At Evolution News: For Darwinism, Pregnancy Is the “Mother of all Chicken-and-Egg Problems”

AF, why do you insist on repeating corrected error? After a certain point, that is outright lying on your part. First, as was shown to you repeatedly, the DESCRIPTION, functionally specific, complex organisation and/or associated information is a label for a readily observable commonplace. The text of your comment is a case in point as is the PC, tablet or phone you composed it on. So is the complex organisation of cells in your body, as is the built in von Neumann kinematic self replicator in those cells, the foundation for reproduction of biological life. So is a watch (or a gear in it, or a screw or a nut and bolt), so is an Abu 6500 CT fishing reel. So would be Paley's self replicating, time keeping watch discussed in his Ch 2 right after the Ch 1 that too many Darwinists set up and knock over as a strawman. Basic fact, an observable reality cannot be self contradictory or incoherent. As, realities must all be so together. Next, you are willfully speaking in disregard to truth to try to attribute the description to me. As I have taken pains to acknowledge and point out, the matter was put in the literature in the 1970's by Orgel [1973] and Wicken [1979]. All I have done is to provide an acrostic abbreviation, also noting that as organisation is reducible to information in a description language [such as AutoCAD] organisation deserves to be recognised too. So, we see here an elaborate rhetorical ruse, a deception intended to set up ad hominem attacks. All too typical of the sort of advocates for darwinism, atheism and fellow traveller ideologies that are a penny a gross in the era of new atheists. Stop willfully misrepresenting, AF. On pain of being identified as willfully obtuse and outright irresponsible before evident, readily accessible and observable truth and facts. Repeat, just to object, you have yet again produced a case of FSCO/I and exemplified its cause, design. That sort of self referential self defeat SHOULD give pause to you and others who resort to tactics such as I am here answering for record. Kindly, see L&FP 55, for reference with illustrations https://uncommondesc.wpengine.com/intelligent-design/lfp-55-defining-clarifying-intelligent-design-as-inference-as-theory-as-a-movement/ (This also addresses the issues of design inference, theory and movement.) Then, actually deal seriously with the observable realities of complex function based on effective orientation, arrangement and coupling -- configuration -- of many parts in accord with Wicken wiring diagrams (such as the exploded view of an Abu 6500 CT reel you were too busy mocking to pause, rethink cynical dismissiveness and consider that this is empirical demonstration). Where, once such FSCO/I goes beyond 500 - 1,000 bits of descriptive length in a compact language [and yes, I allude to Kolmogorov, Chaitin et al], blind search is maximally implausible as a key cause of configuration. On trillions of actually OBSERVED -- notice, again, OBSERVED -- cases, the source of such FSCO/I is, reliably, design. This is only repetitive to the extent that a correct and well founded summary has had to again be made in the teeth of stubborn, hostile, accusatory, closed minded objection. AF, you have exposed yourself, letting cats out of the bag, utterly discrediting your rhetorical tactics. KF kairosfocus

KF repeats:

FSCO/I is _______. You cannot fill that blank.

KF can't fill in his own blank. FSCO/I is his own personal acronym, for a concept that he is unable to define coherently, let alone quantify. I'll let KF have the last words, incoherent and repetitive as they will be. Alan Fox

A new talent . . . emerges. kairosfocus

Thank you KF. This is the first play I’ve ever written and I'm very happy with it. It came to me out of nowhere, I must say. I cannot explain it. All I did was putting various elements of the discussion together, and next, unexpectedly, the play, somehow "emerged", for lack of a better word. And you are absolutely right about the setting: starting with darkness, somber music and then the dramatic rising of light …. it completes it. Origenes

Origenes, 226. Really good bit of wit there. I think I am going to headline it as a guest original post. Thumbs up! KF PS, done: https://uncommondesc.wpengine.com/ud-guest-posts/origenes-the-emergence-of-emergentism-a-play-for-two-actors/ kairosfocus

Jerry, more precisely, the boiling point is the point where saturated vapour pressure . . . a liquid exists in dynamic equilibrium with the atmosphere . . . equals atmospheric pressure allowing bubbles of vapour to form and escape, i.e. boiling. As for bonding angle, Wikipedia confesses:

Water (H2O) is a simple triatomic bent molecule with C2v molecular symmetry and bond angle of 104.5° between the central oxygen atom and the hydrogen atoms. Despite being one of the simplest triatomic molecules, its chemical bonding scheme is nonetheless complex as many of its bonding properties such as bond angle, ionization energy, and electronic state energy cannot be explained by one unified bonding model. Instead, several traditional and advanced bonding models such as simple Lewis and VSEPR structure, valence bond theory, molecular orbital theory, isovalent hybridization, and Bent's rule are discussed below to provide a comprehensive bonding model for H 2O, explaining and rationalizing the various electronic and physical properties and features manifested by its peculiar bonding arrangements.

In short, complex and not fully understood Q-mech [a familiar condition], thus going back to cosmological foundations of the universe. KF kairosfocus

Exactly right. Sometimes I feel like such a loser. The other day I heard that current science cannot even explain liquidity.”

But they can. So this should not be part of this play because if they were naturalist, they would know what does. Nearly all molecules have the three stages of matter, solid, liquid and gas. For water a lot of the specific temperatures is due to the 104.5 degree angle of the hydrogen covalent bonds.

The boiling point is the temperature when a liquid boils and becomes a gas, usually at normal atmospheric pressure. In the liquid phase, molecules are stuck together, rolling around each other. In the gas phase, molecules break apart from each other and move around in space, each separately. The boiling point is a measure of how much energy we need to separate molecules from each other. The two main things that affect the amount of energy needed to separate molecules are the masses of the molecules and the strengths of interactions between the molecules. In general, the heavier the molecule, the more energy—that is, the higher the temperature— we need to boil it. Based on this trend, we would expect H2O, a light molecule, to have a low boiling point. In reality, though, it has a high boiling point of 212 degrees Fahrenheit. This is because of the very strong hydrogen bonding interactions that exist in the water molecule that overwhelm the very low mass of the water molecule and make its boiling point unusually high There’s a property related to boiling point that is also unusual for water. For any material, it takes a certain amount of energy to change the phase from solid to liquid, or from liquid to gas. For the liquid-to-gas phase change, this amount of energy is called the heat of vaporization. Because we have to completely break four hydrogen bonds to separate water molecules and make a gas, it takes a fairly large amount of energy to do that, and water has an unusually high heat of vaporization.

https://www.thegreatcourses.com/courses/the-nature-of-matter-understanding-the-physical-world The question becomes why does water have two hydrogen bonds of 104.5 degrees. And how is this angle predictable from the nature of the hydrogen and oxygen atoms? Maybe it is by the nature of the number of electrons and the orbits they are in and the mass of the two elements. Aside: why ice floats is due to the nature of the hydrogen bonds. They spread out in the solid phase causing a less dense over all material. A couple elements also exhibit this property though it is rare. Water is the only common compound that has this property. jerry

The Emergence of Emergentism: A Play for Two Actors. Two desperate naturalists in a room. A: “I feel completely desperate. There is no way we will ever be able to explain life and consciousness.” B: “I feel the exact same way. The main issue is that we have nothing to work with. All we have is mindless particles in the void obeying mindless regularities. Starting from that, how can we possibly explain life, not to mention personhood, freedom, and rationality? There is simply no way forward.” A: “Exactly right. Sometimes I feel like such a loser. The other day I heard that current science cannot even explain liquidity.” B: “What did you just say?” **POOF** Origenes

SG, while we await your response, more Wiki confessions on the construction of the pyramids:

The entire Giza Plateau is believed[by whom?] to have been constructed over the reign of five pharaohs in less than a hundred years, which generally includes: the Great Pyramid, Khafre and Menkaure's pyramids, the Great Sphinx, the Sphinx, and Valley Temples, 35 boat pits cut out of solid bedrock, and several causeways, as well as paving nearly the entire plateau with large stones. This does not include Khafre's brother Djedefre's northern pyramid, Abu Rawash, which would have also been built during this time frame of 100 years. In the hundred years prior to Giza—beginning with Djoser, who ruled from 2687 to 2667 BC, and amongst dozens of other temples, smaller pyramids, and general construction projects—four other massive pyramids were built: the Step pyramid of Saqqara (believed to be the first Egyptian pyramid), the pyramid of Meidum, the Bent Pyramid, and the Red Pyramid. Also during this period (between 2686 and 2498 BC) the Sadd el-Kafara dam, which used an estimated 100,000 cubic meters of rock and rubble, was built.[58] . . .

Generations indeed, to build the complex. Next, here is their confession regarding a recent theory:

Materials scientist Joseph Davidovits has claimed that the blocks of the pyramid are not carved stone, but mostly a form of limestone concrete and that they were "cast" as with modern concrete.[41] According to this hypothesis, soft limestone with a high kaolinite content was quarried in the wadi on the south of the Giza Plateau. The limestone was then dissolved in large, Nile-fed pools until it became a watery slurry. Lime (found in the ash of cooking fires) and natron (also used by the Egyptians in mummification) were mixed in. The pools were then left to evaporate, leaving behind a moist, clay-like mixture. This wet "concrete" would be carried to the construction site where it would be packed into reusable wooden moulds and in a few days would undergo a chemical reaction similar to the curing of concrete. New blocks, he suggests, could be cast in place, on top of and pressed against the old blocks. Proof-of-concept tests using similar compounds were carried out at a geopolymer institute in northern France and it was found that a crew of five to ten, working with simple hand tools, could agglomerate a structure of five, 1.3 to 4.5 ton blocks in a couple of weeks.[42] He also claims that the Famine Stele, along with other hieroglyphic texts, describe the technology of stone agglomeration. Davidovits's method is not accepted by the academic mainstream. His method does not explain the granite stones, weighing well over 10 tons, above the King's Chamber, which he agrees were carved. Geologists have carefully scrutinized Davidovits's suggested technique and concluded his concrete came from natural limestone quarried in the Mokattam Formation.[43] However, Davidovits alleges that the bulk of the soft limestone came from the same natural Mokkatam Formation quarries found by geologists, and insists that ancient Egyptians used the soft marly layer instead of the hard layer to re-agglomerate stones. Davidovits's hypothesis gained support from Michel Barsoum, a materials science researcher.[44] Michel Barsoum and his colleagues at Drexel University published their findings supporting Davidovits's hypothesis in the Journal of the American Ceramic Society in 2006. Using scanning electron microscopy, they discovered in samples of the limestone pyramid blocks mineral compounds and air bubbles that do not occur in natural limestone.[45]

Another recent theory, which has a greater impact:

Houdin's father was an architect who, in 1999, thought of a construction method that, it seemed to him, made more sense than any existing method proposed for building pyramids. To develop this hypothesis, Jean-Pierre Houdin, also an architect, gave up his job and set about drawing the first fully functional CAD architectural model of the Great Pyramid of Giza.[32] His/their scheme involves using a regular external ramp to build the first 30% of the pyramid, with an "internal ramp" taking stones up beyond that height.[33] The stones of the external ramp are re-cycled into the upper stories, thus explaining the otherwise puzzling lack of evidence for ramps. After four years working alone, Houdin was joined by a team of engineers from the French 3D software company Dassault Systèmes, who used the most modern computer-aided design technology available to further refine and test the hypothesis, making it (according to Houdin) the only one proven to be a viable technique.[34] In 2006 Houdin announced it in a book: Khufu: The Secrets Behind the Building of the Great Pyramid,[35] and in 2008 he and Egyptologist Bob Brier wrote a second book: The Secret of the Great Pyramid.[36] In Houdin's method, each ramp inside the pyramid ended at an open space, a notch temporarily left open in the edge of the construction.[37] This 10-square-meter clear space housed a crane that lifted and rotated each 2.5-ton block, to ready it for eight men to drag up the next internal ramp. There is a notch of sorts in one of the right places, and in 2008 Houdin's co-author Bob Brier, with a National Geographic film crew, entered a previously unremarked chamber that could be the start of one of these internal ramps.[38] In 1986 a member of the French team (see below) saw a desert fox at this notch, rather as if it had ascended internally. Houdin's thesis remains unproven and in 2007, Egyptologist David Jeffreys from the University College London described the internal spiral hypothesis as "far-fetched and horribly complicated", while Oxford University's John Baines, declared he was "suspicious of any theory that seeks to explain only how the Great Pyramid was built".[39] Houdin has another hypothesis developed from his architectural model, one that could finally explain the internal "Grand Gallery" chamber that otherwise appears to have little purpose. He believes the gallery acted as a trolley chute/guide for counterbalance weights. It enabled the raising of the five 60-ton granite beams that roof the King's Chamber. Houdin and Brier and the Dassault team are already credited with proving for the first time that cracks in beams appeared during construction, were examined and tested at the time and declared relatively harmless.[40]

On ramps:

Most Egyptologists acknowledge that ramps are the most tenable of the methods to raise the blocks, yet they acknowledge that it is an incomplete method that must be supplemented by another device. Archaeological evidence for the use of ramps has been found at the Great Pyramid of Giza[23] and other pyramids. The method most accepted for assisting ramps is levering[24] (Lehner 1997: 222). The archaeological record gives evidence of only small ramps and inclined causeways, not something that could have been used to construct even a majority of the monument. To add to the uncertainty, there is considerable evidence demonstrating that non-standardized or ad hoc construction methods were used in pyramid construction (Arnold 1991: 98,[25] Lehner 1997: 223). Therefore, there are many proposed ramps and there is a considerable amount of discrepancy regarding what type of ramp was used to build the pyramids.[26] One of the widely discredited ramping methods is the large straight ramp, and it is routinely discredited on functional grounds for its massive size, lack of archaeological evidence, huge labor cost, and other problems (Arnold 1991: 99, Lehner 1997: 215, Isler 2001: 213[27]). Other ramps serve to correct these problems of ramp size, yet either run into critiques of functionality and limited archaeological evidence. There are zig-zagging ramps, straight ramps using the incomplete part of the superstructure (Arnold 1991), spiraling ramps supported by the superstructure and spiraling ramps leaning on the monument as a large accretion are proposed. Mark Lehner speculated that a spiraling ramp, beginning in the stone quarry to the southeast and continuing around the exterior of the pyramid, may have been used. The stone blocks may have been drawn on sleds along the ramps lubricated by water.[28]

And more. This serves to sustain not only my narrower point that we do not know how the pyramids were built and that logistics issues are major, but to sustain my point that we can and readily do infer on tested, reliable signs of design, even when we do not have an understanding of the means by which such were effected. KF PS, BTW, a screw thread is in effect a spiral [strictly, helically coiled] ramp wrapped around a shaft. Think here of the principle of the screw jack. kairosfocus

AF, we know that designers act by intelligently directed configuration, and that they impose configuring, organisational work that creates an architecture and its systemic implementation; which is of course full of the invisible ingredient, information. That is doubtless full of the mysteries of rational, responsible freedom, but it is also a known reality. It is not poof, magic, just so story. And you know I have put on the table as an ID reference model, a molecular nanotech lab some generations beyond Venter and let's add -- in the spirit of Clarke's HAL, the z9 series [heir of the classic s360 of 58 years ago], using informationally controlled manipulators to effect the key elements of cell based life. I further suggest miniaturisation, say do ribosomes as an early part and using what was already built to carry forward the work. None of that would be a something from the not-being, by poof magic. KF kairosfocus

...it sounds good instead of using POOF.

Wasn't Mike Behe heard using that expression to describe an intervention by the "Designer"? Alan Fox

"Emerged" is a euphemism for we don't know/we can't explain, but it will be thrown around like it means something important and it sounds good instead of using POOF. Andrew asauber

Jerry ....

They may understand why some day but not at present.

Right [setting aside the fact that current science can explain water liquidity bottom-up from the bonding properties of the H2O molecule; as already pointed out in #190, but ignored or perhaps not understood], however those who argue in favor of strong emergentism, which is the main subject at hand here, claim that no one can, in principle, explain water bottom-up; that is from its parts. Strong emergence insists on magic. Magic **poof** is indeed involved.

Mark A.Bedau: " ... it is uncomfortably like magic. How does an irreducible but supervenient downward causal power arise, since by definition it cannot be due to the aggregation of the micro-level potentialities? Such causal powers would be quite unlike anything within our scientific ken. This not only indicates how they will discomfort reasonable forms of materialism. Their mysteriousness will only heighten the traditional worry that emergence entails illegitimately getting something from nothing.”

And it is arguing in favor of strong emergence when one writes:

Jerry: .. no one can predict the characteristics of water from the atomic structure of hydrogen and oxygen. Similarly no one can predict the characteristics of salt (NaCL) from sodium and chlorine atoms. Their characteristics emerged.

"Emerged" .... **POOF** " No one can" as in "by definition", as in "never", as in "not even God", as in strong emergence. Origenes

By saying this, you have just removed yourself as a member of the Emergentists Society

That has always been my position. There was no removal required. My statements have all been accurate. From Michael Egnor.

Emergence always refers to a perceptual or intellectual surprise. A property is said to be emergent if we didn’t expect it to be characteristic of a whole based on our understanding of its parts. Emergence is a mental phenomenon. It is a perceptual surprise, not a magical property somehow evoked by adding a lot of little parts together.

Our understanding of the characteristics of water and many other molecules (I repeated this over and over) do not flow from our understanding of the atomic properties of the constituent atoms. They may understand why some day but not at present. That has been a common usage of the term “emergence.” jerry

Jerry, I suggest, while we cannot naively predict properties of water or NaCl by simple linear extrapolation from those of parent elements, the patterns of chemical and physical interactions involved have been studied through Chemistry and Physics and correspond to the more detailed dynamics thereby exposed. NaCl is a matter of packing of ions to yield an ionic crystalline solid, a salt . . . indeed that term comes in key part from this case. Water has properties tying to polar covalent bonds and the differing agglomerations in the liquid and the solid, hence my semi polymerisation remark. Where also there are several more exotic forms reached under different pressure-temperature conditions. And more. KF PS, a diagram and discussion https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/346750/phase-diagram-of-water kairosfocus

SG, why do you twist what I actually said into pretzels? My reference to generations was to the overall Giza plateau and the nearby Nile echoing Orion and the Milky Way. Several pyramids involving generations. Where, as is admitted there are no records of how this was done, and the logistics of multi ton stone blocks mounted at ever increasing height at a rate of one per three minutes for decades has not been properly explained -- see the Wiki confession below. There are still serious questions on that, ponder ramp slope and scale issues as compounding the scale of challenge. You doubled down on a distraction, and distraction it is: you still have no case of observation of FSCO/I coming about by blind chance and mechanical necessity. As for tectonic scale try the energy to say lift a mile thick 39 sq mile block of rock of density 2.7 g/cc six inches. Something like 6.5*10^14 J. Extend that to continental scale processes. The energy to uplift masses of rock into mountain ranges is demonstrably, observationally present, as is the motion. Your attempt to suggest a Newton rule failure, fails. You have no observationally anchored explanation of complex coded information by blind forces, and to make arguments you are still showing how FSCO/I routinely comes about by design. KF PS, as usual, Wiki confesses:

Egyptian pyramid construction techniques are the controversial subject of many hypotheses. These techniques seem to have developed over time; later pyramids were not constructed in the same way as earlier ones. Most of the construction hypotheses are based on the belief that huge stones were carved from quarries with copper chisels, and these blocks were then dragged and lifted into position. Disagreements chiefly concern the methods used to move and place the stones. In addition to the many unresolved arguments about the construction techniques, there have been disagreements as to the kind of workforce used. The Greeks, many years after the event, believed that the pyramids must have been built by slave labor. Archaeologists now believe that the Great Pyramid of Giza (at least) was built by tens of thousands of skilled workers who camped near the pyramids and worked for a salary or as a form of tax payment (levy) until the construction was completed, pointing to workers' cemeteries discovered in 1990.

That's a whole lot different from, it's all pretty settled conclusive knowledge; which is what you suggested in attempting to pounce on me as ill informed. I predict, you will not concede that I had a point in highlighting that we can know the pyramids were designed, on FSCO/I, without knowing just how. And ditto for other cases. I hope, for your sake, this prediction will be wrong. kairosfocus

Jerry @

At some time in the future one might be able to explain this but I understand no one knows now.

That is good to hear, Jerry. By saying this, you have just removed yourself as a member of the Emergentists Society. Origenes

Jerry:

Everything I say is true.

I could accept that you believe most of what you say. It is pretty obvious, however, that a goodly proportion of what you write in these comment columns has a tenuous hold on accuracy. Alan Fox

KF: SG, work out the effort to create a pyramid including the logistics and you will see it is a far more difficult challenge than you try to imagine

Nobody said it was easy. But it didn’t take generations and it didn’t take ID’s powerful tools to conclude that they were designed and made by humans.

In biology, micro vs macro, body plan level origin issues are a highly significant issue, your sneering notwithstanding.

And it has also been pointed out that significant changes to body plan can be caused by very small genetic changes, your sneering not withstanding.

You are also resorting to repeating already answered objections elsewhere, a sure sign that confirms trollish mentality.

If repetition in response to opposing arguments is a sign of trollish behaviour, I refer everyone to the thousands of comments and dozens of OPs that you have posted on this site, most of which are just a series of repeating already posted opinions.

You know that I am ten miles away from a mountain…

I am happy for you, but irrelevant. Continental mountain ranges are not created and eroded by volcanic eruptions.

But all of this is distractive, you are trying to pretend that there is no observed cause of FSCO/I,

As there is no observed cause of the formation of mountain ranges. But we have a well accepted theory based on the extrapolation from observations of small events. As is the case for evolution.

Your actually observed case of blind chance and mechanical necessity forming FSCO/I is [nylonase, antibiotic resistance, pesticide resistance, peppered moths, bedbugs, coy wolves, changing from egg laying to live births in three toed skinks……]

Sir Giles

That is what you are arguing

Everything I say is true. Incredible that anyone should dispute anything I have said. If anyone can point to how the properties of water and salt are determined by the structure of each atoms structure., be my guess. At some time in the future one might be able to explain this but I understand no one knows now. When they do, the conclusion will be it was built into the design of the universe. Interesting this has nothing to do with biology but atomic physics. Again, one should read the discussion from two years ago linked to above. jerry

Jerry @210

Ori: Yes, you have defended emergentism from the start, and you are mistaken to do so.

Nonsense. I have done just the opposite. Why do you claim that I do?

Because you argue in favor of emergentism, e.g. here:

Jerry: … no one can predict the characteristics of water from the atomic structure of hydrogen and oxygen. Similarly no one can predict the characteristics of salt (NaCL) from sodium and chlorine atoms. Their characteristics emerged.

