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Author | Topic: Nature belongs to ID | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
New Cat's Eye Inactive Member
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Welcome to EvC, Vanessa. I assume you want your posts challenged, so I'm just gonna go right for it.
From Message 1 If ID is to succeeds it must lay claim Nature. Nature is God's work and ID is a champion for God. By calling its opponent Naturalism, ID is giving credence to an explanation that is not a natural process. Call it what it is - Car Crash Evolution. I believe this will pique the public's interest and allow ID to better explain itself. If ID becomes a natural process, then it wouldn't be a champion for God anymore, no? From Message 11 First I apologise for not knowing how to copy and paste quotes in those very useful boxes - I hope to figure it out soon. Type [qs]shaded quotes are easy[/qs] or [quote]quotes are easy[/quote] into the submission box and it will become:
shaded quotes are easy or quote: There's a "Peek" button at the bottom right that will show you the code that people submitted and there's a preview button next to the "Submit" button where you post that will allow you to make sure it looks right before you post it. qs stands for quote shaded, and those are typically used for quotes from the message you're replying to. Regular quotes are typically used for quoting stuff outside that message, from other posters or other websites. But its whatever.
Evolution as explained by Naturalism claims to show how 'Nature did it' . And this is where I take exception. Nature does not develop life by arbitrary events but through systems and processes, whether it is seed to sapling to mighty oak, caterpillar to pupal to butterfly, egg to chick to eagle. One thing I'd like to point out is that all your examples are Eukaryotes. +-- clicky (I don't know how much bology you know) Most of the life on this planet is not eukaryotic and is, instead, much simpler. Early life, too, was much simpler. So, looking at a very complex process like the development of a eukaryotic organism isn't a good comparison to how nature would have devolped life. Given your observation, though, that nature develops things through systems and processes, it follows that the emergence of life itself would follow some complex system/process. At that point, however, we're getting more into chemistry than biology.
We live within profoundly complex and layered systems of life, yet we choose to explain this incredible tapestry as the result of accident - cosmic or chromosomal. Depends on how you look at it and how you're using the word "accident". I could argue this one either way. On one hand, if the universe is completely deterministic, then nothing is an accident because everything that happens is a result of the immediatly previous state of affairs. In this sense, mutations aren't "random" in that they don't result from the conditions of the previous state, but they are still random with respect to the phenotype and the environment. On the other hand, given the state of affairs of my car flying down the highway and that bug flying towards the ground, I could still say that it was an "accident" that it smashed into my windshield. I didn't mean to hit it, and there was no planning on me hitting it. So, in the former sense, an evolutionary explanation is not an accident but in the latter sense it is. Does that make sense?
The birth of a child, from conception through gestation until the baby's first cry demonstrates the wondrous hand of God for the faithful, and the intelligibility of Nature for the sceptical - both sides are satisfied. I believe the true explanation for life on Earth will not require a leap of faith for the faithful nor a loss of reason for the rational. So, given the right conditions and environment of a fertilized egg implanted into the wall of the uterus, could you agree that it is an inevitability that the baby will gestate? In a similiar sense, the emergence of life could be seen as an inevitability given the right conditions and environment. In that sense, it wouldn't be some miraculous thing that required your incredulous approach. We know that nature makes things with complex processess and that given certain conditions things will inevitably fall into place, I don't see any reason to suppose this same thing won't apply to the emergence of life, itself. From Message 17:
My first argument is against the title of 'Naturalism' to explain a process that has little of anything to do with Nature. Nature does not develop life through accident - an egg is fertilised by a sperm and implants itself in the wall of the uterus where a complex process kicks in to develop the baby. Hopefully, from my explanation above, you can see how and why the above statement could be improved. There's not necessarily the dichotomy between an "accident" and "that complex process", and neither must they be mutually exclusive.
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Aware Wolf Member (Idle past 1676 days) Posts: 156 From: New Hampshire, USA Joined:
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It actually seems fairly clear to me what she was saying. You might hear someone say I believe in God, but I don’t go in for that religion stuff, and you would know what he meant: they don’t go to church; pray; read the bible, etc. She was using the term religion in that sense: the actions you take in relation to God, not the belief in God.
