Oh, look. The creationists have been routed, and the problem of the origin of life has been solved. Would you like to learn about the brilliant new science that has creationists and the Christian right terrified?
The Christian right’s obsessive hatred of Darwin is a wonder to behold, but it could someday be rivaled by the hatred of someone you’ve probably never even heard of. Darwin earned their hatred because he explained the evolution of life in a way that doesn’t require the hand of God. Darwin didn’t exclude God, of course, though many creationists seem incapable of grasping this point. But he didn’t require God, either, and that was enough to drive some people mad.
Darwin also didn’t have anything to say about how life got started in the first place — which still leaves a mighty big role for God to play, for those who are so inclined. But that could be about to change, and things could get a whole lot worse for creationists because of Jeremy England, a young MIT professor who’s proposed a theory, based in thermodynamics, showing that the emergence of life was not accidental, but necessary. “[U]nder certain conditions, matter inexorably acquires the key physical attribute associated with life,” he was quoted as saying in an article in Quanta magazine early in 2014, that’s since been republished by Scientific American and, more recently, by Business Insider. In essence, he’s saying, life itself evolved out of simpler non-living systems.
Jeremy England may very well be brilliant; I don’t know of any of his work. His big idea, that the laws of thermodynamics drive the existence of life, is pretty much a no-brainer. Everyone who has studied chemistry and biology should have had the principles of thermodynamics drilled into their heads, and the idea that life is a consequence of a kind of thermodynamic drive is fairly widely held — England seems to have added the idea that it is inevitable and ubiquitous to the general concept, but even that isn’t new.
Here’s a good article on the metabolism-first hypothesis for the origin of life, by Trefil, Morowitz, and Smith. It concludes:
In a larger sense, however, the future of the experimental program associated with the Metabolism First philosophy is tied to the development of the appropriate theory, guided by experimental results. The hope is that the interplay of theory and experiment, so familiar to historians of science, will produce a theory that illuminates the physical principles that led to the development of life and, hence, give us the ability to re-create life in our laboratories.
Assuming the experimental and theoretical programs outlined above work out well, our picture of life as a robust, inevitable outcome of certain geochemical processes will be on firm footing. Who knows? Maybe then someone will write a book titled Necessity, Not Chance.
The notion of necessity and physical constraints shaping the organization of life is at least as old as D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson. England may have some productive twists to add to the story, but actually, it seems to fit into a long and already existing tradition within biology.
So the idea is not novel, but note also that the answer is going to be found with theory and experiment. I’m much more impressed with the more detailed analysis of specific abiotic chemical pathways that could produce the energy that led to early life, than I am with theoretical musings about thermodynamics. Both are important, but it’s observation and experiment that are the heart of science.
As for the claim that creationists will be terrified by this discovery…excuse me, but I have to go off somewhere and laugh for ten minutes or so.
Creationists don’t understand thermodynamics. Heck, they don’t understand basic logic. You think an obscure bit of theory by some brilliant wonk, written up in journals they’ll never read? My dog, man, I’ve still got creationists asking me, “If man evolved from monkeys, why are there still monkeys?” and you think they’re going to be stunned into silence by a technical paper in a physics journal on entropy, heat dissipation, and molecular self-organization? Look at England’s paper — it’s got math in it. The only thing that’s going to terrify the religious right is the prospect of reading the thing.
Creationists are always predicting the imminent death of Darwinism. Let’s not emulate them by predicting the imminent death of religious conservatism…and worse, attributing it to one isolated analysis by one guy working in theoretical physics.
Creationists don’t understand thermodynamics. Heck, they don’t understand basic logic. You think an obscure bit of theory by some brilliant wonk, written up in journals they’ll never read?
“Theory”? That’s just a guess, not a scientific fact!
Yeap. That paper doesn’t describe why there are still monkeys, how order can be created when entropy is always suppose to increase and it doesn’t find all those missing transition fossils. I don’t think it will intimidate creationists much at all. I don’t think this paper will have much effect on modern scientific thinking on abiogenesis either. It’s simply too theoretical. It seems to state that thermodynamically, cell division is possible. I can point at cells dividing to tell you that its possible. Maybe I’m missing something.
Most of those creationists are also predicting that geocentrism will eventually prevail, that the big bang theory will die off any day now, and that the theories of relativity will be proven false. A working theory about abiogenesis could only find itself added to that already long list.
We will never prove how life started – there are probably too many ways for it to start all as improbable and unbelievable as the others. Once we manage to create it for the first time you can bet there will be a thousand as equally likely variations on the theme and no way of finding the one true one.
The longest ‘spontaneous’ RNA chains so far generated (over 100 amino acids) has been achieved at -18C. Not likely in a smoker – unless its not far from an ice filled bay where the massive tides of the early earth would have produced a monstrous slushy with phenomenal surface area and endless supply of ground up junk.
But as is often pointed out – it only needed to happen once. But even that is more likely than convincing a hardened creationist.
