On physics and chemistry as God/God substitute.

Miserable Creatures
Posted by William J Murray

Imagine if atheistic materialism was actually true and humans are nothing more than biological automatons – complexly programmed and reactive robots that behave and think in whatever manner happenstance chemical interactions dictates at any given time.  Let’s think about what would actually mean.

There would be no way for a biological automaton to determine whether or not any statement was in fact true or not since all conclusions are driven by chemistry and not metaphysical “truth” values; indeed, a biological automaton reaches conclusion X for exactly the same reason any other reaches conclusion Y; chemistry.  If chemistry dictates that 1+1=banana, that is what a “person” will conclude. If chemistry dictates they defend that view to the death and see themselves as a martyr for the computational banana cause, that is exactly what they will do.

All such a biological automaton has is whatever chemistry generates as what they see, hear, taste, smell, touch, feel, think, and do. If they eat some stale pizza and, through a chaotic cascade of happenstance physical cause and effect, accept Mohammed with great faith and zeal, then no determined atheist can resist – that is what will occur.  And they will think it was a logical conclusion, if chemistry says so.  They can only be whatever chemistry dictates.

Imagine the frustration of the atheist having to admit that they came to their views exactly the same way any religious fanatic came to theirs. Imagine the bleak realization that there is no way to prove it, or even provide any evidence, because such feats would require that one’s thoughtful capacity to consider such things be removed from, and in control of, the same chemical processes that generate all positions that disagree with theirs.

Imagine the misery of attempting to argue that some things are right, and others are wrong, when the same relentless, impersonal, uncaring chemistry produces both. One might as well call the shape of a fig leaf right and true, and call the shape of a maple leaf wrong and false.  How pitiful it is when atheists act as if their condition is somehow superior to some non-atheist condition, when all conditions are simply a products of happenstance chemistry and physics. It’s not like “they” had a hand in their own thoughts or ideas or conclusions; they have whatever thoughts blind mechanistic forces shoved in their brain.  “They” are nothing but a pitiful puppet doomed to think and act and feel whatever chemistry dictates while stupidly acting and arguing as if something else was the case.

Atheists insist that they live a life as capable of being good as any theist.  They are often proud of how “good” they are in comparison to theists they mock and ridicule. What are they proud of?  What are the mocking and ridiculing?  The inevitable effects of chemical interactions?  Any idea or thought or act that anyone has or does is nothing more than just another effect ultimately generated by mindless chemical interactions and effects.  You might as well be proud that grass is green or ridicule the color of the sky; the same mindless forces generated those things as your own thoughts, beliefs and actions.

How pitiful is it to rant and rave and argue against physics and chemistry?  If atheistic materialism is true, then atheists here are like Don Quixote, acting like windmills are great beasts, or like biological automatons are sentient creatures capable of doing something other than whatever chemistry dictates.  They might as well argue with a tree to get it to change the shape and color of its leaves, or with a stream to get it to change direction. They are tilting at windmills trying to convince the windmill to do something other than what windmills do.  They are madmen arguing with swirling dirt, animated by natural law and chance.


What a ruinous, ludicrous, miserable position to insist for yourself – arguing and debating against the onward, relentless march of happenstance interactions of matter ruled by chemistry and physics as if such arguments mattered, as if you and everyone else is something other than programmed biological automatons doing whatever chemistry dictates.  But then, pitifully, they really can’t do anything else except foolishly act out this absurd facade because they, too, are just the puppets of chemistry.

Darwinists decide to get a life?

Something Is Missing: Evolution Meets Reality with ALIFE

Anika Smith 

Here's some exciting news from the UK, where 300 biologists, computer scientists, physicists, mathematicians, philosophers and social scientists from around the world have gathered "to address one of the greatest challenges in modern science: how to create a genuine artificial life form." ("Can we make software that comes to life?" Telegraph)

Despite the image of Wall-E (with the amusing caption "self-aware computers such as Pixar's Wall-E are surprisingly tricky to put together" -- no, really? Every nerdy kid who ever tried to make a robot in 6th grade science camp could tell you that), the focus of the story is on evolution and -- wait for it -- the failure of Darwin's theory to explain complex creatures.

Using computer programs to test evolution, researchers are learning that natural selection lacks the creative power to evolve complex life -- and so they're looking for answers.

Researchers thought that with more computer power, they could create more complex creatures - the richer the computer's environment, the richer the ALife that could go forth and multiply.

