…and this is a 
D'Souza vs Hitchens
Category: Kooks
Posted on: October 24, 2007 9:09 PM, by PZ Myers
D'Souza is crowing over his debate with Hitchens — he's got a YouTube clip on his site that he seems to think exemplifies his triumph. His arguments there are 1) the fine-tuning argument for God, which is pathetic, as Douglas Adams scotched that one long ago, and 2) the usual claim that atheists are the major murderers of the 20th century, which is again silly — blame totalitarian ideologies for that, not philosophical positions on the existence of deities.
But then, D'Souza is running a poll to judge the winner. I think you can all go over there, view the clip, and judge for yourself how to vote. I have to agree that Hitchens wasn't at his best in the segment D'Souza chose to show, but he is still ten times smarter than the little wingnut pipsqueak.
Comments
ok...OT here, but not sure where else to go with this ques...
I am an avid evolution believer, have a colleague who is same (yeah!)...we were talking the other day and he asked this question: if evolution can go anywhere BIOLOGICALLY, (did I use the word correctly???) why did everything that is not an insect end up with 2 eyes and 4 limbs?
1st, I tried to thing of something without 4 limbs or 2 eyes in any form (couldn't - but I'm an idiot. anyway...)
And then I wondered myself..."hmmmm..." (I thinks to myself...) and then I thought..."ahaha! I know where I can find out!" Off to PZ's blog...
So here I am, idiot du jour, asking:
A: Does everything have 2 eyes / 4 limbs ('cepting those insects, of course.) and...
B. Why we have all ALL of us evolved to such similar forms?
Help??
spam
Posted by: spam spam bacon spam | October 24, 2007 9:25 PM
The debate will be shown on Book TV this Saturday. That is, October 27 at 7:00 PM EST.
http://www.booktv.org/program.aspx?ProgramId=8788&SectionName=&PlayMedia=No
I am sure that after this weekend, it will also be available as a podcast.
Posted by: Janine | October 24, 2007 9:30 PM
I liked that Hitchens kept his drink on his podium (looked like a beer to me). It says a lot about how seriously anyone takes D'Souza.
Posted by: Dan | October 24, 2007 9:32 PM
Not by a long shot. Plants, fungus, spiders, lobsters, any number of things from the deep sea... the 2 eyes and 4 limbs is actually very uncommon. It doesn't appear that way because we pay much more attention to mammals than anything else, probably for reasons of similarity and food.
Posted by: Dustin | October 24, 2007 9:34 PM
sigh ... polling for the truth ... not again! :-(
Typical religious desperation in my opinion. When you can't back up your position with objective evidence, cater to the subjective :-(
Posted by: Ben Abbott | October 24, 2007 9:35 PM
Well, spam spam bacon spam, there are always our cephalopod friends, spiders, crabs, starfish, and you may appreciate this article about the pineal gland. Lotsa stuff, don't be a vertebrate chauvinist! ;^)
Posted by: Mena | October 24, 2007 9:38 PM
Not everything has 4 legs and 2 eyes - see, for example, snakes and whales (and spiders, which are arachnids, not insects, though both are arthropods, if I remember right). But the answer to your question is that evolution cannot go just anywhere. That, in fact, is one of the major pieces of evidence that evolution actually occurred (the whole "descent with modification" stuff). See PZ's posts on Hox genes for a small but significant piece of that puzzle.
Posted by: Owen | October 24, 2007 9:38 PM
Why must a Christian "prove" the existence of God while an atheist may assume the non-existence of God. Darwinism taken to its conclusion must agree that something in the universe is eternal. Why would we agree that cosmic dust is eternal and has no beginning or end and not accept the existence of an eternal creator for the universe. Such a debate will not change the mind of any who have decided to deny God's existence. Because an individual chooses to close his mind to a truth does not make it any less a truth.
Posted by: Tom Douglas | October 24, 2007 9:39 PM
Oops. I did not know the debate has already been posted.
http://www.tkc.edu/debate/
Posted by: Janine | October 24, 2007 9:41 PM
Does everything have 2 eyes / 4 limbs ('cepting those insects, of course.) and..
Actually, we thought of those... I should clarify, we're thinking mammals here. So no bacteria, plants and non-mammalian sea life.
We were wondering how if the primordial "blurp" that popped our single celled ancestors onto the shoreline, how did we all work towards 4 limbs/2 eyes ...? (With those exceptions mentioned above...?)
Posted by: spam spam bacon spam | October 24, 2007 9:41 PM
Do you go around denying the existence of dragons and unicorns, you close-minded bastard?
Posted by: Dan | October 24, 2007 9:43 PM
1. Do snakes have vestiges of appendages?
2. You're saying evolution must go somewhere.... We agree. But why go to 2 eyes/4 appendages?
3. I'll check the post.... Thanks!
Posted by: spam spam bacon spam | October 24, 2007 9:48 PM
The 2 eyes/4 limb animals are part of the same clade. They are related by descent with modification. Lobed finned fish gave rise to amphibians, reptiles, mammals.