That is exactly what emergentists claim. So, you are consistently saying what they are saying. And that’s why I say that you defend emergentism. When you say that “no one can predict the characteristics of water from the atomic structure of hydrogen and oxygen”, you are saying that water is fundamentally unpredictable from its parts. That is precisely the thesis of emergentism. In effect, you are saying that even an omniscient being with a complete knowledge of the atomic structure of hydrogen and oxygen and a complete knowledge of the laws of physics, and unlimited powers of calculation could not predict what would happen once hydrogen and oxygen are combined. God created oxygen and hydrogen, but he was taken by surprise to find out that they formed water. That is what you are arguing, Jerry. Origenes

@211

You cannot just point to a book and say there it is. Be specific. A tried and true way to convince someone is to take an example or two to show your point and that it relevant. Then the onus is to show it is more wide spread.

I'm not trying to convince anyone. I'm definitely not trying to educate anyone! (I get paid for that.) I indicated a book that others could read if they were interested in understanding my point of view. If they decide not to read it, or that it's just not worth their time, that's their choice. PyrrhoManiac1

but the science of self-organizing systems shows that it is not true.

Why don’t you provide some examples? You cannot just point to a book and say there it is. Be specific. A tried and true way to convince someone is to take an example or two to show your point and that it is relevant. Then the onus is to show it is more wide spread and it must be reproducible. Until you do that, it is just words and no one will pay attention. Aside: we have been down this road of self organization before and it led nowhere. There are examples of self organization such as crystals and meteorological events but these have nothing to do with life or Evolution. Maybe there are some relevant ones. jerry

Yes, you have defended emergentism from the start, and you are mistaken to do so.

Nonsense. I have done just the opposite. Why do you claim that I do? Is there an explanation for why salt, water and some other molecules have the properties that they do based solely on their atomic structure and the atomic structure of their component atoms? No one has suggested that an explanation exists. It may in time come or someone has already done it. But no one has pointed to an explanation. Interesting question is why did you make such a disparaging remark based on nonsense? Aside: the Davies quote has zero to do with what I have been saying. There is a better discussion two years ago on emergence. Maybe you should read it first. https://uncommondesc.wpengine.com/intelligent-design/emergence-and-the-dormitive-principle/ jerry

@208

The book you link was published in 1993. I’ve never heard of it, so I’m guessing the only impact it’s had in 30 years is in people’s imaginations.

It helped catalyze the formation of many scientific research projects at universities and research centers around the world, none of which you know anything about. The fact that you don't know about them doesn't mean that they don't exist. PyrrhoManiac1

PM1, The book you link was published in 1993. I've never heard of it, so I'm guessing the only impact it's had in 30 years is in people's imaginations. Andrew asauber

@195

Order does not emerge from disorder – spontaneously. Order emerges from order.

This might feel intuitively certain to you, but the science of self-organizing systems shows that it is not true. PyrrhoManiac1

But no one can predict the characteristics of water from the atomic structure of hydrogen and oxygen. Similarly no one can predict the characteristics of salt (NaCL) from sodium and chlorine atoms. Their characteristics emerged.

**POOF** Jerry, you bought into the fake story of emergentism. I'm sorry to inform you that you have been fooled. Do read the Paul Davies quote at #132

that there is no explanation is what I have been saying from the start.

Yes, you have defended emergentism from the start, and you are mistaken to do so. Origenes

You can call it moondancing if you like, it still doesn’t explain anything.

I didn’t say it did. If you read all my comments - that there is no explanation is what I have been saying from the start. In fact I say it in the comment you quoted from. Absolutely no desperation at all. jerry

"Their characteristics emerged." You seem desperate to use the word "emerged." You can call it moondancing if you like, it still doesn't explain anything. Andrew asauber

water is an ordered structure rooted in deep fine tuned patterns of particles, atoms

This is well understood and has nothing to do with what I am saying. You should read Denton to understand all the characteristics of water. But no one can predict the characteristics of water from the atomic structure of hydrogen and oxygen. Similarly no one can predict the characteristics of salt (NaCL) from sodium and chlorine atoms. Their characteristics emerged. Some characteristics of water are predictable such as it’s solvent powers because of the bi-polar nature of the molecule. But only because it is a liquid with a certain viscosity. So the characteristic of solvent is not said to have emerged. jerry

you have yet to adequately explain how extrapolating from small observed tectonic plate movements to the unobserved formation of mountain ranges is any different from extrapolating the observation of small selection driven phenotypic changes (micro evolution in ID misrepresentation) to explain large unobserved phenotypic changes

It’s night and day. Mountains and tectonic changes are due to the four forces of nature, mainly gravity. It is 100% ID compatible. The fact of Evolution has no such corollary. It’s due to a complex code arising in the cells similar to writing. No explanation for such a phenomenon outside of intelligence. I’m surprised you brought this up. There is zero similarity. jerry

SG, work out the effort to create a pyramid including the logistics and you will see it is a far more difficult challenge than you try to imagine. Next, micro/macro issues are commonplace and I am as used to seeing denials in econ as anywhere else: once system wide complexities and interactions come in, things tend to become ticklish as dynamics can be very surprising and counterintuitive . . . a fine tuning issue. In biology, micro vs macro, body plan level origin issues are a highly significant issue, your sneering notwithstanding. You are also resorting to repeating already answered objections elsewhere, a sure sign that confirms trollish mentality. You know that I am ten miles away from a mountain that formed, broke, reformed, pointing to energy levels, energy storage and breaking points triggering high power events. You know a typical density of rocks 2.7 g/cc, leading to energy levels available in moving tectonic systems of continental scale, pointing to potential for high force events. But all of this is distractive, you are trying to pretend that there is no observed cause of FSCO/I, no search challenge confronting blind chance and/or mechanical necessity as a claimed cause, and so you are fundamentally running away from the force of Newton's rule behind a cloud of rhetorical squid ink. Your actually observed case of blind chance and mechanical necessity forming FSCO/I is _______. You cannot fill that blank. You therefore tried to manufacture distractions from the known, observed cause on trillions of cases, intelligently directed configuration. To object, you had to provide another case in point of FSCO/I by design. You are in unacknowledged self referential absurdity. KF kairosfocus

Jerry, water is an ordered structure rooted in deep fine tuned patterns of particles, atoms and our cosmos. That speaks to how we get a cosmos with terrestrial planets in circumstellar habitable zones, being in galactic habitable zones, with water bodies. The properties of H, O and the physics that allows for such locations are all involved. Front loading of a cosmos habitable for C Chem, aqueous medium, cell based life. Within that context we see H and O, with sufficient O to be material, and that they will react to form a significantly asymmetric molecule that then has polar covalent bonding giving a peculiar pattern of London forces. This enables water to form as in effect a semi polymer [that light of a molecule, 18 amu "should" be a gas under typical conditions], with gaps allowing flow, also to be a universal solvent and to form ice crystals less dense than the liquid so ice floats rather than building up at the bottom of bodies of water. And more. So, we see predictable ordering but there is a lot behind a cosmos with water as universal solvent. Information is the invisible, secret sauce ingredient. KF kairosfocus

KF: Humans move rocks, even huge ones, but an artificial mountain’s worth, at assembly rates that would be astonishing on a king’s lifetime? With a wider pattern sustained for what must have been generations? KF

Except that it is estimated that they were built over a period of 20 years or so by as few as 20,000 labourers. So much for your hyperbolic rhetoric. And we are aware of construction techniques used during that time. Just because we don’t know the specifics doesn’t mean that their human construction was ever in question. Especially considering that people have lived there from the beginning of construction until now. So, the idea that we had to use ID’s powerful inference tools to conclude that they were the result of “design” fails in its infancy., and its inanity. But, since you have brought up the issue of mountains, you have yet to adequately explain how extrapolating from small observed tectonic plate movements to the unobserved formation of mountain ranges is any different from extrapolating the observation of small selection driven phenotypic changes (micro evolution in ID misrepresentation) to explain large unobserved phenotypic changes (macro evolution in ID misrepresentation). Sir Giles

PM1, I see Prince Caspian's remark in 55 that he put up a whole OP in answer to your suggestions. That is, https://uncommondesc.wpengine.com/intelligent-design/from-evolution-news-prigogines-self-organization-vs-specified-biological-complexity/ So, immediately, your comment was NOT ignored; what you claimed above. You commented at 10 there, so you are aware of the answer. KF kairosfocus

SG, we see repetition yet again of an adequately answered claim: for record, FYI, humans do not exhaust known or potential sources of complex, functionally specific organisation and/or information. And, for both Stonehenge and the Pyramid, we do not have any good explanation at relevant times and places for construction of that magnitude. In the case of the Great Pyramid, we are talking about creation of an artificial mountain with polished limestone facing that may have been visible from Israel. Worse, the cluster at Giza with the Nile, apparently exhibits a close resemblance to Orion's belt and the Milky Way, complete with effective apparent magnitude. Humans move rocks, even huge ones, but an artificial mountain's worth, at assembly rates that would be astonishing on a king's lifetime? With a wider pattern sustained for what must have been generations? KF kairosfocus

PM1, as you are likely aware, Shannon warned about the special usage of information. He meant something like information carrying capacity. Semantic, of course, is meaningful, or functional. Complex, functionally specific organisation and/or information requires an adequate source, and the only well warranted source is intelligent action. KF kairosfocus

"Emergence" is a fake idea. Water consists of two hydrogen atoms and one oxygen. It is what it is. And it has established properties - no mystery involved. Order does not emerge from disorder - spontaneously. Order emerges from order. relatd

Hnorman42: Very weird indeed. They insist on the idea that these emergent properties are fundamentally unexplainable, and yet they claim that everything is as understandable and explanatory as naturalism has always been. Come to think of it, they [naturalists] exhibit some very suspicious behavior when it comes to emergence. What's with the sudden departure from the usual promissory note? Why don’t they say, "currently science is not able to understand how liquidity comes about, but we have little doubt that one day …" What’s with the sudden atypical modesty in “we have forever no clue whatsoever – it is magic and we call it ‘emergence’”? Origenes

Origenes @192

The whole emergence stuff is an attempt by some naturalists to make us believe that things (life, consciousness) can magically emerge *poof* from matter.

Agreed. What I find even more amazing though, is that they seem to think that if this were true that it would be an explanation. hnorman42

Jerry @

Ori: There are no examples of strong emergence in chemistry or physics

So why are we talking about something that does not exist?

The whole emergence stuff is an attempt by some naturalists to make us believe that things (life, consciousness) can magically emerge *poof* from matter. Usually, they start off with the water example. Please don't let them fool you. It's all fake news. Matter does not give rise to unexplainable properties emerging out of nowhere.

The above quote says nothing about this only that the subsequent molecule (at certain temperatures) will slide past each other. This phenomenon is what we call liquid.

Exactly, liquidity is not some magical "emergent" property that cannot be explained by the constituents of water, H2O molecules. Instead, no magic is involved and liquidity can be explained by the molecules' properties.

Then there is the solid and gaseous forms that have their own properties. Are these deduced by the nature of Hydrogen and Oxygen atoms?

I am no physicist, but my guess is that they are. I could be wrong, but I have never heard that these things are mysterious to physics. Origenes

There are no examples of strong emergence in chemistry or physics

So why are we talking about something that does not exist?

This is not in accord with my understanding, which is that actual physicists do not hold that liquidity is a strong emergent property, but instead fully reducible

Is this an irrelevant comment? I'm not trying to be negative here. But isn't the question of concern about being able to predict that two atoms of Hydrogen and one atom of Oxygen will have certain properties. Namely, molecules that will slide past each other. The above quote says nothing about this only that the subsequent molecule (at certain temperatures) will slide past each other. This phenomenon is what we call liquid. Then there is the solid and gaseous forms that have their own properties. Are these deduced by the nature of Hydrogen and Oxygen atoms? From my understanding there is no such explanation put forward. That is why I brought up the molecules, HO and H2O2. Maybe they are inappropriate examples? Also there are good chemical discussions on the properties of water to dissolve certain compounds such as salt or sugar but not fats because the resultant molecule is bi polar. That may be predictable from the original atoms. But only if the trait of liquidity is also predicted. There was a long discussion here on "emergence" almost two years ago. https://uncommondesc.wpengine.com/intelligent-design/emergence-and-the-dormitive-principle/ The only conclusions from that it that emergence is a BS term to mean something happened but we don't know how but it had to be natural and cannot be by design. Both these conclusions are begging the question fallacies.

Please don’t let them fool you

Nobody is fooling me. It has all been done before. What they reveal is their lack of understanding about what they are talking about. They are nearly always 100% incoherent. They are walking proof of ID. jerry

Jerry @178

Jerry: From what I understand there is no way to predict the properties of water from the atomic structure of hydrogen and oxygen.

This is not in accord with my understanding, which is that actual physicists do not hold that liquidity is a strong emergent property, but is instead fully reducible. See e.g.:

The most quoted example of emergence is the liquidity property of water. Liquidity is not a characteristic of individual water molecules, and yet when many of those are put together they exhibit liquidity, an “emergent” property. But is this analogy helpful in illuminating the mind/body problem? This “emergent” quality of water can be derived from the properties possessed by certain molecules that are so constituted that they do not bind together in a tight formation but slide past each other. So the phenomenon of liquidity is wholly dependent on phenomena that do not in themselves involve liquidity.

- - -

Jerry: This whole discussion is nonsense in the sense there are no examples of emergence outside of chemistry, ...

There are no examples of strong emergence in chemistry or physics, at least not according to Paul Davies and Chalmers, who I quoted earlier. see e.g. #132, #143 Origenes

you just eliminated your self as someone who understands science...

How so? (I don't expect you can answer this).

..and the activities of intelligent beings.

I actually think there is a limit to understanding other intelligent beings. I suggest the limit is that no sentient being can understand anything as complex as itself. I see much evidence in these UD threads that this limit exists universally. Alan Fox

You should just ask questions till you get up to speed.

Do you think there is a chance some ID proponent will come up with answers? Alan Fox

KF: SG, we can and often do reliably infer to design on sign when we have noconvincing idea of how they did the job, e.g. building stonehenge or the pyramids of Egypt.

Both of which show very clear signs of human construction upon a minimal of examination. Tool marks, archaeological evidence of concurrent human habitation, known capabilities of residents of the day, fire pits, quarries, etc. etc. etc. What does ID have with regard to living organisms? Squat.

As it is you know that after this talk point was raised endlessly, I put up again an elaboration of molecular nanotech lab several generations beyond Venter.

OK. That’s a start. What evidence do you have of this? What tests have been conducted. What papers have been published in peer-reviewed journals?

That such is on the table, backed by what Venter et al have already done…

Yes, humans have demonstrated that we are very adept at taking existing materials and modifying them to serve a different function. We have been doing this for centuries. How is this proving that what we call evolution required intelligent intervention? This is also a classic example of ID’s “cake and eat it” rhetoric. Alpha) A naturalist cause of phenotypic change can be ignored because this has not been demonstrated in the lab. Beta) Scientists have demonstrated that they can cause phenotypic change, therefore intelligent design.

…but such made no difference to the talking point simply highlights that we see objection for the sake of road blocking rhetoric, not serious engagement.

Ahh, another example of asserting nefarious motives to demonize the despised other. Sir Giles

I can make no sense of this. Are you saying ID proponents are prevented from formulating an ID hypothesis by the laws of physics?

you just eliminated your self as someone who understands science and the activities of intelligent beings. You should just ask questions till you get up to speed which doesn't seem likely given one stupid question after the other. jerry

There is a misunderstanding of free will here that needs to be cleared up. First, God knows everything you will do until the day you die. He does not force you to make choices. But some here believe that God somehow controls their choices. That they should be free to make choices outside of the influence of any higher authority. The truth is we all make our own decisions and God does not force us. Just because He knows what we will do does not mean He will tell you what that is. The real problem here is those that reject God claim that they will be influenced by Him - somehow. Christians are also free to choose and to make bad choices. They can pray for God's help but sometimes they will make wrong choices. Man has two choices: To choose himself as the sole authority over his life. Or to choose God and to ask for His help and guidance to help eliminate bad choices from our Christian lives. Free will is real for those who do not believe. But it is wrong to blame God's knowledge of your future as something bad. He won't tell you what He knows about your choices. You will still make them on your own. relatd

And a good and safe way to keep nuisance algae at bay in your saltwater reef tank.

JoeG/ET used to recommend drinking it to keep Covid at bay (or was that sodium hypochlorite, household bleach?). So it must be safe. Though, come to think of it, ET hasn't been seen for a while... Alan Fox

AF: I think you are referring to. H2O2 is hydrogen peroxide, not water.

And a good and safe way to keep nuisance algae at bay in your saltwater reef tank. Sir Giles

HO and H2O2 are completely different molecules from H2O. Why?

It's hydroxide ions, OH- (can't do superscript) and hydronium ions, H3O+ that I think you are referring to. H2O2 is hydrogen peroxide, not water. Alan Fox

PM1 @174

PM1: Laws of physics are relations between variables that tell us what cannot happen and what must happen, not what will happen.

Laws tell us what must happen, not what will happen? What’s the diff? You mean to say that it must be verified by experiment? If so, that is completely beside the point. It is of course the case that laws tell us what will happen. If not, what is their usefulness? How else did we get to the moon?

PM1: There’s a big difference between “explainable in light of” and “predictable from”.

No, there is precisely zero difference.

PM1: It’s one thing to say that we can explain X in terms of Y, quite another to say that if you knew nothing about X but knew everything about Y, one could predict X from Y.

No, the latter is implied by the former. If X can be fully explained by Y, and you know everything about Y, then X must necessarily be predictable by Y. - - - - edit: To know everything about Y, but not knowing that it can cause X (and how) is contradictory. Origenes

So the tools of science will not explain how it happened. It was essentially a one time construction process.

Yet you can tell me nothing of how, when and where this one-time event happened other than in your imagination.

The anti-ID people from 13 years ago were smarter than you...

No doubt! And they have all moved on because ID has never lived up to its own claims.

...and understood it could happen in a laboratory setting.

It being ID? Are you claiming an ID process can be modelled? Tell me more.

They wouldn’t make the silly comments that you do

Certainly ID is being ignored by mainstream scientists.

They were knowledgeable of synthetic biology and its efforts. So pick one process and assume it worked. Even Richard Dawkins understood that.

Can't make much sense of this. Anyone ?

The rest of your comment is nonsense including the boast that you could explain Evolution in a couple of sentences.

Not a boast, Jerry. The essential idea is quite simple. Given self-sustaining replicators, competition for resources results in differential reproduction and imperfect copying of genes results in variation that is selected that leads to phenotypic change over time.

Remember niches don’t get it done so to invoke them are just more non sequitur’s.

Baseless assertion.

Humans are a perfect example of niches not producing any meaningful change where it was needed.

Humans are supremely successful at niche construction which insulates against biological evolutionary change. Not sure what you are getting at with the word "needed". Que sera, sera. Alan Fox

There is no mechanism due to the laws of physics. That is what ID is about and you know it.

I can make no sense of this. Are you saying ID proponents are prevented from formulating an ID hypothesis by the laws of physics? Alan Fox

the liquidity of water, I take it that you do not hold that this is a mysterious irreducible and fundamentally unexplainable “emergent” property?

Mysterious but not relevant to this discussion. From what I understand there is no way to predict the properties of water from the atomic structure of hydrogen and oxygen. Thus, it is fundamentally unexplainable. Maybe some day they will understand how different electron levels lead to certain physical properties. Until that day it will be an emergent property of these three molecules (two hydrogen and one oxygen.). Even in chemistry, the properties that seem to emerge may one day be explainable. HO and H2O2 are completely different molecules from H2O. Why? This whole discussion is nonsense in the sense there are no examples of emergence outside of chemistry, just imaginative events or some physical events such as tornados which is just particles that somehow gets organized. ----------- I expect this discussion is a lot to about nothing as is a lot of discussions here. If there was anything there, it would have been discussed here long ago with its relevance. jerry

@172

It seems to me that PM1 forgets about the component information when he lists the parts of a system. Note that he does not once mention information.

Yes, that's by design. :) Firstly, it doesn't make any sense to list information as a component of a system. Information is the organization of the system, how it is put together. It isn't some separable part of the system. Secondly, I won't worry too much about information because there are (so far as I know) basically two kinds. There's Shannon information, which can be treated interchangeably with thermodynamic concepts. That's different from "semantic information", which is how organisms detect signals in their environment as 'meaning' the presence or absence of opportunities or threats of relevance to the organism. In other words, there's the physicist's concept of information, and then there's the biologist's concept of information. The ID concept of information seems to posit semantic information as pre-existing organisms and as explaining them. I think that's confused. PyrrhoManiac1

Jerry @173, I meant to say "strong emergence" and "with relevant cases" I attempted to refer in particular to biological systems. WRT the liquidity of water, I take it that you do not hold that this is a mysterious irreducible and fundamentally unexplainable "emergent" property? - - - - As a sort of aside: "The revelation of the quantum nature of physical reality is consistent with the understanding that information may be more fundamental than matter and energy." Origenes

Water properties are just prerequisites for functionality. Sandy

@166

Suddenly something emerges which is totally unexpected. **POOF** Suddenly all sorts of things occur which are principally unpredictable, principally unexplainable from known laws. And the system starts to behave in a completely unexplainable unexpected way. And now you tell me that such somehow does not violate the laws?

Laws of physics are relations between variables that tell us what cannot happen and what must happen, not what will happen. The second law of thermodynamics tells us that entropy cannot decrease in a closed system, general relativity tells us that an object with mass cannot accelerate up to the speed of light (or beyond), etc. We can get determinate solutions to very simple physical problems, but once the problems get beyond very simple, predictions fail us. (We can't even solve gravitational attraction between more than two moving bodies!) There's a big difference between "explainable in light of" and "predictable from". It's one thing to say that we can explain X in terms of Y, quite another to say that if you knew nothing about X but knew everything about Y, one could predict X from Y. This is not to say that predictions are useless -- they are crucial, of course! -- but they aren't everything. Maybe I'm just dim, but I don't see why it's a problem to say that life exhibits novel causal powers that aren't predictable from physics alone; see No entailing laws, but enablement in the evolution of the biosphere:

Biological evolution is a complex blend of ever changing structural stability, variability and emergence of new phenotypes, niches, ecosystems. We wish to argue that the evolution of life marks the end of a physics world view of law entailed dynamics. Our considerations depend upon discussing the variability of the very "contexts of life": the interactions between organisms, biological niches and ecosystems. These are ever changing, intrinsically indeterminate and even unprestatable: we do not know ahead of time the "niches" which constitute the boundary conditions on selection. More generally, by the mathematical unprestatability of the "phase space" (space of possibilities), no laws of motion can be formulated for evolution. We call this radical emergence, from life to life. The purpose of this paper is the integration of variation and diversity in a sound conceptual frame and situate unpredictability at a novel theoretical level, that of the very phase space. Our argument will be carried on in close comparisons with physics and the mathematical constructions of phase spaces in that discipline. The role of (theoretical) symmetries as invariant preserving transformations will allow us to understand the nature of physical phase spaces and to stress the differences required for a sound biological theoretizing. In this frame, we discuss the novel notion of "enablement". This will restrict causal analyses to differential cases (a difference that causes a difference). Mutations or other causal differences will allow us to stress that "non conservation principles" are at the core of evolution, in contrast to physical dynamics, largely based on conservation principles as symmetries. Critical transitions, the main locus of symmetry changes in physics, will be discussed, and lead to "extended criticality" as a conceptual frame for a better understanding of the living state of matter.

