On the laws of thermodynamics and evolution and life.

I have yet to meet the person who has ever put forth the argument you describe. My guess is that you haven't either. It's a strawman- an argument nobody is actually positing, stated merely so that the person stating it can claim superior knowledge.

Some people do make that fallacy. They say things like because everything has a cause the universe has a cause. That actually fails due to composition.

Thanks for stating the obvious. It doesn't change the fact that the entire rest of the known universe follows basic fundamental laws that render Life impossible.

That the vast majority of the universe is inhospitable to life and that there's 70 sextillion stars in trillions of galaxies, with even more planets and moons around that, most of which are undoubtedly dead and the whole thing some ~14 billion years old is exactly what we should expect if there is no God. Without a God the only way to make life is by getting really lucky, and you might well need 70 sextillion stars to get lucky enough to mix up the chemicals enough times in enough places and do so over and over and over again in a really old universe. If God existed, you'd need one star and one planet. And even that arrangement might well overly complex.

Actually, we can't. Not even close.

We can and do. In fact, that's pretty much just how climate science works. Heat in vs. heat out.

There's not even close to enough matter in the observable universe to explain the energy that it generates. That's why the aforementioned "Dark Matter" theory exists.

Gravity isn't energy it's a force. You can't take a magnet and make power out of it. You need magnetic flux. The change in gravity is energy. Gravity is just a force there making anything with mass stick together and tugging at spacetime to do it.

This isn't a topic that's open for debate. It's a settled scientific fact.

The fact that you're wrong is certainly worth addressing. Dark Matter is a theory because galaxies spin too fast without flinging apart. So the presumption is there's more gravity there than we suspect. That's not bonus energy, it's additional gravity. And it's concerning galaxies not Earth. And it doesn't have any known implications on "energy in, energy out" on Earth.

For the Universe to be expanding at the rate it's expanding, there simply isn't enough matter in existence.

That's dark energy. If there were only matter things would actually collapse as we originally suspected. The universe however is accelerating in it's expansion. But this is nothing to do with the matter but rather that spacetime is expanding.

But in terms of evolution, it means that natural systems never move from simple states to complex states. It's not how the universe works. Look at any other planet in the solar system. Are they "evolving"? No. They're cooling. They're moving from a state of high energy to a state of low energy.

That's why we have metabolism. It's basically the one of the defining bits of life. They salvage energy and store it. That's what plants do. It's not that they are basking in the sun but rather that they are banking some of the suns energy because that a massive ball of negative entropic energy we orbit around, is constantly bombarding us with it. The entire raison d' etra of life is that it captures energy originally from the sun and uses it to do better at getting more of it. And the better organisms are at this the more of them exist, because we also bank those tricks in hereditary molecules. We end up hitting an energy ceiling whereby most of the potential new critters can't exist. So it ends up, sorting out those banks of tricks, and if anybody happened to have accidentally copied it down wrong and tweaked it for the better, that critter will be more likely to do better, have more copies, and more copies of that helpful trick.

So just some duplicating gunk trying edging each other out for a fraction of that incoming energy to duplicate a but more is entirely possible within the confines of thermodynamics. And that's also basically the definition of life.

Your objection is basically that we don't know of anything else that has a metabolism that isn't alive. And we only know about life on this planet. And you're using this objection to attempt to say that life on this planet isn't possible.

He instead used the term "Natural Selection", which only means "If you kill all the redheads, only blondes and brunettes will be left to reproduce".

He wanted to try to stick to the science and arguments. People had knee jerk reactions to claims about transmutation at the time, as Darwin so acutely learned from Vestiges (book). Also, redheadedness is a recessive gene. You could certainly select against it with murder. But that's artificial selection, not natural selection. Natural selection is when you allow nature to do it because of the struggle for existence and rather than select for just something like non-redheadedness you select for *anything* that makes one do better and the difference has to be ever so slight and you get eons to do it in. Darwin's argument here was quite good. In a couple hundred years look what we did to pigeons and dogs, imagine what the selection of nature could do in eons!

It doesn't say, as so many Atheists seem to think, that the universe wakes up one morning and decides that people are a cooler idea than apes. That's a distinction that requires intelligence. Which the universe doesn't have.

