Questions about evolution and origins

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I read the transcripts. Behe’s claims were trounced by the experts. His claims about the vertebrate immune system demonstrated his ignorance of decades of prior work, and his claim against was in fact demonstrated to be a neat example of how seemlingly novel systems in biology can evolve from prior biological systems.

IC is a fraud. ID is nothing more than Creationism stripped of the word “God” in an attempt to get past the Supreme Court’s lemon test. No one uses IC for anything, not SETI, not archaeologists, no one. It’s a fake, a word salad claim that has no utility whatsoever.
 
Right now, scientists are struggling with identifying cell functions. The only way they are going to find out how all of it works is to take it apart, or, in some cases, find ways to analyze certain processes in action in real time. That means a single cell has so much going on that is not fully understood. Enter Bioinformatics. Evolution provides zero guidance.
 
And???

It looks like you’re about to construct a God of the gaps argument. And you know what happens to a god of the gaps? He just keeps getting smaller.
 
You started off making an interesting point about how modern science doesn’t speak to formal and final causation even though it implicitly assumes it as part of the method.

And then your entire ID argument is based solely on how mechanically complex things can’t be reduced to so-called natural efficient and material causes. Nothing to do with final or formal causes.

And as if such natural things are somehow separate from God’s creative act, too.
 
edwest211 said:
Right now, scientists are struggling with identifying cell functions. The only way they are going to find out how all of it works is to take it apart, or, in some cases, find ways to analyze certain processes in action in real time. That means a single cell has so much going on that is not fully understood. Enter Bioinformatics. Evolution provides zero guidance.
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How odd that one scientific field doesn’t cover everything and how there are other scientific fields for those other things.
 
I was commenting on the post about Paul Daivies postulation, not ID.
 
tafan2 said:
Sorry for asking, what is IC?
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Irreducible Complexity, a claim in Intelligent Design that some biological systems are too complex to have formed naturally. The two examples ID proponents have frequently brought up are the vertebrate eye and the vertebrate immune system. The latter claim was demolished during the Dover Trial, and, if Behe had been a bit more familiar with his own discipline, he’d have known there was extensive literature on the evolution of the vertebrate immune system. At the end of the day, the claim comes down “we know it’s irreducibly complex because we can’t think of a way that it could have evolved.”
 
Evolution, properly understood, does not claim to answer how a cell works.
 
“Nothing in Biology Makes Sense Except in the Light of Evolution” is a 1973 essay by the evolutionary biologist Theodosius Dobzhansky, criticising anti-evolution creationism and espousing theistic evolution. The essay was first published in American Biology Teacher in 1973.
 
Yes. This is my point. But there are two problems, in my mind, with using the word design:
  1. it implies that God’s creative acts follow the way humans make things. Design is a phase of a process to make things. God doesn’t do design-build. The name of the whole theory denigrates God.
  2. Intelligent design proponents will claim that they are not making God a “tinkerer”, but then they seem to do so over and over in their explanation about how ID works.
 
Ok. It certainly sounds like an exaggeration at best. But again, the fact that we are still learning how cells fiction says nothing about the truth or false of evolutionary theory.
 
edwest211 said:
“Nothing in Biology Makes Sense Except in the Light of Evolution” is a 1973 essay by the evolutionary biologist Theodosius Dobzhansky, criticising anti-evolution creationism and espousing theistic evolution. The essay was first published in American Biology Teacher in 1973.
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You seemed to take a dimmer view Dobzhansky’s theistic evolution when I brought it up in another thread.
 
You are not reasoning correctly. When living things had no form, who formed them?
 
I do because I have yet to see how the theistic part is an active or causal component.
 
edwest211 said:
I do because I have yet to see how the theistic part is an active or causal component.
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Does it need to be? So much else in Christianity has to be taken on faith, but oddly that God doesn’t write “Yahweh was here” on our DNA somehow becomes a crisis?
 
Whoa, slow down there. It’s not a crisis but the Church needs God to be a causal agent in the development of life.

The book of evolution is not a one size fits all answer, meaning it fits the religious and the non-religious.
 
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