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RACJ
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Biologists as well, with regard to origins theory.
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buffalo
Guest
Right. And the UPB is 10^150. So lets just add one hundred more times.
So the odds are infestitimal that it would happen the first time or the second or the third.
It is plausible that if it happens the first time in 200 seconds it was setup.
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Crossbones
Guest
I’m sorry; I checked out for a couple of weeks so I didn’t see the last 1000 posts or so. Did you explain why 10^45 transitions a second make sense (that fundamental part of the UPB that you were unable to explain the last time we discussed it) because I’d love to understand it.
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Monkey1976
Guest
Or the 10^100th time. The odds don’t change for a given number of attempts.
Plausible, but not necessarily true. When one applies the principle of parsimony, the fact that a designer is not an absolute necessity makes the designer a needless addition.
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edwest2
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I can say it’s quite reasonable to connect the work of a scientist to his beliefs.Well, you are far more trusting in the people of science than I am. People in any walk of life can have an agenda. Millions of souls have lost their faith due to specious reasoning under the auspices of “science”.Rob
stephenjaygould.org/ctrl/news/file002.html
Peace,
Ed
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buffalo
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powerofk
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So we think. The odds are actually infitesimal in any given 200 seconds. Probability-wise, though, it’s no more probable in the first 200 seconds than it is in ANY given 200 seconds. However, given enough chances, it’ll eventually happen somewhere along the line. At the same time, someone could easily set it up so that it happens on any given 200 seconds. The problem is that we expect science to define the actual cause of phenomena. It doesn’t - it defines the phenomena themselves and what happens in a phenomena, but science as it is currently defined cannot explore anything outside the natural realm.
Here’s the thing. Science, as it is currently defined, is different than how it was defined under Thomas Aquinas and Aristotle. Thomas Aquinas and Aristotle considered metaphysics to be a science; what we consider “the sciences” of today were not well developed before the 1600s. “The sciences” of today explain how the world works. Unfortunately, they cannot explain why the world works the way the world works. If something is not directly observable (or indirectly, through data collection), it can’t be studied (and yes, quantum physics and the laws of relativity have been studied directly). This limits science to studying matter (including life) and energy. As such, this makes evolution to appear as quite random chance.
Is random chance possible? Yes. Is God manipulating change possible? Of course, and absolutely. Can the direct study of only matter and energy answer this question? No. What does happen, though, is that theists see the apparent random chance, say that since the probability is infitesimally small, it must have been intervened in, and so use the apparent random chance as proof of God. Atheists, believing that God is an impossibility, use the apparently random chance as proof of absence of God. But both are wrong. The methods of science and the results of science are actually quite agnostic. They say nothing about the existence or non-existence of God. Scientifically, it doesn’t matter whether evolution is random chance or is guided by God - it just happens.
In essence, God can’t be studied directly through scientific experimentation. But that’s not surprising, considering that God is neither matter nor energy. God is God - He is outside the material world. No matter how far away you travel in the universe, you will never find Heaven - Heaven is outside of space and time. Jesus’s crucifixion defies space and time, and is once for all who believe in Him. God has the ability to intervene in any space and any time. This is what a miracle is - God intervening and defying the laws of nature at a specific time and at a specific place.
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edwest2
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It matters a great deal and Biology textbooks are not agnostic. The writers feel the need to add purely biased, unscientific conclusions to the data.
We can see this in current biology textbooks:
“[E]volution works without either plan or purpose — Evolution is random and undirected.”
(Biology, by Kenneth R. Miller & Joseph S. Levine (1st ed., Prentice Hall, 1991), pg. 658; (3rd ed., Prentice Hall, 1995), pg. 658; (4th ed., Prentice Hall, 1998), pg. 658; emphasis in original.)
“Humans represent just one tiny, largely fortuitous, and late-arising twig on the enormously arborescent bush of life.”
(Stephen J Gould quoted in Biology, by Peter H Raven & George B Johnson (5th ed., McGraw Hill, 1999), pg 15; (6th ed., McGraw Hill, 2000), pg. 16.)
“By coupling **undirected, purposeless **variation to the **blind, uncaring **process of natural selection, Darwin made theological or spiritual explanations of the life processes superfluous.”
