Being a Theistic evolutionist?

[rossum]

We ned independent evidence

Agreed.

were you there at the time?

There is very little point in asking a question to which you already know the answer. That wastes both your time and my time. Much better to ask the question, “how do you know what happened at the time?” I was not there when you were born, however I can observe your presence here and now and the fact that you pass the Turing Test. Because of those observations I can deduce that you were indeed born sometime in the last 150 years. Even though I was not there, I can have some knowledge of the past.

that abiogenesis was a random event.

Chemistry is not a “random event”. We do not see a random mixture of H[sub]2[/sub]O, H[sub]3[/sub]O, H[sub]4[/sub]O etc. We see a non-random mixture of overwhelmingly H[sub]2[/sub]O.

You can’t offer any because there is none.

Correct. Abiogenesis is chemistry, and chemistry is not random. Lipid bilayers do not form randomly; the experiment to generate a lipid bilayer has been repeatedly performed and has been repeatedly successful.

What I offer is the great unlikelihood that this was a random event because it sure looks designed!

Personal opinion is not evidence.

My God is bigger than yours!

So? My gods have more arms than yours!

rossum

 

[rossum]

My own personal non-scientific opinion is that the universe and everything in it was intelligently designed by God, and that He did it in such a way that it is perfectly consistent with the laws of nature that He also designed, so that no one will ever be able to prove the existence of God by pointing to inconsistencies in the laws of nature.

It is possible to think on the universe as a piece of ultimate self-assembly furniture, designed by God.

God doesn’t even have to open the box, check all the bits and put them together. He just sits back and the bits unpack themselves, check themselves and assemble themselves, because that is the way He designed them (except for that annoying little bit of something that is always left over at the end).

Of course, that level of design is well above the type of specific “designer of life” designer that the ID side talk about. With the higher level of designer, all science is doing is to describe the details of how the self-assembly works.

$0.02

rossum

 

[TEPO]

Evolution = we don’t know why life mutates aside from chance.

ID = life mutates in ways because God allows it.

…in any case, there are infinite gasses and elements within the universe. Also, life seems to have a ‘memory’, which means that mutation only occurs where life has no memory of a preconceived state of resistance.

…so what do you call somebody who believes that all life exists with a pre-determined memory, infused by the designer, that determines which ways life may mutate or remain the same? And those abilities to change or remain the same reflect the point of conception where memory becomes permanently stamped within a given species.

(Okay, so I’m bored and I’m babbling…)

 

[TEPO]

It is possible to think on the universe as a piece of ultimate self-assembly furniture, designed by God.

God doesn’t even have to open the box, check all the bits and put them together. He just sits back and the bits unpack themselves, check themselves and assemble themselves, because that is the way He designed them (except for that annoying little bit of something that is always left over at the end).

Of course, that level of design is well above the type of specific “designer of life” designer that the ID side talk about. With the higher level of designer, all science is doing is to describe the details of how the self-assembly works.

$0.02

rossum

I really enjoyed this analogy Rossum. Thanks.

(Not so sure about your signature though…)

 

[TEPO]

Food for thought: has anyone ever wondered why medicines work? I think it’s because life is designed to mutate. Therefore life is capable of both mutation and remaining the same (memory). . (there could be no other way )

 

[Charlemagne_III]

Correct. Abiogenesis is chemistry, and chemistry is not random. Lipid bilayers do not form randomly; the experiment to generate a lipid bilayer has been repeatedly performed and has been repeatedly successful.

Were these exxperiments intelligently designed, or were they random experiments?

 

[Charlemagne_III]

It is possible to think on the universe as a piece of ultimate self-assembly furniture, designed by God.

It’s also possible to think of the universe as a piece of self-assembly furniture not designed by God.

That is the atheist position.

So what is your point? That anything is possible? Hardly worth wasting our time with that.

 

[TEPO]

Well, if everything I’m surrounded by is stardust, and I’m made of stardust, then how else could the ‘furniture’ build itself if God didnt think it?