See also A World Beyond Physics. I don't deny that I'm on very speculative territory in suggesting that teleology is strongly emergent with regard to inanimate nature, and that this is key to understanding how intentionality coheres with a scientific worldview. Such speculation has often been the indulgence of philosophers, even amateurs like myself. Maybe this could be put on the gold standard of experiment, and maybe it can't be. I do think that ID has raised the right issue, about the importance of taking teleology seriously in order to do biology, and has highlighted why evolutionary theory must presuppose teleology and cannot explain it. (There are lots of philosophers of biology who have done this independent of ID, but I'll give credit where it's due.) PyrrhoManiac1

there is one force in the universe that can explain “emergence”, in all the relevant cases, namely (functional specified) information.

How does information explain the properties of water which is the best example of emergence I can think of? jerry

KF @163 Your reply to PM1 is very educational. Key in your response, as I understand it, is that there is one force in the universe that can explain “emergence”, in all the relevant cases, namely (functional specified) information. This ties in nicely with Paul Davis who confronted with the question “what is emergence?”, talks about one thing only, namely information — video. Surely, information explains why certain systems do what they do, and takes away the need to invoke the incoherent concept of “emergence.” It seems to me that PM1 forgets about the component information when he lists the parts of a system. Note that he does not once mention information. Origenes

Emergence is certainly present in molecule formation. The best example is water. Is emergence present in any other process? If so what are they and are they reproducible? That would be a good start in justifying the process as relevant. Otherwise it is just wishful speculation. jerry

It is only ludicrous if theee is indeed a mechanism. I don’t see anything close to one on following your link.

There is no mechanism due to the laws of physics. That is what ID is about and you know it. So the tools of science will not explain how it happened. It was essentially a one time construction process. The anti-ID people from 13 years ago were smarter than you and understood it could happen in a laboratory setting. They wouldn’t make the silly comments that you do They were knowledgeable of synthetic biology and its efforts. So pick one process and assume it worked. Even Richard Dawkins understood that. The rest of your comment is nonsense including the boast that you could explain Evolution in a couple of sentences. Remember niches don’t get it done so to invoke them are just more non sequitur’s. Humans are a perfect example of niches not producing any meaningful change where it was needed. jerry

AF, evolution by design, based on built in capabilities so that creatures with relevant body plans can adapt to current and changing biophysical environments; environments and ecosystems too require design, up to levels involving setting up planets, solar system and onwards to cosmological frameworks; nearby supernovas on a fairly regular basis likely would be lethal. At basic level, Tomcods adapted to otherwise toxic waters, Europeans to drinking milk in adulthood, and we have circumpolar species complexes. Thus, at minimum, a certain degree of front loading. The problem is, adaptation mechanisms have been force fitted to grand macro narratives under ideological straightjackets as Lewontin and others long since exposed. And in case you missed the point on evolution by design, this is related to technological evolution principles as identified by the TRIZ practitioners. All of this has been pointed out here many times for years, just studiously ignored. KF kairosfocus

I mean, I can if necessary, give an abbreviated explanation for biological evolution. It takes a couple of sentences. Why is everyone so coy about how "Intelligent Design" works? Alan Fox

to Also the silliness of saying there is no mechanism for design is ludicrous.

It is only ludicrous if theee is indeed a mechanism. I don't see anything close to one on following your link. Alan Fox

PM1, a few comments:

I am often puzzled at the notion of “levels of reality”. (Is reality structured like a layer cake?) …

You’d better make up your mind on this matter, because strong emergence is all about the claim that higher-order properties emerge from lower-order interactions (yet cannot be explained by them) and next proceed to ‘reach down’, so to speak, in effect constituting new laws. Either our thoughts are produced bottom-up by particles in the brain, or by a "person" who is able to reach down, so to speak.

The emergence of far-from-equilibrium thermodynamic systems does not violate the laws of thermodynamics, but that doesn’t mean that it is predictable from those laws.

So we have some system and the laws. And all is good, since everything acts in accord with laws. All is predictable and understandable. .... But. Wait. What?? Suddenly something emerges which is totally unexpected. **POOF** Suddenly all sorts of things occur which are principally unpredictable, principally unexplainable from known laws. And the system starts to behave in a completely unexplainable unexpected way. And now you tell me that such somehow does not violate the laws? The whole concept of strong emergence is either nonsense, or we live in an unpredictable unlawful universe. Origenes

News to me. Where can I find such an explanation.

https://uncommondesc.wpengine.com/evolution/at-sci-news-moths-produce-ultrasonic-defensive-sounds-to-fend-off-bat-predators/#comment-762546 There was a long discussion there and you were participating. Also the silliness of saying there is no mechanism for design is ludicrous. Here is a comment from about 13 years ago.

Yes, I make sarcastic remarks because absurdity deserves it. If I hear one more person wanting to know what FSCI is, I will scream. I explained it to my niece in 4th grade and she understood it and thought it was neat. But she is really a bright kid. Someone actually wants the laboratory techniques used 3.8 billion years ago. You talk about bizarre. I say a thousand as hyperbole and Mark in all seriousness says there is probably only a dozen. Mark wants the actual technique used a few billion years ago. Mark, I got word from the designer a few weeks ago and he said the original lab and blue prints were subducted under what was to become the African plate 3.4 billion years ago but by then they were mostly rubble anyway. The original cells were relatively simple but still very complex. Subsequent plants/labs went the same way and unfortunately all holograph videos of it are now in hyper space and haven’t been looked at for at least 3 million years. So to answer one of your questions, no further work has been done for quite awhile and the designer expects future work to be done by the latest design itself. The designer travels via hyper space between his home and our area of the universe when it is necessary. The designer said the techniques used were much more sophisticated than anything dreamed of by current synthetic biologist crowd but in a couple million years they may get up to speed and understand how it was actually done. The designer said it is actually a lot more difficult than people think especially since this was a new technique and he had to invent the DNA/RNA/protein process from scratch but amazingly they had the right chemical properties. His comment was “Thank God for that” or else he doesn’t think he wouldn’t have been able to do it. It took him about 200,000 of our years just experimenting with amino acid combinations to get usable proteins. He said it will be easier for current scientists since they will have a template to work off. Adel, if you make a negative comment or exhibit a negative attitude then expect the essence of your negative comment to be dealt with in some way. I would not let any of my children make a comment such as yours without being sent to their room. I could think of hundreds of ways for you to have made a cordial comment inquiring what I think on the matter. But why did you choose the way you did which revealed a lot of things. (By the way I am quite clear on what I think and it is all over this blog.) But thank you any way for your comments. Your comments and Mark Frank’s comment and those by others here help us immensely. We really appreciate how easy you guys make our job convincing others about the logic and facts behind our position.

https://uncommondesc.wpengine.com/intelligent-design/complex-specified-information-you-be-the-judge/#comment-305339 You were exposed to the above comment since it was repeated on a thread in response to a comment you made and that you immediately afterwards made a comment. By the way the title of the thread from 2009 was "Complex Specified Information? You Be The Judge." https://uncommondesc.wpengine.com/evolution/at-big-think-can-we-predict-evolution/#comment-764277 So let's stuff the "news to me" nonsense. jerry

SG, we can and often do reliably infer to design on sign when we have noconvincing idea of how they did the job, e.g. building stonehenge or the pyramids of Egypt. As it is you know that after this talk point was raised endlessly, I put up again an elaboration of molecular nanotech lab several generations beyond Venter. Not to say this is how but this is one way it could be done. That such is on the table, backed by what Venter et al have already done but such made no difference to the talking point simply highlights that we see objection for the sake of road blocking rhetoric, not serious engagement. KF kairosfocus

PM1, You raised points in a thread I was not monitoring, I clip from your linked and will comment on relevant point, in numbered steps of thought: PM1, thought thread, 49: >>The root idea of emergence is “the whole is different from the sum of its parts”: specifically, the whole has causal powers that are distinct from the causal powers that belong to each of its parts, taken individually.>> 1: Note, you are speaking here about wholes, parts and ordering or organisation, which are different. 2: Order is often a result of built in forces such as those that form NaCl crystals, by contrast with organisation; which expresses an invisible component, functional, configuring information that on observation traces to design once complexity is above 500 - 1,000 bits with essentially certain reliability. 3: The aspect of the system's behaviour that comes from interaction arises through the order and/or organisation (and can also come from disordering forces e.g. melting a crystal or breaking down of components deranging function). 4: The whole-parts differences do not arise by poof magic, they come from interaction, order, organisation (and disorganisation). 5: For some systems stochastic behaviour is also material, e.g. how statistical micro behaviour gives rise to macro level thermodynamic properties such as temperature or pressure, or the micro-macro relationships of socio-cultural and economic systems. 6: Going beyond systems, these extend also to networks, now, most famously, the Internet. 7: So, the holistic aspects come from somewhere, and that tends to be in key part, design. 8: For instance, economies are always planned, the issue is the information and control choking of central planning systems vs the relatively superior performance of markets based on households and firms acting at micro level. Economies are particularly prone to disordering shocks. 9: So, your premise fails to escape the Platonic-Mododian triad: mechanical necessity, chance, intelligence acting by art. 10: We may extend to, material causal factors contribute substances and components, actuators are directly effective factors, purposes are targets of designers, and designers are initiating causes. Of course in some cases, we fall short of the full four, e.g. accidents happen. And the butterfly effect causes sharply cumulative divergence in a phase space. I will just mention quantum phenomena, superposition, wave particle duality and entanglement etc. Remember, colour and fire are quantum effects and magnetism a relativistic effect. 11: So, we have not injected a novel, unaccounted for causal capacity, no we are not getting something from nothing, non being. >>I think that this is not only true, but it is necessarily true given a correct understanding of causality itself. Causation is a relation: a causal power is the realization of a difference between things. (As a trivial example: oxygen causes iron to rust because of the relational difference between the orbitals in the atoms, such that iron tends to become iron oxide in the presence of oxygen.)>> 12: Already accounted for. >>Once we see that causation is always about a relational difference, then it becomes rather easy to see that different kinds of organization will bring forth different causal powers. These causal powers will include the power to bring forth new kinds of organization.>> 13: Organisation, as the O in FSCO/I reminds, is informational, and you do not get complex functionally specific information from nothing, it is reliably the product of intelligence, once we are beyond 500 - 1,000 bits. >>What’s needed to naturalize teleology is to combine this generic account of emergence with a specific idea about the levels of complexity that emergence can bring about.>> 13: Question begged, see above on the sources of system behaviour. No, we do not get something from nothing. >>There are, I think, at least three distinct levels: (1) basic thermodynamic systems, which tend to maximize entropy over time unless additional energy is put into the system; >> 14: A common error, as was noted earlier. Injection of unordered, uncoupled energy naturally INCREASES disorder as more energy is available to feed into random thermal motion, enable going over [or through -- tunnelling] potential barriers etc. 15: It is organised, information rich forced ordered motion -- work under a plan -- that increases organisation once we go beyond a modest threshold of complexity as was noted. >>(2) self-organized far-from-equilibrium thermodynamic systems, >> 16: Convection cells and the like come about by ordering forces in the structure of a system, e.g. hurricanes come through Coriolis forces in the context of convection over sea surface waters at or above 80 degrees F. 17: Self ordered systems do not show the sort of complex, information rich ordering we find in cells etc, not on our observation. A question is being begged and empirical evidence is being shunted aside. >>which tend to resist entropy over time if the system is set up with background parameters;>> 18: Ordered systems trace to boundary conditions, circumstances and ordering energy flows, they are nothing like homeostasis in the living cell, which is a metabolising automaton, with protective encapsulation, smart gating and a built in von Neumann kinematic self replicator. 19: In short galloping hypotheses errors. >> (3) teleological systems, which tend to resist entropy over time by virtue of generating their own parameters.>> 20: Organisation and organised work, information rich. >>We know that systems of class (2) can emerge from systems of class (1). (Ilya Prigogine got the 1977 Nobel Prize in chemistry for demonstrating this.)>> 21: He was also very aware of the limitations of his work, much along the lines noted. >> So the $64,000 question is, can systems of class (3) emerge from systems of class (2)?>> 22: No, the OBSERVATIONAL, EMPIRICAL challenge is to demonstrate this, and frankly that is closely related to the challenge conventional thermodynamicists pose to perpetuum mobile advocates: show us a case. >> Moreover, it (the emergent phenomenon) cannot violate known laws of nature.>> 23: Precisely. >>Right, but notice that “cannot violate” is very different from “can be predicted from” or even “are entailed by”.>> 24: See above on what tends to be overlooked about systems. >> The only constraint that the naturalist would insist upon is that no emergent phenomena (teleology, intentionality, normativity) can violate the laws of fundamental physics — no violation of the laws of quantum mechanics, thermodynamics, or general relativity. (Or any successor theory to any or all of those.)>> 25: Organising, configuring work for complex systems, from nothing in effect, is a violation of thermodynamics, posing on order and claiming emergence fails to account for the information and linked work to configure. >>That’s perfectly consistent with also insisting that the laws of fundamental physics do not allow us to predict the behavior of emergent phenomena.>> 26: Creativity is often surprising and transcends the expected, but comes from intelligence. >> I would argue that known laws of physics preclude the natural development of the systemic complexity of atoms that we find in even the simplest living organism.>> 27: Because of the information gap to get to the required organisation. >>If self-organizing far-from-equilibrium systems can emerge spontaneously from equilibrium thermodynamics (and we know that they can), why can’t teleological systems emerge spontaneously from self-organizing far-from-equilibrium systems?>> 28: The information and organising work gaps again. >>As I see it, here’s the fundamental issue at contention: is the difference between a teleological system and a self-organizing but non-teleological system the same kind of difference as the difference between a self-organizing non-teleological system and a system that tends towards equilibrium?>> 29: Information and organising work gap again. >>I might be wrong in thinking that the answer to that question is “yes”. If I’m wrong, then that would strengthen the case for ID. But I don’t think it’s irrational to think that the answer is “yes”, which means that naturalism is not an irrational position to hold.>> 30: The key sidestepped issue is, again, the information and organising work gap. 31: That can only be surmounted by empirical, observed demonstration, not imposed ideological speculation coming from a priori evolutionary materialistic scientism and/or its fellow travellers. KF kairosfocus

KF: AF, we do not need to reason from agent to design, that is cart before horse reasoning in this context.

Fair enough.

We reason from reliable sign to design as process then inquire as to candidate.

You are completely ignoring the most important step. How did the candidate implement its design (ie, hypotheses)?Where is the forensic evidence for the implementation process (ie, testing and evidence). Where is the refining of the hypotheses following observations and testing? Evolutionary theory demonstrates these in abundance. ID, not so much (ie, not at all). Sir Giles

@158

does PM1’s iron oxide, or any other conglomerate PM1 puts forward, have “emergent” causal powers which cannot be given a satisfactory reductive account, even in principal? IOW is the “whole” (iron oxide) really somehow more than the sum of its parts?

This is a good question. Reflecting on it, it's now clear to me that iron oxide would be at best an example of "weak emergence." It demonstrates the emergence of new causal powers, but (arguably) explainable in terms of the constituents: we can explain why oxygen does what it does to iron in terms of the structure of the electron orbitals in oxygen atoms and iron atoms. I am somewhat less happy with "reducible even in principle" (or Chalmers's "deducible in principle") because "reductive in principle" just seems to me "it's possible that someone might be able to carry out the reduction, even though no one actually has". That seems terribly vague to me. In some contexts, "in principle" is just writing a promissory note.

. Strong emergence proposes the “emergence” (*poof*) of new laws with downward causation. How can they operate without influencing anything, without making a difference, without violating known laws of nature?

I am often puzzled at the notion of "levels of reality". (Is reality structured like a layer cake?) I prefer to think of strong emergence as diachronic (happening over time) rather than synchronic (obtaining at the same moment in time). The emergence of far-from-equilibrium thermodynamic systems does not violate the laws of thermodynamics, but that doesn't mean that it is predictable from those laws. The question is, would knowing the laws of thermodynamics and the molecular properties of water allow one to predict the hexagonal structure of Benard cells? Maybe, but it's hard for me to see how. Would knowing the laws that govern dissipative systems allow one to predict emergence of teleological systems? Again, maybe, but I don't see how. I suspect that Davies is setting up a false dichotomy between either (1) "a satisfactory reductive account, even in principle" or (2) "novel global forces." I agree with Davies in rejecting (2): emergence does not involve positing new fundamental forces beyond those of physics. But rejecting (2) does not entail (1), which seems to be what you think his view is. But I'll know more once I've read the paper in its entirety. I've started giving this paper a quick glance, and one think that it makes clear is that his concern is whether there's need for strong emergence within physics. He isn't addressing the question that I'm interested in, which is whether biology is reducible to physics (even "in principle") or if biology is strongly emergent with regard to physics. However, in the same volume that Davies's paper appeared (The Re-emergence of Emergence), there's a paper by Terrence Deacon, which does address this issue. Deacon's article doesn't appear to be free online, but there's a decent summary of it here. PyrrhoManiac1

It is fairly easy to understand why agent causation, i.e. free-will, (and/or consciousness), will NEVER be explained as being an emergent property of particles, (as some atheistic naturalists, apparently, desperately want to believe/imagine). Specifically, in quantum mechanics it is now shown that material particles themselves do not even exist until 'observers' choose, via their free will, what to measure. As the late Steven Weinberg, (who was an atheist), stated in the following article, “In the instrumentalist approach (in quantum mechanics) humans are brought into the laws of nature at the most fundamental level.,,, the instrumentalist approach turns its back on a vision that became possible after Darwin, of a world governed by impersonal physical laws that control human behavior along with everything else.,,, In quantum mechanics these probabilities do not exist until people choose what to measure,,, Unlike the case of classical physics, a choice must be made,,,”

The Trouble with Quantum Mechanics – Steven Weinberg – January 19, 2017 Excerpt: The instrumentalist approach,, (the) wave function,, is merely an instrument that provides predictions of the probabilities of various outcomes when measurements are made.,, In the instrumentalist approach,,, humans are brought into the laws of nature at the most fundamental level. According to Eugene Wigner, a pioneer of quantum mechanics, “it was not possible to formulate the laws of quantum mechanics in a fully consistent way without reference to the consciousness.”11 Thus the instrumentalist approach turns its back on a vision that became possible after Darwin, of a world governed by impersonal physical laws that control human behavior along with everything else. It is not that we object to thinking about humans. Rather, we want to understand the relation of humans to nature, not just assuming the character of this relation by incorporating it in what we suppose are nature’s fundamental laws, but rather by deduction from laws that make no explicit reference to humans. We may in the end have to give up this goal,,, Some physicists who adopt an instrumentalist approach argue that the probabilities we infer from the wave function are objective probabilities, independent of whether humans are making a measurement. I don’t find this tenable. In quantum mechanics these probabilities do not exist until people choose what to measure, such as the spin in one or another direction. Unlike the case of classical physics, a choice must be made,,, http://quantum.phys.unm.edu/466-17/QuantumMechanicsWeinberg.pdf

And as the newly minted Nobel Laureate Anton Zeilinger stated, "what we perceive as reality now depends on our earlier decision what to measure. Which is a very, very, deep message about the nature of reality and our part in the whole universe. We are not just passive observers.”

“The Kochen-Speckter Theorem talks about properties of one system only. So we know that we cannot assume – to put it precisely, we know that it is wrong to assume that the features of a system, which we observe in a measurement exist prior to measurement. Not always. I mean in certain cases. So in a sense, what we perceive as reality now depends on our earlier decision what to measure. Which is a very, very, deep message about the nature of reality and our part in the whole universe. We are not just passive observers.” Anton Zeilinger – Quantum Physics Debunks Materialism – video (7:17 minute mark) https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=4C5pq7W5yRM#t=437

In fact, Anton Zeilinger, in 2018, was instrumental, (via using distant quasars), in closing the last remaining, and 'creepy', 'freedom of choice' loophole,,,

Closing the ‘free will’ loophole: Using distant quasars to test Bell’s theorem – February 20, 2014 Excerpt: Though two major loopholes have since been closed, a third remains; physicists refer to it as “setting independence,” or more provocatively, “free will.” This loophole proposes that a particle detector’s settings may “conspire” with events in the shared causal past of the detectors themselves to determine which properties of the particle to measure — a scenario that, however far-fetched, implies that a physicist running the experiment does not have complete free will in choosing each detector’s setting. Such a scenario would result in biased measurements, suggesting that two particles are correlated more than they actually are, and giving more weight to quantum mechanics than classical physics. “It sounds creepy, but people realized that’s a logical possibility that hasn’t been closed yet,” says MIT’s David Kaiser, the Germeshausen Professor of the History of Science and senior lecturer in the Department of Physics. “Before we make the leap to say the equations of quantum theory tell us the world is inescapably crazy and bizarre, have we closed every conceivable logical loophole, even if they may not seem plausible in the world we know today?” https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/02/140220112515.htm Cosmic Bell Test Using Random Measurement Settings from High-Redshift Quasars – Anton Zeilinger – 14 June 2018 Excerpt: This experiment pushes back to at least approx. 7.8 Gyr ago the most recent time by which any local-realist influences could have exploited the “freedom-of-choice” loophole to engineer the observed Bell violation, excluding any such mechanism from 96% of the space-time volume of the past light cone of our experiment, extending from the big bang to today. https://journals.aps.org/prl/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevLett.121.080403

Moreover, via Wheeler’s Delayed Choice experiment with atoms, “It proves that measurement is everything. At the quantum level, reality does not exist if you are not looking at it,”

Reality doesn’t exist until we measure it, (Delayed Choice with atoms) quantum experiment confirms – Mind = blown. – FIONA MACDONALD – 1 JUN 2015 Excerpt: “It proves that measurement is everything. At the quantum level, reality does not exist if you are not looking at it,” lead researcher and physicist Andrew Truscott said in a press release. “Quantum physics predictions about interference seem odd enough when applied to light, which seems more like a wave, but to have done the experiment with atoms, which are complicated things that have mass and interact with electric fields and so on, adds to the weirdness,” said Roman Khakimov, a PhD student who worked on the experiment.,,, http://www.sciencealert.com/reality-doesn-t-exist-until-we-measure-it-quantum-experiment-confirms

And via experimental realization of Leggett’s inequality we find, “Leggett’s inequality is violated – thus stressing the quantum-mechanical assertion that reality does not exist when we’re not observing it.”

