The opportunity is open and it is time to seize the day. So, I think a comment in a discussion with GP and Dionisio should be headlined:
>>My observation is those who are closed minded, indoctrinated and hostile will simply flare up in anger at anything that threatens their favoured evolutionary materialistic scientism or their comfortable fellow-traveller views calibrated not to get them in hot water with the domineering atheists.
The issue then is, how well cultured they are. The cultured play at subtle rhetorical games pivoting on evasions and how could you concern trolling which provide more or less respectable “good cop” cover. Then come the “bad cops” who try to run riot, bully, intimidate, slander and stalk.
I say, toss over the whole rotten rhetorical game-board.
The whole lot are corrupt, at minimum as enablers.
Science seeks to accurately observe, describe, explain, predict and enable us to act effectively in our world. So truth-seeking is critical to science. Therefore we have to respect findings of related disciplines that support that work. Therefore, we must anchor on empirical observations and recognise that theories are inferences to the best current explanation and are inherently provisional. They remain [live] theories so long as it is credible that they may be substantially true and no further. They are inherently provisional; subject to empirical testing and the requirement of well-tested empirical reliability.
This holds for experimental sciences. It holds doubly for observational sciences and doubly again for scientific investigations of origins, where that deep past cannot itself be observed; we see traces and try to reconstruct and date past circumstances back to origins. All of this successively degrades strength of epistemic stance of relevant theories.
All of this, the a priori materialist activists and their enablers will not acknowledge and have repeatedly tried to turn into accusations of stealth Creationism, “religion” inserting itself into the temple of science and the like.
Such have media power and influence in governance up to a lot of state power.
But that is different from having a good case, or being credible on the merits.
If you cannot acknowledge the patent truth about the epistemological status of science i/l/o the pessimistic induction, you have no genuine credibility, period.
That is settled.
Going further, evolutionary materialistic scientism is self-referentially incoherent, it is amoral and open to nihilism. Indeed, by implying grand delusion of mind, it is profoundly anti-rational. Those who are its agit prop street or Internet cannon fodder are dupes of the ruthless and nihilistic. For them, some measure of sympathy is in order. Those who are ruthless manipulators and deceivers who wish to impose a crooked yardstick as the standard to assess what is straight/true, accurate and upright must now be named as enemies of sound civilisation and treated with stern resolve.
So, I don’t give 50c for their opinions once exposed.
Yes, the fact that for nigh on 70 years we have known that ALPHABETIC TEXT IN CODE lies in the heart of cell based life is utterly blatant. The fact that these still want to argue that extensive text wrote itself out of lucky noise incrementally filtered for performance, over sixty years past 1953 now goes to character.
But design of life from OOL up to us is not the whole story.
We also find that on evidence of the sol system and the wider cosmos, the observed universe was set up for that life.
Design, design not of life that could be effected in a molecular nanotech lab.
Design and construction of a universe.
Involving vast power, super-intellect and capability.
Design beyond and antecedent to cosmos.
Where, logic of being points to a finitely remote necessary being world-root capable of being the causal source of our world.
A world that happens to contain reasoning, knowing, responsibly and rationally free, morally governed creatures.
Us.
That challenges us to rethink worldviews, ideologies and cultural agendas.
And those making a noise and a row know it.
Know it deep inside.
And they are desperately afraid.
So now, it is time.
Time, to provide real leadership in rethinking origins across the board.
And that is why I do not shun to put the whole picture on the table, including as above:
The situation is, that we have inferred on evidence and reasoning a system of analysis termed cosmology. This contains a considerable mathematical apparatus.
In that apparatus we find many specific values and no indication that there are such as they must be as say pi is an exact value tied to the nature of circles.
What is not fixed is at least potentially contingent per the logic of being and the concept of possible worlds, so it is worth exploring on that contingency. And yes, here we are looking at possible worlds and the logic of structure and quantity as connected to such.
