Conclusive evidence for Design!

[Candide_West]

You are confusing outcomes with specified ones. *What are the odds that if I shuffle the cards, throw them up and they land ace to 2 by suit 1,000 times out of 1,000 times?

Theres no need to do any repeating or any specifying. If you randomly shuffle two decks of cards together ANY order they come out in has a probability of 1x10^166. That is the odds of that event happening and it exceeds your UPB. So by your standard it must be designed. But we know it is not because we already stated it is random.*

Dembski himself claims 10^150 to be a most conservative number.

If the UPB is intended to exclude sand ripples on a beach from being classified as “designed” then “conservative” is to say the least a rather inadequate term.*

The answer lies in how we process recognition of design. *

Which of these two are designed and why?

Yes, exactly. You need something specific you can look for which allows recognition of design in general and just as importantly recognition of non-design. We’ve established that probability is not sufficient because:

a. It produces false positives even when faced with simple random events (ie shuffling two decks of cards)
b. It is fundamentally unable to distinguish between designed and undesigned patterns of equal complexity.

So what would you propose to distinguish between designed and undesigned complex patterns or events?

 

[Doxus]

The main problem is the confusion of complexity with design.

When you stumble on a watch, do you assume it had a watchmaker because it is complex? You may think so, but no. You assume it had a maker because we know that watches are made by watchmakers, and there’s no known process by which watches form naturally.

Let’s try it with something different.

You’re walking on a beach and you stumble upon a beautiful, hollow tube of glass with perfectly smooth sides. You’d assume the tube was made by a glassblower somewhere, maybe even a local. But you ask around town and no one recognizes the glass tube, until you ask that weird geologist bloke you know who says,

“Oh yeah, that’s a fulgerite. Caused by lightning hitting the beach and melting the glass. Definitely, perfectly matches these other examples,” and he pulls out a whole drawer full of them. “Beautiful specimen mate, I’ll buy it off ya’ for $20.”

Now knowing that the glass tube has a natural origin, you would no longer assume that it was made by human hands.

Or a different example. The earth’s water cycle is a beautiful system of interlocking parts that, if one part were to be removed, might fail utterly. You, with your faith in god, might say god designed it. However, scientists feel no such compulsion to invoke the supernatural in this case, because the water cycle, given the basic processes of evaporation, condensation, precipitation, run-off, ground seep, and plant transpiration… Given these naturally occurring processes, the water cycle arises spontaneously without the need for divine intervention.

 

[buffalo]

Theres no need to do any repeating or any specifying. If you randomly shuffle two decks of cards together ANY order they come out in has a probability of 1x10^166. That is the odds of that event happening and it exceeds your UPB. So by your standard it must be designed. But we know it is not because we already stated it is random.*

If the UPB is intended to exclude sand ripples on a beach from being classified as “designed” then “conservative” is to say the least a rather inadequate term.*

Yes, exactly. You need something specific you can look for which allows recognition of design in general and just as importantly recognition of non-design. We’ve established that probability is not sufficient because:

a. It produces false positives even when faced with simple random events (ie shuffling two decks of cards)
b. It is fundamentally unable to distinguish between designed and undesigned patterns of equal complexity.

So what would you propose to distinguish between designed and undesigned complex patterns or events?

The specifying is indeed important. So is complexity.

 

[Peter_Plato]

Theres no need to do any repeating or any specifying. If you randomly shuffle two decks of cards together ANY order they come out in has a probability of 1x10^166. That is the odds of that event happening and it exceeds your UPB. So by your standard it must be designed. But we know it is not because we already stated it is random.*

I believe the UPB has time constraints built into it - time since the Big Bang. That means that if your calculations are accurate regarding the shuffling of two decks, and this calculation is above the UPB, then there would not be enough time since the universe began, given Planck minimum units of time, to instantiate every possible outcome with the two decks of cards. The UPB defines the upper limit to the number of real possible events in time, it cannot cap the total number of possible events of any given scenario. Essentially, the UPB means you would not have enough time to deal all the possible options you characterized with two decks of cards, even if you started concurrent with the Big Bang event. So you would have run out of time if you started dealing then and so a large number of possible outcomes with the cards would not have occurred, yet.

The implication is that if the chance of any particular expected event occurring far exceeds the UPB then it is more likely to have been designed or brought about by some other means because relying on chance alone would mean it is far less likely to have occured than not.