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Rahvin Member Posts: 4069 Joined: Member Rating: 10.0
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Mutation is pretty arbitrary the vast majority of the time. You and I both know what Creationists and cdesign proponentists mean whenever they use words like "random" or "arbitrary" or "accident" in reference to mutation. They've usually been told that mutations are like a tornado in a junkyard, utterly random, and that without some intelligent guiding force such a tornado could never assemble a complex, functioning machine. But mutations, while having a significant random element, are not purely arbitrary, and to describe them as such without qualifying the limits of that element is to describe mutation inaccurately. Mutations are guided, simply not by an intelligent external actor. Mutations are dependent on the laws of chemistry - genes don't just randomly self-assemble in totally random patterns from a random soup of base elements (even a totally random soup of base elements would still react in predictable ways; Argon isn't going to just arbitrarily form a covalent bond with Carbon). They're copying errors, and the results are still assembled from the same already-complex components as the rest of the genetic material. Mutations are also dependent on the surrounding genetic code, which is inherited, not random. And finally, of course, mutations are guided by natural selection - their initial appearance is somewhat arbitrary, but their continued prevalence in a population is contingent on environment and circumstance. Individual mutations are random in their initial appearance because we cannot predict from the parent organism specifically what mutations will exist, but those mutations are not so random that we cannot predict with great accuracy the limited types of mutations that can occur, because they are all copying errors. It's like rolling dice - we may not be able to predict the specific result, but we always know that each die will come up as an integer between one and six, that we'll never see a decimal, and we'll never see a ten, and the die will never turn into a chicken. It's random...but not in the same sense as a tornado in a junkyard.The human understanding when it has once adopted an opinion (either as being the received opinion or as being agreeable to itself) draws all things else to support and agree with it. - Francis Bacon "There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old's life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs." - John Rogers A world that can be explained even with bad reasons is a familiar world. But, on the other hand, in a universe suddenly divested of illusions and lights, man feels an alien, a stranger. His exile is without remedy since he is deprived of the memory of a lost home or the hope of a promised land. This divorce between man and his life, the actor and his setting, is properly the feeling of absurdity. — Albert Camus "...the pious hope that by combining numerous little turds ofvariously tainted data, one can obtain a valuable result; but in fact, the outcome is merely a larger than average pile of shit." Barash, David 1995.
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Taz Member (Idle past 3548 days) Posts: 5069 From: Zerus Joined: |
Vanessa, please spend some time to watch the following video. Please pay attention to how the two scientists admit their ignorance of the other guy's field. I have never ever ever ever seen a creationist or IDist be that humble. Usually, they act like they know everything. Real scientists know the boundaries of their knowledge.
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sfs Member (Idle past 2790 days) Posts: 464 From: Cambridge, MA USA Joined: |
Without doubt religious people flow to ID like a duck to water, because it holds up evidence for God (intelligence).
It perhaps should give you pause that most religious scientists react to ID like ducks to a Labrador Retriever.
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jar Member (Idle past 95 days) Posts: 34140 From: Texas!! Joined: |
So once there was a Chesapeake Bay Retriever and a pond full of pet ducks. The retriever insisted on bring us ducks, dropping them at our feet where they immediately waddled indignantly back to the pond. But they had gotten used to the ritual and maybe even grown to believe that being picked up by a big dog and carted away from the pond was some kind of honor.
Ducks are not the brightest things in the world. And there are ID proponents too.Anyone so limited that they can only spell a word one way is severely handicapped!
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NoNukes Inactive Member |
utations are guided, simply not by an intelligent external actor. Mutations are dependent on the laws of chemistry - genes don't just randomly self-assemble in totally random patterns from a random soup of base elements (even a totally random soup of base elements would still react in predictable ways; I don't think it is helpful to use the term "guided" in this way. It is true that there are physical/chemical limits on the mutations that can occur, but that is not the same as guiding. Calling these limitations guidance simply plays into other goofy speculations in an unnecessary way. Further, I don't see any sense in which we ought to say that natural selection guides mutation. Selection determines the distribution of variation in a population, but the mutations themselves are occur randomly with respect to fitness. Edited by NoNukes, : No reason given.Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also in prison. Thoreau: Civil Disobedience (1846) The apathy of the people is enough to make every statue leap from its pedestal and hasten the resurrection of the dead. William Lloyd Garrison
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Percy Member Posts: 22953 From: New Hampshire Joined: Member Rating: 6.9 |
Yes, I think you've got it, thank you. Somehow the interpretation I arrived at early in the morning had abandoned me by the time Jar replied.
