Intelligent design as we know it today is misnomer.

A bold statement only if one ignores the origins of the term “intelligent design” as it is used today.

Creation science

In short, creation science is an attempt to scientifically validate the Biblical account of creation.

Modern creationism emerged shortly after the conclusion of World War I, when Christian fundamentalism was on the rise in the United States.  In 1925, the state of Tennessee passed the Butler Act, prohibiting teachers from denying the Biblical account of the origins of man, and also the teaching of evolution of man.

The Cold War eventually put evolution back into text-books across the country for fear that the Soviet Union would outpace the United States in science education.

Since the 1961 publication of The Genesis Flood, by Henry M. Morris and John C. Whitcomb, the creationist movement has been slowly gaining steam.  The Genesis Flood posits that Earth was created in seven days, and is less than 7,000 years old.  In other words, the authors take a literal interpretation of the Judeo-Christian Bible and examine the scientific plausibility of it.

Creation science by nature seeks to disprove the effectiveness of scientific standards such as radio-carbon dating, as well as accepted scientific facts in cosmology, and biology.

Defenders of creationism tend to be fundamentalist or orthodox Christians.

Creationists were forced to change their tactics when a Supreme Court case ruled that creation science was religious in nature, and therefore could not be taught in public schools.

Edwards v. Aguillard

In 1987, the United States Supreme court ruled that a Louisiana law requiring creationism to be taught alongside evolution was unconstitutional because it violated the Establishment clause of the first amendment.  Which reads:

“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion…”

After that landmark decision, an edited version of Of Pandas and People, the first creationist text-book was released.  The text-book was written by Percival Davis and Dean H. Kenyon, both of them self-professed creationists.  Percival Davis, when asked about the reasons for writing the creationist text-book, told the Wall Street Journal in 1994:

“Of course my motives were religious. There’s no question about it.”

In what way was Pandas edited?

Every instance of the word “creation” or “creator” or any derivative thereof found in the text was replaced with “intelligent design”, “designer”, or any derivative thereof.  Thus, modern Intelligent Design was born.

Shortly after the case, The Discovery Institute was founded to advertise the concept of Intelligent design, and manufacture false controversy about the acceptance of evolution in the scientific community.

Looking at the history of modern creationism, it’s easy to see that intelligent design is firmly rooted in creationism.  But nevertheless, ID had to be different enough to appear at least slightly more legitimate in a court of law or a classroom, so terms were changed  and “God” or “Creator” was taken out of the picture. Read the rest of this entry »

Thermodynamics is the most fundamental science.  The observed laws of thermodynamics are true across the universe, right down to the the quarks that make up hadrons, and even the the things we know nothing about like dark matter and dark energy seem to follow the laws.

Thermodynamics

The second law of thermodynamics is what I want to talk about:

The total entropy of any isolated thermodynamic system always increases over time, approaching a maximum value.

The definition of entropy.

Basically, things will continue to become more and more complicated until an equilibrium is reached.

Just a thought

I’ve suggested in earlier articles that life is the universe.  Humans are not a part of the universe, we are the universe. As Carl Sagan famously said: “We are starstuff.”

The nature of the universe is entropic.

Think for a second about this:  What if survival is a transcendent mechanic?  What if a survival mechanic is prerequisite to existence?

Think about the universe, and everything in it, as one entity.  All the matter, light, life forms, planets, stars, black holes, radiation, and dark matter…everything, as one.  According to the big bang theory, it all had to start somewhere, so it’s not unreasonable to think of everything in the universe, including humans, as related on the quantum level.

So what if the universe has a survival mechanic built into it?

If so, then wouldn’t the emergence of life be inevitable?  Wouldn’t life be a necessary step in the evolution of the universe?  Wouldn’t evolution be an integral part of the universe?

That survival mechanic of the universe is called entropy.  Nature = entropic.

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This article will attempt to expand on a point I briefly mentioned in an earlier article.

When it comes to the beginning of everything, many people of faith point to a single argument for the existence of a divine entity.  They will ask “What are the chances?”

What are the chances that…

The big bang produced all the elements of life in such a seemingly chaotic chemical chain reaction?

Those components formed stars, which then went supernova, eventually giving birth to planetoids?

Strong force, gravitation, electromagnetism, and weak force work perfectly in our favor?

Earth is perfectly situated  in the solar system to support human life?

Bacteria formed from non-living matter or that bacteria arrived to Earth from an asteroid impact?

