Creationism v. Intelligent Design v. Evolution

[buffalo]

The core issue, really. Even with incredible amounts of time in which to take place, life is phenomenally unlikely to occur. If it occurs in the way current scientific theory assumes it must have, which, remember, is still not proven to actually be possible nevermind to have actually happened, no matter how much anyone here tries to dress it up as a moot point…

As for intelligent life, the chances for that occuring as the result of random mutation (with or without it’s cosy, misleading metaphor, “adaption”) is so absurdly low, to believe that such has occurred by chance strikes me as irrational!

Or at least it does when I’ve got the stats… anyone remember what they are? At one point I thought it was 10 to the power of 40,000, but apparently that’s the number of particles in the universe… anyone know what the figure actually is, so I can keep quoting a number in arguments like this?

10 to the 78 is the number of atoms in the universe. Anything over 10 to the 150th is beyond chance.

 

[edwest2]

“For origin of life on Earth, any scenario with a probability less than 10 to the superscript -70 will be considered falsified scientifically (infeasible).”

“For abiogenesis, we would consider 10 to the superscript -164 as the probability of forming a simple life-compatible protein by physicality, or the simplest form of living organism known as 10 to the superscript -340,000,000. These figures make these scenarios operationally falsified.”

Source: Programming of Life by Donald E. Johnson.

Peace,
Ed

 

[Neildown]

The main reason I do not believe in God bc He is supernatural and I don’t believe in anything supernatural.

May I comment on this? Because I have an hypothesis of my own which I think might make sense to an atheist, and I’ve been itching to present it. Like I said, its just an hypothesis, but it may add a little more understanding and a better perception of spirituality.

"Now, many people look at paranormal things as childish, unbelievable, and illogical for the simple fact that they can’t really be explained or interpreted. Basically it is looked at like a fairy tale. I contend that the supernatural is not just some weird state of existence or part of some other world - rather - I suppose that the spiritual world is, essentially, a notch on a spectrum.

“Perhaps, much like light, there is a ‘spectrum’ of reality. If this were the case, it might give a more understandable explanation of how a spiritual soul can exist within a physical body - two different parts coexisting as in a single unit. But since the higher spectrum is imperceptible to the lower spectrum involved, it is almost as if the higher one does not exist - but its effects are still evident. Almost like wind was to the people of old - you could feel it and hear it, but there wasn’t really anything there to see despite the fact that it did and does indeed exist.” - © Neildown

If one looks at spirituality in this way it makes a lot more sense, provided it doesn’t confuse one instead - and it explains in a somewhat scientific way how spirituality can logically exist. If you look at our world, everything belongs on some sort of scale, be it temperature, time, light, or anything else really. Who is to suppose that reality itself does not exist on its own scale? Anyway, that is just some food for thought - hope it’s something to nibble on!

 

[samiam1611]

May I comment on this? Because I have an hypothesis of my own which I think might make sense to an atheist, and I’ve been itching to present it. Like I said, its just an hypothesis, but it may add a little more understanding and a better perception of spirituality.

"Now, many people look at paranormal things as childish, unbelievable, and illogical for the simple fact that they can’t really be explained or interpreted. Basically it is looked at like a fairy tale. I contend that the supernatural is not just some weird state of existence or part of some other world - rather - I suppose that the spiritual world is, essentially, a notch on a spectrum.

“Perhaps, much like light, there is a ‘spectrum’ of reality. If this were the case, it might give a more understandable explanation of how a spiritual soul can exist within a physical body - two different parts coexisting as in a single unit. But since the higher spectrum is imperceptible to the lower spectrum involved, it is almost as if the higher one does not exist - but its effects are still evident. Almost like wind was to the people of old - you could feel it and hear it, but there wasn’t really anything there to see despite the fact that it did and does indeed exist.” - © Neildown

If one looks at spirituality in this way it makes a lot more sense, provided it doesn’t confuse one instead - and it explains in a somewhat scientific way how spirituality can logically exist. If you look at our world, everything belongs on some sort of scale, be it temperature, time, light, or anything else really. Who is to suppose that reality itself does not exist on its own scale? Anyway, that is just some food for thought - hope it’s something to nibble on!