You look a lot like your cousin and have a similar structure to your very distant cousins, the reptiles.
This is an example of evolutionary channelization.
Evolution cannot do everything. It is also blind.
Posted by: raven | October 24, 2007 9:51 PM
Tom Douglas wrote:
Exactly. But religious assertions with absolutely no evidential basis backed up by appeals to ignorance, authority, and dogma do not qualify as "truth," Tom. Never have and never will. Nor will simply calling your nonsensical yet ardently-held beliefs a "truth" make them so.Posted by: H. Humbert | October 24, 2007 9:51 PM
Yeah, what raven @ 13 said.
Posted by: Owen | October 24, 2007 9:56 PM
Well duh, we know. 20% of the population believes Galileo was wrong, more believe the earth is 6,000 years old, Noah had a Big Boat full of dinosaurs, and evolution isn't a fact. Fewer believe HIV/AIDS doesn't exist and that the Germ Theory of Disease is wrong.
There is no end to delusional nonsense.
Posted by: raven | October 24, 2007 9:57 PM
In response to spam spam bacon spam.
Evolution actually predicts that similarities in body plan will be found in species, with more fundamental similarities shared by larger numbers of species. The four limb, two eye plan you mentioned is a very basic component, which likely evolved along with very early vertebrates. Once it was in place, it would have become "locked in" as the species diversified, so that mutation that disrupted it would be lethal (think 3 legged baby with crazy skeletal problems). Also, it's not surprising that its 4 legs and two eyes our other possibilities, 2 eyes are needed for depth perception, and 4 limbs allow stability and control without becoming cumbersome.
Posted by: AttemptingReason | October 24, 2007 9:57 PM
Because you want us to believe YOUR personal fairy tale, and then want to make us live in your fairy world.
Whereas, we are not "making" you believe in evolution: you are living it and we are not stopping you. :)
Posted by: spam spam bacon spam | October 24, 2007 9:59 PM
WTF are you trying to say here?
Posted by: Azkyroth | October 24, 2007 10:02 PM
thank you for sending us there
Posted by: Skeptic4u | October 24, 2007 10:03 PM
"Why must a Christian "prove" the existence of God while an atheist may assume the non-existence of God."
-Tom Douglas
In the absence of evidence, the default assumption is non-existence, for anything, even God. If it were the other way around, logical people would assume that fairies, goblins, etc exist, because there is no evidence for them. To claim the existence of the Christian God is a fundamental claim, and has huge implications for the way the universe works. If we don't see evidence for these implications, there is no reason to believe in that god. Atheists either don't think there is enough evidence for such a huge claim, or think that the evidence used is false (such as arguments from design and morality).
Posted by: AttemptingReason | October 24, 2007 10:08 PM
OK...my takeaway is this: our primordial ancestors started out as fish? I thought we were blurps of oooze on the sand... no? we flopped out?
And why always 4 appendages/binocular vision thru all the crazy paths we all took in crazy different evolutionary directions? What is it about 4 limbs and 2 eyes?
I mean, to compare, insects show us that we COULD have a bunch of crazy variations and make them work, so why not mammals?
Posted by: spam spam bacon spam | October 24, 2007 10:13 PM
Tom:
You are putting words in the mouth of science. There are theories about time and beginnings and endings, but nothing is simply agreed upon and believed with no further investigation.
And, of course, you don't mean just any old eternal creator do you? You mean the one that smote the Egyptians, and spoke in a burning bush, and made Adam and Eve, and had a son, and gets pissed off if you take his name in vain. Right?
Posted by: RamblinDude | October 24, 2007 10:15 PM
Am I a bad person for thinking someone had snuck a goatse onto his page in the featured gallery bit (and for thinking it appropriate)? Here's the pic (don't worry).
Posted by: AlanWCan | October 24, 2007 10:16 PM
spam spam bacon spam: Actually, we thought of those... I should clarify, we're thinking mammals here. So no bacteria, plants and non-mammalian sea life.
You've just answered your own question. You've limited your search to animals descended along a tetrapod lineage. I think Robert May said to a first approximation all species are insects. So, rephrase your question: why do all species (except the odd few exceptions) have 6 legs, an exoskeleton made of chitin, etc. There are plenty of examples of different types of bauplans, just not if you limit yourself to one lineage. It's akin to deciding that all people speak English (or French, or Spanish, or Japanese, or whatever...) based only on a quick look at members of your immediate family, discounting everyone else as the exceptions.
Posted by: AlanWCan | October 24, 2007 10:24 PM
It is an interesting question. Why isn't there a greater diversity of basic body plans among large mammals and reptiles? I don't really buy the "locked in" hypothesis. I think it's more likely just a matter of basic engineering. The "one head, two eyes, four limbs" body plan is just more adaptive for large land-dwelling species across all natural environments than any of the alternatives.
