Proving God Statistically

So your answer is "no", then?(BTW "their" in this context is neuter, not plural. It's an emerging usage.)

Oops. I see a typo.ANYONE WHO DOES BELIEVE DEMBSKI IS A MORONThere. I fixed it.

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ANYONE WHO DOES NOT BELIEVE DEMBSKI IS A MORON

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Here's the code that generated that sentence, first run, by radomly generating letters A - Z and the space character.

lnSequenceLength = 46

=RAND(-1)
lcString = ""
FOR lnLcv = 1 TO lnSequenceLength
	lcString = lcString + CHR(RandomNumber())
ENDFOR
? lcString

FUNCTION RandomNumber
	LOCAL lnMin, lnMax
	lnMin = 65
	lnMax = lnMin + 26
	lnRandom = FLOOR((lnMax - lnMin + 1) * RAND() + lnMin)
	IF (lnRandom = lnMax)
		lnRandom = 32
	ENDIF
	RETURN lnRandom
ENDFUNC

[This message has been edited by DNAunion, 11-19-2003]

Well what do you know, I just looked in the dictionary and I was wrong for calling that an error. Rats![This message has been edited by DNAunion, 11-19-2003]

I want to refer back to the first post for my answer to this, I know i'm kind of late, but still, hear me out.How about if things could have ended up in any way. If the world did not look like how it looks today, there would be something else. So it could have become anything else and it happened to be that this is how it turned out. It wasn't because of God, but because this is the cours it took. Now there are people and everything we see around you. And of course, we would assume that it turned out this way because of God, when it could have turned out any other way. It just happened to turn out this way, it could have been anything, in retrospect, we would look at it and say "Oh it was because of God." The possibilities are endless, and each possible outcome is equally as unlikely, but this outcome has become, and this is where we are. That does not prove the existence of God.

Many organizations accept "their" in this context in their style guidelines as a way of avoiding gender specific singular pronouns. You know, living language and all.Would you want Sting to sing "If you love someone, set HIM free"?

Hey, Welcome back. Thanks - been (and still am) very busy.Maybe you think I'm "blast"ing away at ID because I don't know it as well as you do. No "maybe" about it. Your question(s) clearly indicate that you aren't well-versed in ID. That's okay, ignorance is easily remedied.I've been waiting for a rather long while now to understand what CSI is. Hit the books.http://EvC Forum: Complex Specified Information (CSI) -->EvC Forum: Complex Specified Information (CSI) If you wish, I'll be happy to take this to the one-on-one format of the 'Great Debate' at a later date.Perhaps you can catch that thread up for me? See above.

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Joralex

Well you're the guy who insists that he knows all about Dembski's explanatory filter while claiming that it doesn't require any probability calculations.
Don't you think that YOU ought to get the basics right before (falsely) accusing others of using a strawman ? I beg your pardon ... I do believe that you've either (a) confused me with someone else or, (b) misunderstood something of mine.

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Joralex

Yes. It's like, the odds of winning the lottery are really low. Yet, people win the lottery. The odds that the lottery will be won are much more reasonable.Of course, finding out the odds for life would require knowing the exact numeration of how many configurations represent life and how many don't. Since we have a sample size of one, we can hardly attempt such a calculation - though I suspect that won't stop DNAunion.

Unless someone else posted either of these two messages under your name, I've certainly got the right person.Heres where you brag about knowing all about _The Design Inference_
Post 166post 166 at the top of the page.And if you go to post 173 you will find a direct link to where you made your original error. Post 42I quote : "There is no need to compute the probability or to compare it to any bound. You et al. create a strawman so that you can demolish it and claim victory. NO SALE here."This is in direct contradiction to Dembski's own words in _The Design Inference_ as I showed in my reply.
Post 46So we have established that you made a serious error in regard to the nature of Dembski's design inference and then tried to insist that you knew too much to make such mistakes. Which rather begs the question of why you said something that blatantly contradicts Dembski, doesn't it ?

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Of course, finding out the odds for life would require knowing the exact numeration of how many configurations represent life and how many don't.

