Book review of Nature\'s I.Q. (Evolution)

by xeno6696 , Sonoran Desert, Sunday, September 13, 2009, 05:15 (5549 days ago) @ David Turell


> > > I've admitted that all I can do is theorize that an intelligence has to be behind all this, because I don't think this universe or our life is all a sequence of accidents, the number of which approaches infinity. (Penrose guesses at 10^-300 just for the universe.)
> > 
> > 
> > As stated way earlier, both you and penrose misuse statistics in order to make those kinds of claims. You have to know everything about said system for that kind of knowledge. Inference can't get you there. 
> > 
> > We've never even been past our own moon!!!
> 
> Even if we go past the moon to Mars, we can never expect to leave the Milky Way. You must admit by your standards we will never know everything. We must extrapolate what we can know. And there is another set of close to infinite chance events: evolution, itself. So there are two distinct processes to account for, all by chance or by design, to account for us. Both require enormous series of chance events. And then there is the issue of a very complex code, that is only slightly different from Boolean Math. Invented by chance?; or by an intelligence? As I've said before, I've never seen a code that wasn't intelligently designed. Penrose is just one leg of my stool. And I haven't even mentioned consciousness. My stool is four-legged.-Remember, I'm more strict than most. If I wasn't, I would already be either on your side of the fence, or still with Dawkins. And let us also remember, that in either the atheist case or yours, statistics are ultimately a folly because you cannot claim statistics for events that we do not understand. We don't know how life began--and we cannot go farther than that without being dishonest. Any statistic you or Dawkins places on the "probability" or "improbability" of life is absolutely and positively specious without having actual knowledge about how life got here.-Inferences are fine as long as you recognize that all scientific models are just that; models. They are tenuous explanations. The inference you make is based on this data, and the inference is about something we can't see, feel, hear, taste, or touch--and is completely closed to study by the tools that generated the data your conclusion rests on. If we're talking in terms of "intellectual safety" here, I don't have a stool, I have a solid steel cube. It's admittedly less comfortable than a stool, but it certainly provides more support--especially in the realm of epistemology. And I predict ill things in my future; Grad school after all, makes you dumber...-http://www.phdcomics.com/comics/archive.php?comicid=374

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\"Why is it, Master, that ascetics fight with ascetics?\"

\"It is, brahmin, because of attachment to views, adherence to views, fixation on views, addiction to views, obsession with views, holding firmly to views that ascetics fight with ascetics.\"