109 Searching for reference

Famous quote from a famous scientist. Where does it come from?

[iansmith]

Another great episode Phillip, you are destroying the fiction of evolution one episode at a time.

[technicianbis-igzd]

Thankyou dr Stott, always look forward to you're videos.

[tychonian]

Bravo, Philip. This was one of your best. I like how you respond to people wondering about the source.

[seaknightvirchow]

Because of the issue of where the Wald quote came from, I also looked into it.I perused the Scientific American articles. I also bought a small booklet that published the Massey Lectures called Therefore Choose Life. Wald noted that while teaching at Harvard his students were “more and more upset, more and more troubled. It’s been harder and harder for me to teach them and, it seems, harder and harder for them to learn. Of course I’ve had to ask myself what it is that is troubling them…” which led to the Massey lectures.
I could not find that exact quote but nevertheless, the quote encapsulates what Wald believed and taught. He was a thorough going materialist. He was a Bible reader but saw in it an endearing Jewish cultural heritage, not God.
The title of his lectures, Therefore Choose Life, is from Deuteronomy 30:19. This is ironic given that his philosophy was 180 degrees out from Moses. He says explicitly that nature is his god and it is from science that he finds meaning, the glory of humanity is that we are products of a long process of evolution from star dust; this is the source of inspiration for his students to find meaning and inspiration again.
As an activist he said that our species is faced with three existential threats: pollution, nuclear war, and overpopulation. We are like dinosaurs over utilizing resources possibly to extinction. He thinks that someday some scientist will create life in a laboratory though he would not live to see it.
The contradictions in this sincere and brilliant man are the substance of schizophrenia. If evolution were true, then nature will be self correcting and we need not worry because the universe can get along just fine without us.
At one point he takes the last six commandments of Moses are really about the survival of the species and society, are universal, and have value for us regardless of how they were codified.
He recommends universal birth control to limit the population which is already too large at 3.5 billion but the poorest nations reject birth control therefore increasing poverty. Well, evolution is about the survival of the fittest and the fittest are those who leave the most descendants so this is a strange position to take.
I believe Wald was a deeply ethical man with no foundation either for his science or his ethics but one never knows, he might have just been an egomaniac with a Uriah Heep affect but I don’t think so. Nevertheless, as he opined about political and social issues, it seems that there is a smidgeon of hubris within his mindset.
I would not use his quote as his actual words but that quote does not corrupt his philosophy.

[prime-rib]

I found the book and ordered it from Ebay....I'll let you know if it actually arrives.

[roysammons]

"Time the greatest enemy for the Evolutionist".
😂 My Mrs kept repeating it as you were building up to it 😂😂😂
A very good honest approach Dr Stott.

[faanoosthuizen]

Brilliant!! Well done Philip!
Praise God for revealing His wisdom to those who fear Him and to the humble - to make foolish the carnal humanistic physical wisdom of men who deny and disobey Him. The beginning of wisdom is the fear of God.
It is proven iindeed, only fools say there is no God.

[sifundogumede]

Incredible video 😃, always going to great detail in deed .

I remember you talking about Irriduceble complexity I think, and I researched one of those irreducible complex creatures and found the bombardier beetle it was an amazing example of it, Richard Dawkins however did A misleading experiment or example, he gave an example that said once upon a Time the Bomberder beetles hot spray was less hotter . He did an experiment showing how it went from weak to medium and then two hot 🔥, but he failed to consider that if there was ever a time in the Bomberder beetal s history where it's hot molten spray was weak it would no longer exist because of natural selection it would have been dubbed a creature that had the worst defence mechanism, practically just shooting water at the time of its existence.

The Bumble dryer beetle spray head to have been molten hot from the moment of its existence for it to have survived for this long. It would have been selected out by natural selection.

When i was a child listening to people like him, it was never what they said that made me doubt my faith in God and his young creation, but it was their confidence, how they said it.

