Precision in Nature: Evidence of God or Accidents?

ALTER2EGO -to- EVERYONE:

AGRUMENT #1 FOR AN INTELLIGENT CREATOR:

For the average person, precision indicates that an intelligent person guided the outcome. According to Webster's New World College Dictionary, the word "precision" is defined as follows:

"the quality of being precise; exactness, accuracy"


The reverse of precision is an accident aka a spontaneous event that happen by chance with no one guiding the outcome. Webster’s New Collegiate Dictionary defines an accident as:

"a nonessential event that happens by chance and has undesirable or unfortunate results"


Scientific evidence shows there is extreme precision in everything around us in the natural world. This precision renders the evolution theory and Big Bang theory mere fiction, for precision leaves no room for error or for accidental events. Take, for example, the first discovered 60 elements on the Periodic Table of the Elements of planet earth. Some of these 60 elements are gases and are therefore invisible to the human eye. The atoms--from which the Earth's elements are made--are specifically related to one another. In turn, the elements--e.g. arsenic, bismuth, chromium, gold, krypton--reflect a distinct, natural numeral order based upon the structure of their atoms. This is a proven LAW.

The precision in the order of the elements made it possible for scientists such as Mendeleyev, Ramsey, Moseley, and Bohr to theorize the existence of unknown elements and their characteristics. These elements were later discovered, just as predicted. Because of the distinct numerical order of the elements, the word LAW is applied to the Periodic Table of the Elements. (Sources: (1) The McGraw-Hill Encyclopedia of Science & Technology, (2) "Periodic Law," from Encyclopædia Britannica, Vol. VII, p. 878, copyright 1978, (3) The Hutchinson Dictionary of Scientific Biography


SIDE NOTE: Laws found in nature, as defined by Webster's New World Dictionary, are:

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


QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION:
1. Were it not for the precise relationship among the first 60 discovered elements on the Periodic Table, would scientists have been able to accurately predict the existence of forms of matter that at the time were unknown?

2. Could the precise law within the first 60 discovered elements (on the Periodic Table) have resulted by chance aka spontaneously aka by accident? Or is this evidence for the existence an intelligent Designer/God who guided the outcome?

3. Evolution relies upon things happening by chance aka at random. If evolution were a fact, how does it account for the Periodic Table of the Elements of planet earth in which the first 60 discovered elements are so precise, and so interrelated with one another, that it has been assigned the word "LAW"?

 

god existing whithout guidance has the same problem if it exists whatever qulitys it has can be naturel but that removes the need for god to begin whith

 

Using the Webster's dictionary definition of a word to show that the word accident does not describe what you see and your interpretation of the world is not proof of God, and does not render evolution and the Big Bang Theory pure fiction. In fact, BBT/evolution are in no way mutually exclusive with a creator.

 

I wouldn't say that the opposite of precision is accident. Accidents can be precise. "Accident" implies, as you said, "undesirable or unfortunate results", I'm not sure what your reason for using "accident" rather than just "by chance".

Well, sooner or later. Nowadays, we have technology that will do it without assuming the chemical properties. It might take longer for them to find those technologies, but it's far from impossible.

Well, they had to align themselves some way. If they got together some other way, we'd be looking at that and wondering why that happened.

We also do know why they arrange themselves as they do. There is no mystery there. The pattern comes from quantum physics and Coulomb attraction, and, if you want to be picky, the three-dimension-ness of space.

Your understanding of evolution seems flawed. Evolution does not account for the periodic table, the theory of evolution is a biological theory, it doesn't claim anything about atoms.

Elements did not evolve. They might have fallen into place, but that's not evolution. Certain aspects of nuclear physics, such as the under-abundance of beryllium in space can be explained with methods similar to evolution, but that doesn't make it evolution.

How precise is the pattern of atoms anyway? You're quite vague about what you mean in the first paragraph, so I'm not sure what part of atomic physics you are referring to. If you drop marbles in an area around a box and some fall into the box, exactly how many marbles goes in the box might be accidental, but that doesn't mean that the number of marbles in it in the end becomes imprecise.

