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.
- Log in to post 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
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=&PlayMedi…
I am sure that after this weekend, it will also be available as a podcast.
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.
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.
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 :-(
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! ;^)
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.
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.
Oops. I did not know the debate has already been posted.
http://www.tkc.edu/debate/
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...?)
Do you go around denying the existence of dragons and unicorns, you close-minded bastard?
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!
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.
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.
Yeah, what raven @ 13 said.
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.
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.
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. :)
WTF are you trying to say here?
thank you for sending us there
"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).
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?
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?
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).
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
@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.
"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." <-- should be one of these "?" at the end of that sentence
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.
We don't.
See Bang, Big.
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.
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.
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.
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 ...
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.
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.
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?
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."
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...
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?
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.
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.
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.
Anton Mates,
Yeah, I should have said "almost all" rather than "all."
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.
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?
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.
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.
Fair enough; I apologize. x.x Damn pattern recognition. O.o
@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
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.
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...
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....
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...
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.
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
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...
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.)
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
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.
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...
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...
"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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!]
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.
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/encyclopediaofauthentichindui…
Read it and weep.
"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?"
You just don't seem to get the point. An analogy for our situation is if someone was lined up in front of a vast firing squad, and a thousand bullets all missed. No sane man would walk away from that and say "Well, of course they all misfired - I am alive!". There is something to explain - we can't avoid it.
And when did I claim this was evidence for Gods? Of course it isn't. But you can't hand-wave away this issue as nothing to explain. It needs explaining, and will be some day - by science.
"(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.)"
This just shows a major misunderstanding of physics. Sorry, but a universe expanding so fast that even atoms (if they ever got a chance to form) would be ripped apart, or one that is nothing but a gravitational singularity just isn't going to contain anything much.
I think the geographical and cultural context is very important.
If I were living in America, I would feel compelled to be on the side of Hitchens, an anti-theist. Afterall, one has seen on that side of the Atlantic over the last decades a revival of the negative influence of religion, with its creationist stupidities, mega churches, nonsensical Dino museums and a stronghold of the christian right influencing the Law, be it the pro-life movement, the anti gays, the anti stem cell research, and a quasi fascist form of neoconservative governement.
On the other hand, in mainly secular Europe (led by the Uk, France and Germany), Religion has gradually focussed its efforts on caring for charitable entreprises and has mainly given up on trying to influence legal aspects of governement. On this side of the Atlantic, atheism is more defined as apatheism and has not been compelled to become as vocal as in the states. Afterall, two of the most influencial atheists of our time, Hitchens and Dawkins are british educated and are much more succesful in their righteous crusade angainst the misfeats of religion in the USA.
But again, I think if the new atheist movement wants to be succesful in its goal of eliminating the negative influence of religion in all areas of governement in the USA, it needs first to try to understand what led the USA to take this stance. What is the root-cause of so much stupidity in the USA.
Of course, we have our fair share of stupidity and hypocrisy in Europe, but I am still at lost in understanding what caused such a noticeable difference between two cultures which were, let us not forget, very linked and similarly influenced by Christianity not so long ago. The schism started sometime in the 60s, and has not stopped diverging. Why ? That is the question one needs to find out ?
It's very simple. The first jawed vertebrate had two eyes (never mind the pineal and parietal organs) and two pairs of appendages. This works. Therefore we -- we jawed vertebrates -- have all inherited it. Except for those of us for whom it doesn't work (snakes etc.).
Natural selection removes that which does not work well enough. It does not remove everything except the best.
Basic engineering? Please. Basic engineering would have given us a way to see what is behind our backs! We are left with two possibilities:
1. Stupid design.
2. Evolution.
Bingo. Especially when fixing it requires major changes in the way embryonic development works, which in turn would in many cases require mutations in many, many genes to avoid producing a non-functional outcome.
Incidentally, while vertebrates have two eyes (plus pineal & parietal organ) unless they've lost them, lancelet larvae have a single one at the front end of the body. And indeed, in vertebrate embryos there is first a single eye primordium that then divides into two. In very rare cases it doesn't; somewhere online there's a photo of a newborn kitten with a single eye.
Not all that weird actually. The weirdest is Opabinia, a close relative of the arthropods, which had five eyes.
Definitely not. Amoebae are huge, highly derived eukaryotes. Planctomycete bacteria are more like it, but they, too, have had billions of years of independent evolution.
You are resting on the historical artefact that no arthropod has ever managed to evolve a breathing system that can support a reasonably large animal in today's atmosphere. In parts of the Carboniferous there were not 21 but 35 % oxygen in the atmosphere, and the largest land animals were 2 m long millipede relatives, while the largest apparently terrestrial vertebrates were as long as a laptop is broad.
But even today there are way more species of insects than of tetrapods. Even the spiders AFAIK surpass us. The woodlice (14 legs!) may not, but they are diverse enough...
The pythons and boas do, and they are fairly close to the root of the snake tree.
