So the Large Hadron Collider didn’t promote a new atheist cosmology?

Mapaou

It means that ID would be falsified if an exhaustive search of living organisms (something that is feasible with current technology) does not find a single instance of lateral gene sharing.

Maybe I haven't been keeping up with the times... but... How would that follow to falsify ID exactly? ..or.. How is lateral gene sharing an ID prediction - much more a necessary one? JGuy

It is easy to come up with a solid falsifiable prediction using the intelligent design hypothesis. Intelligent design over time necessarily results in organisms forming a mostly nested hierarchy with many instances of lateral gene sharing across distantly related species. This is what is observed. By contrast, common descent, the Darwinian hypothesis, calls for a strictly nested hierarchy. This has been falsified.

Listen to neo-darwinists long enough and eventually you will realize that they really believe in evolution fairies. No matter what is found in biology, no matter how contrary to their current models: the mutation/selection fairies did it somehow. They give these fairies names like "environmental niche" "exaptation" "adaptation" "convergent evolution" etc.. Their newest is the widespread "genetic convergence" fairy of course. lifepsy

I wrote that a single instance of lateral gene sharing across distantly related species is enough. It means that ID would be falsified if an exhaustive search of living organisms (something that is feasible with current technology) does not find a single instance of lateral gene sharing.

Right, okay, so let's have a look!! Jerad

I was just hoping for some clarification of ‘mostly’. It shouldn’t be hard. Go on, have a go!!

I wrote that a single instance of lateral gene sharing across distantly related species is enough. It means that ID would be falsified if an exhaustive search of living organisms (something that is feasible with current technology) does not find a single instance of lateral gene sharing. What part of the above are you having difficulty with? Never mind. Don't answer that. I gotta go see a man about a dog. Bye. Mapou

I don’t care. All that matters to me is that a non-nested tree of life kills Darwinian evolution dead. The fact that the Darwinist cult is still going on strong makes no difference to me.

That's the spirit!! Damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead!!! Glory calls!!

You must have a reading comprehension impediment then. Nothing could be clearer.

I was just hoping for some clarification of 'mostly'. It shouldn't be hard. Go on, have a go!! Jerad

Well, you know, it hasn’t seemed to have crumbled just yet.

I don't care. All that matters to me is that a non-nested tree of life kills Darwinian evolution dead. The fact that the Darwinist cult is still going on strong makes no difference to me.

Doesn’t affect coming up with a clear and definitive prediction for ID though does it?

You must have a reading comprehension impediment then. Nothing could be clearer. Mapou

It may not pass muster to you but who in the hell are you? The ID prediction is simply that the tree of life is not strictly nested and that instances (one is enough) of lateral gene sharing across distantly related species will be found. This is a direct consequence of intelligent design evolution over long periods of time.

Gee, no need to be so harsh. I was just asking. You seemed so sure so I thought providing a clear and distinct prediction would be child's play.

The fact that the tree of life is not strictly nested falsifies Darwinian evolution. There shall be denials, much weeping and gnashing of teeth but a fact is a fact.

Well, you know, it hasn't seemed to have crumbled just yet. Doesn't affect coming up with a clear and definitive prediction for ID though does it? Jerad

Jerad @26:

So . . . what is your solid, falsifiable prediction? Make sure it’s clear so no one can complain!! I’m not sure ‘mostly’ is going to pass muster.

It may not pass muster to you but who in the hell are you? The ID prediction is simply that the tree of life is not strictly nested and that instances (one is enough) of lateral gene sharing across distantly related species will be found. This is a direct consequence of intelligent design evolution over long periods of time. The fact that the tree of life is not strictly nested falsifies Darwinian evolution. There shall be denials, much weeping and gnashing of teeth but a fact is a fact. Mapou

Do you have any evidence to substantiate your claim that Behe fills in the gap with “poof”? I seem to have missed that in my readings of Behe.

Oh come on Mung! I know you've mastered the 'call them on their bluff' trick but surely you can show that Dr Behe has NOT just filled in the gap with poof. Go on, instead of just trying to score points show us. I don't have Dr Behe's books so I can't look up some references unless they're available online. Jerad

Alan Fox:

Behe accepts common descent and limited evolution. He merely rejects variation and selection as sufficient to explain everything. What fills in the gap? He goes no further than “poof”.

Do you have any evidence to substantiate your claim that Behe fills in the gap with "poof"? I seem to have missed that in my readings of Behe. Mung

It is easy to come up with a solid falsifiable prediction using the intelligent design hypothesis. Intelligent design over time necessarily results in organisms forming a mostly nested hierarchy with many instances of lateral gene sharing across distantly related species. This is what is observed.