Posted by: Jason | October 24, 2007 10:24 PM
Oh, boy. A panadaptationist in our midst.
Do you also argue that it is fortunate that we have noses, that our spectacles do not fall off our faces?
Posted by: PZ Myers | October 24, 2007 10:27 PM
Well... insects don't have that many crazy variations on a theme, even though they do have a lot. Basically insects have 6 legs and X body segments (the number you chose for X depends on who you ask). The way the tagma develop in all orders of insects is the same and they arise from the same ancestral segments. The legs always appear on the same segments as do the wings and the various different caudal appendages and outgrowths of the exoskeleton. The mouth parts are modified in a variety of ways but with careful examination it becomes clear (even to the relatively untrained eye) how they arose from the same ancestral state (which was actually base elements of appendages). Some things lost appendages or gained appendages, but basically insects aren't all that special.
Phylogenetic constraints have a lot to do with how things look.
Posted by: Nutmeg | October 24, 2007 10:30 PM
We also have eyelids to keep the dust from building up on our contact lenses, and we have thumbs to make toilet paper more efficient, PZ.
Posted by: Dan | October 24, 2007 10:51 PM
Plus I can't help but wonder at the death toll if those earlier armies for God had had access to machine guns, revolvers, repeating rifles, hand grenades, howitzers, heavy artillery, land mines, aircraft, bombs, tanks and more, not to mention trucks to move troops rapidly from A to B.
Posted by: Dave | October 24, 2007 10:58 PM
@spam spam bacon spam
The first vertebrates were fish, so all land vertebrates evolved from fish, not just some slime on a beach (the first cell was probably amoeba-like, but it lived in water). Amphibians were the first vertebrates to come out of the water and you can blame them for the four limbs, two eyes body plan. In fact, water pollution these days is producing all sorts of mutant amphibians (i.e. http://oregonstate.edu/dept/ncs/photos/frog2.jpg ). Considering how you don't have a species of five-legged frogs hopping around, four legs/two eyes seem to be a better adaptation, passed down through the reptiles to the mammals. If it ain't broke, don't fix it.
Posted by: DJH | October 24, 2007 10:59 PM
"Why would we agree that cosmic dust is eternal and has no beginning or end and not accept the existence of an eternal creator for the universe."
Because it makes perfect sense. Because if we postulate a creator, then the next question would then be who or what created the creator. To which I'm sure someone like you would offer the cop-out answer that the god is eternal. Well why not cut out the middleman and just presume that the universe is eternal? There's no need for a creator.
Posted by: Rey Fox | October 24, 2007 11:03 PM
We don't.
See Bang, Big.
Posted by: Epikt | October 24, 2007 11:06 PM
Presumably, we should expect any large, land-based extraterrestrial species to also share our basic body plan, unless their environment really is radically different from all terrestrial habitats. So I guess I can throw out my copy of Barlowe's Guide to Extraterrestrials.
Posted by: Jason | October 24, 2007 11:18 PM
Tom, read this. You are correct that a display of ignorance, lies, and fallacy ("a debate like this," as you called it) will not change any of our minds. What I wonder is how people such as yourself manage to find such things so compelling. Also, at the end of written questions, it is customary to include this symbol: ? Unless, of course, you've already decided the answer before you've heard the evidence, in which case, they aren't really questions at all, are they.
Posted by: J Myers | October 24, 2007 11:29 PM
D'nesh D'souza was relevant how long ago?
These debates are tiresome. It basically comes down to whether you appreciate received "wisdom" more that reality.
Posted by: notthedroids | October 24, 2007 11:56 PM
OK, suppose we accept (as I am inclined to) that something is at the beginning of the long chain of "this made that which made this which evolved into what we see now." An uncreated creator, unmoved mover, whatever. Isn't that "something," pretty much by definition, something we know nothing about? How do you get from this concession (that there is something we can't know about) to your anthropoid "God?" Actually, just calling it a "creator" is attributing to it a human characteristic -- never mind draping it with "purpose", "love", the need to be worshipped ...
Posted by: mgarelick | October 25, 2007 12:09 AM
Shorter Spam spam: why does everything have 2 eyes and 4 limbs (excluding everything that doesn't, that is)?
Well, I just don't know. Guess it must be because of god.
Posted by: Neil | October 25, 2007 12:11 AM
Our primordial ancestors started out as some kind of extremely crude replicators which eventually became single cells. Nobody knows exactly where those first life forms arose--although it's a good bet they were in water--but our lineage definitely went through a fishy underwater-living period, in (IIRC) the Ordovician through Devonian.
The thing to remember is that "we"--if you mean we mammals--all took the same path for most of Earth's history. We have a relatively recent (Triassic, I think) common ancestor. The more recent a group's common ancestor, the more similar their body plans will tend to be, because they haven't had time to diverge much. Gaining extra eyes--particularly eyes as complicated as ours--would be a pretty radical evolutionary step, and isn't likely to happen very often.
