Not enough room in DNA

Evolution isn't the best example of the three because many believe in it and are still theists.And of course, I believe the Bible to be the Word of God, so maybe from your worldview it doesn't make my imaginary God a liar, but of course from mine it does make my real god one. I totally agree. Yes, and this is why I believe that God as put enough evidence in this world (from general revelation and special revelation) so that anybody can come to the conclusion that he exists. Or else that would make him a diabolical bastard.Edited by slevesque, : No reason given.

Not particularly. You attribute some things to natural causes, do you not? Such as the issue that this thread is about --- you're satisfied that the genetic information is sufficient to account for development and metabolism, and you don't complain that it's misleading for God not to have left some sort of Gap for him to be a God of in this particular instance.And nor, you will note, have I ever suggested any such thing about any natural process. The fact that some things in nature work wouldn't make it misleading for God to have created them. He could just have made a universe that works. 'Cos of being omniscient. No...ooo ... I don't think that's what I said. That's my objection to fiat creationism, not to God. The problem with fiat creationism is that according to the creationists much of the universe is properly attributable to a miracle, and yet I'm meant to believe that God chose to do all the miracles in such a way that it seems perfectly reasonable for scientists to attribute them all to secondary causes.It's not misleading for God to do a miracle, and neither is it misleading for him to work through secondary causes. It is misleading for him to work miracles in such a way that they look exactly like the operation of secondary causes. That's just jerking scientists about. Well, if it comes to that, a universe in which tiny little pigs with wings suddenly start flying round my head singing show-tunes is also more consistent with the existence of the supernatural. But I don't complain about this not happening as being misleading.Edited by Dr Adequate, : No reason given.

Yes. I think you've missed the point. And now I think that you've got it, apart from your choice of phraseology.Look, suppose that two people argue for different gods. One guy believes in a god that has made everything in the universe pink, the other says that his god made things all different colors.And one of them says: Yes ... true ... and ... ?

Sorry I didn't answer this, I was too interested in talking philosophy.I have never, not even once in my whole life, played cards for money. I have my vices and my follies, but that isn't one of them.

Hi slevesque, Yes, but those people don't believe in a literal and inerrant Genesis. They could believe in a literal-but-fictional Genesis or believe in an allegorical Genesis. Perhaps they might believe in some combination of both. What they would find almost impossible would be to believe in both a literal/inerrant Genesis and evolution. The way I see it, you can't really believe in all of the following at once;

• A literal Genesis 1 & 2.
• An accurate Bible, officially sanctioned as the inerrant Word of God.
• An honest and good god.
• A universe that shows no sign of having been created as per Genesis, and every sign of having been shaped by unguided physical forces.

I don't see how anyone can make those beliefs compatible. Something has to give.Your problem is that we actually do live in a universe that appears to be wholly natural. Whole swathes of phenomena once attributed to Gods now have natural explanations. The Earth does not look created. Humans do appear to have evolved. If God made things this way, it must be seen as dishonest. For him to punish us for believing his lie; that really is an unpleasant prospect. Well all I can say is that he hasn't revealed himself to me. All I have to go on here is a very non-miraculous looking universe. I guess I fell for the deception. Prankster God is a tricky one isn't he?Mutate and Survive

The leap of faith here is that is in the assumption that life is impossible to originate or in the case of the pool table is that you assume there are covers over the pockets when in fact there is none.

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One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we've been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We're no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It is simply too painful to acknowledge -- even to ourselves -- that we've been so credulous. - Carl Sagan, The Fine Art of Baloney Detection"You can't convince a believer of anything; for their belief is not based on evidence, it's based on a deep seated need to believe." - Carl Sagan"It is far better to grasp the Universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring." - Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World

I would think that someone had cheated. Are you saying that God is a cheater? So you are saying that God could NOT use natural laws?

