Intelligent Design explains many follies

till you can answer what you mean by complex your useage of the word is meaningless, as for ToE, it hangs its "hat" on evidence and observation and prediction. where did i say assume anything i said your understanding of science is faulty, scientists who believe in the comet thing is more frenge than anything, being that organic matter came from "non-organic" matter, being that its a matter of how we are composed and there really is no line between organic and inorganic, but processes. this is really irrelivent if you can not answer my questions that doesn't answer anything, its all a smoke screen, the only thing this shows is ID answers nothing

John 10:10 How do the two hydrogen atoms in water know how to form a bond angle between themselves of 104.5 degrees relative to the oxygen atom?How is it that 2 elements that are each individually able to form liquid only at very low temperature {Oxygen from 54 kelvin to 90 kelvin and Hydrogen from 14 kelvin to 20 kelvin} are when bonded together form a substance requiring substantially greater temperatures to form a liquid {273 kelvin to 373 kelvin}.How does water know how to expand when freezing? How is it that snow is white but water is not?Perhaps the answers to those questions about water are not so different from those that are asked about organic matter?Then we have carbon. In its solid form we can have both graphite and diamond. How extraordinary that something soft and brittle like graphite is exactly the same type of atom as diamond yet they are so vastly different in their color texture and hardness.
Carbon has the ability to bond with itself and together with other atoms form nearly 10 million known compounds{ Carbon - Wikipedia}In these three atomic elements are the chemistry of organic matter and all follow rules of chemistry and, even though the rules are complex, they are no different than those that govern the formation of water or the structure of carbon.Life and the chemistry of it are are based on the reactions of elements forming compounds ,compounds chemically reacting with other compounds to form new substances, to complex clusters of substances obey a further wealth of interaction forming cells from which tissues can develop to organs of specific purpose to organisms utilizing the array of organs that comprise their unique bodies all dependant upon and adhering to the laws of physics that underlie the chemistry that forms life.Now we can always ask how can the hydrogen or oxygen do that but I believe those are questions that have been worked out as well.

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Science alone of all the subjects contains within itself the lesson of the danger of belief in the infallibility of the greatest teachers in the preceding generation . . .Learn from science that you must doubt the experts. As a matter of fact, I can also define science another way: Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts.Richard Feynman

Sometimes what seems a reasonable explanation for a phenomenon actually becomes nonsense when you discover more about it. Let me give you an example. In his Voyage of the Beagle, Darwin describes how he visits a site, in Argentina, of the fossil remains of a mastodon.

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Hearing also of the remains of one of the old giants which a man told me he had seen on the Banks of the Parana, I procured a canoe, and proceeded to the place. Two groups of immense bones projected in bold relief from the perpendicular cliff. They were, however, so completely decayed, that I could only bring away small fragments of one of the great molar-teeth; but these were sufficient to show that the remains belonged to a species of Mastodon. The men who took me in the canoe, said they had long known of them, and had often wondered how they had got there: the necessity of a theory being felt, they came to the conclusion, that, like the bizcacha, the mastodon formerly was a burrowing animal! {italics mine, P.}

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(Voyage of the Beagle, by Charles Darwin, chapter VII, October 1st, 1833.)

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The men who took Darwin to the site had no knowledge of geology and stratification. They could not conceive any other way for a mastodon to be found that far beneath the surface than that it must have dug itself a way there.Darwin, on the other hand, was a keen amateur-geologist, who'd read Lyell's Principles of Geology, and appreciated the great explanatory power of Lyell's then relatively novel ideas about land rising out of the sea by sedimentation. For Darwin, there was no question about it: the mastodon had been buried by successive layers of sediment over a long period of time.The point I am trying to make is that it may seem very reasonable to conclude that, since man intelligently designes complex things, therefore all similarly complex things must have been so designed. But why not keep an open mind and realize that there may be other ways for complex things to arise? We know more about biochemistry, genetics, heredity, ecology and so on, than, for instance, William Paley did, when he theorized about his famous watch.In Paley's days it was quite natural to conclude an Intelligent Designer, because science hadn't progressed as far as to be able to provide other possible explanations. We, on the other hand, have the benefit of modern science, which has given us a wealth of information on a great number of subjects related to the study of all things living, all of which points in the same direction: life evolved via a mindless mechanism, and there is no need to posit an intelligent agent to explain things.But to appreciate this, you must take all the facts into consideration, or at least as many as you can find and understand, and not just your everyday experience of, and gut-feeling about, complexity and design.This message has been edited by Parasomnium, 02-Apr-2006 08:48 AM

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"Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge: it is those who know little, not those who know much, who so positively assert that this or that problem will never be solved by science." - Charles Darwin.

