Spotting Beretta's "designer" {Now only 1 summation message per member}

Then you need to show either a design or a designer. Picking at the ToE does not automatically support your position. Heh, that's a complete fudge, Beretta. You're blaming science for the fact you have no evidence of a creator! Science is, or course, not equipped to deal with superstition - it deals with what is observable. However, the identification of who did the design should certainly belong in ID "science" in the same way as water is identified as a major cause of erosion in Geology.Edited by RickJB, : No reason given.

You tell us. And be sure to include Mr Pollock's work in your answer.

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"The wretched world lies now under the tyranny of foolishness; things are believed by Christians of such absurdity as no one ever could aforetime induce the heathen to believe." - Agobard of Lyons, ca. 830 AD

Well design seems to be something that requires intelligence to produce it.It can't have a repetitive formula otherwise it could have been produced due to a natural law.
For example if Macbeth had to be converted into a formula, the formula would be as long as the play - there's no simple reduction formula possible.
Also something created by intelligence is not determined by the physical properties that it is composed of.For example the words on a scrabble game. If you mess the words up, you have destroyed the information but not the carrier of the information because the information component, the words, are not dependant apon the plastic or whatever the board and letters are made up of.The same with Macbeth -if you burn all the paper and ink that carries the play Macbeth, you still haven't destroyed the information component, just the physical carrier of the information.
How did the information component of DNA come together -the information that tells the cell what proteins to make; how do the proteins know which 3d shape to fold into in order to do their job.This information is not a component of the physical properties of the DNA but is carried by the arrangment of the DNA. Well that's exactly how I see evolutionists.Their religious outlook is that everything that exists can be attributed to random mistakes and natural processes. I'll bet it wasn't quite as 'obvious' when they were children not yet indoctrinated by 'science' and it's philosophy of naturalism. Evolution says that there is no God or if there is one, he didn't play a role of any importance and is basically negligable.It's a religious viewpoint that appears obvious to its supporters and thus defensible. It is obvious to anyone who believes that the world was created -that covers quite a few religions not just some particular narrow or specific view. That's not true -the arguments put forward are scientific ones not based on any particular religious text and while some of the arguments are criticisms of the reigning view of evolution, there are also arguments based on the evidence for intelligence being involved in what exists. No, I would think it means that we are creative like God is creative and that if we ever manage to create life that would prove that the creation of life requires intelligence. That may be but it doesn't prove that the design of a human body or any other form of life follows any chemical or physical laws. There was a book written on the subject of DNA called 'Chemical Predestination' where the author proposed that DNA may have formed due to chemical law. The author was Dean Kenyon. The book was in use for 20 years as a standard textbook but Dean Kenyon has since changed his mind and no longer believes that it's arrangement can be explained by natural law.He came across some argument that he said he could not refute and is now an ID proponent. You might find it interesting to find out what the argument was that stumped him and changed his mind. I don't have those details.

You should look at William Dembski's argument for specified complexity and elimination of chance as a cause. He has come up with a way of assessing every situation using probability stats to decide causation of anything found in nature. It's well worth considering. That reminds me of the following:
"For the preaching of the cross is for them that perish foolishness; but unto us which are saved, it is the power of God." (1 Cor 1:18)I sure hope Agobard changed his mind before he met his maker.

Not of the whole. No. But you are ignoring the non-random component of selection that can be applied to gradual change. If we randomly place all the letters on a scrabble board with no plan or design present we are extremely unlikely to produce the structured result of a completed game of scrabble. We would have to do this an impossible number of times to ever stand any chance of achieving an end result that replicated genuine design of the whole purely by chance. This is absolutely true.However if we repeatedly randomly place the letters on a scrabble board but each time leave in place any words that are formed purely by chance......then what? Eventually we will have a board full of complete words. We will in effect end up with the appearance of design!!If we 'select' for the 'attribute' of completed words such that completed words 'survive' then the appearance of design soon follows. No actual design takes place. Just selection.In fact this analogy does not even go far enough because in the case of natural selection the 'words' that 'survive' would be the ones that go on to produce the next combination of letters. So the process would be even less random than the word example above.The point is that if selection is thrown into the mix then the appearance of design naturally follows and the probability of apparent design being produced, given enough time and enough 'generations' is relatively high.Can you not see that this is evidently true?Edited by Straggler, : No reason given.