…and if sciences only purpose is to describe the details, then why is there both resistance to change as well as proof of evolution? I’d be interested in learning more about what this ‘anti-mutate’ ability is and how it forms what gets to stay the same. I’m not interested in learning how things change -we already know about that, which involves chemistry.

This other ‘opposite’ ability is much more mysterious.

 

[Peter_Plato]

It’s also possible to think of the universe as a piece of self-assembly furniture not designed by God.

That is the atheist position.

So what is your point? That anything is possible? Hardly worth wasting our time with that.

You do have to wonder where the tendency towards self-assembly, itself, came from. The atheist position is that such a capacity is a function of the nature of chemicals interacting with the laws of physics. In some sense, that is precisely the position of the theistic evolutionist, i.e, that God front-loaded the capacity into the laws of physics and the nature of matter itself.

The problem for both the atheist and the theistic evolutionist is that the self-assembly of life is ordered and run by the genetic coding in DNA and RNA. It is a problem because the functional complexity of that code is inexplicable - and seemingly not at all influenced - by laws of physics or chemistry.

The order of the nucleotide bases along the spine of a DNA molecule has no connection to any chemical or physical causal antecedents. This is akin to software code in firmware, computer systems or microchip technology. The code is written onto a physical medium but there is nothing in the nature of the medium or laws of physics that explains the specific functional organization found in the code that brings about the ordered results (regulation, self-assembly, replication, etc.)

It is the origin of the specified and complex functionally coherent information found in DNA and RNA that must be explained by both the athiest and the theistic evolutionist since there is no clear connection between laws of chemistry and physics, and the complex code.

This is a “gap” for both the evolution endorsing theist and the materialist atheist which IDvolutionists continue to demonstrate is a very real and perplexing conundrum.

It isn’t just that self-assembly needs to be explained, it is that the specifically inscribed instruction “manual” for self-assembly that exists in genetic code needs to be explained. If it is simply that chemistry and physical laws will explain self-organization why did these, together, need to (in anthroposophical terms) conceive of and write a superfluous instruction manual in what can only be called a “language of instruction” to manage and direct self-organization?

The plot, as they say, thickens.

 

[rossum]

Were these exxperiments intelligently designed, or were they random experiments?

Your confusion is due to the confusing rhetoric of the ID side. Those experiments were designed by humans. That does not mean that lipid bilayers, and the chemistry underlying them, were also designed by humans. I can design an experiment to study the tides. Does that mean that I designed the tides themselves?

Design of an experiment just means that the experiment is designed. That is all.

rossum

 

[rossum]

The order of the nucleotide bases along the spine of a DNA molecule has no connection to any chemical or physical causal antecedents.

Completely false. The vast majority of the DNA in any living organism is inherited from its parent(s). It has a very obvious and well known antecedent.

It is the origin of the specified and complex functionally coherent information found in DNA and RNA that must be explained by both the athiest and the theistic evolutionist since there is no clear connection between laws of chemistry and physics, and the complex code.

How do you measure the information in DNA? We already know that simple evolutionary processes can increase Shannon information and Kolmogorov information in DNA. What objective measure of information are you using? Unless you can measure it we cannot say whether it has increased, decreased or stayed unchanged.

rossum

 

[TEPO]

You do have to wonder where the tendency towards self-assembly, itself, came from. The atheist position is that such a capacity is a function of the nature of chemicals interacting with the laws of physics. In some sense, that is precisely the position of the theistic evolutionist, i.e, that God front-loaded the capacity into the laws of physics and the nature of matter itself.

The problem for both the atheist and the theistic evolutionist is that the self-assembly of life is ordered and run by the genetic coding in DNA and RNA. It is a problem because the functional complexity of that code is inexplicable - and seemingly not at all influenced - by laws of physics or chemistry.

The order of the nucleotide bases along the spine of a DNA molecule has no connection to any chemical or physical causal antecedents. This is akin to software code in firmware, computer systems or microchip technology. The code is written onto a physical medium but there is nothing in the nature of the medium or laws of physics that explains the specific functional organization found in the code that brings about the ordered results (regulation, self-assembly, replication, etc.)

