Intelligent Design (again)

[Rule]

In response to the Kansas school board requiring teachers to spend (a significant portion) of class time, lecturing on intelligent design:

www.venganza.org

(read it closely!)

[Adron]

If the being exists independently of our universe, it is fruitless to attempt to gauge this being based on our universe's laws.  We would be able to see "miracles" or other "divine intervention."

Why should this not be extended into "it is fruitless to build any theories based on an intelligent designer"? If the theory ends up in this world being driven by miracles, controlled outside our universe, what purpose does it serve us?

[Arta]

I question macroevolution.  There is no overwhelming experimental evidence (there CANNOT be such a thing), and the fossil evidence is sketchy at best.  A couple of transitional fossils here and there are certainly not grounds for being dubbed "overwhelming."

The overwhelming experimental evidence is in support of microevolution. Perhaps overwhelming is too strong a word to use to describe the fossil record, but it is most certainly compelling. It is most certainly not 'sketchy'. The article I linked to is excellent, and I recommend that you read it before we continue, otherwise, I'll just end up duplicating parts of it here.

I haven't had a chance to read your article, Arta, but I'm sure I will soon.  Meantime, I'd like to suggest an excellent book, Darwin's Black Box, by Michael Behe.  It presents an ID argument without suggesting a god, although yes -- an ID argument breaks down without some type of eternal being.

This point -- indeed, that book -- is specifically addressed by that article. Suffice it to say that biological complexity is not, in actual fact, irreducible.

Quite briefly, this is my position on ID (it would go better in the SQP forum):

* Life either was designed by an intelligent being or it randomly, spontaneously evolved into being.
Assuming the former:

I'm not going to address the rest of your argument, because it is founded on this assertion, and this assertion is deeply erroneous. First, evolution is anything but spontaneous. Second, I do not accept your assumption. It is not rational. It is not supported by any physical evidence.

The grounding base of a logical argument must be something real. A physical, observable phenominon. It need not necessary be measurable (eg, emotion), but it must be observable. If you base logic on logic alone, or on assumptions that are unsupported by observation, you cease to debate about the real world, or real phenomina. I do agree that 'pure logic' debates can be good fun, but they have no place in a debate of a scientific nature.

Your argument also contains numerous other assumptions (assertions cannot begin with the word 'if'!)

[MyndFyre]

8. Mathematically, it is inconceivable that anything as
complex as a protein, let alone a living cell or a human,
could spring up by chance.
Chance plays a part in evolution (for example, in the random
mutations that can give rise to new traits), but evolution
does not depend on chance to create organisms,
proteins or other entities. Quite the opposite: natural selection,
the principal known mechanism of evolution,
harnesses nonrandom change by preserving "desirable"
(adaptive) features and eliminating "undesirable" (nonadaptive)
ones. As long as the forces of selection stay constant,
natural selection can push evolution in one direction
and produce sophisticated structures in surprisingly
short times.

This argument assumes that there is something from which to select.

11. Natural selection might explain microevolution,
but it cannot explain the origin of new species and higher
orders of life.

This isn't even the right question to ask, and he address the speciation part.  MICROEVOLUTION IS SPECIATION.  There is NO DEBATE about MICROevolution.  He doesn't address the "higher orders of life" part.  How convenient.

He finally comes to the Irreducible Complexity argument in question 15.  He addresses the suggestion of the bacterial flagellum by referring to simpler flagella.  That's fine.  What about blood clotting?  We have a system of blood clotting that takes something to the order of 12 steps, any of which missing leads to no clot being formed (I could be off on the number, I have to find the book).  The IC argument that is not addressed in this article speaks to this: having any number of the steps involved in the blood clot procedure, but not all or not in the right order, would give no advantage to survival and would not be a causal factor involved in selection.

This point -- indeed, that book -- is specifically addressed by that article. Suffice it to say that biological complexity is not, in actual fact, irreducible.

No Arta, you saying so and the guy who wrote the article saying so (it's not even an academic article!) is not sufficient.

Here I thought you might have a conference paper or journal article.  But the file is called "wacko nonsense."  Not very credible.

[Arta]

It was an article in New Scientist. That's credible enough for me. It does have a stupid name.

Higher orders of life?

Irreducible complexity: By simply selecting a different complex thing, you miss the point.I don't know much about blood clotting, but perhaps if you clarified on the steps inolved, I could speculate.

What about the rest of my post?

[Grok]

Groknipotence.  Only MyndFyre comes close to grokking me.

First this language I must write to you in is bound by time.  All your words have tense to them.  Until you shed your tense-based language and thinking, you cannot grok.

The universe "without time" is even tensed, but try to imagine it as MyndFyre described.  I created the physical laws which would create the universe as you know it, including your own piddly existences.  If I choose to create you by means of what you call evolution, that's my business too.  After all, they're my laws.  Had I installed different physical laws, you would accept them as readily as you accept them now, and except during discovery you would have no reason to question them.

Why must evolution not be my creation?  You humans amuse me.