The Drake Equation Fallacy

originally posted by: OccamsRazor04
a reply to: TzarChasm

It's an equation without a solution.

Solve for X

A x 3B + 4C - 9D x 2E = X

Where A = 3

the drake equation was written to figure out a hypothetical estimation, a possible number of planets which exhibit properties known to sustain life. the question is not about how life happens, it is about how life persists and survives.

originally posted by: carsforkids
a reply to: neformore

Aren't you just using a fairy story

Fairy story? Not at all. Fairy tales begin with the words
" Once upon a time" The Bible begins with the words

IN THE BEGINNING

And then proceeds in truth from cover to cover giving us no reason
to doubt the first three words are also true. An intelligent person
would at least know the difference. This is scripture, ancient literature
passed down by scribes. Scribes who you show no appreciation for the
work they had to accomplish for you to even hold a Bible in your hand.
Golden

probably because of the slavery and child murder and incest, but that is just a guess.

a reply to: TzarChasm

An off topic guess!

originally posted by: carsforkids
Fairy story? Not at all. Fairy tales begin with the words
" Once upon a time" The Bible begins with the words

IN THE BEGINNING

The book entitled The Restaurant at the End of the Universe begins with

In the beginning the Universe was created.
This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move.

It was written by Douglas Adams as part of the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy Series. There is no reason to doubt those words are true either. Douglas Adams was an author - not a scribe - but his book is generally more entertaining than the bible and may very well be as factual.

Who knows, in 2000 odd years time, it may even be regarded as a religious text.

(I'm not really sure why you take such great exception to my posts on the thread you started. I suspect its because you don't like people having views different from your own. For what its worth I do respect your religious view - I just don't follow/believe them and have strong views of my own. Maybe you could just ignore my posts as you obviously don't want to have a discussion, haven't really answered any of the points I've raised and simply appear to want to be dismissive. It might be better for your blood pressure/health?)

originally posted by: TzarChasm
probably because of the slavery and child murder and incest, but that is just a guess.

That and a few other bits of nastiness within - and the fact that it has been used as the justification for wars, enslavement, bigotry and hypocrisy across the centuries.

Excellent guess though

a reply to: neformore

(I'm not really sure why you take such great exception to my posts on the thread you started. I suspect its because you don't like people having views different from your own. For what its worth I do respect your religious view - I just don't follow/believe them and have strong views of my own. Maybe you could just ignore my posts as you obviously don't want to have a discussion, haven't really answered any of the points I've raised and simply appear to want to be dismissive. It might be better for your blood pressure/health?)

AH! My blood pressure's fine and your view is fine with me. But as I
said earlier I despise arrogance in intellectuals who degrade Creationists
and intelligent design as if what they believe makes more sense when it
actually makes far less. I'm sure many scientists recognize that the origins
of life can not be accounted for by the scientific method. A supreme being
isn't considered by scientific protocol either. So science is never going to
explain it with it's limited parameters because that's the miraculous part.
Beyond the organic mechanics where again information already exists.
Where? Oh look Genesis again. Scientists know this but most ignore it
because in truth the deception is all that matters.

That and a few other bits of nastiness within - and the fact that it has been used as the justification for wars, enslavement, bigotry and hypocrisy across the centuries.

Huh! I don't see how you account for calling it a fairy tale then.

originally posted by: carsforkids
a reply to: ATruGod

Wouldn't You need some "Extraordinary Evidence" for proof of a Supreme Being from Outside (not captured) the Universe?

Do You have some?

Most likely none that you would agree to as evidence. And yet I see no
possible argument that there is far more, lets say arguable, evidence
for a supreme being than there is life else where in the universe.

Oh please tell us this evidence of a supreme being? And please don't say the bloody bible!

a reply to: Jay-morris

The evidence for intelligence is every where in creation.
It is scientifically impossible to explain our existence in this
world with out an intellect. Care to try? The Bible has information
regarding creation. So I would call that evidence. Doesn't matter to me
what you or science calls it.

a reply to: TzarChasm

I already explained how evolution is relevant in my initial comment when I said:

The basis for their skepticism is not hard to see. It could be summed up with two questions: If such extraterrestrials existed, where would they live? And how did they get there?
...
Yet, even if many planets do exist that meet the stringent conditions necessary to sustain life as we know it, the question remains, How would life arise on those worlds? This brings us to the very foundation of the belief in beings on other worlds​—evolution.