Took me a couple of re-reads to understand! I wouldn’t say it explains it logically exactly. (I am not saying it it illogical though.) Logic to me means more like deductive reasoning. I think maybe this is a less imaginative way to explain it than I have heard before? By that, I mean, less fantasy, more real. (I don’t mean less imaginative like less creative or whatever - it is definitely a new concept to me.)
It sounds kind of like you can appreciate how a scientifically-minded person might think, so you kind of meet me halfway. and I appreciate that, much more than the atheists are so illogical kind of comments.
I’m curious, did you actually copyright that?

 

[buffalo]

Uh OH! Essential reading for evo supporters.

The Evolutionary Accessibility of New Enzyme Functions: A Case Study from the Biotin Pathway

…This leads Koonin and Wolf
to reject convergent evolution (extensive similarity appearing
by evolution from dissimilar starting points) as implausible.
But from this they conclude that homology, while not
formally proven by similarity, is nonetheless overwhelmingly
supported in cases where chance convergence is implausible.
The problem with this is that all non-chance alternatives
must be considered once chance is ruled out. Yet Koonin and
Wolf consider only one of these alternatives—the standard
Darwinian one.
We agree with their rejection of chance, but we argue here
that the Darwinian explanation also appears to be inadequate.
Its deficiencies become evident when the focus moves from
similarities to dissimilarities, and in particular to functionally
important dissimilarities—to innovations. The extent to which
Darwinian evolution can explain enzymatic innovation seems,
on careful inspection, to be very limited. Large-scale innovations
that result in new protein folds appear to be well outside
its range [5]. This paper argues that at least some small-scale
innovations may also be beyond its reach. If studies of this
kind continue to imply that this is typical rather than exceptional,
then answers to the most interesting origins questions
will probably remain elusive until the full range of explanatory
alternatives is considered.

When Theory and Experiment Collide

…As other scientists have found with other enzymes, it turned out not to be a snap. The technical details are reported in a paper just published in BIO-Complexity. [2] Here we’ll keep it simple.
Based on our experimental observations and on calculations we made using a published population model [3], we estimated that Darwin’s mechanism would need a truly staggering amount of time—a trillion trillion years or more—to accomplish the seemingly subtle change in enzyme function that we studied.
Now, if I were a Darwinist a result like this would bother me. I’m sure some of my fellow Darwinists would try to dismiss it as irrelevant… but that would bother me all the more.
The excuse for shrugging it off would, I expect, be that the transition we examined isn’t actually one that anyone thinks occurred in the history of life. That’s true, but it badly misses the point. As Ann and I made clear in the paper, our aim wasn’t to replicate a historical transition, but rather to identify what ought to be a relatively easy transition and find out how hard or easy it really is. We put it this way in the paper [2]:Whether or not a particular conversion ever occurred as a paralogous innovation (or the direction in which it occurred if it did) is not the point of interest here. Rather, the point is to identify the kind of functional innovation that ought to be among the most feasible …] and then to assess how feasible this innovation is.
So, if I had a Darwinist alter ego, here’s the problem he’d be facing right now. To dismiss our study as irrelevant, he’d have to say (in effect) that he sees no inconsistency between these two assessments of the power of Darwin’s mechanism:
http://biologicinstitute.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/transitions.jpg
But that’s not an easy thing to say with a straight face, is it?
Having always believed the bottom picture to be correct, my alter ego would be very reluctant to reject it. And yet he wouldn’t be able to deny the obvious. There is in fact a jaw-dropping, ludicrous, even grotesque inconsistency between the top picture and the bottom picture. They can’t possibly both be true. But that realization, of course, forces an uncomfortable decision.
And here I must confess to feeling more than a little sympathy for my alter ego. I think it’s because of what we have in common.
He loves science.
So do I.
He loves stories.
So do I.
He sees a role for stories in framing scientific ideas.
So do I.
And he has said to himself, “The progress of science has invalidated my alter ego’s favorite story.”
So have I.

