Intelligent Design

[rossum]

Evolutionary science has no value whatsoever in Biology. Only living things that are alive today are being studied.

Evolutionary science helps us to find methods to slow down the evolution of immunity to antibiotics and other drug treatments. Again, you are being lied to by creationist sources.

I think, also, that you will find that palaeontologists study things that are not alive today.

rossum

 

[Al_Moritz]

Ignoring new information generally does not remove or get rid of cognitive dissonance since the new information could not, logically, be the source of existing dissonance. One would have to deny what is already known to get rid of dissonance.

Just for fun, let’s create some dissonance.

Secondary causation makes sense in terms of front loading the cosmos with the kind of causal fine tuning that would determinably, result in life and the appropriate environments coordinated to life. That possibility would seem unproblematic.

The difficulty comes when a mechanism such as blind, unguided and “random” mutation is proposed to be the very means by which God creates life, in particular, where the telos or end form intended is human life.

This would be unproblematic for an atheist since atheists have no prior commitments in terms of evolution having to account for specific outcomes. Theistic evolution proponents, do, however, have this problem.

The issue of ensoulment came up earlier in the thread. The perplexing question is: Why would God choose an unsuperintended process involving an indeterminate series of essentially random events to bring about an intended end if he wanted to end up with a morphological form that would perfectly match the intricately superb and technically precise specifications required for each individual rational human soul that would “inhabit” or embody that physical form in due time. It just seems an odd way for God to go about business.

I could see God using random mutation as a process if he, too, simply wanted to express gleeful surprise each time some new entity came into existence - “Well, I never expected that!”

But why in heck would he deliberately USE random or indeterminate mechanisms to create the determinate life forms that he intended to exist?

There you go…

… resolve the dissonance!

There is no dissonance to be resolved. It only exists in your own mind that continues to ignore information already given.

1. While genetic variation is random, cumulative natural selection working on it as a substrate is anything but random. This makes evolution as a whole a non-random process. Yes, things could have gone this or that way, but not necessarily by much. *) And who says that God could not have infused a soul into a creature that looked different than us humans? In fact, don’t we humans all look a lot different, black and white, brown and yellow? Those different looks of course have nothing to do with human essence, but continue to pose a problem for people unable to look past superficial differences, which makes racism such a persistent while at the same time utterly stupid problem.
2. The Church in its document Communion and Stewardship itself has the following to say (paragraph 69), posted repeatedly here but obviously escaping your atttention. Please read carefully; it shows that none of the difficulties in your imaginary problem with theistic evolution exist:
3. The current scientific debate about the mechanisms at work in evolution requires theological comment insofar as it sometimes implies a misunderstanding of the nature of divine causality. Many neo-Darwinian scientists, as well as some of their critics, have concluded that, if evolution is a radically contingent materialistic process driven by natural selection and random genetic variation, then there can be no place in it for divine providential causality. A growing body of scientific critics of neo-Darwinism point to evidence of design (e.g., biological structures that exhibit specified complexity) that, in their view, cannot be explained in terms of a purely contingent process and that neo-Darwinians have ignored or misinterpreted. The nub of this currently lively disagreement involves scientific observation and generalization concerning whether the available data support inferences of design or chance, and cannot be settled by theology. But it is important to note that, according to the Catholic understanding of divine causality, true contingency in the created order is not incompatible with a purposeful divine providence. Divine causality and created causality radically differ in kind and not only in degree. Thus, even the outcome of a truly contingent natural process can nonetheless fall within God’s providential plan for creation. According to St. Thomas Aquinas: “The effect of divine providence is not only that things should happen somehow, but that they should happen either by necessity or by contingency. Therefore, whatsoever divine providence ordains to happen infallibly and of necessity happens infallibly and of necessity; and that happens from contingency, which the divine providence conceives to happen from contingency” (Summa theologiae, I, 22,4 ad 1). In the Catholic perspective, neo-Darwinians who adduce random genetic variation and natural selection as evidence that the process of evolution is absolutely unguided are straying beyond what can be demonstrated by science. Divine causality can be active in a process that is both contingent and guided. Any evolutionary mechanism that is contingent can only be contingent because God made it so. An unguided evolutionary process – one that falls outside the bounds of divine providence – simply cannot exist because “the causality of God, Who is the first agent, extends to all being, not only as to constituent principles of species, but also as to the individualizing principles…It necessarily follows that all things, inasmuch as they participate in existence, must likewise be subject to divine providence” (Summa theologiae I, 22, 2).

