Intelligent Design

[Thor 2]

it's an unfair request. The theist believes everything is God at work. The atheist believes nothing is. They're both so convinced their view of reality is correct, everything becomes filtered through their mindset. If I think this is all a dream, why would evolution persuade me that it's not? Science, which an idealist will tell you is a useful method for exploring the dream, just shows how clever the dreamer is.

Now steady on Fudbucker, I've been cutting you some slack here. Although an atheist myself I am only 99% sure there is no god directing things, (100% sure it's not Jesus Christ's pop), I am prepared to listen to arguments proving his existence.

If some clear unambiguous religious text, showed a knowledge of some phenomena the writers were not able to determine themselves by observation or deduction, that would be compelling........ yes?

If an otherwise unexplainable event could be brought on by prayer, and the evidence that this happens was able to be shown, that would also be compelling ....... yes?

Regarding the latter, I read that some clergy manage to reverse the flow of a river. When some serious testing was attempted the results were wanting however.

 

[Meadmaker]

Let us say the first round determined one of the universal constants.

Why?

The universal constants are observed. They aren't random trials. As Dave Rogers put it, we don't know whether or not the coins used to determine the universal constants had two heads.

Let's try a different thought experiment. If God were to design a universe, would it look like the one that we have? What is the probability that he would design this universe? It's a meaningless question, isn't it? We know that if God designed our universe, it would look like this one, and if God did not design our universe, it would look like this one.

All this talk of probabilities is absurd.

To illustrate why, just in case someone doesn't get it, and finds it somehow appealing, we'll start with one universal constant, the speed of light, just because lots of people know it. In order to talk of a probability that the speed of light would be what it is, we would have to talk about all the possible values that it could have been. So what is the range of values that c could have been. We know that if it had a different value, we wouldn't exist. Atoms would fall apart. Matter wouldn't be stable. All that stuff. So, how lucky are we? What could c have been. It is approximately 3x10⁸ m/sec. Could it have been 2x10⁸ meters per second? Could it have been 10⁹m/sec. Could it have been 1.4*10^-5 m/sec?

In order to assign a probability to it, we would have to know what all possible outcomes were, just so we could know what probability to assign it.

Such questions don't even make sense.

We know that F=ma. What is the probability that F=ma. Could F have equaled m*v? Aren't we lucky that it happened to equal ma. That's rridiculous, right? Of course. But no more ridiculous than asking about probabilities for universal constants.

 

[Pixel42]

No offense, but you have bought a unicorn there. All combinations have equal probability.

Mostly, we agree, but you are wrong on this. I suggest you do not pursue it.

No, MikeG is right. All specific sequences have equal probability, but some combinations are more likely than others because there are more ways to get them.

Let's use 5 instead of 50 to save typing.

There is only one sequence of 5 heads. This one:

HHHHH

How many sequences are there with 4 heads and 1 tail? Well there's

HHHHT
HHHTH
HHTHH
HTHHH
THHHH

I make that 5.

So there are five times as many ways to get a combination of 4 heads and one tail than there are to get a combination of 5 heads, making the former more likely to come up than the latter.

But none of those 5 specific sequences (HHTHH say) is any more likely to come up than HHHHH.

Got it now?

ETA: whoever said permutations was a better term than specific sequences was right, but it's over forty years since I got my Maths degree so I'm a bit rusty on the nomenclature.

 

[Fudbucker]

Now steady on Fudbucker, I've been cutting you some slack here. Although an atheist myself I am only 99% sure there is no god directing things, (100% sure it's not Jesus Christ's pop), I am prepared to listen to arguments proving his existence.

I'm not a theist. I merely don't know. If anything, I lean towards idealism. The laughable contortions that materialists go through trying to explain something as fundamental as consciousness rules out materialistic conceptions of reality consisting solely of mind-independent matter. That leaves idealism or dualism. God is possible in either one.

If some clear unambiguous religious text, showed a knowledge of some phenomena the writers were not able to determine themselves by observation or deduction, that would be compelling........ yes?