 

[lankin]

Wanstronian,

You’re right, the scientific method has been developing for millenia. I was referring to the catholic church’s influence in its revolution. Truth is capitalized because (1) it is not subjective and (2) there is both spiritual truth and material truth.

I never said the world was perfect. I used “more perfect” in the sense that species can evolve and approach harmony with their environment. This is about the reconciliation of science and religion. I was speaking about how some Christians reject science because they perceive a conflict. What is unfortunate is how some pastors, educated or not, are preaching about how science is evil and DNA is the work of the devil, etc. That is the extreme but any anti-science viewpoint is worrisome.

I was not arguing that evolution proves the existence of God. Science does not account for “supernatural phenomena,” true, but that doesn’t mean God’s work is apart from it. Why can’t evolution be a design of God? God is ‘seen’ through the study of natural phenomena of His design. Whether you believe it to be of His design or not is up to you, but something doesn’t have to be brought forth by miracle to be an instrument of God.

It is explicitly written in the CCC that there can be no conflict between science and religion. What you perceive to be a contradiction in Genesis is actually a misinterpretation–in this case, it is probably an incomplete understanding of the Bible. The Bible is not a scientific document and I don’t expect an account of creation to give a literal, scientific message. Read it for what it is.

Science is not anti-religion, it is apart from religion. Confusing the two leads to things like Creationism. If one seeks the truth, he should respect their complementary nature.

 

[lankin]

“For origin of life on Earth, any scenario with a probability less than 10 to the superscript -70 will be considered falsified scientifically (infeasible).”

“For abiogenesis, we would consider 10 to the superscript -164 as the probability of forming a simple life-compatible protein by physicality, or the simplest form of living organism known as 10 to the superscript -340,000,000. These figures make these scenarios operationally falsified.”

Source: Programming of Life by Donald E. Johnson.

Peace,
Ed

This is where current scientific explanations fail. Given enough time, true, anything can happen. But even billions of years is not nearly enough time for some of these proposals to have probabilistic grounding. Where is it written that we should accept the most outrageous hypothesis simply because no other exists?

 

[samiam1611]

Where is it written that we should accept the most outrageous hypothesis simply because no other exists?

Funny you should say that…

 

[Al_Moritz]

“For origin of life on Earth, any scenario with a probability less than 10 to the superscript -70 will be considered falsified scientifically (infeasible).”

“For abiogenesis, we would consider 10 to the superscript -164 as the probability of forming a simple life-compatible protein by physicality, or the simplest form of living organism known as 10 to the superscript -340,000,000. These figures make these scenarios operationally falsified.”

Source: Programming of Life by Donald E. Johnson.

Peace,
Ed

And we have already established that this is irrelevant since it is wide scientific consensus now that RNA stood at the beginning of life and not proteins. But some people do not pay attention and are not willing to learn.

And the simplest form of known organism is irrelevant. Life would have been started much simpler than the simplest current living organism. No scientist is so idiotic to claim that something of the complexity of the latter would have arisen at once by chance. To believe that such claim is made is to believe a caricature of science, set up as a fake protective shield for unwarranted ID beliefs.

 

[rossum]

10 to the 78 is the number of atoms in the universe. Anything over 10 to the 150th is beyond chance.

You really need to look at this more closely buffalo. Shuffle two packs of cards together to make a double pack of 104 cards. There are 104! different possible orders that those cards could be in, and you have just created one of those orders. That is a chance of over 10^166 You have just done what you said was impossible.