John 10:10 writesMy emphasis.The fact that you can claim that any theory "will always be the most logically reasonable explanation" demonstrates definitively that you are not basing your position on science. Science is about coming to conclusions based on evidence. Since nobody knows what evidence will be collected tomorrow, nobody can say that any scientific theory will always be the best.You have shown that your reverence of ID is not based on evidence, but faith.

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Those who would sacrifice an essential liberty for a temporary security will lose both, and deserve neither. -- Benjamin Franklin

Leaving aside the strawman nature of this question and the ignorance of evolution that it shows (and the fact that this calls into question all of your argument against evolution) ... let's explore the ramifications of this statement.Evolution is the change in species over time. This is observed. We see this in the genetics and we see this in the fossil record, as well as observing it first hand in the real world we live in.Change in species over time. So if a species, or part of a species, even just one sequence of DNA for a species changes, evolution has occurred.Is that {change} more or less complex? The evolution answer is yes - and then it moves on to other changes in species over time. It does not need to explain "complexity" - just change in species over time.Whether it is either more or less complex, by what ever means you use to measure complexity, means that you must have a ways and means to measure "complexity" and a way of testing the level of "complexity" of every element of every organism, and that measurement needs to tell you something -- you need to answer these questions:(1) What is "complexity"?
(2) How is it measured?
(3) What does that tell us?For instance I can measure the "blueness" of the sky, first defining blueness to the nearness to a given wavelength of light - say 475 nm for good measure - and then I can measure the level of "blueness" from sunrise to sunset every day for a whole year and tabulate it and correlate it and run all kinds of statistical analysis of the data, but in the end the question is what does the "Degree of Blueness" (DoB) tell us. I can also measure it the following year and get different results. What does this tell us?At best what this tell us is that the DoB changes from time to time, that some changes are greater than others, that some may be seasonal on an average (if the study is carried out for enough years), and that there is a (poor) correlation between poor "blueness" and bad weather. It also tells us that poor "blueness" is not a predictor of bad weather (being a result and not a cause).What does it measure that is useful? To have scientific value it has to measure something useful, something that can then be used to make predictions ("a higher than average DoB this spring indicates that there will be more and stronger hurricanes this summer") and that can be tested .The DoB measurement does not tell us why the sky is blue (or not), and certainly not that part of the equation is the perception of color by human eyes (and that other species with more color receptors may well perceive the sky to be violet).The DoB measurement does not tell us how polluted the air is, as some pollutants make it more "blue" and some make it less "blue" and because the data can change with the time of day, AND because we already have other measurements that already tell us the levels of pollution directly (no correlation needed, no correction for time of day needed).Now lets assume - for the sake of argument - that we have a measurement of the "Degree of Complexity" (DoC) and can apply this to organisms in a consistent and repeatable manner (different people get the same results, within limits of statistical errors and making allowances for the differences in individual organisms within each species population even those bred specifically for scientific testing to be as similar as possible).We are assuming that (1) and (2) are done: And we come to question (3): what does that tell us?We measure the DoC of many organisms, even ones from the same parents, and we see that there is a difference in DoC between various organisms: what does that tell us?At a bare minimum it tells us that there is a change in species over time - that there is evolution.Let's assume we have a long term study done of all the individuals in a population over several generations, generating a mass of data: what does that tell us?Even assuming a linear trend of decreasing (or increasing) DoC over generations, all this tells us is that there is more change in the species the more time is involved - that there is evolution.It does not tell us why such a trend exists nor what it means. Nor does it tell us whether the same trend exists in other species - it could be just the elimination of extraneous "complexity" in a (controlled) population (or an accumulation of extraneous "complexity" with no natural selection in the (controlled) population).If there were no apparent trend, that the DoC moved up and down around an average value, then the accumulation of absolute value of the changes would still show more change in species the more time is involved - that there is evolution.If there were no trend at all - if the DoC remained at the same value for the individuals, but what contributed to the DoC values of the individuals were different, then this still shows change in species over time - that there is evolution.We can also see that there is a (poor) correlation between DoC measurements and changes in species over time. It also tells us that DoC changes are not always predictors of change in a species over time, because like "blueness" it is a result that is related to numerous causes, some with contradictory results.To be useful scientifically there has to be something of value for the DoC measurements, something it tells us that is specific, and that increases information.Telling us that evolution happens does not increase specific information -- we already have that information from other sources, sources that not only tell us that change has happened but what those changes are, and often why they happened.What the "complexity" argument usually comes down to is:
(a) Gosh, "X" is an extremely complex structure
(b) Such a level of complexity just cannot have happened by natural processes
(c) Therefore something else was involved
(d) Therefore my God!But (a) is not defined nor measured, therefore the DoC is assumed, and the argument is from ignorance, (b) is not demonstrated (it is more likely a failure of logical imagination to consider how it could have happened), so it is assumed as well, and is an argument from personal incredulity, (c) is a conclusion based on assumptions that are logical fallacies, rather than fact, and (d) is a totally unfounded assertion that is logically corrupt even without the fallacies in the precepts.The argument relies on the absence of information. In fact the whole concept of "Intelligent Design" relies on a continued absence of information:(i) if we knew how and why everything happened then there would be no need to assume an outside agent because
(ii) we would know, and
(iii) further, if there were any instance where we knew an outside agent was involved, then
(iv) we would know, but
(v) we can only know that for certain when we have no other explanations, so
(vi) the assumption of an outside agent only works in a vacuum of information.Perhaps you can tell me what science is based on undefined concepts where no effort is made to measure the data values?This isn't science, for the science is notably absent. Personally I fail to see how an absence of explanation is a better explanation of any "folly" ...It's notable in it's ab-science.Enjoy.This message has been edited by RAZD, 04*01*2006 11:39 AM

