A splendid video about evolution

[Laird]

This view holds that ontological statements are meaningful only if they can be verified through empirical observation or are analytically true (such as logical or mathematical statements).

Then it is a false view, unless by "meaningful" you mean something different than what is usually meant: ontological statements like "Reality is not confined to (exhausted by) this so-called 'physical' universe" clearly are meaningful - and truth-apt (definitively either true or false) - even though you think that they can't be verified through empirical observation, which brings us to:

As @Valmar points out, such statements are verifiable through empirical observation, so, again, you must have in mind a particularly narrow definition of "empirical observation", which in turn brings us to:

This view is generally such a narrow one that I don't understand why anybody would find value in it.

@sbu

I am still hoping you will reply to my post #118.

David

@sbu

I am still hoping you will reply to my post #118.

David

Yes I will resume the debate soon, I’m busy at work at the moment. Just wanted to acknowledge Laird’s comment first.

This view is generally such a narrow one that I don't understand why anybody would find value in it.

I understand why logical positivism can come across as narrow. But from my point of view, that’s actually part of its strength. It provides a clear framework for separating what we can reasonably investigate or discuss in terms of truth claims, from what lies outside empirical or logical analysis.
For example, whether there are 0, 1, 2, or even 5 or 10 spiritual dimensions is not something we can assert as true or false — not because it's necessarily wrong, but because there's no way to empirically verify or falsify it.

I understand why logical positivism can come across as narrow. But from my point of view, that’s actually part of its strength. It provides a clear framework for separating what we can reasonably investigate or discuss in terms of truth claims, from what lies outside empirical or logical analysis.
For example, whether there are 0, 1, 2, or even 5 or 10 spiritual dimensions is not something we can assert as true or false — not because it's necessarily wrong, but because there's no way to empirically verify or falsify it.

A key thing you leave out is that logical positivism asserts that scientific facts are the only actual kinds of facts, and that everything else must necessarily be false.

That's not a "strength" ~ that's just Scientism, to put it bluntly.

Scientific experimentation cannot tell us about the meaning of life, why we like apples over bananas, why we like the colour red and not the colour blue, why we like rock music and dislike classical. (these are just random examples, by the way) Science fails to tell us why some things are considered morally correct, and others not.

A nice article I found:

https://philosophynow.org/issues/133/Ein...Positivism

Logical positivism was a philosophical movement of the 1920s and 30s which wanted to introduce the methodology of science and mathematics to philosophy. As part of this ambition, the Vienna Circle (Wiener Kreis in German) of logical positivists tried to purge philosophy of metaphysics – by which they meant any speculation that could not be tested using the methods of modern empirical science. The members of the Vienna Circle, including its nominal leader Moritz Schlick, found the speculative claims of traditional metaphysics, especially those based on religion, to be false, uncertain, or sterile. For Rudolph Carnap, another influential member of the Circle, “the (pseudo)statements of metaphysics do not serve for the description of states of affairs.” They are, like poetry and music, “in the domain of art and not in the domain of theory” (from ‘The End of Metaphysics?’ in Western Philosophy: An Anthology, edited by John Cottingham). Carnap confidently proclaimed that in the Circle’s new materialist philosophy of science, “a radical elimination of metaphysics is attained, which was not yet possible from the earlier anti-metaphysical standpoints.”

In fact, the logical positivists dismissed all non-scientific speculation altogether, not just in philosophy, insisting that all statements and theories are literally meaningless unless they can be logically verified or checked by experiment or observation. This is the so-called verification principle. A.J. Ayer was not a member of the Vienna Circle, but was powerfully influenced by it, and sprang its ideas upon the English-speaking world with his book Language, Truth and Logic. He argued that every verifiable proposition is meaningful (though it may be either true or false), and any unprovable claim, whether about science or metaphysics or the existence of God, is meaningless. Claims about ethics, he said, are also unverifiable so their only meaning can be as expressions of our emotional attitudes. According to verificationism, the meaning of any statement lies in its method of verification.