Take an even more recent group, like the hominids--humans, chimps, orangs, gorillas, bonobos--and you naturally find even less variation. All of us great apes have four limbs, five fingers, five toes, two forward-facing eyes, no tail, etc. That's because we're all descended from one particular kind of mammal, not too long ago.
As for having 2 eyes--mammals are descended from a particular (large) group of animals called the Bilateria. We all have left-right symmetry, so we tend to have even numbers of limbs and eyes. (But not always--some insects and reptiles, for instance, have an odd number, with one eye along the midline of their heads.)
Well, dolphins and whales are mammals, and they don't have four limbs.
But, again, insects as a group have been around for quite a bit longer than mammals have. They also tend to breed much faster, so there have been lots more generations for evolution to work on. So you'd expect them to have diversified more than mammals have.
If you want to compare us to insects, why not use the evolutionary group we're in which appeared at about the same time? That would be the Sarcopterygii or thereabouts, a group containing lungfish and coelacanths and amphibians and reptiles/birds and mammals. Lots of different takes on the number of limbs in there.
Posted by: Anton Mates | October 25, 2007 12:14 AM
D'Souza? Let's call this what it is, a desperate attempt to remain relevant. Ann Coulter dumped him and she's borderline retarded! Frankly, I don't understand why so many people of faith have to go about making a huge deal out of the fact that they actually have faith. Especially taking into consideration that I highly doubt the majority of them even really believe all the stuff they claim to. Like how many Catholics actaully believe the pope is infallible?
Posted by: Dustin | October 25, 2007 12:20 AM
Jason,
Dunno about that. The ratites (ostrich, kiwi, etc.) and other large flightless birds have done quite well on land, in spite of being effectively two-limbed. And snakes have done well also. And some of the bipedal dinosaurs (like T. Rex) were pretty close to two-limbed. And the Carboniferous featured lots of large land-dwelling arthropods, with leg numbers ranging from 6 to "many."
Posted by: Anton Mates | October 25, 2007 12:23 AM
Can you imagine how big that ark would have to be to have dinosaurs on it?
And that the t-rexes were the only ones to walk off when the ark finally landed on Ararat...
I makes me smile in a sick, sick way...
Posted by: Rjaye | October 25, 2007 12:24 AM
But then, D'Souza is running a poll to judge the winner
c'mon people, what's more fun that disrupting an idiotic religious poll?
the poll currently claims D'dimwit won the debate.
get over there and fix it, would ya?
Posted by: Ichthyic | October 25, 2007 12:24 AM
Oh no, Jason! Don't throw it out...send it to meeeeee! ^_^
So...spamspambaconspam, I think people are talking over you here. The reason why all tetrapods share a basic body plan is because it's locked in phylogenetically. That is, they develop to a certain point along a pathway before they start to be different -- tetrapod embryos look all the same up to a point and then they start to look like whales/snakes/chickens/monkeys/what-have-you somewhat later. What you want to do is take a developmental biology class. Until you do that, you might take a look at www.tolweb.org which really gives a good look at the relationships of things.
I suspect the question you're getting hung up on may be "why are these all alike" where "why" means "to what purpose". The answer to that is "no purpose...teleology is for wankers". More worth asking is "why"="from what cause". And the answer to that is, in the immortal words of D'Arcy Wentworth Thompson, "Everything is the way it is because it got that way."
Also, yeah, we started out on land as tetrapods, with bones and all that good stuff. Not blobs of ooze. Arthropods (incl. insects) did it separately from chordates.
Posted by: octopod | October 25, 2007 12:44 AM
Why are there regularities in form?
1. selective constraints
2. mathematical-physical constraints
3. historical constraints
These three kinds of constraints severely limit the variety of forms that an evolving biota will produce. The relationship of these to each other and their relative roles in determining regularities and limits in manifested biological form and function is still not well understood, and it is probably premature to make overly broad claims.
Posted by: Colugo | October 25, 2007 12:46 AM
Hmmmm. What's so great about Christianity?
It's a terrific source of fun for people who have managed to grow up and smell the coffee.
It provides a wonderful, accurate measure of human stupidity. Think how much harder it would be to pick out the morons if people stopped calling themselves Christians.
Christianity is indeed great. Kudos to Jesus, for getting the moron ball rolling.
Posted by: CalGeorge | October 25, 2007 12:50 AM
Anton Mates,
Yeah, I should have said "almost all" rather than "all."
Posted by: Jason | October 25, 2007 12:56 AM
As much as I think D'Souza's religious beliefs are delusional, I believe he did win this debate, on the terms of the debate.
The question was "Is Christianity the Problem?"
D'Souza argued convincingly that Christianity is not the problem, and poor old Hitch spun out the same old soundbites he has in every debate I've seen him in this year, rarely addressing D'Souza's specific arguments.
