Naturalism disguised as evolution

Clear and concise, Mr Williams. Your LTE should confuse most readers. Especially those that disagree.

I'm not christian 134 but I agree with Pat! On everything....

"I am convinced that the battle for humankind's future must be waged and won in the public school classroom by teachers who correctly perceive their role as the proselytizers of a new faith: a religion of humanity that recognizes and respects the spark of what theologians call divinity in every human being. These teachers must embody the same selfless dedication as the most rabid fundamentalist preachers, for they will be ministers of another sort, utilizing a classroom instead of a pulpit to convey humanist values in whatever subject they teach, regardless of the educational level - preschool day care or large state university. The classroom must and will become an arena of conflict between the old and the new - the rotting corpse of Christianity, together with all its adjacent evils and misery, and the new faith of humanism, resplendent in its promise of a world in which the never-realized Christian ideal of 'love thy neighbor' will finally be achieved." John J. Dunphy, 'A Religion for a New Age', The Humanist, vol. 43 (January/February 1983), p.2.

Errr... wrong. Evolution is not a religion. It is, however, a consequence of Science, which has certain Philosophical assumptions. Whether these assumptions conflict with religious ones depends on the Religion in question. EG: neither the Roman Catholic nor Methodist branches of Christianity feel there is one.

What is referred to as "naturalism" is merely one possible philosophical assumption forming the basis of science. More exactly, the essential assumption for Science is that there is some finite rules that link Reality to the Evidence. From this (equivalent to Effective Church-Turing Computability of Evidence) and the minimal assumptions for simple Arithmatic and Logic (Zemelo-Frankel axioms and, say, Robbins' Axioms), science's central criterion for the competition of hypotheses (that the simplest comprehensive description of the evidence is most probably correct) can be derived formally (see paper by Paul M. B. Vitanyi and Ming Li: "Minimum Description Length Induction, Bayesianism and Kolmogorov Complexity").

The claim that "major changes have never been scientifically observed, recorded or induced" is more wrong than I can explain in a 1200 character limit.

Oh... and the webmaster might wish to do something so that non-roman characters (such as "a-acute") don't crash the comment application.

Watch out, the webmaster may block you by "disp[lay name".

deekster, why would he bother? It only crashes the individual posting attempted; it doesn't affect the webserver itself. The simplest fix would be a pre-filter script to translate the couple dozen possibilities to their standard Roman equivalents.

"Evolution is religion," "atheism is religion" I hear these bandied about all the time. Just repeating nonsense doesn't make it so. Religion is religion and science is science. People who say that evolution has not be observed, etc., are showing their ignorance. The truth is, religion is based on magical thinking that can not be proven, tested, etc., and yet somehow that's more acceptable to some people than evidence and fact.

I'll stick with evoulution as part of God's plan.

grouse, any philosophical concept that must be based on faith can be generally referred to as a religion. A lot of the evolution concepts and all of the atheism concepts fall into this category. The fact that you don't understand this concept doesn't make it not so.

There is no faith in evolution. There is only fact. The scientific method can address measureable phenomena and theories that may eventually form must be falsifiable-ya gotta be able to demonstrate it is wrong. You gather evidence and it either supports or refutes the theory. You don't "prove" a theory and even though theories are held to be generally true (because of their success) the option always has to be open that one day evidence will refute or possibly destroy the theory. Lamarcksim is a theory of evolution that bit the dust. Darwin popularized an already known phenomenon of traits changing in a population with time (evolution) by giving a mechanism as to how does a new trait become successful in a population-natural selection. He was actually wrong in a lot of his ideas. As DNA and genes were unknown he hypothesize "gemmules" as carriers of information related to traits. Of course this was wrong. Even natural selection bares little resemblance to Darwin's notion of survival of the fittest (which is erroneous and incorrect) to now "fitness". The theory has evolved through the "Modern Synthesis" and is still incorporating new ideas. Forget Darwin!

