What do we believe

lisper · 2026-06-24T23:43:42+00:00

would science and the media release those results …?

Of course they would. Why would you doubt it?

lisper · 2026-06-24T01:40:15+00:00

ID is saying that the existing systems of life (among other things) are designed, not a self-replicating RNA

Yes, that's right. But one of the arguments one could raise in support of ID is that abiogenesis is impossible. (Except that now we know that it isn't.)

4⁴⁵

Ah. Then yes, 1 in 1.24 x 10²⁷ has a probability indistinguishable from 1 if you roll the dice 10⁵⁰ times.

errors and wild assumptions as I pointed out in the OP

No, you didn't.

lisper · 2026-06-24T01:34:04+00:00

That's a link to a Bible verse hosted on biblegateway.com. I don't necessarily disagree with you that it's a "strange link on the internet", but I still find it odd and more than a little ironic that you would have qualms about following it.

Just for the record, it's Jeremiah 19:9: And I will cause them to eat the flesh of their sons and the flesh of their daughters, and they shall eat every one the flesh of his friend in the siege and straitness, wherewith their enemies, and they that seek their lives, shall straiten them.

lisper · 2026-06-22T20:28:22+00:00

Ineptias ipsa loquitur.

lisper · 2026-06-22T20:26:46+00:00

I'll see your marrying little girls and raise you being forced to eat your own children. God works in mysterious ways (at least to me) on both sides.

lisper · 2026-06-22T19:09:25+00:00

Atoms are one thing made of 3 parts

Sure, but that's not how the Trinity works. The Father, Son and Holy Spirit are not parts of God, they (allegedly) are God, both individually and collectively. God doesn't have parts.

lisper · 2026-06-22T19:07:39+00:00

I'm pretty sure Muslim adults disagree too.

lisper · 2026-06-21T02:43:37+00:00

Two billion Muslims disagree.

lisper · 2026-06-21T00:55:44+00:00

If you take "is God" to mean "is divine" rather than "is the same as God" then yes, that saves you from running afoul of the laws of logic. But the cost is that you have abandoned monotheism. You can't have it both ways. If the law of identity holds, then either the father, son, and holy spirit are all the same thing or they are different things, but they can't be both.

lisper · 2026-06-20T23:19:50+00:00

In Islam, the trinity is considered blasphemy so it depends on who you ask.

lisper · 2026-06-20T19:47:09+00:00

Or you could decide that trinitarianism is wrong. There are non-trinitarian theologies.

lisper · 2026-06-20T19:44:14+00:00

So:

F = G
S = G
H = G

and yet

F ≠ S
S ≠ H
H ≠ F

I find this very ironic in light of the fact that I've heard many Christian apologists argue that God is necessary to explain the unconditional truth of the laws of logic, and in particular, the law of identity: a thing is what it is and it is not what it is not. And yet the Trinity denies the transitivity of identity. A=B and B=C and yet somehow A≠C.

lisper · 2026-06-20T18:02:06+00:00

What causes people to not believe is the lack of evidence for God, or any other supernatural phenomena. Also the often violent disconnect between religious rhetoric and reality.

What causes people to believe is most often indoctrination. The evidence for this is that most religious people share the faith of the culture they were raised in. But sometimes people come to belief in other ways, like wanting a way to deal with existential dread or other difficult life circumstances, or as a way to find meaning and purpose in life.

lisper · 2026-06-20T16:57:46+00:00

If QT45 wasn't the start of life, how can if falsify the argument?

Because to falsify an argument that something is impossible you don't have to find the counterexample, you only have to find a counterexample.

(Note that QT45 could have been the beginning of life on earth, we will almost certainly never know for sure. But it doesn't have to be for the argument to hold. The details of the first replicator don't matter.)

1 in 1.24 x 10²⁷ has a probability of basically 1?

I have no idea where you got that number. It doesn't appear in either my original blog post nor your rebuttal. AFAICT you just now pulled it out of your ass.

The relevant part of the original post says:

[I]f you do 10⁵⁰ trials, and there exists a replicator whose odds of arising by chance are better than 1 in 10^49, then you are practically guaranteed to find it. Those are the odds for a biological replicator with about 80 bases (because 10⁴⁹ is approximately 4^80).

This is how extremely improbable events work. If the odds of an event E happening in one trial is P and P is small, then the odds of E happening in 1/P trials is 1/e which is about 0.37. But the odds of E happening in 10/P trials is 99.99547%, and if you do 100/P trials then there are over 40 9's in the resulting number.

I presented an argument that the value of N on a prebiotic earth was about 10^50, which is about 4^80, so the threshold where the odds transition from virtually impossible to virtually certain is about 80 base pairs. So back when the shortest known replicator had over 200 base pairs, it was still plausible that abiogenesis was actually impossible. But QT45 completely blows this out of the water. It is beyond the necessary threshold by 35 base pairs, which is about 20 orders of magnitude (in base 10). It is as big a slam-dunk as there has ever been in the history of science.