I doubt very much whether it is a necessity of thermodynamics – like creationism I’m not going to waste too much of my four score and ten on it.
Well, yes indeed. The basic problem here is that the author of the piece (Paul Rosenberg) doesn’t appreciate the difference between the old earth creationists and the young earth creationists, doesn’t understand that old earth creationism is NOT a significant part of the current Christian right, doesn’t seem to consider that young earth creationists already reject the mountains of overwhelming contrary evidence so will not be the slightest bit fazed by this tiny fillip, and (a minor error but still irritating) misattributes Ginsberg’s Theorem to Asimov. I’ll give him credit for not protecting the sensitivities of creationists in an opinion magazine aimed at the popular audience, but he needs to work on his analytical skills. C+
An honest–to-goodness creationist explained thermodynamics to me thusly: “Everything gets worse”.
Thereby denying the existence of snowflakes, acorns, and blastocysts.
I’m waiting for the day an alien spaceship arrives in orbit to see how those biological precursors they seeded on Earth 4 billion years ago are getting on.
Creationists won’t know whether to crow or cry…
With all due respect, you seem to be overlooking the obvious.
The headline, and indeed, the entire article is nothing but clickbait — something that Salon and most other “popular” Web magazines rely on to increase their advertising revenue.
I can’t believe that any, even slightly well informed author could possibly believe that anything at all could change the mindset of those who did not use evidence to reach their conclusions in the first place.
The three laws of thermodynamics restated (with a few liberties taken):
Ya can’t win.
Ya can’t break even.
Ya can’t get out of the game.
This may be a minor nit, but I’d like to ban the term “Creationist” when referring to Young Earthers. Nearly everyone is, at the bottom a creationist, in that we know that the whole of reality was created at some point in the past. The real lines are drawn over the who/how/when it happened. I for one, will not concede the use of the term “Creationist” to the exclusive use by the Young Earth crowd. That gives them too much importance in their own eyes.
The thermodynamic explanation doesn’t explain why there isn’t life on the moon or venus or …. Seems like it doesn’t explain very much if it can’t explain the negative case.
nomadiq@2
You can also point to the apparent motion of the sun across the sky. The real question is why. Without an underlying explanation, i.e., theory, you really don’t understand the phenomenon.
My background is physics, but it’s almost certainly not worth my time to try to read the original paper. My thermodynamics is too shaky after 40+ years –that’s another story. So I’m not qualified to judge the importance of the work.
One of the fascinations of science is that it’s turtles all the way down. You uncover one, he’s standing on another. Where’s the bottom? Can there be a bottom?
PZ doesn’t like outsiders dabbling in biology, but it cuts both ways. How many biologists understand the rationale for the hunt for the Higgs boson? By your reasoning, particles (whatever they are) have mass –case closed. Uh, not quite.
@10, Richard Gitschlag
Ugh, let’s not.
Funny. I think the exact opposite and, if anything (but I’m pretty satisfied with the status quo), I would regulate “creationist” to *only* young-earthers. Young earthers believe a ludicrous, wrong, and superstitious belief the the world and animals and humans were magically created at some point in time. Old-earth creationists on the other hand claim a vague nose-of-the-camel innoucuous but meaningless, unquantifiable, and unfalsifiable “Well, God’s there somewhere giving his approval”. Well, fuck. I like chocolate but I don’t bring irrelevant stuff into the conversation.
And, although this is purely a matter of semantics, we must absolutely do *NOT* “know the “the whole of reality was created”. “Created is completely the wrong word. Creation implies a conscious directed effort. Yes, word usage and semantics is subjective but this is much more than a mere nitpick. *No-one* is discussing whether we were came into being or not; we are discussing specifically if we were created— with intent– by someone. The mold growing on my wall was not created. My pile of dirty laundry was not created. I, through an act of my parents having sex, was not created. The tree in my yard was not created. etc. Not merely a useless word in the context but the wrong word in the context.
Oh.
Sorry, I already did.
You’re right. I probably shouldn’t have.
I’m sorry.
The next time someone says to me, “I ain’t no cousin to a damn monkey,” I’m going to tell them…”That’s nothin’, you great-great-great-great…et cetera…granddaddy was a metabolic, chemical reaction.” That should shut them up, but it probably won’t.
Woozy: Then what would you call someone who believes in a God who created a universe that creates? That denies the Young-Earth mythology and accepts the conventional sciences’ explanation of the development of the galaxy, the earth and life?
Kevin Kehres @6:
Not to mention denying god, heaven, and anything else eternal.
What they actually meant, of course, was “everything gets worse, except for the special things I know in my heart don’t.”
Oh, but p-zed, all those thousands of labor-years of work before were by *biologists*. Now that an *out-of-field physicist* has been working on the problem for a couple years surely it’s solved.
Getting back to the original Jeremy England piece, I wish someone would dig into the unsupported leap he makes from “thermodynamics as a basis for abiogenesis” to “thermodynamics as a significant element in biological systems”. Mildest criticism: he’s applying an analog argument to a digital (information-theoretic) domain. Strongest criticism: this is just as bad as “quantum woo”, because it totally ignores scale and statistics.