Quantum physics says goodbye to reality – Apr 20, 2007 Excerpt: Many realizations of the thought experiment have indeed verified the violation of Bell’s inequality. These have ruled out all hidden-variables theories based on joint assumptions of realism, meaning that reality exists when we are not observing it; and locality, meaning that separated events cannot influence one another instantaneously. But a violation of Bell’s inequality does not tell specifically which assumption – realism, locality or both – is discordant with quantum mechanics. Markus Aspelmeyer, Anton Zeilinger and colleagues from the University of Vienna, however, have now shown that realism is more of a problem than locality in the quantum world. They devised an experiment that violates a different inequality proposed by physicist Anthony Leggett in 2003 that relies only on realism, and relaxes the reliance on locality. To do this, rather than taking measurements along just one plane of polarization, the Austrian team took measurements in additional, perpendicular planes to check for elliptical polarization. They found that, just as in the realizations of Bell’s thought experiment, Leggett’s inequality is violated – thus stressing the quantum-mechanical assertion that reality does not exist when we’re not observing it. “Our study shows that ‘just’ giving up the concept of locality would not be enough to obtain a more complete description of quantum mechanics,” Aspelmeyer told Physics Web. “You would also have to give up certain intuitive features of realism.” http://physicsworld.com/cws/article/news/27640

The Mind First and/or Theistic implications of quantum experiments such as the preceding are fairly, and pleasantly, obvious. As Professor Scott Aaronson of MIT once quipped, “Look, we all have fun ridiculing the creationists,,, But if we accept the usual picture of quantum mechanics, then in a certain sense the situation is far worse: the world (as you experience it) might as well not have existed 10^-43 seconds ago!”

“Look, we all have fun ridiculing the creationists who think the world sprang into existence on October 23, 4004 BC at 9AM (presumably Babylonian time), with the fossils already in the ground, light from distant stars heading toward us, etc. But if we accept the usual picture of quantum mechanics, then in a certain sense the situation is far worse: the world (as you experience it) might as well not have existed 10^-43 seconds ago!” – Scott Aaronson – MIT associate Professor quantum computation – Lecture 11: Decoherence and Hidden Variables

So thus in conclusion, since it is now proven that material particles do not even exist until after we choose how we wish to observe and/or measure them, well then so much for your Atheistic desire that agent causation, and/or free will, be explained as some 'magical' emergent property of particles. It just ain't gonna happen that way no matter how much some atheists may wish, and/or imagine, it to happen that way. i.e. Baron Munchausen just ain't never gonna pull himself out of the swamp by his own pigtail, no matter how much he may try. also see

Nov. 2022 - Einstein’s belief that “The experience of ‘the now’ cannot be turned into an object of physical measurement, it can never be a part of physics” has been thoroughly, and impressively, falsified.,,, https://uncommondesc.wpengine.com/time/at-big-think-how-reality-is-shaped-by-the-speed-of-light/#comment-769891

Verse:

Colossians 1:17 He is before all things, and in him all things hold together.

bornagain77

AF, we do not need to reason from agent to design, that is cart before horse reasoning in this context. We reason from reliable sign to design as process then inquire as to candidate. Evidence of arson first before inferring arson then seeking suspects. KF kairosfocus

PM1's emergentism

PM1: I can understand why it might seem like ‘magic’. Let me explain why I disagree. The root idea of emergence is “the whole is different from the sum of its parts”: specifically, the whole has causal powers that are distinct from the causal powers that belong to each of its parts, taken individually.

This notion is at odds with …

…. ontological reductionism: the assertion that the whole really is, in the final analysis, nothing but the sum of the parts, and that the formulation of concepts, theories, and experimental procedures in terms of higher-level concepts is merely a convenience. A minority of scientists—emergentists—challenge this account of nature. [Paul Davies]

- - -

PM1: I think that this is not only true, but it is necessarily true given a correct understanding of causality itself. Causation is a relation: a causal power is the realization of a difference between things. (As a trivial example: oxygen causes iron to rust because of the relational difference between the orbitals in the atoms, such that iron tends to become iron oxide in the presence of oxygen.) Once we see that causation is always about a relational difference, then it becomes rather easy to see that different kinds of organization will bring forth different causal powers. These causal powers will include the power to bring forth new kinds of organization.

Setting aside the matter if “relational difference” is a helpful concept, the question before us is: does PM1’s iron oxide, or any other conglomerate PM1 puts forward, have “emergent” causal powers which cannot be given a satisfactory reductive account, even in principal? IOW is the "whole" (iron oxide) really somehow more than the sum of its parts?

P.Davies: So we are confronted with the key question: is it ever the case that an emergent phenomenon cannot be given a satisfactory reductive account, even in principle? And if the answer is yes, then we come to the next key question: in what way, precisely, does the value-added emergent ‘law’ or ‘behavior’ affect the system? A survey of the literature shows a lot of flabby, vague, qualitative statements about higher-level descriptions and influences springing into play at thresholds of complexity, without one ever being told specifically how these emergent laws affect the individual particle ‘on the ground’ – the humble foot soldier of physics – in a manner that involves a fundamentally new force or law. Thus we are told that in the Benard instability, where fluids spontaneously form convection cells, the molecules organize themselves into an elaborate and orderly pattern of flow, which may extend over macroscopic dimensions, even though individual molecules merely push and pull on their near neighbours (see, for example, Coveney & Highfield, 1995). [also Bishop, 2008] This carries the hint that there is a sort global choreographer, an emergent demon, marshalling the molecules into a coherent, cooperative dance, the better to fulfill the global project of convective flow. Naturally this is absurd. The onset of convection certainly represents novel emergent behaviour, but the normal inter-molecular forces are not in competition with, or over-ridden by, novel global forces. The global system ‘harnesses’ the local forces, but at no stage is there a need for an extra type of force to act on an individual molecule to make it comply with a ‘convective master plan.’ [Paul Davies]

According to Davies, the answer is a resounding: “No.”

PM1: Moreover, it (the emergent phenomenon) cannot violate known laws of nature. Right, but notice that “cannot violate” is very different from “can be predicted from” or even “are entailed by”.

This is an incoherent notion. Strong emergence proposes the “emergence” (*poof*) of new laws with downward causation. How can they operate without influencing anything, without making a difference, without violating known laws of nature? You cannot have your cake and eat it: you cannot have new laws that operate from above without making a difference. Origenes

Jerry asserts:

Explained several times.

News to me. Where can I find such an explanation. Alan Fox

KF: To me

1: there was a once future option [drinking water], 2: actualised as the present through my act of choice and 3: this chosen and carried out act is now the recent past.

So, god is omniscient and all knowing because he knows that you will, at some time in the future, drink water? By that logic I am as omniscient and all knowing as god. Sir Giles

Yes indeed, except for a couple of points: 1) No-one who is an ID proponent can offer a mechanism or agent for the executor of “design”. Nor can anyone tell us how, when, where the “Designer” executes “design”. 2). Nobody can explain what FSCO/I is, let alone quantify it.

Why do you make up such nonsense? Explained several times. Is this the best that you can do? Are you here to promote ID by being stupid in your objections to it? jerry

as to: "at no stage is there a need for an extra type of force to act on an individual molecule to make it comply with a ‘convective master plan.’ PM1: "I don’t see how quoting snippets of Davies is supposed to settle the question." In other news, PM1 also sees no problem with Baron Munchausen puling himself out of a swamp by his own pigtail

pull oneself up by one's bootstraps,,, Widely attributed since at least 1901 to The Surprising Adventures of Baron Munchausen, (1781) by Rudolf Erich Raspe, where the eponymous Baron pulls himself out of a swamp by his own pigtail, though not by his bootstraps. The Adventures is primarily a collection of centuries-old tall tales, however, and using bootstraps may have arisen as a variant on the same theme. https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/pull_oneself_up_by_one%27s_bootstraps#Alternative_forms

bornagain77

For sure, design is the only empirically warranted source for FSCO/I.

Yes indeed, except for a couple of points: 1) No-one who is an ID proponent can offer a mechanism or agent for the executor of "design". Nor can anyone tell us how, when, where the "Designer" executes "design". 2). Nobody can explain what FSCO/I is, let alone quantify it. Apart from 1 and 2 above, it's all fine. ;) Though the Creator of this Universe, working through physical effects, using the niche environment as mechanism, could be the culprit, I guess. Alan Fox

@151 I don't see how quoting snippets of Davies is supposed to settle the question. For all I know, Davies could be setting up and knocking down a strawman view of strong emergence in order to defend a better way of thinking about it. PyrrhoManiac1

PM1 on strong emergence:

But I don’t think this is “magic”: I think it follows straightforwardly from the correct view about the nature of causation itself.

Paul Davies on an out-of-nowhere "emergent demon":

This carries the hint that there is a sort global choreographer, an emergent demon, marshalling the molecules into a coherent, cooperative dance, the better to fulfill the global project of convective flow. Naturally this is absurd. ... The global system ‘harnesses’ the local forces, but at no stage is there a need for an extra type of force to act on an individual molecule to make it comply with a ‘convective master plan.’

Origenes

Emergence = It just does Not science. Anti-Science. Andrew asauber

@148

PM1, you have no adequate causal mechanism. If you disagree, simply link your argument. KF

here PyrrhoManiac1

PM1, you have no adequate causal mechanism. If you disagree, simply link your argument. KF kairosfocus

AF, many questions. The plausible model on the table is a molecular nanotech model and maybe retroviruses as a key tool. The issue as you know is there are strong signs of design in life from OoL up. What we do not yet or even may never know -- Godel haunts me -- should not block us from what we can and do know or should acknowledge. For sure, design is the only empirically warranted source for FSCO/I. The ideological imposition of patently inadequate mechanisms is now leading to poof magic stories by those who claim they lock out the supernatural. But then, any sufficiently advanced technology . . . KF kairosfocus

@143

I realize that I am somewhat off-topic here, but PM1 keeps bringing up strong emergence as if it provides a coherent naturalistic explanation for all things.

I would put it rather as follows: the only version of naturalism that is philosophically and scientifically acceptable would be a version that accommodates something like strong emergence. But I would need to read Chalmers carefully before committing myself to his language. At present, I'm only willing to say that I am inclined towards the view that life is strongly emergent with regard to inanimate nature. But I don't think this is "magic": I think it follows straightforwardly from the correct view about the nature of causation itself. I've addressed that a few times in UD and don't feel particularly inclined to repeat a point that's already been ignored more than once. PyrrhoManiac1

Origenes, some things need to be answered as to what is different from poof, magic, just so stories. KF kairosfocus

AF, what is so difficult to understand about designing creatures in two complementary sexes, opening up many possibilities and advantages?

Not difficult to imagine, perhaps. But how, when, and by what mechanism? And by whom or what? ID proponents don't begin to attempt to answer such questions. Alan Fox

Chalmers on strong emergence:

We can say that a high-level phenomenon is strongly emergent with respect to a low-level domain when the high-level phenomenon arises from the low-level domain, but truths concerning that phenomenon are not deducible even in principle from truths in the low-level domain.

Strong emergence: brand new laws magically spring into being without any explanation whatsoever.

Strong emergence, if it exists, can be used to reject the physicalist picture of the world as fundamentally incomplete. By contrast, weak emergence can be used to support the physicalist picture of the world, by showing how all sorts of phenomena that might seem novel and irreducible at first sight can nevertheless be grounded in underlying simple laws.

There is only one clear case of strong emergence, according to Chalmers:

Strong emergence. We have seen that strong emergence, if it exists, has radical consequences. The question that immediately arises, then, is: are there strongly emergent phenomena? My own view is that the answer to this question is yes. I think there is exactly one clear case of a strongly emergent phenomenon, and that is the phenomenon of consciousness.

- - - - - - - I realize that I am somewhat off-topic here, but PM1 keeps bringing up strong emergence as if it provides a coherent naturalistic explanation for all things. Origenes

AF, what is so difficult to understand about designing creatures in two complementary sexes, opening up many possibilities and advantages? And, for human beings, opening up a whole dimension of love, life partnership and family building? Do we find it strange that there are nuts and complementary bolts? KF kairosfocus

SG, just now, I went and got a glass of water. I did not have to do so, at least just now but obviously water is a condition of healthy life. BTW, tap water here is literally spring water. Now, I freely chose to get water and come back. To me

1: there was a once future option, 2: actualised as the present through my act of choice and 3: this chosen and carried out act is now the recent past.

For God at polar point

4: he was aware of my thirst, 5: of my freedom of choice as to when to drink [note this!], 6: and of my actualised choice and act, then return to the keyboard. 7: All, immediately present to him at the polar point in a higher dimension of reality we sometimes call eternity.

__________________________ In that set,

C1: God's knowing my freedom to choose and the way I manifested it, also how I would use it to make a point, is not an inconsistent set given polar point reality [sometimes expressed theologically as "in him we live and move and have our being" or "he made all things and upholds them by his word of power" etc], C2: likewise, it does not coerce my choice nor serve as a retrocausal force by which the not yet determined the once now act of choice. Indeed, C3: retrocausal determination of the past is a case of the not yet existing being claimed to have causal force, i.e. something from non being as cause, which is absurd.

In short, the bare assertion that God's omniscience removes freedom, is rooted in misconceptions and absurdities. It fails. KF PS, similarly, my composing of this comment is a similar act of rational freedom, and were this just a programmed spewing of characters with no freedom to judge warrant, implication, concepts etc, it would have no more credibility than random giberish vjdeyj5dh or a stuck key xxxxxxxxxxxxx. kairosfocus

AF: "ID explains sex how?"

AF keeps saying that as if that is suppose to make logical sense. AF apparently does not realize that if ID does not have a plausible ‘causal mechanism’ in which to explain the information in life, well then, AF is also left without a plausible ‘causal mechanism’ to explain the information he himself is writing in his posts. And in my honest opinion, this denial of agent causality, and/or free will, as a legitimate form of causation is the primary, and fatal, flaw in the Darwinist’s materialistic account of nature. In their denial of free will, and/or agent causality, the Darwinist is simply left floating in mid-air without any plausible explanation as to how the words on his computer screen might ‘magically’ appear as he is writing them, https://uncommondesc.wpengine.com/intelligent-design/at-evolution-news-for-darwinism-pregnancy-is-the-mother-of-all-chicken-and-egg-problems/#comment-771050 “Information does not magically materialize. It can be created by intelligence or it can be shunted around by natural forces. But natural forces, and Darwinian processes in particular, do not create information.” – William Dembski

Verse:

Genesis 1:27 So God created mankind in his own image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them.

Supplemental note,,, Genetic expression is found to be very different between men and women

On Gender, the Science Is Deafening – December 07, 2018 Excerpt: Ten years ago, if you’d have said that in 2018 teachers would get fired for calling a girl a girl, most people wouldn’t have believed you. ,,, “A man on estrogen is not a woman. He is a man with a male physiology on estrogen, and that’s how a physician must approach him.” The very serious problem, she points out, is that people are so ideologically-driven that they want to ignore the medical research. More than ever, Dr. Cretella says, “Medicine is at the point now where we understand that men and women have — at a minimum — 6,500 genetic differences between us. And this impacts every cell of our bodies — our organ systems, how diseases manifest, how we diagnose, and even treat in some cases.” Treating a person differently based on their feelings isn’t just harmful, she argues, but deadly. In cases like heart disease, certain drugs can endanger women and not men. Even diagnoses present differently in men and women. The symptoms for certain diseases, she explains, can manifest themselves in completely opposite ways. “And these are nuances that medicine is finally studying and bringing to light.”,, https://www.frc.org/updatearticle/20181207/gender-science

bornagain77

PM1, the basic problem with emergentism as often used is, it is in effect a way to say magic step, as opposed to, say, how a chemical compound has its own properties due to specific intelligible interactions of say Na and Cl ions forming a crystal we call salt. Computing is a dynamic-stochastic process, not a rational one, notoriously so from gigo, garbage in, garbage out. KF kairosfocus

SG, a sure sign you realise you do not have it on the merits. The point is simple, to reason one must be free, and yet you are either advocating or taking fellow travellership -- i.e. SUPPORTING [attn, PM1] -- a view that seeks to reduce mind to in effect GIGO limited computation on a substrate. But computation is precisely not reasoning, it is a programmed cause effect process, sometimes with room for a stochastic element: at most, it can express the canned reasoning of its designers, and the history of bugs tells us a lot on that. You and others are therefore trapped in a self defeating argument loop trying to argue for what undermines argument based on reason. It is sounder to acknowledge reasoning as a first given of our experience and to infer from that to a world in which reasoning is possible. KF PS, I cite Reppert for those who want a little more background:

. . . let us suppose that brain state A [--> notice, state of a wetware, electrochemically operated computational substrate], which is token identical to the thought that all men are mortal, and brain state B, which is token identical to the thought that Socrates is a man, together cause the belief [--> concious, perceptual state or disposition] that Socrates is mortal. It isn’t enough for rational inference that these events be those beliefs, it is also necessary that the causal transaction be in virtue of the content of those thoughts . . . [But] if naturalism is true, then the propositional content is irrelevant to the causal transaction that produces the conclusion, and [so] we do not have a case of rational inference. In rational inference, as Lewis puts it, one thought causes another thought not by being, but by being seen to be, the ground for it. But causal transactions in the brain occur in virtue of the brain’s being in a particular type of state that is relevant to physical causal transactions.

PPS, God at polar point of space time reality, simply takes omnipresence and omniscience seriously and illustrates how by moving up a dimension the seemingly impossible becomes intelligible: one point, north of London, Chicago and Tokyo. The fault is our inadequate concepts. kairosfocus

ID explains sex how? Alan Fox

"How did the sexes originate? Why is it that the vast majority of living things require a "male and female" to reproduce? If evolution were true - doesn't it make much more sense that EVERY living organism was self-replicating and required no useless energy expenditure? When did the first male get here? When did the first female get here? How? Why? Wouldn't they have had to appear fully functional and at the same time in order for the next generation of organisms to arrive? Of course, they would. So, how is it that the first male and female for almost 2 million living organisms arrived together and fully functional so that reproduction could take place? "Sex is the QUEEN of evolutionary biology problems." - Dr. Graham Bell - 'The Masterpiece of Nature' The Evolution and Genetics of Sexuality - 1982, Another whack at the “sex paradox” - July 1, 2014 Excerpt: The article is most informative about tests done on the various theses but in the end (they state). And so the paradox of sex lives on. “We still really don’t know the answer to this very most basic question,” says Mark Welch. “We don’t know why sex exists.” https://uncommondesc.wpengine.com/evolution/another-whack-at-the-sex-paradox/ Knowledge gap on the origin of sex - May 26, 2017 Excerpt: There are significant gaps in our knowledge on the evolution of sex, according to a research review on sex chromosomes. Even after more than a century of study, researchers do not know enough about the evolution of sex chromosomes to understand how males and females emerge. https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/05/170526084533.htm New book challenges sexual selection theory in evolution – May 20, 2018 Excerpt: Darwin’s Secret Sex Problem What Darwin Ignored,,, Darwin never seriously confronted the crucial, insurmountable gap in his grand theory between asexual replication and sexual reproduction. Nor could Darwins famed natural selection have provided simultaneous on-time delivery of the first male/female pair of millions of sexually unique species required for evolutions bedrock premise of common descent, a fundamental flaw fatal to the romanticized microbe-to-man Evolution Story. https://uncommondesc.wpengine.com/evolution/new-book-challenges-sexual-selection-theory-in-evolution/ Sex, the Queen of Problems in Evolutionary Biology - Jonathan McLatchie - July 13, 2011 Excerpt: The origin of sexually reproducing organisms from asexually reproducing ancestors is a profound mystery which has baffled many an evolutionary biologist. The origin and subsequent maintenance of sex and recombination is a phenomenon not easily explained by Darwinian evolution. Indeed, there are several substantive, well-known reasons why the origin of sex presents a serious problem for conventional evolutionary explanations. (For Instance) "Sex is not only unnecessary, but it ought to be a recipe for evolutionary disaster. For one thing, it is an inefficient way to reproduce…And sex carries other costs as well…By all rights, any group of animals that evolves sexual reproduction should be promptly outcompeted by nonsexual ones. And yet sex reigns… Why is sex a success, despite all its disadvantages?”,, The problems extend even deeper than this. For there is, of course, the additional conundrum related to the fact that gametes (i.e. sex cells) undergo a fundamentally different type of cell division (i.e. meiosis rather than mitosis),,, And then there is the added problem of male and female complementarity — a seemingly remarkable incidence of co-evolution.,,, ,,, it is argued that the apparent disadvantages of sex, outlined above, are compensated by the advantage which comes from the immense genetic flexibility which arises from the shuffling of genes through the process of recombination and fertilisation.,,, But here’s the thing: the fact of this obvious advantage does NOT explain how sexual reproduction arose in the first place. Indeed, such immense genetic flexibility is of benefit only to future generations, and not to the present population. But natural selection, being devoid of foresight, is not able to retain biological phenomena for their potential future utility.,,, Sex continues to reign as the ultimate conundrum, the queen of problems, in evolutionary biology. https://evolutionnews.org/2011/07/spinning_fanciful_tales_about_/

Moreover, genetic recombination itself is now known to NOT be a random "shuffling of genes" as was falsely presupposed by Darwinists,

Duality in the human genome - Nov. 28, 2014 Excerpt: The results show that most genes can occur in many different forms within a population: On average, about 250 different forms of each gene exist. The researchers found around four million different gene forms just in the 400 or so genomes they analysed. This figure is certain to increase as more human genomes are examined. More than 85 percent of all genes have no predominant form which occurs in more than half of all individuals. This enormous diversity means that over half of all genes in an individual, around 9,000 of 17,500, occur uniquely in that one person - and are therefore individual in the truest sense of the word. The gene, as we imagined it, exists only in exceptional cases. "We need to fundamentally rethink the view of genes that every schoolchild has learned since Gregor Mendel's time.,,, According to the researchers, mutations of genes are not randomly distributed between the parental chromosomes. They found that 60 percent of mutations affect the same chromosome set and 40 percent both sets. Scientists refer to these as cis and trans mutations, respectively. Evidently, an organism must have more cis mutations, where the second gene form remains intact. "It's amazing how precisely the 60:40 ratio is maintained. It occurs in the genome of every individual – almost like a magic formula," says Hoehe. http://medicalxpress.com/news/2014-11-duality-human-genome.html

And as if that was not bad enough, the entire bottom-up 'gene-centric' view of Darwinists is now also known to be wrong, i.e. It has literally become "systems all the way down."

