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Intelligent Design Book Cracks Bestseller List at Amazon.com Signature in the Cell makes 2009 list of top ten bestselling science books
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wanstronian
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I’ve never claimed otherwise, you seem to be claiming some sort of victory here? If we both agree that the sun rises in the east and sets in the west, will you infer that you have outsmarted me?You have pointed out yourself that “NOBODY can explain the self”, let alone the **richness of personal experience". **Thank you for underlining it! It really does justice to the truth of my statement…
Absolutely true - it’s the only reality which can be empirically tested and shown to act consistently and reliably.
Absolutely true. There is no evidence. If you disagree, present such evidence.
I don’t think you can count this as dogma? It’s an opinion based on your rejection of incontrovertible facts.
Hmmm, I’ll concede that I don’t know for sure that there is no consciousness without the brain. But such evidence as exists, strongly indicates that this is the case. Contrast this with the evidence against, which amounts to zero!
Absolutely true. The abstraction of the mind from the brain differentiates between the organic matter, and its function as containing our consciousness.
Absolutely true. Give me an example of a right that is not granted by a governing body.
Yeah - I didn’t say that, it was Touchstone. Get your facts straight.
Absolutely true. Empirically provable using several methods.
Absolutely true. When humanity (or, to concede somewhat, when all intelligent beings) die, these concepts will cease to exist. You can’t have a concept without someone to conceptualise it.
Absolutely true. You have to realise that, just because you don’t believe something, it doesn’t automatically make it dogma when somebody else points out the facts of the matter.
I’ll give you this one, it is a dogmatic statement. However, there is plenty of circumstantial evidence that it is true. And no evidence whatsoever that it comes from anywhere else.
You do make me laugh sometimes. Your interpretation of dogma seems to be, “anything I don’t believe” - you are unencumbered by any inclination to question the common sense of your belief, which is probably why you are so quick to dismiss the refutations of your arbitrary delusion.
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wanstronian
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tonyrey
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You are expert - at dodging questions! It merely reveals your inability to answer them and the weakness of materialism…
BTW You have made yet another false statement. I have never said “God did it”…
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tonyrey
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wanstronian
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You’re conflating ‘dogmatism’ with ‘scientific fact’ and ‘basic logic.’
Now I understand the extent of your ignorance, I think it’s probably best we just avoid each other from now on. There’s no point in me discussing with someone who rejects proven facts, and there’s no point in you continuing to fire baseless assertions in my direction - I prefer not to be told what to believe unless it’s supported by evidence. Neither of us is going to convince the other, so I think I’ll limit my debates from now on to people who are able to think clearly and don’t need to reject scientific fact in order to try and win an argument.
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wanstronian
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Wishing something was true does not make it so.You are expert - at dodging questions! It merely reveals your inability to answer them and the weakness of materialism…
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Sair
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Two things: How do you propose that consciousness arises, independently of physical processes (and, if you don’t actually know, how do you propose that such should be known? What criteria, precisely, should we use for verification?); secondly, does the beginning need to be in any way aware of the end in order for the beginning to lead to the end? And if so, why? You really do need to provide a more sound basis for your assumptions than “science hasn’t revealed the precise answers yet”.
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tonyrey
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reggieM
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Atheist philosopher Thomas Nagel Selects Signature in the Cell as One of Top Books of 2009
Stephen C. Meyer’s Signature in the Cell: DNA and the evidence for Intelligent Design (HarperCollins) is a detailed account of the problem of how life came into existence from lifeless matter – something that had to happen before the process of biological evolution could begin. The controversy over Intelligent Design has so far focused mainly on whether the evolution of life since its beginnings can be explained entirely by natural selection and other non-purposive causes. Meyer takes up the prior question of how the immensely complex and exquisitely functional chemical structure of DNA, which cannot be explained by natural selection because it makes natural selection possible, could have originated without an intentional cause. He examines the history and present state of research on non-purposive chemical explanations of the origin of life, and argues that the available evidence offers no prospect of a credible naturalistic alternative to the hypothesis of an intentional cause. Meyer is a Christian, but atheists, and theists who believe God never intervenes in the natural world, will be instructed by his careful presentation of this fiendishly difficult problem.