But these virtual landscapes have turned out to be surprisingly barren. Prof Mark Bedau of Reed College in Portland, Oregon, will argue at this week's meeting - the 11th International Conference on Artificial Life - that despite the promise that organisms could one day breed in a computer, such systems quickly run out of steam, as genetic possibilities are not open-ended but predefined. Unlike the real world, the outcome of computer evolution is built into its programming.

They might do well to learn from  Biologic's Stylus

 program. But I digress.

His conclusion? Although natural selection is necessary for life, something is missing in our understanding of how evolution produced complex creatures. By this, he doesn't mean intelligent design - the claim that only God can light the blue touch paper of life - but some other concept. "I don't know what it is, nor do I think anyone else does, contrary to the claims you hear asserted," he says. But he believes ALife will be crucial in discovering the missing mechanism.

Dr Richard Watson of Southampton University, the co-organiser of the conference, echoes his concerns. "Although Darwin gave us an essential component for the evolution of complexity, it is not a sufficient theory," he says. "There are other essential components that are missing."

One of these may be "self-organisation", which occurs when simpler units - molecules, microbes or creatures - work together using simple rules to create complex patterns and behaviour. [Emphasis added]

Of course, no one would dare consider the possibility of design (especially not with that straw-man description), but it looks like a few brave souls may be willing to admit, in the face of the evidence, that Darwin's theory really is not sufficient to explain life.

"Evolution on its own doesn't look like it can make the creative leaps that have occurred in the history of life," says Dr Seth Bullock, another of the conference's organisers. "It's a great process for refining, tinkering, and so on. But self-organisation is the process that is needed alongside natural selection before you get the kind of creative power that we see around us.

"Understanding how those two processes combine is the biggest challenge in biology."

I should say so.

A brave new world by any means necessary?

Lying in the Name of Indoctrination

Anika Smith

Dogmatists committed to a dying paradigm will argue with falsehoods to convince the public of their claims... especially when they're targeting children.

As we've covered here this week, Haeckel's faked embryo drawings are still used in science textbooks because, according to some Darwinists, "it is OK to use some inaccuracies temporarily if they help you reach the students."

That's right. According to Darwinist biology professor Bora Zivkovic, who blogs as Coturnix at A Blog Around The Clock and is Online Community Manager at PLoS-ONE, sometimes you have to lie to students in order to get them to accept evolution. Why? Because:

Education is a subversive activity that is implicitly in place in order to counter the prevailing culture. And the prevailing culture in ... many other schools in the country, is a deeply conservative religious culture.
In order to combat that "deeply conservative religious culture," Darwinists like Zivkovic push the "non-overlapping magisteria" model, or NOMA, which claims that science is about facts and religion is about values, and when we keep them in these nice separate realms, nobody gets hurt.

In reality, this scheme was designed by Darwinists in order to convince religious people that evolution is not threatening to their beliefs... the first step towards dismantling their belief system:

You cannot bludgeon kids with truth (or insult their religion, i.e., their parents and friends) and hope they will smile and believe you. Yes, NOMA is wrong, but is a good first tool for gaining trust. You have to bring them over to your side, gain their trust, and then hold their hands and help them step by step. And on that slow journey, which will be painful for many of them, it is OK to use some inaccuracies temporarily if they help you reach the students. (emphasis added)

You see, teaching isn't about actually instructing children to think critically or giving them factual knowledge about a subject like biology. It's about getting young minds to accept evolution, even if that means they're mistaken about the facts of biology for the rest of their lives. Zivkovic admits that teaching bogus examples to kids, like Mickey Mouse's changing appearance over the years is an example of evolution in action, may be factually incorrect, but it's not morally wrong. Zivkovic explains it all for us:

If a student, like Natalie Wright who I quoted above, goes on to study biology, then he or she will unlearn the inaccuracies in time. If most of the students do not, but those cutesy examples help them accept evolution, then it is OK if they keep some of those little inaccuracies for the rest of their lives. It is perfectly fine if they keep thinking that Mickey Mouse evolved as long as they think evolution is fine and dandy overall. Without Mickey, they may have become Creationist activists instead. Without belief in NOMA they would have never accepted anything, and well, so be it. Better NOMA-believers than Creationists, don't you think?


This isn't about minor mistakes in textbooks -- this is about the willful use of inaccurate information in order to convince students that evolution is a fact. Mistaken believers are better than skeptical students for Darwinist biology teachers.

