Precision in Nature: Evidence of God or Accidents?

I'll give you that we don't know exactly why the universe started expanding, but as long as we don't have any reliable reason to believe either this or that, I see no reason for you to assert either that it was nothing before the big bang, that spontaneous vacuum creation cannot happen, or that physical laws that demand the production of a universe didn't cause it.

"Accident" actually means something. A fundamental point of logic is that if you change the meaning of words, you can't expect them to describe the same concepts. We have a good understanding of how planets form, how galaxies, stars and solar systems form, and why they don't crash into each other. None of them are unexplainable, none of them require your god to exist.

And we're still waiting for you to explain what you mean by precision.

There are two kinds of precision you have mentioned. One kind is that which can be explained by evolution, either by having undergone evolution themselves, like humans, or by being created by things that have undergone evolution, like technology.

The other kind is precision which you have merely asserted. You say that the periodic table is precise, when in reality, there is no goal for the structure of elements to line up to, no goal to precisely hit.

 

Did you change the font size too? You know, I have to remove all your formatting before I can answer.

Hey, it was my point. If you think the point was that the marbles had to be physical, you've missed the point, go back and read it.

The point was that certain processes can only chose integer values and they can be completely random, stochastic and uncaused, yet still be precisely integer values.

What's so precise about them? They consist of a mess of quantum wave functions, which correspond to mainly quarks and gluons. Protons can be formed all over the place. Some come from the big bang, others come from burning stars, other come from colliding stars, some are produced in the atmosphere, other appear as by-products in particle accelerators. They can be excited, have inexact, uncollapsed wave functions and so on and so on. Please specify exactly what you refer to as precision.

Most atoms come from the big bang. Exactly what happened there is not completely known, but that is by no means a reason to believe that a specific idea, such as the existence of a god is true.

The reason why they are so precisely interrelated is because they consist of discrete particles. They consist of protons, neutrons and electrons (and a bunch of other stuff). There can be one proton, two protons, three protons and so on. That's the pattern, that's where it comes from (even though the actual discovery thereof was by considering the electrons, which tend to add up with the protons). Patterns do not need to be designed if they have no option but to fall into a natural pattern, such as natural numbers.

 

Next time could you just say "hey guys, what do you think of the anthropic principle?"

So much faster.

 

ALTER2EGO -to- SWENSSON:
At no time did I indicate that you said the Periodic Table is complex. In reality, I've been trying to get that point across to you, while you insist there is nothing complex or precise about the elements on the Periodic Table. Regarding the complexity of the periodic elements, one U.S. Government website speaks of the Periodic table as "the most important generalization in chemistry." That same source further refers to "Periodic laws met in Nature" and its relationship to "complexity of polyatomic molecules and chemical reactions." In case you don't know, "laws in nature" are indicative of things that are precise and reliable. Webster's New World Dictionary defines "laws in nature" as:

"a sequence of events that have been observed to occur with UNVARYING UNIFORMITY under the same conditions."

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/12796101

Now, why would a scientific source—aligned with the U.S. Government—use the word "complexity" regarding something that you insist is neither complex nor precise? And why would that same source speak of Periodic LAW, which is the gold standard for "laws in nature" and is indicative of precision? Are you telling me this precision and law that is seen within the 96 natural elements on the Periodic Table resulted from random events?

DEFINITION OF "RANDOM":
Random describes an action that happens without order or without reason.
http://www.yourdictionary.com/random?

ALTER2EGO -to- SWENSSON:
I clearly defined "precision" in the very second paragraph of my opening post. According to Webster's New World College Dictionary, the word "precision" is defined as follows:

"the quality of being precise; exactness, accuracy"

 

ALTER2EGO -to- SWENSSON:
As you see, there is nothing complex or precise about anything—except when it happens to be something created by humans. Everything that is beyond the capacity of humans, including the universe and the laws of speed, gravity, etc., as you see it, just happened by itself. They just popped up out of nowhere for reasons unknown. That's the logic the average atheist uses, by the way, so your attitude is not unique.

