Intelligent Design

[Bradski]

‘Sentences that convey different ideas may have similar structures, but when we write a sentence we start with the idea, not the sentence structure’.

And when these guys do ‘science’ they start with the answer and go looking for questions that are applicable.

Look, biology is an incredibly complex and complicated sphere of science. It’s not difficult to find something somewhere that doesn’t raise further questions. That makes us realise that we’re nowhere near knowing all there is. But to root around in some arcane area of molecular biology and say: ‘This doesn’t seem right to me, the figures don’t appear to add up, therefore ID’ is as far from science as throwing a rock at the moon is from space exploration. As Pauli said – it’s not even wrong.

And in any case, we really should call this thread ‘Not Very Intelligent Design’. If I was a designer and 99.9% of my designs failed, then I’d be keeping quiet about it. Especially when the ones that do work do not work very well at all. So how about NV-ID?

 

[Peter_Plato]

‘Sentences that convey different ideas may have similar structures, but when we write a sentence we start with the idea, not the sentence structure’.

And when these guys do ‘science’ they start with the answer and go looking for questions that are applicable.

Look, biology is an incredibly complex and complicated sphere of science. It’s not difficult to find something somewhere that doesn’t raise further questions. That makes us realise that we’re nowhere near knowing all there is. But to root around in some arcane area of molecular biology and say: ‘This doesn’t seem right to me, the figures don’t appear to add up, therefore ID’ is as far from science as throwing a rock at the moon is from space exploration. As Pauli said – it’s not even wrong.

Yes, of course, but you forget that many, if not most, scientific discoveries of note were made by the kind of “rooting around in arcane areas” that were often overlooked by everyone else.

Seems to me you are trying very hard to dissuade people from wasting their time and not yours merely because you have a particular view about what science “should” be. What does it matter to you how arcane the area is that they root around in?

And in any case, we really should call this thread ‘Not Very Intelligent Design’. If I was a designer and 99.9% of my designs failed, then I’d be keeping quiet about it. Especially when the ones that do work do not work very well at all. So how about NV-ID?

That assumes you are a designer with limited resources and cannot afford, very much, to have your designs fail.

If, however, you are an omnipotent and omniscient designer with unlimited resources, failed designs may not matter so much, now would they? Just something to keep you occupied on a Sabbath afternoon. Depending, of course, totally upon what your ultimate aims are.

I would venture to guess that God doesn’t have your constraints, nor your reputation to uphold. Recall that pride, for God, is not a virtue.

 

[Bradski]

Yes, of course, but you forget that many, if not most, scientific discoveries of note were made by the kind of “rooting around in arcane areas” that were often overlooked by everyone else.

The term ‘arcane’ wasn’t meant to be pejorative. It wasn’t part of the argument. I’m all for people rooting around in any area they feel is important to them, arcane or otherwise. But I am most definitely not impressed by people who say they already know what the answer is before they even start rooting. Beware Of Confirmation Bias is implicitly written on the first page of any scientific student’s textbook.

If the authors of that paper discover in the midst of their endeavours something that will supersede Teflon or how to stop toast landing butter side down, then the world will beat a path to their door. But please do not try to tell me that what they are doing is science.

Seems to me you are trying very hard to dissuade people from wasting their time and not yours merely because you have a particular view about what science “should” be.

What it should be? Holy Toledo, I am not giving you my personal view on what I consider science should be. I am telling you what it is.

If, however, you are an omnipotent and omniscient designer with unlimited resources, failed designs may not matter so much, now would they?

God failed? How does an omnipotent God design something that fails?

‘Darn it, another species died out again. I just can’t understand it. But hey, it doesn’t matter so much. If I keep practicing, I’m bound to get it right at some point. I mean, who’s to complain…’

 

[Al_Moritz]

God failed? How does an omnipotent God design something that fails?

‘Darn it, another species died out again. I just can’t understand it. But hey, it doesn’t matter so much. If I keep practicing, I’m bound to get it right at some point. I mean, who’s to complain…’

 

[Bradski]

Abiogenesis required that all the parts of life had to come together simultaneously or there would be no possibility of life.

I nearly missed this. It could have slipped through unnoticed. I just picked up on it looking for something else.

This statement cannot possibly be any more wrong.

As I said in an earlier post, there never has been a time when there was no flight, sight, sense, mind etc and then, all of a suddensome, there was.