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we are limited in our ability to understand
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RebelAAmerican.Zen[Deist
... to learn ... to think ... to live ... to laugh ...
to share.

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That's what ID is all about, and why it's the best and most reasonable answer to life's complex existance.

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Indeed, you are right. "Best" and "most reasonable" are subjective terms, and will depend on who is doing the judging. People who are willing to examine actual evidence and make logical inferences based upon the evidence are going to have one opinion as to what is "best" and "most reasonable". Creationists and IDists, who have an emotional commitment to a certain set of beliefs which they will not allow to be shaken, will have a different opinion.

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"Religion is the best business to be in. It's the only one where the customers blame themselves for product failure."
-- Ellis Weiner (quoted on the NAiG message board)

Wow, I think that's a magnificent point, Chiroptera.All creos are deeply committed to the idea that there is a loving god that created the universe and now watches over us all. Given that bedrock, unassailable premise, it's almost impossible for them to understand how such a being would start with a barren rock and wait through billions of years of death of billions upon billions of life forms just to get to the pinnacle of his creation, a primate that walks upright but frequently suffers from low back problems due to poor design. Because they cannot conceive of any reason for such a bizzare plan, they are going to find same way to dismiss or discount any evidence that that is in fact exactly what happened.

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Those who would sacrifice an essential liberty for a temporary security will lose both, and deserve neither. -- Benjamin Franklin

If all who believe in ID have is "an emotional commitment to a certain set of beliefs," then we are to be most pitied.When I use the words "intracately complex design" in reference to the macro universe and the micro structure of things, many here do not seem to know what this means.A single atom with electrons, protons, neutrons, bosons, leptons, quarks, gravitons, etc. is an intracately complex structure that most reasonable people should say could not have happened without design.And we who believe in ID are the ones "who have an emotional commitment to a certain set of beliefs which they will not allow to be shaken?"Again, the shoe in on the other foot!

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The evil one comes to steal, kill and destroy; but I Jesus have come that you might have eternal Life and have eternal Life more abundantly - John 10:10

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A single atom with electrons, protons, neutrons, bosons, leptons, quarks, gravitons, etc. is an intracately complex structure that most reasonable people should say could not have happened without design.

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Why should most reasonable people agree with you on this? This is the essential point that you keep avoiding.

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"Religion is the best business to be in. It's the only one where the customers blame themselves for product failure."
-- Ellis Weiner (quoted on the NAiG message board)

Wow! Two sentences with 12 scientific sounding words - it must be true!Except that you refuse to define what intricately complex is and can't suggest how we can test that all those 'ons' could not have happened without design, however that happened. The only argument you have made is that "most reasonable people" would understand. And then you ask us to believe that you have more than an emotional commitment?This is not the first time I've said this, it almost certainly won't be the last:If you want to be treated like a science, play by the rules of science, not just the language. If not then stop whining if we treat ID as something driven by belief.