Bacteria navigated the evolutionary chain to form humans after about a few hundred million years?

Out of 700 songs, the one that happens to be extremely relevant to my life at the moment decided to play when I hit the “shuffle” button?

And so on…

This, in my opinion, is quite literally a backwards way of thinking.  Let me explain…

Many people of faith believe that they were brought into existence, and then life, by an intelligent being of some kind. This belief presupposes that the observable universe is somehow meant for humans, that all the phenomena we witness has something to do with human existence.  This causes believers to see themselves as superior to, if not separate from nature in some way, and they take these conditioned beliefs with them when judging the universe.  They consider themselves a unique part of the universe, special because a divine being created them, or at least has a purpose for them.

And so they approach big questions with a big ego.  Because of their preconceived notions, they assume that, if indeed nature created humans, than it had to have been in defiance of the odds, and that leads them to the mistaken conclusion that an intelligence is behind it all.

I want people to completely abandon the notion that probability had anything to do with our successful evolution.  I want you to understand that we are not part of this universe; we are the universe.

Consider this

The Miller-Urey experiment in 1952 tested chemical evolution in a setting thought to be similar to early Earth atmospheric conditions.  From Wikipedia:

At the end of one week of continuous operation, Miller and Urey observed that as much as 10–15% of the carbon within the system was now in the form of organic compounds. Two percent of the carbon had formed amino acids that are used to make proteins in living cells, with glycine as the most abundant. Sugars, lipids, and some of the building blocks for nucleic acids were also formed.

The results of this experiment have been reproduced countless times since then, and it’s extremely important to know that many of the building blocks of life on Earth (sugars, lipids, amino acids, carbon, etc…) have been found on meteorites.

In April 2009 Paul G. Higgs and Ralph E. Pudritz of McMaster University in Ontario, published an experiment that tested a hypothesis that 10 of the most abundant amino acids can be formed in the universe regardless of the source.  In other words, the recipe for these certain amino acids is built into the universe.  The Abstract of the Higgs and Purditz journal article (emphasis added):

Of the twenty amino acids used in proteins, ten were formed in Miller’s atmospheric discharge experiments. The two other major proposed sources of prebiotic amino acid synthesis include formation in hydrothermal vents and delivery to Earth via meteorites. We combine observational and experimental data of amino acid frequencies formed by these diverse mechanisms and show that, regardless of the source, these ten early amino acids can be ranked in order of decreasing abundance in prebiotic contexts. This order can be predicted by thermodynamics. The relative abundances of the early amino acids were most likely reflected in the composition of the first proteins at the time the genetic code originated. The remaining amino acids were incorporated into proteins after pathways for their biochemical synthesis evolved. This is consistent with theories of the evolution of the genetic code by stepwise addition of new amino acids. These are hints that key aspects of early biochemistry may be universal.

If 10 of the 20 amino acids present in human biology, are in fact built into the universe, than it’s likely that another species of intelligent life would have some similarities to humans.  Intelligent life might be rare, but Humans are by no means special, much less superior to nature.

The implications of this are huge.  If it’s true that the recipe for life is built into the universe, what does that do to the belief that an intelligent force created life?  What does that do to the notion that Humans exist because we ‘beat the odds’?

There was some chance involved in the evolution of humans specifically, but not life in general.  But what I’m trying to get across is that humans aren’t separate from, or superior to nature, thus we are not the perfect beings that God(s) would have us believe we are.  Because of that, the probability of our existence doesn’t matter one bit.

You could make the very same ‘what are the chances?” argument for this, this, this, this, this, and this.

Try to look at it differently

I’ll play into the probability argument a little, if only to prove it even more inadequate.  Suppose the act of rolling a 20-sided die represented the big bang, and what ever the result was, that’s the universe that formed.  Let’s say I roll a 5, and that creates a universe similar to ours, and after a while, intelligent life forms in universe 5.  Well, obviously that intelligent life is going to wonder where it came from.

What are the chances that an intelligent life was formed from all those seemingly chaotic reactions?!!  Well, the chances were 1 in 20.

Now let’s say I roll it again to make a new universe, and this time I get a 7.  Universe 7 gives me intelligent life after a while, but it’s a helium based life form, and they aren’t made of flesh or blood.  But they still wonder:  what are the chances?

well, the chances are 1 in 20.

One last roll, this time, I get a 16, and that creates a universe that somehow doesn’t support the evolution of intelligent life.  In universe 16, no intelligent life is there to ask the question: what are the chances?

