ID taken to the end

Maybe your question is better asked at AnnaFan's rant about God and bad things. Why do bad things happen? Seems like you're assuming they're due to an all intelligent, all powerful designer.If you're really interested in trying to push ID to see what's there, I'll ask you to go back and hit my previous two post (9 and 20). ID can't go anywhere with such a designer, so I'm more interested to push it assuming a non-God designer.Ben

If a Non-God designer (let's say aliens). Are you suggesting that Aliens put every species on Earth all at once? That they dropped things off from time to time? Or that the swing by ever few years and zap one species into another?

There's lots of ways to get an intelligent designer:
- maybe life on earth before the lineage we see intelligently designed the life we see today (including us).
- maybe extraterrestrial life did it.
- maybe "intelligence" does not require life. I have the hunch (but no real understanding to back it up) that many of Brad's thoughts are headed in this way. Maybe there's something about the laws of the universe that LEAD us into the life we see, rather than it being as "accidental" as (abiogenesis + evolution) proponents would believe.It's hard to keep two of these threads going at the same time. I would invite you to visit my response to AnnaFan's similar question here; it fleshes out some of this, including
- how, if we discovered this, it would move us forward in our understanding of the origins of our own species
- how we don't need to know the origins of our origins to move forward (i.e. starting with a black-box designer is OK; simply revealing that there was design would be a critical step in investigating the physical basis of life.)Hope that helps clear up my thoughts.

And, how woudl you test for any of this.Where did the intelligent designer come from?

Modulous: Perhaps I am a bit awry with my understanding, but doesn't thermodynamics just say that it is statistically improbable that information can and will be produced, not that it can't be produced or is forever lost?

It is more likely that thermodynamics says nothing whatsoever about information. Thermodynamics and information theory both use the term "entropy", and the equations satisfied by entropy are formally the same in both cases. Apart from that, there is probably no relation.Of course this all depends on what is meant by the term "information". There is Shannon information (from Shannon's theory of communication), and Chaitan/Kolmogorov information which is not quite the same thing. As far as I know, Dembski uses Dretske's version of information (from Dretske's 1981 book "Knowledge and the Flow of Information").Shannon information is not conserved. It is created by the transmitter of a message, and disappears when the message signal dies out. I'm not sure about Chaitin information. I suppose it could be said to exist in the platonic world of mathematical forms, and presumably is conserved there. I doubt that it is conserved in the real world.Maybe Dretske information is conserved, or maybe not. I'm not convinced the concept is even workable as defined by Dretske.

I didn't make any excuses. I provided you with an experimental set up. No, we can't. Sorry. We can set up experiment which demonstrates it is probably true, but we cannot measure the amount of energy in the universe before an event, and the amount after it. Can you clarify this sentence?Strike that, I don't want you to and after I've woken up a little I think I understand what you are saying. I provide a link in Message 53 which discusses the science of what I am talking, and Message 53 might help clarify for you what I'm actually saying. Sorry for being dragged into a peculiar off topic spin, I certainly didn't expect to. As such my last post in this thread regarding this subject is Message 53, any further discussion should be on a new thread if somebody decides to create one.This message has been edited by Modulous, Sat, 10-September-2005 07:57 AM

Well I see your point, but I don't think there is more information in a concentrated area of energy than a diffuse one (maybe there is though, its 7am).This wiki article (I prefer answers.com formatting) seems to be discussing basically what I am discussing: physical information (and the physicality, or embodiment, of said information).From the website:

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For a system S, defined abstractly in such a way that it has N distinguishable states (orthogonal quantum states) that are consistent with its description, the amount of information I(S) contained in the system's state can be said to be log(N).