And thus the scientists still want to play GOD. So what else is new? Creationists always accuse scientists/atheists as wanting to make themselves God, so this will just give them further evidence.
[end of role playing.]
—
This is an amazing hypothesis; that thermo inevitably leads to lifeforms. And like any worthwhile hypothesis, it provides experimental procedures to verify that claim [or prove it wrong].
The results, if verify the hypothesis, will definitely leave those deniers gasping for rebuttals.
This is to a large extent pretty old hat. There is a book called Into the Cool, (2005) by Eric D. Schneider and Dorion Sagan that goes into how the laws of thermodynamics are absolutely necessary for life has we know it.
As for this from nomadiq no. 2:
There is of course no reason for Jeremy England to deal with in his paper with thoroughly rebutted lying canards that Creationists have been spouting for decades. And if Mr. England did the Creationists would simply ignore the rebuttals and continue spouting the lying canards as they have been doing for decades.
woozy #14:
No, actually, it really doesn’t. Yes, in the context of discussing creationism, it usually refers to the idea of God creating the universe/Earth/life/whatever, but, in more general usage, the idea of any concious intent is not necessary to accurately use that word, which is more or less what Richard Gitschlag was getting at. That the universe was created is undeniable, or else we wouldn’t exist to sit here discussing it, but, for example, Ray Comfort and Stephen Hawking would have extremely different ideas about what, exactly, did so and when (Comfort thinks it was a magical Sky Daddy did it about 6,000 years ago, Hawking thinks it was created due to the laws of physics being what they are about 13.8 billion years ago).
An idiot.
I already addressed this:
woozy #14
I’m 2nding zmidponk, we often say stuff like “the crater was created by a metiorite” or whatever.
But I’m not going to say everyone is a “creationist”.
zmidponk gets my point.
What I’m objecting to is the equating of “Creationist” with only the Young-Earth bunch.
woozy: You are calling Francis Collins an idiot?
@27, Richard Gitschlag
You seem to be under the mistaken impression that calling someone an idiot is supposed to apply to the entirety of their life and everything they’ve done.
Instead, it can apply selectively to specific things they do or believe.
The context of creationism is the only context in which we are discussing this. In the context of universal origins “created” is either meaningless and pointless or means directed intent by someone. It is completely the wrong word for the concept of simply existing.
I *did* address that in my original post. It *is* the wrong word for this discussion.
brianpansky: woozy made it a blanket statement, not a selective one.
@30, Richard Gitschlag
You’re being silly. Calling someone an idiot doesn’t apply to the entirety of their life and everything they’ve done. Your specialty seems to be using sematincs different from everyone else, just for the lulz.
brianpansky, you seem to be as tone-deaf to nuance as any fundamentalist I’ve met. Only on the other side.
Generally I have found PZ to be more thoughtful than most of the commenters here.
My snarky “idiot” comment was to the idea of innocuously shoe-horning in a necessary God to create the universe but tip-toeing away when it comes to any effort to quantify and define said God even is or to isolate just exactly what role he had, but to still insist he has to be in there ’cause well, God created it, you know.
That’s not a scientific hypothesis. It’s not even coherent concept.
If God is a component of a hypothesis, it must be examinable and defined as a component. “God created the universe be the commonly accepted scientific methods”. Does not do or allow that.
You stated “at the bottom we are all creationists” which is not true. “Creationism” in context does not mean simply that the world came into being. This is precisely the same argument and no more valid than claiming “we all believe in God of some sort” as God is simply a belief in something bigger and more important than us and no-one thing s/he is the biggest most important thing in existence.
It’s disingenuous weaseling and although it was inaccurate and mean of me to jokingly call one who engages in it “an idiot”, it was all the response the question deserved.
Okay, Richard Gitschlag, I think we all understand that you’ve got a stick up your ass about the name “creationist.” Thank you for sharing your thoughts. Do you have anything else to say that doesn’t involve arguing semantics?
No, I made a snarky dismissive insult.
To answer your question seriously what do I call someone who believes that God created the universe as per accepted science. I’d call him a theist. Someone who believes in God. Nothing more; nothing less. Such a statement does not posit any quantifiable or hypothetical meaning.
“These things were not made.”
– Some Pirahã or other, deconverting the up-to-then missionary Dan Everett that was sent to convert them. Everett had pointed at the landscape and asked who had made it.
No, that’s not OEC. That’s the most bleached-out version of theistic evolution. OEC means God created each and every “created kind” that ever existed directly, as opposed to them evolving from each other; the difference to YEC is just the timeframe and the order.
You’re contradicting yourself. The conventional sciences’ explanation is that neither nor anything else creates; instead, stuff just happens (by a complex mixture of chance and necessity). “These things were not made.”
