I'm not a YEC, but I know some who are a lot smarter than you are.

does this make their beliefs any less unscientific?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gHv3ccox6L4

With that video, are you trying to make any point other than 'the world contains many delusional people, some (or many) of whom are religious'?

The title religion and logic. It shows just how illogical religion really is.

This use of this video to make this point totally is totally 100% logic. Bro! Cool!

Grunch from being absent from the thread for a while.

I think to myself, "this has to be a troll, right?". And then I remember that 60 million people voted for Trump.

"There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there always has been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that 'my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.'” Isaac Asimov, 1980

Aaron - you seem like a reasonable person who wants to engage in a discussion. I don't want to quote posts individually - this is not because I feel incapable of rebutting your arguments, but because I feel it is not really progressing the discussion, and also, because I am quite frankly too lazy.

I would like you to answer one question - "how do you reconcile logic with religion?". Before you do, I would like to propose my definitions of these terms:

- Religion: A belief that we are here as a result of a preternatural creator, who is omnipresent and omniscient. This creator wants us to adhere to the teachings of the ancients, and if we don't, bad things will happen.

- Logic: The syllogistic system that the human race has developed to demonstrate that the combination of a number of precepts and a non-fallacious argument must lead to a true conclusion. Conversely, if the precepts are false, or the argument fallacious, then the conclusion may be false.

Yes, it does.

In the same way that it is difficult for the human mind to grasp astronomical distances, it is also rather difficult to grasp evolutionary time scales. Evolution has been compared to a "whirlwind going through a junkyard and assembling a jumbo jet", but it is actually the exact opposite of that; it is a process whereby very slight alterations in successive generations lead to the build-up of the jumbo jet. It is a precise and deterministic process; there is nothing random about it in the long term, as anyone posting on a poker forum should be able to grasp.

Anyway, that was a much longer response than your post warranted. Hope you enjoyed the rally this weekend, Daddy needs all the support he can get right now.

If you genuinely believe this, I retract my last statement about your being interested in a genuine discussion. And by the way, thank you for going some way towards proving my OP.

You can't even define correctly the dogma that you blindly espouse. The irony
that you are talking about anti-intellectualism is comedy gold.

Which part did I get wrong, assuming we can also describe, say, 1,000,000 trials of QQ playing AK and winning as a "precise and deterministic process"?

You have to be joking. Really?

You're going to compare Darwinism to doing trials of QQ vs AK? Wow.
I'm speechless, and you're the one trolling in here incessantly about
religious people being illogical.

Might as well compare Darwinism to flipping a coin then, right?

Is this the **** they teach in public high schools nowadays?
How embarrassing.

Do you actually have any concept of how evolution works?

The better alternative for humanity would have been to walk in front of a train. That may also have been the better alternative for you, but I am not fully conversant with your personal situation.

There's a lot that you've embedded into your definitions. First, your concept of "religion" falls pretty far outside of the normally accepted definitions. Not all religions are theistic. Not all require omniscience or omnipresence. Not all require adherence to specific behaviors that are described by "the ancients."

Similarly, claiming that logic has humanity as its origins presupposes a lot of information.

I'd be glad to engage you in those things, but...

If you genuinely believe that you can prove statements in some sort of absolute way that the universe is older than a few seconds, please demonstrate this. What you ought to discover if you're thinking things through is that there are a whole lot of assumptions that go into the scientific method (which isn't to say that those assumptions are bad). You should also discover that absolute proofs of statements is beyond what science claims to do.

If you read the statement and think carefully about it, you should find that it's actually not that controversial. You should also read the posts around it to understand the context in which the claim was made.

I'll let you contemplate these things and decide for yourself how you would like to continue, or if you would choose not to continue.

Do you?

Please explain how random mutations are deterministic.

Mutations are random
Mutations can be beneficial, neutral, or harmful for the organism, but mutations do not "try" to supply what the organism "needs." Factors in the environment may influence the rate of mutation but are not generally thought to influence the direction of mutation. For example, exposure to harmful chemicals may increase the mutation rate, but will not cause more mutations that make the organism resistant to those chemicals. In this respect, mutations are random — whether a particular mutation happens or not is unrelated to how useful that mutation would be.

http://evolution.berkeley.edu/evolib...e/mutations_07

Enter natural and sexual selection

The mutations themselves are random, the selection of which mutations are propagated to future generations is not random over a sufficiently large number of trials. Much like, you know, hole card distribution is random for all players but the best player ends up with the most money after a sufficiently large number of hands.

Just because a given process contains a random element as an input does not mean that the process necessarily produces a random outcome; there are a lot of examples of natural and mathematical processes/functions which contain some random inputs yet converge to a deterministic/fixed outcome. Evolution is a natural example of such a process.

Again, someone posting on a poker forum should be able to understand this. At the very least, try and educate yourself on topics before you mock others for their lack of understanding thereof.

http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Last_Thursdayism

I knew what he was talking about, I just wasn't going to deign it with a response.

ETA: Although I had never heard of "Last Thursdayism" specifically before. Cool link, thanks.

Edit2: Or rationalwiki. Great site! I'm going exploring

Actually this concept isn't at all what Aaron is referring to, care to try again?

I notice you are partial to insulting the intelligence of others who are demonstrably more intelligent than you are. That's a sign of insecurity, bro. You should work on that.

I also notice you dropped your evolution argument after you were roundly *****-slapped. Yet, you don't seem to learn. You should work on that too.

While I share Aaron's objections to these definitions, especially to the definition of religion, it seems like it's easy to reconcile religion with logic according to these definitions: you just take God as axiomatic. The best part about this is probably that, while it seems like a troll answer, Plantinga has devoted a remarkable amount of effort into developing it :P

More seriously though, the real problem with collapsing the question to those two categories, and I think Aaron pointed this out before when he criticized your use of language like "100% certainty", is that your concept of logic requires some undefined method of ascertaining the truth or falsehood of premises. His entire point earlier on was that science is not just logic, but also epistemology, which you seem to be taking for granted.