To many scientists, it seems logical to believe that if life could evolve from nonliving matter on this planet, that could be true on others as well. As one writer put it: “The general thinking among biologists is that life will begin whenever it is given an environment where it can begin.” But that is where evolution faces an insurmountable objection. Evolutionists cannot even explain how life began on this planet.

Scientists Fred Hoyle and Chandra Wickramasinghe estimate that the odds against life’s vital enzymes forming by chance are one in 10^40,000 (1 with 40,000 zeros after it). Scientists Feinberg and Shapiro go still further. In their book Life Beyond Earth, they put the odds against the material in an organic soup ever taking the first rudimentary steps toward life at one in 10^1,000,000.

Do you find these cumbersome figures hard to grasp? The word “impossible” is easier to remember, and it is just as accurate. The rest of evolutionary theory is equally fraught with trouble.

Still, SETI astronomers blithely assume that life must have originated by chance all over the universe. Gene Bylinsky, in his book Life in Darwin’s Universe, speculates on the various paths evolution might have taken on alien worlds. He suggests that intelligent octopuses, marsupial men with pouches on their stomachs, and bat-​people who make musical instruments are not at all farfetched. Renowned scientists have praised his book. However, other scientists, such as Feinberg and Shapiro, see the gaping flaw in such reasoning. They decry the “weakness in the basic experimental foundations” of scientists’ theories about how life got started on earth. They note, though, that scientists nonetheless “have used these foundations to erect towers that extend to the end of the Universe.”

Remember, just because there are people that are diligently trying to exclude the subject of the origin of life from the subject of evolution, that isn't going to change the fact/truth that: “In its full-throated, biological sense, . . . evolution means a process whereby life arose from nonliving matter and subsequently developed entirely by natural means.” Darwinian evolution postulates that “virtually all of life, or at least all of its most interesting features, resulted from natural selection working on random variation.”—Darwin’s Black Box—The Biochemical Challenge to Evolution, by Michael Behe, associate professor of biochemistry at Lehigh University, Pennsylvania, U.S.A.

The "by natural means" is also referring to the 'by chance' causal factor. The forces of nature operating by chance on molecules are the 2 main causal factors the evolutionist and philosophical naturalist has to work with, they tend to refer to it as 'by chance and necessity' (which is misleading cause the forces of nature by necessity move in the direction described by the words "entropy" or "decay", from order to disorder*, whereas the evolutionary storyline is proposed as moving in the opposite direction, from individual molecules to complete biomolecular machinery and systems of machinery, all by chance, by accident, spontaneously).

*: James Tour has another way of describing the problem for the evolutionary storyline that Behe is addressing above “whereby life arose from nonliving matter and subsequently developed entirely by natural means.” He discusses it at 10:25 in the video I used on page 6.

The Drake equation just does what I described earlier:

To many scientists, it seems logical to believe that if life could evolve from nonliving matter on this planet, that could be true on others as well. As one writer put it: “The general thinking among biologists is that life will begin whenever it is given an environment where it can begin.”

As they say: 'by chance and necessity' (as if the forces of nature by necessity operate in this direction on molecules, but all the evidence points in the other direction). It's a baseless assumption that defies all the evidence regarding that topic, and if used the way neformore used it earlier, it becomes what is known as 'begging the question' (which if translated from the Latin actually means "assuming the initial point") and described on wikipedia as a form of circular reasoning.

The Drake equation is skipping an enormous step in logic by assuming that life could evolve from nonliving matter on any planet with “an environment where it can begin” (according to the environmental factors the Drake equation is willing to consider) by chance. No such environment exists, cause it's impossible to happen by chance in any plausible environment. Drake assumes it's possible in spite of the evidence against it, he just ignores it. His equation is based on catering to a market that wants to ignore the evidence against this evolutionary storyline.

