that in 1895 the understanding of mechanics relevant to naval guns was wildly wrong?

I couldn’t quite follow your argument so I apologize if I am misunderstanding it.

Yes, of course it was wildly wrong. In 1895 the understanding of mechanics was that time and space were absolute, that shells didn't get heavier when heated and accelerated, that the energy delivered to the shell by radiation from the hot combustion products was delivered continuously rather than one photon at a time, and that the laws explaining what happens when you fire a gun are deterministic rather than probabilistic. It is perfectly possible for a theory to be wildly wrong in a dozen ways and still give a very close approximation to a correct prediction. Bilby's assumption that we are not in an analogous position today is unsupported.

 

[Bomb#20]

You're pretty much taking for granted that any hypothetical god-candidate would have to interact with humans using some force/particle/field that's pretty much like the ones we already know about.

Yes.

Because our theoretical physics says that the ones we know about cannot interact with any unknown ones.

Show your work.

It's generally taken for granted in theoretical physics that the ones we know about do interact with unknown ones. Some of the unknown ones are given place-holder names like "dark matter", "dark energy", "inflaton field" and so forth; and there are a hundred other possible unknown ones physicists are actively trying to turn into known ones in pursuit of Nobel Prizes.

Of course, our theoretical physics could be totally wrong. That's my option 4; Your objection here seems to be that my other three options don't include option 4, which is an odd objection to make.

No, it doesn't seem to be that at all -- you read that into my post by selective omission. I explicitly addressed your option 4. Which part of

In the first place, if our understanding of fundamental physics is wildly wrong, how the bejesus can you possibly infer that almost none of our modern technology should work at all? You would need a correct understanding of fundamental physics in order to figure out what our modern technology "should" do.​

didn't you understand?

The rest of your post amounts to the claim that idiots might suggest that we are completely wrong, but everything we base on our (wrong) physics just works anyway, by pure luck.

Hey, good work bringing us back on topic -- back to evolution. You are making a creationist argument. Just like you, creationists groundlessly claim the only alternative to their unevidenced extraordinary claim is pure luck. It's ridiculous. Newtonian physics makes all manner of completely wrong assumptions and yet is a darn good approximation of relativity and quantum mechanics across a broad domain of applicability, not by pure luck, but because the math of relativity and quantum mechanics imply it is. And if it turns out that a fuller understanding of physics implies relativity and quantum mechanics are wildly wrong in a dozen ways, it will likewise undoubtedly also explain the mathematical reasons for why they are darn good approximations.

If, in order to save our souls, we need to hypothesise that reality itself doesn't exist (eg we live in a simulation that can be reset by its operator), then we literally know nothing about reality, and can't even have this (or any) conversation, if for no other reason than that the conversation itself is nonexistent.

How the bejesus do you get from the premise that we live in a simulation that can be reset by its operator to the deduction that reality itself doesn't exist and the conversation itself is nonexistent? What, if you find out your opponent over the web wasn't a human but a chess program, that means your chess game never happened? Simulations are a part of reality, not an alternative to it.

 

[bilby]

You're pretty much taking for granted that any hypothetical god-candidate would have to interact with humans using some force/particle/field that's pretty much like the ones we already know about.

Yes.

Because our theoretical physics says that the ones we know about cannot interact with any unknown ones.

Of course, our theoretical physics could be totally wrong. That's my option 4; Your objection here seems to be that my other three options don't include option 4, which is an odd objection to make.

The rest of your post amounts to the claim that idiots might suggest that we are completely wrong, but everything we base on our (wrong) physics just works anyway, by pure luck.

Yes, they probably will. Idiots argue all kinds of crazy shit. Why should anyone listen to them?

Regardless of unknown details of such quantum scale phenomena as wave-function collapse, at the macroscopic scale of individual human beings, or of individual human brains, or even of individual human neurons, the aggregate physics is fully and completely understood, and the possibility of our thoughts being influenced by, or influencing, an unknown "soul", without producing easily detectable traces of that interaction, are zero.