Why the 'Gene' Concept Holds Back Evolutionary Thinking - James Shapiro - 11/30/2012 Excerpt: The modern concept of the genome has no basic units. It has literally become "systems all the way down." There are piecemeal coding sequences, expression signals, splicing signals, regulatory signals, epigenetic formatting signals, and many other "DNA elements" (to use the neutral ENCODE terminology) that participate in the multiple functions involved in genome expression, replication, transmission, repair.,,, Conventional thinkers may claim that molecular data only add details to a well-established evolutionary paradigm. But the diehard defenders of orthodoxy in evolutionary biology are grievously mistaken in their stubbornness. DNA and molecular genetics have brought us to a fundamentally new conceptual understanding of genomes, how they are organized and how they function. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/james-a-shapiro/why-the-gene-concept-hold_b_2207245.html

bornagain77

...another doozy – the evolution of sex.

This one is actually not fully documented, nor is there one generally accepted explanation.

Because here you need simultaneous evolution of both male and female genitals, the reproduction system, and the software to run it properly.

Sex is sharing genomes. Many organisms don't use a penis for this Alan Fox

Pregnancy is the mother of all chicken and egg problems, but it comes on the heels of another doozy - the evolution of sex. Because here you need simultaneous evolution of both male and female genitals, the reproduction system, and the software to run it properly. Half a penis seems useless to me. How could you go from asexual reproduction to sexual reproduction if it doesn't work the first time. An intermediate stage where the organism is infertile will not work. But, believers will be believers. For the Darwin faithful, there is nothing too difficult for evolution. If it exists, it automatically means in their minds that it evolved. Oh how I wish all their just so stories could be actually tested. Fortunately for them, they do not need to worry about whether or not their hypotheses work or are accurate. All they have to do is make up stories that they hope might work. This is NOT science. It is story telling. tjguy

If nothing violates the laws, if everything acts in accord with the laws, and, given that we, in principle, can know the state of the universe, then where does “genuine unpredictability” enter the scene?

Some atoms are radioactive and a statistically predictable number of atoms will decay (half-life). Often products of decay are emitted as particles. What determines the path any particular emitted particle takes? Alan Fox

Paul Davies on the folly of strong emergentism.

.... ontological reductionism: the assertion that the whole really is, in the final analysis, nothing but the sum of the parts, and that the formulation of concepts, theories, and experimental procedures in terms of higher-level concepts is merely a convenience. A minority of scientists—emergentists—challenge this account of nature. Strong emergence is a far more contentious position, in which it is asserted that the micro-level principles are quite simply inadequate to account for the system’s behaviour as a whole. Strong emergence cannot succeed in systems that are causally closed at the microscopic level, because there is no room for additional principles to operate that are not already implicit in the lower-level rules. So we are confronted with the key question: is it ever the case that an emergent phenomenon cannot be given a satisfactory reductive account, even in principal? And if the answer is yes, then we come to the next key question: in what way, precisely, does the value-added emergent ‘law’ or ‘behavior’ affect the system? A survey of the literature shows a lot of flabby, vague, qualitative statements about higher-level descriptions and influences springing into play at thresholds of complexity, without one ever being told specifically how these emergent laws affect the individual particle ‘on the ground’ – the humble foot soldier of physics – in a manner that involves a fundamentally new force or law. Thus we are told that in the Benard instability, where fluids spontaneously form convection cells, the molecules organize themselves into an elaborate and orderly pattern of flow, which may extend over macroscopic dimensions, even though individual molecules merely push and pull on their near neighbours (see, for example, Coveney & Highfield, 1995). [also Bishop, 2008] This carries the hint that there is a sort global choreographer, an emergent demon, marshalling the molecules into a coherent, cooperative dance, the better to fulfill the global project of convective flow. Naturally this is absurd. The onset of convection certainly represents novel emergent behaviour, but the normal inter-molecular forces are not in competition with, or over-ridden by, novel global forces. The global system ‘harnesses’ the local forces, but at no stage is there a need for an extra type of force to act on an individual molecule to make it comply with a ‘convective master plan.’ - - - Some emergent phenomena are so striking that it is tempting to explain them by encapsulating (ii) as a separate causal category. The term ‘downward causation’ has been used in this context (Campbell, 1974). The question then arises whether this is just another descriptive convenience (as in the case of weak emergence), or whether downward causation ever involves new sorts of forces or influences (as is the case with strong emergence, for example, and with most versions of biological vitalism). In the cases cited above, the answer is surely no, but what about more dramatic examples, such as the mind–body interaction?

Sure, but that is not part of physics :) Origenes

What is the lowliest creature we can imagine that is aware of us? I’ll use a slug but we could probably imagine something lowlier. Is that slug’s understanding of our nature greater than our understanding of the nature of the creator of the universe? I would guess so. Yet we presume to tell this creator of the universe what it should and shouldn’t do. What it must do or have done to get it better. We rarely try to understand why this universe as it is is here or our purpose in it. Are we here for the same reason the slug is here? Or are the purpose of our origins different? Aside: what does the cartoon in this link by George Booth have to do with the creation of intelligent entities. The cartoon is often called consensus. https://lowres.cartooncollections.com/humans-disagreement-agreeing-agreements-control-business-commerce-CC35522_low.jpg jerry

SG states, "Not having free will does not mean coercion. If god knows that I am going to steal a Snickers bar, I do not have the free will not to steal it." You are presupposing that you know God's thoughts. Save for fulfilled prophecy, (which happens to be a powerful apologetic in its own right), and prophecy yet to be fulfilled, God does not reveal the future to man. God certainly does not coerce anyone to steal snickers bars, an indeed God gives us an intuitive moral conscious that we may intuitively know that it is wrong to take that which does not belong to us. And in fact, a person's ability to override his intuitive moral conscious, and to take a snickers bar that he intuitively knows he ought not take, is evidence, in and of itself, that man has free will. Moreover SG, to point out the obvious, you are not defending Atheistic Naturalism, the view that we are 'meat robots' that have no free will (J. Coyne), but you are instead making a purely theological argument. A Theological argument about God's sovereignty trumping our free will, a theological that has been held ,and debated, for centuries by Calvinists.,,, Are you now a Calvinist? That you would be making a purely theological argument, not a naturalistic argument, is just as well, since, as pointed out in post 52 and 53, empirical evidence itself, from both neuroscience and quantum mechanics, proves that, as far as empirical evidence will allow us to tell, we most certainly do have free will. Of related note, the free will of God, via the presupposition of 'contingency, happens to be a essential presupposition that was necessary for the rise of modern science in Medieval Christian Europe,

“That (contingency) was a huge concept (that was important for the founding of modern science). The historians of science call that ‘contingency’. The idea that nature has an order that is built into it. But it is an order that is contingent upon the will of the Creator. It could have been otherwise. Just as there are many ways to make a timepiece, or a clock,,, there are many different ways God could have ordered the universe. And it is up to us not to deduce that order from first principles, or from some intuitions that we have about how nature ought to be, but rather it is important to go out and see how nature actually is.” – Stephen Meyer – 5:00 minute mark – Andrew Klavan and Stephen Meyer Talk God and Science https://idthefuture.com/1530/

And indeed, the belief in ‘contingency’, and/or ‘divine will’, played an integral role in Sir Isaac Newton’s founding of modern physics.

Newton — Rationalizing Christianity, or Not? – Rosalind W. Picard – 1998 Excerpt: The belief that it was by divine will and not by some shadow of necessity that matter existed and possessed its properties, had a direct impact on Newton’s science. It was necessary to discover laws and properties by experimental means, and not by rational deduction. As Newton wrote in another unpublished manuscript, “The world might have been otherwise,,” (see Davis, 1991) https://web.media.mit.edu/~picard/personal/Newton.php ‘Without all doubt this world…could arise from nothing but the perfectly free will of God… From this fountain (what) we call the laws of nature have flowed, in which there appear many traces indeed of the most wise contrivance, but not the least shadow of necessity. These therefore we must not seek from uncertain conjectures, but learn them from observations and experiments.”,,, – Sir Isaac Newton – (Cited from Religion and the Rise of Modern Science by Hooykaas page 49). https://thirdspace.org.au/comment/237

And since Newton also held to the orthodox belief that man is made in the image of God, (and since he explicitly rejected the mechanical and/or necessitarian philosophy), then I hold that Newton would be very pleased to see the recent closing of the “freedom of choice” loophole within quantum mechanics. (A Zeilinger - 2018)

Priest of Nature – the religious worlds of Isaac Newton – R. Iliffe (Princeton University Press, 2017) Excerpt page 5: “The analogy between the human and the divine would remain at the heart of Newtons theological metaphysics. In the essay on God, space, and time that he penned in the early 1690s, the analogy between man and God played a key role. Was it not most agreeable to reason, he asked, that Gods creatures shared his attributes as far as possible as fruit the nature of the tree, and an image the likeness of a man, and by sharing tend towards perfection? Similarly, was it not reasonable to believe that God could be discerned in the more perfect creatures as in a mirror? Such a view also enabled humans to understand the being and attributes of the divine.” https://www.yoono.org/download/prinat.pdf

bornagain77

PM1 @

1. If naturalism is true, then all our actions and thoughts are consequences of events and laws of nature in the remote past before we were born.

PM1: The first premise is not true.

Wiki: In philosophy, naturalism is the idea or belief that only natural laws and forces (as opposed to supernatural ones) operate in the universe.

Wiki seems to agree with premise 1, assuming that the ‘natural forces’ they speak of act in a lawful manner.

PM1: naturalism entails rejecting anything that violates the laws of fundamental physics. But that’s all. More specifically, it says that nothing can happen that would violate the laws of thermodynamics, quantum mechanics, and/or general relativity.

Here PM1 agrees with premise 1, “nothing can happen that would violate the laws” is just saying that everything acts in accord with the laws.

PM1: I don’t think that knowing all the laws of fundamental physics would allow us to determine everything that could happen in the universe.

One also has to factor in the state of events in the universe. On the one hand the laws and the particular state of the universe on the other. The idea is that you have to know both.

PM1 That’s part of the point of emergentism: genuine unpredictable novelties can occur because the space of possibilities cannot be prestated in advance.

I don’t get it, why would there be “genuine unpredictability”? Where does it come from? Why is it that we are predestined to be ignorant of the space of possibilities (or rather 'outcomes')? Is your argument that the search space is too big for computers to calculate? If nothing violates the laws, if everything acts in accord with the laws, and, given that we, in principle, can know the state of the universe, then where does “genuine unpredictability” enter the scene? Origenes

KF@119, I only have so many years left before I become worm food and I have no desire to spend it trying to decipher this convoluted mess. Sir Giles

@124

I don’t know what US President James Monroe was doing on this day in 1822 but I assume that his experience of his “present” was just as vivid and real as ours is of our “present”. But while, for him, the two hundred years between us was a mystery, we know much of what happened as facts. The same presumably applies to a person who exists two hundred years in our future. They know – or will know – for a fact what is still a mystery to us. Yet do we have any reason to privilege Monroe’s or ours or the future person’s present over the others? Wouldn’t it be the case that an omniscient being must, by definition, know all facts that exist to be known regardless of whether they happen to be in the future from our parochial, temporal perspective?

I believe that this is where theology meets philosophy of physics. If we accept a 'block universe', then sure: the universe is a finite but unbounded four-dimensional structure with topological regions that can be designated as "beginning" and "end" relative to the arrow of time. On a 'growing block' theory of the universe, not even God can know future events because they have not yet happened -- not even for Him. PyrrhoManiac1

@123

Dear onlooker, can you imagine having to argue that you are not in control of your mind, in order to defend your belief-system? Yet, that’s where some of us are. The following argument has hit them like a brick wall: 1. If naturalism is true, then all our actions and thoughts are consequences of events and laws of nature in the remote past before we were born. 2. We have no control over circumstances that existed in the remote past before we were born, nor do we have any control over the laws of nature. 3. If A causes B, and we have no control over A, and A is sufficient for B, then we have no control over B. Therefore, 4. If naturalism is true, then we have no control over our own thoughts and actions. Therefore, assuming that rationality requires control, 5. If naturalism is true, we are not rational.

The first premise is not true. As I believe I have argued numerous times in this thread and several others. Each time my arguments were dismissed as nonsense, as not even worth taking time to refute. The "brick wall" exists entirely in delusional fantasies of what naturalism is. It is those fantasies that render most here incapable of the basic literacy needed to respond to my arguments with anything more than snark and dismissal. PyrrhoManiac1

119 Just wanted to highlight this:

For, absent responsible rational freedom, there is no credible base to trust soundness of thought, reasoning, claimed knowledge, so — and it seems you are supporting the Provine, Crick, Rosenberg et al view — we have a clear case of self-defeating self reference.

I don't recall Sir Giles (or anyone else here) either denying "responsible rational freedom" or saying anything that implies the views of Crick, Provine, or Rosenberg. If anything, I've made it perfectly explicit not only that Rosenberg does not speak for me, but also that his view commits a good many errors that are by no means forced upon every proponent of naturalism. I'll go 'on the record' about this exactly once: Rosenberg's claim that meaning cannot be naturalized is a bad argument. Here's his reasoning: 1. linguistic meaning is found in sentences. 2. but the brain does not store information in the form of sentences 3. therefore there is no linguistic meaning in brains 4. but there is nowhere else in the naturalistic worldview that linguistic meaning could exist 5. therefore, meaning must be eliminated in a naturalistic worldview. Apart from (2), every premise is just question-begging, and in the absence of arguments to support them, there is no reason for even the most committed of naturalists to accept (5). Rosenberg's eliminativism about meaning is just question-begging, and there's no reason why anyone (including Rosenberg himself) should accept it. PyrrhoManiac1

PyrrhoManiac1/115

But if he is omniscient and all knowing, as is the claim, then his creations can’t have free will

I don’t think this is right.

On the contrary, I would argue that one takeaway from the Biblical account of Peter's triple denial of knowing Jesus suggests this is the case. Jesus told Peter specifically that this is what would happen. Peter, not unnaturally, denied vehemently that he would do any such thing and we can assume he meant it at the time. Yet the future unwound as Jesus foretold and there appears to be nothing Peter could have done about it. This suggest that if an omniscient being claims that specified future events will happen then they are facts, they already exist to be known rather than just being speculations or estimates of probability.

Firstly, divine omniscience means at most that God knows what we will choose before we make up our minds. But God’s knowledge doesn’t interfere with our choices or somehow cause them. God knows what it is that we shall freely choose, but that doesn’t negate the fact that we do indeed choose freely.

If God knows what we will choose before the fact then for Him, that choice already exists to be known and the same must be true for whatever follows from that choice. Otherwise, God's prescience is not omniscience but only speculation ir, at best, estimates of probability.

Secondly (and this is more tentative, but it makes sense to me): divine omniscience is limited to all possible facts: for every proposition p, God knows whether p or ~p. But in the case of human freedom, if one takes seriously the idea that a free choice is its own kind of creation ex nihilo, then prior to choice there is simply is no fact of the matter to be known.

I don't see how this helps. Prior to the choice, it is not a fact but, yes, only once it has been made does it become a fact. But this is only true for beings who exist only at particular points in space and time. Where the choice is made in our future it is not, for us, a fact. But for an omniscient - and by extension omnipresent being - the choice is a fact. I don't know what US President James Monroe was doing on this day in 1822 but I assume that his experience of his "present" was just as vivid and real as ours is of our "present". But while, for him, the two hundred years between us was a mystery, we know much of what happened as facts. The same presumably applies to a person who exists two hundred years in our future. They know - or will know - for a fact what is still a mystery to us. Yet do we have any reason to privilege Monroe's or ours or the future person's present over the others? Wouldn't it be the case that an omniscient being must, by definition, know all facts that exist to be known regardless of whether they happen to be in the future from our parochial, temporal perspective? Seversky

Dear onlooker, perhaps you are wondering why it is that certain participants on this forum insist that they do not control their thoughts, have only limited control and/or feign that they do not know what ‘control’ means. The explanation for their baffling behavior is that once they admit that they do control their thoughts, they are no longer able to defend their preferred worldview; which is naturalism. Dear onlooker, can you imagine having to argue that you are not in control of your mind, in order to defend your belief-system? Yet, that’s where some of us are. The following argument has hit them like a brick wall: 1. If naturalism is true, then all our actions and thoughts are consequences of events and laws of nature in the remote past before we were born. 2. We have no control over circumstances that existed in the remote past before we were born, nor do we have any control over the laws of nature. 3. If A causes B, and we have no control over A, and A is sufficient for B, then we have no control over B. Therefore, 4. If naturalism is true, then we have no control over our own thoughts and actions. Therefore, assuming that rationality requires control, 5. If naturalism is true, we are not rational. Origenes

Relatd/107

Do you have trouble navigating the grocery store? With finding the items you actually want? With interacting with strangers? How about driving? Is your sense of awareness so poor that you can’t gauge what the driver in front of you might do? Especially if he’s weaving across the road?

I remember watching a TV science show many years ago which invited viewers to take part in a simple experiment. They told us they were going to play a short clip of some basketball players bouncing an passing a ball between them. We were asked to count the number of bounces as a test of our visual acuity. I watched the clip, counted the bounces but was one short. They then told us the total and then replayed the clip. This time I saw someone dressed in a gorilla suit walk slowly into shot, stop in the center of the frame, turn, wave at the camera and then walk out of shot the other side. I was literally staggered. I had not seen that figure at all in my first viewing If I had been told beforehand that my attention could be so distracted that I would not see something that was so plainly there, I would not have believed it. Yet it happened. This is also why we now understand that eyewitness testimony is no longer as reliable as once thought. We are fallible creatures. Our knowledge is limited as are our faculties and senses yet, by and large, they are good enough to enable us to navigate this world in reasonable safety. Which is what we would expect of a natural process like evolution. Evolution doesn't do "perfect" or even "optimal". When it works to our advantage, it does just good enough to give us an edge over the competition. That's the best we can hope for. Seversky

Relatd/101

Answer the question. Are living things actually designed? Yes or no.

I don't know if living things are actually designed. No one does. I can't, therefore, rule out the possibility but I don't think that, on balance, the available data supports it. To that extent, I would say no. But I could be wrong. We both could. Seversky

Origenes, to write, say or think sentences one knows not to be warranted by reason of absurdity automatically means not believing them to be the case. KF kairosfocus

SG, back to relevant focus. For, absent responsible rational freedom, there is no credible base to trust soundness of thought, reasoning, claimed knowledge, so -- and it seems you are supporting the Provine, Crick, Rosenberg et al view -- we have a clear case of self-defeating self reference. As for the attempted side track, start with, the North Pole is due north of every other point on the Earth's surface, giving us an idea of what being polar to time and space would be like. In that context, we can not only reason out but appreciate that God's polar point awareness of outcomes is not equal to nor does it imply that we do not have responsible rational freedom and therefore lack rationality. Rationality, knowledge and freedom are inextricably entangled. As a result a claimed reasoned case that we lack freedom is self defeating. There are some things that cannot be reasonably argued to and this is one of them. Of course, the root problem is reduction of reason to gigo limited computation on wetware, has no room for responsible, rational freedom. Take that as being a good reason to reject computationalism. Mindedness is evidence of reality beyond what physicalism tries to insist on. KF kairosfocus

Sir Giles @

Do you honestly believe that you could truly think that pedophilia was good?

Yes, I honestly believe that I can truly think (and truly write) the sentence "pedophilia is good", and I can also think "I am a unicorn living just beneath the surface of the sun." However, as I have stated before, believing such crazy stuff is another matter entirely. To be clear, I can think those sentences, no problem, but I cannot believe them to be true. Origenes

BA77: Being Omniscient, and having perfect foreknowledge of what each man will freely choose to do, does not equal coercion of men to make those free choices.

Not having free will does not mean coercion. If god knows that I am going to steal a Snickers bar, I do not have the free will not to steal it. If I truly have free will then god cannot have inerrant foreknowledge of my decisions. If you want to argue that can predict to a high probability what my choice will be, then I can accept that. But that is not what believers are saying. Sir Giles

Sir Giles, so in your book, only if God is NOT Omniscient can we have free will? Baloney! As I referenced above, "God stands above all human choices and works through human freedom to bring about His own providential goals.” i.e. Being Omniscient, and having perfect foreknowledge of what each man will freely choose to do, does not equal coercion of men to make those free choices. For a prime example of God working "through human freedom to bring about His own providential goals", I simply reference His atoning sacrifice on the cross. God did not prevent men from freely choosing to do evil, rather than doing good, instead He used human choices to do evil against itself, so as to accomplish His ultimate goal of defeating death. i.e. "They nailed him to the tree, not knowing that by that very act they were bringing the world to his feet. They gave him a cross, not guessing that he would make it a throne."

“It is a glorious phrase of the New Testament, that ‘he led captivity captive.’ The very triumphs of His foes, it means, he used for their defeat. He compelled their dark achievements to sub-serve his end, not theirs. They nailed him to the tree, not knowing that by that very act they were bringing the world to his feet. They gave him a cross, not guessing that he would make it a throne. They flung him outside the gates to die, not knowing that in that very moment they were lifting up all the gates of the universe, to let the King of Glory come in. They thought to root out his doctrines, not understanding that they were implanting imperishably in the hearts of men the very name they intended to destroy. They thought they had defeated God with His back (to) the wall, pinned and helpless and defeated: they did not know that it was God Himself who had tracked them down. He did not conquer in spite of the dark mystery of evil. He conquered through it.” - James Stewart (1896–1990) was a minister of the Church of Scotland

Video and Verses:

Turin Shroud 3-D Hologram Reveals the Words 'The Lamb' https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PC59NxpKyu4 John 1:29 The next day he saw Jesus coming toward him, and said, “Behold, the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world! Matthew 26:39 And He went a little beyond them, and fell on His face and prayed, saying, “My Father, if it is possible, let this cup pass from Me; yet not as I will, but as You will.”