You can see atom nuclei like collections of marbles, even so, the mass of two separate marbles and the mass of a collection of two marbles are different. How's that for precision? Then those marbles attract electrons, through Coulomb attraction, and if they have the force to attract an imprecise number of electrons, let's say 3.05, then still only 3 electrons will be collected. The way you seem to look at elements seems to be highly chemical, you only seem to focus on the electron features. Nuclei show a great number of different configurations, all of which are governed by quantum physics, which is very stochastic. Even if you do consider electrons only, also they are governed by quantum physics and vary a lot. They can also be excited, exchanged or ionized, all of which are fluctuations from the norm. The thing is that the variations are mostly smaller than the full size of the atom, which means that scientist can look at, and label, different versions of the atoms.

 

your argument is highly flawed

But welcome to the forum, anyway.

First request, dont believe what is accepted as true, is true. "we' all are still learning.

what is precise about weight?

'weight' is how the layers were 'predicted'. There were gaps in the layers.

it was a no brainer for the time.

It was kind of like lavoisier and caloric (energy); another no brainers. The concepts were easy and there were no 'laws' to predict with. There was little within the sciences for 'creating' the definitions of elements for the periodic table and the concepts of 'energy' itself.

nothing precise about weight.

it's always an open system by its lack of causality to what that 'cause' is of weight (gravity itself)

ie.. mankind hadn't defined nature to the letter just yet

That first statement is highly flawed just to comprehend 'evolution' and the environments that cause many mutations (per se). For example if you have a red crayon and blue crayon, how many colors can you 'create'? Think of how many variables you would need to calculate to address how many variations you could make.

what makes a system 'random' is to leave open the variables and not know which is causing the change.


Nothing about 'god' in an evolution, unless 'god' is the nature, you are trying to understand. ie... the knowledge you are learning, is about you and 'all ah' it (existence/nature itself: god)

nothing magical about it.

 

To the OP:

If you saw a pothole in the road filled to the top with water, would you assume that the pothole was created with that exact size and shape specifically for the purpose of holding that exact amount of water?

Or would you assume that the water conformed to the shape and size of pothole?

 

ALTER2EGO -to- BISHADI:
Thank you for the "welcome." I apreciate that.

ALTER2EGO -to- BISHADI:
You are missing the point of the example I used with the Periodic Table of the Elements. The fact that all 60 are interrelated, and with such precision, shows deliberation. It was intentional, in other words. So my argument is that someone (in this case, God) guided the outcome.

For example, since the discovery of the first 60 elements on the periodic table, even more naturally occurring elements have been discovered. There are now 92 naturally occurring elements. The last time I checked, there were 118 elements on the period table. And, get this: 26 of them are manmade--the creation of trained scientists in controlled laboratory conditions. Let me see if you will get the significance of the latter statement: that some of the more recent elements are not natural but have since been created by humans.

ALTER2EGO -to- BISHADI:
Where did the crayons come from? How did they get to be red or blue? Who mixed the ingredients that caused "crayon" to be the result? Were they created or did they just appear spontaneously aka by accident?

 

You are attempting to apply human limitations to the Creator. Let me ask you this: if there is no God, how did life come from non-life?

 

ALTER2EGO -to- SWENSSON:
Let me put it another way. The opposite of precision is imprecision, inaccuracy, inexactness--which are what we see when accidents occur. We only see precision when something was deliberately done by an intelligent being.

ALTER2EGO -to- SWENSSON:
How did this technology come to exist? Who created it? Did it happen by itself or was it the invention of intelligent humans who guided the outcome?

ALTER2EGO -to- SWENSSON:
The reason why I mentioned evolution theory and Big Bang theory in my opening post is because both theories rely on precision being the result of accidents aka spontaneous events with no intelligent person guiding the outcome.

ALTER2EGO -to- SWENSSON:
How did the marbles come into existence? They just popped up out of nowhere? Did you notice the language you used in your quotation above that I printed in red? "If you drop marbles in an area...." So someone intelligent had to drop the marble around the box; right? It required the intervention of an intelligent being who wanted the marbles to be dropped precisely around a specific box. Do you see the point I'm trying to make? Things that are precise don't just happen at random; they are done deliberately. And deliberation points to an intelligent being who guided the outcome.