The chances that a roll of the d20 will create a universe without intelligent life? 1 in 20.

As far as we can tell, there is only one universe, so assuming that’s true, ask yourself this:

Do you think the intelligent life that could have been is wondering what the chances are?

The chance of it doesn’t matter one bit.  It’s difficult to explain it any better, so I hope you’ll stop looking at the universe with preconceived notions that you’re special, and start being humble.  You weren’t placed here by an intelligent being, you aren’t God’s conduit, and for those of you who have an abstract view of “God”, (i.e. a god of the gaps) I would ask you this:

Why not just save a step and say that the universe is eternal?

The words of Saint Thomas Aquinas:

“…As we attain to the knowledge of simple things by way of compound things, so must we reach to the knowledge of eternity by means of time, which is nothing but the numbering of movement by “before” and “after.” For since succession occurs in every movement, and one part comes after another, the fact that we reckon before and after in movement, makes us apprehend time, which is nothing else but the measure of before and after in movement. Now in a thing bereft of movement, which is always the same, there is no before or after. As therefore the idea of time consists in the numbering of before and after in movement; so likewise in the apprehension of the uniformity of what is outside of movement, consists the idea of eternity.”

We are the universe, go outside and look up.

The renowned biologist Charles Darwin, in his book The Origin of species, pointed to three culprits that make evolution inevitable:

Variation
If you have variation within a species (Different sized beaks, different sized turtle shells, etc.)…

Selection
And if you have a struggle to survive (wonder why elephants aren’t wondering all over the planet?)…

Heredity
And if the traits and/or survival skills are passed down to new members of a species over a time…

Then…
The later generations of a species would be better adapted to the environment then their parents.

If you have these three behaviors, then you MUST get evolution, or as Philosopher Daniel Dennet put it:

“Design out of chaos, without the aide of mind.”

Read the rest of this entry »

In this world there is a great deal of religious conflict between people of differing religious beliefs and between believers and nonbelievers. But these groups can all come together as one and express the same sentiment concerning their (lack of) belief in the Goddess N’da.

The Creed

Our creed concerning the Goddess N’Da is as follows:

There is no rational basis to believe in the Goddess N’Da.

We claim that everyone, no matter what their other beliefs may be, can agree with this creed.

Background

We will now outline some support for the above creed.

Evidence & Statistics

When we look at the usual pillars of faith, we can see little reason for belief in N’Da.

• Sacred texts: None known.
• Relevant historical events: None known.
• Churches: None known.
• Followers: None known.
• Scientific evidence: None known.

Based on this evidence, there appears to be no reasonable basis for anyone to believe in the Goddess N’Da. She is mentioned in no historic records, and appears to have had no followers at any time in the past. No miracles have been ascribed to her, no one is seen to pray to her, and no one has claimed to have performed any acts under her influence.

Newness Argument

Some people might argue that new religions arise over time, new gods appear and old ones appear to lose followers and die. According to such an argument, the lack of any past support for the Goddess N’Da may only be a sign that the earth was not yet ready for any revelation at all about her existence. In such a worldview, other religions may be seen as preparing the way for her.

A skeptic might wonder “Why Now?” and “Why N’Da?”. Before anyone can reasonably believe in the Goddess N’Da, it seems sensible to wait until there is some more concrete basis for belief (e.g., sacred texts, known followers, miracles or other supernatural occurrences attributed to the Goddess N’Da, claimed consequences for nonbelief, rewards for belief).

Faith

Some people say that to believe without any evidence whatsoever is a test of faith, and on that basis belief in the Goddess N’da would appear to be an act of profound faith. But similar or greater faith would be required to believe that crows are really aliens or that cushions are imbued with the spirits of the dead. There appears to be no good reason to choose to believe in the Goddess N’da compared to any other supernatural force or entity.

Direct Personal Revelation

Some people would claim that although external evidence is not required for faith, they have internal evidence to support their beliefs. They might say that one way to know the reality of the Goddess N’Da is simply to enter a contemplative state and seek revelation. For example, after you have read this paragraph and before reading the next one, close your eyes, relax, breathe slowly and deeply, focus, and take a few minutes to seek enlightenment about the Goddess N’Da. Ask her to reveal herself to you. This feeling of enlightenment can arrive as tingle that slowly builds across your body, a presence or eerie sensation, or simply a feeling of being loved. (Feel free to take a moment now and seek that sensation.)