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*) evolution arrives at the same solution over and over again, a phenomenon known as ‘convergence’. For example, eyes have evolved independently multiple times.

 

[Al_Moritz]

To follow up on my previous post:

God obviously allows for randomness in many things, including the biological appearance of our own genetic offspring, our children. Or do you really think that at conception God personally shuffles the DNA of our parents in the fertilized egg? Be careful with an affirmative answer, it would make God immediately and intimately responsible for every serious genetic disease in every individual.

 

[The_DNA_Rose]

True, I will be speechless when God arrives, but I won’t :yawn:

All I am asking for is a rational argument, as to why humanity will not be fulfilling the role of God, if and when it takes some sort of life to Mars. Your lack of argument, is thus taken as agreement.

 

[PRmerger]

How does the following recent scientific discoveries fit in with “God created life” idea?

"Viruses, long thought to be biology’s hitchhikers, turn out to have been biology’s formative force.

This is striking news, especially at a moment when the basic facts of origins and evolution seem to have fallen under a shroud. In the discussions of intelligent design, one hears a yearning for an old-fashioned creation story, in which some singular, inchoate entity stepped in to give rise to complex life-forms—humans in particular. Now the viruses appear to present a creation story of their own: a stirring, topsy-turvy, and decidedly unintelligent design wherein life arose more by reckless accident than original intent, through an accumulation of genetic accounting errors committed by hordes of mindless, microscopic replication machines. Our descent from apes is the least of it. With the discovery of Mimi, scientists are close to ascribing to viruses the last role that anyone would have conceived for them: that of life’s prime mover."
discovermagazine.com/2006/mar/unintelligent-design

As a Catholic I am not seeing any difficulty with the above.

 

[PRmerger]

All I am asking for is a rational argument, as to why humanity will not be fulfilling the role of God, if and when it takes some sort of life to Mars. Your lack of argument, is thus taken as agreement.

Perhaps if you define what the “role of God” is, in this context, we could discuss further…

 

[The_DNA_Rose]

Your first prediction contains one of those falsehoods that I was talking about earlier, “irreducibly complex structures will NOT be found.” IC systems can evolve, and so can be found in the evolution/descent model. Professor Behe agrees that IC can evolve. IC cannot evolve by the direct route, but it can evolve by indirect routes – like the scaffolding we were discussing earlier.

There are many other errors as well. Basically your picture sets up a strawman version of evolution which bears no relation to reality. For another example it ignores Gould’s Punctuated Equilibrium in the Fossil Record prediction. Another falsehood.

Please do not repeat such false information here. It does not make your side look good. If you have to rely on falsehood and not on truth, then you are not going to win.

rossum

Human DNA, is the most complex code in the known universe, this is just a fact, all of your arguments to this fact, begin with human DNA, that is not understood. The person of Earth who understands DNA, should use this understanding to cure all disease.

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[The_DNA_Rose]

Perhaps if you define what the “role of God” is, in this context, we could discuss further…

I am simply saying that the historical role of God, was to have populated the Earth with all the various forms of life.

You will agree, as no one yet has ever disagreed with me, that it is currently a major goal of mankind, to reach out into the universe, and continue the exploration that Columbus once did. The moon was the first world that I CAN PROVE was first visited by an intelligent multi billion line of DNA code being, his name was Neil.

When we go to Mars and set up a base there, it will happen, and if a single organism can be found to live there, that will evolve, God is proven, and this was all the process of the physics of spaceflight, and of genetic engineering, which can be lumped together as intelligent design…

Evolution is not just the past, but past, present and future, we now have the ability to design life in the present, that will exist in the future.