Even closer to the root are animals like Pachyrhachis from the Cretaceous, which had complete, if small, hindlimbs.
The forelimbs and shoulder girdles, however, are completely gone. A few years ago it was worked out how that could have happened: there's a genetic master switch, and if you press it ( = one mutation in the right place), the forelimbs and the shoulder girdles don't develop.
Exactly, Scott. Terry Pratchett pointed out in one of his books that, far from being fine-tuned for humans, the universe is almost totally inhospitable for us. If some guy were suddenly dropped into a random spot in the universe there's essentially a 100% probability he'd be suffocated, frozen, crushed, or burned immediately. Even dropped on a random spot on the surface of the Earth a person would much more likely to drown, freeze, or die of thirst than live. It takes a special kind of delusion to look at the universe and conclude it was designed to suit us.
Ka-Sproing!!! Damn it! The brand-new, reinforced, titanium-alloy irony meter just blew up and I've only had it for a week.
Already this hindu copy of cretinism is wrong. Bacteria are loaded with chemotaxic and other sensors and very attuned to sensing their environment. I forget the numbers, must be dozens or hundreds of genes involved in discriminating and reacting to the outside environment. The lac operon with its induction repression system was one of the first studied examples.
"Terry Pratchett pointed out in one of his books that, far from being fine-tuned for humans, the universe is almost totally inhospitable for us."
"Terry Pratchett pointed out in one of his books that, far from being fine-tuned for humans, the universe is almost totally inhospitable for us."
Sorry, but this completely misunderstands the true nature of fine tuning. There is a real problem. The fine tuning is not simply for life, but for any complexity of any kind whatsoever. Even fiddling things like the cosmological constant so we get stable atoms is very difficult indeed.
Just because theists use fine tuning (wrongly) as an argument for God, does not mean we should hand-wave it away.
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.
No. The fine-tuning argument goes like this:
If God exists, then the universe should appear to be fine-tuned.
The universe does appear to be fine-tuned.
Therefore, God exists.
Or, put more simply:
If a, then b.
b.
Therefore, a.
This is a fallacy called Affirming the Consequent. God's existence does not follow the appearance of a fine-tuned universe, because other possibilities exist and have not been excluded. Billions of universes could exist within the larger cosmos, for instance, and we could be the only one that supports life. The counter-argument is that we skeptics are making stuff up out of whole cloth for which we have no evidence.
To which I say, exactly the point.
SeanH #77, "It takes a special kind of delusion to look at the universe and conclude it was designed to suit us."
Well ,I guess you can view it both ways, that's the reason why I found myself oscilating (depending on the days :-) ) between atheism and Spinozaïsm/Einsteinism.
The main argument being (check Tipler), it might come a day that we, humans, feel compelled to create a new universe, where, we would want it to be guaranteed that after a period of time (be it 13.7 bill years or less if we want to be better than the previous "Gods") some form of intelligent life comes out that can also, one day, reproduce another universe and so on. A kind of cosmic relay.
Now I know, that's quite different from all religions, a bit crazy maybe, and certainly not a personal God kind of thing, but I kinda like it... Just thinking of that right now...
Everett's Multiverse theories could also fit in that scheme of things.
It also has the benefit of not requiring any supernaturalism or other spirituality nonsense, which I always see as the mother of all cop outs, as Dawkins says.
"If God is not, then everything is permitted."
People blame atheism or religion for human cruelty and violence but the truth is, if religion or atheism did not exist, people would still be cruel and violent towards one another. It's human nature.
Anthropologists know this sad fact: God is not and everything is permitted.
I want religious people to wake up. Why? Because they live in a fantasy world and people who live in a fantasy world can be dangerous.
We have a churchgoing President who is responsible for hundreds of thousands of deaths in Iraq. He claims to get foreign policy advice from God.
We have priests who abuse thousands of children from within the safety of the Catholic church.
We have countless Americans who refuse to respond to the climate crisis because they believe the End Times are approaching.
When it becomes widely accepted for people to lead their lives under the influence of a fantasy, civil society falls apart.
Religion is like mental alcoholism. It should be treated as a psychological malady. There should be 12-step recovery programs.
Ehhhh! Wrong.
We don't understand physics well enough to grasp how phenomena arise from the principles that we know about. We most certainly haven't explored alternate systems enough to even guess intelligently on what sorts of complex phenomena they might be hosting.
For all we know, the laws of physics that hold here are actually extremely hostile to life, and almost anything else would have been better. (See Greg Egan's "Schild's Ladder" for an example.)
You're arguing from a datapoint of one. You cannot generate a statistical analysis from that. And you have no understanding of the possibilities for existence needed to make a conceptual argument.
And
What a laugh. In a debate, often such claims are made and the answers are not amenable to debate forums. Many of these values claimed by D'Souza, even if Hitchens didn't really take it on to your liking, were not worthy of much response because they are a well-debunked load of crap.
