Intelligent Design

[kbachler]

Of course it is not difficult to grasp.
But one must ask themselves where exactly any mutation comes from in the process of natural selection.
According to the natural selection theory, some organism acquires a trait that better suits it to the environment then its brothers, so it stands a better chance of surviving and passing on whatever trait made it better suited.
And the process of acquiring this trait in the first place is…random mutation.

It is not I that is fixated upon randomness.
ID addresses that everything that we are cannot be a random chance.

And actually, reading further down the thread, I find others have addressed this more eloquently then I.

But certainly SOME of what we are must be random chance, correct?

 

[kbachler]

No I have not dismissed that at all.
I encourage you to step away from the script and start thinking for yourself.
If you had read my comments, you would have known what I was saying.

I would be more convinced if you could address the inherent randomness of the process itself. Convince me that the mutations that allow one to survive over another are not random. Evolution theory dictates that somewhere along the way an organism will gain a trait that makes it better suited to the environment over the others of its species and pass it along until. If not random, then where exactly does this mutation come from?
Are you a closet ID follower?

No, anyone reading this thread will be able to read your own comments and know that what you have just written is untrue.
You said
This is a direct argument against me, not the institute.
Otherwise you would not have directed the ‘you’ into the sentence.

Its a direct argument against the institute. The “you” is an implied variable. YOU could be ANY you. But there can only be one Discovery Institute.

 

[kbachler]

You cannot predict the mutation, you cannot predict the outcome, you cannot predict when it will happen.
But you also want to claim it is not random.
And you wish to claim there is no design to be found (I distinctly remember a claim that an SOS written in stones on the beach could be a naturally occurring event.)

Your position is growing tenuous.

Did your script lead you here?

Are you certain that the mutation cannot be (sufficiently) predicted?

An insurance carrier cannot predict exactly how or when A GIVEN individual will die, but they can predict sufficiently well how many death claims they will have to pay in a year. As the insurance carrier, you don’t need to know the former, only the latter.

Natural selection “only needs to know” that there will be a rate of mutation. It doesn’t care exactly which animal mutates or exactly how.

This is why your argument doesn’t hold up. Your perspective is all wrong.

 

[kbachler]

Design is not a scientific theory but a philosophical explanation based on scientific facts.

A somewhat more agreeable definition - but then it shouldn’t be expected (nor should its supports expect it to be) treated as a science.

 

[kbachler]

You do remember my exchanges with kbachler?

Predictable. No dissent is allowed. Anyone who does, now even in the evo community, is wrong, ignorant, etc… We will let the followers of these threads judge for themselves as time goes on.

Typical.

You can disagree - but don’t claim to disagree by presenting scientific facts when you don’t do that.

 

[kbachler]

What is the scientific evidence that purposeless, inanimate molecules produced purposeful, living organisms - some of which formulated the Buddhist belief that the mind is **not **a by-product of physical processes but a separate entity from the body?

This hypothesis is not only incoherent, inconsistent and inadequate but also unverifiable, unfalsifiable, uneconomical and unintelligible!

Science makes no assumption about molecules being purposeless or purposeful, although some branches of physics treat everything at information, and in that case, molecules in a sense have purpose.

The hypothesis is quite coherent and is consistent. Many parts of it have already been verified, and in general much of it is verifiable.

I’m not certain why you think otherwise.

 

[buffalo]

You can disagree - but don’t claim to disagree by presenting scientific facts when you don’t do that.

I have to rank in the top percentile of posters that actually present the latest peer reviewed papers. It is all about connecting the dots. You did read the post about Margulis and remember what you were arguing?

 

[vz71]

But certainly SOME of what we are must be random chance, correct?

I do not see why any should be.

If we are to believe the commercials on TV, car manufacturers plan out every last detail of their vehicles.

Why would we expect any less of the designer behind ourselves?

 

[kbachler]

rossum
**
Was Newton’s theory of gravity ‘proven fact’? Newton was shown to be wrong.**

If Newton was shown to be wrong, why did the Royal Society 5 years ago vote him the greatest scientist who ever lived, even greater than Einstein?

Because he had the best theory of gravity up to the time of Einstein. Because he advanced the theory from the time of Galileo. Because when the mathematics he had to deal with motion and light was insufficient, he invented new mathematics (Calculus) and then came back to the physics problem.

But his theory of gravity was still wrong.

BTW, your argument commits the informal fallacy “appeal to authority”.

 

[kbachler]

This is rich.

Hey everyone…facts change.
But not just any facts, the PROVEN ones too.

What a fantastical world we describe.

There was a time that a flat earth was considered a proven fact. Good thing facts change.

 

[kbachler]

Make your best argument that rocks being arranged to spell out SOS does not have an intelligent agent behind it.

Excellent article on Polyani and Christianity at refwritepage3.blogspot.com/2006/10/michael-polanyis-non-propositionalist.html

A great quote that may help VZ1 with the concept of a fact:

This is mainly accomplished by changing our notion of knowledge-as-a-thing into the notion of knowing-as-an-act. There is no data out there (like a Platonic form), but rather people who know the world in a particular way; e.g. historically, personally, and socially. A fact does not exist as an entity, but is a shared concept in a cultural setting as an experience of reality. Knowing is an act which is fundamentally personal, thus historical and embodied. I like to think of knowers as movie cameras; spatio-temporal things that interact with reality from a created vantage point.

