Posted on 09/22/2005 8:25:42 PM PDT by Crackingham
Sorry, Coyoteman has left the building.
(But be good here, as there could be an encore.)
Ahhh - the battle against religion builds!
Gramsci, Lenin, Marx, and the DNC are smiling!
I almost wish for their "revolution" to start openly - get it all over and done with!
I love the term supernatural. If it is a phenomenon that occurs and is inexplicable, by current standards, it is still a phenomenon.
OTOH, if it is not observable, by current standards, it is not a phenomenon. It is not a very useful term.
But folks sure bandy it about pretty loosely.
DK
Not accurate.
There is no supernatural being necessary in ID....just an intelligence.
For all we know that intelligence is natural.
DI is realistic. This is not what they wanted. the school board is going to get creamed.
xzins - It really sound to me like you are playing word games in an attempt at justifying the teaching of intelligent design in school.
For all we know that intelligence is natural.
The intelligent design hypothesis is that "certain features of the universe and life are best explained by intelligent cause rather than an undirected process such as natural selection".
The mathematicians and physicists already investigating self-organizing complexity have identified intelligence as a candidate natural, emergent phenomenon of self-organizing complexity. They've also suggested the possibility of fractal intelligence. And creatures are known to use intelligence (such as selecting a mate) which may explain certain adaptations, mutations or variations of species.
The ID hypothesis does not stipulate whether the "intelligent cause" is a phenomenon (emergent or fractal) or an agent (God, collective consciousness, aliens, Gaia, etc.) - much less a specific phenomenon or agent.
Thanks for the ping.
How does this translate into "Congress shall make no law....."
Even the very basic theory of Ockhams Razor would support the concept of design over billion to one random chance.
ping
For all we know that intelligence is natural.
So you want it taught in our classrooms that aliens came to the earth some time in the past and created us?
Actually, Ockhams Razor really says we should limit our theories to make the fewest assumptions possible.
In this case, Intelligent Design assumes the existence of an otherwise undetected intelligent being affected our genes at some time in the past. Whereas Evolution assumes that over billions of years, and who knows what number of stars and planets, eventually life got lucky.
IMHO, the broad theme, the chief objection to the theory of evolution is not so much complexity (such as irreducible complexity v Kolmogorov v self-organizing etc.) - as it is that “randomness” cannot be the prime factor in the formulation: random mutations – natural selection > species.
In many ways, the mainstream of mathematics involved in biological research is also moving away from randomness as it investigates self-organizing complexity, swarm intelligence, etc.
When one observes potentiality by simple combination, it is only obvious that life is, to say the least, unlikely given the age of the universe. For instance, Gerald Schroeder points out that a typical protein is a chain of 300 amino acids and that there are 20 common amino acids in life which means that that the number of possible combinations for the protein would be 20300 or 10390. He summed it this way “it would be as if nature reached into a grab bag containing a billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion proteins and pulled out the one that worked and then repeated this trick a million million times.” Schroeder, Gerald “Evolution: Rationality vs. Randomness” (2000)
That is, of course, absurd. That is why other types of probability measures, such as Bayesian, are asserted by scientists to narrow the field from all possibilities to that which was more likely, i.e. not all possibilities are equal.
Many scientists have a unpleasant habit of appealing to combinations as probability when it suits them to argue that this universe is just one of 1080 possible universes and then rejecting combinations as probability when the subject turns to the likelihood of life emerging by happenstance. As Christ said mocking such reasoning "wisdom is justified of all her children”.
IOW, it cuts both ways. If combinations are valid for the beginning of the cosmos, they are valid for the beginning of life. If not, then they should apply to neither the beginning of the cosmos nor of life.
In a math/philosophy sense, randomness as a concept is also questioned most notably by Wolfram – who challenged Gregory Chaitin by claiming that such things as Omega are only pseudo-random because they are the effect of a cause. Which is to say that Chaitin’s formula Omega is the cause of the random number string it creates. Even Brownian motion is the effect of a cause. In other words, in naturalism (whether methodological or metaphysical) everything must be the effect of a prior physical cause (physical causality) and thus never more than pseudo-random.
The bottom line is this: because we as yet do not have a full explanation for space/time and energy/matter – it is impossible to say that what we presume is randomness (for instance at the quantum level) is actually random in the system. Until the “system” is known, randomness is a misleading and false presumption.
> the chief objection to the theory of evolution is not so much complexity (such as irreducible complexity v Kolmogorov v self-organizing etc.) - as it is that “randomness” cannot be the prime factor in the formulation
If that's the chief objection... it's a pretty lame one. Hard to believe that anyone with a basic scientific education would buy into the Creationist bunkum. Oh, wait... ahrdly anyone with a basic scientific education *does* buy into it.
>Gerald Schroeder points out that a typical protein is a chain of 300 amino acids and that there are 20 common amino acids in life which means that that the number of possible combinations for the protein would be 20^300 or 10^390.
...
> That is, of course, absurd.
Yes, it is. His math is silly and ridiculous.
> because we as yet do not have a full explanation for space/time and energy/matter – it is impossible to say that what we presume is randomness (for instance at the quantum level) is actually random in the system.
Freshman-level stoned philosophy major hogwash.
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