Posted on 11/24/2009 6:50:51 PM PST by GodGunsGuts
Pro-Darwin consensus doesn't rule out intelligent design
--snip--
(CNN) -- While we officially celebrate the 150th anniversary of the publication of Charles Darwin's "On the Origin of Species" on November 24, celebrations of Darwin's legacy have actually been building in intensity for several years. Darwin is not just an important 19th century scientific thinker. Increasingly, he is a cultural icon.
Darwin is the subject of adulation that teeters on the edge of hero worship, expressed in everything from scholarly seminars and lecture series to best-selling new atheist tracts like those by Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens. The atheists claim that Darwin disproved once and for all the argument for intelligent design from nature.
And that of course is why he remains hugely controversial. A Zogby poll commissioned by the Discovery Institute this year found that 52 percent of Americans agree "the development of life was guided by intelligent design." Those who are not scientists may wonder if they have a right to entertain skepticism about Darwinian theory.
Read a leading Darwin proponent's view that evolution leaves no room for intelligent design theory...
(Excerpt) Read more at cnn.com ...
Those threads certainly seem to conform to your definition of "religious", and by your account as long is it fits that "common thread", it's all the same. Apparently it's wrong to differentiate one kind of "religion" from another, but only if I do it.
This is bizarre. Your very own posted definition, which VanShuyten quoted back at you, said "organic" "formerly comprised only those existing in or derived from plants or animals, but that now includes all other compounds of carbon." "Formerly" means "not any more."
Organic compounds are produced by living things. Inorganic compounds are produced by non-living natural processes or by human intervention in the laboratory.you still have not answered the question about how life could have begun before life existed.This was the most common definition of "organic" until Wohler's 1828 synthesis of urea (an organic compound) from ammonium cyanate (a salt, and therefore inorganic). But we no longer use this definition, for the simple reason that many compounds that everyone agrees are organic -- including "natural products" which are routinely made by living things -- have been synthesized by humans. Some of these natural products are synthesized by the ton. And unquestionably organic molecules, such as the amino acid glycine, have been found in interstellar space where there are no living things.
Some people apparently still think this definition should hold, but it's just not so.
That's because [voice of Mona Lisa Vito], "It's a bullsh*t question, it's impossible to answer!" It's based on a false premise, as you've been shown.
Did I misquote you? Did you not ask why new life the size of a beagle isn't showing up every day? You waved away the point about viruses, and you seem to have missed the point about how any new life or pre-life would get eaten right away by existing life. If you don't want to talk about beagles, don't bring up beagles.
When scientists can show that organic compounds can self-assemble into information carrying DNA, let me know.
You tell us. Isn't that what scientists are supposed to be doing?
Are you implying that they are self-assembling even now?
What is the mechanism? What are the proofs to support that?
And, are viruses alive?
If they aren't that's no proof that life is self-assembling.
If they are, where did they come from?
Also, define life and then tell us if the appearance of these viruses is part of origins or evolution and when it made the transition.
I'm sure you'll hear about it. And when creationists can demonstrate God creating full-sized cows from nothing, you be sure to let me know, okay?
If you don’t accept that God created anything from nothing, then I take it you don’t hold to the theory about singularity and the universe just spontaneously popping itself into existence out of nothing, from nowhere, for no reason.
So, to the extent we are alive, so are they.
In fact, ever since the discovery of DNA it's been a bit inappropriate to refer to viruses as non-living.
Craig Venter, the fellow who did the human genome project (to completion) is out there sailing around the ocean scooping up viruses out of the ocean, and so forth. He's a top name in this field.
Exogenous transfer of genetic material among/between species is a fact you have to live with. We are constantly becoming a new critter with or without "evolution", Besides, Darwin and that crowd had no idea what mechanism might drive evolution so they came up wit "natural selection" and other demi-gods as explanations. Obviously there are no demigods, and if a virus manages to penetrate your genome and find a home, well, now, your ancestors are that virus and all the people before you.
Since DNA acts in a quantum fashion, it doesn't gradually work its way into your genome ~ it goes to work right now!
Think of some viral infections as being essentially the same as sex, only different!
When DNA from a virus is added to the genome of any species, there’s no Darwinian concept involved at all.
Well said (actually, not the above back quote, but what followed).
”The biggest problem I have with the ID people is that they think too small”
Not true of all “ID people” (dare I say most ID people? I don’t know that I can support that proposition, so I guess I won’t say it). The “ID people” who think too small, do so because their focus is too restricted (or so it seems to me). Their objectives are confined because their objectives are not grounded in faith, but in political calculation (i.e. the DI). Most people of Christian faith do not think of themselves as “ID people.” ID is simply but of a small part of the totality of their religion.