 

[Doxus]

LOL!! You mean Wikipedia? Google? I could look up Brad Pitt being an alien and get some info. I’m in a biology class, and what I’ve learned is that evolution is not a fact or even a theory. The scientific method goes; Someone makes a discovery, it gets observed and examined, examined by others then peer reviewed…However, if the person making the discovery or the peer reviewers have a certain bias…namely atheism, then there is no theory or fact it is merely a hypothesis. I also have several quotes from noble prize winning atheists who admit they don’t believe in it themselves, but they also admit they don’t want to believe in God. And also spontaneous generation was dis-proven by Louis Pasteur. And the theory of “If it’s on the internet it must be true”, falls apart. Richard Dawkins had stated at a “reason” rally to “Ridicule the religious with contempt”, So, to summarize your position atheists will try to belittle Christians through verbal abuse and bullying…where’s the reason and logic in that? Oh, and if you want those quotes I can supply them. God does exist and He wants to forgive you, at least think about that.

I presume you’re going to a private school, of course. With a religious bias of its own.

Or else you just have one of those teachers.

 

[Peter_Plato]

The main problem is the confusion of complexity with design.

When you stumble on a watch, do you assume it had a watchmaker because it is complex? You may think so, but no. You assume it had a maker because we know that watches are made by watchmakers, and there’s no known process by which watches form naturally.

Let’s try it with something different.

You’re walking on a beach and you stumble upon a beautiful, hollow tube of glass with perfectly smooth sides. You’d assume the tube was made by a glassblower somewhere, maybe even a local. But you ask around town and no one recognizes the glass tube, until you ask that weird geologist bloke you know who says,

“Oh yeah, that’s a fulgerite. Caused by lightning hitting the beach and melting the glass. Definitely, perfectly matches these other examples,” and he pulls out a whole drawer full of them. “Beautiful specimen mate, I’ll buy it off ya’ for $20.”

Now knowing that the glass tube has a natural origin, you would no longer assume that it was made by human hands.

You are kidding right? I don’t know of many people who would, on seeing this:



be absolutely certain that it was made by a glass blower somewhere. You need to spend a little time actually looking seriously at what the arguments concerning design really claim. This is a feeble attempt to counter serious ID.

 

[Doxus]

I’ve seen ones much prettier, for the record. They smooth out rapidly once exposed to wave action, though they also tend to shatter more frequently.

And don’t assume that because I propose a simplistic argument at the start that my entire argument is simplistic. It’s not good to assume things, for the usual reasons.

 

[zro_x]

You have ultimate faith in the god of BUC.

I don’t know what BUC means, but I assume that it means that I have faith in science of the gaps. First of all I’m a Catholic, and secondly, I have to say that I’m getting tired of reapeating this over and over again: I do not have faith that science will explain everything! I’m just saying that from our perspective, it is still possible for science to accomplish this goal. It may eventually hit some sort of insurmountable roadblock, or it may not. I don’t have faith, in the sense that you mean it, about anything. You however, seem to have faith that science will hit this roadblock.

If science reached that point then it would be all knowing and thus God Himself.

Not all knowing, but perhaps all knowing about nature, yes.

 

[zro_x]

This sequence is limited to 1’s and 0’s only.

one could say that the genetic code is limited to ones, twos, threes, and fours only.

 

[Trurl]

My design-o-meter tells me the entire set up is designed to create random coin tosses. It’s contrived for sure.

You get an “F” (fail) for your reply.

Look, if you want to use coin tossing appropriately to depict what happened, say at the origin of life “event,” let us do it with gusto and stake it out properly.

That is very premature. I am not interested in any specific application of your “design-o-meter” - just YET (Will call it DOM for simplicity’s sake).

Before any DOM could be used for any specific problem, it must be CALIBRATED. It means that you must point it to something that is definitely designed and see if you DOM recognizes this fact. Then you must point it to something that is definitely NOT designed, and see if it can recognize THAT fact. Otherwise your DOM is a bogus junk.

Now I will present you two sequences of INFORMATION, without telling if either one, if any was “designed”. It will be coded in binary format, which is sufficient for analysis. Of course that is ALL you get. Pure unadultarated information.

Without a key it is most difficult. However, a bunch of 0’s and 1’s are constrained, thus planned. They have meaning thus designed. Seeing this sequence would get me interested to examine whether they have meaning. The design meter would not point to random.

Nonsense. The information presented is “coded” in a special form. The question is not about the method of coding, rather about the INFORMATION behind it. Was it random or designed?