THERE'S NOT ENOUGH ROOM IN THE DNA.Perhaps it would be better to look at this question from another perspective.
Firstly the Human genome is far from being fully understood.
It would appear that there are overlapping information sequences that code for entirely different biological features.
The number of letters in the human genome is not the sum of all the data in it as is the case in a primitive computer hard drive, but instead is only a small factor of the actual information coded within it.
To illustrate this point consider the gambling guessing game, (called Lotto in Australia), numbers 1 to 40. In a linear fashion there are only forty individual values, such as you have described in your first post on this thread. However, if you take a look at the number of possible combinations of any six or seven or eight etc. numbers, then the possibilities are staggeringly huge [equating to biological information encoded on different overlapping levels within the DNA, though I admit this is a very poor analogy], & far greater than the actual total number of letters within the genome as a linear finite number, that you have equated to bytes.For this reason I would suggest that the sheer brilliance, complexity and compactness of information in the DNA is a very strong argument for brilliant design.
Contrary to what is often stated by many, there is no conflict between empirical operational science and a belief in the God of the Christian Bible, the two are entirely compatible. (Please, no petty jibes or retorts at this statement; lets just take a logical look at the facts)Taking this thread back to the nuts and bolts, and since we are talking about DNA, it is very interesting that the defenders of evolution have yet to satisfactorily explain how information losses in the genetic code as brought about via copying errors/mutations can bring about more complex organisms with more information, no matter how much time you wish to throw at it.

I like your analogy and I agree with it. IF I witnessed such a thing, I certainly would agree that that this is a very strong hint that someone (some intelligence) had somehow put all the balls into the pockets.Now, to move your analogy back to reality... what does the duct-tape represent?In your analogy, we can both walk up to the table and you can point to the duct tape and say "look at the physical blocking mechanism we can both objectively measure and verify that it does, indeed, block the natural flow" of the pool balls into the pockets.What, in reality, is the "physical blocking mechanism that we can both objectively measure and verify that it does, indeed, block the natural flow" of evolution being responsible for the varying species we see today?I agree that IF your analogy actually had a counter-part in reality, it would be a very strong hint that something "weird" (perhaps supernatural) is going on.I just don't agree that your analogy has such a counter-part in reality. I think that the counter-part in reality you're thinking of is not objective at all. I think it's subjective. I don't think it's verifiable, and I think there's a good chance it's only a part of your imagination.Using the analogy again, I don't think "duct-tape blocking the holes" actually represents whatever-it-is-you're-thinking-of that is blocking natural evolution. Duct tape is objective. I think you're talking about something that is Subjective. I think you're talking about something like an "invisible force-field that only turns on when we all leave the room" that blocks the balls from going into the pockets. Which is an extremely far stretch away from the convincing duct-tape.

I'm not sure why that is surprising when that isn't what the thread is about. Maybe you should have been looking at a thread where that issue would have been on topic instead, why not try Adding information to the genome., Evolving New Information, Irreducible Complexity, Information Loss and Barry Hall's experiments, Devolution (from The Fall) and "No New Information" or Information Changes in DNA by logical Analysis. Those are just ones with 'information' in the thread title, the issue has been raised in at least a dozen other threads.TTFN,WK

Fair Enough call to a point.But the preceding paragraphs are on topic in relation to the Post that I was addressing my Reply, and also very much to the point of the thread as it was commenced at Message 1.ATB,CT

Perhaps you could tell us what you're talking about. This would require some sort of link to a reputable source, not just your vague memory of something you think you read about somewhere which turns out to be about bacteria. Perhaps you could show us your math.Oh, wait, you're a creationist. You're making what looks like a quantitative claim without being able to produce any actual figures whatsoever. Compactness? Of a eukaryotic genome? Surely you kid.As to whether it is "a very strong argument for brilliant design", that would depend on whether or not you are inclined to commit petitio principii. "Very interesting"? No, there is a mundane, nay, even boring explanation, which is that up until now no creationist on this thread has bothered to make your particular mistake, which is, in fact, off-topic.

Viruses do it a lot, Bacteria occasionally (and Archaea, I believe). It's exceedingly rare in protein coding genes in eukaryotes, but long non-coding RNAs do it quite a lot. (See Mercer, T., Dinger, M., & Mattick, J. (2009). Long non-coding RNAs: insights into functions. Nature Reviews Genetics, 10(3), 155-159. doi:10.1038/nrg2521)Might be that?

There are examples of this sort of thing in mammalian genomes to some extent with dual coding genes with overlapping splice variants (Kovacs et al., 2010) but I'm not sure about the 'entirely different biological features' element. Indeed the latest thing in ID seems to be to try and spin the findings of the ENCODE project to claim the whole genome is functional .TTFN,WK

Alternative gene splicing would have been my second guess.But I don't know if I actually need a second guess, since I still don't know what he was trying to be wrong about in the first place. Heh, I've seen that one. Even if transcription and translation were the same thing, they'd still just be jumping up and down crying "Evolutionists have spoonfed us another fact that we didn't know and couldn't possibly have found out for ourselves! How stupid those evolutionists are!"