For example, D'Souza quote mines noted Athiest Physcist Richard Feynman who said something about how the laws of the universe are amenable to mathmatical analysis, calling it "kind of a miracle." Being a Feynman fan, I know what he was saying and talking about and it had NOTHING to with a non-existent God.
D'Souza claims science came from Christianity. That's a load of crap. Science pre-dates Christianity. Never mind the Greeks, you've got the Romans, the Arabs, etc.
D'Souza claims modern equality types (Democracy) of government came from Christianity. Big news to pre-columbian indian tribes who had democracies (many did). Big news to the Greeks and their democracy in Athens. And never mind the FIRST KNOWN DEMOCRACY was EARLY MESOPOTAMIA (modern day Iraq).
Gilgamesh, lord of Uruk, is remembered as consulting first the senate, "the elders of Uruk", and then the assembly, "the men of the town", before he decides to arm for a fight with King Agga of Kish. His consultation is not only for advice but for consent, and, Jacobsen correctly concludes, the assembly is recognised as "the ultimate political authority"
-- Raul Manglapus, Will of the People: Original Democracy in Non-Western Societies [4]
Here's an interesting story:
A woman who sent her Arab-American boss a threatening note that warned "Remember 9/11" and "You and your kids will pay" was sentenced Wednesday to eight months in a federal halfway house.
Kia Reid, who described herself as Christian, donned gloves to craft the note from magazine clippings and then left it in Nina Timani's office, prosecutors said.
http://rawstory.com/news/2007/Woman_gets_eight_months_in_hate_1025.html
Gee, another Christian doing something nasty!
When is the last time an atheist got jail time for crafting a nasty note to an Arab-American?
Crap. Meant to hit the preview button. They need an "are you sure" button for posting.
Anyway, D'Souza is a liar. The Christians suck it up.
Actually, Victor Stenger has shown that a great many combinations of universal constants produce stable atoms and even stars:
http://www.colorado.edu/philosophy/vstenger/Cosmo/MonkeyGod.pdf
Moreover, steve99, we don't really know that the cosmological constants are all independent variables; physicists are still working on that. Maybe it *couldn't* be otherwise. How do you know, for example, that the strong nuclear force could be an order of magnitude greater or an order of magnitude smaller? You don't.
I see we have another Puddle who thinks he's the universe.
Steve,
Of course we should hand-wave the "fine-tuning" argument away!
The analogy about bullets fails. You are confusing different kinds of statistical issues. If some unlikely event were necessary to have happened for me to be a sentient being, then because I am now a sentient being, I know that the event happened, regardless of whatever probability is to be assigned to this event.
I say this as a human born on January 1st whose siblings include one born on Friday the 13th, another pair who are fraternal twins, and a fourth who is of a different race. Gosh it's horribly unlikely that all of those things could happen!
Furthermore, this effort to assign probabilities to meta-events outside the scope of our universe is completely ill-founded. It's kind of like wondering what mathematics would be like if the value of pi were greater than 4. What you are wondering about is so far beyond our experience and comprehension that anything you have to say about it will be entirely meaningless.
I think it's ridiculous to say "science" will explain the fact that universal constants have the values they have. We already know that life exists so it's obtuse to argue about the possibilities for constants that may exist in alternate universes where life may be impossible. Who cares? This is not "hand-waving". It is taking the question as seriously as it deserves to be taken. And it does not deserve to be taken very seriously.
Things are the way they are. That is what reality is. Ruminating about why things are the way they are, as opposed to some other way which would make life impossible, is the kind of philosophy that stoned sophomores in college practice. Statistics, theory, and whatnot are not going to get people past the point of recognizing that things are the way they are.
The universe is in a certain state. It is not in any state than the state that it is in. Terrific! Um, so what? If you want to talk about "might have beens" in this context you need to explain what "might have been" can even mean in discussing possible universes. All I am familiar with are things that are.
For all I know, if we understood the mathematics of the multiverse properly, the odds of the "universal constants" being what they are would not be infinitessimally small, as you claim they are, but would in fact be enormous. You are claiming intelligibility about concepts that are simply not intelligible. Whatever this universe is, it is exactly that. It is not something else, and it makes no sense to try to apply the mathematics of this universe to the probability that this universe would be something other than this universe. Among other intellectual sins that you are committing, you are ignoring the facts that the very mathematics we comprehend are themselves (is itself?) features (a feature?) of this universe.
The idea that one can intellectually bounce from universe to universe, fixing all of the mathematics while twiddling constants, is one that is entirely _your creation_. You have yet to demonstrate why I should be interested in your model of the multiverse at all. By definition, anything in the hypothetical multiverse outside of our own universe is beyond our capacity to apprehend. With that in mind, what is wrong with saying "so what?"
Steve says:
The problem is not with my understanding of physics, but with your insistence that the physics of this universe need apply to any other possible universe. Why are only the universal constants allowed to vary? As I said, this seems rather parochial to me, and bespeaks the limits of your imagination in your consideration of this problem. Using the math and physics of this universe to model the multiverse makes about as much sense as using planar geometry to model 12-dimensional Riemannian manifolds.