Now shuffle three packs of cards together…

rossum

 

[tonyrey]

You really need to look at this more closely buffalo. Shuffle two packs of cards together to make a double pack of 104 cards. There are 104! different possible orders that those cards could be in, and you have just created one of those orders. That is a chance of over 10^166 You have just done what you said was impossible.

Now shuffle three packs of cards together…

rossum

I don’t think you chose that particular order.
The issue is not whether it can happen…

 

[rossum]

“For origin of life on Earth, any scenario with a probability less than 10 to the superscript -70 will be considered falsified scientifically (infeasible).”

The important word here is “scenario”. There are many possible scenarios with differing probabilities.

“For abiogenesis, we would consider 10 to the superscript -164 as the probability of forming a simple life-compatible protein by physicality, or the simplest form of living organism known as 10 to the superscript -340,000,000. These figures make these scenarios operationally falsified.”

Source: Programming of Life by Donald E. Johnson.

However, Johnson’s calculation is not particularly relevant since it refers to proteins, which arrived fairly late in the usual model of abiogenesis. He is calculating for the wrong scenario. It would also be interesting to see his working by which he arrived at those figures.

rossum

 

[rossum]

I don’t think you chose that particular order…

No, but buffalo’s post said nothing about choice. I was merely showing that fantastically improbable things can and do happen. The situation is more subtle than buffalo implied.

rossum

 

[tonyrey]

And we have already established that this is irrelevant since it is wide scientific consensus now that RNA stood at the beginning of life and not proteins. But some people do not pay attention and are not willing to learn.

And the simplest form of known organism is irrelevant. Life would have been started much simpler than the simplest current living organism. No scientist is so idiotic to claim that something of the complexity of the latter would have arisen at once by chance. To believe that such claim is made is to believe a caricature of science, set up as a fake protective shield for unwarranted ID beliefs.

The magical power of RNA has not been established as an adequate explanation of the origin of all purposeful activity…

 

[Al_Moritz]

Essential reading for evo supporters.

The Evolutionary Accessibility of New Enzyme Functions: A Case Study from the Biotin Pathway

…This leads Koonin and Wolf
to reject convergent evolution (extensive similarity appearing
by evolution from dissimilar starting points) as implausible.
But from this they conclude that homology, while not
formally proven by similarity, is nonetheless overwhelmingly
supported in cases where chance convergence is implausible.
The problem with this is that all non-chance alternatives
must be considered once chance is ruled out. Yet Koonin and
Wolf consider only one of these alternatives—the standard
Darwinian one.
We agree with their rejection of chance, but we argue here
that the Darwinian explanation also appears to be inadequate.
Its deficiencies become evident when the focus moves from
similarities to dissimilarities, and in particular to functionally
important dissimilarities—to innovations. The extent to which
Darwinian evolution can explain enzymatic innovation seems,
on careful inspection, to be very limited. Large-scale innovations
that result in new protein folds appear to be well outside
its range [5]. This paper argues that at least some small-scale
innovations may also be beyond its reach. If studies of this
kind continue to imply that this is typical rather than exceptional,
then answers to the most interesting origins questions
will probably remain elusive until the full range of explanatory
alternatives is considered.

This looks impressive until you discover that the Biologic Institute is ID driven and that the journal Bio-Complexity has ID members on its editorial board. No, thank you. Give me a real peer-reviewed journal.

 

[Al_Moritz]

The magical power of RNA has not been established as an adequate explanation of the origin of all purposeful activity…

There is purpose in evolution because it is God’s plan for creation. But nature itself knows of no purposeful development. Nature is blind.

And if you mean with “purposeful activity” that of humans: of course not. Humans have souls whose creation stands outside the mechanisms of evolution.

 

[vz71]

You really need to look at this more closely buffalo. Shuffle two packs of cards together to make a double pack of 104 cards. There are 104! different possible orders that those cards could be in, and you have just created one of those orders. That is a chance of over 10^166 You have just done what you said was impossible.