And you have my utmost sympathy. Define 'design' in that instance. Show evidene that this "design' was from 'an intelligent creator'. What do you have besides the arguement from incrediblity??

Well there is also the logical fallacy of appeal to anonymous authority ...... and the fact that the numbers of people that 'believe' something bears no relationship to the veracity of the belief.It certainly didn't stop the earth from orbiting the sun.Enjoy.

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we are limited in our ability to understand
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RebelAAmerican.Zen[Deist
... to learn ... to think ... to live ... to laugh ...
to share.

I know some here question my resume credentials, but I work in an industry where one chance happening in one million is considered an incredible event. Most of our nuclear accident scenarios and the designs against these chance accidents are predicated on this 1/1,000,000 chance. If it's less than 1/1,000,000, more design is required to get the odds greater than 1/1,000,000.The odds that a single atom could have designed itself all by itself is much much greater than 1/1,000,000!Sir Isaac Neuton had this to say concerning our solar system:"The six primary planets are revolved about the sun in circles concentric with the sun, and with motions directed towards the same parts, and almost in the same plane. Ten moons are revolved about the earth, Jupiter, and Saturn, in circles concentric with them, with the same direction of motion, and nearly in the planes of the orbits of those planets; but it is not to be conceived that mere mechanical causes could give birth to so many regular motions, since the comets range over all parts of the heavens in very eccentric orbits; for by that kind of motion they pass easily through the orbs of the planets, and with great rapidity; and in their aphelions, where they move the slowest, and are detained the longest, they recede to the greatest distances from each other, and hence suffer the least disturbance from their mutual attractions. This most beautiful system of the sun, planets, and comets, could only proceed from the counsel and dominion of an intelligent and powerful Being. And if the fixed stars are the centres of other like systems, these, being formed by the like wise counsel, must be all subject to the dominion of One; especially since the light of the fixed stars is of the same nature with the light of the sun, and from every system light passes into all the other systems: and lest the systems of the fixed stars should, by their gravity, fall on each other, he hath placed those systems at immense distances from one another."Sir Isaac NewtonPS - I hope no one here brings up Three Mile Island and Chernobyl. The engineers at these nuclear plants "deliberately disabled" the automatic safety systems designed to protect the cores, thus leading to failures that resulted. The plant operators thought they were smarter than the safety engineers who designed the plants. Some here also believe they are smarter than ..............

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The evil one comes to steal, kill and destroy; but I Jesus have come that you might have eternal Life and have eternal Life more abundantly - John 10:10

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I know some here question my resume credentials....

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I don't. Your arguments are lacking in logical rigor. That can be seen simply by examining them. Your credentials are irrelevant.This message has been edited by Chiroptera, 04-Apr-2006 12:44 PM

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"Religion is the best business to be in. It's the only one where the customers blame themselves for product failure."
-- Ellis Weiner (quoted on the NAiG message board)

John 10:10 Since the number of nuclear reactors in the world is less than 500 this is almost a safe level of odds providing they are of the same deisgn. Now if there were a million nuclear power plants in the world then the 1/1,000,000 odds are now become almost a certainty for error.A misunderstanding of the ideas of odds was prevalent at NASA and resulted in the launch of Challenger in 1986 and the disaster that came from that. One member of the management pegged the odds of a catastrophic failure on a given launch at 1/100,000. This translates into more than 1 launch every day of the year for 300 years without expectation of a malfunction. If atoms did not design themselves but occured naturally without design then how do you justify applying odds of design to them? Let us set that aside though and you show us just how you arrive at what the odds are eh? Do you think that just because Isaac Newton stated this that the arguement somehow holds sway? The force of gravity, a consequence of the presence of mass{which Isaac was not aware of}, is all that is needed to explain the motions of all the objets in the universe. He was also ignorant of many things such a the non-fixed location of the stars{and that they were not neceesarily the centers of other systems} though in his time this was the best conclusion observation allowed him to determine.
A persons stature or esteem do not make an arguement valid or invalid since they have nothing at all to do with the arguements merits.

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Science alone of all the subjects contains within itself the lesson of the danger of belief in the infallibility of the greatest teachers in the preceding generation . . .Learn from science that you must doubt the experts. As a matter of fact, I can also define science another way: Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts.Richard Feynman