(What are these things called "atoms" anyway? I just got a fax from Z-space and they assure me that they don't have atoms at all, so to speak.)
As a final note, this "fine-tuning" argument, like many arguments involving probability advanced by IDers, (not that I'm accusing steve of being one) is based on the implicit notion that events that are highly improbable could not possibly have happened by chance.
Whenever this kind of argument occurs, I have to ask: just what is the minimum p value for which something with probability p can happen by chance? People who make these kinds of arguments misunderstand the relationship of probability and statistics with science. All that probability and statistics can do is assign relative value to competing, well-form scientific hypotheses. Statistics alone cannot be used as a justification for an argument or theory. Even if somebody were to say "the probability of the universal constants being exactly what they are is 10^-425665327" I would say: "so what?" Setting aside for the moment the dubious premise that this probability can be well-defined and meaningful, it still doesn't mean a damned thing to describe the probability of an event when we already know that the event has happened.
Since we know the event has happened, and we know that there is no lower bound p_min which forms the mathematical boundary of chance, telling me that p[X] is really, really low for some event X for an event X that I observe does not imply, by itself, that the event X did not happen by chance.
As a demonstration of this principle: get a bag full of, say, 100 20-sided dice. Roll them in order, noting the number rolled on each. Whatever result you get, the odds of it having happened by chance is 20^-100. And that's a really, really small number! And yet, to all apperances, that result just happened by chance.
Andrew (#88) , but chances are that, even if we can find those relations and end up with only one degree of freedom (which would be the minimum), that that unique parameter will require a degree of precision which is much higher than the 30 odd parameters we know today combined...
What I am saying is, the more we will understand the underlying laws, the more we will feel compelled to ask the question, why do we understand ?
Imagine for instance that all parameters of the standard model, coupling constants and masses, cosmological parameters of Lambda CDM model, were all related, geometrically or statistically, to one unique parameter. Call it Lambda. So,now we have all the formulas, but Lambda has to be fixed within lets 230 digits in order to generate all the other parameters. Still ,one will be entitled to ask the question, why Lambda ?
So, some people might say, well there are 10^500 universes and we happen to be living in that one (L. Süsskind). Others might think of a cosmic relay (Tipler) where intelligent life forms evolve until they reproduce another universe with the same value of Lambda (why would they try another value of Lambda if they knew that one had worked for them) ?
Please note that we still don't know what is the shape of the universe, is it multiply connected ? Is it a picard topology ? Is it the result of a quantum bounce as suggested by M.Bojowald and therefore we might try to find some information about the previous generation.
So many fundamental and mindboggling questions, that only science will find out. The Bible doesn't say much about Picard topologies and quantum bounces, so I guess we can put it back where it belongs, on the shelves of our museums, as a reminder of those days when we knew nothing.
I don't understand how complexity is supposed to be a sign of a creator deity. Wouldn't a celestial engineer, in all his infinite wisdom, seek to create the simplest and most efficient entities? Entities that would simply be, I don't know, rarefied minds basking in the warm glowing warming glow of god's love, instead of scrabbling around down here for our piece of the pie. I would think the complicated physical laws and the structures of physical bodes would hint at the lack of a designer, that they all just naturally happened piece by piece over countless eons. Oh wait, they did!
"The analogy about bullets fails. You are confusing different kinds of statistical issues. If some unlikely event were necessary to have happened for me to be a sentient being, then because I am now a sentient being, I know that the event happened, regardless of whatever probability is to be assigned to this event."
But that is what the analogy is about - probability.
"Furthermore, this effort to assign probabilities to meta-events outside the scope of our universe is completely ill-founded."
On the contrary - it is the subject of current research.
"It's kind of like wondering what mathematics would be like if the value of pi were greater than 4. What you are wondering about is so far beyond our experience and comprehension that anything you have to say about it will be entirely meaningless."
No, as this is not about changes of mathematics. There may well be universes that have different mathematical rules. This is about other universes that follow the same laws.
"I think it's ridiculous to say "science" will explain the fact that universal constants have the values they have. We already know that life exists so it's obtuse to argue about the possibilities for constants that may exist in alternate universes where life may be impossible. Who cares? This is not "hand-waving". It is taking the question as seriously as it deserves to be taken. And it does not deserve to be taken very seriously."
That is not a scientific attitude. It is like when explorers were ridiculed for wanting to explore the far oceans, being told "there is nothing there but the edge of the world".
"Things are the way they are. That is what reality is. Ruminating about why things are the way they are, as opposed to some other way which would make life impossible, is the kind of philosophy that stoned sophomores in college practice. Statistics, theory, and whatnot are not going to get people past the point of recognizing that things are the way they are."
Actually, is the serious work of modern cosmologists.
