BookOwl, when you say that you see flaws in the theory of evolution, do you totally reject it in favor of your religious beliefs, or do you think that the theory is on the right track but needs some modifications? Is your judgment purely objective or is it influenced by your religion? Even if evolution were to be totally wrong, that doesn't necessarily mean that Abrahamic Creationism is right. For example, what would a Hindu say?

The reason that we have freedom of religion is that no religion has a objective claim to be the true one. However, science is based on rigorous practices to conclude the most likely explanation given the existing evidence.

birdoftheday wrote:

Surely, when you were taught the theory of gravity, you didn't feel the need to “examine the evidence and make your own conclusion”?

Interesting that you brought up gravity. Scientists don't yet know why gravity exists, just that it is, and how it affects things.

BookOwl wrote:

The currently available evidence does not “overwhelmingly supports evolution”, and the scientists behind the creationism and intelligent design do have evidence for their theories. If you want I can tell you some of it.

How is there not overwhelming evidence? We can see evidence for it everywhere we look!


How did a discussion about Snap! devolve (heh) into a discussion of science vs religion?

Current project: [s3Blocks: scratchblocks rewritten for Scratch 3.0] ::#4b4a60 //https://scratch.mit.edu/discuss/topic/290031/ Basically done!

NitroCipher wrote:

birdoftheday wrote:

Surely, when you were taught the theory of gravity, you didn't feel the need to “examine the evidence and make your own conclusion”?

Interesting that you brought up gravity. Scientists don't yet know why gravity exists, just that it is, and how it affects things.

Relevant: https://imgur.com/S1gxmkR

joefarebrother wrote:

NitroCipher wrote:

Interesting that you brought up gravity. Scientists don't yet know why gravity exists, just that it is, and how it affects things.

Relevant: https://imgur.com/S1gxmkR

Haha. Seriously, though, science isn't about “why” questions. “What,” and sometimes “how.” “Why” is for philosophy or religion. If someone believes that it's God's will that human beings appeared in Africa 300,000 years ago, I can handle that. If someone believes that the world, including human beings, was literally created in a week 6000 years ago, I'm going to need a lot of convincing!

Is it just me, or does Snap! flicker horribly when resizing the window on Safari? (It could well just be me.)

blob8108 wrote:

Is it just me, or does Snap! flicker horribly when resizing the window on Safari? (It could well just be me.)

Not just you. Me too.

BookOwl wrote:

The currently available evidence does not “overwhelmingly supports evolution”, and the scientists behind the creationism and intelligent design do have evidence for their theories. If you want I can tell you some of it.

Yes please. But make sure its evidence for ID and not just against evolution.

https://discovery.org/id/peer-review/ lists a some of papers, that in the words of the Discovery Institute support the thesis of Intelligent Design. But those papers either only deal with evolution and not ID or are “just” essays, that try to philosophically prove ID. Where's the natural scientific research? Also, what have you/we learned from all the ID research? After 30 years of ID, is there now new knowledge going more into details than “An intelligent being created everything”?

Today when I go to my profile page in Firefox it says “comments loading…” and never gets any further. It works in Safari. It worked yesterday in Firefox, so I have to figure out what I did to break it. Last week I let someone talk me into switching from version 31 to version 52.3 (the latest one that allows third-party extensions not blessed by Mozilla) and nothing has worked quite right since.

bharvey wrote:

Today when I go to my profile page in Firefox it says “comments loading…” and never gets any further. It works in Safari. It worked yesterday in Firefox, so I have to figure out what I did to break it. Last week I let someone talk me into switching from version 31 to version 52.3 (the latest one that allows third-party extensions not blessed by Mozilla) and nothing has worked quite right since.

That can happen if you click a link in your messages to a comment which no longer exists. If the comment was deleted, or is on the second page (you would need to click “load more” to find it), you'll get that bug.

Check if your url contains a specific comment id (#comments-1234567890).

bharvey wrote:

Today when I go to my profile page in Firefox it says “comments loading…” and never gets any further. It works in Safari. It worked yesterday in Firefox, so I have to figure out what I did to break it. Last week I let someone talk me into switching from version 31 to version 52.3 (the latest one that allows third-party extensions not blessed by Mozilla) and nothing has worked quite right since.

Does clearing your cache fix it?

Alas, neither clearing cache nor removing the specific message from the URL helps. Since it works in Safari I don't think it can be a Scratch bug. Life is hard.

I hope that in scratch 3.0 custom blocks get handled the same way as they are in Snap!, as it is so much efficient and less cluttered.

Current project: [s3Blocks: scratchblocks rewritten for Scratch 3.0] ::#4b4a60 //https://scratch.mit.edu/discuss/topic/290031/ Basically done!

NitroCipher wrote:

I hope that in scratch 3.0 custom blocks get handled the same way as they are in Snap!, as it is so much efficient and less cluttered.

Thank you. We're proud of our UI.

TheAspiringHacker wrote:

BookOwl, when you say that you see flaws in the theory of evolution, do you totally reject it in favor of your religious beliefs, or do you think that the theory is on the right track but needs some modifications?

I don't think evolution is totally wrong, I just don't believe that it can turn a single-celled creature into a human or a whale or a plant.
Basically I believe that God created humans and several different “kinds” of creatures that then through natural selection turned into the many kinds of creatures we see today. For example, originally a dog kind was created, which then specialized into domesticated dogs wolves, foxes, etc.

TheAspiringHacker wrote:

Is your judgment purely objective or is it influenced by your religion? Even if evolution were to be totally wrong, that doesn't necessarily mean that Abrahamic Creationism is right.

I don't think anybody can be purely objective, so I would have to say no.