---

So the problem is presented to all of you, “design-proponents”. Two sequences of symbols, of which either one, or maybe both, or maybe neither comes from a conscious design process. The possibly undesigned sequence may be random, or it may be something orderly, but undesigned. Grab your DOM, and tell us the result of your “analysis”.

Sequence #1:
010001100101000100110010010000100011000001100110010001110000100100110100

Sequence #2:
110001001000100100011110001110001010001001010001000100010001000100110001

Go for it. I am not giving you any clues, just a hint. “Maybe” one of them is PART of the binary coding of computer program, which would be designed. Also “maybe” one of them was the binary coding of a rat walking in a maze… which would be a random event or maybe something else.

I predict, that neither one of you can decipher this puzzle, so your purported DOM is pure junk!

 

[Candide_West]

The specifying is indeed important. So is complexity.

So… do you have any idea on what a criteria for detecting design could be then?

At the moment we have still got nothing to work with.

 

[buffalo]

I don’t know what BUC means, but I assume that it means that I have faith in science of the gaps. First of all I’m a Catholic, and secondly, I have to say that I’m getting tired of reapeating this over and over again: I do not have faith that science will explain everything! I’m just saying that from our perspective, it is still possible for science to accomplish this goal. It may eventually hit some sort of insurmountable roadblock, or it may not. I don’t have faith, in the sense that you mean it, about anything. You however, seem to have faith that science will hit this roadblock.

Not all knowing, but perhaps all knowing about nature, yes.

Yes - I refer to the god of BUC (blind, unguided chance)

God of the gaps - there will always be at least one gap or we will be God. So yes I have faith.

 

[buffalo]

one could say that the genetic code is limited to ones, twos, threes, and fours only.

Yes we could.

 

[buffalo]

You get an “F” (fail) for your reply.

That is very premature. I am not interested in any specific application of your “design-o-meter” - just YET (Will call it DOM for simplicity’s sake).

Before any DOM could be used for any specific problem, it must be CALIBRATED. It means that you must point it to something that is definitely designed and see if you DOM recognizes this fact. Then you must point it to something that is definitely NOT designed, and see if it can recognize THAT fact. Otherwise your DOM is a bogus junk.

Now I will present you two sequences of INFORMATION, without telling if either one, if any was “designed”. It will be coded in binary format, which is sufficient for analysis. Of course that is ALL you get. Pure unadultarated information.

Nonsense. The information presented is “coded” in a special form. The question is not about the method of coding, rather about the INFORMATION behind it. Was it random or designed?

---

So the problem is presented to all of you, “design-proponents”. Two sequences of symbols, of which either one, or maybe both, or maybe neither comes from a conscious design process. The possibly undesigned sequence may be random, or it may be something orderly, but undesigned. Grab your DOM, and tell us the result of your “analysis”.

Sequence #1:
010001100101000100110010010000100011000001100110010001110000100100110100

Sequence #2:
110001001000100100011110001110001010001001010001000100010001000100110001

Go for it. I am not giving you any clues, just a hint. “Maybe” one of them is PART of the binary coding of computer program, which would be designed. Also “maybe” one of them was the binary coding of a rat walking in a maze… which would be a random event or maybe something else.

I predict, that neither one of you can decipher this puzzle, so your purported DOM is pure junk!

So we go down the information trail. Where did information come from?

Your code is sending a message. Codes need a sender, receiver and a key. You refuse to give me the key. If you give me the key I can decode it.

 

[Candide_West]

I believe the UPB has time constraints built into it - time since the Big Bang. That means that if your calculations are accurate regarding the shuffling of two decks, and this calculation is above the UPB, then there would not be enough time since the universe began, given Planck minimum units of time, to instantiate every possible outcome with the two decks of cards. The UPB defines the upper limit to the number of real possible events in time, it cannot cap the total number of possible events of any given scenario. Essentially, the UPB means you would not have enough time to deal all the possible options you characterized with two decks of cards, even if you started concurrent with the Big Bang event. So you would have run out of time if you started dealing then and so a large number of possible outcomes with the cards would not have occurred, yet.

The implication is that if the chance of any particular expected event occurring far exceeds the UPB then it is more likely to have been designed or brought about by some other means because relying on chance alone would mean it is far less likely to have occured than not.