 

you don’t by an unsupervised universe but an unsupervised god just existing that happens to be able to design the universe because that’s how it happens to be makes sense to you i don’t get that

don’t know how life started

 

When you click quote, the name of the person you're quoting appears in the box, you don't need to write "ALTER2EGO -to- SWENSSON" everywhere. Also, your colour formatting messes up the quote system.

So your logic is "precision was only made by an intelligent being because an intelligent being created everything because precision can only be made by an intelligent being"? That would be circular reasoning, a logical fallacy. Why then did your god decide to put his precision only in things that can undergo evolution? There is more or less no high level precision in stones, rocks, oceans, air, dirt, space and so on. If there is, it is present because of plants or animals, which do undergo evolution (or that directly rely on entities that do) and therefore explain that precision.

Well, the question was "would scientists have been able to accurately predict the existence of forms of matter that at the time", so it would be the scientists who created it.

No, the big bang doesn't. The big bang has no "accidents" in it, not even by your non-standard definition of accident. Nor is there, for that matter, any precision to be found in the big bang theory.

This is completely beside the point. My answer has nothing to do with whether or not the marbles were created by humans or not. It was a thought experiment, they are very common in any discipline which is accurate in determining truths. The marbles could just as easily be rocks thrown from a volcano, and they're not intelligent, are they? The point of the argument is that the things you call precise couldn't be imprecise, and therefore, the precision is not surprising.

Fine, if you want to be picky about what is created by what, how about this: Spontaneous quark/antiquark pairs are produced completely stochastically as sea-quarks in protons. Since they are stochastic and spontaneous, you can't tell how many they will be, yet they will only take precise values, 1 pair, 2 pairs, 3 pairs and so on. That is very precise, yet completely stochastic and without intelligent input. Happy now?

Now, would you care to answer the questions I supplied?

What do you mean by the precision of the pattern of atoms in the periodic table? What features of the atoms is it that is so precise?
In what pattern would you expect them to align themselves without guidance?

 

seems to me your pushing limitations of what you can belive on to nature then altering what nature must be by ading a god to it with what you could not belive in any other form contained within said god

 

There is no end of polemics, and if we go on digging into this all we will arrive at is again a serial of confusions and it is totally a subjective matter. Precision is a subjective matter and it is relative. There is a kind of harmony, precision in nature and from a different lens there is inchoation, imprecision and ineptitude

 

This is far from a given. You're going to have to prove this is true; you can't just make such a fundamental claim and move on. Also, if you're trying to prove there is a designer you can't assume a designer exists right in the first line of your proof. This is begging the question.

No. The opposite of precision is not "accident," certainly not in this context. Sloppiness, carelessness? Maybe. But the opposite of accidental is deliberate, not precise. You're setting up a false dichotomy which says a lot about how you think and nothing about the real world.

You don't get to cite "scientific evidence" as something authoritative in one sentence and then dismiss two theories which, by any measure, are supported by reams of that same evidence in the next. You might disagree with some components of each. You might have a problem with methodology. But to dismiss each as "mere fiction" demonstrates you have no idea how each was arrived at and less of an idea about what constitutes scientific evidence. And I fear you fetishize scientific "laws" by that last sentence. You do know that a good solid theory trumps a law any day, right? Laws are just observations - for the most part we don't even know why they are the way they are. Theories provide a framework that is explanatory and predictive - they're not just hunches. I'll stop here in case you do know this and I'm assuming too little of you. But so many who think like you do misunderstand these basics.

I don't know, and neither do you. But yes, I imagine it certainly helped.

If these are the only two possibilities you can think of and they're mutually exclusive and I have to choose one I guess I'll go with yes, the precise law as you describe it could have happened by accident. But I wouldn't put it that way. All it's evidence of is order, and if you don't presuppose that order needs a designer you might not be so inclined to shout "designer" every time you get confused or amazed.

You couldn't be more exquisitely wrong here. While mutation is more or less random you're ignoring the main component of Darwinian evolution: natural selection. And it is far from random. So your first sentence is wrong.