I consider all goddists to be creationists, because it doesn’t matter how old they think the universe is. I get that some people do use it to refer to YECs specifically, but I just don’t see how you could get non-creationism out of being only slightly less obtuse about history and cosmology. Theists believe the world was created, in the very straightforward sense of being made by some kind of personal agent. If someone doesn’t believe that, they’re not any flavor of theist/creationist/goddist/etc.
zmidponk:
Nope, nope, nope. That is, in fact, deniable. First of all, there’s still quite a lot of momentum behind the idea that the past is eternal, which (if true) would be very hard to reconcile with any sort impersonal, non-theistic, metaphorical “creating” that anybody could reasonably have in mind (much less a theistic version of “creation”). Secondly, “the laws of physics being what they are” is plainly about something that exists — by invoking them you’ve already went off the rails. I mean, if you really think you’re saying existence was created by them somehow, that’s just a lot of confused babbling. You and Stephen fucking Hawking and everyone else can’t coherently sneak in some other preexisting stuff that supposedly creates literally everything. Finally, it makes little or no sense to think of such laws as having some kind of propensity to make things exist or bring stuff about or make things “necessary” in some way. It’s taking the word “law” too literally or at least stretching the analogy too far. You don’t get punished for violating physical laws, as if there’s some “lawgiver” out there making things behave according to its dictates; you just plain don’t violate them because they are summaries we make up of what stuff invariably does. They are just ordinary facts about the stuff which is already around doing whatever it does. And they happen to be really fucking useful facts about all of the physical stuff. But that does not make them magical.
Fine. My mistaken terminology. Although I was under the impression most OEC like to claim God created each through evolution. Perhaps I was wrong or perhaps there’s no consistency.
Anyway, I not only feel fine that YEC keep the term “creationist” but I feel YEC as a whole are the most deserving of the term.
Okay, I know it’s all just semantics but if “create” and thus the label “creationist” means *anything* in this context it means made with intent at a point of time by someone and distinctly opposite from “just happens by a complex mixture of chance and necessity”. As a gradient, OEC and then “theistic evolutionists” have given themselves a wee bit of wiggle room but YEC have placed themselves smack-dab front and center of the “creationist” label.
I’m *not* going to give the OEC a pass and say “Yes, those young-earthers are ignorant nuts but you old earth creationists are sane and reasonable and it’s just a minor matter of disagreement whether it was God or the Big Bang to determine which type of honest creationism is valid”. “Created” is simply the *wrong* word to describe the concept of mere existence except as direct opposition to “just happen”. So no, we are *not* all creationists at bottom.
Ha ha! That line is a wonderful piece of ironic self-deprecation there. Wait. You were joking, weren’t you, when you accused someone of lack of nuance while equating them to fundamentalists?
Woozy: Thank you for a more reasoned comment. I accept your statement.
“As a gradient, OEC and then “theistic evolutionists” have given themselves a wee bit of wiggle room”
The amount of “wiggle room” is far larger than you may be aware of. I’d invite you to sit in on some ‘discussions’ between the YE crowd and evolutionary creationists. YECs accuse us of siding with atheists. (Which we do, when it comes to the sciences. Functionally, we differ in the philosophy.)
“but YEC have placed themselves smack-dab front and center of the “creationist” label.”
Yeah, they have, by trying to make everyone think they are The One and Only True Believers ™
consciousness razor @37:
Where’s the momentum? BGV and subsequent papers argue that past-incompletion seems unavoidable, with new physics necessary to describe the initial conditions at the boundary.
The closest I’ve seen to an argument against this is from Leonard Susskind, but looked at more closely, it’s not really.
I think there must be a God and he hates me because I spent a good deal of time this morning (before reading this post) thinking about how much I hate the term and concept of “sea lioning”.
I am not a physicist, but my understanding is that it’s now thought that energy, at least, has always existed in some form; in other words, there is Something rather than Nothing because the laws of Physics tell us that
Something, not Nothing, is the default.
Therefore “creation” would be the wrong word for the ultimate origin of All the Things. Of course you can use it in the non-agent sense, e.g. “the Earth was created when debris in orbit around the Sun coalesced…” (or whatever–not sure I’ve got that right) but “we’re all creationists” seems misleading at best.
Richard Gitschlag:
What the fuck is that supposed to prove? The YECs would accuse other YECs of being blasphemous heretics if they differ in interpretation regarding two or three Bible verses. That YECs can’t tell the different between non-young earthers and atheist doesn’t prove that you have an incredible amount of nuance, just that they lack it (which is abundantly clear to anyone that isn’t them).
woozy:
God works in mysterious ways. And will continue to work in mysterious ways. Constantly. And will not leave until you see the error of your ways. And has been nothing but polite to you.
(Actually, sealioning is basically the same thing as proselytising plus JAQing off, isn’t it?)
