Chance v. Design Part 3 (Evolution)

by xeno6696 , Sonoran Desert, Tuesday, June 09, 2009, 14:44 (5644 days ago) @ dhw

**Snipped top part of your post. My questions here are answered. And you are correct on one point, if you can&apos;t discern between natural and supernatural how can you rule out a creator? Remember however that its sufficient for materialists that they don&apos;t NEED to invoke the supernatural for an explanation. Science is therefore very very pragmatic in that regard. - My main reason for citing the article was its discussion about chance &quot;in general&quot; and not pertaining to biology, but I picked something awful for that and allowed you and myself to get distracted from the actual discussion. - Since I&apos;m going to be a teacher at some point anyway I&apos;ve started constructing a primer on chance that I hope you and anyone else here would be willing to read. Coupled with it will be a Java program that will demonstrate the system of chance that I will be discussing... though I&apos;m in the middle of 2 programming projects for work (apart from my 3 summer classes) for the visual part. I&apos;m sure you&apos;ll be patient. - &#13;&#10;>&#13;&#10; You query my claim that &quot;96% of matter and energy remains a dark mystery&quot;. &#13;&#10;< - First off, we don&apos;t know if dark matter/energy actually exist. Astronomers are debating this as we speak. This is important to your claim because astronomers do not discuss dark matter/energy as if it is a fact, only a hypothesis. So you cannot truthfully state that we don&apos;t know 96% of the universe, because dark matter/energy are only one explanation for what Astronomers are observing. - Dark energy/matter might actually be a mathematical artifact caused by rounding errors created as astronomers perform their calculations. The most recent Scientific American has an entire article about this, astronomers are considering getting rid of the Cosmological Principle suggesting that we might actually live in a rare section of the universe. What Astronomers are thinking is that the distribution of matter through space is not actually uniform (Uniformity is the assumption of the Cosmological Principle); there might be &quot;bubbles in the swiss cheese of matter&quot; they call voids--places where the density of matter is far less than other places. - If you think about it intuitionally, this makes sense because we have no reason to think the Big Bang happened as a perfect sphere or ellipse, but more like when a firework explodes (and it wasn&apos;t an explosion per se)--unevenly distributed and random. If this view is correct, then your claim is completely meaningless. - In either case, I&apos;d retract the statement for the moment, as it will only apply if Dark Matter/Energy exists, which might not happen in my lifetime. - &#13;&#10;>&#13;&#10; You wrote: &quot;If science is wrong, why does it default to a creator?&quot;&#13;&#10; You talked elsewhere of carts before horses. Since when did science decide beforehand that an unproven theory (abiogenesis) was right? Science is supposed to be objective. In any case it&apos;s not a question of defaulting. There are simply different theories that different people believe. Some of us can&apos;t believe any of them, and so we are agnostics.&#13;&#10;< - Not &quot;right&quot; but &quot;right within the perspective.&quot; The hard part about all of this is how hard it is to escape a perspective... I can&apos;t see a way that a creator could exist based on both my own experience and the unfortunate knowledge that science destroyed virtually every myth about the world. This... definitely stacks my deck toward a materialist view. The comedian Tim Minchin non comedically states &quot;Every mystery about the world that has ever been solved has turned out to be &quot;NOT MAGIC.&quot; This makes it difficult for me to be receptive about supernatural things, a creator especially.