Supplemental note and Verse

Oct. 2022 – And although there will never be a purely mathematical ‘theory of everything’ that bridges the infinite mathematical divide that exists between quantum mechanics and general relativity, all hope is not lost in finding the correct ‘theory if everything’.,,,, https://uncommondesc.wpengine.com/cosmology/from-iai-news-how-infinity-threatens-cosmology/#comment-766384 Verse: Colossians 1:15-20 The Son is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn over all creation. For in him all things were created: things in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or powers or rulers or authorities; all things have been created through him and for him. He is before all things, and in him all things hold together. And he is the head of the body, the church; he is the beginning and the firstborn from among the dead, so that in everything he might have the supremacy. For God was pleased to have all his fullness dwell in him, and through him to reconcile to himself all things, whether things on earth or things in heaven, by making peace through his blood, shed on the cross.

bornagain77

@114

But if he is omniscient and all knowing, as is the claim, then his creations can’t have free will.

I don't think this is right. There are least two strategies for reconciling human free will with divine omniscience. Firstly, divine omniscience means at most that God knows what we will choose before we make up our minds. But God's knowledge doesn't interfere with our choices or somehow cause them. God knows what it is that we shall freely choose, but that doesn't negate the fact that we do indeed choose freely. Secondly (and this is more tentative, but it makes sense to me): divine omniscience is limited to all possible facts: for every proposition p, God knows whether p or ~p. But in the case of human freedom, if one takes seriously the idea that a free choice is its own kind of creation ex nihilo, then prior to choice there is simply is no fact of the matter to be known. I don't know if this idea of free choice as its own kind of creation ex nihilo is theologically mainstream. I got it from my reading of Descartes, who does try to be theologically mainstream (relative to the version of Scholastic Catholicism that was dominant in French academia at the time). PyrrhoManiac1

BA77: So Sir Giles, you hold that God could not create beings with free will, and that God can only create automatons? Really???

Discussions with you would be much more productive if you made an attempt to read comments for content and not twist them to suit your narrative. If god exists, of course he can produce beings with free will. But if he is omniscient and all knowing, as is the claim, then his creations can’t have free will. Sir Giles

Sir Giles claims, "if god is omniscient and all knowing, we can’t have free will. No amount of apologetics will change that." So Sir Giles, you hold that God could not create beings with free will, and that God can only create automatons? Really??? Well, to be short and sweet, and as I've heard from time to time, “Your God is too Small.”

“Your God is too Small.” — John Bertram Phillips https://quotefancy.com/media/wallpaper/3840x2160/1550257-John-Bertram-Phillips-Quote-Your-God-is-too-Small.jpg

bornagain77

Origenes: However, I hold that we are able to think all things including outrageous stuff like “pedophilia is good”

I agree that you could think of the concept, as I could think about Santa Clause, unicorns and god. But I doubt very much that I could think they existed without more evidence than currently exists. Do you honestly believe that you could truly think that pedophilia was good? Or that killing and stealing for your own gain was acceptable? Sir Giles

I'm still not entirely sure what "controlling one's own thoughts" means. But if it means is something like, being able to evaluate one's ideas according to epistemic criteria, and reject those ideas that don't conform to those criteria, then yes, of course I'm happy enough with that! By "epistemic criteria" I mean both rules of inference and rules of evidence. That is, we can ask of ourselves, does this idea make sense? Does it conflict with other things I already believe? How should my other beliefs be revised, modified, or abandoned in order to integrate this idea into what I already take to be the case? What is entailed by this idea? What evidence is there for it? What kinds of evidence would I need in order to confirm or discomfirm this idea? etc. PyrrhoManiac1

BA77, the fact remains, if god is omniscient and all knowing, we can’t have free will. No amount of apologetics will change that. Sir Giles

"God created things which had free will. That means creatures which can go either wrong or right. Some people think they can imagine a creature which was free but had no possibility of going wrong; I cannot. If a thing is free to be good it is also free to be bad. And free will is what has made evil possible. Why, then, did God give them free will? Because free will, though it makes evil possible, is also the only thing that makes possible any love or goodness or joy worth having. A world of automata — of creatures that worked like machines — would hardly be worth creating. The happiness which God designs for His higher creatures is the happiness of being freely, voluntarily united to Him and to each other in an ecstasy of love and delight compared with which the most rapturous love between a man and a woman on this earth is mere milk and water. And for that they must be free. “Of course God knew what would happen if they used their freedom the wrong way: apparently He thought it worth the risk. Perhaps we feel inclined to disagree with Him. But there is a difficulty about disagreeing with God. He is the source from which all your reasoning power comes: you could not be right and He wrong any more than a stream can rise higher than its own source. When you are arguing against Him you are arguing against the very power that makes you able to argue at all: it is like cutting off the branch you are sitting on. If God thinks this state of war in the universe a price worth paying for free will — that is, for making a live world in which creatures can do real good or harm and something of real importance can happen, instead of a toy world which only moves when He pulls the strings — then we may take it is worth paying." - C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity

bornagain77

Seversky at 100, Here is the summary: 1) Atheist naturalism is dead. Intelligent Design involves a being not constrained by physical laws. 2) Evolution/Darwinism is dead. There is no evidence that unguided evolution can produce the diversity of life that we see around us. It appears you want to continue to assert the opposite. relatd

Seversky at 97, Do you have trouble navigating the grocery store? With finding the items you actually want? With interacting with strangers? How about driving? Is your sense of awareness so poor that you can't gauge what the driver in front of you might do? Especially if he's weaving across the road? Quit using the smokescreen. I know you know better. relatd

Sir Giles @95

I would argue that when it really matters (to us) that is the time when you are not in control of your thoughts. If you were truly in control of your thoughts you should be able to think that pedophilia was good.

If I understand you correctly, you are saying that we are unable to think certain things, because they are forbidden. And not being able to think certain things would show that we are not in control of our thoughts. Do I represent your point correctly? Well, if we were indeed not able to think certain things, I would agree with you. However, I hold that we are able to think all things including outrageous stuff like “pedophilia is good” and even “Joe Biden is an intellectual powerhouse”. But surely to believe the crazy things we are able to think is another matter entirely. Origenes

The Bible and Concursus Divinus Excerpt: Augustine also described concurrence: Since God has foreknowledge of our will, its future will be such as He foreknows it. It will be a will precisely because He foreknows it as a will, and it could not be a will if it were not in our power. Hence God also has foreknowledge of our power over it. The power, then, is not taken from me because of His foreknowledge, since this power will be mine all the more certainly because of the infallible foreknowledge of Him who foreknew that I would have it.[4] John Wesley thus taught that the Holy Spirit worked as “His gracious influence is exerted upon all moral beings that do not willfully resist it.…influencing all, but forcing none, and proportioning his influence to the concurrence of the subject.”[5],,, God stands above all human choices and works through human freedom to bring about His own providential goals.”[9] https://thedailyapologist.com/blog/the-bible-and-concursus-divinus

bornagain77

Another example of a commenter misrepresenting the views of another to make it a caricature. Very dishonest.

Seversky, your post might make a lot more sense if ‘you’ actually existed,…

Two can play at that childish game. If you believe in an all knowing omniscient god then you have no free will and are nothing more than a meat robot. Sir Giles

Seversky 97@

Again, what is meant by being in control of one’s thoughts? The question implies that our conscious self is some sort of “controller”‘ that manipulates thoughts …

You try to make it sound weird, but is the one who writes your posts, who I suggest to be you, not UTTERLY OBVIOUSLY “some sort of controller” who UTTERLY OBVIOUSLY “manipulates thoughts”?

… which are a separate entity under its control.

You try to make it sound weird, but let’s consider, arguendo, the possibility that “your” thoughts are not under your control …. Instead something other than you is doing the thinking, something other than you tells you what makes sense, and when you understand something. Consider the possibility that all the thoughts that ever inhabited your 'internal theater' do not stem from you, and in fact have nothing to do with you. You are, in fact, a powerless bystander in relation to "your" thoughts. Consider the possibility that you completely lack the ability to understand anything. Do you feel nausea creeping up on you already?

That, in turn, seems to harken back to the concept of our conscious self being like a little homunculus sitting inside the brain watching the image presented to us by our senses.

Unwarranted nonsensical imagery. Origenes

Seversky, your post might make a lot more sense if 'you' actually existed, (and if 'you' had the free will necessary), to write your post. Just a suggestion,,,, (of course I am saying this to 'you' assuming that 'you' really do exist as real person, and that 'you' are not a 'controlled hallucination", and I am also assuming, contrary to your claims, that 'you' are not just some meat robot with no more control over your actions than a leaf has control over the trajectory of its fall from a tree.)

“Our experiences of being and having a body are ‘controlled hallucinations’ of a very distinctive kind.” - Anil Seth, "The Real Problem" at Aeon - (Nov. 2, 2016) Sam Harris: “The self is an illusion.” – Michael Egnor Demolishes the Myth of Materialism (Science Uprising EP1) https://youtu.be/Fv3c7DWuqpM?t=267 “You are robots made out of meat. Which is what I am going to try to convince you of today” Jerry Coyne – - No, You’re Not a Robot Made Out of Meat (Science Uprising 02) – video https://youtu.be/rQo6SWjwQIk?list=PLR8eQzfCOiS1OmYcqv_yQSpje4p7rAE7-&t=20 The Brain: The Mystery of Consciousness – Monday, Jan. 29, 2007 Part II The Illusion Of Control Another startling conclusion from the science of consciousness is that the intuitive feeling we have that there's an executive "I" that sits in a control room of our brain, scanning the screens of the senses and pushing the buttons of the muscles, is an illusion. Steven Pinker - Professor in the Department of Psychology at Harvard University http://www.academia.edu/2794859/The_Brain_The_Mystery_of_Consciousness

Verse and video

Romans 1:22 Claiming to be wise, they became fools, “It is because we, (as souls), have a faculty of (immaterial) mind that we are capable of having concepts, thoughts, beliefs,,, things like that.”,,, – J.P. Moreland – Is the Soul Immortal? https://youtu.be/QzbdT0GxAdk?t=209

bornagain77

Seversky at 100, Answer the question. Are living things actually designed? Yes or no. relatd

Bornagain77/96

Free will, and/or agent causality, in any real and meaningful sense, is simply completely incompatible with Atheistic Naturalism. And it is on free will, and/or agent causality, that Atheistic Naturalism, as a coherent worldview, is dealt a particularly nasty, and fatal, blow.

Atheism and naturalism are metaphysical positions on respectively the existence of gods and the nature of observable reality. There are a number of philosophies or worldviews which are compatible with either or both. How does denying the existence of the Christian God or holding "that reality is exhausted by nature, containing nothing “supernatural”, and that the scientific method should be used to investigate all areas of reality, including the “human spirit”" - to quote the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy - undermine free will?

Of course, Darwinian atheists resolutely deny that their denial of free will, and/or agent causality, is fatal for their worldview. But alas, denying what is right in front of them is mandatory if they are to maintain an atheistic worldview.

You do realize that, in order to maintain your absolutist notion of free will, you are forced to deny that we are contingent beings, that who and what we are was - and is - shaped by influences over which we have no control whatsoever?

For instance, studies have now established that the design inference is ‘knee jerk’ inference that is built into everyone, even including atheists, and that atheists themselves have to ‘mentally work’ suppressing their “knee jerk” design inference!

From Wikipedia

Pareidolia (/?pær??do?li?, ?p??r-/;[1] also US: /?p??ra?-/)[2] is the tendency for perception to impose a meaningful interpretation on a nebulous stimulus, usually visual, so that one sees an object, pattern, or meaning where there is none. Common examples are perceived images of animals, faces, or objects in cloud formations, seeing faces in inanimate objects, or lunar pareidolia like the Man in the Moon or the Moon rabbit. The concept of pareidolia may extend to include hidden messages in recorded music played in reverse or at higher- or lower-than-normal speeds, and hearing voices (mainly indistinct) or music in random noise, such as that produced by air conditioners or fans.[3][4]

If our built-in "pattern recognition" systems can produce false positives then how much more likely is it that our perception of apparent design is also unreliable?

It is very easy to see why Francis Crick in particular, co-discoverer of the DNA helix, would have to constantly suppress his innate design inference, DNA itself literally screams, “I AM INTELLIGENTLY DESIGNED” from every angle that you look at it.

It may scream it to those whose religious predispositions demand that there to be physical evidence for the existence of their preferred deity, not so much for those of us who do not share those beliefs. Seversky

Bornagain77

Free will, and/or agent causality, in any real and meaningful sense, is simply completely incompatible with Atheistic Naturalism.

Truth.

Of course, Darwinian atheists resolutely deny that their denial of free will, and/or agent causality, is fatal for their worldview. But alas, denying what is right in front of them is mandatory if they are to maintain an atheistic worldview.

At the very outset of rational inquiry, when one embarks on the search for the truth, when one aims to find & understand the truth, one should be aware of a few very obvious requirements in order to be successful. First, one must exist, because if one does not exist, one cannot find the truth. Second, one must have the ability to think & understand [one must control one’s thoughts], because if something else does the thinking and understanding, then one does not understand anything, much less the truth. Third, one must be free in conducting the search, because if something else steers one’s search, then one cannot conduct a search for the truth. - - - These requirements are sacred to those who search the Truth. Origenes

'You' tell em Seversky, not a word/thought in your entire post was written by 'you'. :) (assuming of course that 'you' really do exist as a real person and that 'you' are not just a 'neuronal illusion', and also assuming that 'you' have some capacity to write your thought down,, i.e. your thought that 'you' are not in control of your thoughts) :)

The Confidence of Jerry Coyne – Ross Douthat – January 6, 2014 Excerpt: But then halfway through this peroration, we have as an aside the confession (by Coyne) that yes, okay, it’s quite possible given materialist premises that “our sense of self is a neuronal illusion.” At which point the entire edifice suddenly looks terribly wobbly — because who, exactly, is doing all of this forging and shaping and purpose-creating if Jerry Coyne, as I understand him (and I assume he understands himself) quite possibly does not actually exist at all? The theme of his argument is the crucial importance of human agency under eliminative materialism, but if under materialist premises the actual agent is quite possibly a fiction, then who exactly is this I who “reads” and “learns” and “teaches,” and why in the universe’s name should my illusory self believe Coyne’s bold proclamation that his illusory self’s purposes are somehow “real” and worthy of devotion and pursuit? (Let alone that they’re morally significant: But more on that below.) Prometheus cannot be at once unbound and unreal; the human will cannot be simultaneously triumphant and imaginary. https://douthat.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/01/06/the-confidence-of-jerry-coyne/?mcubz=3 "Free will is an illusion so convincing that people simply refuse to believe that we don’t have it.,,," - Jerry Coyne

That statement by Coyne should literally be the number one example of a self-refuting statement that is given in philosophy/logic 101 classes.

I choose to hold that “I” exist —— to be clear, with “I” I refer to my consciousness, my viewpoint. I am the only one who has access to my “I”, put another way: no one but me can possibly have an informed opinion on this particular subject, therefor whatever I choose to believe about my “I” can only be my absolute responsibility, can only be the result of my fully self-determined choice. – – – – – – (1.) I do something. (2.) A thing that does not exist cannot do something —— from nothing nothing comes. From (1.) and (2.) (3.) I exist https://uncommondesc.wpengine.com/cosmology/from-iai-news-how-infinity-threatens-cosmology/#comment-766606

Verse:

Exodus 3:14 And God said unto Moses, I AM THAT I AM: and he said, Thus shalt thou say unto the children of Israel, I AM hath sent me unto you.

bornagain77

Again, what is meant by being in control of one's thoughts? The question implies that our conscious self is some sort of "controller"' that manipulates thoughts which are a separate entity under its control. That, in turn, seems to harken back to the concept of our conscious self being like a little homunculus sitting inside the brain watching the image presented to us by our senses. But how much control is our conscious self able to exert? For example, although we are aware of seeing the world around us, we are not aware of the considerable amount of processing the brain performs on the images gathered by our eyes. We are only aware of the final result. The same is true for our other senses. We are not aware of the work done by the brain making our heart beat. We are not aware of the work done by the brain controlling our breathing or managing our digestive system. We are not even fully in control of thoughts entering our conscious awareness from the unconscious regions of the mind. Thoughts, memories, sensations, ideas can pop into our minds apparently unbidden. What we do appear to have a measure of control over are what thoughts we focus on consciously a any given time, although that is far from the imaginary total control claimed to be possible by some here. Seversky

Free will, and/or agent causality, in any real and meaningful sense, is simply completely incompatible with Atheistic Naturalism. And it is on free will, and/or agent causality, that Atheistic Naturalism, as a coherent worldview, is dealt a particularly nasty, and fatal, blow. see posts 52 & 53 https://uncommondesc.wpengine.com/intelligent-design/at-evolution-news-for-darwinism-pregnancy-is-the-mother-of-all-chicken-and-egg-problems/#comment-771050 Of course, Darwinian atheists resolutely deny that their denial of free will, and/or agent causality, is fatal for their worldview. But alas, denying what is right in front of them is mandatory if they are to maintain an atheistic worldview. For instance, studies have now established that the design inference is ‘knee jerk’ inference that is built into everyone, even including atheists, and that atheists themselves have to 'mentally work' suppressing their “knee jerk” design inference! As the following study found, seeing design is intuitive whereas "religious non-belief is cognitively effortful."

Richard Dawkins take heed: Even atheists instinctively believe in a creator says study - Mary Papenfuss - June 12, 2015 Excerpt: Three studies at Boston University found that even among atheists, the "knee jerk" reaction to natural phenomenon is the belief that they're purposefully designed by some intelligence, according to a report on the research in Cognition entitled the "Divided Mind of a disbeliever." The findings "suggest that there is a deeply rooted natural tendency to view nature as designed," writes a research team led by Elisa Järnefelt of Newman University. They also provide evidence that, in the researchers' words, "religious non-belief is cognitively effortful." Researchers attempted to plug into the automatic or "default" human brain by showing subjects images of natural landscapes and things made by human beings, then requiring lightning-fast responses to the question on whether "any being purposefully made the thing in the picture," notes Pacific-Standard. "Religious participants' baseline tendency to endorse nature as purposefully created was higher" than that of atheists, the study found. But non-religious participants "increasingly defaulted to understanding natural phenomena as purposefully made" when "they did not have time to censor their thinking," wrote the researchers. The results suggest that "the tendency to construe both living and non-living nature as intentionally made derives from automatic cognitive processes, not just practised explicit beliefs," the report concluded. The results were similar even among subjects from Finland, where atheism is not a controversial issue as it can be in the US. "Design-based intuitions run deep," the researchers conclude, "persisting even in those with no explicit religious commitment and, indeed, even among those with an active aversion to them." http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/richard-dawkins-take-heed-even-atheists-instinctively-believe-creator-says-study-1505712 Is Atheism a Delusion? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Ii-bsrHB0o Design Thinking Is Hardwired in the Human Brain. How Come? - October 17, 2012 Excerpt: "Even Professional Scientists Are Compelled to See Purpose in Nature, Psychologists Find." The article describes a test by Boston University's psychology department, in which researchers found that "despite years of scientific training, even professional chemists, geologists, and physicists from major universities such as Harvard, MIT, and Yale cannot escape a deep-seated belief that natural phenomena exist for a purpose" ,,, Most interesting, though, are the questions begged by this research. One is whether it is even possible to purge teleology from explanation. http://www.evolutionnews.org/2012/10/design_thinking065381.html

i.e. It is not that Atheists do not see purpose and/or Design in nature and biology, it is that Atheists, for whatever severely misguided reason, live in denial of the purpose and/or Design that they themselves see in nature. And yes, ‘denialism’ is considered a mental illness.

"In the psychology of human behavior, denialism is a person's choice to deny reality, as a way to avoid a psychologically uncomfortable truth." - Denialism - Wikipedia

Perhaps the two most famous quotes of atheists suppressing their innate ‘design inference’ are the two following quotes:

“Yet the living results of natural selection overwhelmingly impress us with the appearance of design as if by a master watchmaker, impress us with the illusion of design and planning.” - Richard Dawkins – “The Blind Watchmaker” – 1986 – page 21 “Biologists must constantly keep in mind that what they see was not designed, but rather evolved. It might be thought, therefore, that evolutionary arguments would play a large part in guiding biological research, but this is far from the case” - Francis Crick – What Mad Pursuit - 1988

It is very easy to see why Francis Crick in particular, co-discoverer of the DNA helix, would have to constantly suppress his innate design inference, DNA itself literally screams, “I AM INTELLIGENTLY DESIGNED” from every angle that you look at it. https://uncommondesc.wpengine.com/intelligent-design/movie-night-with-illustra-a-whale-of-a-story-and-18-trillion-feet-of-you/#comment-745611

Romans 1:18-23 For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men who suppress the truth in unrighteousness, because that which is known about God is evident within them; for God made it evident to them. For since the creation of the world His invisible attributes, His eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly seen, being understood through what has been made, so that they are without excuse. For even though they knew God, they did not honor Him as God or give thanks, but they became futile in their speculations, and their foolish heart was darkened. Professing to be wise, they became fools, and exchanged the glory of the incorruptible God for an image in the form of corruptible man and of birds and four-footed animals and crawling creatures.

Of supplemental note:

Humans 'predisposed' to believe in gods and the afterlife - July 14, 2011 - University of Oxford Excerpt: A three-year international research project, directed by two academics at the University of Oxford, finds that humans have natural tendencies to believe in gods and an afterlife. The £1.9 million project involved 57 researchers who conducted over 40 separate studies in 20 countries representing a diverse range of cultures. The studies (both analytical and empirical) conclude that humans are predisposed to believe in gods and an afterlife,,, https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/07/110714103828.htm

bornagain77

Origenes: When I speak of being in control of one’s thoughts, I mean to say, that when we put in the effort, when we believe that it truly matters, we really are in control of our thoughts.

I would argue that when it really matters (to us) that is the time when you are not in control of your thoughts. If you were truly in control of your thoughts you should be able to think that pedophilia was good. Assuming that you are straight, you should be able to think that it would be really fun to have sex with someone of your own sex. You should be able to think that it is fine to steal or kill for your own gain. Sir Giles

To be clear about 'control.' My position is that rationality requires a person who is in control of his thoughts. If I understand Alan Fox correctly then he is saying that, at times, he loosens his control over his thoughts a bit and lets them wander off.

AF: I reflected on how, at any one moment, I choose what to think. I don’t believe I can choose. My thoughts rise unbidden.

