Posted on 11/22/2005 7:58:24 PM PST by truthfinder9
Charles Krauthammer's syndicated essay against intelligent design ran opposite mine in today's Seattle Times. The piece is full of problems, which Tom Gilson and Lawrence Seldon explore in loving detail here and here.
Now I would have framed a couple of points in their otherwise fine analysis a little differently. In one place, Gilson describes agnostic David Berlinski as an ID proponent. It would be more precise to call Berlinski a Darwin skeptic and friendly critic of design theory. Also, Seldon writes that Krauthammer "rants about Dover and Kansas ... writing out of ignorance and knocking down a straw man." To be generous, I would have said that Krauthammer "writes calmly and authoritatively out of ignorance, knocking down a straw man."
I'm rooting for Krauthammer to do his homework and, like British philosopher Antony Flew, change his mind.
Wrong!!
The identity of the peer reviewer is kept confidential.
Clearly, you have no experience with this.
Great!!!
Please post the actual calculations. I would like to test them. Thank you so much in advance. Oh, the odds of mixing together the various chemicals..... are infinitesmally small. How much is "infinitesmally small"?? What is that calculation??? What is the number??? Is it 1 in a million?? One in 1 billion??? The number, please?
Thank you so much in advance.
evolution / life on earth and the creation of the universe are two different things.
trying to bundle them into one argument would be a mistake.
The Earth is Flat bump.
The Evolution v Creation argument may be the undoing of civilization.
If we deny that we are created beings (a creation must have a Creator), we have no accountability and an excuse to behave badly. If kin to apes, our primal desires to murder and breed are then instinctual. We are without guilt and free to roam and do as we please.
Promiscuous sex, unwanted pregnancy, abortion (murder). The decline of the family... the decline of civilization.
Clearly, you have no experience with this.
Bingo. But tell me, kept confidential from whom? If the reviewer really "screws it up", is there no mechanism for disciplining that particular reviewer? If, in the opinion of the editors, you really botch these reviews, do you mean to tell me it does not affect your career?
I think the fall-back position would be a utilitarianism, on which it might be possible to build a certain ethic. But history is not very supportive of such a possibility. Atheist socities have one thing in common: they have all been blood-soaked failures. Whenever I hear folks railing about how "religion causes wars" I like to remind them that Secularist societies have killed for people than all the religious societies put together, and that the most influential atheist in human history was Joseph Stalin, followed closely by Mao Tse-Tung.
Nope, it does not affect your career.
disciplining that particular reviewer. I mean no disrespect, sir, but this one is funny. The answer is yes, they can "discipline" you. They can cease asking you to review papers!! LOL. Peer review is considered a painful task that is undertaken as part of scientific responsibility. No one likes it, but it is like jury duty, you do it as part of a civic obligation.
I have gotten in trouble for negatively reviewing only one paper. And the reason was that my laboratory (not the journal editor) made the review public. They did that only with my permission, because it involved a program review of a program that was costing the DOE millions of dollars annually. So, they used my review to kill the program. The net effect, which I discussed in my earlier post, was that I earned enemies for life.
Otherwise, no one knows the peer reviewer. I have never found out who has reviewed any of my papers,.... ever.
DNA... the code.
My daughter is a genetic anomaly. She cannot procreate because the genetic code is mutated. She is a 45 XO or a Turner.
A mule is also sterile because the dna code is broken. Nature takes care of mutations. They stop at once. A cat makes another cat. Period. A bird cannot make a reptile. The deviancy in the genetic code won't allow it.
However that is what many are taught...In fact I do believe the book is called "Origin of Species" not Differencing of Species...
The first life would be the first "Species" therefore Origin of Species would imply Origin of life... evolution theory does not allow for any non-evolution creation of any Species/Life ...does it? ...because if it did then ID is back in the mix to create the very first life that is designed to survive and improve itself...I.E "evolution" is designed in to it's program
[...Secularist societies have killed more people than all the religious societies put together...]
Excellent Smithers. The beginning of the decline of Western civilization may have its marker in the Scopes decision.
And if I might add. . .
Doesn't it take a lot more faith to believe that this was all an accident of (what is the current guesstimate) 25 million years than it takes to have faith in a Creator?
Uh... and how old is the sun?
Yes, but you don't want to trust a weak BS theory over what God clearly says.
I'm starting to wonder how conservative Krauthammer truly is.
And the best they can do is say that the fossil record supports the ToE.
This is a lie, and you *know* it's a lie -- you've been shown links to the vast amount of data from multiple independently cross-confirming other lines of evidence as well, such as the overwhelming molecular data (DNA and otherwise). The fossil record is just the *tip* of the huge iceberg of evidence for evolution.
Please explain why you're purposely lying like that.
We've been told time and again that you can't "prove" anything in science, (see I've been listening)
...but not understanding...
so they can't really tell us it's a fact
Yes we can.
or that Creation didn't happen because they don't KNOW that God DIDN'T create the universe and use evolution.
Where do you hallucinate that we ever did make such a claim?
Come back when you're able to *honestly* discuss our position.
Does the BIBLE? if not, to content absolutely that creation days were 24 hours long is not Biblically sound ... Hebrew calendar is not the Bible it a tradition of men...
Even 6 24 hours day is creation not SUDDENLY..."Beginning and finish of creation in the same moment... 6 24 hours day is still a lenght of time
The Bible is the true word of God ... tradition of men is is not...