Compelling for what, the existence of God? Let's pretend the Bible is full of predictions of modern scientific truths. That still doesn't get you any closer to theism. Maybe it's all part of a simulation, or aliens wanting to know how we would handle religions that make accurate predictions of things. If the Bible was really like that, I would still think the Christian God a complete joke.

If an otherwise unexplainable event could be brought on by prayer, and the evidence that this happens was able to be shown, that would also be compelling ....... yes?

It would force one to revise some beliefs about reality, but the same problems as the above would apply. Is it really prayer, or some latent psi-ability? Who's answering the prayer, an alien? A simulation programmer?

Regarding the latter, I read that some clergy manage to reverse the flow of a river. When some serious testing was attempted the results were wanting however.

Maybe the river really reversed, everyone's mouths dropped, and then everyone's memories were changed. Maybe that happens all the time.

 

[Mojo]

I seriously have to answer this?

OK, let's take two coin tosses:

HHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH
and
HHHHHHHTTTHTTTTTTHHTHHHTTTTHHHHHHHTTTTHTHTT

Which result strikes you as "not fair"? That is to say, which result is more likely due to interference than randomness?

Hmmm.....

Which sequence is less likely?

 

[Lukraak_Sisser]

I'm not a theist. I merely don't know. If anything, I lean towards idealism. The laughable contortions that materialists go through trying to explain something as fundamental as consciousness rules out materialistic conceptions of reality consisting solely of mind-independent matter. That leaves idealism or dualism. God is possible in either one.

Leaving aside the problem that for some reason we are then never ment to speculate how a God would spontaneously appear, attain sentience and act on this universe, what contortions have you seen in explaining consciousness? It's just an emergent property of complex neuron interactions. We can't fully understand it yet, but that does not mean we never will.

Compelling for what, the existence of God? Let's pretend the Bible is full of predictions of modern scientific truths. That still doesn't get you any closer to theism. Maybe it's all part of a simulation, or aliens wanting to know how we would handle religions that make accurate predictions of things. If the Bible was really like that, I would still think the Christian God a complete joke.

But there is no evidence for any of that.

It would force one to revise some beliefs about reality, but the same problems as the above would apply. Is it really prayer, or some latent psi-ability? Who's answering the prayer, an alien? A simulation programmer?

But there are no actual proven reports of prayer being answered that go above placebo/chance

Maybe the river really reversed, everyone's mouths dropped, and then everyone's memories were changed. Maybe that happens all the time.

And while all of this is a nice philosophical debate, the thing is, ID is touted as a science. Yet, like the fine tuning argument, it ultimately comes down to faith. a god / aliens / something made it this way and we are unable to ever figure it out, so stop looking. And that is the difference between the theistic worldview and the materialistic worldview. Accept without thinking, or try to discover as much as we can and work from there.
And so far each thing that was supposed to be accepted as gods will we discovered the actual underlying cause and are able to understand it, and it turned out there was no supernatural cause. In many cases this ever led to immediate improvements in life.
Plagues are of course the easiest example. Thousands of years of praying and asking for (the) god(s) intercession yielded more plagues. 150 years of actually understanding what causes a disease exterminated most of them.

 

[MikeG]

No offense, but you have bought a unicorn there. All combinations have equal probability.

Mostly, we agree, but you are wrong on this. I suggest you do not pursue it.

No. You miss the point. If we are talking about the total number of heads expected in a toss of 50 coins, then 23, 24, 25, 26, 27 heads is a much more likely outcome than 50. If Fudbucker hadn't said:

...... 50 heads is just as likely as any other combination..........

but had instead said "just as likely as any other sequence", then he would have been right, and he would have saved us 2 pages of explanation. Pixel 42 explains it very clearly.

 

[Aridas]

I'm not a theist. I merely don't know. If anything, I lean towards idealism. The laughable contortions that materialists go through trying to explain something as fundamental as consciousness rules out materialistic conceptions of reality consisting solely of mind-independent matter. That leaves idealism or dualism. God is possible in either one.