Stephen C. Meyer’s Signature in the Cell: DNA and the evidence for Intelligent Design (HarperCollins) is a detailed account of the problem of how life came into existence from lifeless matter – something that had to happen before the process of biological evolution could begin. The controversy over Intelligent Design has so far focused mainly on whether the evolution of life since its beginnings can be explained entirely by natural selection and other non-purposive causes. Meyer takes up the prior question of how the immensely complex and exquisitely functional chemical structure of DNA, which cannot be explained by natural selection because it makes natural selection possible, could have originated without an intentional cause. He examines the history and present state of research on non-purposive chemical explanations of the origin of life, and argues that the available evidence offers no prospect of a credible naturalistic alternative to the hypothesis of an intentional cause. Meyer is a Christian, but atheists, and theists who believe God never intervenes in the natural world, will be instructed by his careful presentation of this fiendishly difficult problem.
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Sair
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The ‘blind, aimless forces’ and ‘intervention’ of which you speak are what evolutionary biologists refer to as ‘selection pressures’. There is natural selection (environmental pressures) and sexual selection (the pressure within a species to find a mate). You may ponder the notion that we humans are at least as responsible for the course of our own evolution, by our choice of mates, as the external environment.
From what, exactly, would it be ‘demoting’ reason to suppose that it came about through unplanned circumstance? The presence of reason now does not entail the presence of reason from the beginning. The ability of our brains to reason and imagine (which, complex and wonderful though they are to us, are nothing more extraordinary than means of processing information) are emergent properties, the result of millions of years of evolution. Sure, it’s an amazing achievement, but there’s been an almost unimaginably long time in which to achieve it. Even now, we are not born with the ability to reason - it is something that, given the right circumstances, emerges as our brains grow and develop.
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Sair
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That response tells me precisely nothing about your hypothesis other than that you haven’t really developed it.
I’ve explained my hypothesis - that consciousness and reason are emergent properties of large, complex, highly-evolved brains - and there is a raft of empirical, circumstantial and anecdotal evidence that supports it.
Just as the entire edifice of evolutionary theory would be toppled by the discovery of a fossilised rabbit in Precambrian rocks (or another such anomalous find), so too could the mind=brain hypothesis be falsified at a stroke - by a single verified instance of an individual’s consciousness persisting after the cessation of brain activity.
Certainly, neuroscientists have not yet identified the precise connections between neural activity and certain types of conscious experience, but it doesn’t follow from this that there are no such connections to be found. And it absolutely doesn’t follow that we should abandon the quest for knowledge in this field and just assume that our minds are supernatural.
So again I ask, what is your hypothesis? What specific data would you seek to support it? How could it be falsified?
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Abu
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Dr Scott Hahn and Dr B. Wiker in Answering The New Atheism, 2008, show very clearly that the odds against life “evolving” from inanimate chemicals are so high as to be impossible. “Dawkins believes that the odds against a propitious string of DNA arising by chance are 1,000,000,000 to one. But when we do the actual calculations we find that the odds against it are a bit over 1,600,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 to one.”
Dawkins best guess at the age of the earth at 4.5 billion years is just not enough time for such odds to be overcome. (p 24, 27-8).
The fact that Dawkins maths and science are so erroneous merely reflects his desire to cling to evolutionism at all costs, much like many others.
Dawkins best guess at the age of the earth at 4.5 billion years is just not enough time for such odds to be overcome. (p 24, 27-8).
The fact that Dawkins maths and science are so erroneous merely reflects his desire to cling to evolutionism at all costs, much like many others.
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Sair
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I wonder if they grasp the difference between ‘by chance’ or ‘random’, and ‘nonrandom’ or ‘subject to local rules and conditions’. Sure, the odds against a fully-fledged DNA molecule just ‘happening’ to pop into existence might be impossibly high, but chemicals tend to behave in certain ways that are not so much subject to mathematical probability as to physical conditions and the structure of atoms and molecules. Anyone with a rudimentary grasp of chemistry knows this.
When are these people going to learn that their ‘random chance’ arguments against evolutionary theory are just no argument at all?
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Abu
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Folks, Sair claims to know more than Drs Wiker and Hahn! Now chemistry is going to produce life! What a mishmash.
We rest our case.
We rest our case.
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tonyrey
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Sair
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Life needs no purpose other than itself. Whence the ‘superimposing’ of purpose? Rationality was not pasted onto us by some external force. It is, as I have said repeatedly to apparently no effect, an emergent property of the physical and chemical structures of our brains. The sum of the parts and their interaction creates properties that no single part could achieve on its own. What are humans that the universe should care about our existence? We are the ones that care about us, and the meaning and purpose of our lives are built from the community of humanity, not from outside it.