It is the origin of the specified and complex functionally coherent information found in DNA and RNA that must be explained by both the athiest and the theistic evolutionist since there is no clear connection between laws of chemistry and physics, and the complex code.

This is a “gap” for both the evolution endorsing theist and the materialist atheist which IDvolutionists continue to demonstrate is a very real and perplexing conundrum.

It isn’t just that self-assembly needs to be explained, it is that the specifically inscribed instruction “manual” for self-assembly that exists in genetic code needs to be explained. If it is simply that chemistry and physical laws will explain self-organization why did these, together, need to (in anthroposophical terms) conceive of and write a superfluous instruction manual in what can only be called a “language of instruction” to manage and direct self-organization?

The plot, as they say, thickens.

Yes. Where does this predictability or ability to retain form come from? Why do certain elements always react the same way to others -thus having ‘memory’…?

…this resistance to change, must be part of the whole process of our abillity to all be so similar to each other. The way things take shape has ‘memory’ written all over it. Everything it seems has a polar opposite… Some things change others do not.

DNA is like a ‘memory’ chip, that allows some things to change over time, while denying other changes.

 

[TEPO]

Completely false. The vast majority of the DNA in any living organism is inherited from its parent(s). It has a very obvious and well known antecedent.

rossum

what force allows memory to be handed down from generation to generation (through DNA) to react a certain way to chemicals and elements found in nature?

This ability to transfer memory seems magical. is there a theory on it -im new to this.

 

[TEPO]

Perhaps that force is called “life”. Perhaps life is not material at all then…

…if this is true, then we really are spirits that control matter (stardust).

 

[Peter_Plato]

Completely false. The vast majority of the DNA in any living organism is inherited from its parent(s). It has a very obvious and well known antecedent.

rossum

That is like saying we know where the OS on any computer came from, it was copied from the "parent” installation disk or iCloud server onto the computer so it has a very obvious and well-known antecedent. It explains, precisely, NOTHING.

The explanation is too “obvious” perhaps because it surreptitiously “hides” the fact that it doesn’t explain the genesis of the “code” behind an explanation for how the code is transmitted. Nor does it explain why the material substrate would ever, of its own accord, come up with such an ingenious method of extending its functionality well beyond its limited “essential” inorganic nature to “Hey, I’m alive and can think about what it means to be alive!”

Why would that even be important to something that is fated to return to inorganic matter despite the apparently grandiose redundancy of this great new innovative functionality? Seems a rather loopy innovation - not quite an infinitely loopy one, but loopy, nonetheless - if atheism is true.

It also seems a great “prank” of nature to give rise to the profound capacity of a “bag of chemicals” to transcend itself and reflect upon its own existence only to reveal, in the end, that the “bag of chemicals” is only a “bag of chemicals” after all, only with pretensions of being something more. A fitting lesson for being so pretentious, apparently.

Yes, Mother Nature is surely at this little jest. Good thing we have those sober atheists around to forewarn the gullible and keeping the more pretentious of us humble.

 

[Ambien89]

I had read some Hebrew exegesis of genesis once that had stated that the Hebrew word used for ‘skins’ in 3:21 was not the word for hides/leathers, etc. but specifically for flesh. That is to say that after the Fall, Adam and Eve were given new flesh: perishable flesh.

So, in my speculative opinion, Adam and Eve had fundamentally different bodies in the Garden, and our world is a perishable one with a perishable past, which they were inserted into. This idea is something slightly like an ‘alternative timeline’ plot of modern science fiction. That is to say, that this world/timeline did not have to be so, but it was created in response to the freely-willed Fall of Adam and Eve.

After all, look at the moral repugnance of evolution as an origin: Man is the apex predator of the land, yet man is reflective, communal, intelligent, imitative, creative, introspective, religious, etc. Now look at the apex predator of the Ocean, the shark, which is nothing like a man. Sheer evolutionary dominance cannot explain man as he is, only as his fleshly body is (that it is ape like). And the more man begins to animalize himself through evolutionary psychology and pop-sci, the more those human qualities mentioned above will wither and die.