If you're not a theist, you're an atheist, by definition. A weak atheist (like many of those who post here), by that description, but still an atheist. Incidentally, even under the premise of materialism, there are ways to fit in a "god" or "gods." Even if materialism is indeed the case, that does not remove the possibility that our universe was intentionally designed to be the way it is, after all, as an easy example.

Compelling for what, the existence of God? Let's pretend the Bible is full of predictions of modern scientific truths. That still doesn't get you any closer to theism. Maybe it's all part of a simulation, or aliens wanting to know how we would handle religions that make accurate predictions of things. If the Bible was really like that, I would still think the Christian God a complete joke.

It would be a big step closer to theism. "There's good evidence of something going on" is vastly better than "there's no good evidence of anything like that going on." It wouldn't be proof, sure, but you're not thinking your arguments through very well, by the look of it.

It would force one to revise some beliefs about reality, but the same problems as the above would apply. Is it really prayer, or some latent psi-ability? Who's answering the prayer, an alien? A simulation programmer?

If it were an alien or simulation programmer, is there a good reason why they couldn't also qualify as a "god?"

Maybe the river really reversed, everyone's mouths dropped, and then everyone's memories were changed. Maybe that happens all the time.

There are always alternate unfalsifiable explanations. So what?

 

[Pixel42]

Which sequence is less likely?

The point, of course, is that there are far more possible combinations of heads and tails that do not form a pattern that's meaningful to us than there are combinations that do, which is why it would indeed be surprising if one of the few that do did come up.

Similarly there are far more sequences of digits that aren't meaningful to us than are (like the digits of pi), so again it would be very surprising if one of those very few meaningful sequences came up.

There was a bit of fun research recently published about why jumbled cables always seem to get themselves into knots that have to be unravelled, and that also comes down to the fact that there are simply more ways to produce chaos than there are to produce order.

 

[Mojo]

The point, of course, is that there are far more possible combinations of heads and tails that do not form a pattern that's meaningful to us than there are combinations that do, which is why it would indeed be surprising if one of the few that do did come up.

Similarly there are far more sequences of digits that aren't meaningful to us than are (like the digits of pi), so again it would be very surprising if one of those very few meaningful sequences came up.

Yes, but one of them coming up in a single draw does not mean it's fixed.

 

[Pixel42]

Yes, but one of them coming up in a single draw does not mean it's fixed.

Indeed. Especially if the person subsequently noting the result of the draw only exists because that particular ticket came up.

 

[MikeG]

Just because it's bugging me, I'm going to explain the coin tossing thing further. To save typing, let's use three instead of 50 for the number of tosses. Every toss is independent of all others, and there is a 50/50 possibility of head or tail, or a chance of 0.5 for each.

With three tosses of the coin, there are 2x2x2=8 possible sequences:

HHH
HHT
HTH
THH
HTT
THT
TTH
TTT

Now, this is the point where Fudbucker got confused. Each of those sequences is equally likely. Each one has a 1/8th chance of being the sequence that was tossed, or a possibility of 0.125. OK

However, examine that list again.

A/.There is one combination of 3 heads
B/.There is one combination of 3 tails.
C/.There are 3 combinations of 2 heads and a tail.
D/.There are 3 combinations of 2 tails and a head.

The chances of each combination are as follows, and are derived from adding up the odds for each sequence:

A/: 1/8 or 0.125
B/: 1/8 or 0.125
C/: 1/8 + 1/8 + 1/8 = 3/8 or 0.375
D/: 1/8 + 1/8 + 1/8 = 3/8 or 0.375

Checking we've got that right by adding the bolded together .....Yep, they add up to 1 (certainty).

So, all the possible sequences are equally as likely, but the combination of a head and 2 tails or a tail and two heads is 3 times more likely than that of all heads or all tails.

I'll leave you to work out the case for n, and apply that to 50.

 

[PartSkeptic]

The lack of understanding of simple probability of some on this site is truly astounding.

