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To: unlearner
Any instance of life self organizing entirely from lifeless matter which is not the result of intelligent (i.e. intentional) assembly (assumably by humans).

And yet thus far you have not provided a single coherent reason to explain why such an observation would completely disprove intelligent design. You have utterly refused to justify your claim that "if life can come about without intelligent assembly, then it is impossible for intelligent design to have occured". If you can't justify that, then you don't have a real falsification criteria.
2,853 posted on 12/29/2005 2:22:20 PM PST by Dimensio (http://angryflower.com/bobsqu.gif <-- required reading before you use your next apostrophe!)
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To: Dimensio
"And yet thus far you have not provided a single coherent reason to explain why such an observation would completely disprove intelligent design. You have utterly refused to justify your claim that 'if life can come about without intelligent assembly, then it is impossible for intelligent design to have occured'. If you can't justify that, then you don't have a real falsification criteria."

Correct. I cannot falsify all of the various conflicting views of ID proponents. (Sometimes I wonder if my cause would not be better served by joining the other side and getting ID proponents not to say foolish things.)

What I claim to be verifiable and falsifiable is my ID based statement. Here is one way to say it: life originates exclusively through the mechanism of intelligent (i.e. intentional) assembly.

This claim has neither been supported nor proved wrong because there are no instances of observed life formation. It is improbable that it will be observed outside of a lab.

A single instance of self assembly would falsify my claim of exclusivity. (You are correct that it would not disprove the possibility of intelligent assembly. It would disprove the necessity of it though.) Many instances of scientists assembling life would support (though not prove) my hypothetical statement.

If you want a prediction, sometime in the next few decades nanotechnology will allow the formation of custom life forms and they will be made as commonly as computer software is today. This will become a matter of routine rather than being regarded as an amazing breakthrough. However, I expect the conjectured mechanism(s) of self assembly will remain elusive, not because they are rare but because they are nonexistent.

By way of comparison, evolution relies on natural selection as a mechanism which explains the large variety of observable species. Breeding is a means of intelligent selection. (However, breeding relies on mechanisms which is does not control directly.) Natural selection is a more attractive explanation because it is simpler. But in the case of life originating, we have no self assembling mechanism observed at this time. If that changes, so does my supposition.
2,854 posted on 12/29/2005 2:44:56 PM PST by unlearner (You will never come to know that which you do not know until you first know that you do not know it.)
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