We, and everything in the universe, are limited by the behaviour of matter and energy. We cannot accomplish anything that breaks the laws of physics. And why, why, why, when scientists repeatedly assert that adaptive evolution involves the nonrandom selection of randomly occurring mutations and genetic variation, do you people continually claim that evolution leaves everything to ‘chance’ - as if the vast diversity of life were the result of some kind of cosmic lottery? For goodness’ sake, read a decent book about evolution - there are plenty to choose from - and come back when you actually understand the theory.
Certainly I believe that the mind emerges as our brains grow. Infant humans are mindless blobs of biomass responding to internal and external stimuli. But they are still sentient creatures, and thus entitled to be spared unnecessary suffering, as every sentient creature is so entitled. While the infant grows, it - like any other young mammal - is absorbing sensory information from its environment, learning about its surroundings, obtaining a body of data that will later build its sense of itself as a being existing in time and space, and be used to determine its behaviour. And by the way, have you ever noticed that the more we perform a particular action - like walking, for example - the less conscious we become of the physical processes involved?
That description was necessarily broad, because I am not a neuroscientist nor an expert in cognitive development. But I don’t understand how you can consider these processes and find them not a source of wonder, but of degradation. I rather think our abilities are all the more wonderful for being part of the autonomous package of matter and energy we call the human person, than to suppose that everything we do is governed by some kind of ‘ghost in the shell’.
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tonyrey
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All that the evidence supports is the fact that the mind and the brain are related - which has been known since mankind began to reason.
You equate evolutionary theory with NeoDarwinism yet the progression from particles to persons is more cogently explained as the result of Design rather than fortuitous combinations of molecules and random genetic mutations.
There is plenty of evidence for survival after death which is automatically rejected by materialists.
The discovery of connections does not dispose of intangible reality. I would be a materialist if nothing intangible existed. But the very existence of intangibles demonstrates that there is another dimension to reality - and it is more powerful than material reality.
I have already explained that belief in the primacy of reason is a more adequate explanation than belief in the primacy of particles. Design is the most powerful, comprehensive and fertile explanation of the immensely complex universe, its order and intelligibility, the exquisite richness and variety of nature, the origin and infinite value of existence, the progressive development of living organisms with the DNA code, the existence of rational beings with their power of self-determination, their transcendence of their environment, their ability to distinguish good and evil, and their capacity for love and self-sacrifice. The success of science demonstrates the superiority of reason over blind forces like random mutations and natural selection. Design accounts for all the most important aspects of existence: truth, goodness, freedom, beauty, justice, love, the right to life and the principles of liberty, equality and fraternity.
This explanation will be falsified if
- Science completely explains persons as physical organisms.
- A detailed blueprint of a feasible world with far less suffering is presented.
- The order and regularity of nature breaks down and life begins to become extinct.
- Scientific discoveries prove that life and evolution occurred solely as the result of natural selection and random mutations.
- Science establishes that there is far more failure than success in nature.
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tonyrey
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You have not even explained how purposeful cells emerged from purposeless molecules!
The repetition of *emergent property *does not explain**how **the power of reason developed. You equate it with computation in spite of the fact that it entails creativity and insight.
This is another article of faith - that synthesis occurs spontaneously!
Why do you ask? The universe is obviously indifferent but it provides a basis for life and rational, sentient existence. Is that insignificant?
So nothing else matters but humanity? That is a very parochial view of reality… Are our purposes entirely arbitrary? Unrelated to our nature?
Do you believe there are no limits to what chance can achieve?
So you reject free will?!
I am in very good company. Jacques Monod, atheist and Nobel laureate, in his book “Chance and Necessity” uses precisely those words…
Your condescension is misguided. I happen to have written a Ph.D. thesis on the subject… Have you?
Why is every sentient creature entitled to be spared unnecessary suffering? Is that a human convention? Or is it an objective truth? Do you deny that cruelty is evil regardless of what people believe? Or is it just another concept?
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You are misrepresenting me… How can a person who believes those processes are designed possibly not find them not source of wonder but of degradation? And, even more significantly, gratitude and love…
“autonomous” is the key word. Where do you obtain your autonomy? From the laws of physic by which you believe you are governed? I prefer to be a person than a machine without a ghost! But then I believe in the primacy of persons and you don’t…
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wanstronian
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It’s ironic that a theist will attempt to pick at the tiniest of holes in the large body of evidence that supports a materialistic view of the world, but that same theist will never apply even a fraction of the analysis effort to their own hypotheses, which in 100% of cases are considerably less robust.
I wonder whether any intelligent theist apologist has ever had the courage to really think about their own arguments, and remained a theist apologist.
I wonder whether any intelligent theist apologist has ever had the courage to really think about their own arguments, and remained a theist apologist.
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