D'Souza's main contention appeared to be that Hitch's morality, and the morality of the western world, was shaped by the Christian backdrop to their upbringing.
Hitch failed to convincingly argue against this point of view. Perhaps he was tired and/or bored. Regardless, D'Souza demolished him, on the terms of the debate.
Posted by: Kevin Murphy | October 25, 2007 1:40 AM
On the off chance Kevin is actually sincere and not either trolling or on the payroll of one creationist organization or another...
So, Kevin, what sort of argument, had Hitchens made it, would you consider adequate refutation of that idiotic claim?
Posted by: Azkyroth | October 25, 2007 1:56 AM
That was actually painful to watch. D'Souza was absolutely awful. Hitchens was not on top of his game and did seem to sidestep some of the arguments that would have been very satisfying to attack head on, but god damn D'Souza was terrible. What a weasel.
I'd like to see one theist face the problem of providing proof for the existence of God instead of merely presuming it and moving on. "The rational world makes more sense within the framework of God-belief," says D'Souza. Using his conclusion as a premise like that should have gotten him booed off the stage.
Ugh. Did anyone notice D'Souza invoking Hume in regards to science and miracles? My jaw dropped. The audacity. And the whole discussion about atheists having no evidence for the non-existence of life after death -- someone needs to teach D'Souza basic, basic logic.
Posted by: Chuck Morrison | October 25, 2007 1:58 AM
No Azkyroth, I'm not a troll. I think the supernatural claims of Christianity are 100% retarded. I'm an anti-theist and a huge Hitchens reader.
Every other debate involving Hitchens this year (and I've watched all of them) has seen Hitch the undisputed winner.
I just think that in this particular case Hitch lost.
D'Souza had an interesting twist on the usual BS faith-head arguments. He pointed out that in many cases Western societies has a set of morality not shared by non-Western societies, which suggests that they were informed, even if indirectly, by Christianity.
There was at least one occasion where Hitch had to resort to talking about Islam in order to answer D'Souza's question. Considering the debate was about Christianity, that was a screaming cop-out as far as I was concerned.
I was raised as a (very liberal) Christian, and became an atheist as soon as I was old enough to think rationally, so I can't personally discount the notion that my morality was informed by my religious upbringing.
I look to people like Hitch to give me good reasons that it was not, and in this debate he did not.
That's all I'm saying.
Posted by: Kevin Murphy | October 25, 2007 2:09 AM
Fair enough; I apologize. x.x Damn pattern recognition. O.o
Posted by: Azkyroth | October 25, 2007 2:39 AM
@Rjaye: Noah let the T-Rex off because it kept stomping on his wife (not to mention the little hutch that had all the animals in it): http://www.dinosaurcomics.com
Posted by: CarrerCrytharis | October 25, 2007 2:43 AM
What a dismal excuse for a debate on both sides. Refunds should have been handed out at the door. I was forced to spit it out half-chewed.
D'Nesh opened by promising he would cite no theology, and promptly put the lie to that a few minutes later by telling us things god had supposedly told him. D'Souza did a creditable job of identifying a list of themes important to many humanists: the right to individual dissent, a belief in personal dignity, gender equality, antipathy to oppression and slavery, compassion towards others. He then let loose a giant whopper: all of these ideas originally came from Christianity! Instead of providing the anticipated historical evidence for this outrageous claim, his explication was to first raise a non sequitur about the modern world's response to the most recent Indonesian tsunami victims, then claim that since slavery existed in Sparta and since "Western" values equate to Christianity, jiggle and shake, QED! Stunned by the douchebaggery and saturated already, I skipped ahead to the beginning of Hitchens' response.
Surely Hitch would knock this putz out of the room in short order. After some lengthy and nauseatingly fawning praise for the fearsome debating prowess of D'Nesh (even more disturbing coming immediately after listening to the guy blather ignorantly about "history") an apparently three-or-four-martini Hitchens slouched into his rebuttal. Rather than address any of the silliness D'Nesh left hanging, he just headed off into his own canned schtick, slouching into a weak recap of material from his book. I had to hang up the phone on him too after only a few minutes of head pain.
It seems perfect for Faux News Channel to me -- entirely unwatchable.
Posted by: melior | October 25, 2007 3:16 AM
My view on the 4 limbs/two eyes is this:
The first such animals to arrive on land were the best suited to their environment and became ever more so through natural selection. Other animal types weren't as well suited for land travel/growing to a large size on land. Once a niche is filled it's hard to overthrow the owner of it.
There are probably other reasons as to why most fish have two eyes, 2 pectoral and 2 pelvic fins in the first place -it must be a very efficient combination. More streamlined than having lots of limbs. Two eyes allows for binocular vision, which is great for hunting - lots of fish have both binocular and monocular vision. Many spiders have two of their eyes for binocular vision.
So even if a 6 legged mammal were more efficient at running - later land animals were constrained by what was more efficient for a fish in a sea environment.