So . . . what is your solid, falsifiable prediction? Make sure it's clear so no one can complain!! I'm not sure 'mostly' is going to pass muster. Jerad

It is easy to come up with a solid falsifiable prediction using the intelligent design hypothesis. Intelligent design over time necessarily results in organisms forming a mostly nested hierarchy with many instances of lateral gene sharing across distantly related species. This is what is observed. By contrast, common descent, the Darwinian hypothesis, calls for a strictly nested hierarchy. This has been falsified. Mapou

It’s pretty obvious you find your own superficial sarcasm comforting. It relieves you of the effort of actually having to face the facts and think about them.

Well, you don't know what has gone through my mind since I started participating here at UD, listening to ID: The Future and reading Evolution New and Views. Perhaps you just have to assume that the reason I disagree with you is because I'm ignoring the facts rather than that I have spent a lot of time considering all the arguments. How do you know you're right? Have you spent years considering all points of view? Do you understand the biological and mathematical arguments? Jerad

...face the facts...

Well, it's not our fault if nobody wants to face the fact that there is no positive scientific theory of ID and that no amount of ranting about it will change that fact. You need a theory if you want ID to be taken seriously. If you just don't like evolutionary theory because of religious convictions , well, ID is going nowhere. Alan Fox

Why don’t you just chill out a bit. Clearly I’m just having a bit of a jest.

No you're not. It's pretty obvious you find your own superficial sarcasm comforting. It relieves you of the effort of actually having to face the facts and think about them. cantor

I don’t see a practical alternative theory here, proffered by anyone. Behe accepts common descent and limited evolution. He merely rejects variation and selection as sufficient to explain everything. What fills in the gap? He goes no further than “poof”.

It just all seems so tentative and timid to me. When I was in grad school we were expected to think of new and strange udeas and to present them with verve and conviction. One of my mathematics professors said we had to have a killer instinct. To go for the prize. We got shot down, a lot. But less and less as we learned what our discipline was really about. People who sat off to the side and said: I've got this great idea but I'm not going to tell you what it is . . . and, by the way, you're wrong! Those folks. . . we just learned to ignore them eventually. You've got to be able to present your ideas and defend them. And to take the lumps when you're wrong. And them pick yourself up and try again. The Expelled Syndrome is doing a great disservice to the ID community by getting them to believe that it's not their ideas, it's the materialists conspiring against you. So the people with ideas and tentative models never learn how to develop their notions into something that can actually stand up to scrutiny. Jerad

at some of the commenters here are really proposing as an alternative to evolutionary theory!! And, at times, I wonder if they know.

I don't see a practical alternative theory here, proffered by anyone. Behe accepts common descent and limited evolution. He merely rejects variation and selection as sufficient to explain everything. What fills in the gap? He goes no further than "poof". Alan Fox

But generally it’s the lack of a central, core ID paradigm that creates the biggest roadblocks for me.

Yes, indeed. We can love the sinner but hate the sin. Alan Fox

I don’t get the impression that Jerad is self-important. I just think he has given up on taking ID seriously. It’s a common problem amongst critics (and some proponents!)

I certainly take seriously that some ID proponents take ID very seriously. And I think some ID proponents have really tried hard to think through at least some of the questions and objections brought up by critics. Axel gave a nice (albeit brief) answer a few minutes ago. And I bet Dr Behe has things pretty well worked out in his head. I find the Expelled Syndrome frustrating and hard to work around. Sometimes paranoia overrides the discussions. But generally it's the lack of a central, core ID paradigm that creates the biggest roadblocks for me. I'm not even sure what some of the commenters here are really proposing as an alternative to evolutionary theory!! And, at times, I wonder if they know. Jerad

If you truly think you are to be taken seriously instead of a the troll you are, you are severely mistaken in your assessment of your own importance.

Oh the pomposity, Phil! I don't get the impression that Jerad is self-important. I just think he has given up on taking ID seriously. It's a common problem amongst critics (and some proponents!) Alan Fox

Hey, do you have anything to do with this band: http://www.reverbnation.com/bornagain77 Jerad

So falsification of the atheist’s materialistic presuppositions does not matter to you because of your personal opinion/bias against Theism? And exactly why should your crude, and rude, personal opinion matter to me or anyone else? or to what the science actually says? Am I to take your flippant remarks as serious scientific refutation? If you truly think you are to be taken seriously instead of a the troll you are, you are severely mistaken in your assessment of your own importance.