“[U]nder certain conditions, matter inexorably acquires the key physical attribute associated with life,”
inexorably, in the same sense that given an infinite number of monkeys and an infinite number of typewriters…
woozy@14 – I’m not entirely sure I’d 100% agree with the parameters you’re setting on the word “create”. The tree that grew from a seed was not created, sure. The mold growing on your wall, the rust spreading over your car, the icicle forming below your gutter… sure. The word “create” does imply a consciousness, a creator. But where does that start (or, depending which direction we’re going, stop)? You said you weren’t created when your parents engaged in the specific act of coitus which led to your father’s spermatozoon fusing with your mother’s ovum, but what if they had previously agreed that they were attempting to conceive a child through that specific act of coitus?
You said that you don’t create your pile of dirty laundry, but aren’t you the one who decides which clothes you will wear on which day, and where you will stand when you disrobe, and the angle at which you toss the soiled clothing, and the force with which you toss it?
When my cat chooses which chair to shred, and at which time on which day, is she creating clawmarks? Do birds create nests? The shells of the eggs they lay? Their guano? Do spiders create their webs, do ants create their hills? Do either of the former two create the exoskeletons they shed when molting? Do cnidarians create reefs?
The further we get from humans, phylogenetically, the blurrier it gets.
There goes PZ again, dissing the philosophers.
/snark
Look, it is semantics but it is semantics of meaning in context. Sure, everything exists and we call it “creation” and all men were created equal and everything had to come from somewhere and hey, we’re all God’s creatures (creature = something created) right? Sure. Whatever. But if Creationism is to have any contextual meaning other than Gee-stuff-exists-ism it has to mean a deliberate act of creation. More than just a “just happened”, more than a “cause”. “We are all Xes at bottom” is just a weasel tactic to downplay that one actually believes anything and others might disagree. “Hey, you go out and marvel at the vastness of the universe. Why don’t we just call that God? We’re all theists at bottom, right?” No. “God” in context means something entirely else. As does “creation”.
Who the fuck cares and why the fuck is this my concern? It’s the concern of the idiot, yes “idiot”, who claims “we are all creationists at bottom”. Well, *he* said it so *he* is the one who has to show that I believe the universe was “created”. I don’t. End of story.
Then I would have saved a bunch of money on my shrink bills, wouldn’t I?
(Does misapplying the diaphragm because you are nervous in the guest bedroom of you parent-in-laws on Valentines day weekend, count as “creation”? Too much information? Gee, in my family we consider that amusing dinner time anecdote! Oddly, enough in my family we don’t consider “gee, stuff exists so it was created”. Funny, how different people have different uses of language.)
===========
Back on topic:
astro @46
You say that as though you are sarcastic. With selection, mathematical distribution is an incredibly powerful determinant. This is, after all, how evolution works.
woozy #29:
You’re still kinda missing the original point. Why should it be the case that, in this context, the word ‘create’ or any derivative thereof, is exclusively reserved for the idea of ‘magical Sky Daddy wiggled his fingers’? I don’t see why it should. It is quite accurate to say that the Big Bang theory holds that the universe as we know it was created by all of space-time expanding from a single point. By using the word ‘created’ there, I am in no way stating or implying that there is any directed consciousness or directed intent implicit in the Big Bang theory, and yet I am using it accurately.
consciousness razor #37:
You are correct, I did disregard the idea of an eternal universe, mainly because, as I understood it, no-one really takes that idea seriously any more. Of course, I could be wrong about that.
Then go have a look at what Hawking says and tell him where he went wrong, then. It is entirely possible he is, and it is an incomplete theory that, frankly, I don’t actually understand, but it does involve the existence of multiple universes, so the idea that this universe is ‘literally everything’ is wrong, according to this theory.
Erm, what?
Because, otherwise we wouldn’t call it “creationism”; we’d call it “stuff-just-exists-ism”.
Accurate, but meaningless and contentless. And pointless. That’s “stuff-just-exists-ism”.
… and, it isn’t actually accurate, as the more precise and concerned with meaning than me, conciousness’ razor pointed out. “create” implies an external primary agent. There wasn’t one. No agent. No primary. No external. “create” is the wrong word.
I’m not aware that Hawking ever used the word “created”. If he did I’d assume he meant it casually and colloquially.
(I’m not sure what consciousness’ razor has against Stephen Hawking.)
To go back to the “the creator was created by the volcanic eruption” example. Although I really balk at the use it is colloquially acceptable. However to call such a process the “creationist theory of the crater” with emphasis that the crux of the hypothesis being that the crater was “created” is … well, just plain nuts to be honest.
I think what s/he is saying is: Creationism implies an acting agent to bring things into come into being. This is not the case with either the big bang nor the mold on my wall. The “laws of physics” might have “caused” the universe (if one is really loose with semantics) but the “laws of physics” didn’t force, make, or necessitate that the universe must exist.
“Nearly everyone is, at the bottom a creationist, in that we know that the whole of reality was created at some point in the past.”
Good thing reality is not a popularity contest then isn’t it?
PZ: “Look at England’s paper — it’s got math in it.”