Okay, so?
My daughter is a genetic anomaly. She cannot procreate because the genetic code is mutated. She is a 45 XO or a Turner.
I'm sorry to hear that, but this does nothing to invalidate evolutionary biology. The fact that there are certain kinds of mutations which can prevent fertility (or cause early death, etc.) in no way demonstrates what you're tyring to imply -- that *all* mutations are dead ends. That is simply not the case, and has been well known for centuries.
A mule is also sterile because the dna code is broken.
No, sorry, that's not why mules are sterile.
Nature takes care of mutations.
Nature takes care of *harmful* mutations. On the other hand, nature *enhances* the reproduction of beneficial mutations.
They stop at once.
Only the severely harmful ones. Please don't make blanket claims about biology when you clearly don't have any kind of background in it.
A cat makes another cat. Period.
Evolutionary change is a reality. Period.
A bird cannot make a reptile.
No one claimed that they would. In fact, birds came from reptiles, not vice versa.
The deviancy in the genetic code won't allow it.
This is quite simply incorrect.
For material which addresses the several fallacies you've made in your argument, see:
29+ Evidences for macroevolution: The scientific case for common descent
However that is what many are taught...
Really? Where? Be specific.
In fact I do believe the book is called "Origin of Species" not Differencing of Species...
Wow, hairsplitting word quibbles as a cheap attempt to "prove" that the author was saying something different than what he really wrote -- how lame.
The first life would be the first "Species" therefore Origin of Species would imply Origin of life...
No, it wouldn't, except in that goofy word-lawyering way you're trying to use to twist what Darwin actually clearly wrote about...
Why don't you try to make your case, if you can, on the *actual* content of the book instead of how you can dance around the words of the title by misapplying definitions?
evolution theory does not allow for any non-evolution creation of any Species/Life ...does it?
Of course it does. Just how ignorant are you?
Hint: The *majority* of American evolutionists are Christians.
Hint #2: Here's a passage from the conclusion of Darwin's book:
It is interesting to contemplate an entangled bank, clothed with many plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting about, and with worms crawling through the damp earth, and to reflect that these elaborately constructed forms, so different from each other, and dependent on each other in so complex a manner, have all been produced by laws acting around us. These laws, taken in the largest sense, being Growth with Reproduction; inheritance which is almost implied by reproduction; Variability from the indirect and direct action of the external conditions of life, and from use and disuse; a Ratio of Increase so high as to lead to a Struggle for Life, and as a consequence to Natural Selection, entailing Divergence of Character and the Extinction of less-improved forms. Thus, from the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows. There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.Darwin *quite* clearly differentiated the processes of his own theory, versus whatever it was that "breathed" life into the first living things, which he did *not* speculate or theorize about. Nor is Darwinian evolution in any way dependent upon the origins of life itself -- evolution occurs whenever life is present, *wherever* it may have originated from.
...because if it did then ID is back in the mix to create the very first life that is designed to survive and improve itself...I.E "evolution" is designed in to it's program
That's one possible hypothesis, of course. Feel free to present any evidence you think you may have for it.
But don't misrepresent evolutionary biology.
From http://expertpages.com/news/dna.htm:
All the human chromosomes taken together contain about 3 billion
base pairs from an alphabet of the 2 bases of or :
2 ^ (3 * 10^9) = 10 ^ (3 * 10^9 / Log2(10))
= 10 ^ (3 * 10^9 / 3.3)
= 10 ^ (0.9 * 10^9)
So there are about "ten to the .9 billion" different DNA combinations
possible, with DNA the size of a humans.
From http://curious.astro.cornell.edu/question.php?number=342:
Mass of Universe: 3 x 10^55 gram,
Large subatomic particles (Neutrons and protons) per gram:
6.022 x 10^23 (Avogadro's Constant)
The number of large subatomic particles (protons and neutrons)
in the universe (if all mass in the universe were such particles)
is approximately 3 x 10^55 x 6.022 x 10^23, or 1.8 ^ 10^79.
A chromosome is a few nanometers across -- let's say one nanometer.
Light travels at 3 * 10^8 meters per second. There are about
1/32 billion seconds in a year, and the universe is perhaps 15
billion years old. So a computer fast enough to have
one cycle in the time it took like to travel across the width
of a single chromosome, running continuously for the life of the
universe would execute the following number of cycles:
1/32 * 10^9 * 15 * 10^9 * 3 * 10^8 * 10^9 = 1.4 * 10^35 cycles.
So replacing every large subatomic particle with a computer capable
of computing, composing and testing the viability of some random
combination of human DNA in the time it took light to travel across
a gene, that ran for the life of the known universe, would result
in testing about 1.4 * 10^35 * 1.8 * 10^79 = 2.52 * 10^114 = 10^114.4
different DNA combinations being tried.
There are 10 ^ (0.9 * 10^9) combinations to try.
So we would need to have 10 ^ (0.9 * 10^9 - 114.4) = 10 ^
899999885 Universes before such a universe of ultra fast
computers tried all DNA combinations. That's a billion billion
billion ... billion (repeated 100 million times) universes, each
containing a billion billion ... billion (repeated 9 times)
computers, each fast enough to calculate a billion billion
cycles per second (about a billion times faster than your
PC), running for the entire 15 billion year life of a typical
Universe, computing and testing for viability an entire DNA
sequence once each cycle, to find your DNA and recognize its
viability as a human.
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