Human Intelligence

I'm afraid that quantum indeterminism disagrees with you, my friend. Many things at the quantum level are acausal. An example I've used before is the resulting spin of a pion that is emitted from the decay of a muon with spin 0. Is it possible to precisely predict the resulting spin of the pion? Nope. We can only calculate the probabilities of the of possible spin-states. Each and every resulting spin value is still a surprise.I suppose that this doesn't totally eliminate the possibility of an undetectable cause or "hidden variable" as it's been called before, but if we're going to expect others to accept such untestable hypotheses, we might as well start saying that God did it.

I think you're stuck on this accident/purpose dichotomy, which doesn't seem like a useful way of looking at the world.Let's say you enter the lottery, you among 1 million other people. There's exactly one million tickets, and one that wins. There's a ticket for everybody that enters, and one person for every possible ticket.As it happens, you win. Congratulations. Now, given that somebody was guaranteed to win, does it make it an "accident" that you won? "Accident" makes it sound unlikely. And it is unlikely that you of all people wouldwin. But it was guaranteed that somebody would win.Life is the same way. Some kind of life is inevitable, given a universe that supports sufficiently complex chemistry and enough time. That the course of life on this Earth took the path it did is astronomically unlikely, yes. Yet, life has to take some path.I don't see "accident" as anything but a meaningless, and possibly misleading, descriptor of this phenomenon. I think other people agree, and that's why you're having a tough time getting a straight answer - nobody thinks "accident" is a good word to describe what happened, and nobody thinks "purpose" is a good word to describe it either.

Be careful when you begin with either of the premises "everything has a cause" or "everything came from somewhere" and then try to deduce from those premises that there must therefore be one thing without a cause or that didn't come from somewhere. Both are contradictory.

No argument, just commenting that this is an excellent analogy.

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If it rained on the rocks for millions of years, then one day lightning struck the ground (or the water, or whatever) and suddenly there was a living microbe, would you consider the living microbe to be the intentional result of a "cause"?

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If indeed the origins of life was a natural event, there would be no intent in causing the first replicator (in your description the result would be a self replicating chemical reaction, according to current theories, not a full microbe). So, I would call it a "result" of a rare occurence. Once you have an imperfect replicator (mutations)and limited resources, however, evolution will occur. Does this answer your question?

I bow before you :ae:, hehhe...Actually, I do have a vague idea about some of these things, and while I agree with you about things at the quantum level being acausal, my point had more to do with Skeptics use of the word "accident".An accident implies intention (or lack therof), thus, to say that humans are here by accident, or that the universe formed by accident, seems to me a silly statement.These things are, for whatever reason, (causal or acausal ), by no ones intention at all. That's what I meant about acciden being a human value imposed on a simply existing universe. All things, on the phisical level at least, being results of a long chain of causality, lacking any intention at all.Sort of like saying, the wind blows by accident. Or somesuch. hehehe... ... umm.... ya

Hey skeptic,I was a bit brief in my last post to you, I was kind of busy when I jumped into the topic. Anyway, I covered most of what I meant in my post to :ae: above, but Ill add alitle more with refrence to your last response to me. Indeed, all words are human. I was trying to stress the idea that things like "accidental" are values that don't exist in the phisical world. Accident implies intention (or lack thereof), yet there is no reason we should impose intention upon the things around us. After all, a rock dosn't intend to be inanimate does it? Does the wind intend to blow? Likewise, does the universe intend to expand?You see, it is unfair to try and impose these idea of an accident where the concept is non-existant. i.e. outside of the human mind, there are no accidents, just cause and effect. Im saying that the qusion of weather or not, inteligence, the universe, et al. is accidental, is a useless one, since the term accident isn't something applicable outside of human perception.Because of this, we need not impose the idea of a first cause either. There is nothing to indicate that a first cause is even necissary. It seems, things just are Or maybe :ae: has some excelent factoids on this subject

I completely agree.In my previous post I was just being nitpicky, as I'm often wont to be. Your point is still valid.