At this point, most people who are sensitive to the sin of relativism cry foul. Isn’t this just a culturally relativistic version of science and knowledge? No! The difference for Polanyi is that while all knowing happens in a social fabric (and is advanced thusly), there is a fundamental and fiduciary commitment to our interaction with reality. In other words, while you may have a different experience of the same reality I am experiencing, we are not rejecting that we are both experiencing the same reality. It is the acknowledgement of both reality as formative to our experience and the perspectival nature of our experience that makes Polanyi’s epistemology robust in its explication of the act of knowing.

 

[buffalo]

There was a time that a flat earth was considered a proven fact. Good thing facts change.

Source?

 

[kbachler]

Source?

Sorry, it’s a little difficult to quote the burnt books (scrolls) at the library at Alexander, but how about this:

The concept of a spherical Earth displaced earlier beliefs in a flat Earth: In early Mesopotamian mythology, the world was portrayed as a flat disk floating in the ocean and surrounded by a spherical sky,[7] and this forms the premise for early world maps like those of Anaximander and Hecataeus of Miletus.

. Easily quoted from the “Spherical Earth” article at Wikipedia, the note [7] refers to Otto E. Neugebauer (1975). A History of Ancient Mathematical Astronomy. Birkhäuser. p. 577. ISBN 354006995X

 

[buffalo]

Sorry, it’s a little difficult to quote the burnt books (scrolls) at the library at Alexander, but how about this:

. Easily quoted from the “Spherical Earth” article at Wikipedia, the note [7] refers to Otto E. Neugebauer (1975). A History of Ancient Mathematical Astronomy. Birkhäuser. p. 577. ISBN 354006995X

Any evidence that Adam or the early Hebrews believed this?

 

[vz71]

There was a time that a flat earth was considered a proven fact. Good thing facts change.

The fact did not change.

The earth being flat was never a fact, and it certainly was never proven.

 

[kbachler]

Test the SOS all you want. Go for it.

The argument is very simple and is given in Polyani’s book. (See the 3rd section, on “Order, the first subsection is on Chance and Order”.

Suppose that there are 10,000,000 million ways that pebbles can be arranged in a garden. You come and see an “SOS.” There is only one way that could happen, which seems to confirm that the SOS was designed, since the odds of it happening are 1 in 10,000,000 - very small odds indeed.

But now suppose that the pebbles are scattered about, seemingly with no pattern. How many ways are there for the pebbles to be arranged EXACTLY that way?

Interestingly, it is STILL 1 in 10,000,000! But we would not be ready to say that this random disbursement was “designed”. Why not?

Because in the former case OUR BRAIN saw a pattern and implied it, while in the latter case our brain failed to see a pattern and did not apply it; this even though the chance of either arrangement arising was exactly the same.

This is EXACTLY WHY you can’t just look at something and imply design. The basic premise is one that has been long known to be flawed.

This is also why its important to understand the good knowledge that is already available - so that when the snake oil salesmen come around, you know how to test their bad theory.

 

[kbachler]

The fact did not change.

The earth being flat was never a fact, and it certainly was never proven.

It was a fact - as evidenced by the maps that further proved what was self-evident.

VZ71, you need to understand what a fact is. You seem to think of knowledge as something that is separately objective. Sorry, but there is no such thing.

 

[rossum]

You must have a lot of fun at the Craps tables.
But beyond your quite possibly unrealized income as a dice player, one should note that DNA sequnces are not dice.

I had previously pointed you at population genetics. You did not appear to want to study population genetics, so I picked a much simpler example of a die as maybe more suitable. It appears that you do not want to study that either. If you are not prepared to put in the work then it is no wonder that you find it difficult to understand the power of evolution.

If you are really interested in actually learning about how we can make sound predictions based on a random underlying process than have a look at the Hardy Weinberg equation.

Where is the ID equivalent? What part of ID tells about the frequency of different alleles we would expect in a population if the designer is influencing the genetics of that population? Evolution can do this, what had ID got to offer in its place?

Another statement against a point I have not proposed.

So, you are admitting that there is no scientific evidence for ID?

All this from a statement that evolution theory is incorrect.

No, it arises from the statement that ID is science. If ID is science then it should be able to answer scientific questions, and to back up its answers with scientific evidence. Evolution has an answer, and supporting evidence, to the question of whether humans and chimps share a common ancestor. I was merely enquiring as to what the ID answer was and what the supporting evidence for the ID answer might be.

It is perhaps symptomatic that you react by criticising the question rather than providing an answer to it. Once again you show how far ID has to travel before it can be considered science. Science uses evidence to answer questions. I have seen nothing so far from ID to indicate that it is science. It does not answer questions and it does not provide evidence.

rossum

 

[rossum]

I do not see why any should be.

If we are to believe the commercials on TV, car manufacturers plan out every last detail of their vehicles.

Why would we expect any less of the designer behind ourselves?

Because our designer doesn’t make commercials?

rossum

 

[valentino]

That’s a specifically human experience, though. It doesn’t follow that any other creative force, be it natural or supernatural, would act in the way we do.

A creator may not need to plan but there has to some kind of thought or internal mechanism which causes this creation and to which these humans can relate to be based on certain laws(mathmatics,physics,ect.)This mechanism causes order.