There never was a time when life suddenly started. There was a time when there was definitely no life of any description. And there was most definately a time when there was no doubt that life had started. But in between those two times?

There are a number of criteria required to be met by an entity for it to be classified as what we normally describe as ‘alive’ (and there is still no universal consensus on what these criteria are). And there is no moment when ‘all parts of life’ came together ‘simultaneously’ like producing the rabbit from Peter’s hat.

Just like a man losing his hair, there is no specific moment when he moves from being hirsute to being bald. There is no moment when you can definitely say that losing one more hair will result in what we describe as ‘baldness’. It is a very, very gradual process, well beyond anything we are capable of coming to terms with, being creatures with a life span as short as we have.

Just as you can’t ‘see’ someone growing old, there is no way you have the ability to ‘see’ life emerging. You don’t look any different today than you did yesterday, but at some point you won’t be young any more (inanimate), but you will reach a point when you are definitely old (animate). Now stretch that over a few billion years and tell me that it all came together simultaneously.

 

[Al_Moritz]

I nearly missed this. It could have slipped through unnoticed. I just picked up on it looking for something else.

This statement cannot possibly be any more wrong.

Indeed. The abstract of my article on the origin of life reads:

Abstract

Even the simplest currently living cells contain hundreds of proteins most of which are essential to their functioning. Yet such complexity cannot have stood at the origin of life. Based on research in the field it is proposed here how, once a self-replicating genetic molecule existed, life might have started and gradual evolution of complexity was made possible – in contrast to the sudden appearance of complexity that creationists claim to have been necessary at the beginning of life. Conditions for synthesis of organic molecules on the early Earth are reviewed, and ‘gene-first’ and ‘metabolism-first’ models are discussed. While the origin of the homochirality of amino acids and sugars has been a puzzling problem for decades, recent findings provide plausible explanations.

Link:
talkorigins.org/faqs/abioprob/originoflife.html

 

[Charlemagne_III]

I don’t know about you, but if I am offered the sale of a decent sized bridge, I generally check the credentials of whomever is making me the offer before I even start reading the brochure let alone the small print.

It is summarily dismissed with no apologies whatsoever. And you have just used up a year’s supply of chutzpah.

“There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally **breathed by the Creator **into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.” Origin of the Species, 1872 (last edition before Darwin’s death).

Are Darwin’s credentials and chutzpah in doubt?

 

[Charlemagne_III]

There never was a time when life suddenly started. There was a time when there was definitely no life of any description. And there was most definately a time when there was no doubt that life had started. But in between those two times?

Now stretch that over a few billion years and tell me that it all came together simultaneously.

And you know all this how? You do have easy answers based on absurdities. Have you lived for billions of years to observe the process that led to abiogenesis.

If you want a time frame, there are no billions of years for that first living organism to come together. Water did not exist on the planet until 500 million years before the speculative time of abiogenesis.

Go thou and calculate some more.

 

[inocente]

There is nothing in the Dharmic religions that comes anywhere near the Big Bang.

"The Hindu religion is the only one of the world’s great faiths … in which the time scales correspond, no doubt by accident, to those of modern scientific cosmology. - genius.com/Carl-sagan-on-god-and-gods-annotated

Read Genesis again. Notice that there was darkness before the creation of light. Why wouldn’t that correspond to 380,000 years?

You’re welcome!

‘God called the light “day,” and the darkness he called “night.”’ - Gen 1:5

You’re claiming that God called the first 380,000 years “night” and ever since He’s called it “day”, so we’re still in the first day, according to you.

I like Lemaitre’s quote, but not because it disposes of “Let there be light.”

“Let there be light” is still operative from a scientific point of view, as Sagan points out in Cosmos.

There is no quote from the Hindu texts that is comparable to “Let there be light.”

If there is, document it.

You can’t get deeper into scientism than trying to use Sagan to validate scripture . But “Let there be light” isn’t scientific, it’s poetry. Gen 1 has the Earth created before light. There’s nothing remotely correct about the account.

I’m not a Hindu and have no knowledge of its creation accounts, but with the aid of google easily found from the Bhagavata Purana, c. 1000 BCE:

SB 12.4.1: Sukadeva Gosvami said: My dear King, I have already described to you the measurements of time, beginning from the smallest fraction measured by the movement of a single atom up to the total life span of Lord Brahma.