Even if we accept your definition, it really doesn't answer the question - what constitutes design made by a creator? We still have no reason to assume that the creator's design is anything like our own.The "information" (an ill-defined term) as you call it falls from the physical properties of the world we see around us. Nowhere, be it in DNA or elsewhere, do we see chemicals operating in a way that cotradicts either their own physical propeties or those of the universe at large. Careful, you're almost implying that ID is "obvious" to the inexperienced/uneducated!When I was a small child it was "obvious" that the sun was an electric light of some kind, until my Dad explained it was a ball of hot gas 90 million miles away. So you have to believe the world was created before it becomes "obvious"? Kenyon became a creationist at some point in the 1970s. It's also interesting to learn that he hasn't had any research grants since the 1970s. I guess things are just "obvious" to him these days, so research isn't needed.....Edited by RickJB, : No reason given.Edited by RickJB, : No reason given.

And why do you hope that? He was an archbishop in France who, says Wikipedia Or, Beretta, do you subscribe to trial by fire for suspected witches?

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"The wretched world lies now under the tyranny of foolishness; things are believed by Christians of such absurdity as no one ever could aforetime induce the heathen to believe." - Agobard of Lyons, ca. 830 AD

Excuse my historical ignorance -I thought Agobard, from that quote, was opposed to the message of Christianity not to some of the things that people ascribe to Christianity -my mistake.

Hi, Beretta. This is a good start. The next thing to do is to look at the natural world and see if anything fits this definition. If you go down to a molecular level, you see that DNA is really just a long, repetitive formula of 4 bases. Furthermore, genes can be divided into "families" or groups based on their sequence similarity to one another. There is a repeated pattern of nested hierarchy at the population, organismal and molecular scales, which seems to me to contradict your definition.If you studied insects (as I do), you'd also notice that everything about them is a repeated pattern. For us, legs are legs. For insects, legs are legs, antennae, mouthparts, and possibly even wings (I don't buy in to legs-to-wings (migrating coccopodite) theory, though). This is shown by a gene in Drosophila which causes the antennae to develop into legs. The development of legs and antennae is controlled by the same basic set of genes, except expressed differently in different parts of the body.So, the insect's bauplan is a repetitive pattern, and the insect can be reduced to a simpler "formula": doesn't this violate your definition as given above? Actually, there is ample evidence that the folding of proteins into their 3D structures is based almost entirely on the sequence of amino acids in the polypeptide. Also, the “information component” of DNA is just another effect of chemistry: tRNA’s are little nucleic acid chains that bridge the gap between the DNA template and the protein. These tRNA’s have two bond sites, one which is specific to a DNA codon (or to a set of codons), and one which is specific to an amino acid. This is why DNA can accurately code proteins, because the molecular machinery in the cell has become fine-tuned to favor the accurate transmission of sequence between DNA and protein. Science has never made the claim that the “obvious” must be true. Incidentally, neither did RickJB. In fact, science actually makes more of the counter-claim: that only rigorous testing yields reliable understanding. Much of what has been learned through the scientific method is very counter-intuitive (see “General Relativity” for a wonderful example of this). Experiments quite often return with results that the most astute of men would never have intuited in a thousand years. I tend to think of evolution as saying that, if there is a God, this is how He did it. If evolution is, in fact, the Divine method of Creation, then science believes Him to have played a major role. Scientists will not say this, because we are committed to caution in our claims. All we can claim is that we see a pattern in nature, and the pattern follows our theory. I have said time and time again that I would not oppose science teachers teaching their children evolution and saying, at the end, “and God did it.” I rather like the Jackson Pollock example. It shows that an intelligent designer does not necessarily imply an orderly design. It shows that the existence of God does not rule the possibility of a spontaneous, unguided “Creation” process. As a Christian, I believe that God could have created life from scratch. But, from what I’ve seen in the natural evidence, it does not look like He did.Personally, if I were a grand, all-knowing and all-powerful Creator God, I would find it more interesting---and more fun---to let spontaneity rule. Where’s the fun in doing something that doesn’t take any thought or effort? That’s boring. Spontaneity at least has the possibility of surprising you.Edited by Bluejay, : Additions.

