Is that so? Are snowflakes not fractally structured? Are living things not also typically symmetrical? Both snowflakes and humans are the products of the gradual accumulation of complexity according to simple rules, against constraining factors (heat and humidity in one case, food scarcity and predation in the other).
The gist of my argument is that the process "life", both its genesis and its evolution, is infinitely more complex and "purposeful" (remember you said it has a "goal") than the process "crystallization". I don't deny that they share similarities. I understand why you conclude that the absence of a sculptor in one case indicates the absence of a so far unknown energy source in the other. My argument is this: both a bush fire and my TFT monitor emit light. It does not follow that my TFT monitor could be the result of a lightning strike, that would be a "jump to conclusions".
If snowflakes can form just because of well studied and generally understood molecular forces, why does evolution require something different and special to occur?
Because, as you must admit, there is a huge gap to bridge between the process of crystallization and the process of abiogenesis and evolution. They share similarities. But the differences are clearly non-trivial.
Or that you have retreated somewhat from that position.
Less assumptions. I never held the position that just because humans can recreate natural processes, these processes cannot occur naturally, and nothing I wrote indicates that. But that may be because my English is so poor. My argument is that the amount of work and thought and intent and intelligence and design that goes into recreating some of those processes even on the most simplicistic scale are an indication for the probability that these processes are not merely small islands of order in the sea of universal entropy, but part of a superconscious scheme that goes way beyond the measly misunderstandings of today's "scientific consensus".
I don't think anything is truly random, but ultimately is the way that it is because of the initial starting conditions of the big bang. Everything then proceeded from there in a (at least potentially) predictable cause and effect manner.
De gustibus non est disputandum. I think this is the core of our differences, if we leave all the other bickering and name-calling and insinuations aside. I'm skeptical about the "Big Bang" religion, I see it as a fancy way of replacing white-bearded deities with another unexplainable, unprovable, esoteric, occult mystery, shrouded in the learned words of scholars' speculations and debates on their exegesis. And as I indicated, I'm not a fan of cartesianism and determinism, and I really don't think either of us can prove either way, it's mostly a matter of taste and definitions. Maybe we can make this the crystallization point of a different debate one day.
Beauty is just pleasurable sensory input.
Above paragraph also goes for this part of the debate. I disagree strongly. I think it is the way the cosmos communicates to us that it is more than an extremely complex Babbage machine and part of the force that makes us keep "falling upwards" against entropy.
Because it is a kind of intelligence, in a manner of speaking.
So we do have common ground!
Just a very simple minded and short sighted kind. Evolution can be conceived of as a kind of computer, like any optimizing process.
Precisely what I'm saying.
The data that goes in one end is the genome of the species it's acting upon. This is modified according to the secondary data, environmental conditions. The output is the genome modified in a way which makes the species better adapted to those conditions.
Agreed.
There is nothing supernatural or conscious about this.
The program coded itself?
Turtles all the way down.
It's just a whole lot of trial and error. Extinction clears away the errors, what's left is every solution that worked.
Butbutbut you said
There are for example many mistakes evolution made in our bodies that an intelligence would not have. If you do not propose an intelligent designer but only that evolution is some sort of supernatural force, if it makes such mistakes, how would products of it differ in any discernible way from products of evolution as a purely natural process?
Ah, forget it, I'm just being a scamp for funsies ;)
This assumes your contention that life is in some way supernatural is correct. You have not demonstrated that to be true. Until that time, it is not a valid example.
I'm trying to, you're just bending over backwards to rationalize all indications away with speculation of all different sorts. Just the way we dislike dogmatic religious fanatics for.
To clarify: my contention is that the process of life, the underlying "code", so to speak, is evidence of a "supernatural" form of energy in the sense that it so far defies discovery and recognition of the contemporary "scientific consensus". Life is a part of nature. Uni- verse. All is one, and one is all.
Electromagnetic radiation is not immaterial.
1600 AD: "A force that cannot be grasped with our senses, that you need complex machinery for to detect, yet can be used to do material work, even lift tons of weight, with a mere flick of a finger? Go away! Vade retro, satanas!"
I hope you get what I'm getting at.
Sufficed to say the brain is structured very much like a computer, and is altogether more complex than it needs to be if in fact it's only a signal receiver.
Less assumptions. I never said it's only a signal receiver. I said one of its many functions could be to tap into and amplify the cosmic background "noise" to allow for free will despite the cartesian nature of the deterministic processes that then happen on the material scale.
I don't know how familiar you are with the intricacies of cryptography, but a formidable problem is to generate unpredictability (commonly referred to as "randomness") for encryption purposes (OTP, for example). Since computers are deterministic, as you contend the universe is, there can be no randomness. These software generators are called "Pseudorandom Number Generators", PRNGs. So there are devices dedicated to the generation of "True Randomness", TRNGs, which provide the computer with "noise"; some of which are as simple as a "bad" resistor. Think of it this way, if you will.