That distinction requires people not intelligence. Humans are apes. Ape is a taxonomic group and humans are certainly a great ape. And evolution never made that decision. After all, there are still apes and there are still monkeys. It's not that one is cooler than the other but that each group has survived on it's own merits.

Me, I argue that evolution is inconsistent with the second law because the second law says that evolution can't happen.

It doesn't. It says things will tend to lose their energy and order. Your argument would suggest more directly that life itself cannot exist. That I cannot from eating sugars and breathing oxygen live from day to day without decaying in short order. And it's actually true if I were not alive. As soon as my metabolism shuts down and I'm not unbanking energy stored reserves of the negative entropy of the sun my body will break down. The problem here is that we're alive, and we store energy. We effectively have sugar-batteries. So even though we should stop working, we fight that breakdown and loss by adding even more energy into the system, constantly. We get that energy from the sun and banking it is called metabolism. And we tend to make copies of ourselves so if one copy stops working there are others, and if one copy happens to be an improvement then more copies of that copy are made and the future copies will be improved. And necessarily since worse copies won't copy they won't be around.

Far from thermodynamics making evolution impossible, thermodynamics are the reason why evolution works. You got to beat the decay and anything that doesn't is screwed. So the critters with the best methods of thriving giving such decay do the best, and thus there are more of them. Is it any wonder that some of the most successful organisms thrive on poop and death?

There's absolutely no way to explain why the universe, sans God, would suddenly decide that Elephants are "better" than snails.

People tend to decide such things like that. But, nature doesn't. You can tell by the existence of both elephants and snails. They both do a great job. Elephants exploit economy of size and run warm blooded, and snails conserve their energy and protect their bodies with a natural ceramic. Those are both really great strategies and they both do very well in their respective niches. And both of them beat out the decay.

But "better"? Nature doesn't really decide that. I suppose one could argue that lizards are better than trilobites because trilobites bit it, but that just surviving. Copies of lizards are still around, so by some measure they were better at avoiding the decay. But, that's a bit narrow of a definition.

So basically, if we just overlook that troublesome "How did Life come into being in the first place?" thing, then everything is hunky-dory. But we can't. That's the entire issue.

No it's not. All your objections were to how things cannot possibly beat out decay but metabolism and evolution certainly do solve that. You could build a little rover with a solar panel, battery and wheels, and that would suffice to solve those problems. Abiogenesis is actually a completely different issue. Where do these original copiers come from? And odds for that are pretty good that they just kicked up by chance.

Richard Carrier Interview. On Fine-Tuning and the Universe.

http://www.thebestschools.org/blog/2011/12/31/richard-carrier-interview/

Similarly the “fine tuning” of the universe’s physical constants: that would be a great proof—if it wasn’t exactly the same thing we’d see if a god didn’t exist. If there is no god, we will only ever find ourselves in a universe finely tuned (in that case, by random chance), because without a god, there is no other kind of universe that can produce us. Likewise, a universe that produced us by chance would have to be enormously vast in size and enormously old, so as to have all the room to mix countless chemicals countless times in countless places so as to have any chance of accidentally kicking up something as complex as life. And that’s exactly the universe we see: one enormously vast in size and age. A godless universe would also only produce life rarely and sparingly, and that’s also what we see: by far most of the universe is lethal to life (being a deadly radiation filled vacuum) and by far most of the matter in the universe is lethal to life (constituting stars and black holes on which no life can ever live). Again, all exactly what we’d expect of a godless universe. Not what we’d expect of a god-made one.

So often I am kudized for being so intelligent. But, most of the time I'm just stealing from Richard Carrier.  He's so often right about such things that I absolutely love it. He's right. If God wanted to make the universe he'd only need 1 star and 1 planet. Everything else is rather pointless. However, if random chance wanted to make a universe, it'd need to be hugely vast and insanely old to stand any chance at all of having us exist.

Rolling Dice. Probability and Evolution.

Somebody posted this link to me on rolling dice by probability and doing so by evolution. I've made this point before, but it's written in Javascript. How cool is that?

Placebos and self-reported results.

http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/index.php/spin-city-placebos-and-asthma/

It turns out placebos aren't really that effective at all. They are only wrongly reported as effective. There is a growing idea that just because a lot of alternative medicine doesn't do much more than placebo but it turns out that placebo have a rather large effect that CAM/IM is a worthwhile investment. Well it turns out that the only thing much of the placebo reaction does is make people think they are wildly successful but as it turns out, people are horrible judges of such things. Objective measures find they don't do anything at all.