A reasonable exercise at the triple-point border between Science, Philosophy and Mathematics.
What emerged was astonishing: the values we see as a cluster are astonishingly fine tuned in ways that set our observed world at a fine-tuned operating point in parameter and structure of laws space.
This is remarkable already.
John Leslie observed a further matter that is also just as interesting:
“One striking thing about the fine tuning is that a force strength or a particle mass often appears to require accurate tuning for several reasons at once. Look at electromagnetism. Electromagnetism seems to require tuning for there to be any clear-cut distinction between matter and radiation; for stars to burn neither too fast nor too slowly for life’s requirements; for protons to be stable; for complex chemistry to be possible; for chemical changes not to be extremely sluggish; and for carbon synthesis inside stars (carbon being quite probably crucial to life). Universes all obeying the same fundamental laws could still differ in the strengths of their physical forces, as was explained earlier, and random variations in electromagnetism from universe to universe might then ensure that it took on any particular strength sooner or later. Yet how could they possibly account for the fact that the same one strength satisfied many potentially conflicting requirements, each of them a requirement for impressively accurate tuning?” [Our Place in the Cosmos, The Royal Institute of Philosophy, 1998 (courtesy Wayback Machine) Emphases added.]
AND:
“. . . the need for such explanations does not depend on any estimate of how many universes would be observer-permitting, out of the entire field of possible universes. Claiming that our universe is ‘fine tuned for observers’, we base our claim on how life’s evolution would apparently have been rendered utterly impossible by comparatively minor alterations in physical force strengths, elementary particle masses and so forth. There is no need for us to ask whether very great alterations in these affairs would have rendered it fully possible once more, let alone whether physical worlds conforming to very different laws could have been observer-permitting without being in any way fine tuned. Here it can be useful to think of a fly on a wall, surrounded by an empty region. A bullet hits the fly Two explanations suggest themselves. Perhaps many bullets are hitting the wall or perhaps a marksman fired the bullet. There is no need to ask whether distant areas of the wall, or other quite different walls, are covered with flies so that more or less any bullet striking there would have hit one. The important point is that the local area contains just the one fly.”
Such is of course amenable to computer sims.
And now we see something that is confronting us with a well-known characteristic of design: multiple components synthesised into a coherent whole that requires the mutual adaptation of the parts to work.
Where, the alternative, oh we are just one bit out of a vast, quasi-infinite multiverse has many, many peculiarities and challenges. Not least, if you are doing that while wearing a lab coat you need to provide empirical observational data on the multiverse. That seems to be missing in fact and on many ways of thought in principle too.
If you slip across the border into highly mathematical philosophy [and much of this stuff is actually clearly across that border], you are looking at the point that in phil you cannot rule out any serious worldview option without a legitimate comparative difficulties process and something like fatal incoherence.
So, which is it:
A: in science we see per obvious contingency of the mathematics, fine tuning and cannot find credible evidence of a multiverse
OR
B: we look at the issues freely, and cannot rule out all that phil would bring to the table, including much broader worldviews issues . . . .
PS: If one suggests that the parameters we see are locked by higher order laws, so that our cosmos is explained on necessity, that simply postpones the contingency one level. And a fine tuning super-law is itself at least as fine tuned as what it specifies . . . .
[M]y view is we need to look at both together, especially on the significance of a cosmos set up to produce H, He, O and C as first four elements in abundance, with N close by: stars, periodic table, water, organic chem, proteins. Bring in terrestrial planets in circumstellar and spiral arm galactic habitable zones with privileged planet fine tuning, and we are looking at setting the table for biological life based on C-chemistry, aqueous medium cells
It is time for grand synthesis and a challenge to a dying civilisation: stop, turn back from the unstable, crumbling brink of the precipice. Before it collapses, precipitating us into a dark age of horrors worse than anything seen before.
Remember, nukes, bio weapons EMP and other weapons of mass devastation are now in play.>>
So, now, it is time. Time to think again. END