That’s more than comparable, there’s nothing in Gen 1 as sophisticated as atoms.

SB 12.4.29 - Although perceived, the transformation of even a single atom of material nature has no ultimate definition without reference to the Supreme Soul. To be accepted as factually existing, something must possess the same quality as pure spirit-eternal, unchanging existence.

Sounds like a precursor of Aristotle’s prime matter.

Then in the Rig Vada:

CXXI - IN the beginning rose Hiranyagarbha, born Only Lord of all created beings. He fixed and holdeth up this earth and heaven. …] By him the heavens are strong and earth is steadfast, by him light’s realm and sky-vault are supported.

Sounds like that might be where Gen 1 gets its “God called the vault “sky.”.

 

[DrTaffy]

It appears naturalism is in the same boat as intelligent design

No, we answered the challenge made to us. You lot are still frantically avoiding the following questions:

1. How often have you seen an omnipotent immaterial being create intelligent beings ex nihilo?
2. How exactly did this omnipotent, intelligent, immaterial being come about, what is it made of, how exactly does it work?

because neither does naturalism show how material being creates intelligent beings ex nihilo.

But we don’t claim creation ex nihilo. We can provide all sorts of evidence for evolution, neurobiology, animals with some of our own mental abilities and so on. You have yet to produce anything on the same level.

Genetic algorithms are, in themselves, impotent.

Actually, they are very impressively capable.

A mousetrap might have algorithms - genetic or otherwise - as an aspect of its design, but that is a far cry from claiming genetic algorithms or design, on its own, can come into existence instantiated in being without some effective means of bringing it about.

A phrase that suggests that you don’t understand what algorithms are. They would not be ‘an aspect of its design’ but a means by which that design was reached.

And I note that you have not even tried to meet the challenge of showing that a genetic algorithmic approach could not design a mouse trap.:ehh:

Natural selection may function to filter out deficient designs, but it cannot create a continual stream of varied and improved ones as a necessary aspect of random chance.

Natural selection + random variation in a population can and does produce a constant stream of improvements. Engineers actually use it to do so. And the kind of results it produces bear a remarkable resemblance to the kind of solutions we see in living things.

So, neither have you completely demonstrated the “mechanism” by which the undeniable design can simply materialize.

Yes we have. Explicitly. Natural selection has been shown to be a very powerful design process.

 

[Peter_Plato]

The term ‘arcane’ wasn’t meant to be pejorative. It wasn’t part of the argument. I’m all for people rooting around in any area they feel is important to them, arcane or otherwise. But I am most definitely not impressed by people who say they already know what the answer is before they even start rooting.

This version fails to account for why they would be rooting. If they already know the answer, why would they bother searching for it?

What is more likely true is that they have strong suspicions about the answer but have certain criteria they still uphold because they know that those are necessary for proving the answer.

I would suggest confirmation bias is more a problem for those who think in line with the going trends in science since they have few others that challenge their ideas and so it would be easy to slip into the “express” lane of confirming what everyone knows to be true because everyone knows it to be true. Sound familiar? Evolutionist heal thine own confirmation bias.

Confirmation bias would be much more difficult to get away with when every Tom, Dick or Bradski are challenging your every move. Now, of course, that assumes that Tom, Dick and Bradski bother to read your work in the first place rather than assume it is wrong merely because it challenges their confirmation bias.

And of course, there is absolutely no confirmation bias in declining to read the works of others because you “already know the answer” before you start rooting around in their work.

 

[DrTaffy]

Not really. But you seem to be posing a possibility that is so improbable as to be laughable.

Says the man still frantically avoiding the following questions:

1. How often have you seen an omnipotent immaterial being create intelligent beings ex nihilo?
2. How exactly did this omnipotent, intelligent, immaterial being come about, what is it made of, how exactly does it work?

As well, now that I look back at my post to which you are replying, as a whole host of other questions.

You do have easy answers based on absurdities. Have you lived for billions of years to observe the process that led to abiogenesis.

…and you are back to demanding that we have personally witnessed the processes we believe in. When have you witnessed God creating life ex nihilo, let alone the Universe?

 

[Charlemagne_III]

"The Hindu religion is the only one of the world’s great faiths … in which the time scales correspond, no doubt by accident, to those of modern scientific cosmology. - genius.com/Carl-sagan-on-god-and-gods-annotated

If you would read The Science of God: the Convergence of Scientific and Biblical Wisdom or Genesis and the Big Bang, both by Gerald Schroeder, you would see how much more science there is in Genesis than in Hinduism.

