Posted on 12/10/2009 7:24:11 AM PST by GodGunsGuts
With millions of eyes on Copenhagen, this seems an appropriate time to ask whether ID thinking has any relevance to understanding the Earth's environment. Can design concepts help us weigh the diverse and often conflicting messages? I think ID is helpful, because features of the Earth's environments and ecologies start to take on new meaning. In this blog, I am thinking particularly of negative feedback mechanisms. Human design engineers will use negative feedback to promote stability and positive feedback to amplify an input signal. They select the mechanisms they need to achieve the desired effect. By analogy, if the Earth is designed for life, we would expect to see negative feedback mechanisms predominating to achieve stable environments. What do we find? ...
(Excerpt) Read more at arn.org ...
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http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2203455/posts?page=78#78
Ping!
Thanks for sharing this! As a teen, this was my original reason for rejecting fully naturalistic evolution, though I had no idea of any alternative to what I was being taught in schools, media, etc. I recognized that there was no conceivable feedback loop for an evolved ecosystem to maintain itself without spinning out of control as organisms in it changed. The Biosphere II mess a few years later, in the 90's, perfectly illustrated my point. Despite much intelligence being applied, the artificial ecosystem in BSII quickly came unglued and the environment became unlivable as most species quickly went extinct.
Dr. Henry Zuill, a Harvard-trained ecologist, published an article in Origins a few years ago that demonstrated this better than I could put into words, for which I thank him. But based on a letter I published in the CRSQ c. 1993 I can claim some kind of precedence on this point.
On this logic, given the obvious predominance of such negative feedback mechanisms controlling climate change it’s highly unlikely that massive shifts such as the so-called “ice ages” could have occurred.
The question is since the Earth seems to be in the sweet spot that does not seem to run to either extreme, is this by design or chance?
If scientists started with the paradigm that the universe was created and engineered (designed), it might just put them in the mindset that would allow them to make connections sooner and sooner than groping around, hoping to see patterns and figure out how stuff fit together.
Starting out with materialistic naturalism and trying to guess what may have happened when there is no intelligent cause is grasping at straws, trying to find meaning in meaninglessness.
It’s easier to find meaning when you presume it’s there already.
Many of the early great scientists, like Newton, presumed that God made the universe and that since He was a God of order, one could learn about the universe and Him through it.
It’s interesting that as science and scientists have moved from the concept of the universe being the product of design to the product of lack of purpose, an accident, as it were, that science seems to also have gotten past it’s glory days. It just doesn’t seem to be that there is the caliber of scientists that there used to be.
I doubt that it can be attributed to any scientists being less intelligent, although Newtons are not a dime a dozen, but rather the lack of training of how to think.
A trained engineer is more likely to figure out how a piece of machinery works and what it’s for, presuming purpose, than a kid playing with it and just experimenting.
Wow, you had a very active mind at a very young age! I didn’t start thinking about this stuff until after I got saved, and only then because of the startling difference between what I was reading in Genesis and the random, purposeless, goo-to-you evolution that was being promoted in my leftist science textbooks.
I came from Alabama with my banjo on my knee,
I’m goin’ to Louisiana, my true love for to see
It rained all night the day I left, the weather it was dry
The sun so hot I froze to death; Susanna, don’t you cry.
Peer review at its finest, just like we’re seeing in Climategate.
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