TheAspiringHacker wrote:

For example, what would a Hindu say?

You could probably ask 10 different Hindus and get 10 different answers since Hinduism doesn't really have a concept of absolute truth.
One Hindu creation story I read said that the world was created by a god who was born in a flower that grew out of another god's belly button.

TheAspiringHacker wrote:

The reason that we have freedom of religion is that no religion has a objective claim to be the true one. However, science is based on rigorous practices to conclude the most likely explanation given the existing evidence.

The founding fathers would probably disagree with you. The reason that the US has freedom of religion is that the founding fathers looked at history and saw what happened when the government imposed a specific religion. (Here's a hint: Not good things)

NitroCipher wrote:

BookOwl wrote:

The currently available evidence does not “overwhelmingly supports evolution”, and the scientists behind the creationism and intelligent design do have evidence for their theories. If you want I can tell you some of it.

How is there not overwhelming evidence? We can see evidence for it everywhere we look!

Do you mean life? Life isn't really evidence for or against any theory, since all origin hypothesizes(?) explain it.

MartinBraendli2 wrote:

BookOwl wrote:

The currently available evidence does not “overwhelmingly supports evolution”, and the scientists behind the creationism and intelligent design do have evidence for their theories. If you want I can tell you some of it.

Yes please. But make sure its evidence for ID and not just against evolution.

How about all the information in DNA?
DNA stores a tremendous amount of information, and from what we know of information theory information can only come from intelligence and not randomness. Since we are talking about the origin of life there can not be any natural intelligent agents to create the information, which only leaves an intelligent supernatural being. Exactly who this being is is beyond the scope of science.

BookOwl wrote:

The founding fathers would probably disagree with you.

I think Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson would.

BookOwl wrote:

How about all the information in DNA?
DNA stores a tremendous amount of information, and from what we know of information theory information can only come from intelligence and not randomness. Since we are talking about the origin of life there can not be any natural intelligent agents to create the information, which only leaves an intelligent supernatural being. Exactly who this being is is beyond the scope of science.

Let's say that I made a bunch of random procedures using Snap!. Each procedure has a separate procedure to replicate itself.
Now let's say that some kind of natural condition in the project ONLY allows procedures that generate prime numbers to replicate themselves.
Wouldn't that result in randomly-generated “information”?
I dunno. I don't really need to convince you of evolution, I don't believe you'll be punished for not believing in it anyway.

BookOwl wrote:

DNA stores a tremendous amount of information, and from what we know of information theory information can only come from intelligence and not randomness. Since we are talking about the origin of life there can not be any natural intelligent agents to create the information, which only leaves an intelligent supernatural being. Exactly who this being is is beyond the scope of science.

This is based on the idea, that intelligence can create information. But can it?
As an example: If i have a couple of axioms (like in maths) I can combine them and deduce a “new” theorem. But even if the whole humanity hasn't thought of this theorem before, I didn't create new information. The information of my theorem was contained within the axiomata, I just discovered it.

Now If I understand you correctly, you say something like “Intelligent beings can create information. There IS information. Ergo, an intelligent being must have created that infromation”. But for this reasoning you would have to show that Intelligence can create new Infromation AND that no other process can.

Can you give an examle of intelligence creating information and not “just” discovering or combining preexisting information? I see what subjectivly new information is. A lot of information is new to me. But what would be an example absolutely new infromation?

MartinBraendli2 wrote:

BookOwl wrote:

DNA stores a tremendous amount of information, and from what we know of information theory information can only come from intelligence and not randomness. Since we are talking about the origin of life there can not be any natural intelligent agents to create the information, which only leaves an intelligent supernatural being. Exactly who this being is is beyond the scope of science.

This is based on the idea, that intelligence can create information. But can it?
As an example: If i have a couple of axioms (like in maths) I can combine them and deduce a “new” theorem. But even if the whole humanity hasn't thought of this theorem before, I didn't create new information. The information of my theorem was contained within the axiomata, I just discovered it.

Now If I understand you correctly, you say something like “Intelligent beings can create information. There IS information. Ergo, an intelligent being must have created that infromation”. But for this reasoning you would have to show that Intelligence can create new Infromation AND that no other process can.

Can you give an examle of intelligence creating information and not “just” discovering or combining preexisting information? I see what subjectivly new information is. A lot of information is new to me. But what would be an example absolutely new infromation?

EDIT: This debate seams a bit unfair, since its basically you (BookOwl) vs. a group. I really hope that you can view that as a challange, like playing chess against multiple people simultanously.
EDIT2: LOL, one of the many times I clicked “quote” instead of “edit”. Sry about that.

Sure, randomness can create information. Isn't that the point of the monkeys-and-typewriters thing?

It's absolutely true that for information to come from randomness (in this case, mutation, which has to do with cosmic rays and things like that) is really unlikely at any given moment, which is why it took billions of years to get from single-cell organisms to us. (And it'd take billions of years for those monkeys to write Hamlet.) (Why do the monkeys in this story always choose Shakespeare?)

But anyway, to disprove your theory about the specialness of the human species, we don't have to get there from microbes. We just have to get there from gorillas, which is much easier; our DNA is quite similar.

(Side note: Hypotheses. Just as the plural of parenthesis is parentheses, and the plural of crisis is crises.)

But, being an ethicist rather than a biologist, I'm more interested in the idea that a Mafia hit man can accept Jesus on his deathbed and get into heaven, whereas I, who have certainly sinned but only in small ways, I believe, but who am not going to accept Jesus on my deathbed, am condemned to hell because my supposed early ancestor wanted an apple.

(Edit: Yeah, I get it, not any old apple. I'm being snarky.)