Component Fallacy

This video doesn’t really matter, I was just looking for something to bounce off of. Apparently I watched it 2 years ago, but I don’t remember. I only got through 7 minutes this time. The guy is just going through his own misunderstanding of other people’s ideas, and then landing on Christianity.

Just before I stopped listening, he says that Dawkins and Darwin will tell you that evolution does not explain everything. It does not explain the origin of life. And somehow, then he goes to church, and it’s not so bad, and gets answers. Whatever.

What he misses is, underneath evolution is another scientific principle, that there are simpler physical laws and particles that will become more complex things as the universe goes from low entropy toward high and locally low entropy spaces exist as part of that process. I suspect later he says something about how chemical reactions don’t explain morality or some such. Funny thing is, he calls evolution a “lazy” explanation of complex life.

It’s the composition fallacy, that what is true of those tiny particles is true for the whole. So if a hydrogen atom doesn’t have thoughts, then humans can’t have thoughts. It assumes that we know more about atoms than we do, and more about all the forces of the universe than we do. We know a lot. We have a few formulas that explain gravity, light, motion, reactions, all the stuff we interact with. We’re a little vague on the very large and the very small, but it’s pretty clear that there isn’t something beyond or much more complex needed to create the complex universe.

This applies to the Chemist turned Christian, the mathematician who says it’s all math, the person who says we can control our emotions using our thoughts (which include emotions), and anyone who claims there is something that we must understand because without that we can’t understand the universe or the planet or what we should have for breakfast.

The trouble with my worldview here is, now I can’t tell anyone to do anything, because I’ll need a reason, and I’ve just said there aren’t any. I’ll work that out eventually.

1 Like

So he replaced it with an infinitely more complex solution called “unknowable” God who simply said, “let there be light”, and there was light, just like that.
How lazy can you get?

The short version; We can say a tremendous amount about the observable universe, including what we can calculate but can’t sense directly. The conclusions that can come from that however, are limited to the scope of the universe.

The problem is that Theism assumes a “timeless irreducible complexity”, which is an illogical concept.

Somewhere there must have been a beginning, a simple singularity that had only one property, energy , from which the entire universe evolved.

What came after the beginning can be debated with all the current hypotheses , but the “Beginning” must have been a simple form with infinite potential, and not as an already expressed complex pattern, that would require time to evolve.

It is no mystery why humans are late-comers. We started as simple bacteria and it took a few billion years for that simple single-celled life form to become organized into the complex human micro-biome we can find in various adaptations worldwide.

I didn’t mean for this to be a comment on theism alone. That’s an easy target. It’s on any conclusion that one might draw by examining the components that make up everything.

How to destroy a presuppositionist

[quote=“egghead, post:6, topic:11033, full:true”]
How to destroy a presuppositionist

No one is speaking of physical harm.
The intent of this discussion is enlightenment, not destruction.

1 Like

Not sure what I supposed to get from that