Never forget

Here's one of my essays disproving evolutionary chance

Look, being real for a second, I apologize for being such an ass. I make no excuse for my appalling conduct, and I hate that I'm so bad at restraining my frustrations. I'm not mad at you, I'm mad at what you believe, and I inappropriately conflate those two, lashing out at the person and not their position. That's abhorrent behavior on my part, I own it and I'm sorry, though in fact I have no business litigating people's ideologies either.

I strive not to begrudge people the right to think, feel and believe whatever they please, but I fall short of this on the regular. (This is partly why I stay well away from religious streams.) Everyone deserves better than to be berated by some belligerent dickhole on the internet. For whatever it's worth, I applaud you for maintaining your cool, and I respect your follow-through showing me your paper. You have made a good-faith effort to reach some sort of understanding. I have done the exact opposite.

The one small comfort I take is that I am ashamed of myself. At least I know I done f**ked up. I'll leave you in peace now.

Why thank you :) remember that its only natural to ponder reality, so of course there's will be different opinions. Being respectful and having an open mind is best

The owner of this stream once said that "civil discourse runs marathons." Just being civil is so huge, and...I don't know about rare, but all it takes is one or two jackasses to ruin the entire discussion. I'll try harder to bring my best to the table, and stow the bile. It's...very unpleasant to feel so angry. The LEAST I can do is not spew it at anyone else.

Thats a good quote. It's almost impossible to have a good debate when the other person is completely shutting their mind down in arrogance. The difference between a smart person and an idiot can often be seen on how they act when in an argument. It's like having an open mind vs. Having a closed mind

Yeah that's great, we've already established you don't know dick about science. You evidently can click links though since this meme and this stream have zero to do with the matter at hand. Go poke around BibViz.org for awhile and let's see how thick your skull REALLY is. You owe it to yourself to read this too, seeing as how you and people like you literally define it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_from_incredulity

How's the essay btw

I mean, when you say "If you think about it, chance is really stupid." That sounds like the argument from incredulity to me...but I'm so horribly biased. The structure of the essay is good and your penmanship is way better than mine.

Thanks 👍 but that was kinda the introduction sentence to that idea. It was so I could start actually PROVING how evolutionary chance is stupid, using the figures for chance forming a protein. Once we figure out how unbelievably hard it is for chance to form a single protein, it puts an entire universe out of the question

Doesn't the paper only account for a single particle trying to turn into a cell? I didn't crunch the numbers but even an absurdly improbable event may occur with relative frequency if that probability is applied absurdly large quantities of particles. There are ~1.725 x 10^44 particles in the Earth's atmosphere.

The water on Earth is thought to have been deposited over billions of years by water-rich asteroids melting down in the atmosphere and accumulating into the oceans. It's a lot of volume, but also a lot of time.

Just ideas. In fact, one of the ironies of science is that nearly everything we ever though we knew to be true has been demonstrated to be false. Which means almost everything we think we know now is probably false too.

It accounts for a protein, a cell is bigger. As for time, even a google years (10 to the power of 100) probably couldn't make a life form. I dont even think scientists know how long these asteroids and cosmic dust have been around, but if it's that long it just sounds immeasurable in the first place

You want to hear something absolutely stupefying? A child could write out a googol in long form on a bar napkin in 5 minutes. That number: a 1 with 100 zeroes after it, is larger than the estimated number of particles in the observable universe, dark matter and energy included. The entire observable universe, every photon, quark, nutrino, alpha particle, everything, with room to spare.

There are many numbers (not practical numbers mind you) that are finite, but too big to fit in the observable universe. Meaning, there isn't enough matter in the observable universe to represent the number with ordinary digital notation. In fact, if every Planck volume of space (the theoretical smallest, indivisible unit of space, equal to 4.2217×10−105 m^3), was occupied by one digit of the number, the entire observable universe couldn't contain it. And the longform representation of a googol, which is larger than every quanta of matter and energy in the observable universe, can fit on a post-it note. The universe is TINY. Sort of. (More like math is weird.)

A googolbang is defined as a googol factorial, or google!. That represents, roughly, every permutation of every configuration of matter and energy in the known universe. So, the equivalent of every possible parallel universe. Essentially, everything that is physically possible. That number won't fit in the observable universe either.