Not as problem for the intelligent design creationists – Dembski’s a mathematician.
who’s “we”, Kimosabe?
ah, context. right.
to be clear, and without needing to add anything… this^^.
have you read his book?
I mean, ALL of it, not just the first half?
If you can get past his musings on “moral law”, and NOT conclude the man actually IS an idiot… you must have missed something.
Thanks, but I’d rather watch paint dry: it’s more intellectually stimulating. (This is based on experience. I have spent considerable time on “BioLogos”. There is absolutely nothing worth reading there, unless you want examples of how theism destroys intellectual honesty and coherence.)
I was raising a completely separate issue at that point. Laws like F=MA don’t do stuff. They are also not something extra which exists over and above the matter moving around in spacetime, making stuff behave according to them (changing its velocity in time, for instance). F=MA is not the sort of thing which pushes or pulls some other kinds of things around. And it’s certainly not the sort of thing which “causes existence,” whatever the fuck that could possibly mean. As I said (and as Hume did centuries ago), it’s just our way to neatly summarize what happens. They are sets of facts, just like any other facts, which are identified as laws because they are especially useful and interesting and comprehensible to us. To the extent we are talking about them as human creations, they are extremely simple and general representations of reality. The old view of “laws” as somehow “governing” the world is historically tied to creationism of course, with its agent(s) enforcing them somehow; but apart from all of that nonsense, it’s just a very misguided way to think about what a natural law is and what “existence” means. They don’t exist independently of the stuff in the world which is happening. There’s just the fact of that stuff happening, with no other extra special thing on top of it or prior to it. It’s not a new idea and not too hard to understand, but hopefully that’s clearer now.
consciousness razor #60:
Then you’re railing against something I didn’t say. No wonder I was confused. Like I said, I don’t really understand Hawking’s theory myself, but, from what I do understand, and putting it in very general terms, it is a way of combining quantum physics with the General Theory of Relativity in order to solve the problem of the latter theory breaking down when it comes to dealing with the very early universe and/or the beginning of it. I don’t even begin to comprehend the details, but from what I understand, this means that all that is required for a universe to be created is the laws of physics, as we know them, to simply be accurate. No magical Sky Daddy wiggling fingers needed, nor any magical laws being enforced by supernatural policemen.
The people who say things like “The evil commander Zorg chased spaceman Spiff across all creation.” Which is actually not something I say very much.
Well, yeah, context. “Create” actually means something when someone says “I created the spandex cheese-filter” or “God created the world”. It doesn’t really mean anything when someone says “Volcanic activity created the crater” or “The universe was created during the big bang” (neither of which I’d ever feel comfortable saying but which are both probably semantically correct). It’s a very invalid leap to claim that because a fanciful but meaningless word is acceptable in a colloquial context it’s therefore okay in a precise methodical and definitive context.
Wellllll… I know several new-agey types and “progressive christian” types who don’t believe this. Or so they claim.
I don’t really have any problems with people believing God exists hanging about under coffee tables and behind dust bunnies and looking down on me in the shower. And if, when talking about what model explains how the universe began they believe God was hanging about and doing his ineffable God-like tendencies that don’t really come into the model– that’s fine.
If others believe God snapped his fingers and willed light into existence, well, then god is an integral part of their model. That’s fine. They’re whackos and they are wrong but that’s their model.
It’s when people insist that they believe in the accepted scientific model because they are oh, so reasonable, rational, and intelligent but then insist an shoehorning their God into it, because, well, he’s God and he did everything— he has to be in the model, but then they never define just exact what he is and exactly what he’s doing there except well, he’s God, he’s got to be there, and *then* insisting that this shoehorned model with an extra element that is required but which must not be examined is really the exact same as mine and I absolutely can not have any disagreement with it unless I’m a closed minded bigot… that is when I get pissed and start calling people “idiots”.
It doesn’t actually matter what his theory is. The issue is whether “created” is a valid word to describe the universe in his model. I really do not think it is at all. All his theory postulates is that the universe came into existence. Whether “come into existence” equals “created” or not, is a purely semantic one. But if it does, then “created” is an utterly meaningless word and should be avoided. If it doesn’t then “created” is the wrong word and misleading. Either way I (and I presume Hawking as well) am *not* a “creationist at bottom”.
No idea what you’re saying here. It looks like a deepity. On the one hand, it’s a trivial tautology: the physical facts are what they are, and nothing else is “required,” other than the physical world, in order for it to be what it is. That is, assuming that we have the facts right — but we don’t technically have a working “theory of everything” yet, so who knows how he could make such a claim about it. Astounding. But this would be true whether or not the universe is “created” (in this extremely minimal sense of having a finite amount of time in the past), as long as there aren’t supernatural entities, again given the same freedom to speculate about a final and comprehensive theory which nobody actually has. I don’t see how it could make a difference, since either way there still aren’t any non-natural entities doing anything beyond what is “required” according to the physics, which is where you seem to have backpedaled now. Anyway, if Hawking were only trying to say that there’s only natural stuff, why not just say that? Many people have claimed the Big Bang implies a creation, and effectively he’s said that’s not the case — yet you’ve turned that around yet again to say something like “creation” is undeniable. It really is baffling to try to figure out what that’s supposed to mean, if it’s not something which is utterly pointless.
