It's to be expected that your average person should make logical mistakes in his arguments. It's even to be expected that those with training in the arts, humanities, philosophy, theology and other non-scientific disciplines should make mistakes in logic. But I'm disappointed to see people with scientific training make mistakes in logic. And they do. Much more often than I would like to see. It's like seeing a man parking badly - they're letting the side down.
Still, it seems they are just like everybody else; if something is in line with what they believe, they demand little or no evidence before accepting it. But if it is in any way contrary to what they believe nothing but absolute mathematically certain evidence will do. And in most cases not even that.
Stephen Hawking said: "on the face of it, life does seem to be too unlikely to be just a coincidence." Then he goes on, trying to find ways to show that what he just said is not true, after all. He invokes parallel universes to get past the astronomical odds against 'just by chance.' There is absolutely no evidence supporting parallel universes. The astronomical odds are a certainty. Stephen Hawking should know one cannot invoke speculation as evidence to change a factual reality. One can also not invoke what amounts to magic - here we are, so it must have happened. Is Stephen Hawking so committed to atheism that he abandons logic to defend it? What a disappointment.
I'm reading a book called Confessions of a Greenpeace Dropout by Patrick Moore. Patrick Moore has a PhD in environmental science. While attending a conference in Nairobi, he had a Damascus Road experience. He saw that Greenpeace was a movement more in line with ideals and convictions than reality. In fact, he went over to the other side to such an extent that he even doubts that man-made green-house gases are in any way responsible for the documented increase in global temperatures. He does not doubt the increase in green-house gases and the global heating up, just the connection between the two. He uses the analogy of the correlation between increased ice-cream consumption and an increase in shark attacks on humans. He does mention that there is no known direct connection between ice-cream consumption and shark attacks, which is of course true. There is no evidence that either humans having eaten ice-cream or ice-cream itself attracts sharks. However, Patrick Moore should know this is not an apt analogy to use to illustrate the connection between an increase of hot house gases and an increased global temperature - it is well known that hot house gases prevent heat from being lost. Therefore, it can be said with certainty that the increase in hot house gases is at least to some extent responsible for the increased global temperature. There may be other candidates also responsible for this, like sun spots. But in the absence of other candidates as clearly related to a temperature increase as hot house gases, it is justified to declare hot house gases the number one contender for the lion's share of the responsibility for the increased global temperature. This is not rocket science. I cannot see why Patrick Moore and others can't see this.
Patrick Moore is also heavily into atheism and evolution. Nevertheless, he says he bases his realities on science. In his own words: "The real strength of science is that it is based on two things: observable facts that can be repeated and logic." Then he goes on to say, not on the same page, of course, that whales come from hippopotamus-like animals that swam down rivers, ended up in the oceans and became whales. In the light of the total absence of any evidence for this, this qualifies as complete nonsense. Where are the "observable facts that can be repeated" that is his requirement for anything to be established as a fact? Or is such nonsense acceptable to him because it supports evolution? One should be consistent.
As for evolution, the starting point of evolution is the development of life purely by chance. If this cannot happen, evolution does not even get out of the starting blocks. The Internet is full of discussions about this. Everybody agrees that the chance of life coming about by random chance is less than one out of a figure bigger than the number of all the atoms in the Universe. Evolutionists have a few ways they try to get past that, among those life seeded from outer space (but how did life get there?) or the claim that the process wasn't really random. Exactly what it was, they don't say. The only way one can defeat such overwhelming odds is a brute force attack - try all combinations. But a brute force attack is not a random process. One should try one combination only once. Even if that is possible through random means, the numbers still are too large. And it isn't. So, purely mathematically speaking, the probability of life coming to be by random means runs up against insurmountable odds. So, mathematically speaking it is impossible that life can come about by itself by random means. This is a fact. There are no "observable facts that can be repeated" to show how life can come about by itself. To be consistent, anyone who claims to go only by science and logic should admit that evolution is a mathematical impossibility. As life developing by itself by random processes is a mathematical impossibility, it is a mathematical necessity that there should be something or someone behind the development of life. Again, this is not rocket science.
It is disappointing that people with scientific training make easily avoidable, logical mistakes. What is even more disappointing is that they so often talk absolute nonsense. This, unfortunately, is not as rare as it should be. Let me stress that no amount of speculation can prevent anything from being nonsense.
