Replies

No one argues that the shape of clouds is intelligently designed.

Creationists are all over the map on when God stops manipulating and just sits back and lets things happen. It was once thought that angels pushed the planets around. Some people are still in about the same place.

No one argues that simple things could not have arisen by chance.

I don't personally equate chemistry with "chance." There's nothing magic about complexity, either. At any rate, no sub-optimal "design," however clunky, disproves ID. Not the human back, or the many diseases of man and animal, not the patterns of extinction in the fossil and historical records, nothing. "God has his purposes and could have left it that way."

There's nothing magic about complexity, either.

We are not talking magic, we are talking design. No highly complex thing with great specificity of purpose has ever arisen by random chance. No natural forces have ever created any highly complex thing. Random chance, the agent of evolution cannot intelligently design anything. When one has a jigsaw puzzle of thousands of pieces, one cannot go around making the pieces to fit exactly with each other by chance. This is what evolutionists claim and it is utter nonsense.

"There's nothing magic about complexity"

I just got Wolfram's "New Science" book as a birthday present. I had to look up what he says about evolution, since some on FR said he disputed evolution as a source of complexity.

What he says, in a nutshell, is that irreducible complexity can arise from very simple programs, and that a very simple program can produce a noncomputible output -- that is to say, there can be no shortcut or formula that predicts the outcome -- only way to know is to run the program.

Perhaps I am simple minded, but I interpret this to mean that things can exist that cannot be designed, because the process that produces them is immune from prediction. It's a very interesting asssertion, that a deterministic, binary process with just a handful of rules, can produce an infinitely complex output.

Wolfram equates genes with these simple kinds of programs, and assumes that natural selection prunes them.