Drake is cunning at avoiding the 2nd question that I bolded at the start of this comment in his equation. Just pretend it's not important, that it's already settled and we can move on to calculating how many extraterrestrial civilizations are in our galaxy; just ridiculous. Just assume the initial evolutionary point, which has already been proven to be impossible. Never mind the people that are already aware of that, you're not catering to those anyway are you Drake?

originally posted by: carsforkids
a reply to: Jay-morris

The evidence for intelligence is every where in creation.
It is scientifically impossible to explain our existence in this
world with out an intellect. Care to try? The Bible has information
regarding creation. So I would call that evidence. Doesn't matter to me
what you or science calls it.

The evidence for intelligence is every where in creation.
It is scientifically impossible to explain our existence in this
world with out an intellect. Care to try?

Because it's we do not have the answers now, does not mean it's scienticly impossible. Thsts a stupid this to say. Yet, here you are claiming you have all the answers (without evidence) You are going on belief, and people like you will not be swayed. We see this time and time again!

Would not suprise me if we found intelligent alien life, people like you would call them demons!

So I would call that evidence. Doesn't matter to me
what you or science calls it.

Again! You are using your belief! There is absolutly zero evidence that God exists. Absolutly nothing! The bible is not evidence of a God!

originally posted by: neformore
...
However we are here, now, and tangible. We definitely exist and that means the chances of intelligent life existing in the universe is >0, and that means statistically that it is repeatable, even if it is rare.

You are refusing to consider and/or discuss the cause for our existence (our emergence) in that line of reasoning. You can continue to leave out the causal factors of 'chance (or a mindless process)' vs 'creation (or purposeful design)', from your arguments; but that doesn't change the underlying reasoning of such arguments. What you claim is "repeatable" is referring to the spontaneous generation of life by chance rather than by means of creation. Or at least it carries that implication in the context of the comment you were responding to in spite of any attempts to detract from it by focussing on just the subject of existence alone in that argument.

In so doing, you are also refusing to consider the proposed causal factor of 'creation', which includes properly evaluating it in comparison with the proposed causal factors of 'the forces of nature operating by chance events'. And you're ignoring the question (and any proposed causal explanation to): If such extraterrestrials existed, how did they get there (wherever they are proposed to live)?

Or should I have tried to drag out an answer to the question what it is that you say is actually repeatable? I think it's painfully obvious, the spontaneous generation of life by chance according to “the general thinking among biologists ... that life will begin whenever it is given an environment where it can begin.” (just like Drake thinks, just out of the blue, spontaneously, by chance, by accident) As one writer put it as mentioned before.

Nothing else fits there in that argument where you use the word "repeatable" for it still to make sense to bring it up in response to my initial commentary. If I try to fit "intelligent life existing" into what is referred to as supposedly being "repeatable" (the "it") I don't get a coherent sentence or point. So what else could one fit in there to confuse the issue some more, for those so inclined to detract from the causal factors and more detailed evolutionary storyline discussed in this comment? It's not like I'm the one having to dodge the real issue here. So I'm sticking with the obvious regarding what "it" is that supposedly is "repeatable" in that argument. Why bother dragging it out when people are actively avoiding the issue.

If one really wants to believe something is possible, the word "impossible" can indeed be a hard thing to swallow. As demonstrated in this thread. Nevertheless, regarding the notion of the spontaneous generation of life by chance in any imaginable environment, the word “impossible” is easy to remember, and it is just as accurate as any of the figures proposed by the scientists* mentioned in my initial comment; which are already generous regarding what it considers as requirements for the spontaneous generation of life by chance from nonliving matter. Even more generous than the lady in the scene above. (*: and evolutionists and philosophical naturalists)

Once more because it can't be stated enough:

To many scientists, it seems logical to believe that if life could evolve from nonliving matter on this planet, that could be true on others as well. As one writer put it: “The general thinking among biologists is that life will begin whenever it is given an environment where it can begin.” But that is where evolution faces an insurmountable objection. Evolutionists cannot even explain how life began on this planet.

Scientists Fred Hoyle and Chandra Wickramasinghe estimate that the odds against life’s vital enzymes forming by chance are one in 10^40,000 (1 with 40,000 zeros after it). Scientists Feinberg and Shapiro go still further. In their book Life Beyond Earth, they put the odds against the material in an organic soup ever taking the first rudimentary steps toward life at one in 10^1,000,000.

