(February 20, 2013 at 12:37 pm)Drew_2013 Wrote: Okay I am reading it once again (I believe this is the article you referred to)
The Anthropic Fallacy written in 2009
Are you being serious right now? Are you so hopelessly incompetent that you can't even follow a simple discussion where each of my argument is given directly below the point it addresses so that all of the lines of debate remain separate and there should not be any confusion as to what is a response to what? Or is this just an extremely ill thought-out attempt at creating a strawman? Do you really think that just because you choose to act as if my arguments don't exist that I would've forgotten the ones I actually made? Or is it that you make so many errors and fallacies that you lose track of which of them you are being nailed on?
I have not referred to any article in this thread. Whatever article you are cherry-picking these paragraphs from, this would be my first time seeing them. The fallacy I was referring to in this line of argument was your blatant use of "denying the antecedent" explained both with use of example and application. I have no idea whose argument you are replying to here nor any idea what the article actually says - since I don't think you have actually addressed the whole article here.
Since you are guilty of anthropic fallacy, I will address your arguments. I won't justify all the arguments provided here because these weren't my arguments to begin with and I am not aware of their full content. So I'll leave that to the person who originally presented them.
(February 20, 2013 at 12:37 pm)Drew_2013 Wrote: 1. All the life on this planet is related – you only have to glance at the molecular evidence in the form of DNA. It’s all from the same stock, and is supported by the element carbon. We know of no other form of life, although some have suggested that silicon could possibly form the kind of complex, long-chain molecules that life needs, as carbon does. This tends to give us what is known as ‘carbon chauvinism’, in that there could be plenty of other intelligent beings that aren’t like us, and don’t require the kind of physical or chemical set-up we have here. Just because we don’t know about them doesn’t mean that they couldn’t exist.
Is this serious? Again I was told when I first posted on this discussion board atheists only consider facts. How is it you require theists to cite facts as evidence in favor of their belief but atheists can cite mere possibilities and act as if they carry the same weight. If something isn't a well established fact, it doesn't exist. I have to assume this is his best argument against the anthropic principal because he cites it first, yet his objection is based on fantasy.
No, its not.
First of all, notice that the author has gone to great lengths to separate facts from hypotheses. Further, the hypotheses themselves are likely given as a response to specific arguments. If I had to guess, this is given as a response to your argument that life would require water/right distance from sun/magnetic field etc. What you are implying by that statement is that no other life than what we know of is possible.
That is your hypotheses. There is no evidence for that and as such providing a counter-hypothesis as to how such a life might be possible is sufficient. Its not an argument completely based on fantasy, since we know for a fact that biogenic silica is used by some life-forms on earth for skeletal structure and there is a theory (meaning it has some facts to support it) about the idea that the first living organisms were silicon based. But even if it was fantasy, it is still only in response to your fantasy that life isn't possible outside the narrow environmental parameters existing upon this Earth.
Personally, I don't think he needed to break out the hypotheticals to counter the argument of specific environmental conditions. As it happens we know for a fact that life is possible outside the so called narrow weather range. We know of organisms that can survive in extreme volcanic heat, in extreme colds and even in vacuum. Your premise is that the environmental conditions of earth are suitable for life, but this clearly shows that life tends to adapt to the conditions it finds itself in.
(February 20, 2013 at 12:37 pm)Drew_2013 Wrote: Hindsight gives a very illusory idea of cause and effect. Imagine you’ve hit a golf ball 300 yards and it comes to rest with a specific and unique alignment with the blades of grass it finally comes into contact with, as it inevitably must. The chances of exactly that configuration occurring is zero, considering the infinite number of alternative positions that the ball could have occupied. That doesn’t mean that it can’t have happened, though, or that it was somehow ‘planned’ because the ball has to end up somewhere, doesn’t it. It’s next to impossible to win the lottery, but someone does, and the fact that you couldn’t have predicted the winner beforehand (unfortunately) is just as much as a giveaway as the fact that you couldn’t have predicted the arrangement of grass blades on your golf ball after the drive.
This is why I wanted you to tell me which one of these arguments or points really mean something to you so I'm not guessing which ones you think are really relevant or applicable to our discussion. The analogy of hitting a golf ball and it landing in specific blades of grass is in his estimation next to zero. The landing of the ball in a particular patch of grass doesn't produce a specific result. The result we're discussing are the combination of events and conditions necessary for life to be possible in the universe. What does a ball landing somewhere in grass accomplish?
Actually, it does produce a specific result. The alignment and configuration of grass due to the ball falling on it may be as unique and specific as the conditions necessary for known form of life. But since that configuration is of no personal significance to you, you have no problem simply accepting mechanistic forces as the cause of that configuration. However, since the conditions for life are of personal significance, you look for something more or other that that. A more simplistic analogy is that when someone else wins the lottery, you have no problem accepting dumb luck as explanation, while if you win it, some higher power must have intervened to make it so.
(February 20, 2013 at 12:37 pm)Drew_2013 Wrote: A variation on this argument is the notion we shouldn't be surprised to find ourselves in a universe that allows us to exist because if it didn't we wouldn't be here to observe it. That's trivially true. What does surprise us is the astonishingly narrow set of parameters and conditions necessary for life to obtain if created by forces that didn't care and didn't plan or engineer our existence.
Its not surprising or astonishing at all. In fact, it should be expected because if it weren't so, we wouldn't be here.
The fact is, this universe is extremely vast with an enormous range of conditions occurring through it. Given all sorts of possible combinations of environmental factors, its not only unsurprising that one of them would match the criteria to adequately support our kind of life, it is to be expected.