 

[Peter_Plato]

How do you measure the information in DNA? We already know that simple evolutionary processes can increase Shannon information and Kolmogorov information in DNA. What objective measure of information are you using? Unless you can measure it we cannot say whether it has increased, decreased or stayed unchanged.

rossum

I am not clear that an explanation for the increase or decrease in information is even an issue. The question is why information that was susceptible to alteration existed in DNA in the first place.

If it was the case that the amount of information in original DNA was the same as it is today and merely structurally altered to bring about the array of new life, the anticipatory “open architecture” of the code would then require explanation. Got one?

If the amount of information has increased, the issue still comes down to how the original information could have been amenable to addition without destruction, since “random” change to information is virtually always destructive. Got one?

If information “amount” has decreased then an explanation for the inverse correlation of increase in complexity in life forms to decrease in genetic information would be required. Got one?

It seems to me that you have a “problem of explanation” regardless of which information scenario you choose. It is a logical problem that needs to be overcome.

There is information in DNA, how did that information come about since it could not have been the result of chemical processes or physical laws.

There are no chemical processes that explain the “information” in these words I am typing on the screen. Even though their embodiment as arrangements of screen text is explainable in terms of electronics, the information or “conceptual content” can not AT ALL be explained in terms of electrochemical analysis. The problem is almost identical for genetic code.

Nucleotide bases that “carry” the code are manifestations of chemistry and laws of physics, but the complex and specified arrangement of those bases that IS the genetic code is not explained by laws of physics and chemistry.

You KNOW that, you simply have an impossible time admitting that you know that.

 

[rossum]

what force allows memory to be handed down from generation to generation (through DNA) to react a certain way to chemicals and elements found in nature?

This ability to transfer memory seems magical. is there a theory on it -im new to this.

Do you have an example of what you mean? Some inter-generational transfers are epigenetic, while others are built into DNA (such as the pattern of a spider’s web).

rossum

 

[Ambien89]

Processes are responsible for nothing. 1+1 is not ‘responsible for’ 2. The premises by which addition is operative and he who carries out an addition are responsible for the creation of 2 from 1 and 1.

The claim of atheistic evolution then is that any and all physicall processes are purely ‘random’. However, the definition of randomness is only founded on ignorance. It would be better if no philosophical claims about randomness and what nature is, were attached to a purely physical theory.

 

[Peter_Plato]

I had read some Hebrew exegesis of genesis once that had stated that the Hebrew word used for ‘skins’ in 3:21 was not the word for hides/leathers, etc. but specifically for flesh. That is to say that after the Fall, Adam and Eve were given new flesh: perishable flesh.

So, in my speculative opinion, Adam and Eve had fundamentally different bodies in the Garden, and our world is a perishable one with a perishable past, which they were inserted into. This idea is something slightly like an ‘alternative timeline’ plot of modern science fiction. That is to say, that this world/timeline did not have to be so, but it was created in response to the freely-willed Fall of Adam and Eve.

After all, look at the moral repugnance of evolution as an origin: Man is the apex predator of the land, yet man is reflective, communal, intelligent, imitative, creative, introspective, religious, etc. Now look at the apex predator of the Ocean, the shark, which is nothing like a man. Sheer evolutionary dominance cannot explain man as he is, only as his fleshly body is (that it is ape like). And the more man begins to animalize himself through evolutionary psychology and pop-sci, the more those human qualities mentioned above will wither and die.

A good point to ponder. Unfortunately, human beings often exhibit “shark-like” characteristics. Although, admittedly, when these take hold, there are large manifestos (Mein Kampf, Das Kapital, Manifesto of the Chinese People’s Liberation Army, etc.) that attempt to put a human face on shark-like behaviour, showing, I guess, that deep down we know we are transcendent beings but have to justify our “animalized” behaviour with convoluted reflective analysis.