Get over it.

 

[rossum]

Welcome to Catholic Answers.

Human DNA, is the most complex code in the known universe, this is just a fact, all of your arguments to this fact, begin with human DNA, that is not understood.

You are incorrect. There many organisms whose DNA code is more complex than human DNA, whether measuring Shannon complexity or Kolmogorov complexity. Upthread I gave the examples of an onion and an amoeba, both of whose DNA is more complex by those measures than human DNA. There are others.

The person of Earth who understands DNA, should use this understanding to cure all disease.

Why does the person have to be “of Earth”. Why not some immaterial being with complete understanding and far more powers than us mere humans? Why are you expecting humans to step in where God fails to act?

rossum

 

[DrTaffy]

DrTaffy;12569245:

Natural selection of a large population over many generations with assortative mating and mutations

is not a conservative process, and that is what we are discussing.

Even in large populations it is conservative.

With assortative mating and mutations, it is potentially very creative. This is proven, undeniable. It is used as an engineering design technique.

Compare with:

The difficulty comes when a mechanism such as blind, unguided and “random” mutation is proposed to be the very means by which God creates life, in particular, where the telos or end form intended is human life.

You like to single out natural selection, and claim that since it is conservative it cannot explain the evolution of life, then single out mutation and claim that since it is unguided it cannot explain the evolution of life. Yet the two together can.

Mutation (and assortative mating and other processes) produce new material, natural selection provides guidance.

And at least we have a concrete mechanism, susceptible to experiment and examination and proof. What equivalent does ID have? What is your God made of, by what mechanism does he interact with the world, how does his sentience come about as you assert that intelligence cannnot arise by itself?

If you want ID to be treated as science, not fairy tales, produce an actual scientific argument.

Here is the peer reviewed paper on Natural Selection:

Reductive Evolution Can Prevent Populations from Taking Simple Adaptive Paths to High Fitness

I have no idea what argument you are trying to draw from that paper, or what you mean by it being “the peer reviewed paper on Natural Selection”. It makes a rather woolly argument about a rather minor point of evolutionary theory, and as far as ‘peer review’ goes it is yet another paper from ‘Bio-Complexity’ - a vanity publication by the Discovery Institute set up to act as a platform for their views.

If it has a valid argument, let alone being “the” peer reviewed paper on Natural Selection, why is it not in a reputable journal? :ehh:

If you want bigger eggs you keep selecting the hens that are laying the bigger eggs, and you get bigger and bigger eggs. But you also get hens with defective feathers and wobbly eggs.

With artificial selection. With natural selection any serious defects will be weeded out quickly.

Natural selection eliminates and maybe maintains, but it doesn’t create.

Again, mutation and similair processes do create. This has been demonstrated beyond doubt in fields such as evolvable hardware.

I was taught over and over again that the accumulation of random mutations led to evolutionary change — led to new species. I believed it until I looked for evidence.

Such as the observed cases of speciation?

Meanwhile, this thread is putatively about intelligent design, yet where do we see evidence for ID presented, as opposed to complaints about mainstream evolutionary biology and demands for proof from the naturalistic side?

 

[PRmerger]

I am simply saying that the historical role of God, was to have populated the Earth with all the various forms of life.

Ah, so if you mean by “role of God”: reproduction, then, shrug, I have no argument with you. We are all possible co-creators with God. Very Catholic, that.

However, if by “role of God” you simply mean The Creator, then, no, human beings are not capable of creating “various forms of life”.

 

[The_DNA_Rose]

Welcome to Catholic Answers.

You are incorrect. There many organisms whose DNA code is more complex than human DNA, whether measuring Shannon complexity or Kolmogorov complexity. Upthread I gave the examples of an onion and an amoeba, both of whose DNA is more complex by those measures than human DNA. There are others.