Yup, semantic nitpicking. Alright, make the small change from "every guy" to "whoever currently has your fancy".
My English is abysmal.
Or you are being extremely disingenuous.
No, that would be if it was perpetrated by scientists, but I claimed that they were not true scientists because of some aspect of how they conducted themselves. What you're doing is blaming an outsider hoax on science itself.
No, science did well, the scientific method prevailed, the hoax was uncovered, and those who called out the fraud are now hailed as heroes. Rightfully so. But it took decades, and in these decades, they themselves were "outsiders" who disagreed with the many who took the hoax at face value and used it as evidence in support of their claims.
My original argument, namely, that the fact that hoaxes are perpetrated is by far not sufficient evidence that all claims of evidence in support of a theory are automatically a hoax, is still valid.
That does not mean that chemistry is simply the modern alchemy and has not demonstrated 100% superior capability to produce verifiably true findings. What you did was to suggest that chemists are just modern alchemists and are just as mistaken to feel sure of their findings as alchemists were.
I am merely trying to open your mind to the possibility that contemporary physics and science are not the last rung of the ladder to knowledge, and that many of their claims – although superior to their antecedent – can and most likely will dwarf similarly in comparison with the insights of future applications of the same underlying principle.
Why is the real American constitution not openly displayed in a museum, but instead replicas of it?
Another example for the same ad hoc rationalization that we criticize in believers. At first, you challenged me to find an example for a plastic dinosaur skeleton. Now that you understand that the majority of dinosaur skeletons on display are not actually fossils, you have a completely harmless explanation ready.
Do you get my point? I'm not saying there were no dinosaurs. I'm saying that "popular science" misleads just as "popular religious fanaticism" does, and that this does not constitute conclusive evidence of any sort one way or another.
Do you know what thorium is?
That thing that leaves 231Pa with a t1/2 of 30,000 years behind?
Counter-question: do you know what a heliostat is?
Once every 26 million years, though smaller impacts are more recent. Do you recall the meteor which exploded over Russia in 2013?
Let's absolutely avoid making a cost-benefit calculation between a few shattered glass windows, one broken spine and a little sunburn per century on one side and the space program on the other.
But I don't think you're abiding by it.
I don't think you're abiding by the Ideological Turing Test.
You say this as if supernaturalism is something new and cutting edge. It isn't.
The dream of humans to fly isn't all that new either.
Waiting for science to advance to the point where it can prove spirits exist is like waiting for it to prove the existence of griffons and centaurs.
Poor strawman, stop hurting him! I'm excitedly observing science advance, whatever the outcome.
Not in a vacuum, but I would contend that something like a computer constitutes a tangible validation of science. For computers to work, our understanding of how electrons behave has to be accurate to a staggering degree of precision.
For a Turing complete machine to work, it would suffice to understand how marbles fall into the right place, or how one line of dots on graph paper results in the next line of dots following a given ruleset.
That understanding came from science. All technology is just applied science, and all instances of working technology are demonstrations of the accuracy of the scientific findings they're based on.
It is the other way round. Crackpots tinker around, their devices and applications are the results of the art of engineering (an evolutionary process, if you will, a form of in-spiration (what is it that is being "breathed in" here, and where into?)), and science then tries to explain how it all works, and based upon an understanding of these explanations, the next crackpots finetune their tinkering and engineering. It is, for example, safe to say that the Law of the Lever was "understood" and applied long before Archimedes of Syracuse formalized it. That what you call science merely helped engineer better levers.
A simplistic example? Here is another one: I once challenged reddit to name an application, a technical device, that resulted from Einsteinian relativity theories. Guess what they came up with!
I think science has a lot of useful things to say about how best to design societies to maximize desirable attributes like comfort, safety, opportunity, fulfillment and so on. But then only because humans desire those attributes. Much of how we design societies is simply down to arbitrary human wants.
Science also gave us the atomic bomb and Sarin and Mengele's experiments.
I am not arguing against the sciencitic method. I am arguing against the goals some scientific fields pursue and their methods in achieving their goals. I argue against their using my means of living by fraud or threat of force, a.k.a. taxpayer's money or the false promise of peace by means of greater firepower via funding by the military-industrial complex, when experiments on how to better feed every human being cost a fraction and would lead to way more desirable outcomes.
we have to brute force it by exploring everywhere we can in a boringly meticulous way.
I disagree. It is entirely reasonable to suggest that some places on the map of science, at least as of now, do not deserve the same attention as others. We can go back to slamming the particle zoo into each other once we have figured out how to provide water, food, clothing, shelter, education and access to the internet for everyone who now desperately needs it far more than to know whether some primitive form of proto-life can be proved from the fossil record to have existed on Io or Titan or Enceladus or whichever extraterrestrial body currently has your fancy.