Do you find these cumbersome figures hard to grasp? The word “impossible” is easier to remember, and it is just as accurate.

Any event that has one chance in just 10^50 is dismissed by mathematicians as never happening. The possibility for this storyline to be true, for life to have emerged in that manner, by chance, is so far beyond “impossible” that we don't even have an appropiate word to remind people of the likelihood that their blind belief in it is accurate/true/correct, or remotely justified.

originally posted by: whereislogic
...
Scientists Fred Hoyle and Chandra Wickramasinghe estimate that the odds against life’s vital enzymes forming by chance are one in 10^40,000 (1 with 40,000 zeros after it). Scientists Feinberg and Shapiro go still further. In their book Life Beyond Earth, they put the odds against the material in an organic soup ever taking the first rudimentary steps toward life at one in 10^1,000,000.

Do you find these cumbersome figures hard to grasp? The word “impossible” is easier to remember, and it is just as accurate.

Any event that has one chance in just 10^50 is dismissed by mathematicians as never happening. The possibility for this storyline to be true, for life to have emerged in that manner, by chance, is so far beyond “impossible” that we don't even have an appropiate word to remind people of the likelihood that their blind belief in it is accurate/true/correct, or remotely justified.

Still, SETI astronomers blithely assume that life must have originated by chance all over the universe.

As do many people in this thread who refuse to either spell it out as such or admit to it. The base assumption of the Drake equation. And the most relevant issue of this thread and problem with the Drake equation; which includes an answer to whether the Drake equation is useful/beneficial or not in the sciences, or any search for “an accurate knowledge of truth”.

...Thus Paul wrote about some who were learning (taking in knowledge) “yet never able to come to an accurate knowledge [...] of truth.” (2Ti 3:6, 7)

Source: Knowledge (Insight on the Scriptures, Volume 2)

originally posted by: Maverick7
Here I thought this would be a thread with an intelligent discussion of the deficiencies of the Drake Equation, which, by the way only concerns the Milky Way and possibly "communicating" sentient civilizations in our current time sync, and it's just some dimwit moanings about supreme beings, lacking science and even basic understanding of the DE.

It's very limited, as there are many, many more relevant terms. It can not be applied to the whole Universe, just the 50 or so galaxies in our Local Group which are gravitationally bound, and says NOTHING about any sentient beings coming here and flying around in the atmosphere while pretending to hide (badly).

It also forgets the territorial alien possibility (IE> the possibility that one and only one alien culture controls OUR area of space, and the others abide by treaties with them.)

And it's just plain egocentric. We're assuming that the space faring peoples of the universe all think we humans are just so very interesting, and all want to come meet us.

But if there are thousands of alien species out there, and we are just one, then they've probably "made first contact" about a bazillion times already with other new life bearing planets, and our world would just be number bazillion and one.

Why don't they try to make contact? Because they already did. It just wasn't with us.

Between brackets is mine.

originally posted by: OccamsRazor04

All we know is we are here. Us being here has no bearing on whether other intelligent species can develop [by chance and the forces of nature alone] until we understand how we got to be here. So we do not know it is possible. Even if it is, you are making a jump to high probability.

Please include the causal factors in the evolutionary storyline. Continuously leaving it out of the discussion gets confusing for some people.

And it facilitates any dodging behaviour regarding the real issue, what is the chance, or are the odds of this mythological event to occur in a universe that consists of less than 10^100 atoms and has existed less than 15 billion years (limiting the amount of events where atoms and molecules interact, the amount of possible chemical reactions by chance according to the forces of nature). So much for switching from one galaxy to the whole universe to imply that the odds are any significantly better then (as neformore and Mach2 did), it remains far beyond the description "impossible". Of course, technically, there is no 'beyond' impossible, it's either possible or not, but I'm referring to the earlier quoted estimates of the odds regarding some specific components of this evolutionary storyline. Like "the odds against the material in an organic soup ever taking the first rudimentary steps toward life at one in 10^1,000,000"; that's not even the complete storyline of "other intelligent species" developing by chance and according to the forces of nature alone from nonliving matter. There, now I spelled out the whole storyline again, partly using your words.

