Title Author Date

reason or un-reason? Horvath, Gabor Oct 14, 2006

Dear "Talk Reason"
Politics is not science. When you say you intend to defend "genuine science" from the "crop" (sic) of creationism you already prove that you use political gibberish. Evolutionism is anything but genuine science.

Tell me using real scientific approach what your idea is about the origin of universal regulators, that is the LAWS which are immutable and rule the whole physical world?

Did they "evolve"?
If yes tell me a hypothetical idea HOW it could happen.

If they did not "evolve", how come we have them?

Thanks and regards: Gabor

Title Author Date

reason or un-reason? TalkReason , Oct 22, 2006

Dear Gabor:

While we appreciate your letter, your sentence that "evolutionism is anything but genuine science", makes one shrug and tend to dismiss your assertions as an obvious display of either ignorance or a willful tendency to deny facts. If by "evolutionism" you mean evolutionary biology, you most probably are trying to judge something you know little about. Evolutionary biology is one of the best substantiated sciences, based on immense empirical material bolstered by very substantial theoretical insights. Thousands of evolutionary biologists spend their life on studying their subject and work hard to achieve a better understanding of biological problems, while nihilistic attackers like you senselessly try to dismiss all the data and theories for reason often having little to do with the search for truth.

Regarding your question about "universal regulators," it has no relation to evolutionary biology and mostly belongs in philosophy. The vexing problem of the origin of physical laws hardly can be answered using empirical methods, so, at least for now, it is beyond science. However, scientific data can (and do) provide some ideas as to the origin of laws. Your question contains a supposition that laws of physics are "immutable." Such an asseveration is not based on any first principles or empirical foundation. "Immutable" can be read as meaning that the same laws are valid forever. Given the prevalent view of modern science about our universe being in existence for about 15 billion years, which is rather far from "forever," the assertion of laws being "immutable" sounds quite arbitrary. More reasonable seems to be the notion that laws of physics have indeed evolved. There is a large body of literature where this question is being discussed, and in the era of Google you can easily get access to it without requesting Talk Reason to explain it in a detailed way, within the limits of a reply to a letter. Perhaps you may start with publications by Lee Smolin or perhaps even by Peirce.

Talk Reason