(Evolutionary Biology, by Douglas J. Futuyma (3rd ed., Sinauer Associates Inc., 1998), p. 5.)
“Darwin knew that accepting his theory required believing in philosophical materialism, the conviction that **matter is the stuff of all existence **and that all mental and spiritual phenomena are its by-products. Darwinian evolution was not only purposeless but also heartless–a process in which the rigors of nature ruthlessly eliminate the unfit. Suddenly, humanity was reduced to just one more species in a world that cared nothing for us. The great human mind was no more than a mass of evolving neurons. Worst of all, there was no divine plan to guide us.”
(Biology: Discovering Life by Joseph S. Levine & Kenneth R. Miller (1st ed., D.C. Heath and Co., 1992), pg. 152; (2nd ed… D.C. Heath and Co., 1994), p. 161; emphases in original.)
“Adopting this view of the world means accepting not only the processes of evolution, but also the view that the living world is constantly evolving, and that evolutionary change occurs without any goals.’ The idea that **evolution is not directed **towards a final goal state has been more difficult for many people to accept than the process of evolution itself.”
(Life: The Science of Biology by William K. Purves, David Sadava, Gordon H. Orians, & H. Craig Keller, (6th ed., Sinauer; W.H. Freeman and Co., 2001), pg. 3.)
“The ‘blind’ watchmaker is natural selection. **Natural selection is totally blind **to the future. “**Humans are fundamentally not exceptional **because we came from the same evolutionary source as every other species. It is natural selection of selfish genes that has given us our bodies and brains “Natural selection is a bewilderingly simple idea. And yet what it explains is the whole of life, the diversity of life, the apparent design of life.”
(Richard Dawkins quoted in *Biology *by Neil A. Campbell, Jane B. Reese. & Lawrence G. Mitchell (5th ed., Addison Wesley Longman, 1999), pgs. 412-413.)
“Of course, no species has 'chosen’ a strategy. Rather, its ancestors ‘little by little, generation after generation’ merely wandered into a successful way of life through the action of random evolutionary forces. Once pointed in a certain direction, a line of evolution survives only if the cosmic dice continues to roll in its favor. “[J]ust by chance, a wonderful diversity of life has developed during the billions of years in which organisms have been evolving on earth.
(Biology by Burton S. Guttman (1st ed., McGraw Hill, 1999), pgs. 36-37.)
“It is difficult to avoid the speculation that Darwin, as has been the case with others, found the implications of his theory difficult to confront. “The real difficulty in accepting Darwins theory has always been that it seems to diminish our significance. Earlier, astronomy had made it clear that the earth is not the center of the solar universe, or even of our own solar system. Now the new biology asked us to accept the proposition that, like all other organisms, we too are the products of a random process that, as far as science can show, we are not created for any special purpose or as part of any universal design.”
(Invitation to Biology, by Helena Curtis & N. Sue Barnes(3rd ed., Worth, 1981), pgs. 474-475.)
Peace,
Ed
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buffalo
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How many more times of can we add 100 more until we all agree it is impossible without being setup? 100 more, 200 more, 300 more? Or will anti-ID’ers forever hold out for more?
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Crossbones
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I’m not seeing it. It say there are 10^45 possible quantum states a second, but it doesn’t say where that number came from. Am I missing it? Can you point me to the specific text on it?
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powerofk
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And again, that’s the writers adding their conclusions. The thing is, as far as science can tell, evolution is random. Supernatural explanations cannot be used for science. The result in the natural world appears to be random. It’s like this - it is statistically possible that a 1st grade student could receive a perfect score on a multiple choice test on calculus. Is it probable? No - the chances of this happening are exhorbitantly small. But if it did happen, there are really 3 possibilities: either the child is insanely intelligent for his age, the child is being told the answers, or the child was just a really lucky guesser. The first possibility is actually the least probable of the three (unless he’s a Vulcan from Star Trek).
The second appears to be the most probable, at least at first, but there is no actual evidence that points to this happening. The child was alone in the room with a proctor, the child was fully searched for information devices, the proctor was absolutely quiet and did not engage the child at all, and the room was completely shut off from the outside world. In addition, as far as anyone knows, this is the first time the child has seen the test and did not have any advance knowledge of the answers.