On defining 'science'

Has Science's Freedom Become Its Downfall?
Sarah Chaffee

Writing in The New Atlantis, Daniel Sarewitz has a lengthy essay on why science, "pride of modernity, our one source of objective knowledge, is in deep trouble." He argues that science, rather than being disconnected from practical purposes, is most effective when it has a goal. Sarewitz cites Department of Defense projects as examples, and notes the recent reproducibility crisis as a sign of failure.

These are important points, but one of his overarching themes jumped out at me as another reason to reject scientism. The theme is this: Science when considered as the final authority on all matters simply doesn't work. It doesn't work as science.

In contrast to the idea that we can simply unleash science and it will bring us progress, Sarewitz notes:

Advancing according to its own logic, much of science has lost sight of the better world it is supposed to help create. Shielded from accountability to anything outside of itself, the "free play of free intellects" begins to seem like little more than a cover for indifference and irresponsibility. The tragic irony here is that the stunted imagination of mainstream science is a consequence of the very autonomy that scientists insist is the key to their success. Only through direct engagement with the real world can science free itself to rediscover the path toward truth.

It is time to realize that science doesn't belong on a pedestal -- it is a human endeavor. Respecting science is one thing, and all to the good. Kowtowing to it is a different matter, as we see clearly in the area of origins science, where the neo-Darwinist view is typically treated as the only option. As noted by Jerry Fodor and Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini, two researchers who (while critical of ID) buck the dominant natural-selection paradigm:

Much of the vast neo-Darwinian literature is distressingly uncritical. The possibility that anything is seriously amiss with Darwin's account of evolution is hardly considered. Such dissent as there is often relies on theistic premises which Darwinists rightly say have no place in the evaluation of scientific theories. So onlookers are left with the impression that there is little or nothing about Darwin's theory to which a scientific naturalist could reasonably object. The methodological scepticism that characterises most areas of scientific discourse seems strikingly absent when Darwinism is the topic.

Case in point: the discovery of a complex eye in a single-celled organism. An Evolution News & Views article quotes Nature, noting that the eye is seen as helping to "demonstrate how evolutionary plasticity of mitochondria and plastids can generate an extreme level of subcellular complexity." ENV continues:

The authors did not think this is a clear evolutionary story. "The ocelloid is among the most complex subcellular structures known, but its function and evolutionary relationship to other organelles remain unclear," they say. Never in the paper do they explain how organelles with different histories came together into a functioning eye. Most of the paper is descriptive of the parts and how they function individually, or where they might have been derived by endosymbiosis. To explain the eye's origin as a functioning whole, they make up a phrase, "evolutionary plasticity" --

Nevertheless, the genomic and detailed ultrastructural data presented here have resolved the basic components of the ocelloid and their origins, and demonstrate how evolutionary plasticity of mitochondria and plastids can generate an extreme level of subcellular complexity.

Other than that, they have very little to say about evolution, and nothing about natural selection.

...

In the same issue of Nature, Richards and Gomes review the paper.

...

The work sheds new light on how very different organisms can evolve similar traits in response to their environments, a process known as convergent evolution. Eye-like structures have evolved independently many times in different kinds of animals and algae with varying abilities to detect the intensity of light, its direction, or objects.

"When we see such similar structural complexity at fundamentally different levels of organization in lineages that are very distantly related to each other, in this case warnowiids and animals, then you get a much deeper understanding of convergence," Leander says.

We've discussed before the idea that  sight is irreducibly complex  -- it could not have been built up by a step-by-step process. Neo-Darwinism is treated as if it were exempt from critical consideration.

Under scientism, methodological naturalism excludes the consideration of rational alternatives. But a different orientation may move science forward -- as Douglas Axe points out.

"Science is trapped in a self-destructive vortex," Sarewitz observes. "[T]o escape, it will have to abdicate its protected political status and embrace both its limits and its accountability to the rest of society."


He's right. Ironically, perhaps, it is by defining the limitations of science that we spur its advancement.

Natural powered flight Vs. Darwinism.

Birds, Insects, and What They Share
Evolution News & Views

Biologists are improving photographic techniques to study the intricacies of flight. Let's look at what two research labs have been observing about birds and insects. They share amazing similarities in their flight strategies, despite the vast phylogenetic distance between them. This will give us an opportunity to ask what kind of cause could account for these similarities.