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Darwin loves you.

I would imagine anything that can't be reduced to a reductionist formula -something that requires imagination rather than pure physical law for its formation. No, not the chemicals, the organization of the parts of the DNA that allow them to send a message that can be interpreted by a receiver that then puts together something else.The chemical properties of the DNA is not the message or the code -it is the organization of its parts, much like a computer programme, that is beyond physical law. It's like the cd-rom that obeys the laws of whatever it is made of but the information on the cd-rom is not limited by the physical laws of the medium.
Got to go...can't finish now....

quote:

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You should look at William Dembski's argument for specified complexity and elimination of chance as a cause. He has come up with a way of assessing every situation using probability stats to decide causation of anything found in nature. It's well worth considering.

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That is overstating it. Dembski's method is a simple eliminative argument. It's only useful in cases where there are problems with positive arguments for design (which aren't part of Dembski's method) and the situation is simple enough that we can identify all the alternatives and calculate probabilities for them.Unsurprisingly, it has never been successfully applied to biology and is largely ignored even within the ID movement. It's very hard to find cases where it is actually useful.If that weren't enough, as Dembski has since recognised, a target chosen after the fact is not the same as one chosen in advance. Dembski's notion of specification isn't strong enough to make up the difference. So far as I know this problem has yet to be fixed.

I have, it's rubbish.Here's some of my critique: No.

are you able to pick a creature for us to see where the design feature can be spotted ... or shall we move on from that ?? ...your number 70 post .. really ..here is what wikipedia has to say on DNA and infomation .. hmmm seems DNA and its infomation can manage with out a designer .. who would have guessed that .. next ...Edited by ikabod, : No reason given.

But isn't having some knowledge of the designer integral to identifying and understanding the designs? Take your example of a painting. Obviously we can look at it and agree that it's designed, maybe even discuss its aesthetic qualities, but that won't advance our understanding of it. To do that you would need to know something of the designer/artist. Why use that style or palette ? Why choose that subject matter? How does this compare to other artists? Etc. From all this, even without a name, we can get some idea who the artist was.Similarly in nature, if you've identified something that is designed, do you simply take a moment to appreciate the design and move on, or do you make some effort to understand the design? If the latter, how do you do this without some idea of the designer? Can you answer questions like, why do mammals have three different ways to reproduce? Or why do octopi have better 'designed' eyes than humans? Or does the extinct organisms found in the fossil record represent failed designs or a work in progress? And how do we know there is even one designer, since a painting 'designed' by Van Gogh and one 'designed' by rembrandt can be recognised as created by two different people?So, of the various designs you see in nature (but you have so far failed to cite, as others have noted on this thread) what does this tell us about your designer?

Maybe it would help with understanding but I don't think that it's necessary to know who the designer is in order to be able to identify design.It should give us reason to look for the designer but still first things first - are we alone or is a designer responsible for all the amazing creatures that do exist? I reckon that once you recognize that there has to be a designer, you would want to try and find out who that designer is. If you are told from early childhood that there is only apparent design but that it is not real design and nothing is responsible for our being here, you won't be particularly interested in the question and may miss out on something major about life that you really need to know. Design? We live in a different environment, maybe it's not a 'better' design just different reflecting something they need that we don't. I can only think our eye design is pretty brilliant if you look at the details. Common genetic code - we need to be able to eat and use what we eat for our own growth and maintenance. Very imaginative, very mathematical, very brilliant - way beyond our limited brains and abilities to understand in more than a fairly elementary way.