Does anyone understand the part about the car being made from metal and oil thrown from 2 miles up or whatever?
Some people genuinely think that the theory of the big bang says the explosion made everything exactly as it is now by random chance, rather than just being the starting point for a very very long and gradual process.
I’ve had people ask me “how an explosion could form a human” before, which is ridiculous in many levels.
Not everyone can understand a multistep process. Studies have shown they are literally incapable. They survive by copying and memorization of processes.
I’ve always wondered if people like that are an unfortunate combination of some of our less adaptive traits. It can take strong selective pressure to get a species to dump maladaptive but not fatal characteristics.
Honest question, can you find something I can read about these studies?
I am able to find the specific studies in the moment to support my statement “literally incapable”
The specific concept is “higher order thinking skills”
There are a lot of studies on this topic, mostly around what is means, who has it and what and how we fail to teach it to some people.
It’s clear from the studies I am seeing that despite decades of efforts no one has developed a fool-proof strategy to teach this skill.
Which begs the question as to if it is a skill (something we can teach) versus an existing ability that can be honed or allowed to atrophy.
I would wager some people can think of at least one fellow student who failed to develop this ability despite the attempts of teachers.
Barring that, most may know people who have displayed a lack the ability or fail to deploy it. The ability to quantify a persons higher order thinking ability is itself a topic of study.
If you’re only looking for further reading on the topic, I would suggest reading up on critical thinking / higher order thinking and how it affects one’s ability to detect fake news and other misinformation such as antivax conspiracies.
I’ll look into it a bit more. It does mesh with my experience, where I feel like different concepts just don’t work with some people’s brains.
It’s a religious nut who has 0 idea about how probability works. Don’t over think it.
It sounds like a reference to the “Junkyard Tornado” fallacy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Junkyard_tornado?wprov=sfla1
The chance that higher life forms might have emerged in this way is comparable to the chance that a tornado sweeping through a junkyard might assemble a Boeing 747 from the materials therein.
Even Boeing can’t assemble a 747. Maybe the junkyard tornado deserves a shot at it.
LET THE JUNKYARD TORNADO COOK
This reminds me of a programming quote that I can’t seem to find, but the gist was “In programming a one in a million occurrence is going to occur all the time.” The idea being that because computers go so fast and repeat the same instructions over and over any failure condition even at a low probability will appear to happen often simply because of the scale.
You are so right!
For the big social media guys, they are rocking >1b users, and probably many times that in terms of active user accounts. Their databases contain just about every variant of every name and address on the planet. They have users from a timezone that’s +25 hours and the several that are +/-xh15m. Transactions from opposite sides of the globe are colliding and overlapping hundreds of times a second. They have seen every character set (including Klingon and Egyptian hieroglyphics). They see 1-in-1-trillion events all the time.
Their way of developing software is miles away, in fact totally different, from the traditional company app that has a few thousand users and managers that will enforce user workrounds for bugs and useability issues.
This person doesn’t understand how anything works but likes to post as though they do. Lack of belief isn’t belief.
The argument starts with the presumption that the universe would turn out this particular way. To use their own analogy the issue isn’t whether the bullet fired goes through the donut hole, but rather whether it ends up anywhere at all (I like those odds).
I can’t believe religious people still believe in dice! The probability that I rolled a 6, 4, 4, 5, 2, 1, 3, 3, 4, 1 is .000000016538 like thats basically impossible!
Inshallah this guy will learn how probability works.
It’s not 1/10^60 on an infinite timeline though. If it could ever happen, then it’s 100% certainty that it will happen over infinity opportunities.
If you can only exist and perceive a die when it rolls a six, guess what 100% of your observations will be dingdong?
The atheist is under no obligation to explain the origin of the Universe. We can just say “I don’t know”. It’s the theist who must defend grand claims.
Dismissing of course that same probability for a god of any kind…
David J. Darling (a renowned astronomer) proposed that God is actually a collective universal consciousness that reached back through time to create itself.
At least they’re considering odds. That’s a good start. Like the flat earthers in Behind the Curve who set out to prove flat earth theory with science, there’s a chance of learning.
Religious apologists who argue like skeptics are sometimes only missing knowledge or working through some childhood programming.
But, very much like the flat earthers in that doc, they can walk right up to the truth…and then ignore it.
Which I did for 20 or so years. It eventually got through to me though, thankfully.
Wow. Was it flat earth specifically? Or what was your worldview that it took you a while to see through?
I mean, when I was younger and angrier and less logical, I was in the conspiracy-o-sphere in the early 2000s—bush-centric/neocon centric. It’s interesting, those things used to align with leftist beliefs. Like…the 9/11 stuff wasn’t “the Illuminati” or whatever. It was, “Cheney and Rumsfeld were in PNAC, where they specifically talked about an ‘antagonizing incident’ akin to Pearl Harbor in order to get public support for war in Iraq and Afghanistan.” Which…is all actually true. And that tied into the whole “how did the buildings fall directly into their own lot like a planned demolition; where is the rest of the plane/crash zone in the lawn at the pentagon; why after all the planes were grounded, were the Bush family flying out members of bin Landen’s family; why did building seven collapse; where are all the plane parts in PA; how did they hit the one empty unit of the pentagon under construction, etc.”
Which…I mean, I still don’t think we know all we should know. But I also now have a logical portion of my adult brain that says, “okay, well while all those may be interesting questions, where are the whistleblowers that would undoubtedly have come out by now, where is the evidence of a planned demolition, etc.”
I mean, maybe it was just because I found all this stuff in a formative time of my life, but I still do think about that stuff sometimes, and there is still a part of me that wonders more about it than the standard accepted story…but those questions do wrestle with my more logical thinking. And it’s very, very unpopular to say anything about the 9/11 conspiracy stuff because it was hijacked (poor choice of words) by whack jobs that taint everything they touch.
But there was also a point in my life where all of that stuff ended up turning me off because of how crazy it got. Maybe I was just somewhat sensible from a younger age, but it’s like I responded to those kinds of questions, but then when they all pushed the conspiracy shit further, I was like, “…um…yeah, I’m out.”
I was evangelical Christian. As straight and pious as they come in the way the most aren’t. I was steeped in it and had a heavy natural skepticism but that was beat out of me and I tried so fucking hard to believe. I realized when I was 31 or so that I never actually did believe and that I was just trying to believe. But I leveraged all the usual mental gymnastics that made my 15 year old brain feel clever. So when I got away from it (I got burned real bad by a pastor… long story… that made me hesitant and scared to go to another church) I got the space I needed to find the perspective and lean into my skepticism.
That’s the spark notes version of how I got out.
Damn. Well, here’s to you living a better life post-Evangelicalism. I’m sorry something horrible had to happen to finally push you away for good, but I hope you’ve been able to recover from whatever it was and find happiness.
Thanks!
I’m happier and living the best life I ever have. 💖💖
impossible to any rational mind
I’ll take the probabilistic universe over invisible sky wizard as my incomprehensible to the rational mind any day of the week.
Confidently incorrect.
Also describes every religious person.
Who’s arguing that car aren’t made of metal and oil???
Also we believe in such slim chance because the universe roll its dice millions of time on every millisecond.
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Ehh, to be perfectly pendantic, being atheists means rejecting belief in a deity. Faith in non-deific systems remains fair play.
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