Reading some bloke's comments ...
I found this comment on the following atheist's blog web site: (www.geoffarnold.com/mt-archives/000349.html)
'fby, your feable attempt to minimize the reality of the statistical improbability of life occuring spontateously is comical. 1/1000? If it were anywhere near 1/1000, life would be springing up all over. In the last analysis I saw (this was a few years ago, I admit), you would have to put over 20 zeroes behind the 1 to begin to get close to how low the probability is. How could anybody put their faith in a belief system that is so improbable? This is why Flew changed - it is only logical to do so when faced with the facts.
It is clear that you have your own religion, and that's ok. You have put your faith in a scientifically impossible fantasy, while most others put their faith in an unprovable deity. Just two different versions of religion/faith that can not be proven and both seem illogical to the objective observer.'
---Kcbmc (kcbmc@yahoo.com)
In a latter comment, he also added:
'You are coming very close to the brink upon which Mr. Flew stood not too long ago. Humanly speaking, 1 chance in 10*20 is the same thing as "impossible". In scientific terms we try not to use the word "impossible", however. Your belief in such an event puts you at the pinnacle of intellectual dishonesty - the belief in a theory that is beyond plausibility.
It is this confrontation with intellectual honesty upon which Mr. Flew changed his position. The level of absurdity is too much for a thinking individual to sustain - lest you fall into the catogory of delusional or denial.'
posted by -=Kim Kaze=- at 7:10 AM
3 Comments:
You know, all of this talk of probabilities is simply obfuscation. Nobody actually talk about the events over which we're quantifying, and without that the numbers are meaningless. The only reason people talk in these terms is to provide a pseudo-scientific rationalisation for their prejudices.
You cite a good example from that comment on my blog. Somebody said that 1 in 10^20 is effectively impossible. Yet if we're considering a chemical reaction in a small tidal pool containing a litre of water, and the probability of a particular molecular interaction is 1 in 10^20 per second, the number of such "impossible" reactions is going to be around 10^6 every second. That's a lot of "impossibility". (Or is it? It all depends....)
Biblical literalists should simply 'fess up, and admit that their views are incompatible with the skeptical, data-driven scientific viewpoint. And scientists should refrain from using metaphors drawn from the language of mythology in describing what they do.
8:54 PM, January 22, 2006
I don't agree. Biblical literalist scientists are not numbered on one hand exactly; there's a lot of them out there. Also when you say 'Biblical literalists', you are taking a very sweeping stab in the dark at a logo of your choice. The kind of Biblical literalists that I would agree with for example, are those who read the Bible as it was intended to be read when it was put together, and with a plain eye. So you don't suddenly go into a metaphore and take it as historical, in the same breath you don't go into the historical narrative and take it metaphorically, etc.
People basically don't like what the Bible says because it judges their life, if it's true. Your talk about probabilities is interesting but at the end of the day, you haven't refuted the comment on probability, you've simply said 'in reality, I don't think that would happen'. You can't show why or how and you've not done so. I think this needs to be realised. You have your view and the other gentleman has his. But you haven't rebutted him - you've simply said you think he's wrong.
12:29 AM, January 23, 2006
'The only reason people talk in these terms is to provide a pseudo-scientific rationalisation for their prejudices.'
Sounds like an accurate description of evolutionary thinking to me. Never mind that all we ever see in nature is a loss of genetic code and information, speciation, genetic drift etc. Never mind that we have never ever observed one kind changing into anything else and never mind that catastrophic theroy far better fits the evidence on earth than a slow, gradual process.
We say we can gain information by random chance and given enough time. We say that the information to read dna etc. was also somehow miraculously evolved, also. And finally, we say that information does arise and has arisen, and that somehow, all of the untestable, belief-based theroys above are 'science', more so than ant other belief-driven scientific theory.
12:33 AM, January 23, 2006
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