Why does the person have to be “of Earth”. Why not some immaterial being with complete understanding and far more powers than us mere humans? Why are you expecting humans to step in where God fails to act?

rossum

Well then, can you give an example of an organism, that has more complex DNA than does a human? And also show that this organism, can do DNA sequencing, or design the electron microscopes that are used to view DNA?

One example would suffice for me, that exist somewhere outside of your imagination that is…

Sheesh, some people.

 

[Peter_Plato]

I am simply saying that the historical role of God, was to have populated the Earth with all the various forms of life.

You will agree, as no one yet has ever disagreed with me, that it is currently a major goal of mankind, to reach out into the universe, and continue the exploration that Columbus once did. The moon was the first world that I CAN PROVE was first visited by an intelligent multi billion line of DNA code being, his name was Neil.

When we go to Mars and set up a base there, it will happen, and if a single organism can be found to live there, that will evolve, God is proven, and this was all the process of the physics of spaceflight, and of genetic engineering, which can be lumped together as intelligent design…

Evolution is not just the past, but past, present and future, we now have the ability to design life in the present, that will exist in the future.

Get over it.

We do not have the ability to “design” life since we have no true vision of the full potential of life - the end for which it has been created to begin with. Sure we can come up with contrived or arbitrary ends, or insist that survival, knowledge, comfort, security, pleasure, happiness, etc., are those final goods, but we can’t know that with certainty. To simply assume them as sufficient to what you take to mean playing the “role of God” I would suggest is the Fall that got us here to begin with.

There is no “role” to be played with regard to God because God alone CAN play that role. He alone has the full capability of doing so. To presume human can fulfill that role will result in a terminal line of Hitlers, Idi Amins, Pol Pots, Josef Stalins, :yawn: Oh my, did I just :yawn: again? I apologize for my rudeness. That sudden tiredness just came over me.

 

[The_DNA_Rose]

Ah, so if you mean by “role of God”: reproduction, then, shrug, I have no argument with you. We are all possible co-creators with God. Very Catholic, that.

However, if by “role of God” you simply mean The Creator, then, no, human beings are not capable of creating “various forms of life”.

Synthetic life now exist on the Earth, or life that was created by humanity.

NEW YORK — Life is a DNA software system, genome scientist Craig Venter told a packed auditorium here at the American Museum of Natural History Monday night (Oct. 21). In his talk, Venter offered a longsighted view of the creation and digitization of synthetic life.

Creating synthetic life is just a crowning achievement of Venter’s career and the evolution of the field of biology. In 2000, Venter led of one of the two teams that sequenced the human genome, the blueprint for life. Then in 2010, his team transplanted man-made DNA into a bacterial cell to create the first synthetic organism.

To create a synthetic cell, Venter said, he and his colleagues had to find a way to write the DNA software and boot it up. And this technology opened up a host of practical applications, he explains in his new book “Life at the Speed of Light” (Viking Adult, 2013), in which Venter tells the story of these milestones and speculates on the future of biology in the digital age. [Unraveling the Human Genome: 6 Molecular Milestones]

livescience.com/40623-craig-venter-envisions-future-of-biology.html

Yawn

 

[Gary_Sheldrake]

Human DNA, is the most complex code in the known universe, this is just a fact, all of your arguments to this fact, begin with human DNA, that is not understood. The person of Earth who understands DNA, should use this understanding to cure all disease.

Next

I think too much fanfare is made of DNA. DNA simply tells RNA how to make proteins. The DNA in your arm looks just like the DNA in your foot and so on. We have no clue as to how one DNA builds a nipple and another builds an eyelash. No idea whatsoever. Studying DNA to understand complex organisms like humans is like trying to figure out your laptop by studying its molecules. It doesn’t tell you a thing about Google Chrome, Internet Explorer, the information you store on your computer, the conversations you have on forums or any program you run on it.

All the best,
Gary

 

[PRmerger]

Synthetic life now exist on the Earth, or life that was created by humanity.

LOL!

We’re talking about the “role of God”, Rose. Creatio ex nihilo.

Can you give an example of a creature doing this?