Soon, Karl Popper in his Logic of Scientific Discovery pointed out a problem with verification: no number of observations that agree with a theory can ever conclusively prove it true. A classic example is the claim that “all swans are white.” Not even a large number of sightings of white swans will prove this true, but even a single sighting of a non-white swan will disprove it (‘falsify it’). He argued that a “theory which is not refutable by any conceivable event is non-scientific. Irrefutability is not a virtue of a theory (as people often think) but a vice… the criterion of the scientific status of a theory is its falsifiability, or refutability, or testability.” So for Popper falsifiability, not verifiability, is the test which distinguishes genuine science from what Popper called ‘pseudo-science’ – or ‘metaphysics’.

@sbu

I want very much to debate this with you, but as you know, science is best done in a careful analytic sort of way, so lets try to sort out one or two points.

1)      Are you conceding that random mutations on their own would be limited in power in the way Behe claims, or do you have a counter argument? This is important, as I will explain later in the discussion.
….
If indeed simple mutations on their own cannot power evolution, isn't that something worth knowing? I mean people talk as if RM+NS can produce absolutely anything (even starting from pre-biotic soup chemistry) - imposing some limits on this process would an interesting start.

I don't want to debate with you in a mud-slinging sort of way, I hope that you don't want that either.

David

David, while none of us claims to be professional biologists, and that becoming a true subject matter expert requires academic-level study, I'll give my best attempt at explaining why I remain unconvinced by (at least some of) Michael Behe's arguments.

We can certainly agree that the origin of life remains a mystery for now. However, regarding evidence that random mutations can produce beneficial changes, we have substantial molecular evidence. We can observe beneficial mutations arising in real-time through laboratory evolution experiments with bacteria and other organisms, giving us empirical data on both rates and effects.
Consider how cancer evolves to become treatment-resistant - this is a perfect example of random mutations producing 'solutions' to environmental challenges (drug treatments) that we can observe happening over months to years. Most mutations in cancer cells are neutral or harmful, but occasionally one provides resistance. These resistant cells are then selected for and multiply rapidly.
We see similar patterns in antibiotic resistance in bacteria, HIV developing drug resistance, and even beneficial mutations in human populations like lactose tolerance or high-altitude adaptations.
So I'm not following the argument in your point 1) - could you elaborate on what you mean?

With the birth of a more accurate understanding called Quantum mechanics, classical physics was shown only to be only an approximation by the 1920's . This must also apply to classical biology... a useful approximation at some scale... but also superseded by QM

QM itself, is now being extended, and generalized together with General Relativity...

And we also have Penington's mini revolution in theoretical physics... where he just comes right out and says it in his 2019 lecture. Matching patterns/replicas/copies can connect different spacetimes... with the right sort of isolation.

...what we're going to find is that just like for the page curve, there's going to be a really crucial role played by Euclidean wormholes connecting different space times. This time however it's gonna be a slightly different. Okay. Before, the euclidean wormholes were connecting different replicas that were used in this replica trick entropy calculation. Now, at least at some level what's going to be happening, is that to do this measurement on the hawking radiation, we're going to have to do some very complicated quantum computation. It's a very complicated measurement, if we want to turn it into a simple measurement, we need to use an amazingly powerful quantum computer, and that quantum computer is effectively going to be doing calculations that are equivalent to simulating the entire blackhole system, and somehow, there are going to be Euclidean wormholes connecting the real black hole to the simulated black hole in the quantum computer. At least that's one way of describing the picture, and that, is totally crazy, but the maths works. So yeah, you guys can see what you think of it at the end of this talk

At some fundamental mathematical level, organisms can connect to different spacetimes, allowing both the past AND the future to mathematically influence the organism (in a dumb way) towards future patterns where there are more of one pattern, compared with other patterns.

David, while none of us claims to be professional biologists, and that becoming a true subject matter expert requires academic-level study, I'll give my best attempt at explaining why I remain unconvinced by (at least some of) Michael Behe's arguments.