There are plenty of things we don't know. Whether or not souls are a possibility turns out not to be one of those unknowns.

If, in order to save our souls, we need to hypothesise that reality itself doesn't exist (eg we live in a simulation that can be reset by its operator), then we literally know nothing about reality, and can't even have this (or any) conversation, if for no other reason than that the conversation itself is nonexistent.

We can destroy any unpleasant idea (such as the non-existence of souls), by taking the anti-solipsistic approach: I cannot know that I think, therefore maybe I'm not.

Sadly, doing so also destroys the entire rest of the universe, ourselves included, which seems like an excessive price to pay.

Bilby, let's imagine for a moment you are in a video game. The video game has a set of rules and nothing you can see can violate them. They are absolute laws which have never been broken and every interaction you have ever seen obeys those rules.

Now, let's for a moment say that the rules you see are that bits only flip states according to a fixed set of interactions confined to a few sets of "class behaviors" and so on.

What is being proposed here is that a creator of said video game can stop the game, use a side channel memory hacker to alter the class state in a volatile way not beholden to the rules of the simulation, and even access simulations, systems, where that information has been expressed.

IF there is a God, THEN this is a simulation, and the laws of physics such as we understand them would be quite a bit more mutable than we give credit, because they would exist in something capable of side-channel modification, even if we can't directly access the side channel ourselves.

I don't expect that it is, and I don't expect that it isn't, but dead to rights, our understanding of our laws of physics are so much "DFHack*" from not mattering.

One of the more important aspects to me is that most of the people I know who would do something like creating a universe simulation are not going to let out a disappointed zealot who feels betrayed for having an imperfect "God".

*DFHack is a game memory modification suite hooked into the rendering engine of Dwarf Fortress. By acting as a pass-through layer it gains access to the DF memory space to claim mutexes, inject queues, and ultimately hook the process so that the system can be put on pause and the system state can be modified outside normal the function of the simulation.

All of which is irrelevant to the question of whether humans have souls that survive their death.

But definitely falls into anti-solipsism.

Yes, it's possible that we're in a simulation. No, that's not a useful idea.

I think I think, therefore I think I am. If I am wrong, then I am not, and literally anything goes, and nobody including the people who are hypothesising that we are in a simulation knows shit about shit.

If your hypothesis is correct, then all hypotheses are useless, including yours.

 

[bilby]

It's generally taken for granted in theoretical physics that the ones we know about do interact with unknown ones. Some of the unknown ones are given place-holder names like "dark matter", "dark energy", "inflaton field" and so forth; and there are a hundred other possible unknown ones physicists are actively trying to turn into known ones in pursuit of Nobel Prizes.

And not a single one of them has the ability to influence a single human being (but not simultaneously influence every human on the planet in the exact same way) without destroying him.

 

[bilby]

Simulations are a part of reality, not an alternative to it.

Simulations are NOT a part of the things they are simulating. If reality itself is a simulation, then the simulation is not a part of reality, and nothing we can do from within reality can tell us anything about the greater reality inhabited by the simulator(s).

 

[Shadowy Man]

You might as well claim that if our modern 1895 understanding of fundamental physics is wildly wrong then none of our modern naval guns should hit their targets.

Are you suggesting that in 1895 the understanding of mechanics relevant to naval guns was wildly wrong?

I couldn’t quite follow your argument so I apologize if I am misunderstanding it.

Yes, of course it was wildly wrong. In 1895 the understanding of mechanics was that time and space were absolute, that shells didn't get heavier when heated and accelerated, that the energy delivered to the shell by radiation from the hot combustion products was delivered continuously rather than one photon at a time, and that the laws explaining what happens when you fire a gun are deterministic rather than probabilistic. It is perfectly possible for a theory to be wildly wrong in a dozen ways and still give a very close approximation to a correct prediction. Bilby's assumption that we are not in an analogous position today is unsupported.

And you say this based on your expertise as a physicist?

what exactly do you think “wrong” means in physics? I think I know how you would answer that but I find it likely that a physicist would answer it differently than you.