Is Darwin's Theory of Evolution True? Part 4.0

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Yeah, I agree. Those arguments like the OP here appeal only to believers. It takes a true believer to imagine that chemical processes, which would have randomly appeared in the first place, randomly bring about life in all its diversity. The fallacy is ontological I believe, even if the argument is valid. God as designer/programmer and creation as the designed/program go together; describing the relationship, that one follows from the other does not prove its reality. That’s why things have to be revealed in some manner to be true. Logic can take us only so far however, and leads to nonsense when it strays beyond the true facts. That’s the case I see with evolutionary theories, when science, limited in its scope, is used to ascertain the mechanisms of creation.
 
It’s just a description to describe God.
“Who is Bob?”
“Bob is the town doctor.”
Yet Bob is Bob regardless if he is in fact the town doctor, yet this is an easy way to identify who Bob is.

If you are attempting to say that it is a passing away of creator to be to Creator, then one simply must remember that God is not bound to time as we who are confined to the universe in such a way are. 19 billion years ago simply has not occurred. Or, if it did, we have no idea about it. Time began for us >15 billion years ago or such. Beyond that is the depths of eternity, or else a created time we know not about.
 
Our body is renewing itself all the time. Without our conscious (name removed by moderator)ut. Old cells die and get replaced with new ones. We have an autonomic nervous system for some functions like breathing. We don’t have to think about it, we just do it. So, if evolution made us what we are - discard the soul - then everything we experience, everything boils down to chemicals and reactions to sensory (name removed by moderator)uts. The end. We are biological robots - nothing more. We live, we reproduce, or not, and die. End of story. Discrad God/gods/belief systems. So that’s it. “Eat, drink and be merry for tomorrow you die.” or something like that.

For Catholics, that sort of thinking is so far from any sort of complete answer. But scientists are busy reverse-engineering the genome. And have moved on to Bioinformatics:

“Bioinformatics … is an interdisciplinary field that develops methods and software tools for understanding biological data. As an interdisciplinary field of science, bioinformatics combines Computer Science, Biology, Mathematics, and Engineering to analyze and interpret biological data.”

So Design fits the way things are done and has become the way things are done.
 
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Aloysium said:
randomly bring about life in all its diversity.
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And where are all these environmental changes coming from to cause all this diversity…it’s just too vague. How many different kinds of environmental pressures did take just to mutate and evolve the Flower/Honey Bee relationship ? How about the Sea Anemone/Clownfish relationship? The stars are always aligned when it comes to environmental changes and evolution.
 
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Who has said that all behaviors are programmed, in this thread or in the past three?
 
You posted this:

Step 1) Call all behaviors or physical traits “programming”
Step 2) Demand that programming, by definition, refer only to the willful act of a sentient programmer
Step 3) Therefore conclude that all behaviors or physical traits are the willful act of a sentient programmer

Problem: begging the question is an instant and obvious logical failure. If you define everything in terms of a sentient creator, then your conclusion that a sentient creator did everything isn’t a discovery about reality-- it’s just a reformulation of your axioms.
 
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To borrow a legal term here, we should look at proximate cause. Given that my parents had free will, my existence is most directly caused by them getting married and. . . well, you know the rest. It doesn’t really matter whether we were arrived at by evolution or by God’s grace in that case-- it was for sure my parents getting together and intermingling their DNA in a particular way that is the proximate cause.

However, I could not have existed without my grandparents doing the same thing, and so on, back a very long time-- whether to Adam and Eve or to a collection of micro-organisms doesn’t really matter that much. Call the latter two the “ultimate cause.”

Here’s my understanding of the official Catholic Church position on this issue right now: 1) the ultimate cause of ANY chain of events is rooted in the Creator God. i.e. even if evolution is true, the ultimate cause can only be God; 2) Those aspects which are not explainable in physical terms, especially the capacity for “dead” matter to experience subjectively, are also left to God, since we cannot establish any cause at all for it with physical means.

Note that the relationship of evolution to species today and species that existed in the past is really not a matter of great religious importance. So long as subjective consciousness right here right now is credited to God, and the ultimate cause of everything (i.e. the origin of the Universe) also, then that’s the point.
 
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You managed to read my entire post, and then find a way to ignore it at the same time. If a religious person wants to argue that we are programmed, and that programming requires a programmer, then he’s guilty of begging the question, and the mechanism used for begging the question is a conflation of different definitions of the term “program.”

I’m not arguing for or against the idea of God, evolution, Adam and Eve or anything. I’m just showing how this particular failure to present a logical argument doesn’t arrive at a sound conclusion.
 
You introduced the concept of programming with regard to stem cells. The rest of the argument, so far as I can see right now, has branched out from there.
 
Yes, our bodies are programmed for life, our behavior is not.

The complex language and instruction sets that keep life going comes from a mind.

Did you catch the AI video I posted by Dr Marks? Take a look and I would be interested to hear your comments.
 
Unfortunately, it’s hard for me to make time to watch that video. I’ll leave it at intending to watch it for now unless you want to summarize it.

“The complex language and instruction sets.” Again, you are using terminology that strongly implies mind, and then saying i comes from a mind. What language, specifically, do you mean? What instruction sets, specifically, are you talking about? Instinct? DNA?
 
The DNA code. Not the physical aspect as marvelous as that is. The language/coded instruction sets for life.

When you have time the video will fill in many blanks.
 
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benjamin1973 said:
Given that my parents had free will, my existence is most directly caused by them
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Watching a pizza commercial on the Olympic closing ceremonies playing in the background, the analogy of the oven’s role in baking came to mind. Parents are an indirect cause, although necessary to the act of conception.

Who we are in ourselves is not a random event caused by incidental factors. There is no true probability to our being here. It would be zero in terms of predictability, given one’s uniqueness and temporal nonexistence until one exists. And then, given that each of us is here, it is 100% certain that we would be here. There exists no reality that does not include each of us.

Along those lines, I would say that Adam and Eve are not the ultimate cause the first manifestation of mankind, the Creator of which is God.
benjamin1973 said:
Here’s my understanding of the official Catholic Church position
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It’s more complicated than that. Give it a few more decades of contemplation and prayer.
 
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DNA really is amazing. It literally is a language. And then the copying mechanism literally has a proofreading function. It’s krazy kool.
 
DNA is not a language. It is a template by which proteins are ordered and organized. You guys keep using language which defines biology in terms of a maker. It’s that same conflation of terms still.
 
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