"The idea that one can intellectually bounce from universe to universe, fixing all of the mathematics while twiddling constants, is one that is entirely _your creation_. You have yet to demonstrate why I should be interested in your model of the multiverse at all."
It is not my model. There are plenty of models proposed by modern physicists, as they have explanatory power. Multiverse models are simpler than Universe models - they require fewer parameters.
"The problem is not with my understanding of physics, but with your insistence that the physics of this universe need apply to any other possible universe."
No, I am afraid the problem IS with your understanding of physics :)
"Why are only the universal constants allowed to vary?"
They aren't the only thing that may vary. But they are the only things we currently don't know how to stop varying! If you want to vary other things as well, you make the problem worse.
"Using the math and physics of this universe to model the multiverse makes about as much sense as using planar geometry to model 12-dimensional Riemannian manifolds."
Sorry, but this is just nonsense. There are at least two forms of multiverse model - Many Worlds and Inflationary - that involve the same math and physics as our universe.
As I said, I think people really don't understand the issue.
Cedar Park Church in Bothell Washington:
Dinesh D'souza will be speaking in the 9 and 10:45am services on October 28th, 2007 at the Bothell Sanctuary This is a free event, and everyone is welcome.
http://www.cedarpark.org
FYI - Rev. Joe Fuiten, pastor of the Cedar Park Church said that Christian-based social conservatism is the way it's always been in America. And anyone who disagrees with that assertion or thinks it should be otherwise, is an "illegal alien here."
http://dneiwert.blogspot.com/2007/08/guess-whos-illegal-now.html
Aren't they just the cutest bunch of ftards...
I didn't think this debate went so badly as the initial (and obviously biased) review of it seemed to suggest. I'm not Hitch's biggest fan, but I think he held up well in the face of selective & misleading statistics and history that is difficult to refute in a live setting - it takes time to research the validity of such statements. D'Souza knows this - and knows most of the audience will have no appreciation for it - and so uses it to his advantage. The structure of the debate worked against Hitchens as well - especially the Q&A session where a hostile audience directed most of the questions at Hitch; D'Moron got to do D'Rebuttal, but his opponent didn't.
I didn't think this debate went so badly as the initial (and obviously biased) review of it seemed to suggest. I'm not Hitch's biggest fan, but I think he held up well in the face of selective & misleading statistics and history that is difficult to refute in a live setting - it takes time to research the validity of such statements. D'Souza knows this - and knows most of the audience will have no appreciation for it - and so uses it to his advantage. The structure of the debate worked against Hitchens as well - especially the Q&A session where a hostile audience directed most of the questions at Hitch; D'Moron got to do D'Rebuttal, but his opponent didn't.
#40 is an impostor Dustin. The real Dustin doesn't call Coulter borderline retarded, he calls her a raging drug junkie. Reject the false prophet!
Anyway, when D'Souza says "Stenger says the laws of physics come out of nothing", D'Souza is grossly misrepresenting Stenger's philosophy. Stenger does not say that the laws of physics came out of nothing, he says they come out of our heads. Stenger's philosophy could probably best be described as a blend of phenomenalism and ontological relativity. His claim that physics is a construction is not to be confused with the postmodernist classification of science as a mere cultural narrative, and Stenger explicitly rejects this classification several times in his book "The Comprehensible Cosmos: Where Do the Laws of Physics Come From?".
It may be that D'Souza isn't talking about "The Comprehensible Cosmos", but is saying "Stenger says the laws of physics come out of nothing" because of Stenger's refusal to indulge in bronze age mythology and because D'Souza hasn't taken the time to realize that Stenger doesn't think of the universe as some construct that conforms to laws as though they were axioms, but that those laws arise from the structure of the universe and our attempts to explain that structure through our models.
Either way, D'Souza is very wrong.
scott:
I'm glad you liked my example. There are many more to chose from, so it was certainly coincidental and not forced. :-P
It isn't strictly necessary here, but it gives a full complement to the possibilities of regarding uniqueness: unique solution forced by a fundamental theory, coincidence, or in between as a likelihood over multiverses.
[But it is important for the argument of naturalness, as we have two different concepts of fine-tuning at play.
Ordinarily physical laws naturally have normalized parameters of the order ~ 1. Fine-tuning in the physical sense is when they are smaller by many magnitudes. Then we have to find terms that for some reason balance each other out almost exactly to give such resulting small parameters, they need fine-tuning. This happens in todays theories, and has no apparent explanation except in the sense already given, forcing or coincidence.
Multiverses removes that consideration in a sense by changing the concept of what can be natural from normalized parameters to likely parameters. The likelihoods comes from being able to pick likely parameters conditional on some outcome. (Here observers like us.)
Fine-tuning in the biological sense, that some parameters needs to be in some, often very wide, ranges for life like us to exist is related to physical fine-tuning. But there is no ongoing concern of naturalness.]
steve99,
You just don't seem to get the point. An analogy for our situation is if someone was lined up in front of a vast firing squad, and a thousand bullets all missed. No sane man would walk away from that and say "Well, of course they all misfired - I am alive!". There is something to explain - we can't avoid it.