Secondly, evolution has nothing to say about the periodic table, or chemistry in general. It's more focused on biology - you know, living things, that have genes and reproduce. You have been assigned an F, and if we add it to your LAW we get "FLAW."

You want to believe the things you believe. And then you've tried to build this house of cards to "prove" that your beliefs are logical. But even though I've shown that your argument is deeply flawed and based on incorrect information, something even you must acknowledge, it doesn't matter, and you won't change your mind.

So why bother pretending that you've arrived at your beliefs logically? Only an idiot would be swayed by your argument for very long - it's both logically and factually terrible. So you're not going to convince anybody to take your side and you're not fooling anybody that you arrived at your position riding such a meagre little coach.

Why bother? Your position wasn't reasoned into you. I certainly doubt it can be reasoned out.

 

Does it matter?

Yes, as it comes about from a first-order event (namely, how physics occurred after the first few billionths of a second after the Big Bang). You're looking at things after the fact and of course they look ordered and that's how things were intended to be. However, prior to the way physics became after the initial period of the Big Bang, it probably would have been impossible to deduce how elements would behave if, say, the weak nuclear force were 0.2% weaker while gravity were 0.2% stronger. Yet, should that have happened, I have no doubt that there would, eventually, be some intelligent entity asking about how fine-tuned the universe must be for life to occur.

Biology is complicated chemistry, and follows all the rules thereof. And evolution occurs via non-random natural selection.

 

exactly... if one can believe a God poofed out of nothing... why not believe the Universe popped out of nothing, which would be easier to poof? which is more complex?

 

Human understanding clearly has a limit and therefore cannot be extended to explain the eternity of an intelligent Designer/God, because this is well beyond the realm of human understanding. Man's inability to explain how God has always existed does not change the fact that there is obvious design and precision in the universe—which indicates deliberation. Something done deliberately indicates an intelligent being or person guided the outcome. Human experimentation has proven that precision cannot occur spontaneously.

 

Repeating yourself using slightly different wording isn't the same as responding to the avalanche of errors that were pointed out in your thinking. You're just going to pretend we didn't take the time to respond, in detail, to your OP? Why bother posting at all?

 

ALTER2EGO -to- SWENSSON:
No, I'm not using circular argument at all; I'm using logic. You are not going to tell me that a marble and a crayon created themselves aka spontaneously aka by accident. Someone intelligent had to mix the ingredients in order for a crayon or a marble to be the result. Logic tells you that was the case with the crayon and the marble. Yet, you are sitting in front of your computer insisting that the elements on the periodic Table—which are far more complex than a crayon or a marble—somehow resulted by themselves.

You are now extending that argument to stones, rocks, oceans, air, etc. which are all precise. They are so precise that they are able to maintain other life forms. Look at what happens when there's an oil spill in the ocean? Fish and birds start dying as a direct result because the pollution from the oil spill caused a disruption to the precision in the ocean.

When you argue that dirt is not precise, you need to speak to farmers who rely on the soil to produce crops. Dirt is not just "dirt." It is alive with organisms that provide nourishment to the plants. Air is not just air. It contains various organisms that enable us to enhale safely, without poisoning us. Or haven't you heard of the oxygen-carbon cycle that is vital for the lives of humans and animals, insects, etc? Let me tell you about the oxygen-carbon cycle.

THE OXYGEN-CARBON DIOXIDE CYCLE:
Without trees we would all die. Trees inhale carbon-dioxide and turn it into oxygen. In fact, trees clean the air of many impurities. We inhale oxygen and exhale carbon dioxide for the trees, and then the trees use the carbon dioxide that we exhale and turns it back into oxygen for us--and back and forth, back and forth the cycle repeats itself continuously. As stated by one source:

Read more at: http://www.lenntech.com/carbon-cycle.htm

This cycle could not have resulted without an Intelligent God guiding the outcome because there is too much PRECISION involved. Precision leaves no room for error or guesswork.

 

ALTER2EGO -to- SWENSSON:
No, that is not the question I asked. In a previous post, you credited scientists for inventing technologies that are able to do certain things. Below are your exact words:

The point I was trying to make is this: It required intelligent persons to create the technology, as opposed to the technology simply occurring spontaneously/by accident. Yet, you are arguing that the far more precise universe did not require an intelligent designer. I want you to think about that.

