Evidence for Design?

[tonyrey]

**More support for IDvolution! God “breathed” the super language of DNA into the “kinds” in the creative act. **

The First Gene: The Birth of Programming, Messaging and Formal Control

“The First Gene: The Birth of Programming, Messaging and Formal Control” ** is a peer-reviewed anthology of papers that focuses**, for the first time, entirely on the following difficult scientific questions:…

Abstract: Could a composome, chemoton, or RNA vesicular protocell come to life in the absence of formal instructions, controls and regulation? Redundant, low-informational selfordering is not organization. Organization must be programmed. Intertwined circular constraints (e.g. complex hypercylces), even with negative and positive feedback, do not steer physicochemical reactions toward formal function or metabolic success. Complex hypercycles quickly and selfishly exhaust sequence and other phase spaces of potential metabolic resources.

“Chance and necessity are completely inadequate to describe the most important elements of what we repeatedly observe in intra-cellular life, especially. Science must acknowledge the reality and validity not only of a very indirect, post facto natural selection,** but of purposeful selection for potential function as a fundamental category of reality. To disallow purposeful selection renders the practice of mathematics and science impossible.**”

A new technical book, The First Gene, edited by Gene Emergence Project director David L. Abel, …" Materialists will not like this book because its arguments are 100% scientific, devoid of religious, political, or cultural concerns, and most importantly, compelling.

From reading The First Gene, a number of minimal theoretical and material requirements for life emerge:

*High levels of prescriptive information - :yup:
*Programming - :yup:
*Symbol systems and language - :yup:
*Molecules which can carry this information and programming
*Highly unlikely sequences of functional information - :yup:
*Formal function - :yup:
*An “agent” capable of making “intentional choices of mind” which can “choose” between various options, select for future function, and instantiate these requirements for life. - :yup:

Anti-ID conspiracy theorists love to say that those pesky creationists are always changing their terminology to get around the First Amendment. ID’s intellectual pedigree refutes that charge, but The First Gene adds more reasons why that charge should not be taken seriously. The book offers highly technical, strictly scientific arguments about the nature of information, information processing, and biological functionality. Even a cursory read of this book shows that its contributors are just thinking about doing good science. And this science leads them to the conclusion that blind and unguided material causes cannot produce the complexity we observe in life. Some agent capable of making choices is required to produce the first life.

It is highly significant that no one has refuted the points you have listed.

 

[inocente]

Radio waves are a great example. We can hear the radio. Can we track radio waves like radar? X-rays are an important part of the natural world.

Radar works by using radio waves. It uses short wavelengths, called microwaves, and that word is a clue that you shouldn’t get close to the front of a radar dish as it will cook you.

What are natural numbers? I’ve heard of abstract thought but what is an abstract thing.

Natural numbers are the whole numbers we use for counting. They exclude negative numbers and decimals, some mathematicians also exclude zero, arguing not that they are supernatural but are artificial.

Since I am on a quest for evidence of a real “supernatural world”, I am assuming that we agree that there are things in the natural world such as radio waves and x-rays which are not typically sense experience yet they are not totally separate in the natural world. Correct? Or do you have other examples? What I am trying to do is to specify what exists in the natural world and what exists in the supernatural world.

Radio waves are very much part of the natural world, they are exactly the same as visible light waves but with wavelengths far beyond the capacity of our eyes. We never developed an organ to sense them, partly because radio waves aren’t useful for finding food and shelter, partly because it’s very hard for carbon-based life to detect such long waves. As a result we had to invent the radio receiver, which converts the waves into electricity which is fed to a loudspeaker which converts them into sound.

You can sense light that has a wavelength in between visible and radio - it’s called infrared, and you feel it on your skin, for instance the warmth of the sun. Your microwave oven heats food by bombarding it with light in the radio band just beyond infrared. All these and a lot more are part of the natural world. Here’s a cool fact if you remember old tube TVs: when they were not tuned-in and were just picking up static, 1% of what you saw and heard was the echo of the Big Bang, what’s known as the cosmic microwave background radiation.

Then, can you imagine imagination as evidence of a supernatural world in the sense that there is another world in addition to our natural one?