Then again, I may very well be wrong about my interpretation of what Alan is writing here ... Anyway, I want to make the point that I too can, on occasion, engage in daydreaming and let my thoughts wander off somewhat unsupervised, so to speak. What I mean by being in control of one's thoughts, is that when we put in the effort, when we believe that it truly matters, we really are in control of our thoughts. So, I am not making the claim that we are in control "at any one moment." Origenes

So AF holds that the ‘niche”, not AF himself, is responsible for the information that he himself is writing in his posts?” AF at 68: “Yes, sort of, though I don’t know,,,,”

Ah, a goalpost move. Evolutionary changes over time contribute to what the human species are today. There are many aspects of how and what we are that are constrained by our evolutionary history. Our thinking processes are no exception. However, that has nothing to do with (hoe I understood) Origenes' question. I reflected on how, at any one moment, I choose what to think. I don't believe I can choose. My thoughts rise unbidden. Can I separate my thoughts from being me? On this perhaps Descartes was right. Cogito ergo sum Alan Fox

BA77: “So AF holds that the ‘niche”, not AF himself, is responsible for the information that he himself is writing in his posts?” AF at 68: “Yes, sort of, though I don’t know,,,,” Origenes: Does rationality require a person who is in control of his thoughts? PyrrhoManiac1: No, I don’t think so.

Game over.

(1) rationality implies a thinker in control of thoughts. (2) under materialism a thinker is an effect caused by processes in the brain (determinism). (3) in order for materialism to ground rationality a thinker (an effect) must control processes in the brain (a cause). (1)&(2) (4) no effect can control its cause. Therefore materialism cannot ground rationality. per Box UD

bornagain77

PM1 @88

I think I made it pretty clear that I regard myself (and most other people, with various caveats as appropriate) as having limited, partial control over what we say and do.

In the context of rationality, this is highly problematic. How does ‘limited, partial control over what you say and do’ not undercut any position you take? Including the position you express here, since it follows that you have limited, partial control over regarding yourself to have limited, partial control over what you say or do ….

I don’t think that control extends all the day down to what we think …

Utterly baffling. But you cannot help thinking this, because you have no control over what you think … PM1, by claiming that you have no control over your thoughts, you step outside of the realm of rationality.

... what we can do, of course, is decide what we’re doing to do with our thoughts: are we going to express them? If so, how? and to whom? and in what ways?

Utter nonsense. If you have no control over your thoughts, you obviously cannot have control over the thought process leading up to the decision concerning what to do with your thoughts.

Or are our thoughts inappropriate, silly, misguided, disrespectful, or even unethical? In those cases, are we going to simply suppress them?

More nonsense. Obviously, one needs to have control over one’s thoughts in order to make those decisions. Origenes

All I do is ask a straightforward question.

For shame, Origenes. There is a serious point as to whether we can or do control our own thoughts. First, we could try to establish the common ground. But shy away if you need to, discussing ideas can be a bit scary. Alan Fox

PM1 @, Giles @

Sir Giles: PM1, an excellent example of someone misrepresenting your view ... can be seen @84 above.

That's weird, in post @84 I make no attempt whatsoever to (mis)represent anyone's view. All I do is ask a straightforward question. Origenes

@84

Let us be very clear here. Are you the one who gave arguments? Are you the one who thinks? IOW are you the one who is in control? Or is something else, other than you, in control?

I think I made it pretty clear that I regard myself (and most other people, with various caveats as appropriate) as having limited, partial control over what we say and do. I don't think that control extends all the day down to what we think -- what we can do, of course, is decide what we're doing to do with our thoughts: are we going to express them? If so, how? and to whom? and in what ways? Or are our thoughts inappropriate, silly, misguided, disrespectful, or even unethical? In those cases, are we going to simply suppress them? Or will we engage in further self-analysis about what is causing those thoughts, so as to weaken their influence? PyrrhoManiac1

PM1, an excellent example of someone misrepresenting your view in a childish ploy to justify dismissing your view rather than honestly addressing it can be seen @84 above. Sir Giles

PM1@85, a sure sign that they have no cogent response to the logic of your argument is when they start their response with “Whatever” and then paste thousands of words from others’ non relevant articles. Or when they accuse you of having some ulterior motive for disagreeing, as if wishing to have an honest discussion isn’t motive enough, and then claiming that this justifies casting doubt on anything you have to say. Oh well, if nothing else, it is entertaining to watch them dance. :) Sir Giles

@82

PM1@82, you are wasting your time if you are expecting an honest and fair discussion here. With few exceptions, those who comment here simply misrepresent opposing views, or never make an attempt to understand them, raise strawmen based on these misrepresented interpretations, apply a label to you and then feel justified in dismissing everything you say. Regardless of the logic of your argument. Hence the childish use of terms like “meat robot”.

I reluctantly agree. Most of the people here have no interest in fair and honest discussion, because they are believe that their view is the only rational view, and that therefore anyone who disagrees with them must be in conflict with reason itself. It does not and cannot occur to them that it is they who are in conflict with reason itself, because it is they who refuse to engage in fair and honest discussion. Well, at least I tried. PyrrhoManiac1

PM1

I gave arguments for why I think that the concept of control ....

Let us be very clear here. Are you the one who gave arguments? Are you the one who thinks? IOW are you the one who is in control? Or is something else, other than you, in control? Origenes

PM1@82, you are wasting your time if you are expecting an honest and fair discussion here. With few exceptions, those who comment here simply misrepresent opposing views, or never make an attempt to understand them, raise strawmen based on these misrepresented interpretations, apply a label to you and then feel justified in dismissing everything you say. Regardless of the logic of your argument. Hence the childish use of terms like “meat robot”, “fellow travellers”, “your ilk”. Another common approach is to start every response to a comment that opposes their deeply held world view (faith) with dismissive accusations. Things like “strawman”, “red herring”, “turnabout projection”, “ad hominem attack”, etc. People who do this are not interested in a fair and open discussion. They are just interested in sermonizing to and belittling those who have views different than they have. Sir Giles

@81

There is simply no rational way forward once someone claims that he does not exist or is not in control of his thoughts. Everything that follows after such has to be absurd; in particular, an expose of the reasons by a nonexistent person or a person who has no control of his thoughts.

I gave arguments for why I think that the concept of control is not the right concept to use here. If you refuse to engage with me because of that, it's not because I have failed to give reasons for my views. I'm acting exactly as a rational being does: giving reasons for my commitments and asking for your reasons for yours. If you decide that this is insufficient for continued discussion, that's an irrational decision on your part. But, if you want to be irrational, by all means, be my guest. I've demonstrated my commitment to rational discourse and I've demonstrated why rationality and naturalism are fully consistent. If you simply refuse to be convinced and refuse to give reasons for why you aren't convinced, that's your own irrational intransigence. Against such stubbornness there is no argument. PyrrhoManiac1

PyrrhoManiac1, some positions are unacceptable in the context of rational debate—the title "The Thought that Stops Thought" was well chosen by Caspian. There is simply no rational way forward once someone claims that he does not exist and/or is not in control of his thoughts. Everything that follows has to be utterly absurd; in particular, an expose of the reasons by a nonexistent person or 'by' a person who has no control of his thoughts. - - - - - Bornagain, 'no meaning', well yes, of course, how could thoughts have meaning? As Rosenberg has pointed out repeatedly thoughts aren’t about anything. Origenes

Origenes, methinks the meat robot, referred to as PM1, and through no will of its own, "doth protest too much". bornagain77

@78 It is, however, simply false that "if naturalism is true, no sentence has meaning". So the 'argument from meaning' is valid, but it is not sound, since it relies on a false premise. The real problem is that Craig is arguing against Rosenberg's version of naturalism. To be sure, Rosenberg's view has a lot of serious problems, and I'm not going to defend it in any way. But Craig's mistake is to think that he has refuted metaphysical naturalism as such rather than just refuting Rosenberg's specific version of it. Rosenberg has, I think, done us a major disservice by articulating a version of metaphysical naturalism that is so extreme and so badly reasoned that it ends up making all of metaphysical naturalism look bad. For far more coherent versions of metaphysical naturalism that are not vulnerable to Craig's objections to Rosenberg, I recommend Life After Faith (for an explanation of secular humanism) and Incomplete Nature (for an explanation of how to naturalize intentionality and meaning, which is exactly what Rosenberg denies can be done). PyrrhoManiac1

Origenes, you are under the false impression that words are actually suppose to mean something when a Darwinist says them. But alas, under atheism, meaning is only an illusion. Their words are as meaningless, and make as much logical sense, as the burbling and wheezing sounds of rotting meat, (and, I might add, their words, logically speaking, have very much the same putrid odor of rotting meant) :)

2.) The argument from meaning 1. If naturalism is true, no sentence has any meaning. 2. Premise (1) has meaning. 3. Therefore naturalism is not true. - Is Metaphysical Naturalism Viable? - William Lane Craig - video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HzS_CQnmoLQ

bornagain77

@76 Are you cognizant of the difference between answering a question in the negative and giving reasons for rejecting the question? PyrrhoManiac1

Alan Fox and PyrrhoManiac1 hold that they are not in control of their ‘own’ thoughts.

PyrrhoManiac1: None of this resembles anything that I said, nor is it implied by what I did say.

... Yesterday, in another thread, the following exchange:

Origenes: Does rationality require a person who is in control of his thoughts?

PyrrhoManiac1: No, I don’t think so.

- - - -

Alan Fox: What does “in control of one’s own thoughts” even mean?

LOL Origenes

Origenes: "Perhaps the most baffling aspect to all of it is their total unawareness of any problem with their situation." And right on cue, the Darwinbots, via bleeps, gurgles, and various squeaks, that bear an uncanny resemblance to meaningful human language, immediately display "their total unawareness of any problem with their situation." :) bornagain77

@72

Alan Fox and PyrrhoManiac1 hold that they are not in control of their ‘own’ thoughts. They are disengaged bystanders to their ‘own’ internal theater. Thoughts concocted by some unknown source (niche?), beyond their control, are forming in their heads and they are simply powerless to intervene. Things are really bad, they continually say and do stuff—or rather things are being said and done—, without them even being consulted. Perhaps the most baffling aspect to all of it is their total unawareness of any problem with their situation.

None of this resembles anything that I said, nor is it implied by what I did say. If it is implied, one would need to demonstrate the implication and not merely insinuate it. PyrrhoManiac1

Alan Fox and PyrrhoManiac1 hold that they are not in control of their ‘own’ thoughts.

Where have I asserted that? Where has PM1 asserted that? What does "in control of one's own thoughts" even mean? And once we decide, we are, as always, in the same boat. As PM1 has already noted, folks are very fond of loaded "gotcha" questions while being utterly unable to come up with answers to these questions themselves. Frankly, Origenes, you disappoint me. Alan Fox

Bornagain @69 Alan Fox and PyrrhoManiac1 hold that they are not in control of their 'own' thoughts. They are disengaged bystanders to their 'own' internal theater. Thoughts concocted by some unknown source (niche?), beyond their control, are forming in their heads and they are simply powerless to intervene. Things are really bad, they continually say and do stuff—or rather things are being said and done—, without them even being consulted. Perhaps the most baffling aspect to all of it is their total unawareness of any problem with their situation. Origenes

The current mountain of evidence overwhelmingly supports the the ideas of common descent and change over time

ID agrees. Though what one means by common descent is up for grabs. If one means that all life descended from a common ancestor naturally, that is nonsense. There is zero proof of that. So ID being science+ cannot accept that. If one means that all life has a common genetic code, then that is fairly well established. A couple of exceptions. The expression “overwhelmingly supports” doesn’t have any basis in actual proof. It means one can speculate and then present that as proof. For example, niches and small changes just don’t get it done. So speculation there is fruitless. Niches overwhelmingly frustrates common descent by natural means. The fact that anyone would propose it, is proof that there is no proof. It’s desperation. jerry

...why on God’s green earth should I, or anyone else, pay any attention whatsoever to your posts?

You don't pay attention. The bulk of what you post allegedly in response to me are non sequiturs, irrelevancies, and (if I'm lucky) strawman misrepresentations of what I write. Alan Fox

BA77: "So AF holds that the ‘niche”, not AF himself, is responsible for the information that he himself is writing in his posts?" AF: "Yes, sort of, though I don’t know,,,," So AF, if you yourself are not actually responsible for what you are writing in your posts, why on God's green earth should I, or anyone else, pay any attention whatsoever to your posts? By your own admission, you are not responsible for what you are saying/writing. We might as well debate a brick wall for all the good it would do, since you yourself, by your own admission, are not actually responsible for what you are saying. bornagain77

So AF holds that the ‘niche”, not AF himself, is responsible for the information that he himself is writing in his posts?

Yes, sort of, though I don't know, as I said. The current mountain of evidence overwhelmingly supports the the ideas of common descent and change over time. Why there is a universe and why there are humans has not been answered yet.

And he says that as if that is suppose to make any logical sense?

I report, you decide. For yourself, of course. God forbid you are ever in a position of authority over anyone else. To reassure lurkers here, I have no and seek no authority over others' lives. Live and let live. Alan Fox

as to:

AF: How does Intelligent Design work? You forgot that bit.” BA77: AF keeps saying that as if that is supposed to make logical sense. AF apparently does not realize that if ID does not have a plausible ‘causal mechanism’ in which to explain the information in life, well then, AF is also left without a plausible ‘causal mechanism’ to explain the information he himself is writing in his posts. AF: But evolution has a causal mechanism. I have mentioned it many times. The niche.,,,

So AF holds that the 'niche'', not AF himself, is responsible for the information that he himself is writing in his posts? And he says that as if that is suppose to make any logical sense? Again, the denial of agent causality, and/or free will, as a legitimate form of causation by Atheistic Naturalists, is the primary, and fatal flaw, in their worldview.

“Information does not magically materialize. It can be created by intelligence or it can be shunted around by natural forces. But natural forces, and Darwinian processes in particular, do not create information.” - William Dembski

bornagain77

Thanks, Origenes. I would have missed this had you not quoted BA77.

AF keeps saying that as if that is supposed to make logical sense. AF apparently does not realize that if ID does not have a plausible ‘causal mechanism’ in which to explain the information in life, well then, AF is also left without a plausible ‘causal mechanism’ to explain the information he himself is writing in his posts.

But evolution has a causal mechanism. I have mentioned it many times. The niche. I'll point out again that I don't know but I can't rule out a Creator of the Universe who would then be the cause of everything. So evolution has the niche environment and a mechanism to explain observed change over time. "Intelligent Design" has? Alan Fox

Ba77, It is worth repeating that here, science is ultimately not the most important issue. It is worldview. On one side there are atheist materialists who are very sensitive to any mention of God here. They are quick to bring in deism or a non-personal God. Why is that? And your detailed posts need to be here. Lurkers and casual readers on this site are meant to be distracted by posts by atheist materialists. They want their worldview to be true regardless of what you post. Or posts made in support of things you've mentioned. The atheist materialists stand on one side of a chasm of infinite depth. There is a way for them to cross over to the theist position. To the ID position, but they cannot bring themselves to do it. Regardless of any apparent intelligence they possess, they must defend evolution/Darwinism. No matter how irrational that is. Regardless of the evidence showing that it is. 2 Timothy 3:7 "always learning and never able to arrive at a knowledge of the truth." John 3:19 "And this is the judgment: the light has come into the world, and people loved the darkness rather than the light because their works were evil." relatd

Bornagain Thank you for your excellent posts such as #52 and #53. In particular I fully enjoyed the following takedown of Alan Fox:

AF: How does Intelligent Design work? You forgot that bit.”

AF keeps saying that as if that is supposed to make logical sense. AF apparently does not realize that if ID does not have a plausible ‘causal mechanism’ in which to explain the information in life, well then, AF is also left without a plausible ‘causal mechanism’ to explain the information he himself is writing in his posts. And in my honest opinion, this denial of agent causality, and/or free will, as a legitimate form of causation is the primary, and fatal, flaw in the Darwinist’s materialistic account of nature.

Origenes

CD at 61, Answer the question. Is life actually designed? Yes or no. relatd

ID adds nothing to the findings of science

Absolute nonsense. When every scientist around is hawking Darwin as one of the great scientists in history, the purveyors of science are in a sense bankrupt. If they are completely lacking in integrity on this, where else are they also empty suits. As I said ID is science+ . It cannot afford to be wrong. It obvious that modern science is intellectually deficient.

Meyer’s “hypothesis” is anemic at best, and useless in “proving” Christianity.

More nonsense. Meyer’s work is absolutely accurate and very complete as far as I can see so it is the opposite of anemic. It certainly isn’t useless in proving there is a creator which is a major step in accepting a specific religion. Why do you make stuff up? It’s embarrassing for any adult to do so to prove a bogus point. ID has more coherence that modern science.

The key component of deism, however, is its rejection of revealed knowledge or truth and miracles (the hallmark of a personal God)

Then take up your advocacy some place else. This site is not for the discussion of a particular religion. I’m sure you can find lots of Christian/Jewish/Muslim sites that will be better fodder for you.

needed was one shot,

True, but why create conscious and intelligent entities? That says something about the purpose of the creation. One has to be incredibly naive to not believe the creator knew exactly what these entities would think. So how can one argue that this creator had no interest in the creation. A very strange creator don’t you think?

not needless and repetitious tinkering with the ghosts in the machine

There may be a reason for this. There may not have been any tinkering. Especially if it was planned. Whatever changes were made were conscious, planned and chosen. May the answer is in exploring that? jerry

Jerry/60 To say something is "compatible with ID" is an empty statement, because ID can be made compatible with anything, even atheism, if you believe some of the more bizarre commentators on this blog. However, ID adds nothing to the findings of science. Meyer clearly rejects, along with atheism, pantheism and deism, as inconsistent with his "evidence." He has confirmed this position over and over ad nauseum in his book-hawking interviews and podcasts. To his credit, he agreed in an interview with Frank Turek that his "hypothesis" only gets you to theism, not Christianity which requires "augmentation" by faith in scripture. Thus, Meyer's "hypothesis" is anemic at best, and useless in "proving" Christianity. Finally, deism doesn't necessarily imply a "disinterested" God but rather, rejects the idea of a "personal" God. The key component of deism, however, is its rejection of revealed knowledge or truth and miracles (the hallmark of a personal God). It is no more "nonsensical" than theism. In fact, it is more parsimonious and more in keeping with a creator powerful enough to bring the universe into existence. All he/she/it needed was one shot, not needless and repetitious tinkering with the ghosts in the machine.... chuckdarwin

So, are we to understand that deism and theism are equally plausible

I didn’t say that. Everything I said supports a creator that had very specific interest in the creation and orchestrated life and its progression. It all points to a plan, not disinterest. The deist interpretation is nonsense based on these scientific findings of OOL, complex life, consciousness and human nature itself. Some conspicuous choices by the creator no matter when they were made.

ID scheme

I’m not aware of an ID scheme. I am aware of an attempt to make sense of our world based on science and logic. Thus, ID is science+ Aside: Meyer’s book does not point to any specific religion, only to a creator that he calls God. Hence, God Hypothesis. Christianity is barely mentioned in his book. When it is, it mainly with the rise of science. Aside2: genetics which now contains epigenetics is completely compatible with ID. Thus, my recommendation of Darwin’s finches as appropriate mascots for ID. Since any changes in them is due to genetics.       Let’s Go Finches jerry

Jerry/58 So, are we to understand that deism and theism are equally plausible (contra Meyer's God Hypothesis ruling out deism) explanations for the universe and life within the ID scheme? chuckdarwin

ID supports 99.999+% of scientific findings. All ID says is that at some time in the history of the universe, that some intelligence interfered in the basic laws of physics that were originally created. Whether it be the standard model or some other current version. It could have been at the beginning by setting up boundary conditions that led not only to the fine tuning of the universe and our solar system but also led to life and complex life. We have no idea of how these boundary conditions were implemented and if they were only implemented at the creation event. Or the creator could have acted later after the creation to implement life and complex life. What we do know is that the current laws of physics as we know them does not allow for OOL or complex life to arise once life began. This has led many to speculate that the creator intervened at specific times to allow life and complex life to arise. Is part of the message the creator left is that special events had to happen. And this led to what we see in the universe? Some religions have argued not only that these events happened after the creation event but have been ongoing since the beginning of the universe. None of these events which must counter act the laws of physics mean that the laws of physics are not still foremost except for some rare occurrences. To preclude that an intelligence existed when the fine tuning of the universe screams design seems ludicrous. But that's what we speculate about. We will probably never know the exact truth and is this by design? To argue that there was some emergent events just begs the question as most science on life and Evolution does. Emergence just transfers the event from gradual accumulation to some magical event. If either was science then there should be a forensic trail or the ability to repeat the emergent events. Aside: if emergent events were the cause of life and complex life, where did this power to cause the emergence come from? Is it in the laws of physics? If so, is it then due to the creator of the laws of physics? If so, how is this different from the creator implementing OOL and after that implementing complex life and consciousness? jerry

"Lewontin is objecting only to a very specific conception of God — one that even most people of faith would reject." Most people of faith would reject that 'miracles may happen'? bornagain77

@38

The worldview precedes the scientific theory. Remember Lewontin. The commitment to materialism is absolute, for a Divine foot cannot be allowed in the door.

I think this quote is often misinterpreted, and while my remarks will fall mostly on deaf ears, I live in hope that at the least the truth will be where it belongs. The fuller quote is

. Moreover, that materialism is absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door. The eminent Kant scholar Lewis Beck used to say that anyone who could believe in God could believe in anything. To appeal to an omnipotent deity is to allow that at any moment the regularities of nature may be ruptured, that miracles may happen.

