Most British scientists: Richard Dawkins' work misrepresents science

Q-reeus said:
There is zero evidence for it. And you know better than to assert otherwise.
Click to expand...
yes there is as stated:
abiogenesis obviously occurred, as at some point in time, there was no life on our planet, and then there there was life.
There are many hypotheses as to the pathway and mechanisms that gave rise to life including Panspermia.
Perhaps instead of blinkering yourself to those views that align with your own bias, you need to read all the facts with of course an open mind. :rolleyes:
That we know you are unable to do..
ID of course certainly fits your claim that there is zero evidence, plus of course being totally unscientific, supernatural and to ease some people into a zone they are comfortable in.
 
Q-reeus said:
Others should though be free to see it otherwise without being routinely smeared as mental/moral defectives.
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Hi Q-reeus
I agree with your sentiment.

As a generalisation I detect a certain inability on the part of religious folk to grasp how they, in the eyes of others, dismiss certain aspects in an arguement if in conflict with their belief even when to do so simply avoids a reality that is unavoidable.

I really think, again generalising, it is this unintentional disconnect that brings cries of mental defective etc.

For example if I point out the possibility that the words of Jesus would be corrupted by virtue of the aspect of hearsay and actual recording many years after the words were spoken, not only will a religious person argue such is not possible, but offer an "excuse" does it matter given that we have received the message.
I suggest that reasoning is flawed but a religious person has no idea why I see such as flawed.
I wish I could express myself better here but know this I dont see the matter other than there seems to be two different mind sets engaging in these matters each confused as to why the other does not get it... which unfortunately because of frustration may lead to name calling.

I would like to see a thread to discuss ID in the religion section or if that does not sit well with advocates of ID say in alternative theories even though ID is not strictly a theory.

But I take this opportunity to ask a question which you may be able to answer and I admit that I ask because I feel it may expose another problem for ID, so my motive is somewhat not pure.

If we a accept ID it seems we throw out evolution as offerring the explanation as to the appearance of new species. My assumption which may be simplistic and wrong but I will proceed on my assumption.

So does ID suggest that rather than humans and apes having a common ansestor that humans were a new design placed on the Earth 1,2,3 million years ago and at that time a new species of ape appeared.
Also what some regard as acommon ancestor somehow "recalled" when the new model was delivered?
And through out history when a new species does ID have it appear somewhat like a new model?

So we have our designer say first placing dinasours then when they disappeared then placing new and more variations of mammals over a certain period.

Does ID have modern humans being placed on Earth say 60,000 years ago, or to pick another number 6000 years ago.

Were Neanderthals placed on Earth as a new species but recalled when the modern human was designed?

Pity we dont have another thread I have so many questions I need to ask about ID.

You see if it has any scientific basis we could have evidence of something super natural which would be interesting.


Alex
 
To reject the obvious scientific answer, [Abiogenisis] simply because we are ignorant of the detail and methodology, and whether it actually occurred elsewhere off the Earth, in this big wide wonderful universe we inhabit, is akin to finding a needle in a haystack, but that doesn't mean we throw our hands up in the air and accept some view from a loony creationist who needs to gain notoriety, by suggesting/insinuating a god of the gaps, similar to what others here have suggested by the same tired old mechanism of highligting the gaps that are present in cosmology and science today:
It's grown into a real fanatical mission by some and seems to be gathering pace, as science continues to push any mythical, magical spaghetti monster into oblivion.
 
Further...
Does the fact that say spiders have been around for 20 million years suggest that the designer was happy with that design and left it in place.
I wonder if modern humans are up to scratch or if we are about to be replaced by a better model.... One can only hope.
Alex
 
Xelasnave.1947 said:
Further...
Does the fact that say spiders have been around for 20 million years suggest that the designer was happy with that design and left it in place.
I wonder if modern humans are up to scratch or if we are about to be replaced by a better model.... One can only hope.
Alex
Click to expand...
Can you explain carbon making molecules?
 
Q-reeus said:
There is zero evidence for it. And you know better than to assert otherwise. No example you or anyone else can offer amounts to more than a hypothesis pleading exceedingly special conditions for it to be viable.
Click to expand...
Examples of actual paths have nothing to do with it - I don't have any, and I don't know of any that are much more than guesses. Examples of evidence that it occurred is what I posted, earlier, and others have as well - there's a lot of that, as you have seen. There's even a sufficient mechanism - Darwinian evolution.
 
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/anonymous?p=AONE&sw=w&issn=10639330&v=2.1&it=r&id=GALE|A439185738&sid=googleScholar&linkaccess=fulltext&authCount=1&isAnonymousEntry=true


Title debating The "God" Construct
Author(s): Dave E. Matson .
Source: Skeptic (Altadena, CA).
Document Type: Article

Article Preview :

