Thank you for being willing to restate your case.
Okey doke. You clearly missed my reply to Pars, so maybe this will help..
Life could indeed be a highly unlikely event on the grand cosmic scale. That does not prevent it from happening, and more to the point: once it has happened the probability is irrelevant. You could flip 50 heads in a row the first time: probability does not say when in the course of events the improbable happens. 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.
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.
That's the full offending section. I need to first point out that all you originally posted was the last paragraph. That alone is not BtQ when you are generically discussing models. That is why you got a rather strong negative reaction.
Yes, it IS begging the question all by itself, as I have shown over and over, needing only that people remember that the context was a mathematical model about the improbability of abiogenesis -- which even this expanded section doesn't include, though maybe that should be included for the sake of clarity. All I needed was the short paragraph I started out with to show the question-begging, however, but the whole section does give more context for those who need it. And why do you think I myself posted the entire section in
Message 60, which you seem to be ignoring as if you are correcting me? And I bolded relevant parts of it too, in order to help emphasize what I'm trying to get at. Your version leaves out the bolding.
But then there was the idea of context. Pars points out that inside the previous paragraph (the first one here) RAZD is discussing abiogenesis when he talks about Life and it. I absolutely agree.
So far so good.
"Life could indeed be a highly unlikely event on the grand cosmic scale. ...To argue from the existence of life ..." Meaning: That life ever came to be at all by sheerly self-originating means (implying abiogenesis) is "the highly unlikely event." He certainly doesn't have Creation in mind since, given a Creator, there is nothing unlikely about it.
Unfortunately Pars suggests that that is BtQ, but it is not as that is a specific explanation/description of why improbability is not a bar to something actually happening. In a description one can definitely assume to know everything in an omniscient sense.
You can't "know in an omniscient sense" that the existence of life is due to abiogenesis but this appears to be the message here. To assert such a thing is definitely begging the question since that is exactly what is in dispute. The phrase "to argue from the existence of life" is a misrepresentation of the mathematical model he is disputing, which was not arguing anything from the existence of life itself but only arguing about the METHOD OF ORIGIN of life. This shows that in his mind there is only one possible origin of life, abiogenesis, and that the existence of life itself is its evidence, and the entire argument against it is dismissed by this choice of words. This IS begging the question.
There is a paragraph break at this point, and then he discusses math and models. You and Pars appear to assume that he is extending discussion from the previous paragraph and so still in specific mode. Thus "something" and "it" refer to abiogenesis and we do have evidence for that. If that was the case then yes that would be BtQ.
What he is discussing is how "evidence all around you" for "something" invalidates a model that says that this "something" "cannot happen." As an abstract statement there is nothing wrong with it, but the problem is that it is in a whole post about a particular mathematical model that purports to show the improbability of ABIOGENESIS, which is the "something that cannot happen" but by saying there is "evidence all around you" for this "something that cannot happen" he cannot possibly be talking about abiogenesis as there is no such evidence all around us for abiogenesis. THEREFORE he MUST be talking about "the existence of life" itself, which he has already introduced in the same confused manner in the preceding paragraph, as if in his mind the very existence of life itself PROVES abiogenesis, WHICH IS BEGGING THE QUESTION UNDER DISPUTE. {Edit: And again, he can't be talking about the "existence of life" either, as that misrepresents the math model which is NOT about the "existence of life" but about abiogenesis.}
I thoroughly covered this already many many times and the last time I did so was in my
Message 31, showing the possible ways the various terms in this paragraph could be construed in relation to the context of the mathematical model being discussed, and how he has mingled the terms so that the paragraph makes no sense in relation to the actual example no matter how you juggle it. This is because he ASSUMES that abiogenesis has occurred and to his mind the mere existence of life itself is evidence that it has occurred. This begs the question the model he has been arguing with was intended to dispute.
However I simply do not see that being the case, it looks to me like you guys have made the assumption of BtQ and are now reading back to the last paragraph to make the connections (though I will admit on a first read, with the vague language used such a conclusion could be reached).
Nobody is reading anything backwards. The "vague" language is itself the vehicle for the question-begging as it proves he thinks that abiogenesis is practically synonymous with the fact that life obviously exists, making abiogenesis a foregone conclusion, thus dismissing out of hand any argument whatever about the improbability or impossibility of abiogenesis.
In context, he goes through a series of common errors found within math and models to show why models do not show reality. The offending last paragraph may be the conclusion of the last common error, in which case he has not made a BtQ error though he has erred in what conclusion you can make, or it may be the concluding paragraph of the section (all the errors so far mentioned) which means there is no error at all.
I see it as the conclusion of the whole set, and only got confused at one time when I read it through Pars' filter of staunchly joining it in reference only to the previous paragraph. But again even that does not result in BtQ. The something and it are generic and appear to me to refer to the "potential products of a system being modelled" and not demanding "products actually produced by the system being modelled".
RAZD obviously THOUGHT he was just demonstrating some common errors. But in the process he exposed his own inability to separate his argument from the assumption he aims to prove.
Could I be wrong? Yes. But it certainly did not read that way to me and only looks that way if I insist on tying a separate paragraph to the previous one so tightly that I don't notice the change from specific to generic wording, and so both paragraphs are the same argument, rather than one being an explanation and the other a conclusion.
I suggest that your way of reading it and inability to see the question-begging merely demonstrate that you share the same confusion I've identified in RAZD that amounts to the question-begging. That is, you have the same trouble thinking of the existence of life apart from the assumption that it arose somehow by natural means from non-life to life.
This message has been edited by Faith, 10-08-2005 09:53 AM
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