At least someone has the decency to admit that I'm not being given a straight answer. But actually, I can't get a straight answer because the people who are expected to answer know precisely where I'm going with this and choose to derail the conversation by invoking the power of semantics (cut to a scene with Bill Clinton answering "...that depends one what the definition of "is" is....)
"Accident" in the context of this discussion is simply the opposite of "intelligent design". Again, it's all in the "context" of the discussion, which takes a little common sense (something which a few of us think doesn't exist). The answers that have been posted to my basic question so far are clearly dodging the obvious, again, by playing the semantics game. But at least you admit that the whole concept is a "phenomenon" (which defies explanation). Awesome example, but it certainly doesn't apply here. If you take 1000k tickets, and draw one (1), then it's obvious that one (1) win will. But what we're talking about here is an immense amount of hydrogen gas eventually evolving into a rock (and many other things, of course), then clouds (?) raining on the rocks for millions of years, then unavoidably producing life. I don't see how life being produced from wet rocks can be labeled as inevitable. Again, how in any possible thought process can you say that life is inevitable simply because it exists? With that reasoning, we could say the Grand Canyon was dug out by now-extinct giants playing in the sand millions of years ago and referencing the existence of the Grand Canyon itself as evidence? Or just because the woodshed sitting in your neighbor's back yard exists isn't proof that it was inevitable, even if you back up your claims with data describing the amount of available lumber and steel. You would need to employ a couple of carpenters, and that's where the intelligence comes into the formula, which is also the issue we're trying so hard to avoid.

No. And my guess is that you know it doesn't. Your frustration seems to lie in fact that you can't explain the origin of evolution while avoiding the requirement of an intelligent presence.

Yep. You nailed it right on the head! The formula requires intelligent intervention. That's the point I've been trying to get to all along. Thank you.

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Your frustration seems to lie in fact that you can't explain the origin of evolution while avoiding the requirement of an intelligent presence.

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I freely admit that it could have required the intervention of an intelligent presence, or it could have been due to natural causes. There is little evidence for how life started so I am open to ideas. However, the diversification of species by the mechanisms of evolution is supported by mountains of evidence so I am less wishy-washy in this respect. BTW, it is not the origin of evolution, but the origin of life. Evolution is a consequence of mutation and selection, this mechanism has always been around but only causes speciation once there is life. I am not trying to avoid your questions, I merely wanted to make sure I understood your question correctly. I won't duck any question you ask unless you start being confrontational. Deal?

Hey, I'm with you. I hate to see arguments degenerate into what words mean. But it takes co-operation from both sides to prevent that.That's why I'd suggest you stop using the term "accident". It doesn't have a meaning relevant to what we're talking about. The fact that you continue to use it suggests that it's you who's about to embark on an argument from semantics, and quite frankly, none of us want to play that game. That's not what "accident" means in any context. Accidents don'thappen because of a lack of intelligent action. Accidents happen in spite of intelligent action.Now who's arguing from semantics? You, that's who. Because life is just a kind of chemistry. And chemistry is simply the interactions between matter. Given enough time, every potential chemical reaction that can occur will occur - including the specific chemical reactions that are the precursors to life.Google up the "gambler's paradox" or "the random walk." These are mathematical analogies that explain why, given enough time, everything that could happen does happen. Because life is a finite state of matter. And given enough time, all possible finite states of matter will come into existence.It doesn't surprise me at all that there was probably no life in the universe for almost 12 billion years. Just stop for a minute and think how long that is. It doesn't surprise me that for most of the one billion year history of life, life was a blue-green scum on a pond of dirty water.If you want to argue that wet rocks can'tever give rise to life, that's one thing. I don't understand what training in biochemistry will allow you to make that statement.On the other hand, if you're only going to argue that there's a very small but non-zero probability that wet rocks give rise to life, then that's tantamount to admitting that I'm right - because given sufficient time, all things that can occur will occur. It's mathematical fact.

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At least someone has the decency to admit that I'm not being given a straight answer. But actually, I can't get a straight answer because the people who are expected to answer know precisely where I'm going with this and choose to derail the conversation by invoking the power of semantics (cut to a scene with Bill Clinton answering "...that depends one what the definition of "is" is....)
"Accident" in the context of this discussion is simply the opposite of "intelligent design". Again, it's all in the "context" of the discussion, which takes a little common sense (something which a few of us think doesn't exist). The answers that have been posted to my basic question so far are clearly dodging the obvious, again, by playing the semantics game. But at least you admit that the whole concept is a "phenomenon" (which defies explanation).

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We are playing with semantics because you are erecting a strawman argument. IOW, you define evolution however you want (accident in this thread) in order to tear it down when in fact your original definition is not correct. I think what you want to say is that evolution is not goal oriented in that there are many possible outcomes of which evolution is blind. Intelligent design seems to say that there are goals and organisms contain information to reach those goals.BTW, even if a staunch evolutionist used the word "accident" I would have posted the exact same thing.

Fallacy of false dichotomy. Just because the laws of physical chemistry don't intend to give rise to life doesn't mean that they're insufficient to give rise to life.Surely somebody so intent on avoiding semantics games should know better than to invoke well-known logical fallacies.Does water intend to take on a certain crystal shape? Do snowflakes therefore require intelligent intervention to form?