Cee Lo Green: Bowdlerized Imagine.

"Nothing to kill or die for. And all religion is true." -- Well that's something to kill and die for.

Come on we don't have much in the way of popular works. Imagine is the only really popularly atheistic song. Just as Emperors new clothes is the only really popular skeptical story. It's just kind of a dick move to don a fur coat and expensive jewelry and make Imagine a pro-religion song. You might as well rewrite the Emperors New Clothes to be a story about the virtues of faith.

Also a great talk from "Skepticon, Heuristics and Biases, Skepticon 4 Eliezer Yudkowsky "

Christianity Invented?

So I ran across this article and basically it was horrible crap and I told em why. But, put a lot of work into it so I also posted it here.

Christianity existed prior to Constantine significantly so. It's the start of a terrible conspiracy theory to suggest otherwise. Much of the supposed external sources for a historical Jesus are from the second and third centuries and do no claim Jesus was real but expressly do establish that Christians actually existed. There was a push at the time to create one religion for one empire and Christianity did become the state religion afterwards. But there's every reason to suppose that any other religion could have done just as well and would likely have been more Roman than some middle-eastern blood cult.

You suggest that Christianity is a copycat religion, this is largely false and based on the work of Graves. Who was so sloppy as to be effectively worthless. Of the 16 mythical crucifixions most are outright fabrications or huge stretches to suppose that Osiris being cut into pieces is a "crufixition". Which isn't to say there weren't other blood magic crucified saviors, the Thracian God Zalmoxis is actually attested to in the BCE and was crucified and through his magical blood you can live forever in a spiritual realm. However, Graves never cited this. Rather he cited things like Chrishna who was not ever said to be crucified until there was a massive Christian influence in the region. And since these aren't properly attested and when, we have little to go on to suppose this. And saying that Mithra was crucified is downright absurd. Mithra's amazing feat was that he was born of a rock and slew a cosmic bull of some sort. There's little on their actual beliefs but what we know largely comes from a pictograph. In short, the only way anybody could say what you're saying is if they believed terrible scholarship and outright falsehoods. There's absolutely no historical records to indicate Mithra ever died much less died by crucifixion. With so many good arguments for the failures of Christianity or arguments you can draw out by pointing out the religion claims the universe is fundamentally hinged on the oxygen carrying cells of terrestrial animals as to propose that God needed blood to fix the universe, and only his own blood had enough magic to do it, so he gave himself a body and killed it. This is absurd as a genuine cosmology, but is exactly what superstitious people obsessed with blood magic would come up with if invented a religion, and lo and behold exactly such a people existed exactly where Christianity is first practiced.

Such arguments are terrible in a sea of great potential arguments to the point that it undercuts the entire case by even offering them (maybe somebody knows the most basic elements of the story of Horus or Mithra and can so easily scoff at them, that they will feel justified scoffing at all of them. If you give a bad argument along with good arguments, established cognitive biases are such that if they can see through the bad arguments they won't even address the good arguments.

The purpose of the Council of Nicaea was largely to establish the true Christian faith and condemn the heresies of Arianism. Deciding the true Christianity and outlawing all those others. It was the domination of Trinitarianism not the whole sale invention of Christianity.

While it is true that Eusebius argued for lying for Jesus and likely did. It is even the case that every copy of Josephus' work we have today that includes the Testimonium Flavium comes from a specific copy owned by Eusebius and that there's certainly a chance that he was the one who actually made that forgery. It is also the case that most all of the given external sources for a historical Jesus are significantly flawed. Most simply are late first and early second century documents which attest to the existence of Christians. And therein is a significant problem for your proposed thesis. Rather than evidence for it, you're saying that all of these documents can't even attest to the existence of Christians. Nor can there have been pretty much any of the early church fathers. Somehow all of the writings of Origen (AD 184/5–253/4), are actually fraudulent and don't really exist? Seriously? And that's just Origen, there's a dozen others Clement, Ignatius, Polycarp, Tertuillian, etc. Who defended the faith in the second and third centuries. They must all be fiction as well? Many of the Early church fathers argued for a Christianity much like the one that survived Nicaea.