Just to be clear, I don't actually agree with the numbers quoted there because the people coming up with these numbers have a tendency to be too generous to the storyline in skipping some problems that cause the odds of this happening to be best described by the phrase I prefer: 'no way in hell!' (there are insurmountable hurdles for this to happen by chance and the forces of nature alone, that cannot be put in such numbers because they are insurmountable, the forces of nature on their own operating by chance do not have the effect of creating or developing machinery and technology from individual molecules and their chemical reactions governed solely by the earlier mentioned causal factors; or as James Tour puts it at 10:25-14:10 in the video shared earlier: "Molecules don't care about life. Organisms care about life. Chemistry, on the contrary is utterly indifferent to life. Without a biologically derived entity acting upon them, molecules have never been shown to evolve toward life. Never." An insurmountable problem or hurdle for the evolutionary storyline and thus the Drake equation that assumes this storyline to be a given. Please do have a look at the full point by James Tour before deciding to respond to this entire sidenote, I have given the minimum timeframe but the subject is the backdrop of most of what he says after 14:10 as well; the video is on page 6).

When confronted with the astronomical odds against a living cell forming by chance, some evolutionists feel forced to back away. In their book Evolution From Space, the noted British astronomers Sir Fred Hoyle and Chandra Wickramasinghe assert that the chances of life’s springing from some ancient random mixing of chemicals are so “outrageously small” as to be absurd “even if the whole universe consisted of organic soup.” (which we know it doesn't) They give up, saying: “These issues are too complex to set numbers to.” They add: “There is no way . . . in which we can simply get by with a bigger and better organic soup, as we ourselves hoped might be possible a year or two ago. The numbers we calculated above are essentially just as unfaceable for a universal soup as for a terrestrial one.”* They write that “Darwinian evolution is most unlikely to get even one polypeptide [chain of essential life substances] right, let alone the thousands on which living cells depend for survival. This situation is well known to geneticists and yet nobody seems to blow the whistle decisively on the theory.”

Why have scientists aware of this failed to “blow the whistle”? “If Darwinism were not considered socially desirable . . . it would of course be otherwise,” answers the book. When an entire society “becomes committed to a particular set of concepts, educational continuity makes it exceedingly hard to change the pattern,” it adds. “You either have to believe the concepts or you will be branded a heretic.” Evolutionists fear that any retreat would “open the flood-gates” of irrationalism. In other words, even cracking the door to the only possible alternative​—creation by a higher intelligence—​would force them to face all the issues that such a conclusion implies.

*: Evolution From Space, pp. 30, 31.

Hence, after acknowledging that intelligence must somehow have been involved in bringing life into existence, the authors continue: “Indeed, such a theory is so obvious that one wonders why it is not widely accepted as being self-evident. The reasons are psychological rather than scientific.”⁠24 Thus an observer might conclude that a “psychological” barrier is the only plausible explanation as to why most evolutionists cling to a chance origin for life and reject any “design or purpose or directedness,”⁠25 as Dawkins expressed it. Indeed, even Hoyle and Wickramasinghe, after acknowledging the need for intelligence, say that they do not believe a personal Creator is responsible for the origin of life.⁠26 In their thinking, intelligence is mandatory, but a Creator is unacceptable. Do you find that contradictory?
...
24. Evolution From Space, pp. 30, 31.

25. The Selfish Gene, p. 14.

26. Evolution From Space, p. 31.

Source: Could Life Originate by Chance?

a reply to: Jay-morris

Again! You are using your belief!

No I'm using common sense free of bias. My faith my belief came after.

originally posted by: whereislogic

Just to be clear, I don't actually agree with the numbers quoted there because the people coming up with these numbers have a tendency to be too generous to the storyline in skipping some problems that cause the odds of this happening to be best described by the phrase I prefer: 'no way in hell!' ...

Bringing us back to this scene:

At least my preferred phrase is a lot more clearer than the lady's, or Feinberg and Shapiro putting the odds against the material in an organic soup ever taking the first rudimentary steps toward life at one in 10^1,000,000. That still encourages the behaviour and type of reaction acted out by Jim Carrey in the scene above for those who just don't want to get the message. Because: 'it's not gonna happen' (or 'it never happened that way' in light of the evolutionary storyline that is analogous here), is not what is tickling their ears, what they want to hear.

