PING!
OOOO! This will convince everyone! (</mega-sarcasm off>)
2 really good articles there!
Very interesting - will read later. After this complex and obviously indepth analysis, I respond to the first sentence - I think most people are unswayed by the concept of irreducible complexity because they’re not exposed to it and/or have no idea what it means - and because they’ve been conditioned to respond with derision to anyone who dares to question Darwinism.
Bookmarked for later.
Wouldn’t you know it. The mods moved my Creation/ID/Evolution thread to Gen/Chat—AGAIN!
Question: Is this presented as an argument that evolution is impossible, or that abiogenesis is impossible?
Irreducible design is hardly new to human thinking as we design many things ourselves with just that feature as a result of the design.
An internal combustion engine is an example. It has several systems that must function at a minimal level of performance for the engine to function as a whole. Remove or reduce any one of these systems and the engine will not function as a engine.
Not only must the systems be present and functioning they must do so in a coordinated way with all other systems.
An internal combustion engine even with all systems in perfect condition won’t function. It requires a starter, not the motor that spins the engine, but some agent to overcome the inertia of the engine and start all the systems functioning.
The experiments of Miller and others as noted on FR do not change that simple fact of cause and effect.
A scientist mixes chemicals that came from a supply house in beakers made by a glass blower and shocks it with electricity delivered by a grid, all intelligently designed as is the very experiment it’s self.
So what role is being played by this scientist if not that of an intelligent designer? What kind of complexity does his experiment demonstrate?
Thanks for posting. While I don’t have time to participate I hope to read some good discussions here.
The silence is deafening in here. Are those on the other side of the debate stumped? Usually, there would be over a hundred replies by now.
[[(A) All aspects of life (not just bacterial flagellums and blood clotting cascades) lie beyond the reach of naturalistic explanations,]]
This part needs to be stressed and adhered to without goign beyond- while it quite possibly does show it lies beyond the ability of naturalism, we shouldn’t say that it shuts off any other possible explanation (even htough reasonably, there really is no other explanation, as Macroevolution hypothesis, the whole basis for throwing God out of hte creation model, relies only on naturalism)
Objective knowledge and historical inferenceScience gets results by observation and experiment upon repeatable phenomena. Its most valued products are general laws that are observed repeatedly which we can confidently call ‘objective knowledge’. These general laws may be incomplete or even false, but they are objective in that they are open to testing by others. New information may cause them to be modified or discarded. Meanwhile, this objective knowledge is usually useful in curing disease, improving technology and food production, etc.
But the subject of origins is quite different. It deals with unique sequences of unobservable and unrepeatable past events. No one can develop general laws about unique, unobservable and unrepeatable past events. Our general laws can tell us what might have happened in the past but they cannot tell us what did happen. Nor does anyone have a time machine to go back and observe what actually happened.
The best that science can do is extrapolate backwards in time from present day objective knowledge, using the principle of uniformity. This principle says that the laws of nature remain the same through all of time and space.
Note that this principle is not objective knowledge—we cannot visit all of time and space to verify it, so it is just a convenient but necessary philosophical assumption. Most people do not realize that this principle underlies all of evolutionary theory, nor do they realize that it is potentially an anti-God assumption because it assumes that God has never intervened in history.
Historical inference is thus quite different to objective knowledge. We cannot test it by observation or experiment, so it is only as good as the assumptions it is built upon. If the assumptions are wrong, the ‘knowledge’ will be faulty.
In the following discussion, the objective knowledge of life is available to all sides. Surprisingly, there is universal agreement on the fact that at present there is no naturalistic explanation for the origin of life. The controversy lies entirely in the historical inferences about what might have happened in the past. The only way we can evaluate these historical inferences is to examine the assumptions used to make those historical inferences and test the logical connections for internal consistency.
IBTBut it’s not science crowd.
Yeah, I know, I’m late to the party.
For the beginnings of life do not sharply differ from their purely physical-chemical antecedents. One can reconcile this continuity with the irreducibility of living things by recalling the analogous case of inanimate artifacts. Take the irreducibility of machines; no animal can produce a machine, but some animals can make primitive tools, and their use of these tools may be hardly distinguishable from the mere use of the animal’s limbs. Or take a set of sounds conveying information; the set of sounds can be so obscured by noise that its presence is no longer clearly identifiable. We can say, then, that the control exercised by the boundary conditions of a system can be reduced gradually to a vanishing point. The fact that the effect of a higher principle over a system under dual control can have any value down to zero may allow us also to conceive of the continuous emergence of irreducible principles within the origin of life.Later, he analogizes to language:
I shall illustrate the structure of such a hierarchy by showing the way five levels make up a spoken literary composition.So are we to conclude that grammar could not have evolved from vocalizations without some intelligent designer having the final product--a completed text--as a goal from the beginning?The lowest level is the production of a voice; the second, the utterance of words; the third, the joining of words to make sentences; the fourth, the working of sentences into a style; the fifth, and highest, the composition of the text.