No, because that would argue that every novel, every soap opera, every kid’s game was evidence of its own little world existing somewhere. In fact I’d worry about even starting down that road as it’s playing around the edges of delusion and occult magic, and isn’t good for the soul! You brought to mind an old episode of Friends, where the kooky one thinks she’s found evidence of the supernatural in this clip - youtube.com/watch?v=LCzcJwzszZE

 

[tonyrey]

Then, can you imagine imagination as evidence of a supernatural world in the sense that there is another world in addition to our natural one?

The imagination is far more likely to be a substitute for the supernatural than a source of genuine inspiration! Hence the appeal of astrology, witchcraft, fortune telling and the Harry Potter books…

 

[reggieM]

But doesn’t this argue against ‘irreducible complexity’? What we do not understand today does not necessitate that we will not understand tomorrow. That’s why I don’t argue for biological ID, today we can say it is irreducible, tomorrow might prove that wrong.

You’re right that the explanation does not follow necessarily. It’s a question of evidence. The fact that we see no way that a natural force could have caused it is evidence that a natural force did not cause it. The fact that something has the appearance of having been designed by intelligence is evidence that it was designed by intelligence.

If those facts are overturned by evidence to the contrary then so be it. The same is true with any scientific proposal – none of it can be given as absolute truth. It’s always provisional. We can’t know with absolute certainty what the origin of life really was - it can’t be tested.

So, biological ID offers a challenge. It’s a proposal that can be falsified by contrary evidence. With that, I don’t see any reason to avoid the arguments it offers. Otherwise, nobody would offer scientific proposals at all, for fear that they might be falsified some time.

I think we agree that the product of the human person is God-breathed, concerning the soul (the form) and the hylemorphic dualism of the person. But the humanoid (the matter) is a result of natural evolution in the teleological sense.

That’s where we disagree because I don’t think nature can produce a human being from an animal. Beyond that, I don’t think the evidence for the standard evolutionary story of origins is convincing (for many reasons) – but that’s off-topic here.

 

[reggieM]

It is highly significant that no one has refuted the points you have listed.

I’ve read some of the peer-reviewed papers that were collected for that book. It makes a strong case for the design argument (and against materialism).

There really is no plausible naturalistic explanation for these things …

*High levels of prescriptive information -
*Programming -
*Symbol systems and language -
*Molecules which can carry this information and programming
*Highly unlikely sequences of functional information -
*Formal function -
*An “agent” capable of making “intentional choices of mind” which can “choose” between various options, select for future function, and instantiate these requirements for life. -

It doesn’t work philosophically. Programming, communication, choice between options, functions for a purpose … none of these can come from a mindless source.

This quote from one of the reviews was interesting also:

“Why would a prebiotic environment have “cared” whether anything functioned? How could inanimate nature have recognized, valued, pursued or worked to preserve the “usefulness” of certain molecules? Undirected evolution has no goal. Natural selection favors only the fittest already-programmed, already-living organisms. Evolution cannot program at the genetic level.
“Survival of the fittest” does not explain the generation of the very first organism, fit or unfit.”

I’ve wondered about those things, and they’re definitely not answered by current scientific theories.

Chemicals do not need to survive – since they’re not alive. The formation of life could not have been a “goal” of inanimate matter. Even if life could accidentally being from chemicals, why would it ever “need” or “want” to survive? There would be no purpose for the “struggle for survival” since the inanimate chemicals that caused life don’t care about survival.

 

[grannymh]

The imagination is far more likely to be a substitute for the supernatural than a source of genuine inspiration! Hence the appeal of astrology, witchcraft, fortune telling and the Harry Potter books…

Not when one goes back to the ancient myths, mostly verbal, of human origins.

How long has man known about the supernatural world? I am not talking about what exists in the supernatural world. It is more important that one is capable of seeing the difference between the “world” and its inhabitants. Biological science can distinguish between the “world” and its inhabitants.

Perhaps a page from the science book can help people understand the difference between the supernatural world and the inhabitants that humans can place in that world or the one inhabitant, singular, Who exists as a Creator.

 

[buffalo]

Chemicals do not need to survive – since they’re not alive. The formation of life could not have been a “goal” of inanimate matter. Even if life could accidentally being from chemicals, why would it ever “need” or “want” to survive? There would be no purpose for the “struggle for survival” since the inanimate chemicals that caused life don’t care about survival.

Perfect question - an unguided blind process doesn’t answer it.