The behaviour is getting ridiulous to the point of becoming funny though. Too bad it's not as obvious what's going on here to most people as the scene acted out above.

originally posted by: carsforkids
a reply to: Jay-morris

Again! You are using your belief!

No I'm using common sense free of bias. My faith my belief came after.

It's not common sense! You are calling your belief as scientific fact! When it clearly us not! If people say they saw an alien spaceship, and this was documented, does that make it real and scientific fact? No, it does not!

You are not using common sense, you are using your belief to somehow justify what you say as evidence!

originally posted by: carsforkids
All of the questions however failed to include one perfectly scientific
question. What if we are the product of a supreme being from outside
(not captured in) the universe?

Just so you know, hypotheses and math theories don't include unfalsifiable claims. Drake equation is really just an estimate, we know much more about habitable planets today than at that time, so the equation wasn't perfect. Bringing up a "what if" doesn't make the drake equation fallacious, it makes your argument fallacious.

The fact that we have ancient information already telling us that what is going on here on earth is THE BEGINNING.

We have ancient information written by primitive humans that knew nothing about the world. This "info" is no more or less valid than Grimm's fairy tales. The bible wasn't already there, we wrote it 4 billion + years after the formation of earth and 200,000+ years after homo sapiens evolved.

If we are going to consider his equation at all it should at least have
some observable evidence to back it up.

Again, it's just a math equation meant to estimate. It's not a scientific theory or hypothesis. Most math theories cannot be backed up via scientific method.

It's a Probability Theory.

The hypothesis doesn't even refute the previous information and it matters not how old the information is.

Information isn't some be all end all, where ancient man made texts suddenly become scientifically valid and need to be refuted in every equation or hypothesis. The fact that the ancient texts cannot be backed up or proved in any reasonable manner, means they aren't going to be factored into such things. The bible doesn't hold true by default.

Or where it comes from because it is authoritative information.

We already know it comes from humans.

There is a big fat zero of evidence for life existing anywhere else in the universe.

There is evidence of other habitable planets in our galaxy. We can't investigate because of insufficient technology, so it's a bit silly to make such a statement. Trust me, it's only a matter of time before life is discovered elsewhere. I'd bet that remnants of it will eventually be found on Mars, Venus and more than one moon in our solar system. But you have to be patient and let science investigate, these things take years to put together.

And far more evidence of a supreme being giving us information that is correct IMO.

Zero evidence of that.

"Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence". Carl Sagan

Drakes equation fails.

This just proves you have no clue about what you are talking about. That's not an extraordinary claim, hell it's not even a claim, it's just a probability theory in math.

This post was an epic fail.

originally posted by: whereislogic
ou are refusing to consider and/or discuss the cause for our existence (our emergence) in that line of reasoning. You can continue to leave out the causal factors of 'chance (or a mindless process)' vs 'creation (or purposeful design)', from your arguments; but that doesn't change the underlying reasoning of such arguments. What you claim is "repeatable" is referring to the spontaneous generation of life by chance rather than by means of creation. Or at least it carries that implication in the context of the comment you were responding to in spite of any attempts to detract from it by focussing on just the subject of existence alone in that argument.

In so doing, you are also refusing to consider the proposed causal factor of 'creation', which includes properly evaluating it in comparison with the proposed causal factors of 'the forces of nature operating by chance events'. And you're ignoring the question (and any proposed causal explanation to): If such extraterrestrials existed, how did they get there (wherever they are proposed to live)?

OK.

So, assuming there is a supreme being how did it come into existence?

We're getting deep into theology here, but that - to me - is the fallacy of creation vs the development over time of bio chemistry.

One relies completely and utterley on blind faith - and nothing else.

The other relies on things we can actually measure and physically see.

This is why I - personally - can't accept a divine being as the basis of everything. I certainly can't accept a book of political ideology written by humans as evidence of one.

a reply to: Jay-morris

Jesus Christ is documented historically and the Bible is a document.

And your saying they aren't is wrong.