Of course it is true in the abstract, but it only appears not to assume anything about abiogenesis if you ignore everything else he has been saying, particularly the previous paragraph:
But there are two problems in your assertion. First it is not clear that RAZD is referring to natural abiogenesis rather than life.
OK, here is the paragraph again:
quote:
Math is not evidence for reality. If you have a mathematical model that says something cannot happen when you have evidence around you that it has, the probability is high that the mathematical model is erroneous.
The problem, as Parasomnium has pointed out on this thread, is that two of these statements contradict each other. It's pretty clear that when he speaks of "evidence all around us" he has life in mind, not abiogenesis, since there's hardly that kind of conspicuous evidence for abiogenesis. But in the first statement about a "mathematical model that says something cannot happen" he is clearly not speaking of life but of the origin of life from non-life, because that's what the mathematical model purports to be describing, certainly not life itself, as there's no way anyone is saying "life cannot happen." This wouldn't even make sense as an abstract statement because it's too absurd.
Secondly it states "if there is evidence". Thus you cannot argue that the statement directly begs the question even in context.
It says "WHEN there is evidence," even "when there is evidence ALL AROUND YOU." The "if" refers to the mathematical model, not the evidence. Translation: Given this mathematical model that "says something cannot happen" BUT IN FACT you have evidence all around you that IT HAS, THEN the model is most likely wrong.
quote:
If the model says something cannot happen
But evidence all around you says it has happened
Then the model is most likely wrong.
That's quite true in the abstract.
But in context you get one of two possibilities:
quote:
(1) If the model says abiogenesis cannot happen
But evidence all around you says abiogenesis has happened
Then the model is most likely wrong.
Problem is that there is no evidence all around that abiogenesis has happened. So who knows if the model is wrong or not from this statement.
Yet again, since clearly he had in mind that the evidence is that LIFE happened, not abiogenesis, we get:
quote:
(2) If the model says life cannot happen
But evidence all around you says life has happened
Then the model is most likely wrong.
Problem here of course is that the model isn't saying that life cannot happen. No model would ever say such a thing. Yet RAZD pretty clearly did mean to say that the evidence all around you is that life has happened, not abiogenesis.
The whole statement functions as begging the question in favor of abiogenesis. I read it as RAZD's simply so completely believing that the only way life could have arisen is by some natural process, life out of non-life, that asserting the evidence for life itself all around us is pretty much synonymous in his mind with saying that abiogenesis has happened.
You would have to argue that the evidence RAZD had in mind begged the question which is getting rather tenuous to say the least.
I think what the statements mean as outlined above are clear enough on the face of it and that they add up to the question-begging I'm talking about.
I must also point out that I have already discussed the sentence you chose to bold and pointed out that it makes more sense if RAZD is talking about the origin of life in general, as he later claimed. The fact that RAZD talks only of Life - rather than the means by which life arrived - you also choose to bold - is also consistent with my reading. Surely the fact that the very text you chose to emphasise can be used to argue agaisnt your cliams is evidnece enough that the matter is not clear-cut.
Do you mean this text?: "To argue from the existence of life that the "improbability" of it is evidence of miraculous intervention is just a post hoc ergo proctor hoc logical fallacy"
I don't recall your argument, but my point is that his fallacy is obvious in this statement, as he is misrepresenting the mathematical model as arguing for the improbability of LIFE, rather than abiogenesis, which shows how the two are practically synonymous in his mind, thus begging the question the model aims to challenge.
I should add that if the context is necessary to understand your assertion you should have included it in your post. Ypu cannot expect others to automatically agree with you when you leave out information that you yourself claim is necessary to understand your assertion.
It isn't necessary, but perhaps it helps and should have been included, though I'm not even sure it helps. The fallacy is quite clear there too, but doesn't seem to be as evident to others as it is to me nevertheless.
I might also add that you seem to have had no problem in ignoring these statements:
there is no way they can properly model the probability without understanding the process to the point where it would be evident that we knew how life evolved.
This is the primary fallacy of these "calculations" that they presume to know that which they do not know.
there are just too many unknowns involved
I do not see how you can fairly complain that others "ignore" text - text which you did not consider significant enough to quote, and which at most only implies the meaning you infer - when you have ignored explicit statements from the same post.
I said "ignore CONTEXT" not ignore "text" and I meant the context of the question of abiogenesis which is what the mathematical model is about. In any case, the above statements are irrelevant to the point about question-begging. They are about the scientific questions, which were not my topic. The fallacy I wanted to demonstrate is not changed by these statements or dependent on them.
This message has been edited by Faith, 10-06-2005 10:16 PM
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