_________________________________________________________________

Most people will feel something when they try the above exercise if they focus properly, given an appropriate open frame of mind, but we should not assume that they have actually felt the love of the Goddess N’Da. There are other, more rational, explanations, involving suggestion. No matter how profound the feeling appears to be (and for some people, the results can be dramatic), we can almost always explain those results as simply the result of suggestion.

Conspiracy Theories

Of course, one might ask why anyone would take the time to refute the existence of a nonexistent God with no known followers, and that doing so is clearly suspicious. “Why,” they might ask, “do they want us not to believe?”. A typical conspiracy explanation would be that followers of the Goddess N’Da have as a tenet of their faith the requirement that they only argue against the existence of the Goddess N’Da, in which case, vast numbers of people (including self-professed atheists!) could secretly be followers of the Goddess N’Da. Similarly, as Donald Rumsfeld said, “Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence,” so the fact that there are no public records of N’Da showing her power and no public sacred texts does not mean that these things do not exist.

Like most conspiracy theories, this theory cannot easily be refuted, but Occam’s Razor suggests that given multiple explanations, we should prefer the simplest one. Thus, rather than suppose that there are lots of people who believe in the Goddess N’Da but do not admit it, which is somewhat paranoid, it is simpler to suppose that most people do not believe in the Goddess N’Da.

Gnostic vs Agnostic Views

In the creed, it merely states that there is no rational basis to believe in the Goddess N’Da. Some people might be willing to go further and explicitly state that the Goddess N’Da does not exist (gnostic viewpoint). Our suggested creed is more inclusive since it is accessible to agnostics who might be skeptical about the Goddess N’Da, but who, nevertheless, cannot completely rule out the possibility of her existence.

Unresolved Questions

One last unresolved question that remains is one we raised in the conspiracy section: If there is no Goddess N’Da, why talk about her at all? We might also note that the entire tone of this document is careful to avoid making an outright statement on the existence of the Goddess N’Da, which allows the possibility that its author(s) actually (secretly) believe.

In this case, Occam’s Razor would still lead us to prefer the explanation that this page is an elaborate joke or thought experiment written by one individual than that the Goddess N’Da is the one true god who demands that most patience and faith, whose love is received in private contemplation, and whose existence must never be acknowledged except to oneself.

Reposted from: http://nda.jottit.com/

I often hear the argument that the universe is too “ordered” or too “perfect” for it’s creation to have been an “accidental” or a “random” event.  This argument makes absolutely no sense to me.

First of all.  Our concept of “order” comes from observing reality.  What would a “disorderly” universe look like?  Perhaps it would a universe where asteroids impact astral bodies hundreds of times per hour, forever and ever and ever, or maybe it would be a universe where 99.9% of the astral bodies formed by its creation would kill any and all carbon-based lifeforms instantly.  Or maybe it would be a universe with voids all over it that consist of absolute nothingness, or infinitely dense holes in the fabric of space that absorb anything they can reach.  Or maybe it would be a universe where entire moons are composed of rivers of methane flowing over frozen water.  Maybe it would be a universe where most planetary orbits are unstable, or where less than 3% of gaseous bodies in space form a star.  Or maybe it would a universe where many galaxies come dangerously close to a supernova, or where our own galaxy is on a collision course with the Andromeda galaxy.  Or a disorderly universe might be one that expands for trillions upon trillions of years until the temperature of the universe is so low that it cannot sustain life or motion at all.

Too bad all of the above mentioned phenomena are part of the universe we live in.  To call this universe, and Earth, and humans “too perfect” to have been an accident, is just a ridiculously egotistical claim.  This universe is obviously not designed for human life, nor was Earth specifically designed to host human life, It would be more accurate to say that the Earth’s conditions gave way to the evolution of species, and one of those species happened to be humans.  Even our survival has been threatened in the past by nature, and still to this day, Earth is not a friendly environment, what with the tsunamis that kill 200 thousand people, earth quakes that destroy entire ecosystems, and volcanic eruptions that wipe out entire cultures.  Also consider that it took 3.5 billion years before multi-cellular life appeared on the planet, and that humans aren’t adapted for 2/3 of the Earth surface.  Also the Ratio of extinct life to surviving life, it’s 99:1, that is, 99% of known species that have occupied the Earth, are now extinct.  What life there is today, is but 1% of life that could have been.

A “disorderly” universe cannot exist.  The intelligent life of any universe would derive from their observations, an order (not, the order) that lets them inquire about it.

