It sounds as though you're defining God as the force (with unknown properties) that caused the existence of space-time. This is technically okay, however I think it is unwise, since most people consider God to be some kind of personal entity. To choose the word "God" for that unknown force loads it with the implication that it is a person of some kind, which is not necessarily the case, since absolutely nothing about that force is known.

There is no official "athiestic assertion which assumes that matter and anti-matter emerged from a clear blue sky so to speak". Many atheists acknowledge that such a force may have operated, but they simply do not assume that such a force was a person of some kind, a "god". They acknowledge that absolutely nothing is known about the event which caused the universe to exist.

I recall hearing a scientific theory that there is a kind of meta universe with physics of its own, and that our universe came into existence when two other universes collided, perhaps like the formation of bubbles from soapy water. This is a model that describes a phenomenon resulting in the existence of our universe, without that phenomenon being intelligent. I'm not asserting that this theory is actually correct, but just showing that such models do exist. (I do recall that this model fit the maths quite well, actually, however it's not really testable, so I doubt we'll ever know anything beyond theory.)

#1. Humanity= People. Pretty simple.
#2. Are dominant and recessive genes "opposing forces?" No. They work together. They are linked but one has precedence.
#3. The "perfect mathematical science" is the mythical science that can always tell you with complete accuracy the truth. Contrast with the human based science we experience.
#4. Actual science is, as I already stated, biased, because humans begin with their own assumptions as to what should be a "given", and the same data can be interpreted in many ways.


#5. I heard that God was proven by science. Can't remember where I heard it, though...

__________________
War is Peace.
Freedom is Slavery.
Ignorance is Strength.

It's a post 9/11 world.

Well, haven't most gods been just anthropomorphized powers and principles? That aside, I think it is better to use the word Creator when speaking of God as the prime mover. Another consideration besides the lack of time before the universe existed(which totally screws the "natural" Big Bang theory) is the question, how did the alleged singularity that held the universe come to be? The Big Bang Theory doesn't fully solve the origin question.

You may be thinking of Pribram and Bohm's Holographic theory. This theory, which I believe to be correct (as far as it has been researched) explains things such as how electrons "jump" from one shell to the next without crossing the space in between (because the shells are where the waves from the "implicit order" converge to form "electrons". The implicit order is the "metauniverse" you are talking about, I think.), and a host of other questions previously unexplained. It isn't that 2 universes collided to create this one, it is that 2 universes of complementary waves continuously collide to create what we call the physical universe. However, saying that the universe came from other universes only changes the question to, "how did those universes come to be?"

__________________
War is Peace.
Freedom is Slavery.
Ignorance is Strength.

It's a post 9/11 world.

"Humanity" refers to an abstract concept: that which defines what it means to be a human. We were in fact close enough in definition that I was correct to be confused as to how "humanity" and "science" are two parts of a whole. That is like saying humanity and hammers are linked, but humans are the dominant of the two. Science is a tool, not a symbiotic organism... To express the relationship between humans and science in that way is nonsensical.

Dominant and recessive genes are opposing forces... In a strictly dominant/recessive relationship, only the phenotype of one gene manifests while the other doesn't appear. It is one or the other, so one must "win", so to speak. Thus, the phenotype to appear is that of the dominant gene. If they worked together, the genes would compound upon one another instead.

This kind of relationship makes absolutely no sense for science and humanity, for the same reasons as described above. Humanity is the controller. Science is the tool. It is a tool that is used by humans to achieve the very same goals they would have without it, just more effectively.

Not only is this "science" mythical: it is not science. Science, as I've described in many previous posts, is a policy for observers to build models of the world so that they can make confident guesses as to what will happen next in a particular context.

Science never has "told the truth". The only thing you get from science are guesses as to how observations all fit together. These guesses are tested against further observation to make sure they are consistent, but that is all you can show for them. Science has never claimed to be more than that, and if you are criticizing it for being more, it is your own fault, and perhaps the moronic "scientists" who convinced you it was.

Science is based on certain axioms, or prerequisite beliefs. If you do not have these beliefs, then science is useless to you, except in a purely hypothetical sense. These axioms are pretty much as simple as this: logic and observation. If you do not trust these, then go ahead and ignore science. If you do belief in these, but not science, then you've made a mistake somewhere, perhaps in understanding what science is.