Why don't you just chill out a bit. Clearly I'm just having a bit of a jest. Anyway, I'd dispute that you managed to falsify anything but there's no point in arguing about it. Jerad

So falsification of the atheist's materialistic presuppositions does not matter to you because of your personal opinion/bias against Theism? And exactly why should your crude, and rude, personal opinion matter to me or anyone else? or to what the science actually says? Am I to take your flippant remarks as serious scientific refutation? If you truly think you are to be taken seriously instead of a the troll you are, you are severely mistaken in your assessment of your own importance. bornagain77

Actually, I quite like the idea of Zeus and Jehovah shooting craps in some dive in Valhalla. I bet they'd have good drinks there. Jerad

I don’t know about Feynman, but as for myself, being a Christian Theist, I find it rather comforting to know that it takes an ‘infinite amount of logic to figure out what one stinky tiny bit of space-time is going to do’:

Yeah, maybe the gods do play dice after all!! Jerad

As to this comment:

Dark matter tops physicists' wish list, post-Higgs - October 2013 Excerpt: However, the standard model is still incomplete – it does not account for gravity, for example – so physicists hoped the Higgs would turn out to be weird enough to point the way to new theories. But further results from the LHC suggest the Higgs looks exactly as expected. "The LHC has not found any trace of new physics," says Luis Ibanez of the Autonomous University of Madrid in Spain.

It is interesting to note that Dr. Craig used the Peter Higg's mathematical prediction of the Higg's boson itself, which Higg's made 3 decades ago, as a philosophical proof for Theism:

Mathematics and Physics - A Happy Coincidence? - Dr. Craig - video http://www.metacafe.com/watch/9826382/ 1. If God did not exist the applicability of mathematics would be a happy coincidence. 2. The applicability of mathematics is not a happy coincidence. 3. Therefore, God exists.

Moreover, some theorists hold the Higgs Boson (aka the God Particle) is also finely tuned for life:

Rethinking the universe: - June 17, 2013 Excerpt: Their idea is that the Higgs boson mass has to have an "unnaturally" small value for life to be possible. In other words, if it didn't, we wouldn't be here.,,, http://phys.org/news/2013-06-rethinking-universe-groundbreaking-theory-multiverse.html

Of reelated note: In the following video, at the 22:27 to the 29:50 minute mark, is a pretty neat little presentation of the Schrodinger Equation in answer to the question, 'Why does mathematics describe the universe?'

The Professors: An after-hours conversation on Georgia Tech's hardest questions - veritas video http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=vBQ9uFOFLWM&t=1349

Moreover, the predictions of quantum mechanics are based entirely upon the math and are not based upon how particles behave over time as the materialistic atheist would presuppose:

Wheeler's Classic Delayed Choice Experiment: Excerpt: Now, for many billions of years the photon is in transit in region 3. Yet we can choose (many billions of years later) which experimental set up to employ – the single wide-focus, or the two narrowly focused instruments. We have chosen whether to know which side of the galaxy the photon passed by (by choosing whether to use the two-telescope set up or not, which are the instruments that would give us the information about which side of the galaxy the photon passed). We have delayed this choice until a time long after the particles "have passed by one side of the galaxy, or the other side of the galaxy, or both sides of the galaxy," so to speak. Yet, it seems paradoxically that our later choice of whether to obtain this information determines which side of the galaxy the light passed, so to speak, billions of years ago. So it seems that time has nothing to do with effects of quantum mechanics. And, indeed, the original thought experiment was not based on any analysis of how particles evolve and behave over time – it was based on the mathematics. This is what the mathematics predicted for a result, and this is exactly the result obtained in the laboratory. http://www.bottomlayer.com/bottom/basic_delayed_choice.htm

In fact, the materialistic presuppositions (of atheists) were recently found to be unnecessary baggage that greatly hindered a more efficient mathematical calculation from quantum mechanics:

A Jewel at the Heart of Quantum Physics - September 17, 2013 Excerpt: “The degree of efficiency is mind-boggling,” said Jacob Bourjaily, a theoretical physicist at Harvard University and one of the researchers who developed the new idea. “You can easily do, on paper, computations that were infeasible even with a computer before.” https://www.simonsfoundation.org/quanta/20130917-a-jewel-at-the-heart-of-quantum-physics/ Bohemian Gravity - Rob Sheldon - September 19, 2013 Excerpt: Quanta magazine carried an article about a hypergeometric object that is as much better than Feynman diagrams as Feynman was better than Heisenberg's S-matrices. But the discoverers are candid about it, "The amplituhedron, or a similar geometric object, could help by removing two deeply rooted principles of physics: locality and unitarity. “Both are hard-wired in the usual way we think about things,” said Nima Arkani-Hamed, a professor of physics at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, N.J., and the lead author of the new work, which he is presenting in talks and in a forthcoming paper. “Both are suspect.”" What are these suspect principles? None other than two of the founding principles of materialism--that there do not exist "spooky-action-at-a-distance" forces, and that material causes are the only ones in the universe.,,, http://procrustes.blogtownhall.com/2013/09/19/bohemian_gravity.thtml

Of related note of trying to include space-time into the calculations:

“It always bothers me that in spite of all this local business, what goes on in a tiny, no matter how tiny, region of space, and no matter how tiny a region of time, according to laws as we understand them today, it takes a computing machine an infinite number of logical operations to figure out. Now how can all that be going on in that tiny space? Why should it take an infinite amount of logic to figure out what one stinky tiny bit of space-time is going to do?" - Richard Feynman – one of the founding fathers of QED (Quantum Electrodynamics) Quote taken from the 6:45 minute mark of the following video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=obCjODeoLVw

I don’t know about Feynman, but as for myself, being a Christian Theist, I find it rather comforting to know that it takes an ‘infinite amount of logic to figure out what one stinky tiny bit of space-time is going to do’:

John1:1 "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God." of note: ‘the Word’ in John1:1 is translated from ‘Logos’ in Greek. Logos is the root word from which we derive our modern word logic http://etymonline.com/?term=logic

Music:

Nine Inch Nails - Everyday Is Exactly The Same - music http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QEHHE64xpfY

bornagain77

S’pose she has to find something to keep the pages scrolling somehow. Absent developments in ID theory, it must be a struggle! ;)

True. Gotta make sure she puts out the content and to try and get people to clink on her posts. She used to have 3 or 4 blogs of her own but very few people seemed to read them. But at UD at least sometimes the Darwinbots read one and complain. Jerad

The problem is Jerad, there is and always have been cosmologies consistent with the level of understanding of the people at various epochs.

True, true.

However, the atheist contribution to modern physics has been so nugatory, to put it mildly (essentially, donkey-work), that atheist cosmologies ‘ipso facto’, can, at best, only provide amusement.

Do you really think so? So all that stuff about relativity and black holes and dark matter and the bosons . . . all that stuff is just tool sharpening?

Why should News’ not seek to amuse us with the enormity of the mismatch between this particular soaring flight of atheists’ fancy, and the risibly costly reality of what they actually managed to establish?

'Cause it makes news a completely biased and agenda-ridden reporter who might not be able to be trusted with presenting enough of a story for the readers to be able to make up their own mind? But, then again, if no one really thinks of it as being 'news' then . . . carry on!! There's this rather snide tone to many of News' stories: if it was expensive and we don't agree with it then it's derisible. There doesn't seem to be any appreciation for the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake. Sad. Jerad

Why should News’ not seek to amuse us with the enormity of the mismatch between this particular soaring flight of atheists’ fancy, and the risibly costly reality of what they actually managed to establish?

S'pose she has to find something to keep the pages scrolling somehow. Absent developments in ID theory, it must be a struggle! ;) Alan Fox

Sorry to be picky like that. But gotta be consistent with verancular.

True, true. My bad. It's spelled "vernacular" by the way. Jerad

Sorry to be picky like that. But gotta be consistent with verancular. Axel

'larn 'em', Jerad, not, 'learn 'em'. Axel

The problem is Jerad, there is and always have been cosmologies consistent with the level of understanding of the people at various epochs. However, the atheist contribution to modern physics has been so nugatory, to put it mildly (essentially, donkey-work), that atheist cosmologies 'ipso facto', can, at best, only provide amusement. Why should News' not seek to amuse us with the enormity of the mismatch between this particular soaring flight of atheists' fancy, and the risibly costly reality of what they actually managed to establish? Axel

Or else to reveal the real reason anyone cared about the project?

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHHAHA Yeah, no way people can't just be curious and want to know about the nature of reality. They must have an agenda!!! Gotta beat back those damn faith heads with sub-atomic particles. That'll learn 'em!!!! Bury the bozos with bosons!! Jerad

Or else to reveal the real reason anyone cared about the project? News

So, I guess you stuck the word 'atheist' into the title of the post just to 'sex' it up a bit and get people to read it. Jerad