No, that is not a valid analogy for our situation. We know from our knowledge of the nature of guns and bullets and firing squads that the probability of a thousand bullets all missing is extremely low. That is why there is "something to explain" in that case. But we have no comparable knowledge regarding the probability of the universe.
Even if it turns out that universes capable of supporting our type of life are extremely improbable, the anthropic principle is sufficient to account for our existence in such a universe.
Face it, Christian: you cannot go from the natural to a supernatural existence by any reasoning, and you cannot explain existence by referring to a Creator.
I'm sorry Steve, but you've pretty much limited yourself by your choice of model.
"No, as this is not about changes of mathematics. There may well be universes that have different mathematical rules. This is about other universes that follow the same laws."
Explain to me again why anybody would care about that?
I know that physicists have _modeled_ other universes. That really isn't terribly important since we have no data about other universes. Modeling what another universe is like is pretty much meaningless, since everything we have contact with is in this universe.
Next you'll be telling me that the film Flatliners constitutes scientific research.
My attitude is entirely scientific. What I'm talking about are the limits of thought, not the limits of whatever ship you happen to be sailing in at the moment. You are avoiding the main issues of my comment and, to be frank, making the comparison with medieval maps is pathetic.
Wait - are we talking about reality or talking about modeling? I thought this entire discussion was a serious discussion of what reality must be. My argument has been that reality is far too complex for this "finely tuned universe" model to be of interest. Basically you are conceding this point when you complain that adding more variables "makes the problem worse". Hell, if we're happy with models that are mostly true, I can model the Earth as flat. That will be accurate for almost all the observations I have in this life.
And you're not bringing us any closer to that end, are you?
You were the one who claimed credibility to the fine-tuning argument and that "it does indicate that our universe is rather special". But now we're finding out that you're not willing to make a truth claim about the universe, but you only want to talk about a limited number of models of the universe, and you're rejecting models that allow for more complication.
Whatever you're trying to do, and I have to say I've completely lost sight of that because the tone of your posts has basically been reduced to "I know physics and you don't", you have completely failed to show any kind of meaningful support for the "finely-tuned universe" argument. I don't know physics but I do know about math, statistics, and science in general to know when an argument is claiming far more than it has demonstrated. But I cannot even make that criticism of the "finely-tuned universe" argument, because what it is is something entirely non-scientific. All it is is a person trying to turn an emotional feeling about the universe ("it's special") into something substantial by a haphazard application of mathematical and scientific language.
If you want to be taken seriously, I suggest that you quantify what you mean when you say "the universe is pretty special" and do something other than try to take down people who are noticing that you have yet to present a coherent argument. Who's doing the "hand-waving" here?
Caledonian,
it is important to understand that there are different models of multiverse theories.
Supersymetric models (ie String theory with inflation) need many additional curled up dimensions (calabi yau spaces) in order to account for the laws of nature. Now, as the mathematical models unable a huge number of topologies (> 10^500), the only rational explanation for us being in this particular one is the anthropic principle. Even in this case, these models fail to explain the fine tuning of the cosmological constant by 10^30 orders of magnitude. Moreover, these calabi yau spaces are far from being "observable", with current technology. So what about if there are no Calabi Yau spaces ?
Other models as being studied by Bojowald, Ashketar, Smolin, etc... do not posit these calabi yau spaces, but require very specific border conditions of the 3 sphere we live in. Moreover, the latest WMAP results are hinting towards a particular topology (picard topology) which could be a more complex multiconnected space.
In any case, this begs the question : is the anthropic principle more partimonuous than for example the idea that we live in a universe that has been precisely defined by a higher intelligence that lived in one of the universe with which ours is or has been connected. An intelligence like we could become (if we survive and evolve long enough to be that one in our universe) and feel compelled to create again a new universe with these by then very well understood border conditions. Can gigantic balck holes be created and acted upon as to be those new connections ?
If this were th case, what would we say ? Was our universe not created so at to evolve a species, somewhere (maybe not us, but an another one, the future will say) that would be first to colonize its galaxy and eventually give birth to a new universe, using whatever mechanisms it has by then well understood and perfected. We are only in year 13.7 b after the "birth" of our universe, still quite a number of years to go...
So, why would the anthropic principle be more partimonous than cosmic relay universe. Where is the truth ?
I personally think that string theory and the anthropic reasoning it leads to is a big cop out.
ParsiMONGOUS! o_0
Popular cosmology is a poisonous cocktail of just-so and abstract skimming.