The idea has existed long before the term. In a letter to John Adams, dated April 11, 1823, by Thomas Jefferson we see a much better statement of the theme than we hear today:
“The argument which they [the denier of Christian faith] rest on as triumphant and unanswerable is, that in every hypothesis of cosmogony, you must admit an eternal pre-existence of something; and according to the rule of sound philosophy, you are never to employ two principles to solve a difficulty when one will suffice. They say then, that it is more simple to believe at once in the eternal pre-existence of the world, as it is now going on, and may forever go on by the principle of reproduction which we see and witness, than to believe in the eternal pre-existence of an ulterior cause, or Creator of the world, a Being whom we see not and know not, of whose form, substance and mode, or place of existence, or of action, no sense informs us, no power of the mind enables us to delineate or comprehend.”
[By 141 years Jefferson anticipates the detection of the cosmic microwave background radiation signaling that the universe indeed had a beginning.]
He continues: “On the contrary, I hold, (without appeal to revelation) that when we take a view of the universe, in its parts, general or particular, it is impossible for the human mind not to perceive and feel a conviction of design, consummate skill, and indefinite power in every atom of its composition. . The movements of the heavenly bodies, so exactly held in their course by the balance of centrifugal and centripetal forces; the structure of our earth itself, with its distribution of lands, waters and atmosphere; animal and vegetable bodies, examined in all their minutest particles; insects, mere atoms of life, yet as perfectly organized as man or mammoth; the mineral substances, their generation and uses; it is impossible, I say, for the human mind not to believe, that there is in all this, design, cause and effect, up to an ultimate cause, a Fabricator of all things from matter and motion, their Preserver and Regulator while permitted to exist in their present forms, and their regeneration into new and other forms.”
In diary entries, some sixty six years earlier Adams recorded very much the same thoughts as Jefferson (see diary entries by John Adams of Sunday, May 22[23], 1757, pg 16, Monday, May 23[24], 1757, pg 16, Fryday, May 27[28], 1757, pg 17).
Even today we see the belief of Creationism and a design concept incorporated in a much larger framework Christian faith as exemplified in the following remarks of President Bush:
”We believe that liberty is the design of nature. We believe that liberty is the direction of history. We believe that human fulfillment and excellence come in the responsible exercise of liberty. And we believe that freedom, the freedom we prize, is not for us alone. It is the right and the capacity of all mankind.”
. . . . . George W Bush, remarks delivered at the National Endowment of Democracy, Thursday, November 6, 2003
I didn't say that.
Because they think it is an insult to their intelligence to consider that there is someone more intelligent than they are, or that there are things beyond their ability to understand.
Creationists don't advocate that.
Nobody ever said that God created animals out of nothing. He used the dust of the earth, as He said in Scripture.
So, what's the mechanism that scientists say caused the first organic to self-assemble into information carrying DNA?
Oh, okay. So when creationists can demonstrate God creating full-sized cows out of dust, let me know.
So, what's the mechanism that scientists say caused the first organic to self-assemble into information carrying DNA?
I don't think they know yet. But my conclusion from "we don't know yet" is not "so God must have done it."
You did misunderstand initially, now you seem to have the idea that I presented because you have an answer.
What a huge assumption and leap of faith to state that ANY NEW LIFE OR PRE-LIFE (sic) WOULD GET EATEN RIGHT AWAY BY EXISTING LIFE
So, initially when there was absolutely no life...my original question...how did life begin? I am not trying to annoy you, simply trying to get what a concise thought on the matter is. I have never read nor heard of an answer to that question that is reasonable by any sense of logic and reason. BTW, life either is or isn’t...pre-life is no life. To my knowledge, there can be no in between.
Lastly, my point with the Beagle is why are there not large animals popping out? We truly now have a “soup” from which life may be created if the atheist view is to be accepted. There really is no reason to begin with a simple single cell organism is there? If so, why?
And, if you say that it has to be single cell...please prove it... :)
BTW, Ha Ha Thats Very Logical, thanks for debating with me.
Please elaborate on what exactly "the dust of the earth" actually is.
Go outside. Look down. There you go.
Those big dust bunnies under her bed. God molded them into Adam, dummy.
Actually, viral transciption of DNA is most assuredly a Darwinian mechanism: the location and timing of the viral DNA insertion are ‘random’ in the technical sense of not chosen in advance to be adaptive. No one except critics who do not understand evolutionary biology has ever asserted that uniformly at random transcription errors are the source of the ‘random variation’.
You have evidently not paid any attention to my postings on earlier ‘crevo’ threads. I have at various times criticized the use of the word ‘random’ to mean something contrary to the normal meaning of the word, and pointed out as you just have the transcription of already field-tested bits of DNA is plainly the most likely driving mechanism for evolutionary change, rather than mere transcription errors in DNA replication (which fact makes the a priori probability estimates on which ‘intelligent design theory’ depends not only unfalsifable and unverifiable, but also completely irrelevant—though I should note that I do not hold the view that causation by an unknown and exotic intelligence cannot be a scientific hypothesis: the only reason the discipline of xenoarchaeology should not exist is lack of a feasible star-drive. And yes, the Lord God is as exotic an intelligence as one can get, being absolutely transcendent in essence.)
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