Free Republic
Browse · Search
News/Activism
Topics · Post Article

To: The_Reader_David
You can't have it both ways. Either ID-created mentality is superior to that generated by evolution, or it is not. If ID-generated mentality is reliable, then so are the conclusions logically generated and supported by the evidence which derive from that mentality. My point is that the statement of the new-creos proves to be a contradiction.
59 posted on 04/14/2002 2:32:00 PM PDT by gcruse
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 54 | View Replies ]


To: gcruse
I hardly see a contradiction in the testable hypostheses that the genome and information-theoretic content of protein structures will have certain information-theoretic properties. It may well be false, but at least it is scientific in the Popperian sense.

I also don't see that I'm trying to have anything "both ways"--unless you are very doctrinaire. The information-theoretic insights of the ID crowd and the chaotic-dynamics approach of the punctuated equalibrium evolutionists are complementary. I suspect a fruitful interplay would already have begun if evolutionary biologists were not hamstrung by the absolutist materialists in their ranks, for whom (usually gradualist) Darwinism with ontological randomness (rather than epistemological randomness or law-constrained stochastic processes) and a tautological version of natural selection functions as an atheistic creation myth. S. Kauffman of the Santa Fe institute is looking for an extra law of thermodynamics applicable to open systems. Every model of self-organizing complexity anyone comes up with is obviously designed (models always are) and gives the feeling of being very clever and special (e.g. "most" cellular automata are boring).

Before it's all over, I'm quite certain that there will be extra laws of "fitness" discovered, and maybe even extra fundamental laws like the ones Kauffman is trying out (to the discomfort of the evolution-as-argument-from-no-design atheists), and that the stochastic element will remain (to the discomfort of creationists who would like everything to be purposeful).

Personally, I'm happy with the God who not only plays dice, but rolls them where you can't see them, as one (I forget which) quantum physicist commented in contradiction to Einstein's dictum.

115 posted on 04/14/2002 9:10:40 PM PDT by The_Reader_David
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 59 | View Replies ]

Free Republic
Browse · Search
News/Activism
Topics · Post Article


FreeRepublic, LLC, PO BOX 9771, FRESNO, CA 93794
FreeRepublic.com is powered by software copyright 2000-2008 John Robinson