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Fred Hoyle thought that there is design in nature

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Science historian Michael Flannery offers a vid link below. He notes,

Two things are important to bear in mind: first, nothing in Hoyle’s rejection bears upon a teleological universe (Hoyle’s steady state can–and did–coexist with a purposeful and intelligently guided universe); and second, Hoyle’s rejection of the big bang still allows him to have very skeptical view of “safe” science and government power.

The frequently repeated claim that Fred Hoyle was an atheist has been greatly exaggerated. While Hoyle had been an atheist early in his career, he didn’t end that way. This is made clear in his book, The Intelligent Universe (1983) where he argued that “the information-rich” universe was guided and controlled by an “overriding intelligence,” and in the final chapter of his autobiography, Home is Where the Wind Blows (1994), “A Lucky Ending.”

More re Fred Hoyle.

Hey! Didn’t we also just recently get the story about Karl Popper dismissing Darwinism? Despite all the attempts to talk around his view?

Has someone, somehow, unblocked the news spout. Or what?

See also: Evolutionary biologists today want Popper’s name but not his game. Increasingly, one depends on these reticent or redacted sources of information to put together what really happened. It sounds as though Popper spent some time sheltering himself from the hellstorm of wounded pretensions that make up accepted current evolutionary biology and eventually realized that, like sociology, it is not really a science at present anyway. So why die on that hill? Hence the confusion around what Popper said. (He was fleeing the scene at the time.)

