NvC-1: What is the premise of Naturalism in Biology?

I cannot believe that this got promoted while you have yet to address the problems caused by your intent to lie to us in your first topic. Actually, you have explicitly refused to address the issue of your lying.Yet again, you keep defining "Naturalism" as philosophical naturalism, whereas science uses methodological naturalism. You refuse to even recognize methodological naturalism, choosing instead to impose philosophical naturalism on science which is a damned lie!Here you continue your damned lying by imposing your philosophical naturalism on biology in order to force upon biology your damned lie that it states that God does not exist. Biology makes no such statement, you damned liar! Like all of science, biology uses methodological naturalism which uses only naturalistic explanations because that's the only kind of explanation that science can work with and which never takes any kind of position regarding any of the gods. Period!Stop lying about science! Except for the simple facts that science uses methodological naturalism, not your philosophical naturalism, and that science has nothing whatsoever to do with atheism-versus-theism, but rather is non-theistic.So by explicitly and deliberately choosing to eliminate those vital and essential ideas from your discussion, you have chosen to deliberately lie about science!Stop lying about science! Really? Have you? I don't remember seeing that, though I do remember raising with you the fact that there is a wide range of different kinds of creationists, so which kind are you? Where did you write that? Please point us to it. Or is that simply yet another one of your damned lies?So far, you have been demonstrating that you are just yet another lying deceiving creationist. I really wish that that would not be the case, but then you are what you are.Oh, and:Stop lying about science!Stop lying, period!

Let's go ahead and add in a god and see how that turns out.Universal Gravitation:

        GMm
FG =   -------
d2

Now let's introduce "God" into that equation as γ (the Greek letter gamma, since "G" is already taken as the constant of gravitation and "g" is commonly used for gravitational acceleration). We could add "God" either as a term or as a factor.Adding "God"as a term, we'd get:

        GMm
FG =   -------  + γ
d2

And adding "God" as a factor we'd get:

        γGMm
FG =   -------
d2

Now, the "Atheistic" form of the equation (ie, what we would very properly call the non-theist form, but Richard L. Wang insists that it is Atheistic) gives us the correct value, so any additional terms or factors that we add to it must not change that correct value.Therefore, adding "God" as a term must mean that that term is equal to ZERO. Therefore, God equals zero. God is quite literally nothing. QED.Adding "God" as a factor must mean that that term is equal to unity. Which means that GOD HAS NO EFFECT ON ANYTHING AND THEREFORE IS COMPLETELY MEANINGLESS. Again, QED.And, of course, adding in the "God" factor/term or just plain leaving it out has no effect on the outcome. So adding "God" into science is completely meaningless and has no effect whatsoever outside of adding some confusion as to why we are being required to do something so obviously stupid.So that's what Richard L. Wang wants to prove about his god? Really?Edited by dwise1, : added reason for not using "g" instead of γ

So then you admit to creating a contrived redefinition. Typical creationist deception.One lesson we were taught in Formal Logic was about sophistry, the use of logical arguments to deliberately deceive. The lesson was that if you can get your audience to accept the right false premises, you can "prove" anything including that black is white.That is what you are doing with your false redefinitions. No, discuss it now. Because until you have revealed your own personal special pleading deceptive redefinition of evolution, then nothing you say about the subject could possibly make any sense.Stop being a typical dishonest creationist.

And as part of knowing about fire, you would also need to know about -- or at least be able to think through -- situations which may appear to violate the natural order while not actually doing so.An example if I may. An old-ish Boy Scout trick. What happens when you put a paper cup into the campfire. It burns up. Put water in a paper cup and place it in the fire. It doesn't burn up. That violates what you know about the natural order of paper cups and fire. A miracle!Until you realize that the heat going into the paper cup is actually going into heating up the water, so that cup-water system never gets hot enough to reach the kindling point of the cup until the water has boiled away. But to realize that, you need to know a lot about fire and how things catch on fire. "Common sense" knowledge about fire is insufficient and could lead you astray.For example the "burning bush". I think that few people realize that a candle wick isn't what's burning, but rather it's the wax under the wick that's being drawn up (ie, "wicked up" through wicking action) and being burned. The only part of the wick that does eventually burn is the part that the melted wax can no longer get to. So then some illusionist could construct a "burning bush" trick in which the bush serve to transport the flammable (or inflammable) material for the fire leaving the bush itself unconsumed by the flames.There have been countless generations of countless professionals whose job it is and has been to produce such miracles on command every day of the week and twice on Saturdays (same schedule as Captain America socking Hitler on the jaw -- how many people caught that throw-away, especially considering what was depicted on the cover of the very first Captain America comic, March 1941?). All without ever actually having to resort to using the supernatural. Id est, all by natural means.So then the criterion for determining that the supernatural was at play is not just that you country bumpkins can't figure it out (hey, I once saw with my own eyes in a cruise ship magic act the guy draw a bowling ball on a sketch pad and an actual bowling ball with appropriate gravitas (or at least gravity) drop out of it to the stage floor -- now try to explain that without resorting to God!). Rather, we must first thoroughly exhaust all possible natural explanations. As one of my signatures here quotes Sherlock Holmes ("The Hound of the Baskervilles"):

