A proof against ID and Creationism

Hi Menachem,Nwr has already addressed the "argument from awe", so I'll reply to this small part: Because ID makes no testable claims, it cannot be falsified. The claim by scientists isn't that ID has been disproved, but that it isn't science.Dembski claims that specified complexity is a sign of design, but he proposes no deterministic method for identifying it. This makes sense, since other scientists working on complexity haven't gotten much beyond characterizing it as a very difficult area of study (I'm minimizing their accomplishments, but you get the idea). This leaves IDists with nothing much to go on but, "Golly, that sure is complex!" Thus the conclusion of design becomes subjective and individual, the antithesis of science but consistent with those who see religion as a personal issue.--Percy

The videos are about an hour, a bit long. Can you summarize the content and tie them in to the topic of this thread?--Percy

How do you determine whether something "cannot self assemble or self synthesize"?--PercyPS - I think your characterization of ID is off-target at best, but we'll go with the horse what brought ya.

In reply to the question, "How do you determine whether something 'cannot self assemble or self synthesize'?" you say: I have somewhat the same response as Parasomnium, but I'll phrase it differently. The origins of life community does not claim to have reconstructed the process by which pre-life became life. They do not know whether proteins came first, or RNA came first, or something else came first, or how many intermediate steps there were, or what those intermediate steps were. One can't calculate a probability for an unknown process. Your 1 in 10⁴² figure is made up.We all understand that the odds of pouring a mixture of amino acids into a beaker and having them spontaneously form proteins is small. No one is proposing that that's how it happened. Most origins of life researchers believe that life arose through a long sequence of small steps whose details we may never tease out of the sparse evidence.--Percy

This is false. For example, any new mutation, which is just a copying error during cell division, can produce a new allele, thereby increasing the amount of information in the population's gene pool. Mutations require no intelligence.This principle is also demonstrated by genetic algorithms. We can get into the details if you like. They demonstrate true originality and creativity.--Percy

This makes a lot of sense from a religious standpoint, but it appears to present problems from a scientific perspective. You were replying to the opening post, and one of the problems I see with that post, from the point of view of ID proponents, is that it assumes the designer is God.One of the fundamental premises of ID is that we do not know, and indeed cannot know, who the designer is. This premise is also unscientific, since true science would not rule out a priori what can and cannot be known. Examples of science ruling things out would be relativity, which holds that matter and energy cannot exceed the speed of light, and quantum mechanics, which requires a tradeoff between knowledge of momentum and position. These principles are well established by both theory and experiment.So if ID is going to rule out knowledge of the designer, it has to justify it.Naturally, ID cannot by any means concede that the designer is God, for two primary reasons, though there are undoubtedly many others. First, the connection to evangelical Christianity's concern about evolution are already a matter of very lengthy public record, and so the obvious conclusion that ID proposes God as the designer for religious rather than scientific reasons.Second, there is insufficient scientific evidence of God. He is not, at this time, a scientific phenomena or force that can be scientifically advanced as responsible for any observations, and there is a lack of any theoretical foundation for his existence.--Percy

I agree with Ramoss that your post is largely incorrect, it might help to point out why. Though I cannot be sure, this could quite possibly be true. Perhaps someone here knows and can fill us in. Though this is by no means always true, I think most people would agree with this in the context of evolution, but no one claimed that randomness, by itself, produces improvements. More on this later. This is a good first sentence for a paragraph presenting the arguments for why chemical evolution isn't possible, but appearing by itself it is just a bare assertion with no supporting argument or evidence. Because your starting premise was unsupported, your conclusion is undemonstrated.The actual process of evolution, whether chemical or genetic, is not just randomness. It is randomness and selection. The selection process is carried out by the environment. In the evolution of living organisms the environment prevents those least suited for that environment from surviving to reproduce, thereby reducing in frequency of occurrence their particular genes and allele combinations. Chance favorable mutations and allele combinations carry forward and spread throughout populations.--Percy

Hi Inkorrekt,Would you like some help with the dBCodes for quoting? Let me know. They're fairly easy to use. It's important to carefully define terms. When you said that "whatever cannot self assemble or self synthesize is the work of an intelligent designer", what did you mean by "self assemble" and "self synthesize"? If you meant that if you put the raw materials for something like proteins in a beaker and left them alone and waited for them to self assemble into proteins, then I'm pretty sure that's not what the origins of life community means by "self asembly". Just as the complex organic molecules of the Miller/Urey experiment were not formed by pouring raw materials into a beaker and letting them sit, self assembly processes are not expected to be spontaneous. We don't know how the original replicator came about, but on the early earth there were a huge variety of temperatures, environments, chemicals, compounds and elements, all cycling away year after year for hundreds of millions of years across the entire planet.But about assembling a model, are you sure that's the correct analogy? One has to take care when arguing by analogy - you have to be certain the analogy is valid, and I'm pretty sure that's not the case here. The parts of a model airplane do not behave at all like the raw materials of proteins.A better analogy, still not one that applies to protein formation, but better in the sense that it shows how randomness can lead to order, is to dump a lot of tennis balls into a large box. The tennis balls won't be packed very tightly. Now shake the box vigourously back and forth for a few minutes, and when you're done you'll find that the tennis balls have packed themselves into an orderly array.In other words, you must chose carefully when arguing by analogy. There is nothing in your model analogy that argues against protein formation. Independent of who is correct about protein self-assembly, the absence of any self assembly capability in toy models is not a relevant consideration.--Percy

Hi Inkorrekt,I think we've actually reached a conclusion we both agree upon. I was replying to this from your Message 239: I replied with the example of mutations, and you've just replied: So you now agree that there are at least some things new that do not require intelligence. Do I have that right? Why do you call mutations "well organized"? The most common modifier of mutation is "random", as in "random mutation". While there are such things as mutational hot spots in genomes, for the most part mutations are random both in their occurrence and their effect.And what do you mean by "fully directed process"? Do you mean the IDer directs the process of mutation?--Percy