For instance, you made an issue of crayons, marbles, and technologies created by intelligent humans while under the same breath you failed to present a credible explanation for how humans got here. Keep in mind that the human is far more complex than anything the human creates. An atheist will never admit that if it required an intelligent human to create crayons, marbles, and technology, then logic dictates that it required someone of vast intellect to have created the even more complex human and the vastly complex universe. Oh, no! Those just popped up out of nowhere by means of some theory that this or that scientist dreamed up. A theory, mind you, of which the scientists cannot present a shred of evidence that would move it from "theory" to fact.

So according to you (and other atheists I've debated at other websites), humans did not require a vastly more intelligent Creator to create them. Instead, humans merely evolved. Evolved from what, might I ask? And when I say "from what," I'm talking about the genesis: the very first organism that humans supposedly evolved from. How did life come from non-life so that evolution could then proceed?

 

ALTER2EGO -to- SWENSSON:
So according to your logic, the carbon-oxygen cycle that keeps living things alive just happened by itself; is that it?

It just so happened by some strange coincidence that humans, insects, birds, and animals need oxygen to live. And it just so happens, by another co-incidence, that plants need carbon-dioxide to live. Then by some strange co-incidence, trees inhale carbon-dioxide and turn it into oxygen. And it just so happens that humans and other oxygen breathers exhale carbon-dioxide, which the trees then inhale and turn into oxygen. All of that is just by accident; is that right?

BTW: You never did tell me where protons come from. You told me a lot of things in this latest response, including the wonders of evolution THEORY (not fact). Never mind that scientific theory is nothing more than educated guesses aka a group of hypotheses that can be disproven.

You also avoided answering my question as to where atoms come from. You acknowledge that protons and atoms exist, but you've yet to tell me where they come from and why they are so precise—so much so, that scientists can base laws off them. Another thing you didn't address was the following issue from my last set of posts to you:

Keep in mind that 26 of the elements on the Periodic Table are manmade. Those 26 required well-trained, credentialed scientists to create them in controlled conditions in laboratories. If it required intelligent, well-trained scientists to create 26 of those elements, explain how the 92 naturally occurring elements on the Periodic Table just happened to pop up out of no where—without the need of an intelligent designer?

 

Laws are not proven. FAIL

 

I don't know that they're necessarily fiction, but I think it's highly possible that they could have been guided by an intelligent force which would explain their precision. In other words, the big bang and evolution could be "tools of God." But when people refuse to consider consciousness as a potential building block of the universe, then all they are left with to explain it is random chance.

I think the best analogy I ever heard was that to believe that the universe happened by mere chance is to believe that a tornado could rip through a junkyard and assemble a perfectly working 747 aircraft that could fly itself.

 

Recurrent laryngeal nerve......... not very precise, is it? Seems to support that whole evolution thing, doesn't it?

 

Yeah, and it's a retarded analogy, plus it's to do with evolution not the big bang. Tsk tsk tsk, confusing evolution for cosmology.

 

ok we have a limit true assuming your god exists because you say it is beyond that limit stupid

Ignoring the problem that what you see as precision must exist without being created either in nature without a god or in the god you turn to in order to explain nature stupid

 

This is as dumb as pouring water in a cup and declaring, "Hey look, the water perfectly fits the cup with such precision. It's obvious that the cup was made for this water."

 

Where did the cup come from? Who created the cup? Did it simply evolve, meaning it came into existence at random aka by accident? Let me know.

 

I see you're as clueless about analogies as you are about science.

 

we all know cups cant exist on their own just like a universe wher thing happen a certain way all the time or at least most of the time cant just exist

the only orderd thing that can exist on its own for no reason with no design is a ordrly super genius god who happens to build at least one verse be it uni or otherwise

um because

 

He's also clearly unfamiliar with Douglas Adams.

I don't think it's worth the trouble explaining all this to him. He's clearly just discovered the anthropic principle but not the fact that it's been completely discredited since the 1930s. Next up: Pascal's Wager!

 

Is this meant to be analogous to evolution?