That geometry is also crazy. Things aren't just unfathomably big... they can also be unfathomably small :O
AI is also getting way too good. In the future, AI is gonna be everyone's religion 😂

My fear is that it gets so good that we lose the ability to discern fact from fabrication at any level.

That probably won't happen...

Maybe the universe isn't tiny, that number is just big asf 😂
There may be less than a Google atoms in the universe, but there's probably more than a Google ways they could be arranged. What are the chances we ended up with a world this awesome instead of some Grey slop of matter? Besides, a protien takes more than a Google tries to form...

There's definitely a degree of relativity there, at least in the sense that it's relative to your vantage point.

I asked a.i. for the midpoint in the size scale from the Planck length to the size of the observable universe. You know what it said? Linearly the midpoint is roughly half the size of the observable universe (derp), but logarithmically it is roughly the size of a cell. I cried when I read that. The cell is to the Planck length as the observable universe is to the cell. (Give or take an order of magnitude.) That kind of symmetry gives me goosebumps.

And I'm not using this logic lol. I'm not saying X is false because I can't imagine it to be true. I'm saying I used science to disprove X, and Y is all that's left

Being real again, the scientific method is immutable, but with few exceptions (laws, for example, like the law of thermodynamics that states that matter and energy can be neither created nor destroyed, but only change forms), its findings aren't meant to be taken as definitive answers. Rather, they represent our best guess based on the data we can gather at the time. The conclusions are subject to revision. This is why the positions held by scientists in any given field will change over time. Heck, there's usually some degree of contention within fields, especially as new hypothesis seek to usurp old ones.

Science can't prove there's no god. It just doesn't find enough evidence to state that there is one. Doesn't mean there's not. But religion is a matter of faith. Science is a matter of evidence. Faith doesn't depend on evidence, and evidence only cares about faith insofar as how credible the evidence is.

Actually, the Christian faith is built on both faith and evidence. If you ponder about reality and beginnings for long enough... some people come to the conclusion that theres an eternal creator. Then there's things like pondering the beauty of flowers and nature... how the earth has perfect cycles of water, and seasons, and reproduction... and how there's such abstract things like love and emotion and fear. Those are all things that chance and cosmic dust can't really account for.
Then, there's cold hard facts. People have uncovered Jame's bone box. A bone box is where they will sometimes keep your bones when you die, kinda like a coffin. James was an apostle and a brother of Jesus. The box said something like "James, son of Joseph, brother of Jesus. In Israelite history, they would ONLY put references of your family (besides their dad) on someone's bone box if that family member was extremely important. That there proves the existence of Jesus

I can't refute that. I have no right to, I don't want to, and I wouldn't even if I could. It's no ones place to tell another person what they must or must not believe. You're right that there's a profound and compelling beauty to nature. I've argued at length that nature is not art, because it fails to meet the definitional criteria of art--it isn't a human construct. But that doesn't mean people can't view nature as art. And if they believe it's art, then to them it IS art regardless of what anyone else says. So...I...I can't believe I'm only just connecting these dots...personal beliefs are ABSOLUTELY TRUE to the individual who holds them. Full stop. It's not just that they have the right to them, it's that they are 100% as true for them as anyone's beliefs are to him or herself. It was so easy to comprehend this in terms of preference (color, sports team, season, time of day, etc) but science "vs" religion felt like a zero-sum, winner-take-all Highlander fight to the death. It's not! It never was...history just makes it look that way.

Well, take heart in the knowledge that our interaction has helped to *finally* get me over a stumbling block that will make my life and my interactions with people of faith a LOT easier. Where there has always been a bottomless pool of bile, I feel a solemn duty to honor not just the right of people to believe what they want, but to honor the beliefs themselves. Holy crap that sounds cheesy. I don't care. I don't think I've ever felt closer to people, as a whole. This imaginary barrier is gone. I'm going to remember this for the rest of my life. Thank you! I am in your debt. You helped me knock that wall down. It suddenly feels like we're on the same team.