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Comments
Einstein was positively rapturous about the design of the universe. And what's more, if you read what he has to say about 'the luminous figure of the Nazarene' (Christ), you will surely find it difficult to esacape the conclusion that, had it not been for the Catholic church's ambivalence towards the Jews before the war, and its eventual 'sequelae', from which he and Bohr to name but two top scientists had fled, you would perhaps share my view that it is highly likely that Einstein would have become a formal Christian. A deist, himself, specifically a panentheist, he seems to have had difficulty in concealing his contempt for the mindless atheism of the scientific Establishment of his day. Yet, some atheists have had the audacity to claim him as one of their number ! Much to his fury ! Likewise, Planck, a sidesman in the Lutheran church all his adult life, was withering about them for the same scurrilous mendacity concerning his own Lutheran faith. Wikipedia does all it can in the same direction.Axel
May 7, 2018
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@ your #4, rvb8 'News for O’Leary, or O’Leary for News, makes an argument from authority; Hoyle believes ‘X’, Hoyle is really smart, ‘X’ must be true. She then carries on the ‘argument from autority’ theme by saying, even the great Karl Popper has attacked evolution. I therefore point out, that really smart people can have stupid ideas, I give the varfiably nutty Newton. Despite his genius he believed some really spaced out thinking. My point? Collecting names on a list, and pointing out how smart they are, does not an argument make. How the heck do you think people get an education (perhaps, not your good self, apparently) other than from people who can speak on a subject authoritatively ! Arguemnt sfrom authority aore only duds if they are irrelevant - which is not the case here. However, despite your protestation, your attempted disparagment of O'Leary for News' point was even more inane, since it replaced considerations of truth with some weird evocation of 'unhealthiness'!!!! The psychic world is known beyond all peradventure to exist. Get over it. What on earth were you thinking of ? The only point you made that proved to be false was the alchemy one, but finer brains than yours fell for it 'en masse', together with 'flogiston'. So, dismissing Newton as an educated half- wit, speaks more to your mental deficiencies than Newton's, which should not surprise us, if your IQ were doubled.Axel
May 7, 2018
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RVB8, pardon a note, but you still have not responded to the point by point replies to your talking points that seem to be used to try to undermine young converts. Second, you continually speak of Christians in terms of contempt that point to extreme hostility and bias, as you have done again, above. These suggest that you may be well advised to moderate and re-think, addressing issues on the merits. A good test will be whether you can accurately and fairly summarise the actual arguments being used on the other side. For instance, belief in the God of ethical theism is not an irresponsible, cultish, immature and ill-supported delusional belief sustained by fraudsters. I suggest a re-think on your part -- in light of comparative difficulties of major worldview options -- is highly advisable. Here at UD may be a good start, and here on will give additional reading at first level, whilst here on will give a context for why Christians -- especially the Evangelicals you so obviously view with contempt -- believe the gospel . . . do take time to view the video by former atheist turned what you would dismissively term "televangelist" Lee Stroebel, noting what significant scholars have been saying. KFkairosfocus
May 26, 2017
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FFT, just watch the actual vid: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ebqAH5mLZNk&ytbChannel=Joshua%20Hults -- do what your attention is being distracted from. Hoyle is expressing his minority SS cosmos view in light of why he has doubts on the BB, with its elaborate reconstructions of an unobservable past. (That raises issues on Newton's rule that in reconstructions from traces, we should use factors shown to cause the like effects.) He goes on to highlight the self-reinforcing juggernaut dangers of taxpayer funded "consensus" driven science and how it poses career dilemmas for those who spot something that funding approvers or journal etc gatekeepers will not like. He highlights as a case, access to observation time on big ticket, publicly funded telescopes, and the implication of censorship in favour of the schoolmen of today is sobering indeed. For simpler cases, crowd funding might work, but when agit prop zealots and zombies are likely to descend with cyber riots and stalking with job threats to try to lock out any escape from the reservation, that should give pause; as should the fate of Wikipedia as a telling case of where the ideological zealots of today would go if they can get away with it. When suppression of actual discoveries is a likely outcome, that should give us sobering pause. So should unjustified career busting and stalking extending even to uninvolved family. We do not need red guards. He advocates for an alternative giving the example of how aristocratic backers of old would support who they thought had credibility, regardless of general opinion. Thought-provoking, and so it is no surprise that those who demand conformity to the school of evo mat scientism and deem the partyline the mark of intelligence, would be playing games. Just from lectures etc I have seen, Hoyle was a maverick, and was far more open to design of the cosmos and life than too many are willing to face. As for the mockery of his thermodynamic/ informational insights on the issues, let the objectors show us observational evidence and linked analysis that shows that the search challenge and island of function/fine tuning in config spaces issues that are on the table are not real. KF PS: Walker and Davies:
In physics, particularly in statistical mechanics, we base many of our calculations on the assumption of metric transitivity, which asserts that a system’s trajectory will eventually [--> given "enough time and search resources"] explore the entirety of its state space – thus everything that is phys-ically possible will eventually happen. It should then be trivially true that one could choose an arbitrary “final state” (e.g., a living organism) and “explain” it by evolving the system backwards in time choosing an appropriate state at some ’start’ time t_0 (fine-tuning the initial state). In the case of a chaotic system the initial state must be specified to arbitrarily high precision. But this account amounts to no more than saying that the world is as it is because it was as it was, and our current narrative therefore scarcely constitutes an explanation in the true scientific sense. We are left in a bit of a conundrum with respect to the problem of specifying the initial conditions necessary to explain our world. A key point is that if we require specialness in our initial state (such that we observe the current state of the world and not any other state) metric transitivity cannot hold true, as it blurs any dependency on initial conditions – that is, it makes little sense for us to single out any particular state as special by calling it the ’initial’ state. If we instead relax the assumption of metric transitivity (which seems more realistic for many real world physical systems – including life), then our phase space will consist of isolated pocket regions and it is not necessarily possible to get to any other physically possible state (see e.g. Fig. 1 for a cellular automata example).
[--> or, there may not be "enough" time and/or resources for the relevant exploration, i.e. we see the 500 - 1,000 bit complexity threshold at work vs 10^57 - 10^80 atoms with fast rxn rates at about 10^-13 to 10^-15 s leading to inability to explore more than a vanishingly small fraction on the gamut of Sol system or observed cosmos . . . the only actually, credibly observed cosmos]
Thus the initial state must be tuned to be in the region of phase space in which we find ourselves [--> notice, fine tuning], and there are regions of the configuration space our physical universe would be excluded from accessing, even if those states may be equally consistent and permissible under the microscopic laws of physics (starting from a different initial state). Thus according to the standard picture, we require special initial conditions to explain the complexity of the world, but also have a sense that we should not be on a particularly special trajectory to get here (or anywhere else) as it would be a sign of fine–tuning of the initial conditions. [ --> notice, the "loading"] Stated most simply, a potential problem with the way we currently formulate physics is that you can’t necessarily get everywhere from anywhere (see Walker [31] for discussion). ["The “Hard Problem” of Life," June 23, 2016, a discussion by Sara Imari Walker and Paul C.W. Davies at Arxiv.]
kairosfocus
May 26, 2017
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groovamos, I'm not arrogant or angry. When you accuse others of this, it is an example of what psychologists call 'projection'. You say I incorrectly accused Newton of spiritualism when this word did not even exist in Newton's day. Fair enough I concede the point. However all of the symptoms of spiritualism existed then, as they do today, although happily to a lesser extent. Those symptoms are; a willingness to be given hope, when things look bad; a willingness to contribute to the source of that hope, through work or finacial aid; a fierce reaction to any that gainsay the unsupported belief; a nasty group mentality; a victamisation of all counter views. Any of this sunding familiar? Now, you could counter and say these traits also describe Darwinists. However, the problem with that is the lack of evolutionary biologists in prison, involved in mass persuasion in goup churches, the general mild nature of scientists as opposed to fundamentalist, and the considerably larger humour gene, present in scientists, again as opposed to fundamentalists. groovamos, you do realise that the word 'ego' coined by Freud is the third part of the psyche along with the 'superego' and 'Id'? Do you use Marxist phraseology too?rvb8
May 25, 2017
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Why don't you read Hoyle's book, The Mathematics of Evolution, where you'll find that Hoyle rejected evolution as a young man, IIRC, as a teenager. It was immediately obvious to him that evolutionary theory was a non-starter.PaV
May 25, 2017
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rvb You launch into spirited (sic) defence of ‘spiritualism’ I see. You see that? where? how? A fad that no longer exists that I would "defen(d)" ? You didn't like being shown that neither the word nor the fad existed in Newton's day, it hurts when ignorance is exposed I would think. In other words all I can see is a defense of Newton against your personal attack. And in answer to your your rhetorical question about millions of middle class people suffering ill health; they were. It is called delusion, and religious hucksters in the early years of the twentieth century made a killing off these dellusionals. No dude my defense is regarding 75% of LIVING citizens of the United States with, according to you, an unhealthy belief in God. You can't even wake up to how arrogant, angry atheists appear to others when they say stuff like that. But I like it when you guys shoot yourselves in the foot in front of the young-uns. BTW congrats on failure to quash the word "spirited", your unconscious mind knows quite more than does your ego regarding what is the basis of your being.groovamos
May 25, 2017
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groovamos, 'Dude'? A tiny minority true. But then again with how crowded heaven is going to be (with all the religions positively certain they're supporting the right supreme dude?? being a 'tiny minority' sounds sane. You launch into spirited defence of 'spiritualism' I see. Why? It has the same amount of physical evidence as religion or ID. And in answer to your your rhetorical question about millions of middle class people suffering ill health; they were. It is called delusion, and religious hucksters in the early years of the twentieth century made a killing off these dellusionals. To day there are a large number still suffering the delusion, they have merely replaced spiritualism with the 'real' faith, and fork out millions, in a never ending religious, con, gravy train, to? Televangelists, faith healers, or spiritualists. Flannery, I did not miss the point. Do you see how News then employs Popper in the same argument? She happily points out how Popper dissed Darwinism; Oh, and BTW, he's really smart too. The argument from authority is not a road ID should go down, because when push comes to shove and you line up your heavy hitters, just think what the opposition can line up? Whether living or dead, and without breaking a sweat; want to compare lists? It won't be pretty.rvb8