quote:

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Of course, if Dr. Mortimer's surmise should be correct and we are dealing with forces outside the ordinary laws of Nature, there is an end of our investigation. But we are bound to exhaust all other hypotheses before falling back upon this one.

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ABE:
Or was it my high school chemistry teacher who put a paper cup filled with water over a Bunsen burner? And we duplicated that experiment once at a campout?Edited by dwise1, : ABE: Or was that in high school chemistry class?Edited by dwise1, : bowling ballEdited by dwise1, : "without resorting to God"

The standard creationist argument is that both camps are dealing with the same data, but just interpreting it differently.But that's not what's happening here. What's happening here is that the creationists are claiming to have different data. Supernaturalistic data.In that case, then fine! Let them present their supernaturalistic data!We welcome it! Put up or shut up!

That is not the question. The issue is not your use of acronyms (eg, DN), but rather your horrific redefining of those term to mean something entirely different from their normal definitions. 
BTW, typing can be a cultural issue, different for different languages as I learned one night.I learned touch-typing in school around when I was 13. My father told me that he tried the US Navy course, but that involved locking you in a room with a typewriter and an exercise book, but that is how it's learned. We drilled on the home keys, repeatedly typing the same single letters (BTW, that's the reason for the bit of embossing on the F and J keys, so that you can feel where to place your index fingers to put on the home keys). Then going up and down and inwards from those home keys. Then two-letter words in English, then three-letter words, then the most common four-letter words, etc. Until we could spell out uncommon words, but then just rip through the common ones. There was a pattern developing there that we never saw.About seven years later in college, I had a German assignment to hand in, so I decided to type it (there's a longer story to that that's not really relevant). So I started typing in German for the first time in my life. I couldn't understand why I had to spell every single word out letter for letter, even the most common ones (like the eight different forms of "the" or "a"). But then as I progressed through that evolution I realized that more and more of the more common German words were being incorporated into my "muscle memory." That is the moment that I realized the real purpose of all those keyboard exercises: to implant the most common words into our muscle memory so that we can just type them out at sight without having to think them through.But Chinese typing is very different -- warning and apologies, but most of my knowledge of Chinese writing is through Japanese Kanji. In Kanji, every symbol is a separate idea or object. The advantage is that one writing system can support any number of spoken languages. The disadvantage is that you cannot read out what's written in another language, but rather you must rely on writing in order to communicate.I only have two exposures to Chinese/Kanji keyboards. One was a James Bond movie where he teams up with a Chinese agent (female, of course -- "Tomorrow Never Dies"). They need to hack into a computer and he wants to do it, but the keyboard is in Chinese so she does it instead. After that, I spoke with a Chinese colleague and he confirmed that there are several mode keys which change the character generated by pressing any particular key. Which would make typing on a Chinese keyboard even more complex and probably not very conducive to touch-typing.The other example was a Japanese TV series set in WWII that I saw on German TV in the 1970's. In the background of one scene there was a Japanese typewriter, mechanical, of course. It looked like an old style cash register, but it was enormous and dwarfed the furniture in the room. It was about 5 or 6 feet wide and 2 or 3 feet across in a curve with I could not even begin to imagine how many keys it had for individual Kanji characters.I have a Kanji reference book with the first 888 characters that elementary school children must learn, but it says that you must know at least 1,200 characters in order to read a newspaper. Now just imagine having to try to reduce that down to a computer keyboard.Mind blown.Edited by dwise1, : minor tweaks, no deletions and minor additions