I understand that this is meant to analog my refusal to google articles for you on chromosome count differentiation. They are not the analogous though.

First of all, I have logically deduced that God is inherently incapable of being proven by science, unless he manifests directly in the visible world, and so I am confident that the rumors you heard are incorrect or that you misheard. I do not care where you heard them. I am not asking where you heard them.

Now for your situation, you presented the fact that you were confused about an aspect of the theory of evolution. I told you that science has addressed it, that I had read an article about it a while back, and that, unfortunately, I don't recall which article it was. This of course is not meant to be any sort of evidence to support the theory of evolution. It was only meant as a notification that you can find such evidence online. It was never my intention to prove anything to you. However, today I'm feeling generous. I will look up an article for you.

http://www.madsci.org/posts/archives...1026.Ev.r.html

Finding that was as easy as googling for the keywords: chromosome number evolution.

This is of course merely a description of the process as reportedly observed by others. If you would like scientific journals covering particular experiments, you'll have to find them yourself, as I have nother bothered with them since they're too technical for my knowledge of the field. If you would like further confirmation, you can find more documents, and perhaps even ask experts who may have observed these processes themselves.

The "Big Bang" Theory is not an explanation of origin, but of the very beginning of the universe. As in, X started the universe, *then* there was a big bang. It is a descriptive model of what happened, not an explanatory model of why it happened. The latter is beyond the scope of science, unless somehow there is an observable context outside our universe, or before the "beginning".

I remember it had something to do with an advanced theory called "M-theory" or "Manifold theory", which I didn't understand in the slightest. Your comment on the fact that it fails to explain the true origin of everything (including the metaverse), is irrelevant. I understand that it doesn't, and that the same could be said of the explanation that there was a being which made the deliberate decision to create everything. The whole point for me bringing that theory up was to show that there exists an explanation for the beginning of our universe (the "force" you mentioned a few posts ago), that did not involve an anthropomorphic entity, that the existence of such a "force" need not imply that it's "God".

First, thank you for the informative link which specifically addressed the question. I apparantly had trouble finding the right search parameters. The ultimate answer it gave (inbreeding), however, is something I had already considered and ruled too unlikely, because it would be required in every case, and many animals don't have big litters of offspring. Every new level of unlikelihood pushes the evolutionary timescale back immensely as you know, and if gets pushed too far back then we don't have enough time since the Earth has been around.

This article demonstrates my point about assuming "Givens" though. You said:
The article says :
Now I am sure you will say logic and observation led them to make these assumptions. Direct observation of evolution is impossible. That leaves logic. And now we come full circle with my assertion that science is inseparable from humanity. Science is absolutely dependent on human reason. That reasoning determines what will be the assumptions and how the data will be interpreted. To put it another way, they assumed evolution in order to prove it.

__________________
War is Peace.
Freedom is Slavery.
Ignorance is Strength.

It's a post 9/11 world.

As I've said before, science is a process of observation and then modeling. A model is a conceptual representation of how things could work. A good model is one that is consistent with observations. The more consistent a model is with observations, the more useful it is. Proof has nothing to do with science. Science does not exist to give you guarantees, but to give you the best possible answer given your limited perspective. Science is all about educated guesses which are meant to be used, not believed.

Consequentially, "they" did not assume evolution in the sense of believing it arbitrarily, but rather as a temporary hypothetical situation. Furthermore, they did not do so to prove evolution, but rather to explore the logical implications of the model of evolution. If the model of evolution is accurate, then it means X, Y, and Z are true. That isn't what gives the theory its credence. The consistency that the theory has with observations gives those who understand this the confidence that they have the best possible information available when making decisions to which the theory is relevant. In no way does science ever guarantee that your expectations are correct.

Now, to say "science and humanity are inseparable" is a strange way of putting it, but now that I understand what you mean, I agree. Of course, that is the case. Science is a construct built atop empiricism, a policy for deeming descriptions of observations as true, and logic, a policy for deriving truths from other statements already deemed true. Both of these are policies for defining truth, which would not be necessary if we were omniscient. In other words, science exists because we're nothing more than human. What is your point?

Also, when I said that science is based on assumptions, I meant only these: the policies of empiricism and logic. Science requires no further assumption (except for hypothetical assumption, which is fine to do when exploring implications). If you consider observations and logic good sources of truth, but have something against the use of science, all that means is you misunderstand science, which you have shown several times to be the case. Could you please demonstrate your current understanding of what science is, so that we can at least come to agree on this?