I hope you guys like to bet, and are prepared to put your money where your mouth is. Fudbucker and I can take it off you suckers.

Darn, my conscience just told me that what I am proposing is unethical - it would be like taking candy from a baby.

 

[abaddon]

No, MikeG is right. All specific sequences have equal probability, but some combinations are more likely than others because there are more ways to get them.

Let's use 5 instead of 50 to save typing.

There is only one sequence of 5 heads. This one:

HHHHH

How many sequences are there with 4 heads and 1 tail? Well there's

HHHHT
HHHTH
HHTHH
HTHHH
THHHH

I make that 5.

So there are five times as many ways to get a combination of 4 heads and one tail than there are to get a combination of 5 heads, making the former more likely to come up than the latter.

But none of those 5 specific sequences (HHTHH say) is any more likely to come up than HHHHH.

Got it now?

ETA: whoever said permutations was a better term than specific sequences was right, but it's over forty years since I got my Maths degree so I'm a bit rusty on the nomenclature.

No. You miss the point. If we are talking about the total number of heads expected in a toss of 50 coins, then 23, 24, 25, 26, 27 heads is a much more likely outcome than 50. If Fudbucker hadn't said:



but had instead said "just as likely as any other sequence", then he would have been right, and he would have saved us 2 pages of explanation. Pixel 42 explains it very clearly.

Well there you go. Clearly, I borked my interpretation. My bad. Apologies.

 

[Donn]

it's an unfair request. The theist believes everything is God at work. The atheist believes nothing is. They're both so convinced their view of reality is correct, everything becomes filtered through their mindset. If I think this is all a dream, why would evolution persuade me that it's not? Science, which an idealist will tell you is a useful method for exploring the dream, just shows how clever the dreamer is.

The Idealist spins in one place, forming an impervious shield. Within, there is much tap-tapping as they correct the world.

 

[abaddon]

The lack of understanding of simple probability of some on this site is truly astounding.

I hope you guys like to bet, and are prepared to put your money where your mouth is. Fudbucker and I can take it off you suckers.

Darn, my conscience just told me that what I am proposing is unethical - it would be like taking candy from a baby.

Would that be like the way the nukes were fired off in September? Is that how certain you are?

 

[Donn]

The point, of course, is that there are far more possible combinations of heads and tails that do not form a pattern that's meaningful to us than there are combinations that do, which is why it would indeed be surprising if one of the few that do did come up.

Similarly there are far more sequences of digits that aren't meaningful to us than are (like the digits of pi), so again it would be very surprising if one of those very few meaningful sequences came up.

My brain glazes-over when stats appear, but while reading your post I thought:
How many special numbers exist that we don't know about yet? They might also be appearing and going unnoticed because we don't know to notice.

That somehow makes the appearance of numbers we do notice a little suspect to me. I am probably making a mistake.

 

[Pixel42]

The lack of understanding of simple probability of some on this site is truly astounding. .

The only posters on this thread consistently demonstrating a lack of understanding of simple probability are you and Fudbucker.

Abaddon also demonstrated a lack of understanding but, unlike you and Fudbucker, he is willing to learn.

 

[Donn]

Well there you go. Clearly, I borked my interpretation. My bad. Apologies.

 

[Porpoise of Life]

The lack of understanding of simple probability of some on this site is truly astounding.

I hope you guys like to bet, and are prepared to put your money where your mouth is. Fudbucker and I can take it off you suckers.

Darn, my conscience just told me that what I am proposing is unethical - it would be like taking candy from a baby.

There certainly are posters whose understanding of probability is sub par. Mike's calculations however, are correct.

As soon as you start cheating, probability goes out the window.
The fact that you can rig a game in order to fleece people does not say anything about the distribution of probabilities in a fair/random system.

Since you're suggesting that someone manipulated the variables in order to create us, and that that could not have happened by chance... It's up to you to prove that.
All you have is "But we're here, so of course someone meant for us to be here!"

I wonder whether you object to the puddle analogy so much because you don't understand it, or because you do and you don't have a good answer...