The confidence of the evolutionist was scery to me, but know i know it's backed up by nothing 😊

[mendoncacorreia]

"It has occurred to me lately—I must confess with some shock at first to my scientific sensibilities—that both questions might be brought into some degree of congruence. This is with the assumption that MIND, rather than emerging as a late outgrowth in the evolution of life, has existed always, as the matrix, the source and condition of physical reality—that the stuff of which physical reality is composed is MIND-stuff. It is MIND that has composed a physical Universe that breeds life, and so eventually evolves creatures that know and create: science-, art-, and technology-making animals. In them the universe begins to know itself." (George Wald, 'Life and mind in the universe', International Journal of Quantum Chemistry, 12-15 March 1984.)

[JoshuaLeonard-iejr]

Proverbs 14:1 tells us fools deny God with their heart, yet many fools like Wald can't escape the inevitable fact in their head that there is a God.

[marierejoiceinjesus]

I messaged you on Patreon. I found a senate congressional record from 1979 that quotes him similar. YT deletes all links.

[BrettCoryell]

On Hoyle and the 10^40, 000 calculation. Dr. Stott, I think you should walk us through that calculation in a video. Where did that number come from?

Prediction: If you show us how Hoyle got that number, we will all see that:
1) the formation of whatever bacteria he's assuming is assumed to come from completely random events. Stawman. This is not how anybody thinks life arose.
2) the math will assume a series of independent events (sequential trials). Strawman. Things don't have to happen in one and only one order, independently.
3) it will assume that the only enzymes allowed for life are the exact ones we have today. Stawman. Nobody thinks this is the only way it could have happened.

All of these things affect the math. Imagine if you said the only way to solve a Rubik's Cube was to make random moves. The math would show it's impossible! That's not how anybody solves the cube, so math based on the presumption of pure randomness and independent events is irrelevant. Hoyle's math is irrelevant in the same way.

But you'll never make that video because you already know it has these shortcomings. Dr. Stott, why do you put forward weak arguments with known flaws?

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even if life arose from non-intelligent spontaneous generation, the question is how did we get our intelligence from such a process?

[BrettCoryell]

0:25 Quoting Wald, "When it comes to the origin of life, we have only two possibilities as to how life arose." And here is another reason why the Wald quote doesn't matter. There are more than two possibilities. This is well known.

Why hold this quote up as evidence of anything? It is not the position of the majority of scientists, nor has it been the position of a number of famous philosophers and theologians throughout the centuries. Philo, Origen, Maimonedes, and Thomas Aquinas all considered the possibility of an eternal universe made by nobody. Descartes, a good Christian, also considered the possibility that everything he perceives was created by a deceiver. Nobody thinks there are only two possibilities here.

Why does Dr. Stott bring us the worst, weakest, most childish form of the argument? If there is affirmative evidence for God creating life, then let's have it.

[BrettCoryell]

0:20 "[The Wald quote] is so well known, I didn't think twice about using it." And here is the crux of the problem. The same problem that happens over and over in Dr. Stott's videos. He doesn't check his sources. He doesn't care what is true. He only looks for things that confirm his current beliefs. That's a recipe for self-delusion.

Because Dr. Stott is not careful with the facts -- even after he is corrected -- people should not believe what he says about factual matters.

Will we find that quote? Maybe, maybe not. What Wald thinks about God is not the important question. The important question is always, "Does Dr. Stott have a good and reliable reason for believing the things he is telling us about science?" The answer to that question is no for dozens and dozens and dozens of topics.

[prime-rib]

I forget the details, but a bunch of mathematicians got together in the 1960s and crunched these numbers. They came away from their conference with the conclusion that the evolutionists needed to come up with a different theory of the origin of life. Although the idea of the multiverse had been around since the 50s, it was at this time that it began to get traction. I remember being taught in the 70s during high school about the concept - with the idea that if there are an infinite number of universes, the probability of one like our is 1. But this isn't science. It's merely a philosophical attempt to avoid a creator. The same can be said about the Big Bang, string theory and much of what else passes for science today.