It would look like Chinese to you. As I recall, he stated early on that he has only published in Chinese. ABE:
Here is what he actually wrote in Message 11: I would add a comment that the biology that he's been self-studying is probably from creationist sources. Especially Discovery Institute type sources who use information theory to confuse their audience.Edited by dwise1, : ABE

Then you cannot talk about science. And you most especially must not grossly misrepresent science as you have been doing and as you explicitly and stubborn insist on doing. 
You try to present yourself as "not your average creationist", as being some kind of unique kind of creationist. Rather, from everything you've been writing you appear to be a very common kind of creationist who uses deceptive arguments to push a religious agenda: a Discovery Institute (DI) type "intelligent design" (ID) creationist.IDists decry science as being "atheistic" because (they falsely claim) it uses philosophical naturalism which includes the premise that God does not exist. The goal of DI IDism (as presented in the DI's Wedge Strategy with its religious agenda's carefully laid-out 5-year, 10-year, and 20-year plans) is to fundamentally reform science so that it would make use of supernaturalistic explanations, basically bringing God into science. That is called theistic science:

quote:

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Theistic science, also referred to as theistic realism, is the pseudoscientific proposal that the central scientific method of requiring testability, known as methodological naturalism, should be replaced by a philosophy of science that allows occasional supernatural explanations which are inherently untestable. Proponents propose supernatural explanations for topics raised by their theology, in particular evolution.

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Supporters of theistic realism or theistic science include intelligent design creationism proponents J. P. Moreland, Stephen C. Meyer and Phillip E. Johnson.

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Instead of the relationship between religion and science being a dialogue, theistic science seeks to alter the basic methods of science. As Alvin Plantinga puts it, this is a "science stopper", and these concepts lack any mainstream credence.

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That is what I told you from the beginning in Message 9 and nothing has changed: Notably, in that So Just How is ID's Supernatural-based Science Supposed to Work? (SUM. MESSAGES ONLY) topic (it's a link, so just click on it to go there), I asked for advocates and proponents of "theistic science" to explain just how a supernatural-based science was supposed to work in practical terms (ie, just exactly how you are supposed to do that and still get productive results). In the nearly 400 messages of that topic, nobody was able to answer that simple basic question. Taq had the last word in the final message, Message 396, in which he presented an analogy of a new sports fan wanting how that sport is run to be changed to include quantum physics: {Since Richard L. Wang will, in typical creationist fashion, just ignore this message and will never follow that link, this is for the edification of Lurkers. That Wikipedia page on "theistic science" links to another Wikipedia page, Timeline of intelligent design, which lays out in time-line fashion a rather good and fairly comprehensive history of the anti-evolution movement, especially the ID faction. } 
Richard L. Wang, despite the obvious fact that science uses methodological naturalism (restricting itself to naturalistic methods and explanation for the simple reason that that is all it can deal with and without making any statements about the supernatural, including whether it exists), you insist on falsely characterizing it as using philosophical naturalism (even to the point of falsely presenting that as the only form of naturalism) in order to falsely claim that science is denying the existence of God.Despite the obvious fact that science is non-theistic (completely neutral about the gods, since the gods are irrelevant to what science does), you have repeatedly falsely presented science as being atheistic (ie, denying the existence of God). Furthermore, you have characterized all explanations in in science as necessarily being either "Atheistic" or "Theistic", again completely ignoring that very simple and obvious fact that proper scientific explanations can only be non-theistic. Richard L. Wang:

The big problem is that appeals to information and to information theory is a basic tool in ID to generate BS claims and arguments and to baffle their audiences. Under the mask of esoteric mathematics, they can freely redefine it to mean whatever they want and to misapply it wherever they wish -- if we can't follow what they're doing, then how can we call them on it?Remember that every discipline has its own terminology often using the same words as many other disciplines (as well as common usages) but redefined to fit the specific needs of that particular discipline. There are even instances where different related disciplines can have definitions for the same term that are very close, yet still different. For example, in both electrical engineering and electronics practiced by technicians, current is the flow of charge and is measured the same way in both disciplines (eg, Coulombs, amperes), but for technicians it's electron flow which goes from negative to positive and for EEs it's an abstract charge carrier, "holes", that flow from positive to negative.One of the oldest creationist deceptive practices has been called "semantic shifting" wherein they take a scientific term and replace its proper definition with a street definition. That way, they can misquote a scientific source without having to change a single word, just by applying the wrong definitions.So whenever a creationist starts using the word, "information", your BS detector should start flashing red before it pegs its needle. Same as whenever a creationist says anything about "evolution". In basic computer science, data are the raw numbers that don't mean anything until they've been processed and interpret whereupon they become information. Data just exists, whereas information is useful. Same as using statistical analysis to convert statistics (raw data points) into information.That would point to information not existing on its own, but rather it only exists when people need it. You don't need gods to explain the existence of information, but rather people.