Sagan clearly had no use for Christianity, so it’s odd that he would regard Hinduism as more scientific than Genesis. I doubt that Sagan qualifies as a true student of Genesis, but Schroeder certainly is and he has his PhD in Physics from M.I.T. He is certainly no Kentucky born again Baptist Creationist.

 

[Charlemagne_III]

1. How often have you seen an omnipotent immaterial being create intelligent beings ex nihilo?
2. How exactly did this omnipotent, intelligent, immaterial being come about, what is it made of, how exactly does it work?[/INDENT]
   .

Neither question is the subject of this thread.

Go start another thread and I’ll meet you there.

:shrug:Thanks.

 

[Peter_Plato]

Actually, they are very impressively capable.

Yes, they are. On paper… or rather on a computer monitor.

Assuming mutations - as they occur genetically - are capable of spawning successive functional design improvements before they become unfit is another story, however.

Yes, I know… we have “observed” the emergence of the rabbit from the hat.

I see it as not capitulating to “confirmation bias” and viewing reality from all possible angles before drawing a “confirmed” conclusion.

You claim it is a “done deal.” I claim it isn’t until all the cards are on the table. Refusing to look at some of the cards and only the ones that affirm your side of the story - as Bradski is so keen to point out - is confirmation bias.

Have you read the article?

 

[Peter_Plato]

But we don’t claim creation ex nihilo. We can provide all sorts of evidence for evolution, neurobiology, animals with some of our own mental abilities and so on. You have yet to produce anything on the same level.

Yes, of course, and scientists are now “intelligently” mapping the genome and finding successive layers of coding that is only being discovered because of deep insights into mathematics and algorithms by very intelligent human beings.

And those intelligent human beings are only now - with intelligence - designing and engineering complex assembly plants that do not even come close to rivalling what occurs in each and every living cell. What we don’t see occurring are complex manufacturing plants self-assembling without the assistance of intelligence.

Your assumption is that human intelligence, itself, was the product of blind forces and random chance and therefore natural process are, too. The alternative is that human intelligence as a “product” has not been sufficiently explained by naturalists and, therefore, its genesis and the genesis of design in nature - both seen hand in hand - are not so easily explained as you suppose.

 

[tonyrey]

The topic of this thread is “intelligent design” - so if you feel that ‘mind’ or similar concepts are what cdesign proponentsists refer to as ‘irreducible complex’ it is up to you to prove that, so your definition that matters.

You cannot prove your position by asserting it and demanding that we either prove you wrong or accept your assertion.

Here you are then:

The mind is a conscious, intangible, intelligent, purposeful, autonomous entity.

 

[Charlemagne_III]

What the proponents of the Blind Watchmaker would have us believe is that Nature can select and produce highly complex designs without knowing what it is doing. What the proponents of Intelligent Design propose is that what nature has produced appears to be the product of intelligent design.

The latter position does not produce a conflation of science and religion. One does not have to know the designer, or talk about the designer, to know that a certain thing has been designed. The essence of this dispute is whether a mousetrap can blindly, according to some vague and unobservable law of nature, assemble itself for the purpose of trapping mice.

That abiogenesis was a product and process infinitely more complicated than a mousetrap there can be no doubt. Even given half a billion years, a mousetrap could not assemble itself without being designed for the purpose of trapping mice. How much more incredible is the notion that in the same amount of time the first living organism could assemble itself without being designed for the purpose of replicating itself and starting the whole chain of evolution toward Man.

Whatever questions may be asked about the Designer are really irrelevant to the believable probability that abiogenesis was a designed event and the unbelievable probability that abiogenesis was designed by and in the dark unconsciousness of the Blind Watchmaker.

 

[DrTaffy]

Neither question is the subject of this thread.

Both questions are directly relevant to intelligent design, and you clearly felt that they were relevant when you demanded that we answer the equivalent question.

We have met your demand. You are still frantically avoiding the reciprocal questions. And you repeated the demand in an even more extreme form back in post #308

 

[Al_Moritz]

Whatever questions may be asked about the Designer are really irrelevant to the believable probability that abiogenesis was a designed event and the unbelievable probability that abiogenesis was designed by and in the dark unconsciousness of the Blind Watchmaker.

Argument from ignorance.