Posted on 01/20/2015 5:45:16 AM PST by Heartlander
“the blanket rejection of all of “Darwinism””
Nobody actually does this though, except ignorant lay people who aren’t really involved in the debate. Certainly not anyone in the field of ID.
Well, maybe this will clear things up:
ID does not propose a young earth.
Now many of the contentions of ID are compatible with creationism, and some creationists do propose a young earth. However, there is no reciprocity there. Just because some people who believe in the ID hypothesis also believe in a young earth, does not mean that the ID hypothesis suddenly involves a young earth.
“...that doesn’t fit your limited notion of the Creator.”
Is the idea that a Creator couldn’t create the universe that we see in less than 10,000 years a limited notion of a Creator?
What they need to do, to get their message across, is to parse “Darwinism”, for the average person. Break it down to say 10 major ideas, identify the reasonable ones, and spotlight the bad assumptions built on top of reasonable ideas.
The tower of Babel undoubtedly had a very good foundation, but even a good foundation can only support so much tower before it all collapses.
Well, there are 2 major contentions of Darwinism that I think most of the critics (both creationists and ID proponents) would agree are the weak points:
1) That random mutations (or other random mechanics) can lead to the creation of new and useful genetic information, rather than simply jumbling around or destroying existing information.
2) That there is no limit to the malleability of an organism’s genome, in the sense that, you could change a single-celled organism into a human being, if you simply have enough mutations and enough time.
Creationist generally have more objections than ID proponents, and they aren’t limited to just Darwinism and biology, but those two points are the basic ones objected to by both camps.
“There is popular common belief that man uses only 10 to 15 % of the brain..”
If there is a popular common belief that kissing frogs causes warts, does that make it scientific?
“...one can reasonably conclude that neo-Darwinism, far from being contrary to intelligent design, actually implies intelligent design, since the biosphere in the neo-Darwinian account can reasonably be argued to have the properties of an intelligent agent in the sense of Hutter.”
Ah, but isn’t that circular reasoning? The biosphere would have to preexist itself in order to be the intelligent designer of the biological components that make up the biosphere.
“I’ve not heard anyone suggest my pet theory that at least some of them are really new species as contrasted with merely undiscovered throughout human history.”
Well, since we don’t know all the existing species (and how could we be certain if we ever did find them all?), it would seem impossible to distinguish a new species from one that was simply undiscovered.
You could say “well there is no fossil record of this species”, but preservation is so rare that we can’t expect all species to necessarily be represented that way.
“Evolution can’t be disproven and ID can’t be proven.”
Ah, but only one of those conditions is fatal for a scientific theory. The other is completely normal.
“Going down the ID path only one question remains......”
Yes, and ID doesn’t attempt to answer that question, but then again, evolution doesn’t attempt to answer where the first common ancestor organism came from, before all the modification, adaptation and variation happened.
Out of the “big 3” (evolution, ID, and creationism), only one actually proposes a “buck stops here” type of hypothesis.
Sure, there are “laymen” out there who have that confusion, but to say that is true of creationists in general is just a straw man.
“Interesting link in that it in no way stated or backed up your claim.”
I made no claim. I just posted the link.
I can’t even fathom how they could hope to reduce the complexity of it to a simpler form.
Ok, consider that perhaps you start with only RNA as a primordial situation. It’s still pretty useless unless it can replicate. Which means the RNA, which has no intelligence, would have to somehow create a ribosome to manufacture the proteins that it needs to replicate itself?
We do have intelligence, but we still can’t create a ribosome if we wanted to, so how can a dumb piece of RNA, that has no idea what a ribosome is, or that it might need one, going to manage such a feat?
In the Darwin Debate, How Long Before the Tide Turns in Favor of Intelligent Design?
...
As soon as ID accepts evolution as God’s method of implementing design.
That “theory” seems to be the very poor reasoning. Here’s the meat of it, from the article:
“Energy will always seek the path of least resistance if left to its own devices, which is why things in the universe - including the universe itself - tend to ‘spread out’, also known as an increase in entropy.
Based on this, Dr England suggests that when atoms are supplied with energy, in certain conditions they will always eventually give rise to life.
‘You start with a random clump of atoms, and if you shine light on it for long enough, it should not be so surprising that you get a plant,’ he said.
The reason for this, and the underlying aspect of his theory, is that while all matter - from rocks to plants - absorbs and dissipates energy, life is much better at redistributing it.”
Entropy is a natural law, like conservation of momentum. It’s just a fundamental part of the mechanics of this universe. So it doesn’t require any life to happen, and if life doesn’t exist in the first place, then there is no intelligence to say “oh this entropy could happen so much more efficiently if there was some life”. We might observe that entropy increases in the presence of life, but to work backwards from that to the conclusion that life must spontaneously self-organize itself with the goal of increasing entropy is ridiculous and unsupportable.
Try this one instead:
“Humans with light skin pigmentation have skin with low amounts of eumelanin, and possess fewer melanosomes than humans with dark skin pigmentation. Light skin provides better absorption qualities of ultraviolet radiation. This helps the body to synthesize higher amounts of vitamin D for bodily processes such as calcium development.”
http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Light_skin
“Sharing,” not “carrying.”
“We’re talking about really tiny things like proteins and RNA strands—things not even to the level of single cells. There could be lots of those forming every day (and getting eaten immediately, perhaps)—how would we ever know?”
Well, a Saturn rocket could spontaneously appear too, I suppose, but we have only ever seen those produced by human engineers and modern factories.
Similarly, we have only ever seen proteins and RNA produced by the machinery of living cells.
“How is light skin an advantage in regions without much sunlight?”
Well, our bodies need to absorb UV radiation through our skin to synthesize vitamin D. Melanin blocks that radiation, and hinders the synthesis. If you live in a region with less sunlight, then having skin that is too dark will lead to vitamin D deficiency (unless you can offset it with your diet), putting you at a disadvantage to people with less melanin.
Okay, forget proteins for now. They've found amino acids and other organic molecules in interstellar dust and on comets. And I believe they've synthesized RNA in the lab, without the help of living cells. And there are lots of people working on figuring out the next step, to replication. Like I said, I wouldn't bet against our figuring this stuff out eventually.
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