Christianity existed long before Rome. The claims you are making is so absurd as to be downright shame worthy. With the bounties of proper claims why would anybody make the claims you're offering here? It's so bad and scattershot as to make the entire post worthless because you can't tell the mistakes from the points you got right, so much so that you'd be better off disregarding everything you said and doing all the research yourself. And that's not even considering the minor points like you suppose the library of Alexandria was burned to get rid of other gospels or evidence that Christianity didn't exist, or that the "The Serapeum housed the Great Library of Alexandria." Neither of which is true. They burnt the temple and the Serapeum burnt too. But, it wasn't the library of Alexandria, it was a separate annex across the town from the library that housed some of the books of the library. It was more to do with the civil unrest and general not caring about the books than it was an overt attempt at censorship. There were many other copies of the books the Library housed throughout Europe, they didn't get destroyed by fire or to suppress anything but rather they mostly rotted and nobody ever cared to rewrite them or save them during the dark ages.

Even the minor stuff you get horribly wrong. And you're using it to draw an absurd conclusion. It would be better to not read what you wrote, because it's filled with so many mistakes that it would likely make you wronger after you read the thing, than the small possibility that you rightfully correct somebody's mistaken impression.

Anasognosia and Cognition

Intelligent Design Pre-Darwin, Naturalism, and Evidence.

Prior to the theory of evolution by natural selection, Intelligent Design was the theory supported by all the evidence. Scientists from Galen, Newton, Jefferson, Galileo, even Darwin when he was younger accepted this as the best explanation for how such amazing functional complexity could exist in the human body. The only alternative at the time being chance, and chance was a clear loser.

There wasn't a lack of any evidence, but rather a huge amount of evidence for the propositions. Which weren't as much magical thinking as we would think today as they were simply unknown. They weren't wrong for thinking this way. They honestly were very rational and went where the evidence lead them, and it lead them towards something that had many of the attributes one would ascribe to a God.

It actually was good evidence for God. Which is why when evolution came around and kicked that ideas' teeth in, all the foremost scientists in the world went from largely being deists and theists to being atheists. For this diversity of life to exist without God requires that there be a process like evolution that could create the diversity out of only randomness and time, and lo and behold there is *EXACTLY* such a process.

It isn't proof or certainty, but the fact of the matter is that evolution is good evidence that there is no God. It would be remarkably strange for God to create a universe whereby God need not exist, considering with God every universe would be possible. However, if there were no God, we would have to have a universe like this universe.

The chances that we'd have this universe are much higher if there is no God. And such claims that the only alternative to our current science is nothing at all is absurd. From preformation to Phlogiston and miasma, we've been wrong before, but we were lead there because that's actually what reasonable logical inference and evidence led us to conclude.

Ignoring such things and thinking the other side is a blank slate is actually kissing away an easy win. If you assert nothing, and they only assert bad arguments, when you've torn through their bad arguments you've finally managed to tie, because you never pointed out that what you're saying has always been the case and that the universe actually is particularly good evidence that they're wrong. And that what you're saying isn't an implicit assumption of science but rather the conclusion of science. It isn't that science must assume that the supernatural doesn't exist but rather than science works so damned well without it that that is considerable evidence that it doesn't. Science builds on the shoulders of other science, and the if one treats naturalism as a theory, you will find it has considerable evidence to support it, no evidence that contradicts it, and that it works effectively as a base theory for the rest of science. You need not exclude the supernatural a priori, you can do so a posterori. The supernatural doesn't work, it never has, and has always been wrong. It's not some special bias against supernatural claims but rather the fact that it's always been wrong that rightfully leads one to assume it would be wrong this time as well.

Seeing what we hear. The McGurk Effect.

Either it's true or it isn't, 50/50.

I actually had somebody insist that their position was a coin flip because it was either true or not.

I am saying that the universe is natural phenomenon. That the only answer that has ever been right is generally the most likely answer for any new questions. You are saying that God needed blood to fix the universe and some bits of Semitic mythology are true even though they describe a radically alien universe. -- You don't get to slap a 50/50 on that bad boy. It's a horse race. My horse has never ever lost. Your horse has never ever won. My explanation has been the answer to everything we've ever figured out. Your answer has never been the answer to anything ever in the history of the universe!

Heh.

Christianity in a nutshell.