A reply to Douglas Navarick's article "The 'God' Construct: A Testable Hypothesis for Unifying Science and Theology," Skeptic, vol.20, no. 3, 2015, pp. 47-51 Dave Matson replies to Douglas Navarick's article "The 'God' Construct" Douglas Navarick has obviously given some thought to "The 'God' Construct," but the howlers I encountered robbed it of any credibility. For example: "Abiogenesis must be considered speculative considering that every cell ever observed has come from another living cell." I have yet to hear anyone in the science of abiogenesis claim that a living cell could appear naturally from scratch without benefit of prior cells! Given the complexity of even the simplest prokaryotes, such a claim would be preposterous. The goal of abiogenists is to recover the long pathway that eventually led to the first cells. If that is no longer possible, then the hope is to discover workable pathways. Navarick's demand that abiogenists produce a living cell from scratch, comparing that to the failure to find compelling evidence for ESP, demonstrates a profound ignorance of abiogenesis. Yes, cells come from cells even as cats come from cats. However, the conclusion that cats cannot credibly come from non-cats (based on the observation that every single cat studied traces to a prior cat) is absurd in the light of evolution. Here we have a perfect analogy to Navarick's attempt to discredit abiogenesis! Abiogenists will never witness a cell arising naturally from scratch; we will never observe evolution producing a cat from scratch. Neither predicts as much. Either path is a long, winding story. Navarick derides abiogenesis for lacking a mechanism. In fact, there are plausible mechanisms now being sketched out. One can hardly expect all the bugs to be ironed out at this early stage; it's a difficult field. Plausible mechanisms, complete with problems, are all that any science has to work with in exploring new areas. One should not confuse plausible mechanisms (with their inevitable problems) with "no mechanism in sight." The reason for keeping a supernatural deity out of science is that God is an ad hoc story that is compatible with everything and, therefore, explains nothing. Opening the door to supernatural "explanations" of any kind, which by definition cannot be investigated by the laws of nature--the only tool box we have--would turn science into a debating society unable to settle anything. We need not be dogmatic. If we observed a swimming pool that froze solid after the last person left, and became usable the instant someone jumped in, we might reasonably call it a "supernatural" event. However, we can't even assume that such an event had a cause (let alone an intelligent, living cause) since that falls back on natural principles that might not apply to a supernatural event. Even if a supernatural event could somehow be certified, it could never be a part of any scientific explanation. It would forever be an isolated, odd-man-out fact sitting in a corner by itself. Any demand that scientific explanation include the supernatural is, therefore, totally...

You Are Viewing A Preview Page of the Full ArticleThe article found is from the Gale Academic OneFile database.
 
https://arxiv.org/pdf/1601.05063v2.pdf

The longevity of habitable planets and the development of intelligent life
Fergus Simpson1∗
September 1, 2016

Abstract
Why did the emergence of our species require a timescale similar to the entire habitable period of our planet? Our late appearance has previously been interpreted by Carter (2008) as evidence that observers typically require a very long development time, implying that intelligent life is a rare occurrence. Here we present an alternative explanation, which simply asserts that many planets possess brief periods of habitability. We also propose that the rate-limiting step for the formation of observers is the enlargement of species from an initially microbial state. In this scenario the development of intelligent life is a slow but almost inevitable process, greatly enhancing the prospects of future SETI experiments such as the Breakthrough Listen project.



Conclusions
Few hypotheses can naturally explain our appearance towards the latter stages of the Earth’s habitable period. One possibility is that our evolution was fortuitously rapid, which in turn implies that a large fraction of habitable planets never produce intelligent life. In this work we have highlighted an alternative explanation, in which many planets possess relatively brief habitable periods. This lifts the previous restrictions on the prevalence of intelligent life, which is encouraging news for future SETI experiments. When interpreting the duration of the Earth’s habitable period, we must account for the strong selection effects which are at work. Some planets will sustain habitable conditions for longer than others, and we are likely to find ourselves on a planet with a long habitable period. That habitable periods can vary in their duration appears to have been overlooked in previous studies. Transient periods of habitability, as exhibited by Mars, may be a much more frequent phenomenon than environments which remain continuously stable for many billions of years. Aside from atmospheric mass loss, habitable periods might be truncated by unstable climates. These instabilities could arise from positive feedback mechanisms such as the heightened albedo following the formation of ice, or a runaway greenhouse effect following an increase in surface temperatures. In this work we have assumed that the mean population of observers is uncorrelated with the length of the habitable period. Complications arise if the mean population of observers is correlated with the length of the habitable period. The probability distributions defined in (1) and (2) then ought to include a weighting function ¯n(th, te). The strength of population selection effects can be substantial (Simpson, 2016). As one example of how this could arise, consider the population of a hypothetical civilisation hosted by an M dwarf. Since the stellar irradiance is predominantly in the infra-red, only a small proportion reaches the surface. With less energy available, the planet can only support a small number of observers. This is further exacerbated if tidal locking renders most of the planet’s surface uninhabitable. This kind of population dependence acts as another mechanism to bias the observed values of th and te. We revisited the hard step model, finding that our appearance towards the end of our habitable period is insufficient evidence to introduce multiple steps. From a Bayesian perspective, the simpler case of a single hard step is preferred, as it avoids overfitting the data. The timescale for the emergence of observers may be dictated by an intrinsically slow process: the enlargement of species. Given the rate at which this process is known to have occurred, there is little reason to believe that primitive life could gain fifteen orders of magnitude in mass in much less than one billion years. Planets younger than our own are less likely to host intelligent life. Stellar age could therefore be a useful indicator for prioritising targets in SETI experiments such as Breakthrough Listen - there is little hope in listening to younger star systems.
 
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