More on the egotism of the “fine-tuning” argument

To think that Humans are physiologically or communicatively perfect as a species is also a terribly ignorant and egotistical claim.  Consider that a crocidile can eat a meal a month and be perfectly fit, whereas, because of our warm-blooded nature, humans have to eat constantly.  The human eye has a narrow view of the elecromagnetic spectrum. (did you know dolphins use echolocation to see?  A dolphin can see through solid objects).  We age to death, contracting cancer, alzheimers, and deteriorating senses along the way.  Consider that close to 40% of birth defects are genetic (perfect?! lol!), and around 60 percent are unknown causes.  There are some cases where a fetus developes with it’s heart outside of it’s body, or is missing a pelvis, or their eyes are attached to each other or their head is missing.  Also consider that humans eat, drink and breath through the same hole in our body, garuanteeing that some percent of people will choke in their life time.  My favorite “design” flaw is that humans dispose of waste through the same holes that we use for reproduction, an “Entertainment center in the middle of a sewage complex”, as Neil deGrasse Tyson put it.

Many people assume that Earth was designed for humans and that the universe is orderly.  You can identify a big ego by asking this question:

Doesn’t the universe make you feel small?

Of course, an egotistical response would be to say that it does make you feel small.  That means that you had a preconceived notion that you and your species were some how special.

“There are people who say ‘this makes me feel small because I need to see the immensity of the cosmos’ and I say ‘no, you’re not thinking about it the right way’…When I look up in the universe, I feel large [as opposed to small]…I know the molecules in my body are traceable to phenomena in the cosmos, and it’s our fifteen pounds of brain matter that figured this out!…”

Chance

One could say that the chances of Earth being where it is are low.  That’s irrelevant.  The fact is, the universe rolled a dice and the result formed us where we are.  It could have had a different result, one that didn’t form us, or Earth, but then, what would that question matter?

Consider the other 5 recipes that didn’t get to exist, do you think they’re complaining?

Check out the link below to see more!

Read the rest of this entry »

Paul Stamets on 6 ways mushrooms can save the world
Paul Stamets explains that humans have similar behavioural characteristics to fungi, and goes further to explain how fungi could solve hunger, create entire forests, provide clean, renewable fuel and more.  A quote from Staments:

“…Matter begets life, life becomes single cells, single cells become strings, strings become chains, chains network, and this is the paradigm that we see throughout the universe.”

Dan Ariely asks, Are we in control of our own decisions?
Dan Ariely examines external influences on the decisions we make, suggesting that we aren’t really in complete control of our decisions.  The example of the Economist ad best illustrates his point that the way in which choices are presented to us greatly influences how we view the choices.

Dan Gilbert on our mistaken expectations
Dan Gilbert suggests that a method for making the right decisions, 100% of the time, exists, and a mathematician named Daniel Burnoulli figured it out:

Expected Value = (odds of gain) * (value of gain)

Gilbert uses this formula to explain why so many decisions we make are completely irrational and not the “right” one.  Similar to Ariely’s presentation, Gilbert suggests that comparison between options leads us askew of the proper decision.  I highly recommend you pay attention to the two questions that the audience asks at the end.  A quote:

“If I told you that there will be a plague next year that will kill 15,000 people, you might be alarmed…if you didn’t find out it was the flu.“

Full Story

“This is incredible and potentially game changing. It’s stuff like this that makes you realize that we live in the future, and it’s awesome.”

stem cells from the eye cultured into contact lenses.  Patients which were once blind in some fashion, experienced renewed vision within a day.  One step closer to curing blindness, and it happens to be a really cheap (well, maybe not the actual lenses), quick procedure.

dump some UV light, sugar molecules, an isolated base, and some phosphate into a bowl, and stir.

That’s the laymens recipe for what was likely the primordial soup that brought DNA into the mix.  And it’s what John Sutherland, from the University of Manchester, UK, cooked up recently, while researching the origins of DNA.

Sutherlands recipe is a slight modification of a previously tested soup that did not yield any interesting results.  But this time, Sutherland got it right.

Until now, it’s been a complete mystery as to how molecules capable of storing genetic information could have ever arisen from the primordial cooking pot (which is likely to be a warm pond, like Darwin theorized).  But Sutherlands soup produced RNA naturally, and spontaneously; Sutherland:

“We don’t use any way-out scenarios - all the conditions are consistent with what we know about early Earth.”

Think of RNA as a messenger between DNA and our amino acids (essential to life).

Sutherlands experiment has demonstrated that, maybe, possibly, life can spontaneously and naturally be created.