May 25, 2017
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groovamos, 'Dude'? A tiny minority true. But then again with how crowded heaven is going to be (with all the religions positively certain they're supporting the right supreme dude?? being a 'tiny minority' sounds sane. You launch into spirited defence of 'spiritualism' I see. Why? It has the same amount of physical evidence as religion or ID. And in answer to your your rhetorical question about millions of middle class people suffering ill health; they were. It is called delusion, and religious hucksters in the early years of the twentieth century made a killing off these dellusionals. To day there are a large number still suffering the delusion, they have merely replaced spiritualism with the 'real' faith, and fork out millions, in a never ending religious, con, gravy train, to? Televangelists, faith healers, or spiritualists. Flannery, I did not miss the point. Do you see how News then employs Popper in the same argument? She happily points out how Popper dissed Darwinism; Oh, and BTW, he's really smart too. The argument from authority is not a road ID should go down, because when push comes to shove and you line up your heavy hitters, just think what the opposition can line up? Whether living or dead, and without breaking a sweat; want to compare lists? It won't be pretty.rvb8
May 25, 2017
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FYI: Ouija board created approximately 1891Heartlander
May 24, 2017
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rvb: Newton believed in God, and had other unhealthy inclinations; Ouija boards, and alchemism, spiritualism, and the occult. You're real knowledgeable and talented there aren't you boy. You can diagnose someone as unhealthy living 300 years before your time, with no evidence of that poor health to show for it at least that you have offered as yet. Oh BTW someone confined to bed prior to death is not going to give you a pass on this wacky pronouncement. You don't even know what is meant by 'spiritualism' which is a word not coined in Newton's day, and can be considered a proper noun (which for your information means it is often capitalized). Its advent began in the 1840's, when the term came into general usage 120 years after the death of the great Newton: "Spiritualism developed and reached its peak growth in membership from the 1840s to the 1920s, especially in English-speaking countries. By 1897, spiritualism was said to have more than eight million followers in the United States and Europe, mostly drawn from the middle and upper classes." (wikipedia) Wow boy those millions in the middle and upper classes really were suffering ill health hee hee just like the 75% of Americans unhealthy enough to believe in God according to recent polls. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spiritualism According to dictionary.com the term was first recorded in 1825. Face it dude you materialists have been a tiny fraction of humanity and you always will be (as a group that is - your time personally as a materialist is severely limited as is your time itself). In other words your attachments and fears are totally out of alignment with reality.groovamos
May 23, 2017
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rvb8, You've entirely missed the point. The argument wasn't that Hoyle believes X, Hoyle is really smart, X must be true. The point was to correct an all too common error that Hoyle lived and died an atheist. He did not. It's a question of historical accuracy and getting our attributions right. It worth noting because in so doing a few other things are cleared up, such as the false notion that science and theism are mutually exclusive and "at war" (the old, threadbare notion that theism is somehow a "science stopper"), and that a careful examination of the natural world must somehow dictate a hypnotic descent into naturalism.Flannery
May 23, 2017
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Axel, 'non-sequiturs'? No, actually, completely relavent. News for O'Leary, or O'Leary for News, makes an argument from authority; Hoyle believes 'X', Hoyle is really smart, 'X' must be true. She then carries on the 'argument from autority' theme by saying, even the great Karl Popper has attacked evolution. I therefore point out, that really smart people can have stupid ideas, I give the varfiably nutty Newton. Despite his genius he believed some really spaced out thinking. My point? Collecting names on a list, and pointing out how smart they are, does not an argument make.rvb8
May 22, 2017
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'Ouija boards, and alchemism, spiritualism, and the occult.' Total non sequiturs, rvb8. The world is full of more fanciful realities than even alchemy. The others are simply real.Axel
May 22, 2017
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Everyone with an IQ above roomtemperature surely could not fail to recognise the design in nature. Atheists repress it, don't want to know ; while it would be one of the things that keeps agnostics open to God's existence.Axel
May 22, 2017
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"Fred Hoyle thought that there is design in nature." Also Karl Popper was recently caught dissing Darwinism. Newton believed in God, and had other unhealthy inclinations; Ouija boards, and alchemism, spiritualism, and the occult. What's your point 'News for O'Leary' or 'O'Leary for News'? That smart people can be dull? That great scientists can believe in God?' We already new smart people can have silly ideas; it proves nothing about the validity or otherwise, of those ideas. It simply proves smart people can have silly ideas. How exactly, is this piece of non-news, supporting the concept that design is detectable in nature, and therfore points to a designer? Where is your physical, testable evidence? You know, the kind of evidence uncovered daily by, paleontologists, geologists, DNA experts, homolgies, nested hiarchies, biogeography, vetigial structures, mathematical modellings etc etc? News for O'Reilly, or O'Reilly for News, "he said she said", is not news, we call that gossip! Interestingly enough, false evidence for a false theory suits ID down to the ground.rvb8
May 20, 2017
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