The principles of each level operate under the control of the next-higher level. The voice you produce is shaped into words by a vocabulary; a given vocabulary is shaped into sentences in accordance with a grammar; and the sentences are fitted into a style, which in turn is made to convey the ideas of the composition. Thus each level is subject to dual control: (i) control in accordance with the laws that apply to its elements in themselves, and (ii) control in accordance with the laws of the powers that control the comprehensive entity formed by these elements.
Such multiple control is made possible by the fact that the principles governing the isolated particulars of a lower level leave indeterminate conditions to be controlled by a higher principle. Voice production leaves largely open the combination of sounds into words, which is controlled by a vocabulary. Next, a vocabulary leaves largely open the combination of words to form sentences, which is controlled by grammar, and so on. Consequently, the operations of a higher level cannot be accounted for by the laws governing its particulars on the next-lower level. You cannot derive a vocabulary from phonetics; you cannot derive grammar from a vocabulary; a correct use of grammar does not account for good style; and a good style does not supply the content of a piece of prose.
Polanyi also says, by the way, that "The principles additional to the domain of inanimate nature are the product of an evolution the most primitive stages of which show only vegetative functions."
For a Darwinist, the same must also apply to the origin of life—it must be an emergent property of matter. An emergent property of a system is some special arrangement that is not usually observed, but may arise through natural causes under the right environmental conditions.
In regards to the water molecules, and silver...I also think of cardiac cells and fibers. Taking a sliver of cardiac tissue from the heart and looking at it under the microscope, it beats like a whole heart beats. Muscle fibers contract, neurons pulse, excretory cells from excretory organs excrete and so on.
It’s a mightily hollow explanation to explain that it’s just this way because of natural selection over billions of years. A much better explanation is since each of these cells obviously have a purpose, that there was some meaningful force behind their being and functions in the first place.
Proteins and basic chemicals forming together in such a way with this kind of complexity to form complex functions make more sense in that they were designed opposed to they “just are” via natural selection over (alot) of time; mechanisms and structures of purpose from no purposeful rational force behind it makes little sense if any to most people.
Even the simplest experiments have some kind of intelligent design behind them, the right chemicals, the right environment, etc...even these simple factors take enormous thought and trial and error by scientists and we’re nowhere near the idea that we can take these chemicals separately and add them together in just such an exact and necessary way to succeed to cause cells to beat on their own in order to eventually make a heart beat (on it’s own, structurally).
But to THEN think about these cells forming complex structures like a heart with ventricles and valves and adding in electrical current to the muscle, beating pulsating muscle, to in turn form a heart, one of billions or more of different KINDS of hearts...is too staggering to think all just happened with no purpose, randomly, over “alot of time”.
Just sorting out the differences between a hamster’s heart compared to a gerbil’s heart, or mice, or guinea pigs, etc. etc. etc. could take a lifetime and we still wouldn’t be close to understading the complexity.
But to then turn around and tell children there’s “no place for God in science class”, seems to be about as petty and arrogant as one CAN BE petty and arrogant!
The author nails it with his “exclusion by definition” and “ridicule” observations in part 2. As I’ve been saying all along, NO ONE has placed people with God hang-ups in charge of defining science and all too often the best they can do is ridicule, which does nothing but prove that they’re desperate and incapable of discussing the science; ironically while blubbering incoherently about only they and they alone are the keepers of all things scientific!
Overall a compelling paper and appeals to common sense for those that are not under the spell of the evo cult.
Whoa! This is going to take some time, and quite a few martinis, to digest, boss... I’ll get back to you!
What does this have to do with anything under the keyword homosexualagenda?
(See my Tagline)
Over 600 posts. And not a single one pulled.
In Science, as in any other endeavor, one should strive for a lot of......
Laboratory
......and little of......
Laboratory....
.....in the......
.....Laboratory.....
...and let the experiments do the talking, not the naval-gazing.