 

I have no problem with it being a law, I have no problem with it being the most important generalization in chemistry, I have no problem with it "having a relationship to the complexity of polyatomic molecules". Complex polyatomic molecules are all around us, but they are all products of evolution or made by things that have undergone evolution. These two cases are very important in chemistry, and I agree with the US website that chemistry is a flourishing scientific subject, but I still don't see any precision in inorganic chemistry. I had a look around and I can't find a common inorganic (or inorganically produced) molecule more complex than ammonium.

As I said earlier, it only mentions what can be done with chemistry, not that the foundations are complex. It's like saying that a brick is complex because you can build complex structures out of it.

It is humans that have decided what to call an element and what not to call an element. That which humans have decided to call elements refer to object characterized by their number of electrons. Electrons can only be integers (in the low energy limit). Electrons are attracted by protons. Protons also come only in integers (in the low energy limit). The fact that the electrons then align themselves in integer values is not proof of guiding, since it would be impossible for it to align in any other fashion.

Ok, you might have defined it, but I still don't see how it applies to the pattern of elements. So protons come together and align themselves in a certain way (based on quantum physics). It has only one way of getting together, when minimizing energy. What feature of the protons are lining up exactly with respect to what?

You've so far always dodged this question by asking about the creation of the constituents, so I'll try another way. Numbers are abstract and do not need to exist to be considered. If you pick a number in an unguided fashion, let's say for the sake of argument, 2, then you will have picked precisely 2, exactly 2. The precision in the answer is not an effect of being guided, since we defined the choosing process to be unguided.

 

Nature makes mistakes sometimes. How else do you explain homosexuality?

 

The laws are to a large extent fundamentally mathematical and its effect on reality is not as arbitrary as they might seem. Even so, the universe had to end up with some form of laws, it was then evolution that made sure that there would be a species that could consider it. For instance, if the speed of light was 1 km/h, then atoms would be smaller (because the particles that propagate the information about distance to other particles would move slower), and the entire universe would shrink in size, still not disabling life. It might not be life as we know it, quantum fluctuations would be much larger, but evolution would have found another way to produce species.

The universe is not ideal for life. It's got cosmic radiation, stars with varying intensity, meteors and so on.

No the production of complex things does not require an intelligence, it only requires a process which can produce complexity. One of those is letting an already complex system create it, another is to allow processes such as evolution take place. For things that aren't too complex (such as the first species), they can be produced by having a vast experiment and keep it for a long time.

So now you're moving away from "where did precision come from?" via "where did the universe come from?" and "how did humans evolve?" to "where did the first life come from?". You're argument is incoherent and spreads out rather than solves itself.

We don't know exactly how life came about, after all, to say anything with certainty of what happened that long ago would be unreasonable at this day and age. We have a few ideas, we've had the Miller-Urey experiment, which proves that the production of useful molecules can happen in some not-too-uncommon conditions, and given that the universe a lot larger than their test tubes and a lot older than their experiment, it is reasonable to think that that production is credible.

 

Is that a self imposed alter 2 ego?

 

So is it a mystery to you as to why the behavior of electrons and photons conforms to the laws of QED? And if not, what do you know that Feynmann (at least as of 1978) did not?

 

There are many theories but science hasn't yet nailed down how life started. That doesn't make science contradictory to your beliefs. It simply leaves room for more future knowledge. If we define god as "mother nature" for instance, there isn't any contradition at all. To define god as an old man in a flowing white beard with anthropomorphic characteristics is a bit of stretch, don't you think?

 

It depends on what level you are referring to. I am capable of working through the quantum mechanics of photons and electrons but if you want to go much further than that, you'll end up with the Klein-Gordon equation. While the Klein-Gordon equation is fundamental and kind of tricky to understand, it is not complex (well, it is, but in another sense of the word).

If we can trace back the structure of atoms to the Klein-Gordon equation, the complexity that whatshisname refers to is the direct product of a system which is simple. That is, if we believe his assertion that the periodic table is indeed complex.

 

Assuming yor refer to this, if you think Feynman wasn't aware in 1978 of the implications of an equation published 52 years earlier, I would like to know why.

It should be obvious that that is not nearly good enough to answer my question.

I never said anything about that, and it's not within light years of the issue here.