The third possibility is that the child is just a very good guesser. This is what is left after all other possibilities are eliminated. Could the child have been fed the answers by a non-observable means? Of course - the proctor may have used non-verbal human behaviors (such as coughing, head scratching, and the like) to cue the child what the answer was. The child or the adult may have telepathic powers. God Himself may have told the child what the answers were. Ultimately, it’s impossible to tell.
And that’s where science is with evolution. It’s impossible to tell, scientifically, whether what appears to be random chance actually is random chance or is divine intervention. All that an honest scientist can say is this:
Evolution is the change in a population over time. Changes actually occur in the DNA of individuals in the population. Eventually, the population may become isolated enough (sexually or otherwise) from the parent population that it becomes a new species. As far as biologists can tell, these changes in DNA that cause evolution, called mutations, are random. Any speculation about the presence or absence of intervention from beyond the physical realm are beyond the bounds of science and are best left to the realms of philosophy and other related fields.
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JamesCaruso
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The 33% have obviously not reviewed the evidence to the contrary, or they fear damnation for not rejecting evolution on the level of a religious belief.
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powerofk
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Except an improbability does not equal an impossibility. 1/10^35, while small, does not equal zero. Eventually, given enough coin tosses, there could very well be the string of 200 coin tosses described somewhere in those coin tosses. Regardless, buffalo, you’re arguing with people that believe that God is the First Cause of Everything. The vast majority of people on these forums, myself included, are Catholic (and even most of the people on these forums who aren’t Catholic are other Christians). The thing about the Catholic faith is that it doesn’t require us to reject science - we don’t believe that reason and faith are opposed to each other. We use our reason to augment our faith.
Darwin’s faith was shaken because he was stuck with only a literal interpretation of the Bible as his primary source of faith. On the other hand, Mendel’s faith was not shaken when he discovered the laws of genetics - on the contrary, his faith was augmented. This is because the Catholic faith is not faith in spite of reason - it’s faith augmenting and augmented by reason.
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HansTrappist
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Exactly!
Anyone can look at a skyscraper or an automobile or a computer and immediately tell you that those objects were designed by an intelligent agent. Why should we be shocked when we discover the design present in the molecular building blocks of life? The only ones who are disturbed at the evidence of design are the Materialists - who have decided, a priori, that the Designer does not exist.
I think that Michael Behe and the other pioneers in Intelligent Design Theory will some day get the credit that is due to them. Mr. Behe acutally identified the limit of Random/Darwinian Evolution (he placed it between between the level of vertebrate species and class). In an impartial Scientific Community this discovery would have been welcomed as huge news. Alas, proponents of Intelligent Design are blacklisted not only in the scientific community but in the classroom as well. And as Mr. Behe notes, getting this question of Evolution wrong can actually have practical implications for our lives, particularly in the field of medicine.
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TaylorCat
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Hey, I just thought I would reply to this post as I think it is a common misconception to use an analogy such as a building as evidence for a designer.
It is important to understand that we know the building had an intelligent designer(s), as there are many examples of buildings from intelligent design. We can go to the planning office and view the original architectural layouts and verify who designed it.
When applying this to natural life, it is important to remember that no scientific evidence to date suggests that a creator was at hand. This of course, doesn’t rule it out and scientists do not have an agenda to “disprove” it. If sufficient evidence was to be discovered tomorrow that proved intelligent design, scientists would admit their error. So far however, all evidence points to a natural process. Evolution at this point can be deemed fact, like gravity.
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HansTrappist
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Design is simply the “purposeful arrangement of parts.” Inferences of design do not require that we wonder about the designer. We can determine that a system was designed by examining the system itself.
Serious biochemists do not doubt that the molecular building blocks of Life look suspiciously like they were designed. Even atheist Richard Dawkins has defined Biology as, "the study of complicated things that give the appearance of having been designed for a purpose.”
Of course, Dawkins does not believe that they were designed. He believes that Random processes - whether they be cosmological or biological - are responsible for the material world.
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HansTrappist
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What do you mean by “Evolution?”
If by “Evolution” you mean Common Descent, then yes that is a fact.
If you mean Natural Selection, then yes that is a fact.
If by “Evolution” you mean that Natural Selection coupled with Random Mutation can change Life in many interesting ways then yes that is a fact.
