Father's Day 2005

Well it was a lovely time this morning as I got to see my daughter, she bought me a Star Wars mug for daddy's day - now everytime I drink some tea I hear "Most impressive young Skywalker, but you are not a Jedi yet" from a small speaker embedded in the bottom of the cup!

Not so nice was when her mother (Alice), with her new man in tow (who moved into Alice's house last night) turned up to take her to London to visit Ellen's (Alice's other daughter) father. "It's time for a family day out" says Alice to my morose and crying daughter as she is dragged off to the car.

As a result, this morning, I can't help but feel that something is wrong. Alice's new fellow has been banished from his house as his partner found out that he was having an affair with Alice. So he's leaving the two kids that he has there, plus the two kids from his original relationship, to go and live in the house my daughter spends most of her time in. So there is my ex-wife Alice, with two children by two different men, shacking up with a chap that has four children by two different women.

Ellen is seeing a child psychologist right now for emotional problems.

This isn't the way I was told it was going to be - I am accepting it, it's against my worldview, therefore I am being altruistic.

I pray that God will look after my daughter. I wish that I had the power to do so.

When looking for a root cause of this mess I wonder if people rush into relationships? Alice parted with me as I was not what she was looking for. She has now found something better than me and is "going for it", Tony (Alice's new beau) found something better than his partner and is "going for it" with Alice.

Could it be that people often rush into relationships out of fear, thinking "I dont want to be alone!" and then when we meet someone we actually want to be with, we leave a trail of emotional devastation to match any tsunami behind us?

Perhaps the best advice I can give to my daughter for her future relationships is to guard against this. Only settle-down and have children when you are very very sure, play the field for a bit and find out what doesn't work, etc. You will be afraid, but attempt not to act out of fear.

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Now young Bagwell, thank you for your views on The Theory of Evolution, ok I didn't realise your standpoint so thanks for taking the time to elucidate. In your last post you said on Natural Selection:

It is blind; not subject to guidance by some force of nature, selecting what is "good" based on some standard of nature, but rather selecting what survives.

And that is in my opinion absolutely correct. That's what everyone should understand about Natural Selection. I thought that everyone did!

I guess I have two questions:

1) Why would things on Earth build up, become more complex (sludge-to-humans) rather than fall apart (humans-to-sludge) ? (ie. What powers Evolution to go in the direction that the Thoery claims it to be going in? In other words, why is Earth's biosphere becoming more organized?)

2) Does the Theory of Evolution possess the quality of a good theory, does it predict anything?

I read the article on irreducible complexity, my opinion is that the author does seem to display an ad hominem rejection of Natural Selection. My two points on that article would be that physics is always looking for irreducibly complex problems to attack. That led to the invention of the microscope. Mathematics on the other hand seems to be going the other way, and irrational numbers are certainly irreducibly complex. But on questions such as "is a city irreducibly complex"? I will say "no". For instance, there are streets and houses. Inside the houses are people, inside the people are genes, inside the genes are molecules, inside the molecules are atoms, inside the atoms are protons, neutrons and electons - now the electron may be irreducibly complex - but I doubt it. Inside the protons and neutrons are other things we call quarks and gluons, they may be irreducibly complex, but again I doubt it. To me, all matter is a result of a symmetry breaking.

He says that Darwinists get a great comfort from the fact that the Earth is 4.8 billion years old (thus allowing time for Evolution), but that this time is vanishingly small compared to the odds of us existing - but fails to appreciate that we do exist. Intelligent life has arisen on Earth, somehow. What is he basing his "the odds are vanishingly small that we should exist" argument upon?

In fact, one might think that the fact that life exists on Earth suggests that life is likely to evolve on most Earth-like planets. Would one not?

But that would be to overlook an observation selection effect. For no matter how small the proportion of all Earth-like planets that evolve intelligent life, we will find ourselves on a planet that did (or we will trace our origin to a planet where intelligent life evolved, in case we are not originated from Earth).

Knowing that intelligent life arose on our planet Earth is predicted equally well by the hypothesis that intelligent life is very improbable even on Earth-like planets as by the hypothesis that intelligent life is highly probable on Earth-like planets.

Our knoweldge that life exists on Earth therefore does not distinguish between the two hypotheses, provided that on both hypotheses intelligent life would have evolved somewhere. So is he saying the existence of life anywhere in the Universe is vanishingly small?

But, if the “intelligent-life-is-improbable” hypothesis asserted by the PDF author said that intelligent life was so improbable that is was unlikely to have evolved anywhere in the whole cosmos, then the evidence that intelligent life evolved on Earth would count against it. For this hypothesis would not have predicted our observation. In fact, it would have predicted that there would have been no observations at all.

I believe that Hawking refers to this as the anthropic principle.

Happy Sunday!

Current song: "Telling Lies" -- David Bowie

PS. Yes that's exactly what a chippy is.