Im glad you're opening up some, but wait a sec... is this like the "your truth, my truth" thing ? Because that actually is a fallacy... truth is objective, not subjective

Not precisely. Actually I think truth is subjective and fact is objective, but that's kind of semantic. Everyone can have their own favorite scene in a film, but the content of the film is objective. And yet we experience the world subjectively, so each person will take away a different significance. "It was so exciting!" "There was so much violence" "The middle was too slow" "I really liked the character development in the middle" "Hey, I think I saw a 2015 car in the background--this film was set in the early 2000's!" Everyone experiences things through their own lens.

Then again, if someone breaks a window, the window doesn't really care how it got broken. Let's imagine a murder investigation. There's a crime scene with a body and all sorts of evidence. Detectives gather evidence, put the clues together and form a story based on what the evidence points to. Sometimes they get it mostly right, like close enough for justice to be done. Sometimes they go after the wrong guy and the killer gets away. Sometimes the case is never solved. I guess the point is that truth/fact (what I incorrectly refer to as "reality") is largely objective, at least above the quantum scale, but that our interpretations of it aren't always correct. A lot of philosophy deals with how we can really know if anything is absolutely true. (Interesting but not particularly useful.)

The Bible acts as way more of a call-out of how things absolutely are. Science is...ideally, only concerned with accurate data and has no allegiance to any particular conclusion. In that respect, religion is WAY more useful for getting a definitive, concrete answer. But unless or until the test gets graded, we can't actually "know" whether we're right or not, or how close to right we were. Hence religion being a matter of faith. And secular science being a useless tool for finding concrete answers and meaning.

Indiana Jones make a good point :) although I believe that fact and truth are interchangeable, which is why I like sticking to the word "opinion" more. Movies have some awesome quotes sometimes
And I forgive you for your abuse 😅 if you corrected yourself and shown that you're more open minded that what those rants were all about, then it's all good

The atheist stream is not a kind place for theists--I encourage you to give it a wide berth. I could be wrong, but I really don't think there's anything to be gained there. Just my 2 cents.

When I get back to this site it's not like I'll be posting here, but if I could win someone over that woul be cool. Since non believers are f@$%&ng doomed to hell and all, I care about the people here. It's Jesus's great commission to share the gospel u_u

I appreciate that. I won't be converted to Christianity, but you've already helped me become a better person for the time that I'm here.

On becoming a better person though, thats super good :D

I'm still damned. Striving to love your fellow man, help the needy, respect women, protect children, honor family, work diligently, admit fault and leave the world a better place than you found it doesn't mean shit if you don't bend knee and kiss the ring. Part of my stance has always been that if you're right and I'm wrong, I'd much rather share eternity with all the independent minded, free-thinkers of history. Most of them are as decent as any theist.

Religion has no more dominion over morality than atheism has over reason. If my lifestyle, being happily married to a loving wife, earning my keep through honest work, cherishing my relationships with my friends and family members, not stealing, not lying, doing my best not to harm other people, makes me a sinner, then the only thing Christians can claim over me as far as virtue is their belief in god.

And if god condemns otherwise virtuous people to an eternity of torture simply for refusing to placate his ego, then god can kiss this particular one of his creations right between the ass cheeks.

All I'm saying is the idea that people are atheist because they refuse to give up a life of sin is an absolute fallacy, unless believing in god is the only virtue Christians care about.

not just that we have to do righteous things. Even if we never sinned, we can't get to heaven because we have not real righteousness. When we believe in Jesus, he gives us his righteousness.
as for not wanting to rape and murder, we all have the potential to desire that. Maybe all it takes is some outside factors. Lets say you don't care to watch porn. But one day, you see some on accident. Since humanity is cursed by sin, we have a desire to be sexually immoral. Once you see that porn, you start thinking about it... and the more you think, the more you like it. Sure, you didn't think you'd like it at first, but now that you kinda do, what's going to stop you from looking at it more? Atheists don't get a higher moral law from anywhere

Phew good that checks out 👍 I think opinion/fact would be a better name than truth/fact though lol

Agreed! Lol, I need to dig up a youtube clip...
https://youtu.be/8Aaymp0ZRpc

I gotta get some school work done now. Nice chatting with you. Sorry again about my unacceptable behavior earlier. All it did was reveal what a cretin I can be, and how stoic you are in the face of abuse. Kudos!