On the other hand, it could be something like the claim I already outlined where “laws” are actively doing stuff and somehow bootstrap everything into existence, including themselves. That just looks like circular reasoning to me, if it’s not incoherent, but if it were true it might actually be significant and worth saying. It would count as some kind of an explanation of existence, or an attempt at it anyway, rather than a mere statement on the level of claiming that physical things exist and non-physical things aren’t needed. Hawking and others do seem to think this sort of move carries some kind of explanatory weight behind it, or at least I don’t know how else to make any sense of it. And given that there is no such theory on the table that Hawking could have to talk about (either now or years ago when he was making such statements even then), it’s hard to see what the finer details of the actual laws supposedly have to do with any of it.
I don’t know. I’m not impressed either way. There are much less sloppy and less confusing ways of saying naturalism is true. And as woozy keeps saying, it has nothing to do with “creationism” in the usual sense anyway, except maybe when it comes to the poor reasoning and the lack of evidence presented.
woozy #62:
Only if you assume that the word ‘created’ necessarily implies a directed intent or consciousness, and it seems to be the case, for reasons you don’t seem to be too clear on, that, according to you, it does – but only in this subject.
Why? It’s no more or less meaningless than choosing any other word, phrase or way of describing it or referring to it.
consciousness razor #63:
Exactly what I said and nothing else. Frankly, it looks like you’re getting confused because you’re looking for a deeper meaning in what I’m saying and there isn’t any.
Well, first of all, “created” does imply directed intent or consciousness. It also implies an act, an acting agent, an external frame of reference, an intended or recognized result. *No* aspect of the word “created” either necessary or implied is appropriate.
Colloquially we can slide in casual conversation (although we shouldn’t) but we can’t ignore them *all*. And we can’t casually insist that others agree with us and manipulate others intent. We are *not* all creationists. No more are we all spiritualists just because “spirit” means belief and thought and we all belief in thoughts at bottom. We are not all theists because God simply means the guiding principles of the universe and we all believe in that at bottom.
What is this “it” you are referring to? And why should any word be universally acceptable and common to all models of universal origins. You don’t choose name for models such as “creationism” “Big bang theory” because the words are obiquitous.
to be clear, I said that to counter my earlier statement, which was way too quick on the draw.
er, it was a statement of agreement after having read the first part out of context of the rest.
too much coffee.
I think the argumentum ad dictionary-um works just fine here.
Dictionary.com is the reference.
Etymology of the word according to Online Etymology Dictionary:
Etymology and history of the word according to Wikipedia article on creativity:
Verdict: Though some uses of the word do not necessarily imply conscious effort (a creator, creativity, etc.), most of them do imply some form of agency.
Regardless, it is just fucking word games. It is obvious that the person saying “everyone is a creationist at some level” is just bullshitting us with the usual strained semantic handwaving that is so common with apologetics. I mean, is it not obvious that this would make the meaning of the word “creationist” itself at least worthless? Regardless of the nuances and hairsplitting about the word “create” or “creation”, “creationist” has a specific meaning. No, you are not “creationist” because you believe that a blacksmith can create a horseshoe. A horseshoe would be a creation in that scenario but that doesn’t mean you believe in Creation. But might as well call yourself a creationist in that case if you are also calling yourself a creationist because you believe that the Big Bang “created” the universe, and that gravity “created” the stars and planets. Makes about as much sense.
And not a *single* one of them is appropriate to make the blanket statement “we know that the whole of reality was created at some point in the past” (Richard Gitschlag @10) and “That the universe was created is undeniable, or else we wouldn’t exist to sit here discussing it” and ” Hawking thinks it was created due to the laws of physics being what they are about 13.8 billion years ago” (zmidponk @23). [Hawking thinks absolutely *nothing* of the kind by any of the nine definitions.]
I never claimed it was anything more. But if you play games you follow rules. If you bankrupt a word to the point that it has no significant meaning, you can’t apply it and claim you’ve said anything of significance. Creation either means something significant or it is pointless to use it. That is true of any word in any game we play.
My point exactly. But Richard Gitshlag wants to do something even *weirder*. He wants “creationist” to *not* apply to young earthers and *to* apply to big-bangers. Why not young earthers? Because they are wrong and therefore can’t be allowed the correct and universally accepted scientific term “creationist” which belong to big-bangers and the OECs who are both exactly alike and scientific and correct except for one unimportant minor detail. (Apparently the proper term has nothing to do with what you claim, but everything to do with whether you are one of the good guys or bad guys, and of course the OEC are the good guys and every-one would see that if those bad young-earthers hadn’t stolen the legitimate word “creationist” which all right-thinking people and only right thinking people should accept.)
Well, no, no, no, NO! I am not going to let him play that.