That's my view as a layman...
Posted by: scott | October 25, 2007 3:16 AM
The fine-tuning argument isn't pathetic, and Douglas Adams didn't successfully refute it. Don't get me wrong - it is no argument at all for a creator, but it does indicate that our universe is rather special. Douglas Adams wrote about a puddle finding itself well-fitted to a hole in the ground, and being amazed at the fit. Well, to continue the analogy, for virtually all values of the constants of the universe you would get worlds with only ice or steam (in reality, universe that expanded so fast nothing could form, or collapsed instantly into a black hole), so the fact that you even have water to form the puddle is pretty astonishing....
Posted by: steve99 | October 25, 2007 3:24 AM
I don't think talking about Islam is a cop out when discussing Western religion. Judaism, Christianity and Islam are very related (Jesus is also considered a prophet in Islam - he's just not the Messiah), therefore the differences in our morals/cultures is due to things other than just religion.
It's actually a very strong point, because it shows that the European system of morals is more secular in it's development than religious. It's a point that Richard Dawkins makes very often.
Hitchens is a lush and a bigot - those are the only reasons he could ever lose an argument with this guy...
Posted by: scott | October 25, 2007 3:26 AM
The fine-tuning argument isn't pathetic, and Douglas Adams didn't successfully refute it. Don't get me wrong - it is no argument at all for a creator, but it does indicate that our universe is rather special. Douglas Adams wrote about a puddle finding itself well-fitted to a hole in the ground, and being amazed at the fit. Well, to continue the analogy, for virtually all values of the constants of the universe you would get worlds with only ice or steam (in reality, universe that expanded so fast nothing could form, or collapsed instantly into a black hole), so the fact that you even have water to form the puddle is pretty astonishing....
But why is it astonishing? If we couldn't exist in any of those gazillion possible ice and steam universes, it's not surprising that we find ourselves in one that is neither, is it? If we knew there were only one universe, and that the chances of that one universe being the one we're in rather than any of a gazillion possible lifeless universes, then it would be astonishing. But we don't know that. Douglas Adams' argument is right.
Posted by: Jason | October 25, 2007 3:43 AM
Scott,
I was just pointing out that in a debate about Christianity, Hitch chose to bring up Islam -- one of his regular well-rehearsed arguments about Islam in fact -- rather than addressing his opponent's argument. It just made Hitch's position look weaker than D'Souza's, when we all know it is not.
I'm just judging the debate within its own terms, remember.
Kevin
Posted by: Kevin Murphy | October 25, 2007 3:45 AM
Christianity, if it were a philosophy without God and if Jesus had actually written down the stuff he was thinking, instead of us having to hear it through the distorted views of the apostles could have been great.
Combining the New Testament with the Old was a huge mistake. Tacking on all the other bullshit to the New Testament is also crap. Organizing the whole church to have power and money and then forcing this onto Europe and killing heretics - Goddamn! What's good about any of it, except for a few choice words from the man himself.
If that's cherry-picking, then I'm a cherry-picker. A lot of what Jesus said was pretty cool. It's the misuse of it by all the hypocrites that gives Jesus a bad name...
Posted by: scott | October 25, 2007 3:45 AM
Yes, Steve, it is true that we live in a universe whose physical laws do not preclude our existence.
Duh!
Because of that...I'm supposed to bow down to somebody rambling on about six-winged magical creatures arrayed around a golden throne?
Do you see the disconnect?
(Also, FWIW, we really have absolutely no idea what possibilities there would be in a universe with variation of our physical constants. It seems rather parochial for humans to presume that our combination of physical constants is the only one which would permit life to happen. This bespeaks a lack of imaginatiaon, IMHO.)
Posted by: RickD | October 25, 2007 3:56 AM
Kevin,
I don't have access to YouTube, so I'll just have to take your word for it. Hitchens most likely dropped the ball. Which doesn't surprise me. He even had a tough time against Al Sharpton for Chrissakes...
-Scott
Posted by: scott | October 25, 2007 3:56 AM
1) If you want radically different creatures look into the fossils found in the Burgess Shale from the Cambrian period. Some really weird stuff has died out since then.
2) Mammals make up a very small percentage of the available species on this planet. I can recall being told there are more species of just beetles than all other non-insect species combined, if not all other species period. For all our claims of being the most superior life-form on the planet the removal of insects would likely leave us on a very short road to extinction. One could argue, using the same arguments for design that the Xians love that we exist primarily to give cockroaches a good home, they've been here far longer, they out number us, and hell there's even species that can live on the insulation on the wires in our gadgets.
3) If you take the Old Testament literally, as the YECs do, then all the modern so-called "atheist" mass murderers are likely still trying to catch up with the Israelites. In doesn't take much more than a conservative estimate to place the number of people killed by the Israelites in their collected genocides in the 30-40 million range, if not more. Canaan for example was home to 7 nations each larger than the Israelite nation who were all put to the sword, before their cities where pulled down. In the OT during Exodus the Israelites have a very simple and effective approach to diplomacy, they kill every body they meet. And to be blunt the Israelites are still killing people or causing people to be killed because they believe god gave them Canaan.