I’m afraid I can’t help you on why the UPB was proposed at the value it was. But the calculation for the probability of any particular result of mixing two decks of cards is quite simple. There are plenty of permutation calculator tools available for free on the internet, you can just do a search for “permutation calculator” and you should get plenty of options to choose from (along with explanations about how the calculation works if you’re interested).

set the value of n = 104, the value of r = 104 (selecting 104 cards out of 104) tell it that the order matters and the items cannot repeat. you should come out with 1x10^166

 

[buffalo]

I’m afraid I can’t help you on why the UPB was proposed at the value it was. But the calculation for the probability of any particular result of mixing two decks of cards is quite simple. There are plenty of permutation calculator tools available for free on the internet, you can just do a search for “permutation calculator” and you should get plenty of options to choose from (along with explanations about how the calculation works if you’re interested).

set the value of n = 104, the value of r = 104 (selecting 104 cards out of 104) tell it that the order matters and the items cannot repeat. you should come out with 1x10^166

I showed you how it was set on an earlier post. It is quite conservative. Borel placed it around 10^70 or so if I remember.

 

[tonyrey]

I presume you’re going to a private school, of course. With a religious bias of its own.

Or else you just have one of those teachers.

Á superb example of an argumentum ad hominem which does precisely nothing to further the discussion!

 

[tonyrey]

So we go down the information trail. Where did information come from?

Your code is sending a message. Codes need a sender, receiver and a key. You refuse to give me the key. If you give me the key I can decode it.

Anyone can invent a code that is impossible to decipher! It is quite evident that belief in absurdity begets more absurdity…

 

[Doxus]

On the subject of genetic information and abiogenesis:

Let’s look at a sequenced bacterial genome. The cyanobacteria anabaena nostoc has a genome 6,413,771 base pairs long, with 5,368 genes. Simple division tells us that the average length of a gene in that bacteria is about 1200 base pairs.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sequenced_bacterial_genomes#Cyanobacteria
It’s actually probably shorter than that, because of the presence of structural and/or “junk” DNA. But we’ll assume the worst case.

Plug the numbers into a permutation calculator and you get about 2.89x10^8 possible permutations of that length of gene. Many genes are actually shorter, as short as 200 base pairs.
mathsisfun.com/combinatorics/combinations-permutations-calculator.html

Let’s also assume the worst case and assume that there are only about 100,000 functional permutations in that 12000 base pair set. That means that only ~0.0346% of gene permutations are functional, again assuming extremely worst case scenarios.

That still means you only need a few thousand random assortments of base pairs before you start finding functional genes. Again, for 12000 base pair sequences. And during the formation of life on earth in the oceans there would have been trillions (or more) of random assortments of base pairs, over millions of years, often occurring inside lipid bilayer bubbles where the chemistry would be isolated.

Talking about probability as if it discredits abiogenesis demonstrates a profound misunderstanding of how many things there are, as well as a poor grasp of probability and statistics.

 

[atheistgirl]

I’m in a biology class, and what I’ve learned is that evolution is not a fact or even a theory.

For the good of your future education, you need to change schools now. The Catholic Church herself recognizes the fact of evolution.

The scientific method goes; Someone makes a discovery, it gets observed and examined, examined by others then peer reviewed…However, if the person making the discovery or the peer reviewers have a certain bias…namely atheism, then there is no theory or fact it is merely a hypothesis.

This is too funny.

Check out the requirements to be published in AinG.org

If you’re a scientist - and they prefer people to hold doctorates in their specialty, to get on their list, and get published, you have to print off, sign and agree to their statement of faith. Their statement of faith includes the following:

*The following are held by members of the Board of Answers in Genesis to be either consistent with Scripture or implied by Scripture:

■Scripture teaches a recent origin for man and the whole creation, spanning approximately 4,000 years from creation to Christ.
■The days in Genesis do not correspond to geologic ages, but are six [6] consecutive twenty-four [24] hour days of creation.
■The Noachian Flood was a significant geological event and much (but not all) fossiliferous sediment originated at that time.
■The gap theory has no basis in Scripture.
■The view, commonly used to evade the implications or the authority of biblical teaching, that knowledge and/or truth may be divided into secular and religious, is rejected.
■**By definition, no apparent, perceived or claimed evidence in any field, including history and chronology, can be valid if it contradicts the scriptural record. *Of primary importance is the fact that evidence is always subject to interpretation by fallible people who do not possess all information.



So much for the scientific method and peer review eh?

Sarah x