We can certainly agree that the origin of life remains a mystery for now. However, regarding evidence that random mutations can produce beneficial changes, we have substantial molecular evidence. We can observe beneficial mutations arising in real-time through laboratory evolution experiments with bacteria and other organisms, giving us empirical data on both rates and effects.
Consider how cancer evolves to become treatment-resistant - this is a perfect example of random mutations producing 'solutions' to environmental challenges (drug treatments) that we can observe happening over months to years. Most mutations in cancer cells are neutral or harmful, but occasionally one provides resistance. These resistant cells are then selected for and multiply rapidly.
We see similar patterns in antibiotic resistance in bacteria, HIV developing drug resistance, and even beneficial mutations in human populations like lactose tolerance or high-altitude adaptations.
So I'm not following the argument in your point 1) - could you elaborate on what you mean?

Thanks for starting to debate this issue iin a scientific way.

OK, my point is that following Behe's logic none of those observations should happen. Every one of them implies that living matter does not follow materialist laws. Somehow those biological systems must be able to sense which mutations are beneficial and which are not! I mean at rock bottom we have a stream of symbols (nucleotide bases) that must obey simple combinatorial rules.

Let's just take the case of bacterial resistance. This is an interesting case where a mutation can improve a bacterium provided a certain antibiotic is in use. In most (maybe all?) cases this weakens the bacterium in the wild. I think that is why bacteria have never absolutely overwhelmed the existing antibiotics.

A substantial number of biologists follow The Third Way (TTW):

https://www.thethirdwayofevolution.com/

This is a grouping that claims that evolution can somehow escape the limitations of RM+NS. @stephenw can give you more details of this approach. However, having read a bit of this concept, I couldn't find any clear example of how this way of thinking transcends the logic of Darwinism - even though it claims to. Maybe you will discover how this is done, and we will come into agreement!

I would say that the value of TTW is that it enables biologists to publish observations that aren't consistent with Darwinism - such as the ones you cite - but which do occur.

David

[Laird]

I understand why logical positivism can come across as narrow. But from my point of view, that’s actually part of its strength. It provides a clear framework for separating what we can reasonably investigate or discuss in terms of truth claims, from what lies outside empirical or logical analysis.
For example, whether there are 0, 1, 2, or even 5 or 10 spiritual dimensions is not something we can assert as true or false — not because it's necessarily wrong, but because there's no way to empirically verify or falsify it.

You sort of skirted vaguely around the first issue I raised, so I'll ask an explicit question to confront it directly:

Do you accept that sentences of that form –"There are n spiritual dimensions", where n is an integer ≥ 0 – contain propositionally meaningful content, or, in other words, that each of them expresses a meaningful proposition, and thus that they are truth-apt, or, in other words, that each one is either true or false?

Note that in asking that, I am explicitly asking you to ignore whether or not we can know or ascertain or even investigate what each one's truth value is (i.e., whether it is true or false); I am simply asking you to acknowledge that, as meaningful propositions, statements of that form necessarily are either true or false, regardless of which one it is, and whether any of us knows or can know what it is.

You sort of skirted vaguely around the first issue I raised, so I'll ask an explicit question to confront it directly:

Do you accept that sentences of that form –"There are n spiritual dimensions", where n is an integer ≥ 0 – contain propositionally meaningful content, or, in other words, that each of them expresses a meaningful proposition, and thus that they are truth-apt, or, in other words, that each one is either true or false?

Note that in asking that, I am explicitly asking you to ignore whether or not we can know or ascertain or even investigate what each one's truth value is (i.e., whether it is true or false); I am simply asking you to acknowledge that, as meaningful propositions, statements of that form necessarily are either true or false, regardless of which one it is, and whether any of us knows or can know what it is.

I agree that from the standpoint of formal logic, the sentence “There are n spiritual dimensions” is well-formed and, strictly speaking, either true or false. But from a logical positivist perspective, the deeper issue is that the question itself is meaningless, because the terms involved can’t be empirically defined or verified. So the sentence has propositional form, but it doesn’t express a cognitively meaningful proposition, which means we can’t meaningfully assign it a truth value at all.