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Woozy: If you are going to tear apart my comments, the least you could do is quote me accurately, which you have not done.
Woozy, you seem to have surpassed yourself in using a lot of words to miss a very basic point. I’ll try again.
‘The crater was created by a meteor colliding with the moon.’
Did I use the word ‘created’ incorrectly there? No, I did not (it would fall under definition number 5 in anteprepro’s post). By using the word ‘created’, am I necessarily implying or stating that the meteor must have been fired at that moon with intent, or by a conscious entity? No. Therefore, if I state that the universe was created, am I saying that the universe must have been created with intent or by a conscious entity? No. So, why should we concede the exclusive use of a word to people who believe in magical Sky Daddies wiggling their fingers and poofing things into existence when we’re talking about the origins of the universe? We shouldn’t. Yes, it is appropriate to use that word when talking about their ideas, but not ONLY when talking about their ideas, because that word simply doesn’t dictate or imply there must be intent or a consciousness there.
It actually sounds like you’ve been listening to a particular argument of creationists too much – ‘anything created must have a creator, so who created the universe if not God?’ One way in which this argument breaks down is that something that is created does not necessarily have to have a creator.
I apologize if I misquoted you but I am not aware that I have done so.
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Actually, If your purpose of the statement was to propose a scientific explanation for the crater you have. “Create” has misleading implications which should be avoided in expressing scientific theories.
No, but you are implying external cause, action, direction and result.
Which of the nine definitions does “create” satisfy? Claiming the universe was created is an inaccurate statement. It fails all nine definitions. It should not be used.
“Concede”????
If a word is imprecise to meaningless we should avoid, and shun it. This is simple clarity. “Creation” in this sense means NOTHING. It should not be used. Words should only be used in scientific exposition if the have significant meaning and then they should only be used to express that significant meaning.
“Create” is worse than neutral because it has imply meaning that isn’t always accurate.
Yes it does. The meteor was the creator of the crater. You are claiming the laws of physics is the creator of the universe. That is, as CR explained, wrong. Worse than wrong.
Woozy, it’s getting pretty obvious that you simply think the word ‘create’, or any derivative thereof MUST imply that there is intent and/or consciousness, whereas I completely disagree, given that I have used that word, and have seen and heard others use it on numerous occasions without any such implication or statement. You are seemingly tying yourself in knots to deny that this can possibly be true. As such, I see no further purpose to this discussion.
Oh, and, given that you are so intent on the context of using ‘create’ when referring to the origins of the universe, it is interesting to note that the context of the creationist argument I referred to so thoroughly eludes you that you utterly missed that ‘creator’, in that context, means ‘a conscious entity that intentionally set out to create this’.
zmidponk,
No. As I’ve said from the from the very beginning, a word either has significance (“I created a fly-wheel out of discarded cheese rinds”) or does not (“The universe was created”). When a word has little or no significance is precisely when it should *NOT* be used as a descriptive. If an existentialist is someone who believes things exist, the word has no meaning. If a humanitarian is someone who thinks humans are decent, the word has no meaning. If a creationist is someone who believes the universe somehow came into being, the word has no meaning.
If a word is to be used in a meaningful way it must reflect its significance. An existentialist isn’t simply someone who believes things exist (which is nearly everybody) but someone who believes existence alone is the only source of meaning. A humanitarian is someone who focuses her energy on helping humanity. And a creationist must be someone who believes the act and method of universal creation is significant to his model.
That is your most serious offense.
But even when words are casually and universally accepted they can slip in implied meaning that is inaccurate and sometimes dangerous. “What created that big hole in the ground?” “What keeps that building up?” “Why is that stain shaped like that?” and “what’s this made of?” are all fairly innocent and no harm is likely to come of asking them but they are rife with potential pitfalls and faulty assumptions. “What created the universe” “What keeps the planet up” “What is that stain shaped like that” and “what is matter made of” are all fallacious and full of faulty biases and assumptions.
I didn’t begin this discussion concerned that “create” was so dangerous. My first intent was simply that it was meaningless when not inappropriate. But by now, you have convinced me that it is outright poison. It *does* imply a cause and direction and external framework, and thus, when used in discussing universal origins implies and forces the speakers into a relational and causal mindframe which might not be appropriate.
It’s OK to challenge my statements, I don’t mind.
What I wrote was “Nearly everyone is, at the bottom a creationist,” I didn’t say “everyone”. I may have overstated it, but a majority of people are creationists of one form or another.
As to the Young Earth crowd, I wrote “I for one, will not concede the use of the term “Creationist” to the exclusive use by the Young Earth crowd.”
I am a “creationist, but NOT a YE or strictly an OE, but an “evolutionary creationist”, in that I believe the conventional sciences adequately describe the physical universe, without requiring any “tinkering” by any outside supernatural entity. But the existence or non-existence of another “reality” is, by definition, beyond the scope of the sciences.
I’m OK with disagreeing with that, just fairly represent my statements.
Rich G.