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Not unless one requires absolute certainty. If one is satisfied with a tentaive, working number, then we do have some idea, as far as life as we know it is concerned. OOL researchers have been trying to 100 years to reproduce in a lab what putatively happened here on Earth some 4 GYa, without success. They've performed experiments where each one used trillions (some as high as 10^15, IIRC) RNA molecules without success. Orgel calculates, based just on theory (no empirical evidence backing it up) that an RNA replicase would have to be at least 40 monomers long, and that only 10,000 such 40-mer would be capable of replication: that's only 1 in 10^20. And, there would probably need to be two such replicators arising virtually simultaneously in the same microscopic volume, which gives a probability of something like 1 in 10^44. And that's for a 40-mer: the closest scientists have come to creating an RNA replicase is about 180 nucleotides in length. It an RNA replicator actually needed to be that long the probability would be astronomically smaller still. Perhaps a 32-aa peptide (along the lines of the Ghadiri ligase) would have started things off instead of RNA. If we assume 20 amino acids, each equally likely at each position, then the probability of hitting the GL is 1 in 4.295 x 10^41: and that's just for one copy (remember, the GL requires its halves to be handed to it, for free, for each copy it is to make). It also assumes preexisting homochirality; take that assumption out things get harder.That all gives us a rough idea about the probability associated with the OOL. We also have other evidence, or should I say, absence of evidence. If life were easy to arise under various conditions, why haven't we detected life on the Moon or Mars, or in objects that have collided with Earth? Why hasn't SETI detected (intelligent) life? Why haven't we found the key organic molecules of life - DNA, RNA, and proteins - in astronomical observations (they have found sugars, for example)?Basically, we have some idea of the UPPER LIMIT for the OOL. For example, take a random setting - randomly select temperature, pH, pressure, substances present - and add undirected energy: will life arise? Well, I think most all of us (at least the reasonble ones of us) would agree that the probability would be much less than 0.5.What does any of this prove? Nothing, of course. It's all tenative and "ballparkish".

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Since we have a sample size of one, we can hardly attempt such a calculation - though I suspect that won't stop DNAunion.

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Depends upon what you are talking about. Life as we know it, or life of any hypothetical kind. Since no ones knows what life of any other kind would be like - exactly what molecules, for example - we can't guess at what molecules and conditions are needed to have it arise.But if we restrict ourselves to the only kind of life we have empirical observations for, then we have a pretty good idea what is required for life to arise and we have some guestimations - ballpark figures - on the associated probability.[This message has been edited by DNAunion, 11-20-2003]

You keep mentioning this. I don't find SETI's failure to date indicative of anything at all. After all why would aliens necessarily use radio? Turn the tables - our own bubble of radio transmission is only 80 years or so in radius. Why assume theirs is any larger? Figures that are useless, yes. If you restrict to only the life we know, then you're painting the bull's-eye around the arrow.

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Would you want Sting to sing "If you love someone, set HIM free"?

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After he left The Police, nothing he has sung has been what I wanted![This message has been edited by DNAunion, 11-21-2003]

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After all why would aliens necessarily use radio?

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Hmm, no possible method of transmitting messages faster? Travels out in a bublle-like sphere, unlike light which travels in a straight line? Able to be detected even while the "sun" is out, unlike light? Readily travels through dust clouds in space, unlike light? Longer wavelength than light provides less loss due to redshift?

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Turn the tables - our own bubble of radio transmission is only 80 years or so in radius. Why assume theirs is any larger?

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Some indications that their's might be larger...the assumption of SETI is that there are MANY technologically advanced civilizations out there trying to communicate with others, and that such civilizations have been blinking into existence periodically, over a long period of time. So a safe assumption, under the SETI assumptions, is that there are, have been, or were, numerous civilizations out there that have been trying to communicate, possibly for the past million or more years.Besides, we are a technologically young civilization: why would you assume we have been at it longer than any others?[This message has been edited by DNAunion, 11-21-2003]

No, actually it doesn't. The radio stations deliberately tune the attennae so the signel is strong where the population is and not other places. The signel can have odd shapes. Easily solved by using restricted frequencies of light away from where the sun is strongest. This makes sense, but only if the civilization is trying to communicate over intersteller distances.I think the reason that SETI is using radio is that it can piggy back on radio astronomy. We are, I think, looking for our keys under the street light since it is all we can do right now and it is pretty cheap to do so with a huge but unlikely payoff.It may well be that our "radio bubble" will get to be maybe 100 light years in radius and then cut off. We are starting to use light (in pipes) for a lot of communications now. We may find that directed laser (at radio frequencies perhaps) will be better for commuications in the near future.We may do long distance communications by other means that broadcast radio in the near future and go "radio quiet".