Add information. purpose and design and it answers it very well.

 

[grannymh]

Natural numbers are the whole numbers we use for counting. They exclude negative numbers and decimals, some mathematicians also exclude zero, arguing not that they are supernatural but are artificial.

I knew that. Only from the angle of a form of experiential education which some teachers, and this granny, use with the little kids.

I loved reading the rest of your post. I have never lost intense curiosity…even though I may never use what I learn. And even though it takes only 27 minutes to forget what I learned.

As to where I am going with imagination. Imagination is an ability which originally depended on knowledge on what was happening outside the anatomy. Eventually, imagination could approach what is inside the anatomy based on facts from open wounds, dissection and so on.

I believe that the problem which people are having with “imagination” is that they automatically assume that “imagination” means every novel, every soap opera, every kid’s game … the edges of delusion and occult magic, and isn’t good for the soul!
This is a serious error which prevents creative thinking.

 

[inocente]

More support for IDvolution! God “breathed” the super language of DNA into the “kinds” in the creative act.

I’ve read some of the peer-reviewed papers that were collected for that book. It makes a strong case for the design argument (and against materialism).

It is highly significant that no one has refuted the points you have listed.

That book is a self-published fraud. The publisher is registered in the author’s own name at a post box (!), and he’s such a fraudster that he pretends it’s a huge company with an “Academic - Biological Division”.

He calls himself Director of the Gene Emergence Project, Department of ProtoBioCybernetics / ProtoBioSemiotics rolleyes, The Origin of Life Science Foundation, Inc., which turns out to be in a suburban house in Maryland. Apparently he’s a retired vet.

And he does it in a blog with a blogspot.com address - he couldn’t even be bothered to set up a website, and still you guys fell for it hook, line and sinker!



I recommend you take up the habit of spending a few minutes reviewing evidence in future if you don’t want to watch your credibility crash through the floor again.

And ID fans might start listening now when the rest of us tell you ID is lies, lies, lies and lies.

 

[reggieM]

I recommend you take up the habit of spending a few minutes reviewing evidence in future if you don’t want to watch your credibility crash through the floor again.

And ID fans might start listening now when the rest of us tell you ID is lies, lies, lies and lies.

Inocente,

Here’s a list of David Abel’s work:

davidlabel.blogspot.com/

It will take you more than a few minutes to review the evidence.

One way to start is to actually read the papers. Then, you can critique the science.

It seems, instead, that you’re saying it is all “lies, lies, lies”.

I wouldn’t say that your response is very convincing.

Tony’s comment stands:

It is highly significant that no one has refuted the points you have listed.

If you want to refute the points raised, you have to do better than that.

 

[tonyrey]

That book is a self-published fraud. The publisher is registered in the author’s own name at a post box (!), and he’s such a fraudster that he pretends it’s a huge company with an “Academic - Biological Division”.

He calls himself Director of the Gene Emergence Project, Department of ProtoBioCybernetics / ProtoBioSemiotics rolleyes, The Origin of Life Science Foundation, Inc., which turns out to be in a suburban house in Maryland. Apparently he’s a retired vet.

And he does it in a blog with a blogspot.com address - he couldn’t even be bothered to set up a website, and still you guys fell for it hook, line and sinker!

I recommend you take up the habit of spending a few minutes reviewing evidence in future if you don’t want to watch your credibility crash through the floor again.

And ID fans might start listening now when the rest of us tell you ID is lies, lies, lies and lies.

Your argumenta ad hominem are a hopelessly inadequate substitute for a rational argument…

 

[tonyrey]

The imagination is far more likely to be a substitute for the supernatural than a source of genuine inspiration! Hence the appeal of astrology, witchcraft, fortune telling and the Harry Potter books…

In other words science reveals its strict limitations as an interpretation of reality…

 

[grannymh]

In other words science reveals its strict limitations as an interpretation of reality…

If you say so…

However, at this point I am not talking about any kind of science. There are other ways to learn about human nature beyond the material world. One way is to start with basic Catholic doctrines.