4) If you take the New Testament literally as the YECs and others do then Christ will return to become the greatest mass murderer of all time, after all he has initiate the torture, murder and damning to eternal torment in hell of about 6 billion people.
5) After reading sections of the bible like Deuteronomy 28:15-68 and Revelation the best I can come up with is that the Xians believe that god, who seems to have created humans expressly to kiss his ass and because he needs something more interesting than insects to pull the wings off of, loves us. Near as I can tell the Xian belief is that god created 99.9999% of humans with the fore knowledge they would all be damned to hell and never ending pain and torment. But he loves them, and they toady up in some desperate hope that he wouldn't subject them to the same ridiculously arbitrary standard that they expect him to apply to everyone else.
Posted by: Venger | October 25, 2007 4:01 AM
I totally agree with RickD,
there are numerous other possibilities for our existence, why try to pin it down on "the one true religion"?! Sure, a very irresponsible, indifferent God or Gods could've created the universe, but to believe in the God of Abraham and Jesus over any of the other Gods that humans believe in seems ridiculous to me.
The fact that we are relegated to this tiny planet seems to point in the other direction. Why create the entire universe for humans and then only allow them to be able to survive in an infinitessimally small portion of it? Hell, we can't even survive in most places on our own planet...
Posted by: scott | October 25, 2007 4:12 AM
4 limbs/ two eyes
and @ Venger:
yeah, maybe God created the world for the trillions of bacteria in our guts!
We somehow feel a kinship to animals with two eyes and four limbs, hence the desire to hear an answer regarding only those types of animals. But like you said, there are way more other organisms besides mammals that thrive here on Earth and many of them will be here long after we're gone...
Posted by: scott | October 25, 2007 4:26 AM
"I don't have access to YouTube, so I'll just have to take your word for it."
Probably not a great idea. You have no idea who I am. I could be a Creationist Troll for all you know.
Posted by: Kevin Murphy | October 25, 2007 4:35 AM
Tom Douglas:
"Darwinism", as in evolution by natural selection, doesn't suggest anything of the kind. Nor does the larger modern theory of evolution demand it. The astronomically and geologically derived age of an 4.54 Ga old Earth and its fossils record are consistent with evolution.
But it seems your argument is really with cosmology, a completely different science. On the face of it your question doesn't make sense as stated. The dust in our universe can be traced back earliest to the start of big bang. No matter or even our spacetime existed before that.
Furthermore it is a reasonably general property of cosmologies such as big bang that inflationary cosmologies are past incomplete. This means that if you follow worldlines back they will eventually end up in a region with indefinite energy. Since matter couldn't exist under those conditions we can safely say that no dust was eternal, whether it is situated in our universe or you are speculating about multiverses.
But it seems your argument is really with initial conditions of cosmology. Then answer is then simply that cosmologies that are backwards eternal, indefinite ("no boundary" cosmologies) or definite are all possible cosmologies.
Finally you make a theological question out of the question of why an eventual future total cosmology initial conditions are the way they are. That would be a long discussion all by itself. I think it suffice to say here that most physicists envision that a fundamental theory (combining todays effective theories of interactions) will have a unique solution on grounds of beauty (which here is parsimony). In other words, then nature must be that it is.
Posted by: Torbjörn Larsson, OM | October 25, 2007 5:05 AM
No offense meant to all the Hitchens fans present, but he is not much of a debater, in the sense of providing reasoned arguments, at least from what I've read of his. He is very competent at innuendo and abuse.
Also he is a bum-kisser for the far-right, so he probably consciously threw the match to make D'Souza look good (which he would have to do, D'Souza being such a pathetic figure). Although, to be fair, Hitchens did give Coulter's book a hard time, or so I'm told.
Posted by: MFB | October 25, 2007 5:08 AM
Steven Pinker at TEDtalks gives a different perspective on the question of the "murderous" 20th century. "A Brief History of Violence".
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ramBFRt1Uzk&mode=user&search=
Pinker compares rates of people killing people over millenia, centuries, and recently.
Posted by: bernarda | October 25, 2007 5:49 AM
steve99:
We must distinguish between the theological fine-tuning argument, and the physical situation of observing fine-tuning. The former is pathetic, mostly due to it being based on a trivial misunderstanding of probabilities.
Creationists and others that look back on a passed event look at their unconditional a priori probabilities and conclude that low probabilities will mean low likelihood that we see what we see. But likelihoods are conditional probabilities, based on our observations and other circumstances. And low a priori probabilities doesn't automatically translate to low likelihoods.
