For many years, atheistical objectors — often, taking a cue from ruthless advocacy groups such as the NCSE and/or ACLU etc — have been tempted to dismiss ID as “Religion” or “Creationism,” and this long since answered point still occasionally crops up here at UD.
(Unfortunately, even when it is not explicit, it is often an implicit rhetorical filter that warps understanding of what ID supporters, thinkers and scientists say; with an underlying insinuation of lying on our part. Which, for cause, I take very personally, as one who has repeatedly put life — when you deal with Communists . . . — and career on the line on matters of truth; for decades. Where, too, the very ease with which such objectors assume or project deception to us, should make them pause given the saying, “out of the abundance of the heart, the mouth speaks.” Projection, in short, is an issue that should give such objectors pause.)
Currently, in the ID as Terrorism discussion thread, RVB8 has commented:
[RVB8, 34:] >>ID is an outlier of religion. It has religious antecedents, and is supported by religion. The very notion of a ‘designer’, implies a God.>>
This of course, is a subtler form of the same insinuation, but pivots on conflating religion with philosophy and on failing to understand the centrality of philosophical considerations to any serious discussion, Science, Mathematics, whatever. Issues of logic and its first principles, ethics (why do we find an urge to the truth and the right), epistemology, critical analysis of worldview options and possibilities of being, etc are after all at the root of all discussions. Where, we can see you one “God is a manifestation of religion,” and raise you that imposition of Lewontin’s a priori evolutionary materialism is an outpost of atheistical ideological domination of science, education, media, government, law and other key institutions in our civilisation.
Accordingly, it’s back to basics time and I responded at 35:
[KF, 35:] >>Pardon, but we have heard the atheistical, self-falsifying evolutionary materialistic agenda talking points many times before.
Until you can pass the Newton vera causa test of actually showing how, reliably, blind chance and mechanical necessity produces functionally specific, complex organisation and/or associated information per observation, it remains the case — on a trillion member base — that the only observed source of FSCO/I is design.
That is, intelligently directed configuration.
This is an empirical matter.
It is backed up by the fact that an analysis of blind search challenge in configuration spaces of scale 500 – 1,000+ bits on sol system or observed cosmos scope atomic resources are utterly unable to search more than a negligible fraction, thus are maximally implausible as a means of finding isolated islands of function.
Thus, FSCO/I is an empirically massively verified and analytically plausible strong sign of design as best causal explanation of origin of an entity exhibiting such a phenomenon. Similarly, complex, mutual adaptation of parts to yield function — fine tuning — is an aspect of FSCO/I, and it is often associated with irreducible complexity of function; whereby a core of component entities are mutually necessary and together sufficient for core function to emerge or to persist.
Also, codes, algorithms and associated execution or communication machinery are manifestations of a linguistically driven process, which is directly a sign of intelligence in action as posts in this thread demonstrate. (The case of D/RNA then becomes an obvious wake-up call . . . the first contact sign, credibly, has been detected, c 1953, in a molecular biology lab and was published in Nature. As Crick wrote to his son, March 19th in that year: “Now we believe that the DNA is a code. That is, the order of bases (the letters) makes one gene different from another gene (just as one page of print is different from another) . . . “)
If you dispute such, simply produce cases of FSCO/I emerging by blind chance and/or mechanical necessity, in actually observed point: ___________ .
I can save you a lot of fuss and bother, by pointing out that the simplest easiest way to get there is by computer based random text generation — and not targeted, informed search such as Dawkins’ Weasel — which has shown ability to get to about 20 – 24 ASCII characters in sense-making text, a factor of ~ 10^100 possibilities short of the 10^150 – 301 range that is the ID detection threshold.
The search challenge is real.
FSCO/I and related phenomena are strong, reliable signs of intelligently directed configuration as cause.
It is time to move on to Robert Sheldon’s point, opening up a new, fresh world of insight from unfettered, uncensored science:
[ID] is about understanding the role of information in nature . . . . It isn’t just “detecting design in nature”, because that’s the easy part. It’s understanding design, understanding information in nature . . . . ID is taking us back to our roots–looking for purpose, looking for coherence, looking for meaning. Because the fundamental property of information is coherence, anti-entropy, function.
And, an honest examination of the above reasoning chain will show that it is patently empirical, inductive, analytical, scientific and clearly not religious in character.>>
Let’s see if RVB8 and/or other advocates of evolutionary materialism and/or its fellow travellers, have an answer (including to its inherent self-falsification along the lines long since pointed out by J B S Haldane). END