 

[joeyvandelmeyer]

Hi everyone. I believe this is important. Here are three private revelations I know to be authentic and I believe they need to be propagated. Have a look, pray, and if you agree, show these to others, too. Blessed be Jesus and Mary.

take a look:

directionforourtimes.com/

youshallbelieve.com/

holylove.org/

americaneedsfatima.org/Articles/amazing-video-eucharist-is-our-lord.html

may God bless

 

[tonyrey]

In other words science reveals its strict limitations as an interpretation of reality…

There seems to be a contradiction between “If you say so” - which casts doubt on the limitations of science as an interpretation of reality - and “There are other ways to learn about human nature beyond the material world.” Surely science is limited to the material world…

 

[reggieM]

These are some of the arguments that are posed against the design argument:

1. There is no scientific evidence of intelligent design in nature
2. There is nothing in nature that appears to have been designed for a purpose
3. Anything in nature that appears to have been designed can be explained by natural processes
4. Everything that can be observed in the universe is explainable by natural laws
5. Science can explain everything that can be observed in nature or the universe
6. What is considered to be miraculous is actually explainable by science
7. The only things that can be observed in the universe which are not the product of natural laws are miracles – but those are extremely rare.
8. Whatever cannot be directly explained by natural laws is explained by random chance occurrences

Do you agree with some or all of these?

 

[tonyrey]

These are some of the arguments that are posed against the design argument:

1. There is no scientific evidence of intelligent design in nature
2. There is nothing in nature that appears to have been designed for a purpose
3. Anything in nature that appears to have been designed can be explained by natural processes
4. Everything that can be observed in the universe is explainable by natural laws
5. Science can explain everything that can be observed in nature or the universe
6. What is considered to be miraculous is actually explainable by science
7. The only things that can be observed in the universe which are not the product of natural laws are miracles – but those are extremely rare.
8. Whatever cannot be directly explained by natural laws is explained by random chance occurrences

Do you agree with some or all of these?

I strongly disagree with all of them! They presuppose that apart from sustaining the universe in existence God has left it to run under its own steam regardless of any dead ends it may encounter or the amount of suffering caused by misfortunes and human beings. The rarity of miracles is a direct contradiction of the teaching of Jesus…

 

[reggieM]

I strongly disagree with all of them! They presuppose that apart from sustaining the universe in existence God has left it to run under its own steam regardless of any dead ends it may encounter or the amount of suffering caused by misfortunes and human beings. The rarity of miracles is a direct contradiction of the teaching of Jesus…

True! It would also mean that everything is determined by natural laws so there could be no free will, and therefore no moral responsibility (and no rationality either).

 

[grannymh]

Why should God be incapable of creating other prime movers?

If the prime mover refers to God, than God is the only prime mover or first Creator. None is equal to God. There are not two “firsts”.

How do you define “evidence”? Physical phenomena - inferred from our perceptions?
Aren’t they fundamentally mysterious?

Evidence exists independently from anyone’s perceptions. Inference describes what the evidence means in terms of reaching a conclusion. Human perceptions, usually objective, determine if the evidence warrants the conclusion. Human perceptions, which are considered subjective can also determine if the evidence warrants the conclusion. However, objective reasoning is usually preferred, yet it can be augmented by valid subjective reasoning.

I realize that this is a tad confusing. The difficulty is that subjective and objective modes of thought can be confused on CAF. Unfortunately, once one allows the confusion, then there is no way I can untangle the modes of reasoning on CAF…

 

[inocente]

Inocente,

Here’s a list of David Abel’s work:

davidlabel.blogspot.com/

It will take you more than a few minutes to review the evidence.

One way to start is to actually read the papers. Then, you can critique the science.

Your argumenta ad hominem are a hopelessly inadequate substitute for a rational argument…

Surely you can’t be serious. That blog is where he fraudulently calls himself a director of an institute which doesn’t exist. His supposed publishing company fraudulently doesn’t exist. The guy is a confidence trickster. And you go on defending him? Why? What would he have to do for you to open your eyes?

My career is in information technology and I’m an expert on programming. I read one of his “papers”. Garbage. Nothing he writes is even close to correct. He is a dilettante.

But that’s not what you want to hear so it seems that after finding out you were suckered into buying the Eiffel Tower from Abel and his cohorts, you’ll happily go on to buy the Golden Gate Bridge, and then the Empire State Building.

What his willfully ignorant barbarism is doing to the Church I can’t say, but I think it is killing it softly by filling it with lies. Why would you possibly want to help him?