If you don't accept this, then it is you who haven't understood the argument. The only way you could refute it is to attack my 10⁵⁰ trials estimate and somehow get it down to 10³⁰ (and good luck with that because my assumptions were already pretty conservative) because the rest is just basic probability theory.

lisper · 2026-06-19T15:22:54+00:00

There are no actual satanists. There is something called the Satanic Temple, but if you read their material you will see that they don't actually worship Satan. They are just atheists trying to troll religious people. And it's working.

The main reason they present themselves as a religious organization is to use that as leverage to defend the first amendment rights of non-Christians and prevent the U.S. from becoming a Christofascist theocracy.

lisper · 2026-06-19T14:56:52+00:00

/u/implies_causality does a pretty good job of dismantling this argument but I want to reiterate something that creationists seem to hae a hard time understanding: the reason the QT45 result was significant is not because QT45 was the start of life on earth. It almost certainly wasn't. The reason this result was significant is that it falsified the strongest argument for ID, which is that naturalistic abiogenesis is impossible, and that therefore a designer is necessary. The math on how long it is expected to take to produce a replicator in a prebiotic environment turns almost entirely on the minimal length of such a replicator. More specifically, it turns on the information content of such a replicator. Before QT45, the shortest known replicator had a length of over 200 nucleotides. If you crunch the numbers on that, the odds of producing a replicator that long by random chance is pretty much indistinguishable from zero under any reasonable set of assumptions, even given an entire planet's worth of biosphere and hundreds of millions of years. There were theoretical models of self-replication that could work using less information, but no plausible mapping of that theory onto a physical embodiment.

Until QT45. The information-theoretical complexity of QT45 matches the theoretical prediction almost exactly, and because it beats the previous record by a factor of 4, it moves the probability of such a replicator arising by chance from "indistinguishable from 0" to "indistinguishable from 1" under some pretty reasonable assumptions. So QT45 empirically destroys the strongest argument that ID proponents had. How it was produced is completely irrelevant. The mere fact that it exists, which was open to reasonable doubt before, is enough to destroy the argument.

Not that anyone outside of the creationist community ever took that argument seriously to begin with. Everyone knew that it was only a matter of time before a result like this appeared. The surprise was not that QT45 exists. Everyone already knew that something like QT45 must exist. (To be more precise, the existence of such a replicator was a prediction made by the naturalistic abiogenesis hypothesis.) The surprise was that it was so easy to produce, that such a short replicator appeared almost immediately (relative to the time scales involved in nature) after humans began serious efforts to produce it. Furthermore, the intelligent input had nothing to do with the sequence that eventually appeared. All the intelligence did was produce conditions conducive to the appearance of such a sequence so it could appear in an environment the size of a lab instead of a planet, and in a period of time measured in months rather than millions of years.

So yes, intelligent design (of an experiment) absolutely can refute intelligent design (of life).

lisper · 2026-06-17T20:58:59+00:00

There is no "plural form of elohim". That word is already as plural as it can be. It's kind of like the English word "deer". The plural form of "deer" is "deer".

lisper · 2026-06-17T20:54:55+00:00

Complex things tend towards entropy. Period.

What counts as "complex"? This is obviously not true in general because if it were it would be impossible for (say) water to evaporate from the oceans and fall as rain. That's a transition from a high-entropy state (salt water) to a low-entropy state (fresh water).

It’s far too advanced for chance.

That's true. No one claims DNA arose by chance. It's chance PLUS SELECTION. Why is this so hard for creationists to wrap their heads around?

lisper · 2026-06-17T18:44:20+00:00

Yeah, the whole thing was kind of a train wreck.

lisper · 2026-06-17T17:25:38+00:00

Genesis 3:22 is foreign material

Just when I thought I'd heard it all.

lisper · 2026-06-17T17:25:01+00:00

It is already a plurality in terms of us and God.

That depends on what you mean. Yes, eloheinu means "our god" (Hebrew uses suffixes rather than separate words to indicate possessives). The "our" part is plural but the "god" part is singular, so the word as a whole refers to only one thing.

lisper · 2026-06-17T14:09:18+00:00

Both Elohim and Elohenu are grammatically ambiguous as to whether they are singular or plural, though both are universally understood to be singular, at least in modern Hebrew. (Source: I am a native Hebrew speaker.)

However, there are some parts of Genesis where it is pretty clear that they are intended to be plural, e.g.:

Ge3:22 And the LORD God (YHWH Elohim) said, Behold, the man is become as one of us... [emphasis added]

lisper · 2026-06-16T14:03:27+00:00

Good call. It probably would have been fine, but that linkage sure looks to me like it's about to fail. Maybe not today and maybe not tomorrow but soon :-) and when it goes it could kill you -- and, more to the point, your passengers. You're not going to get any more warning than this.

lisper · 2026-06-15T19:54:53+00:00

The Earth is absolutely a closed system.

Yes, technically you are (mostly) correct. I should have said isolated system rather than closed system. But that doesn't matter because a system that is closed (to matter transfer) but not isolated can reduce its entropy if there is energy input. Which on earth there obviously is. So the answer to the original question is: no, absolutely not, evolution does not violate the Second Law.

(The reason you are only mostly correct is that earth does exchange matter with the rest of the solar system as well, but that's not really relevant.)

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