Of course their intentions weren't to prove evolution, it is quite obviously a given in their minds. But one of the things required for evolution to be true is that viable offspring have to emerge when number of chromosomes change. And on this very important sticking point, they say "to be sure, we must assume (evolution is true), and then assume(we know what we are doing)". Not very convincing, and completely circular.

My now much belaboured point is that science is a tool not only used by humans, but also created by them. Hence built-in human flaws, presumptions, and biases (even though the people try to avoid them, they are just people).

My first statement on the matter: "Science is just a collection of ideas assembled by humanity". Perhaps "best guesses" would have been better wording than "ideas", but the definition still holds.

__________________
War is Peace.
Freedom is Slavery.
Ignorance is Strength.

It's a post 9/11 world.

Also, about the whole "humanity" thing, sorry about the confusion. I used to say "mankind", but a PC English professor told me mankind was "sexist"(actually took points off for it!) and got me using that word instead. I need to stop doing that.

__________________
War is Peace.
Freedom is Slavery.
Ignorance is Strength.

It's a post 9/11 world.

I didn't read the article when I gave you the link; I just recognized it as the one I had read before. Going back, I see that the quote above is completely wrong, both in wording and meaning. Also, I notice that, although it is more accurately repeated, your original quote from the previous post is drawn completely out of context, which changes its meaning entirely. They are not, in fact, addressing the issue of having viable offspring, as you say. They are addressing the knowledge of whether a difference between chromosome number is due to a loss or a gain, which is only even used to illustrate a concept.

All the author of that article is saying is:
Let there be a species A and a species B which are closely related descendents of a species P. Let B have one more chromosome than A. The question is, how do we determine which of the two, A or B, is the mutation, i.e. which differs from P in the number of chromosomes?

Before I explain the method of deduction that the author presents, I will give a brief explanation of a concept in logic. In logical deduction, it is okay to assume something as long as you take that assumption into account when formulating your conclusion. Here's an example argument: Let's assume X is true. Given this assumption, we now know that Y is definitely true. The conclusion of the argument is not that Y is true, but that X implies Y. i.e. the assumption was taken into account by saying it implies the conclusion.

Now, the answer proposed by the author is to take a collection of species, S, which are likely decendents of P and assume for the sake of argument that they actually are decendents of P. If this is the case, then you can look at the most common number of chromosomes in S and deduce that this is the most likely number of chromosomes that P has (since mutation in the number of chromosomes will be less frequent than retention). This means that you can determine whether A or B is the likely mutant, assuming you are correct enough about the descendency of the members of S.

Now, it is not necessary that you be absolutely correct about every member for this method to be useful. Science lacks absolute precision, but certainty is not necessarily absolute 0% or 100%. In the above deduction about chromosomes, they made assumptions that everything in S was a decendent of P and then came to the conclusion of how many chromosomes are in P. If their assumption was false, this argument would be meaningless. However, evidence (not presented in the article, since this was beyond the scope of the article) shows that their assumption is probably correct, and thus the conclusion is probably correct as well. Confidence in the premise can be thought of as a scaling factor in the confidence of the conclusion. (This is expressed more precisely with math, but I'd rather adhere to common language here.)

This is a fallacy. It is true that humans make mistakes, but that does not mean that every human invention is flawed. Science has shown itself to be robust. I am not only certain that it doesn't necessarily have flaws, but I am actually quite confidence that it in fact does not have flaws. It may have shortcomings, but these aren't flaws, only limits to its scope.

Furthermore, it is useless in an argument to merely say that the basis of the other's argument is flawed. In order to actually argue, you must show exactly where the flaw lies, because if you do not see any particular flaws, then your claim that they exist is unfounded.

Right I thought so, that is inaccurate. Science is the process which generates models of the world. These models, I believe, correspond to these "ideas". Science is the process, but you only see the results of the process and label them as "science". You dislike the results, but fail to understand the scientific argument that backs them. The problem is that the models can change, but the process doesn't. The issue is not whether a model generated through science is "true" (afterall, no one can absolutely judge whether they are true anyway, except by whim), but whether it was the best possible model given what was known at the time. Think of it as approximation to the truth, and the models change to become closer.