But if by “Evolution is a fact” you are implying that Darwin’s mechanism - Random Mutation coupled with Natural Selection - is the sole mechanism behind “Evolution” then, no, sorry that is not a fact.
In fact, Michael Behe wrote a book, The Edge of Evolution: The Search for the Limits of Darwinism that demonstrates that there is in fact a limit to what Random processes can achieve in Nature:
"…In light of the recent tremendous progress of science, can we determine not what is merely theoretically possible for Darwinian evolution, not what may happen only in some fanciful Just-So story, but rather what is biologically reasonable to expect of random mutation and natural selection at the molecular level? If we can decide what is biologically reasonable to expect of unguided evolution, then we can also determine what is unreasonable to expect of it.
Since we’ll be looking at borderline, marginal cases, determining the ragged edge of evolution will necessarily be more tentative than finding clear-cut examples of what certainly can and cannot be done by Darwinian processes. Sickle hemoglobin can inarguably be explained by mutation and selection, the bacterial flagellum cannot. Is the edge of Darwinian evolution closer to sickle hemoglobin, or closer to the flagellum…?
…Studies of malaria provide our best data about what Darwinian evolution can do, but there are other studies of interest. One excellent source of information comes from the study of the human immunodeficiency virus HIV, the virus that causes AIDS…The amount of genetic information in the AIDS virus is less than a thousandth the amount of DNA in the malarial parasite. What’s more, viruses such as HIV mutate much more readily than cells do— about ten thousand times faster. The HIV virus is so small, and the mutation rate is so great, that on average each new copy of the virus contains one change, one mutation, from its parent. HIV mutates at the evolutionary speed limit— Darwinian evolution just can’t go any faster…
…And exactly what has all that evolution of HIV wrought? Very little. Although news stories rightly emphasize the ability of HIV to quickly develop drug resistance, and although massive publicity makes HIV seem to the public to be an evolutionary powerhouse, on a functional biochemical level the virus has been a complete stick-in-the-mud. Over the years its DNA sequence has certainly changed. HIV has killed millions of people, fended off the human immune system, and become resistant to whatever drug humanity could throw at it. Yet through all that, there have been no significant basic biochemical changes in the virus at all…
With a few apparent exceptions, HIV enters its target cells of the immune system by first binding tightly and specifically to one of the many kinds of proteins on their surface, and then reaching over to bind another protein called a coreceptor. (Some humans are resistant to HIV because they burn the bridge that the virus uses to invade the cell: They have a broken copy of the gene for a coreceptor.) A hundred billion billion mutant viruses later, HIV continues to do exactly the same thing, to bind the same way. If a mutant virus developed the ability to enter other kinds of cells by binding to other kinds of proteins, it might replicate more effectively and thus outcompete its siblings. That hasn’t happened. Neither has much else happened at a molecular level. No new gizmos or basic machinery. There have been no reports of new viral protein-protein interactions developing in an infected cell due to mutations in HIV proteins. No gene duplication has occurred leading to a new function. None of the fancy tricks that routinely figure in Darwinian speculations has apparently been of much use to HIV.
But what about its ability to quickly evolve drug resistance and evade the immune system? Doesn’t that show that Darwinian evolution is very powerful? Isn’t that a sophisticated maneuver? No. It turns out that HIV employs the same modest tricks that malaria uses to evade drugs— mostly simple point mutations to decrease the binding of the poison to its pathogen target…Like the development of resistance to rat poison by rats, resistance of HIV to drugs is a very simple biochemical affair.
The bottom line: Despite huge population numbers and intense selective pressure, microbes as disparate as malaria and HIV yield similar, minor, evolutionary responses. Darwinists have loudly celebrated studies of finch beaks, showing modest changes in the shapes and sizes of beaks over time, as the finches’ food supplies changed. But here we have genetic studies over thousands upon thousands of generations, of trillions upon trillions of organisms, and little of biochemical significance to show for it…"
Let’s go ahead and make that hard.
How many years must a random change happen before the entire code will support life and provide the characteristics of me?
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tskrobacz
Guest
It’s just plain ignorance. Genesis is metaphoric language, not science. It is exquisite theology.
Or they see flaws that rule it out.
It doesn’t really help the case when proponents of the theory assume the worst of those that do not believe it.
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