 

ALTER2EGO -to- SWENSSON:
The Big Bang Theory says space began expanding by itself aka spontaneously aka by accident—for no explainable reason, with nobody guiding the outcome. Then out of nowhere, amidst all this spontaneous/accidental expansion of space, up popped millions of planets with their own individual fields of gravitational pull, which keeps them within their own orbits so that the planets don't crash into each other. And all this happened by itself by means of unexplainable spontaneous events aka accidents. Of course scientists are too slick to come right out and use the word "accident," but that's what it boils down to.

I'm waiting for you or somebody else to explain how precision in the universe and everything else could have "just happened," which amounts to accidental occurrences.

 

ALTER2EGO -to- SWENSSON
Of course it does, and you know where all this is leading; that's why you won't answer the question. It required someone intelligent to create the marbles. So tell me, how did the rocks come into existence? Where did the ingredients come from, which in turn became rocks? They just happened spontaneously aka by accident?

ALTER2EGO -to- SWENSSON:
Where did the protons come from? Protons are precise. How did precise protons just happen by themselves?

ALTER2EGO -to- SWENSSON:
Where did the atoms come from? From out of nowhere? And why are they so precisely interrelated so that when several were missing from the Periodic Table, scientists were able to theorize the qualities of the missing elements? Remember, this is so precise that it is referred to as a LAW. Explain to me how precision could have happened by accident. 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. Yet, here you are insisting that the 92 natural elements did not likewise require an intelligent person (God) to bring them into existence. What logic are you using?

 

Ok.

1. There is speculation about what might have "caused" the big bang the include wondering if such a question is even meaningful. But it's all hypothesis right now. The BBT does NOT claim that it happened by accident.

2. The BBT theory contains no speculation about the probability that any remaining mysteries are impossible to explain.

3. Millions of planets didn't "pop up" for quite a while. Star and planet formation is quite well understood.

4. I wish you'd stop saying science believes something is unexplainable. And we've explained to you why "accident" is a poor choice of word for what you're struggling to describe. An event whose cause is currently unknown does not automatically get classified as an accident. And it doesn't get labelled "unexplainable" from now on.

You depict science and the work it does like it all happens in a shiny picture book for children. It's all far more complicated, subtle, and interesting thatn the drab little story you keep repeating.

If you just repeat the same story again but this time in a squeaky voice instead of addressing the fairly shocking list of grade-school level errors I'm going to bail on this thread. It's seeming too much like.... like a car accident in slow motion. There. I'm a lot happier with my use of "accident" than yours.

 

Wow, you've given a lot of really long answers.

Please stop putting words in my mouth. At no point have I called the periodic table complex, in fact, the entire point of my post is that I question your assertion that the periodic table is complex.

What is so precise about those things? You keep throwing the word precise around, but you have now twice neglected to define it. Yet again, the only valid precisions you provide are the results of evolution. Fish and birds may be dying, but the ocean has not undergone evolution, and is therefore not affected by the oil in itself. The ocean doesn't die from some oil, does it?

Again, the only real precision you mention is the product of evolution. There is a huge abundance of chemical and nuclear cycles in nature. The fact that a few of them are useful is not precision, it is statistically likely. We use a handful of them in our bodies and nature in general uses even more.

The carbon and oxygen in our atmosphere enjoy a large margin for error, humans can survive in a large range of partial and inclusive pressures. And if we didn't, the theory of evolution predicts that we will die and other animals which are able to survive under those conditions will thrive. Oxygen content and other chemical contents in the air has changed greatly over time. How's that for precision?

By your assertion that dirt is not precise, especially in combination with your inability to argue for the precision of anything whose precision is not easily explained, suggests that you wouldn't know what imprecision looks like. Even if something is completely stochastic, it will have a certain outcome, which you could point at and call precise because it has precisely that value. However, that doesn't mean that the outcome was indeed completely stochastic.

 

Yeah, technology can be created by humans since humans have undergone evolution. My point all along.