Now shuffle three packs of cards together…

rossum

The fact that the cards are in a particular order is not an improbable event, it is a certainty. Any multitude of items will be in some kind of order.

So are these cards in the right order?

Well, now we are getting into the fantastically improbable.

rossum,
Tell me the exact order the cards should be.
I’ll shuffle the decks a few times.
Then we will see if you are right, and the shuffled decks arrived at the exact order you said.
And if your order is there, I will accept that evolutionary theory may have some standing concerning such improbable events that I attribute to a designer.

 

[rossum]

The fact that the cards are in a particular order is not an improbable event, it is a certainty. Any multitude of items will be in some kind of order.

So are these cards in the right order?

Well, now we are getting into the fantastically improbable.

rossum,
Tell me the exact order the cards should be.
I’ll shuffle the decks a few times.
Then we will see if you are right, and the shuffled decks arrived at the exact order you said.
And if your order is there, I will accept that evolutionary theory may have some standing concerning such improbable events that I attribute to a designer.

The problem you now have is that you do not know how many targets you are shooting at. How many ways are there to make a very primitive living organism? We know that there are at the very least twelve billion different ways to make a human being (we each could have been of the opposite sex). Yockey (1992) calculated that there were 2.3 x 10^93 different ways to make a working Cytochrome C. You are not shooting at a single target.

The card order I require is one which places an Ace of Hearts somewhere before a King of Clubs. You will find that it is not difficult to shuffle a double pack to meet my requirement.

As well as specifying the total number of all possible outcomes, you also need to specify the number of ways there are to meet the requirement. You cannot just assume that there is only one single way to meet the requirement.

rossum

 

[vz71]

The problem you now have is that you do not know how many targets you are shooting at. How many ways are there to make a very primitive living organism? We know that there are at the very least twelve billion different ways to make a human being (we each could have been of the opposite sex). Yockey (1992) calculated that there were 2.3 x 10^93 different ways to make a working Cytochrome C. You are not shooting at a single target.

And you are moving it.

The card order I require is one which places an Ace of Hearts somewhere before a King of Clubs. You will find that it is not difficult to shuffle a double pack to meet my requirement.

I imagine not.
Put the goal posts back where they were.

As well as specifying the total number of all possible outcomes, you also need to specify the number of ways there are to meet the requirement. You cannot just assume that there is only one single way to meet the requirement.

rossum

Sure I can. There is only one way to meet the requirement that I put forth.
Too bad you cannot follow through without attempting to change the game.

 

[Neildown]

Took me a couple of re-reads to understand! I wouldn’t say it explains it logically exactly. (I am not saying it it illogical though.) Logic to me means more like deductive reasoning. I think maybe this is a less imaginative way to explain it than I have heard before? By that, I mean, less fantasy, more real. (I don’t mean less imaginative like less creative or whatever - it is definitely a new concept to me.)
It sounds kind of like you can appreciate how a scientifically-minded person might think, so you kind of meet me halfway. and I appreciate that, much more than the atheists are so illogical kind of comments.
I’m curious, did you actually copyright that?

Lol. Yeah I understand - deductive reasoning has its place in here too though - but it is much of religious and philosophical origin with some scientific method thrown in. It is based mainly off of what I know of my faith, and so I just started determining the missing numbers, seeing what might fit. There are a lot of things not presented in that example, as explaining something we can’t see is very difficult in many areas, but that is the main gist of it. Yes, that would probably be the best way to put it [less imaginative/fantasy-like]. Many people thought the Holocaust was a story, and what was at first considered a myth eventually began an honest fact - I would be delighted if that were the case for idea, but I’m not getting ahead of myself just yet. Well thank you, I’m glad to hear that.
It is not a registered copyright but I have multiple proofs of my authorship, so it is technically copyrighted. It’s material that I plan on using for a novel, which will explain things more in-depth as the story progresses.