--Percy
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Percy Member Posts: 22953 From: New Hampshire Joined: Member Rating: 6.9 |
Hi Rahvin,
I'm afraid I can't go with your definition of guided. Within biology mutations are random with respect to fitness, and that's all that matters. I agree they're not random with regard to the laws of chemistry and physics, but it doesn't seem relevant. --Percy
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Percy Member Posts: 22953 From: New Hampshire Joined: Member Rating: 6.9 |
Hi WK,
Haven't we had this conversation before? Multiple times? I understand the importance you place on accuracy. Please understand the importance I place on attempting to find a level of detail where I'll be understood. There's a place in this world for both approaches. --Percy Edited by Percy, : Grammar.
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Dr Adequate Member Posts: 16113 Joined: |
I agree with Percy and NoNukes. Vanessa would have to be a whole lot more wrong than she appears to be about what she means when she calls mutations "unguided" before your statement would be less misleading.
In normal English, one would not even say that raindrops were "guided" downwards, even though they are obeying the law of gravity. That would imply an intelligent agency.
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Percy Member Posts: 22953 From: New Hampshire Joined: Member Rating: 6.9 |
For those of us with limited time, is there a minute mark in the video where we should begin watching to see an example of mutual deference.
--Percy
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New Cat's Eye Inactive Member |
Within biology mutations are random with respect to fitness, and that's all that matters. I agree they're not random with regard to the laws of chemistry and physics, but it doesn't seem relevant. I think it becomes relevant when your opponent is talking about the emergence of life and its evolution as some random cosmic accident with such a low probability that it must have been guided. Pointing out that the laws of physics and chemistry contrain the possibilities eliminates a lot of that improbability and can show that its not necessarily so miraculous afterall.
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Vanessa Member (Idle past 4495 days) Posts: 38 Joined:
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Dear Catholic Scientist
First, thank you for the instructions on using quotes!Second, I am on holiday using my husband's IPad, which takes too long to type. Also I prefer to be out seeing the sights. You argue that life was much simpler when it first formed. I think you mean that it wouldn't have been too difficult to happen. But that presupposes we know what life is. We don't. We can isolate a cell in a Petrie dish, pierce the side so that the contents spill out and the cell dies. In the dish we have all that is needed for life, or do we? For we can not put it back together again. We cannot bring it back to life. We can not create the simplest life form, so it is premature to say it is simple. I did not say the universe is completely deterministic. Does anyone? Man has the gift of self determination. Everyone knows that. The argument against a designed intelligent universe, but definition, must claim that it arose by fortuitous accident. By accident I mean no intention, no plan, like a car hurtling through a copse of trees, it will gather leaves, smash it's windscreen, puncture a tire - all arbitrary. I believe that is the position of current evolutionary theory. The gestation of a baby once embedded in the uterine wall is only possible because a system of growth predates the egg's arrival. I argue it is the same for life on Earth, a system of development is in place before the first cells on Earth first formed. I hold up Nature as evidence. Nature develops life through predetermined systems. You say it isn't necessary, do you have an example do support this claim? Edited by Vanessa, : Forgot some words Edited by Vanessa, : Forgot some words
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Vanessa Member (Idle past 4495 days) Posts: 38 Joined: |
Hello Percy
Sorry I can't quote with an IPad. I believe your definition of naturalism is incomplete - 'all phenomenon can be explained in terms of natural causes and laws'. It should add 'and came about by accident.' The definition you gave presupposes the natural laws were in place and came from nothing. Like saying a baby comes from natural causes and laws. A baby is the result of a complex natural system that predates the baby. So too for life on Earth - i argue there is a natural system in place before life formed on Earth. I hold up Nature as my proof. Nature develops life through predetermined systems. If you know of any life that came about without any predetermined system please tell me. Edited by Vanessa, : Greting
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