Otherwise, if you’re just talking about human creativity, then that’s a bit of a stretch link it with the “role of God”.

That’s like calling this book the “Word of God”:

http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/61K1lRzLR1L.SL500_AA300.jpg

 

[DrTaffy]

You

demanded that we show where we have seen mindless things produce intelligent beings, which we did. Yet you consistently refuse to either admit that it was a silly, hypocritical standard or to meet it yourself by showing where you have seen intelligent beings created ex nihilo by an immaterial omnipotent being.
edit: ‘you’ above refers to Charlemagne, not PP

No, what you have shown is that intelligent beings have been “observed to” emerge from “mindless things” over a long period of time.

The example given was of mindless sperm and eggs forming a human. Depending on how old a human has to be for you to admit that it has a ‘mind’, you are calling a few years at most ‘a long period of time’ for intelligence to arise?

Even given that, how does this not meet the challenge that we show where we have seen mindless things produce intelligent beings?

Are you about to take up the challenge of meeting the same standard for divine creation? Seen any intelligent beings created ex nihilo by an omnipotent immaterial entity recently?

What is missing is a full accounting for how intelligent beings can possibly derive from mindless things in a way that demonstrates the actual mechanisms by which that “emergence” can be explained.

THAT you have not done.

Full account, I’ll grant you. I’m not fully up to date in this field, but I cannot imagine that such a breakthrough would have gone unnoticed.

But we are light years ahead of ID. We have a demonstrable mechanism, we have a detailed model that explains a lot of details that are otherwise inexplicable and which appear to flatly contradict individual design by a sane intelligent designer.

You have blind assertion and complaints about details of our work.

Where are your demonstrations of “the actual mechanisms” behind God’s existence, his own intelligence, his interaction with the universe?

The “how” has been completely left out of the accounting. It is required before it can be claimed that mindless things have been definitively shown to “produce” intelligent beings.

Logic fail. If we observe mindless things producing intelligent beings, we have proven that mindless things can produce intelligent beings.

If you wish to assert that this can only happen with the assistance of some other process that we failed to observe, such as a wickle invisible angel turning up with a brand new soul (slightly soiled thanks to umpety-great grandma Eve but otherwise OK) and hammering it up the newborn’s left nostril, produce the evidence.

 

[Gary_Sheldrake]

Well then, can you give an example of an organism, that has more complex DNA than does a human? And also show that this organism, can do DNA sequencing, or design the electron microscopes that are used to view DNA?

One example would suffice for me, that exist somewhere outside of your imagination that is…

Sheesh, some people.

An onion has 12 times as much DNA than a Harvard Professor. Amoebas have more DNA than people.

All the best,
Gary

 

[Gary_Sheldrake]

LOL!

We’re talking about the “role of God”, Rose. Creatio ex nihilo.

Can you give an example of a creature doing this?

Otherwise, if you’re just talking about human creativity, then that’s a bit of a stretch link it with the “role of God”.

That’s like calling this book the “Word of God”:

http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/61K1lRzLR1L.SL500_AA300.jpg

I love your ducks! Very cute.

 

[The_DNA_Rose]

I think too much fanfare is made of DNA. DNA simply tells RNA how to make proteins. The DNA in your arm looks just like the DNA in your foot and so on. We have no clue as to how one DNA builds a nipple and another builds an eyelash. No idea whatsoever. Studying DNA to understand complex organisms like humans is like trying to figure out your laptop by studying its molecules. It doesn’t tell you a thing about Google Chrome, Internet Explorer, the information you store on your computer, the conversations you have on forums or any program you run on it.

All the best,
Gary

DNA is the chemical code, that is made of molecules, as you say, that enables those molecules and the elements that make up the molecules, to enable your thought process, and all life a we know it. The understanding of DNA will be the understanding of how life, both exist from the elements of the Earth and as to how evolution of life, happens.

Thus your belief that DNA is meaningless, is just not supported by science, and would be clearly rejected by the millions of humans that are actively engaged in some type of DNA research.

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