There are a variety of "fine-tuning" arguments, and they vary in strength. Most of the people posting here seem to be attacking some of its weaker versions. The first thing to keep in mind is that it is not meant to be a proof, but an inference, so any conclusion such as "God therefore exists" obviously weakens the argument severely (and, of course, the argument is further weakened if one concludes that a specific god exists). The second thing to consider is that the fine-tuning argument applies to the conditions necessary for the existence and development of a universe capable of producing sentient beings, and not to any of the sundry "parts" of that universe (this is where the "puddle" analogy fails). The third thing to consider is that there is a difference between epistemic probability and objective probability, and that theists are referring to the latter in their development of the argument, while atheists refer to the former in their criticisms of it. Finally, at least it is an argument! It is an attempt to justify a conclusion with a bit of reasoning. Perhaps both sides tend to evaluate the relative strength or weakness the argument in light of their preconceptions, but at least it moves talk about religion between theists and atheists onto the (somewhat)more neutral field of reason.
A final question -- what's with all the name calling? Even Professor Meyers engaged in this in his original post. If it's witty, then at least it's worth reading, but here it's jejune at best. If D'souza is wrong, say it and show why he's wrong, and then your job is done. What does, "And he's an idiot" add to an intelligent critique? (By the way, D'souza is so clearly not an idiot that to resort to calling him one betrays a lack of confidence -- or quite a bit of ignorance -- on the part of those who do it, in my opinion.)
If D'Souza is not an idiot, that debate certainly showed no proof of his intelligence.
eric,
Do you think there are any strong fine-tuning arguments? Maybe you could present what you consider to be an example of such.
"What does, "And he's an idiot" add to an intelligent critique?"
A nice concise summary.
Talk about irony meters exploding.. 12 step programs are all based on the original program from two delusional half wits, who liked to cry on each other's shoulders over their alcoholic binges, until they cured each other, then attributed that *cure* to the fact that they talk about God a lot during their meetings. All such programs start with the premise, "You are an idiot that can't make your own decisions!", and end with, "But if you let God make them for you, everything will be OK." Its even got some wacky cleansing BS that is a bit like confession, where you go out and ask forgiveness and make amends to the people you hurt (not a bad idea actually), but with the purpose being to cleans yourself of the guilt of those actions, so you can better accept God's guidance, or some BS like that (really idiotic).
So, I am not clear what a religious twelve step program that emphasizes giving up your free will to some god is going to cure people believing in god. lol
Going the have to find some Unobtanium for the new meter, the Adamantium one doesn't seem to be working too well. ;)
The answer to Sousa's first question is obvious. We are tuned by evolution to survive in this universe. Evolution did the fine tuning. In fact it fine tuned us to the one tiny portion of the universe in which we live. Most of the universe is uninhabitable by us.
Even if it turns out that universes capable of supporting our type of life are extremely improbable, the anthropic principle is sufficient to account for our existence in such a universe.
That's succinct. Biologists who reject the anthropic principle as unscientific might find themselves backed into a corner if/as SETI fails to hear anything, or chemists stumble in their attempts to come up with simple replicators.
What I'm wondering is whether Adam's puddle really illustrates the notion that the anthropic principle is sufficient to explain our existence in an improbable universe. I don't think so...the analogy seems to be arguing that that it's a fallacy to consider the universe to be improbable from the beginning.
********
Give D'Souza some credit...he begins his argument with a huge handicap. Of all the Abrahamic apologists, who is the best?
Dawkins would have been much more effective in this debate, which steered toward scientific issues.
#8: "Why would we agree that cosmic dust is eternal and has no beginning or end?"
Who's this 'we', Kemo Sabe? In addition to the various big bang-oriented refutations of this hooey posted above, it also seems that protons decay, with a half-life of somewhere around 10^30 years (give or take an order of magnitude or three). There goes your eternal space dust. There's actually an interesting book called _The Five Ages of the Universe_, which goes over the possible future evolution of our universe over the next 10^150 years or so (assuming no big rip or gnab gib); in their model, space dust as we know it won't exist after the year 10^40 or so.
Probably a minor point in this discussion, but still...
and...
#98: "Anyway, when D'Souza says "Stenger says the laws of physics come out of nothing", D'Souza is grossly misrepresenting Stenger's philosophy. Stenger does not say that the laws of physics came out of nothing, he says they come out of our heads."
In D'Souza's case, those may well be the same thing.
Thanks for the blog PZ!
I just had to post a better video of Hitchens here...
http://politicalbunker.com/dsouza-and-hitchens-slug-it-out
D'Souza. Makes me think of marching bands for some reason. ;o)
But.... but .... D'Souza and Hitchens both want to kill large numbers of ragheads! Why can't they just agree to disagree about the trivia, and extend each other the queasy hand of comradeship for the duration of the War against Islamofascism?
I just watched D'Souza's initial statement, upon hearing his list of 3 things science "takes for granted" I almost cried. Does this guy know anyhting about science?
eric:
Read my comment #70 where I discuss the "puddle" analogy. It applies for any anthropic argument of specialness or fine-tuning, whether you are discussing parts of universes or whole universes.
Again no, there is a difference between a priori unconditional probabilities and a posteriori conditional probabilities (likelihoods) and theists confuse them. Some philosophical arguments on multiverses are with epistemic probabilities, many scientific are bayesian with objective a priori.