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It then goes on to say that if we use a natural log, things start to resemble thermodynamic equations (Boltzman's)...this tends to cause IDers to fall over themselves in excitement (a webwide google or forumwide search for 'jerry don bauer' will show this to anyone interested).Anyway, thinking about your question further I would tend (pun intended (pun not intended)) to agree with your more specific wording. Indeed we can go further, the universe has a finite maximum storage capacity and it has a finite current storage capacity. It is highly improbable that this current storage capacity will increase, and highly probable that it will decrease.We cannot increase our maximum storage capacity since this would mean creating energy (which is the idea I had in mind when I mentioned it originally), but we can decrease our current storage capacity by increasing the amount of unworkable energy in the system and of course we can increase our local storage capacity by doing work.For a talk origins read, there is a quick article here which discusses my actual point when I started discussing this in Message 39.

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Even if there were a law of conservation of information, it would not necessarily invalidate evolution. Information is transferred from the environment to organisms by natural selection and other processes.

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which is basically what I started off actually saying: I know I've gone on at some length based on quite a straightforward question, but I intend this to be the last word I say on this in this thread:- Nuggin is right in that it is off topic and in danger of getting really off topic. As such, any further questions I shall refer to this post and invite people to start a new thread.

Your message 53 does not address Dembski's claims at all. Except for Dembski, and a few other ID people, the 'law of conservation of information' is not taken very seriously from the people in the field.A critique of his 'law' can be found at | American Scientist-

Since this is off topic, why don't you start a new thread on it, as I suggested in Message 53?

Modulous: Very well, I like this. All anything that could increase information can do is increase info in an area, not throughout the whole system, I see. Thanks.

Please contact me about your registration.

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It seems pretty clear to me that mutation does take place. We've all seen pictures of two headed turtles, etc. Is this the method by which the designer makes changes?Your argument is one large, intricately woven straw-man argument — and it is a straw-man that I am constantly seeing on this forum, used by both creationists and Darwinians. That straw-man is how most of the people here are defining intelligent design. Intelligent design holds that certain features of the biological world are more adequately explained by an intelligence rather than a mindless process. This is the theory of intelligent design. Intelligent design does not define the designer, and as such your statement doesn't ID dictate that a child with a liver disease was put here on purpose by the great designer is irrelevant to the theory of intelligent design. Detecting the work of an intelligence in a biochemical system simply cannot tell us who the designer is. For all we know, the intelligent designer or designers are extinct by now. From the standpoint of detecting design in biochemical systems, the identity of the designer is simply irrelevant.

Your response would be great if any of it were actually correct.Let's take it a bit at a time. Except that ID doesn't actually have any examples of these "features". Even Behe himself has caved on the few he proposed.So, the BETTER statement is: "ID SPECULATES that there COULD BE features in the biological world which IF THEY ACTUAL EXIST MIGHT BE more adequately explained by an intelligence".Until you actually FIND one, it's really really really premature to draw conclusions based on rank speculation. There is no "theory" of intelligent design. ID doesn't fit any of the criteria set out by the scientific term "theory". Dembski has gone on record that the design is "the Christian God". The DI's wedge document which explains WHY they invented ID in the first place makes it clear that its the "Christian God". The "cDesign Proponentists" typo makes it clear that its the "Christian God".Claiming that ID doesn't "define" the designer is pretty amateur. Nice try but you should actually brush up on your history. You can not detect "work" if you don't know who the worker is and/or the mechanism through which the work was completed.If you lack both of these, you have no way of distinguishing work from non-work.A crystal looks very precise and if you don't have any idea how they are created, you would conclude they are the work of a craftsman - you would be wrong.Modern art is often quite messy. If you don't know about paint and are only assessing it on its "organization", you would conclude it is not created - you would be wrong again.If you can't identify the designer and can't identify the mechanism, you have NOTHING to evaluate. LOL. A nice (if sadly pathetic) twist on the "space aliens" joke. Who "designed those designers"?Oops, back to "The Christian God" - nice try though. Seeing as the "standpoint of design" is a political agenda to relabel Christian Creationism as something the masses can be confused by, the identity of the designer is really the ONLY relevant thing.

Deleted - was an accidental repost.Edited by Nuggin, : No reason given.