Quite correct, as I remarked in Message 126 of this very topic but 5 days ago. Shifting between different definitions of a term is called semantic shifting and it has been a very common creationist tactic since long before I started studying "creation science" in 1981. Its purposes are to deceive and to generate confusion, since deception and confusion are essential for the survival and propagation of creationism whereas truthfulness and clarity can only lead to its eradication.From my Message 126: We have seen Richard L. Wang deploy his misuse of the word, "information", here as a red herring to mislead us and to generate confusion. And he has succeeded in that endeavor.Instead, he needs to answer for his misrepresentation of evolution (as being nothing more than point mutations), his total misrepresentation of neo-Darwinism as being something entirely different from what it actually is, and his implying that information must be supernatural in origin.

No, that is not information, but rather that is data. Data is not information.You are not correct, ergo ... . I have a pattern for you, a string of 32 binary bits which contain information. Ah, but what information? Is that information inherent in those bits? Or is that information arbitrarily decided by whoever is using that data, those bits?

quote:

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1100 0011 0111 1001 1110 0011 1110 1101 (expressed in hex as C379E3ED)

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Ok, so tell me what the information is that that bit string contains. They're right there in front of you. So what is the specific information that they contain?Well, that all depends on how you decide to interpret those bits. Because "bits are bits" (as per an old dog food commercial from a few decades ago). The bits do form a definite pattern, but the actual information contained in that pattern depends entirely on how you choose to interpret that pattern. IOW, there is no single cosmic information being transmitted here, nothing to see here, move along, move along.So just what information does that bit string contain? Here are a few possibilities:

• Maybe it's a signed long integer (ie, 2's Complement with the MSB being the sign bit), in which case it would be -1015421971.
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• Or maybe it's an unsigned long integer, in which case it would be 3279545325.
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• Or maybe it's a 32-bit floating-point representation as per IEEE 754, in which case the information would be -249.890335.
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• Of maybe it's a floating-point value using some other form of encoding. I have encountered a couple non-IEEE-754 floating-point encodings being used by GPS satellites (and had to write conversion functions to convert them to IEEE-754 and back -- those conversion functions involved a lot of intricate bit swapping and resizing -- taking into account the satellite's big-endianness and the computer's little-endianness (ie, Intel) --, all of which I worked out while serving as the door for a ladies' styling dance class, so my code review was extra rigorous and it passed with flying colors).
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• Or maybe it's a pointer, which is a memory address, 0xC379E3ED.
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• Or maybe it's a character string fragment, which raise a plethora of possibilities:
  1. What character codeset are we to use? EBCDIC? (8-bit) Extended ASCII? (8-bit, but with many different extended code-sets). Baudot? (7-bit). Unicode? Something else completely different?
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  2. For that matter, if the applicable character set is, for example, something like octal, then we'd have to regroup the bits into the octal number 030336361755.
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• Some arbitrary bit-field encoding. For example, some I/O devices have input command registers in which specific bits of a command have specific arbitrary meanings.

Beginning programmers often have a common initial problem. They think that those data bits must have some kind of inherent meaning. They do not! Any and all meaning that any data bits have depends directly on how the program uses them.Therefore, data has no inherent meaning until somebody uses it and turns it into information.So all this twaddle is just nonsense. Information is not supernatural in origin!Edited by dwise1, : -- taking into account the satellite's big-endianness and the computer's little-endianness --

A couple decades ago, I knew a PhD Chemistry. One day I asked him whether we could make things happen that could not happen naturally -- ie, change or act in violation of natural law. He assured me that we could not. All we can do is to set up the conditions for a reaction or a natural process to occur and, if that reaction or process could not happen naturally, then it would not happen.So, no, humans cannot violate natural law. The most that we could do would be to create conditions for reactions or other processes to occur -- conditions that would not normally arise on their own in the wild -- , but if those reactions or processes would not naturally occur under those conditions, then they will not occur.