Captain C:
Um, I don't think so. References? IIRC such hypotheses are abandoned, since measured lifetimes are incompatible with their predictions. (I.e. the lower limit is far too high for these theories.)
"Sorry, but this completely misunderstands the true nature of fine tuning. There is a real problem. The fine tuning is not simply for life, but for any complexity of any kind whatsoever. Even fiddling things like the cosmological constant so we get stable atoms is very difficult indeed."
OK. But what if fine-tuning were the most-likely outcome of every possible universe in which complexity arises?
A relatively stable and complex universe would be the only kind of universe in which intelligent life could evolve to ask if fine-tuning exists, hence it's moot.
I think RickD's D&D dice example in #91 pretty much nails it - just because something is very improbable, doesn't mean it can't happen purely by chance.
"Anything that happens, happens. Anything that in happening causes something else to happen, causes something else to happen and anything that in happening causes itself to happen again, happens again".
- Douglas Adams
@Duncan #114 - Just like I've always said: Atheists and Religious Nuts need to stop fighting each other and find common ground.
Probably because it is sufficient to account for anything we observe.
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.
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.
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!]
It's very simple. The first jawed vertebrate had two eyes (never mind the pineal and parietal organs) and two pairs of appendages. This works. Therefore we -- we jawed vertebrates -- have all inherited it. Except for those of us for whom it doesn't work (snakes etc.).
Natural selection removes that which does not work well enough. It does not remove everything except the best.
Basic engineering? Please. Basic engineering would have given us a way to see what is behind our backs! We are left with two possibilities:
1. Stupid design.
2. Evolution.
Bingo. Especially when fixing it requires major changes in the way embryonic development works, which in turn would in many cases require mutations in many, many genes to avoid producing a non-functional outcome.
Incidentally, while vertebrates have two eyes (plus pineal & parietal organ) unless they've lost them, lancelet larvae have a single one at the front end of the body. And indeed, in vertebrate embryos there is first a single eye primordium that then divides into two. In very rare cases it doesn't; somewhere online there's a photo of a newborn kitten with a single eye.
Not all that weird actually. The weirdest is Opabinia, a close relative of the arthropods, which had five eyes.
Definitely not. Amoebae are huge, highly derived eukaryotes. Planctomycete bacteria are more like it, but they, too, have had billions of years of independent evolution.
You are resting on the historical artefact that no arthropod has ever managed to evolve a breathing system that can support a reasonably large animal in today's atmosphere. In parts of the Carboniferous there were not 21 but 35 % oxygen in the atmosphere, and the largest land animals were 2 m long millipede relatives, while the largest apparently terrestrial vertebrates were as long as a laptop is broad.
But even today there are way more species of insects than of tetrapods. Even the spiders AFAIK surpass us. The woodlice (14 legs!) may not, but they are diverse enough...
The pythons and boas do, and they are fairly close to the root of the snake tree.
Even closer to the root are animals like Pachyrhachis from the Cretaceous, which had complete, if small, hindlimbs.
The forelimbs and shoulder girdles, however, are completely gone. A few years ago it was worked out how that could have happened: there's a genetic master switch, and if you press it ( = one mutation in the right place), the forelimbs and the shoulder girdles don't develop.
scott:
I'm glad you liked my example. There are many more to chose from, so it was certainly coincidental and not forced. :-P
It isn't strictly necessary here, but it gives a full complement to the possibilities of regarding uniqueness: unique solution forced by a fundamental theory, coincidence, or in between as a likelihood over multiverses.
[But it is important for the argument of naturalness, as we have two different concepts of fine-tuning at play.
Ordinarily physical laws naturally have normalized parameters of the order ~ 1. Fine-tuning in the physical sense is when they are smaller by many magnitudes. Then we have to find terms that for some reason balance each other out almost exactly to give such resulting small parameters, they need fine-tuning. This happens in todays theories, and has no apparent explanation except in the sense already given, forcing or coincidence.
Multiverses removes that consideration in a sense by changing the concept of what can be natural from normalized parameters to likely parameters. The likelihoods comes from being able to pick likely parameters conditional on some outcome. (Here observers like us.)
Fine-tuning in the biological sense, that some parameters needs to be in some, often very wide, ranges for life like us to exist is related to physical fine-tuning. But there is no ongoing concern of naturalness.]
eric:
Read my comment #70 where I discuss the "puddle" analogy. It applies for any anthropic argument of specialness or fine-tuning, whether you are discussing parts of universes or whole universes.
Again no, there is a difference between a priori unconditional probabilities and a posteriori conditional probabilities (likelihoods) and theists confuse them. Some philosophical arguments on multiverses are with epistemic probabilities, many scientific are bayesian with objective a priori.
Captain C:
Um, I don't think so. References? IIRC such hypotheses are abandoned, since measured lifetimes are incompatible with their predictions. (I.e. the lower limit is far too high for these theories.)