PT: do you not understand the difference between philosophical and scientific (in the case of evolution)? Atheism is not based on faith. In my case, it's based on the lack of evidence, not just plausibility. I guess you'd call mathematics a religion.

If evolution is true why do mothers still only have two hands ?
I saw that one in Rants & Raves the other day and thought it was pretty good.

Yeah, And why do men have two heads (neither one has a bit of damn sense), and a Y chromosome full of junk DNA.

Bizarro: there is a minimal amount of faith involved to Science; specifically, that formal logic is valid, that ZF is self-consistent, and that there is some manner of finite connection from Reality to Evidence. It's not a lot of faith, but some. On the other hand, patriciathomas is wrong; a group of beliefs also requires associate formalized rites/rituals and an explicit moral component to the beliefs before qualifying as a religion. Star Trek is a religion ("Star Trek Fandom as a Religious Phenomenon", Michael Jindra; Sociology of Religion v55 #1 pp. 27-51); Evolution is not. Furthermore, Evolution's concepts do not inherently require any more faith than the rest of science. Logic, ZF, and inference of Reality from Evidence suffices. Only those too lazy to follow the many steps along the way need (or believe there is a need) to take anything else on Faith.

What does ZFC and the ontological assumption have to do with evolution-it is the foundation of mathematics-No? You must be a Stephen Wolfram follower with cellular automata and the idea that natural selection is unnecessary.

grouse, as per your 2:11p post. Yes, atheism is a religion based on a leap of faith. You're positive, for what ever reason seems to assure you, that there is no God. You have no proof, and you don't recognize the proof of there being a God. Therefore, based on pure faith, you follow the philosophy of Godlessness. (way to cover your bases) No, I believe math is a science of relevancy. One fact as relates to another fact. However, from any given starting point that all agree on. Math is an absolute.

Bizzaro: you're partly correct. I find Wolfram interesting, but too meandering for anyone to "follow". Calling natural selection "unnecessary" also seems inaccurate; I'd consider it more accurate to say that other mechanisms in a more general expression of Evolution may yield similar effects. EG: the competitive selection of variations in Design; see Basalla's "The Evolution of Technology".

The Formal Grammars branch of mathematics is the only way to assure self-consistency (or at least, to within the limits such assurance is possible). Ergo, Mathematics is implicitly the foundation language of all formal science. Explicitly, I get ZF (Choice or its refutation aren't needed), via the mathematical Vitanyi-Li paper I mentioned for proof of a formalized Occam's Razor (usable for "greedy" search hypotheses testing). The math tools used in the paper may be built from a ZF basis and shown to be of equivalent consistency (and mostly were in Turing's day). The assumption of the Effective Strong Church-Turing Universe Thesis is also required by the Vitanyi-Li proof, and can be shown equivalent (via Chomky's formal grammar work) to finite connection of Reality to Evidence.

Thus: all science implicitly makes those assumptions. Under those assumptions, the simplest comprehensive explanation is provably most probably correct. In this formal sense, Evolution is the simplest comprehensive explanation of the present evidence. Ergo, the Evolution Hypothesis is most probably correct, and the Scientific Theory.

Which brings me now back to patriciathomas's most recent post, and what appears to be a misunderstanding of "proof". As with other terms, the use of the term differs in the field of Science from other fields and colloquial use. "Proof" in science is the process by which hypotheses compete against one another for the "best" description of the present evidence, as I described above; the champion "proven", the others "disproven". Such proof in Science merely "most probable". We can't be absolutely 100% sure we're experiencing Reality, as opposed to the Matrix or some psychotic Delusion. So, Science settles for "most likely" until a better option comes along. There's certainly room to have Hope in God. Alas for Ms. Thomas, the evidence does not support the hypotheses of Ganesh, the Flying Spaghetti Monster, Discordian Eris, or the Christian Triune Divinity. For now, these are all "disproven".