Is DNA Designed?

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The early atmosphere was a reducing atmosphere, dominated by carbon dioxide and gases like hydrogen sulfide and methane. But the earliest life was anaerobic, so a lack of free oxygen wasn’t a problem. In fact the largest extinction event in the planet’s history occurred about 2.5 billion years ago when the cyanobacteria first appeared, and began photosynthezing and excreting O2. A great many anaerobic organisms couldn’t tolerate the growing O2 levels and died off. But we also know that sulfur metabolizing genes are among the oldest genes of life, indicating life’s earliest times were in an atmosphere quite different from the one that was in place by about two billion years ago.
 
niceatheist said:
The early atmosphere was a reducing atmosphere, dominated by carbon dioxide and gases like hydrogen sulfide and methane. But the earliest life was anaerobic, so a lack of free oxygen wasn’t a problem. In fact the largest extinction event in the planet’s history occurred about 2.5 billion years ago when the cyanobacteria first appeared, and began photosynthezing and excreting O2. A great many anaerobic organisms couldn’t tolerate the growing O2 levels and died off. But we also know that sulfur metabolizing genes are among the oldest genes of life, indicating life’s earliest times were in an atmosphere quite different from the one that was in place by about two billion years ago.
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Do you have empirical evidence of this? Observable, repeatable and predictable?
 
Bradskii said:
By God. Now the $64,000 question:

Name something in the natural world NOT designed by God.

Your time starts…now.
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I hope that was meant as agreement, because I took @buffalo to be agreeing with what you’re saying.

It never ceases to amaze me that people conclude that a God who would make a universe that works in an orderly fashion must be some kind of far-removed and uncaring “clock maker.” I guess that it is the Fall talking? We can’t imagine creating any system ourselves without constantly putting our two bits in and changing it around to be more to our liking of the moment–that is, until we got distracted by something else and left what we started in neglect. We can’t imagine raising children and giving them any real choices that we don’t cut off at every turn if we see they’re wrong-headed?

In other words, having tasted the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, we lack the love to refrain from being control freaks, so we can’t imagine an all-Powerful Being who is not a control freak. That means a deity who isn’t constantly reaching in and fiddling with things in a way we can see just must not care.
 
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You’ve never heard of the Blind Watchmaker? 🙂

Yes, God sustains His creation, not random randomness going to and fro until it hits a solution. That we can ??? believe??? Not.
 
edwest211 said:
You’ve never heard of the Blind Watchmaker? 🙂

Yes, God sustains His creation, not random randomness going to and fro until it hits a solution. That we can ??? believe??? Not.
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Oh you mean Dawkins? Dawkins, ironically enough, has limited his imagination. Whether it is his attachment to a mechanical universe with no conductor built on some kind of hope that he actually might be the most intelligent sentient being to ever exist, I could not say.

Las Vegas is built on games of chance. Do we think it is random that the casinos make money? We know it isn’t. Any mathematician can tell you that when the number of trials is high, there isn’t a lot of “chance” in random events. The more trials, the less chance. The more you understand what influences seemingly “random” events, the less chance. Someone who creates from a real-time knowledge and power over all time, space and reality is not planning from the same vantage point we have of the same events.

Dawkins has the mental capacity to understand that. He either doesn’t want to believe it or cannot bring himself to believe that God is not a control freak. He can imagine that the natural world could be as it is without any deity because it has an order which is self-enforcing. He uses this to conclude there is no deity. (As far as I know, he doesn’t have any answer for what started a universe whose starting point in space and time science has identified. If the universe as we know it had a start, then who or what started it? What started that? And so on…)
 
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Of course they are observable, and observations are repeatable. The problem seems to be you don’t know what those words mean in science.
 
You don’t need to be. There are plenty of phenomena that cannot be directly observed. If that’s your standard, how do you know you had a great great great grandfather?
 
buffalo said:
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niceatheist:
Of course they are observable,
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You were there?
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If you have a fossil you can repeat falsifiable and empirical tests on it to determine its age, for example.
 
Wesrock said:
If you have a fossil you can repeat falsifiable and empirical tests on it to determine its age, for example.
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Interestingly enough, dates that are returned that do not fit current paradigm are thrown out as wrong.

We are discussing whether DNA is designed.
 
edwest211 said:
I question the dates. No, really.
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Let’s be honest. You don’t question THE dates. You question ANY dates that don’t support your scientifically bereft fundamental position. Yes, really.
 
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Bradskii said:
Let’s be honest. You don’t question THE dates. You question ANY dates that don’t support your scientifically bereft fundamental position.
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Let’s be honest. You don’t question THE dates as long as they support your scientifically bereft atheistic materialist position.
 
So you can infer the existence of a great great great grandfather, but you have no direct evidence. And in fact, that is how a lot of science works, through inference. You can’t see an electron, but you can infer its existence and its properties through the effects it has on observable objects. We actually have a lot better than even that for the early atmosphere, we can find ancient rocks from the period before there was free oxygen, we have zircon crystals that capture primordial water, in essence we have enough “fossil” atmospheric data to reconstruct the reducing atmosphere that existed. We even know roughly when the cyanobacteria became numerous enough to begin altering the atmosphere because we quite literally have rocks from around 2.4-2.5 billion years ago that have iron oxide deposits. In other words, iron minerals literally began to rust as oxygen levels rose.

Repeatability, prediction and observation don’t mean that unless you directly observe a phenomenon you cannot formulate testable hypotheses. We have no way of observing the core of the Earth, but we can use indirect methods like sound waves to gain density data, and because we know how specific elements and minerals behave under such conditions, we can construct a model of the core of the planet.
 
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