"You don't just partly fly," Paul Nelson quips in  Flight: the Genius of Birds . "Because flight requires not just having a pair of wings, but having your entire biology coordinated towards that function." As he speaks, we watch a crow temporarily folding its wings and dropping like a rock. It quickly spreads its wings again and takes control of the air, demonstrating the truth of Nelson's statement. Insects, being lighter, might drop a little slower, but they can't just partly fly either. And what astounding flyers they are!

A fruit fly can change its flight direction in less than one hundredth of a second. But how does it do that? A firm understanding of how fruit flies hover has emerged over the past two decades, whereas more recent work focussing on understanding how flight manoeuvres are performed. In a review article, as part of the special theme edition of Philosophical Transactions B, Florian Muijers of Wageningen University and Michael Dickinson of California Institute of Technology, describe how flies manipulate wing movement to control their body motion during active manoeuvres, and how these actions are regulated by sensory feedback.
That's how an article on Phys.org about "the flight of fruit flies under the microscope" begins. Dickinson has been studying these aerobatic champions for over a decade in his lab at Caltech. His fascination has not waned. How can these tiny insects dart about so fast, land on ceilings, and respond quickly to multiple sensory cues with only 1 millionth the neurons of a human brain? How can all their behaviors, including food searching, reproduction, and predator avoidance be packed into such a small space? Using innovative techniques, such as the Tethered Flight Simulator, Dickinson and his students have only begun to answer these questions. In a TED Talk  from 2013, you can see his infectious enthusiasm for flying insects as he compares them to engineered aircraft with sophisticated control systems.

The new study explores similarities between tiny fruit flies and larger insects and birds:

Fruit flies move their wings back and forth rather than up and down. This it is remarkably similar to what has been observed in hummingbirds, honey bees and hawk moths. Whether this pattern is optimal with respect to energetics is not entirely clear; nevertheless, the similarity among species is noteworthy and suggests that a combination of physical and biological constraints restrict the solutions available to hovering animals.
What does it take, for instance, to change direction in a hundredth of a second?

To keep in balance during such manoeuvre, the fly must perform corrective movements to control its body orientation. This mechanism uses input from different sensors: the antennae which can detect bilateral differences in airspeed, the visual system which can detect the optic flow created by the fly's forward motion, and the halteres which are thought to act as gyroscopes by detecting Coriolis forces resulting from body rotation. This allows a fly to correct itself in less than a hundredth of a second.
Like a helicopter, the fruit fly pitches nose down to accelerate. But like an airplane, it banks to change direction. A video clip in the article shows the wings flapping in slow motion. Notice how stable the body is during flight. When it sees a threat, the fly can respond and dart away in less time than an eye blink. In the TED Talk, Dickinson explores some of the computational requirements for these behaviors, and how they can be met with far fewer neurons than we have. He shows a parasitic fly with 7,000 neurons packed into a body the size of a paramecium -- and it can fly!

Birds

A colorful lovebird stars in a video from Stanford University posted on the BBC News Science-Environment section. Scientists spent four years designing and building a complex wind tunnel to study bird flight. In real time, the bird darts through the tunnel in about a second, but well-placed high-speed cameras show what really happens. It's as beautiful and graceful as a ballet.

The researchers want to "study how birds fly to develop better flying airplanes and robots," the narrator says. "And they want to understand how can it be that birds fly so effectively. We understand so little about it, although we see it every day and take it for granted." In future work, they want to watch hummingbirds to learn how, unlike other birds, their unique wingbeats provide lift on both forward and backward strokes, allowing them to hover. The Illustra film animates the shoulder joints unique to hummingbirds that allow the wings to rotate, providing optimal lift in both directions.

Vera Causa

So how do hummingbirds and fruit flies share similar wingbeat designs that allow them to hover, despite being phylogenetically distant? Evolutionists sometimes speak as if the environment itself causes different animals to arrive at the same solution (they call it "convergent evolution"). But that cannot be the vera causa (true cause). Constraints cannot bring something into being to meet the constraints. It takes engineering to design a system able to take advantage of opportunities in spite of constraints. It takes superb engineering to optimize a function within the constraints.


The student learns from the master. If top engineers at Caltech and Stanford study fruit flies and birds for decades and still have more to learn, who is the master? It's not so much the insect or bird; they do what they were programmed to do. The master is the mind that did the programming: an intelligent mind able to teach our designing minds a thing or two about engineering.