Mormonism

You'd always think that such things would be such a resounding slam dunk that nobody would believe it. You can make somebody watch this, have them fact check the data, and they'd still just ignore it.

Ask Tat: The Why of Gayness.

"Is being gay a product of choice, preference, environment or is it caused by a mutated sex determining gene?"

None of the above. These are often given as the main guesses but they are notabily wrong and naive. A couple facts of gayness.

1) Twins share sexual preference to a greater degree than siblings share sexual preference.
2) Identical twins share sexual preference to a greater degree than fraternal twins.
3) Identical twins do not share 100% identical sexual preference.
4) The youngest son of a woman who has had several sons has a statistically significant increased chance of being homosexual.
5) This increased chance does not exist if the child is not biologically hers.

These aren't in dispute. And they tell us a lot of what the answer could be. In that it's not choice, and it's not strictly genetics. It is to some degree congenial (being established during gestation), and to some degree genetic. Because twins are more likely to share sexual orientation than siblings and they are genetically just siblings. But, identical twins don't absolutely share sexual identity, which would be a requirement if it were genetic because they would share all of their genes.

So we're likely talking about something that is genetically influenced, that happens during development in a rather complicated cascade of hormones that isn't absolute. The ability to turn off the attraction to one sex during development isn't absolute. In fact, in bonobos it's completely gone leaving the population to be completely bisexual. Attraction to generally one gender more than another isn't an exacting thing, it's actually somewhat vague and sometimes wrong. Just as gender identity is often wrong, and a large degree of inter-sexed people. The fact is, being attracted to men, is perfectly common and typical for women. So it's not as much some kind of freak mutation as a imperfect sexual dimorphism of a somewhat useful but generally unrequired non-attraction to one gender. Both non-attraction to men and non-attraction to women are common but they are generally closely tied with one's gender. Being closely rather than absolutely means that gayness exists.

Richard Carrier on Bayes.

I preblogged this. I'm so sure it's awesome I'm already posting it and saying it's epic. Or at the least we can say that it's more epic than all the alternatives.

I am so smart! Minecraft triangulation.

I'm posting this to be humble.

If I weren't humble, I would post this to Facebook or something where people could see it. So playing Minecraft, there's a newly added end game section to the game. Where you can actually beat the thing rather than an endless sandbox. Well, to get there you can track Eyes of Ender, which are silly things that you throw into the sky that fly up and land towards the Fortress, where you might be able to get to the end part. I realized that you can just triangulate the position. After two throws at P(-32,-198) which ended at P(-22,-198) and P(-250,-1556) which ended at P(-241, -1546) I calculated the position at P(972,-198). We went there, dug around, and found the sucker at P(1070,-101). The important bit being that we found the sucker. Seriously, there's so much space in the game and I found the sucker with math. When used right, Math is like a super-power.

Quotes: Richard Carrier.

"God needs blood to fix the universe, but only his own blood had enough magical power to do it, so he gave himself a body and then killed it." - Richard Carrier.

Don't Talk to the Police

It's seriously one of the best lectures you'll run into.

I often love to cite unicorns as mythological creatures in some rants...

But, I actually pull my punches because years ago I ran into this stupid site:


http://www.lair2000.net/Unicorn_Dreams/Unicorns_Man_Made/unicorns_man_made.html

It's so stupid as to have a special bubbly mouse cursor and anything but it makes a pretty good case that unicorns under some definitions do exist.

Hm. You know, DarkMatter2525 might be on to something.

I admit it's a bit speculative, but really does fit the observed phenomenon well. When a god believer tells you to believe in their God. It's a bit like they are offering this figure in their heads to you, that they have come to know and love. And telling them, no, that doesn't exist, and you're wrong. Really is a kind of rejection of God (of their God in their head) and of that person. Reacting emotionally is the obvious response, whereas I've analogized it to becoming upset because I don't believe in bigfoot, but theists don't have a person relationship with bigfoot.

"Hey, do you want to go steady with my God?" -- No. Your God is fake, stupid, doesn't make any sense. Nobody should go steady with that mythological hogwash.

So ofcourse there's definite rejection going on there.

"Hey, do you want to go steady with my God?" -- No. I'm already going steady with MY God. 

Understandably, far less animosity there.

It puts things like Julia Sweeney's Letting God of God chapter where she "breaks up with God" in a new light.