For a trivial example, pick a hand of cards. It was very improbable a priori that you will see the hand you picked, considering all possible combinations. But conditional on that you picked a hand, it is very likely a posteriori that you will see a hand. :-P
For a less trivial example, assume that the a priori probability for life is low. (In all likelihood it isn't considering the short time it took to develop here, but we will assume it anyway.) That doesn't make life unlikely, considering the vast number of potential planets in the universe. We only need the likelihood to approach 1 to be consistent with observing life here on Earth and its "fine-tuned conditions".
And that is in essence Adam's argument. It isn't the hole that was created before it rained to fit the exact amount of rain water (a priori), it is the exact amount of rain water that fits the hole after raining (a posteriori).
Don't get me wrong - but we don't know whether our universe is unique or not from such data.
If it is unique, and the fundamental physics doesn't require uniqueness as physicists commonly hope, we can assume that the resulting physics was a coincidence. One data point doesn't give us any probabilities by itself. If we use physical anthropic principles, this is the tautological one - the universe is consistent with our existence.
There are several theories that has multiverses as a naturally consequence. Here we have the added possibility of the weak anthropic principle. The universe may belong to a likelihood distribution conditional on our existence. Here there may be other types of universes as in the coincidence case, but they are unlikely to contain observers such as us.
So there is no go for anthropic arguments of any kind whether fine-tuning or non-coincidence. Analysing fine-tuning you will find under weak assumptions that observing it actually suggests a natural universe.
Posted by: Torbjörn Larsson, OM | October 25, 2007 5:52 AM
I got sidetracked by interesting questions in this thread. Sorry about wasting bandwidth.
My original contribution was intended to be short and sweet, slightly OT on the tangent of pathetic arguments, or as in this case a really, really pathetic press release:
That is right, the University of Manchester is responsible for a press release referring to casting "doubt" (as if there was anything but doubt previously) and "the theory of creationism"!
Furthermore they play right into the creationists fallacious arguments:
And we all know how much artificial selection impresses creationists with an independent confirmation of evolutionary mechanisms.
Maybe we should all write the UoM and Brightsurf and tell them that this isn't presenting science view on scam pseudosciences? [Banging head on monitor. Not good enough... reaching for coffee cup and gives a whack to the head... ah, that's better!]
Posted by: Torbjörn Larsson, OM | October 25, 2007 6:09 AM
Torbjörn Larsson,
I liked your "less trivial example", but why bring
multiverses into it?
To quote Douglas Adams: "The fact that we live at the bottom of a deep gravity well, on the surface of a gas covered planet going around a nuclear fireball 90 million miles away and think this to be normal is obviously some indication of how skewed our perspective tends to be."
The reason anyone would believe that fine-tuning means God exists is purely out of bias. We exist, therefore our existence must be the "desired" outcome. What if God views huumans like we do ants? - maybe "He" is more interested in the black holes and we're just a completely unimportant by-product of creation...
Anyway, it's still far from being a good basis for believing in the Judeo-Christian God.
Posted by: scott | October 25, 2007 6:44 AM
Hey, it isn't only jesus freaks that are completely off-the-wall on evolution. Here is an extract from a Hindu site.
"Now coming to the technical aspects of this theory, you should know that the very basis of the theory is unscientific.
1. The first born one-cell microorganism may only grow bigger but it can never produce sense organs on its own. It is impossible, because it has no such impulse to observe the outside world. Senses are never evolved through the evolution process. The impulse to see or hear or taste or smell or touch is not inherent in the body tissues. They are the natural impulses of a being who already has his senses and already has a developed mind.
2. The adaptation or natural selection process can only effect to change the body color or a slight change in the appearance of the body, like, Japanese, Indians and Europeans, etc. That�s all. It cannot tend to create new species. See the human beings around the world in various environmental situations. You can�t find a group of human beings who would have started a new human species with a strange body and behavior.
3. Technically the mutation process has a very narrow margin of DNA alteration. So it is unable to create brand new species. It could only multiply the number of species of only one category like the various species of tigers and lions. A tiger cannot produce the species of wolves or dogs or bison. This technical discrepancy crumbles the whole theory of evolution.
There are hundreds of questions to which the theory of evolution has no answer. When it says that the inner urge of a being to accommodate to the new situation causes a change in the body formation, then why has the evolution now stopped? The intellectual work load of a human being has increased to at least fifty times more than it was 6,000 years ago. But a human being still has the same size of brain as it had before. It didn�t increase with the increased requirement; moreover there is no sign of the development of any new arm in the human body when physical activity is also tremendously increased as compared to the earlier days. It would have been handy to have four hands so the modern man could work on two computers at the same time, and could work better and faster in the kitchen or in the office."
http://web.archive.org/web/20040423103757/encyclopediaofauthentichinduism.org/articles/44_a_review_of.htm
Read it and weep.
Posted by: bernarda | October 25, 2007 7:13 AM
"Yes, Steve, it is true that we live in a universe whose physical laws do not preclude our existence.
Duh!
Because of that...I'm supposed to bow down to