This indicates pretty clearly that by materialism, Lewontin means the a priori commitment to causal regularity. It means assuming that God will not tweak the causal structure of the universe so that the results of an experiment are different from what they would have otherwise been. In metaphysical terms, it means that science requires an a priori rejection of occasionalism. (I have heard it said that the rise of occasionalism in Islamic theology led to the demise of Islamic science, but I have not corroborated this claim for myself.) Nothing in his conception of materialism entails that God is not the author and guarantor of the causal order -- all that it rules out is the possibility that God might, at any time, interfere in an experiment or observation for reasons known only to Him and inscrutable to us. It is true that as a Marxist, Lewontin had political objections to organized religion, but with regard to his philosophy of science, Lewontin is objecting only to a very specific conception of God -- one that even most people of faith would reject. PyrrhoManiac1

AD/38 You lost me at "Divine"...... chuckdarwin

AF/46 Yes, "a more recent" common ancestor. Thanks for the catch. My old brain ain't what it used to be...... :-) chuckdarwin

And indeed the Atheist’s denial of free will does not ‘reflect reality as it really is’. Neuroscience itself, despite the atheist’s constant denial to the contrary, shows that we do indeed have free will,

Michael Egnor Shows You’re Not A Meat Robot (Science Uprising EP2) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rQo6SWjwQIk Michael Egnor: Is free will a dangerous myth? – October 6, 2018 Excerpt: 4.,,, the neuroscientific evidence unequivocally supports the existence of free will. The first neuroscientist to map the brains of conscious subjects, Wilder Penfield, noted that there is an immaterial power of volition in the human mind that he could not stimulate with electrodes. The pioneer in the neuroscience of free will was Benjamin Libet, who demonstrated clearly that, while there is an unconscious material predisposition to acts as shown by electrical brain activity, we retain an immaterial “free won’t,” which is the ability to veto an unconscious urge to act. Many experiments have followed on Libet’s work, most of which use fMRI imaging of brain activity. They all confirm Libet’s observations by showing what is at most a loose correlation between brain activity and volition (for example, nearly half the time the brain activity that precedes the act is on the wrong side of the brain for the activity to determine the will)—the looseness of correlation being best explained as evidence for libertarian free will. Modern neuroscience clearly demonstrates an immaterial component to volition. Harari is wrong about free will. It is not a myth. Free will is a real and fundamental aspect of being human, and the denial of free will is junk science and self-refuting logical nonsense. https://mindmatters.ai/2018/10/is-free-will-a-dangerous-myth/

In further demonstrating that the atheist’s denial of the reality of free will does not “reflect reality as it really is’, in quantum mechanics we also now find that, via their free will, “humans are brought into the laws of nature at the most fundamental level.,,,”

The Trouble with Quantum Mechanics – Steven Weinberg – January 19, 2017 Excerpt: The instrumentalist approach,, (the) wave function,, is merely an instrument that provides predictions of the probabilities of various outcomes when measurements are made.,, In the instrumentalist approach,,, humans are brought into the laws of nature at the most fundamental level. According to Eugene Wigner, a pioneer of quantum mechanics, “it was not possible to formulate the laws of quantum mechanics in a fully consistent way without reference to the consciousness.”11 Thus the instrumentalist approach turns its back on a vision that became possible after Darwin, of a world governed by impersonal physical laws that control human behavior along with everything else. It is not that we object to thinking about humans. Rather, we want to understand the relation of humans to nature, not just assuming the character of this relation by incorporating it in what we suppose are nature’s fundamental laws, but rather by deduction from laws that make no explicit reference to humans. We may in the end have to give up this goal,,, Some physicists who adopt an instrumentalist approach argue that the probabilities we infer from the wave function are objective probabilities, independent of whether humans are making a measurement. I don’t find this tenable. In quantum mechanics these probabilities do not exist until people choose what to measure, such as the spin in one or another direction. Unlike the case of classical physics, a choice must be made,,, http://quantum.phys.unm.edu/466-17/QuantumMechanicsWeinberg.pdf Cosmic Bell Test Using Random Measurement Settings from High-Redshift Quasars – Anton Zeilinger – 14 June 2018 Excerpt: This experiment pushes back to at least approx. 7.8 Gyr ago the most recent time by which any local-realist influences could have exploited the “freedom-of-choice” loophole to engineer the observed Bell violation, excluding any such mechanism from 96% of the space-time volume of the past light cone of our experiment, extending from the big bang to today. https://journals.aps.org/prl/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevLett.121.080403

As newly minted Nobel Laureate Anton Zeilinger stated, “what we perceive as reality now depends on our earlier decision what to measure. Which is a very, very, deep message about the nature of reality and our part in the whole universe. We are not just passive observers.”

“The Kochen-Speckter Theorem talks about properties of one system only. So we know that we cannot assume – to put it precisely, we know that it is wrong to assume that the features of a system, which we observe in a measurement exist prior to measurement. Not always. I mean in certain cases. So in a sense, what we perceive as reality now depends on our earlier decision what to measure. Which is a very, very, deep message about the nature of reality and our part in the whole universe. We are not just passive observers.” – Anton Zeilinger – Quantum Physics Debunks Materialism – video (7:17 minute mark) https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=4C5pq7W5yRM#t=437

Moreover, advances in quantum information theory, as well as the experimental realization of the Maxwell demon thought experiment, have now shown that intelligent agents do indeed have the capacity within themselves, the 'causal power', to 'thermodynamically' move a system 'uphill' towards life,

Nov. 2022 - it is now experimentally proven, (via advances in quantum information theory, and the experimental realization of the Maxwell demon thought experiment), immaterial information has a ‘thermodynamic content’, and that an immaterial mind has the capacity to infuse ‘thermodynamically meaningful’ immaterial information into a system in order move a system toward lower entropy and higher energy i.e. toward life. https://uncommondesc.wpengine.com/intelligent-design/from-evolution-news-prigogines-self-organization-vs-specified-biological-complexity/#comment-770929

Moreover, when we rightly allow the Agent causality of God ‘back’ into physics, (as the Christian founders of modern science originally held with the presupposition of ‘contingency’), and as quantum mechanics itself now empirically demands with the closing of the “freedom-of-choice” loophole by Anton Zeilinger and company), then rightly allowing the Agent causality of God ‘back’ into physics provides us with a very plausible resolution for the much sought after ‘theory of everything’ in that Christ’s resurrection from the dead bridges the infinite mathematical divide that exists between General Relativity and Quantum Mechanics and provides us with an empirically backed reconciliation, via the Shroud of Turin, between Quantum Mechanics and General Relativity into the much sought after ‘Theory of Everything”

Oct. 2022 – And although there will never be a purely mathematical ‘theory of everything’ that bridges the infinite mathematical divide that exists between quantum mechanics and general relativity, all hope is not lost in finding the correct ‘theory if everything’.,,,, https://uncommondesc.wpengine.com/cosmology/from-iai-news-how-infinity-threatens-cosmology/#comment-766384

Verse:

Colossians 1:15-20 The Son is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn over all creation. For in him all things were created: things in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or powers or rulers or authorities; all things have been created through him and for him. He is before all things, and in him all things hold together. And he is the head of the body, the church; he is the beginning and the firstborn from among the dead, so that in everything he might have the supremacy. For God was pleased to have all his fullness dwell in him, and through him to reconcile to himself all things, whether things on earth or things in heaven, by making peace through his blood, shed on the cross.

All in all, when we rightly, (and sanely I might add), recognize agent causality as legitimate form of causation in science, the many outstanding, seemingly irresolvable, problems in science find ready solutions. Whereas, on the other hand, denying the reality of agent causation as a legitimate form of causation in science creates situations where, as George Ellis pointed out, "we will have instances of uncaused changes in the world; I presume we wish to avoid that situation.,,,"

Recognising Top-Down Causation - George Ellis Excerpt: Causation: The nature of causation is highly contested territory, and I will take a pragmatic view: Definition 1: Causal Effect If making a change in a quantity X results in a reliable demonstrable change in a quantity Y in a given context, then X has a causal effect on Y. Example: I press the key labelled “A” on my computer keyboard; the letter “A” appears on my computer screen.,,, Definition 2: Existence If Y is a physical entity made up of ordinary matter, and X is some kind of entity that has a demonstrable causal effect on Y as per Definition 1, then we must acknowledge that X also exists (even if it is not made up of such matter). This is clearly a sensible and testable criterion; in the example above, it leads to the conclusion that both the data and the relevant software exist. If we do not adopt this definition, we will have instances of uncaused changes in the world; I presume we wish to avoid that situation.,,, Excerpt: page 5: A: Both the program and the data are non-physical entities, indeed so is all software. A program is not a physical thing you can point to, but by Definition 2 it certainly exists. You can point to a CD or flashdrive where it is stored, but that is not the thing in itself: it is a medium in which it is stored. The program itself is an abstract entity, shaped by abstract logic. Is the software “nothing but” its realisation through a specific set of stored electronic states in the computer memory banks? No it is not because it is the precise pattern in those states that matters: a higher level relation that is not apparent at the scale of the electrons themselves. It’s a relational thing (and if you get the relations between the symbols wrong, so you have a syntax error, it will all come to a grinding halt). This abstract nature of software is realised in the concept of virtual machines, which occur at every level in the computer hierarchy except the bottom one [17]. But this tower of virtual machines causes physical effects in the real world, for example when a computer controls a robot in an assembly line to create physical artefacts. Excerpt page 7:,,, The mind is not a physical entity, but it certainly is causally effective: proof is the existence of the computer on which you are reading this text. It could not exist if it had not been designed and manufactured according to someone’s plans, thereby proving the causal efficacy of thoughts, which like computer programs and data are not physical entities. https://arxiv.org/pdf/1212.2275.pdf

In short, and in conclusion, the denial of agent causality, and/or free will, as a legitimate form of causation by Atheistic Naturalists, is the primary, and fatal flaw, in their worldview. bornagain77

AF at 48: "I made an exception and glanced at rather than scrolled through your comment 40." I guess I'm suppose to be honored that AF has graciously humbled himself, and slowed down enough, to at least 'glance' at my post and spit on it ??? Oh well,,, Anyways AF continues: "It’s a mish-mash of scoffing at evolutionary strawmen. Where’s the beef? How does Intelligent Design work? You forgot that bit." AF keeps saying that as if that is suppose to make logical sense. AF apparently does not realize that if ID does not have a plausible 'causal mechanism' in which to explain the information in life, well then, AF is also left without a plausible 'causal mechanism' to explain the information he himself is writing in his posts. And in my honest opinion, this denial of agent causality, and/or free will, as a legitimate form of causation is the primary, and fatal, flaw in the Darwinist's materialistic account of nature. In their denial of free will, and/or agent causality, the Darwinist is simply left floating in mid-air without any plausible explanation as to how the words on his computer screen might 'magically' appear as he is writing them,

Do You Like SETI? Fine, Then Let’s Dump Methodological Naturalism Paul Nelson – September 24, 2014 Excerpt: Epistemology — how we know — and ontology — what exists — are both affected by methodological naturalism. If we say, “We cannot know that a mind caused x,” laying down an epistemological boundary defined by MN, then our ontology comprising real causes for x won’t include minds. MN entails an ontology in which minds are the consequence of physics, and thus, can only be placeholders for a more detailed causal account in which physics is the only (ultimate) actor. You didn’t write your email to me. Physics did, and informed you of that event after the fact. “That’s crazy,” you reply, “I certainly did write my email.” Okay, then — to what does the pronoun “I” in that sentence refer? Your personal agency; your mind. Are you supernatural?,,,, You are certainly an intelligent cause, however, and your intelligence does not collapse into physics. (If it does collapse — i.e., can be reduced without explanatory loss — we haven’t the faintest idea how, which amounts to the same thing.) To explain the effects you bring about in the world — such as your email, a real pattern — we must refer to you as a unique agent. https://evolutionnews.org/2014/09/do_you_like_set/

Indeed, in his denial of free will, and/or his denial of agent causality, the Darwinist, (instead of being 'scientific' as he adamantly insist he is doing), actually reveals that he does not have nearly as good of a grasp on the actual ’cause and effect’ relationships of reality as he seems to believe that he has,

A Professor’s Journey out of Nihilism: Why I am not an Atheist – University of Wyoming – J. Budziszewski “There were two great holes in the argument about the irrelevance of God. The first is that in order to attack free will, I supposed that I understood cause and effect; I supposed causation to be less mysterious than volition.,,, ,,, To call the equations of gravity “laws” and speak of the apple as “obeying” them is to speak as though, like the traffic laws, the “laws” of gravity are addressed to rational agents capable of conforming their wills to the command. This is cheating, because it makes mechanical causality (the more opaque of the two phenomena) seem like volition (the less). In my own way of thinking the cheating was even graver, because I attacked the less opaque in the name of the more. The other hole in my reasoning was cruder. If my imprisonment in a blind causality made my reasoning so unreliable that I couldn’t trust my beliefs, then by the same token I shouldn’t have trusted my beliefs about imprisonment in a blind causality. But in that case I had no business denying free will in the first place.” – J. Budziszewski – above quote taken at the 34:30 minute mark of the following lecture https://soundcloud.com/thomisticinstitute/atheism-to-catholicism-a-professors-journey-out-of-nihilism-prof-j-budziszewski

To clearly demonstrate just how unscientific the Darwinist's denial of agent causality, and/or, free will actually is, “if Einstein did not have free will in some meaningful sense, then he could not have been responsible for the theory of relativity – it would have been a product of lower level processes but not of an intelligent mind choosing between possible options.”

Physicist George Ellis on the importance of philosophy and free will – July 27, 2014 Excerpt: And free will?: Horgan: Einstein, in the following quote, seemed to doubt free will: “If the moon, in the act of completing its eternal way around the Earth, were gifted with self-consciousness, it would feel thoroughly convinced that it was traveling its way of its own accord…. So would a Being, endowed with higher insight and more perfect intelligence, watching man and his doings, smile about man’s illusion that he was acting according to his own free will.” Do you believe in free will? Ellis: Yes. Einstein is perpetuating the belief that all causation is bottom up. This simply is not the case, as I can demonstrate with many examples from sociology, neuroscience, physiology, epigenetics, engineering, and physics. Furthermore if Einstein did not have free will in some meaningful sense, then he could not have been responsible for the theory of relativity – it would have been a product of lower level processes but not of an intelligent mind choosing between possible options. I find it very hard to believe this to be the case – indeed it does not seem to make any sense. Physicists should pay attention to Aristotle’s four forms of causation – if they have the free will to decide what they are doing. If they don’t, then why waste time talking to them? They are then not responsible for what they say. https://uncommondesc.wpengine.com/intelligent-design/physicist-george-ellis-on-the-importance-of-philosophy-and-free-will/

Moreover, (as if that was not bad enough), in their denial of reality of free will, Darwinian atheists have also forsaken any claim that they are making, and/or that they are even capable of making, logically coherent arguments,,

The Medial Pre-Frontal Cortex Did It: Sam Harris’s Free Will Martin Cothran – November 9, 2012 Excerpt: There is something ironic about the position of thinkers like Harris on issues like this: they claim that their position is the result of the irresistible necessity of logic (in fact, they pride themselves on their logic). Their belief is the consequent, in a ground/consequent relation between their evidence and their conclusion. But their very stated position is that any mental state — including their position on this issue — is the effect of a physical, not logical cause. By their own logic, it isn’t logic that demands their assent to the claim that free will is an illusion, but the prior chemical state of their brains. The only condition under which we could possibly find their argument convincing is if they are not true. The claim that free will is an illusion requires the possibility that minds have the freedom to assent to a logical argument, a freedom denied by the claim itself. It is an assent that must, in order to remain logical and not physiological, presume a perspective outside the physical order. ,,, If prior physical states are all that determine our beliefs, any one physical state is no more rational than any other. It isn’t rational or irrational, it just is. https://evolutionnews.org/2012/11/sam_harriss_fre/ “It seems to me immensely unlikely that mind is a mere by-product of matter. For if my mental processes are determined wholly by the motions of atoms in my brain I have no reason to suppose that my beliefs are true. They may be sound chemically, but that does not make them sound logically. And hence I have no reason for supposing my brain to be composed of atoms. In order to escape from this necessity of sawing away the branch on which I am sitting, so to speak, I am compelled to believe that mind is not wholly conditioned by matter.” – J.B.S. Haldane – “When I am dead,” in Possible Worlds: And Other Essays [1927], “Supposing there was no intelligence behind the universe, no creative mind. In that case, nobody designed my brain for the purpose of thinking. It is merely that when the atoms inside my skull happen, for physical or chemical reasons, to arrange themselves in a certain way, this gives me, as a by-product, the sensation I call thought. But, if so, how can I trust my own thinking to be true? It’s like upsetting a milk jug and hoping that the way it splashes itself will give you a map of London. But if I can’t trust my own thinking, of course I can’t trust the arguments leading to Atheism, and therefore have no reason to be an Atheist, or anything else. Unless I believe in God, I cannot believe in thought: so I can never use thought to disbelieve in God.” – C.S. Lewis

Moreover, as if that was not bad enough, nobody lives their life as if they do not have free will,

The Heretic – Who is Thomas Nagel and why are so many of his fellow academics condemning him? – March 25, 2013 Excerpt: ,,,Fortunately, materialism is never translated into life as it’s lived. As colleagues and friends, husbands and mothers, wives and fathers, sons and daughters, materialists never put their money where their mouth is. Nobody thinks his daughter is just molecules in motion and nothing but; nobody thinks the Holocaust was evil, but only in a relative, provisional sense. A materialist who lived his life according to his professed convictions—understanding himself to have no moral agency at all, seeing his friends and enemies and family as genetically determined robots—wouldn’t just be a materialist: He’d be a psychopath. https://www.sott.net/article/260160-The-Heretic-Who-is-Thomas-Nagel-and-why-are-so-many-of-his-fellow-academics-condemning-him

Even leading Darwinian atheists themselves have honestly admitted that it impossible for them to live their lives as if they do not have free will,

Darwin’s Robots: When Evolutionary Materialists Admit that Their Own Worldview Fails – Nancy Pearcey – April 23, 2015 Excerpt: Even materialists often admit that, in practice, it is impossible for humans to live any other way. One philosopher jokes that if people deny free will, then when ordering at a restaurant they should say, “Just bring me whatever the laws of nature have determined I will get.” An especially clear example is Galen Strawson, a philosopher who states with great bravado, “The impossibility of free will … can be proved with complete certainty.” Yet in an interview, Strawson admits that, in practice, no one accepts his deterministic view. “To be honest, I can’t really accept it myself,” he says. “I can’t really live with this fact from day to day. Can you, really?”,,, In What Science Offers the Humanities, Edward Slingerland, identifies himself as an unabashed materialist and reductionist. Slingerland argues that Darwinian materialism leads logically to the conclusion that humans are robots — that our sense of having a will or self or consciousness is an illusion. Yet, he admits, it is an illusion we find impossible to shake. No one “can help acting like and at some level really feeling that he or she is free.” We are “constitutionally incapable of experiencing ourselves and other conspecifics [humans] as robots.” One section in his book is even titled “We Are Robots Designed Not to Believe That We Are Robots.”,,, When I teach these concepts in the classroom, an example my students find especially poignant is Flesh and Machines by Rodney Brooks, professor emeritus at MIT. Brooks writes that a human being is nothing but a machine — a “big bag of skin full of biomolecules” interacting by the laws of physics and chemistry. In ordinary life, of course, it is difficult to actually see people that way. But, he says, “When I look at my children, I can, when I force myself, … see that they are machines.” Is that how he treats them, though? Of course not: “That is not how I treat them…. I interact with them on an entirely different level. They have my unconditional love, the furthest one might be able to get from rational analysis.” Certainly if what counts as “rational” is a materialist worldview in which humans are machines, then loving your children is irrational. It has no basis within Brooks’s worldview. It sticks out of his box. How does he reconcile such a heart-wrenching cognitive dissonance? He doesn’t. Brooks ends by saying, “I maintain two sets of inconsistent beliefs.” He has given up on any attempt to reconcile his theory with his experience. He has abandoned all hope for a unified, logically consistent worldview. http://www.evolutionnews.org/2015/04/when_evolutiona095451.html

Even Richard Dawkins himself admitted that it would be ‘intolerable’ for him to live his life as if his atheistic materialism were actually true and that he had no free will, i.e. no moral agency,

Who wrote Richard Dawkins’s new book? – October 28, 2006 Excerpt: Dawkins: What I do know is that what it feels like to me, and I think to all of us, we don’t feel determined. We feel like blaming people for what they do or giving people the credit for what they do. We feel like admiring people for what they do.,,, Manzari: But do you personally see that as an inconsistency in your views? Dawkins: I sort of do. Yes. But it is an inconsistency that we sort of have to live with otherwise life would be intolerable. http://www.evolutionnews.org/2006/10/who_wrote_richard_dawkinss_new002783.html

In what should be needless to say, if it is impossible for you to live as if your worldview were actually true then your worldview cannot possibly reflect reality as it really is but your worldview must instead be based on a delusion.

Existential Argument against Atheism – November 1, 2013 by Jason Petersen 1. If a worldview is true then you should be able to live consistently with that worldview. 2. Atheists are unable to live consistently with their worldview. 3. If you can’t live consistently with an atheist worldview then the worldview does not reflect reality. 4. If a worldview does not reflect reality then that worldview is a delusion. 5. If atheism is a delusion then atheism cannot be true. Conclusion: Atheism is false. – per answers for hope

bornagain77

And you don’t have to take Logan Paul Gage’s, or Michael Egnor's, word for it. In 2019, a Darwinist honestly admitted that “The most important concept in all of biology, (i.e. species), is a complete mystery”

What is a species? The most important concept in all of biology is a complete mystery – July 16, 2019 https://theconversation.com/what-is-a-species-the-most-important-concept-in-all-of-biology-is-a-complete-mystery-119200

And as the following 2020 article pointed out, Darwinists simply have no rigid, ‘one size fits all’, demarcation criteria for what actually constitutes a species.

At New Scientist: Questioning The Idea Of Species – Nov. 2020 Excerpt: Take the apparently simple organising principle of a species. You might have learned at school that a species is a group of individuals that can breed to produce fertile offspring. But this is just one of at least 34 competing definitions concocted over the past century by researchers working in different fields.,,,, https://uncommondesc.wpengine.com/darwinism/at-new-scientist-questioning-the-idea-of-species/

The abstract concept of species simply can't be reduced to materialistic explanations. How much does the concept of species weigh? Is the concept of species positively or negatively charged? Is the concept of species closer to Minnesota or Zimbabwe? or etc.. etc..? Those questions are all, obviously, nonsensical simply because the concept of Species is an abstract, immaterial, classification of the immaterial mind. Darwinists, with their reductive materialistic framework, simply have no basis in which to classify organisms into different categories, whether it be categories of species, genus, clades, phylum, or etc... Even Charles Darwin himself inadvertently admitted, (as Logan Paul Gage pointed out), that he did not have a rigid 'materialistic' definition for what a species actually was when he stated, “I look at the term species as one arbitrarily given, for the sake of convenience,”

“I look at the term species as one arbitrarily given, for the sake of convenience, to a set of individuals closely resembling each other, and that it does not essentially differ from the term variety, which is given to less distinct and more fluctuating forms. The term variety, again, in comparison with mere individual differences, is also applied arbitrarily, for convenience’s sake.” – Charles Darwin

As should be needless to say, if your theory can’t even provide a rigid ‘scientific’ definition for what a ‘species’ actually is in the first place, (in your theory that adamantly claims to be the ‘be all/end all’ scientific explanation for the ‘origin of species’), well then, so much for your claim that you have scientifically explained the ‘origin of species’. i.e. Scientifically speaking, your claim is worse than useless, and as Wolfgang Pauli might have put it, your theory is, ‘Not even wrong’. Quotes and verse

“There is a moral or metaphysical part of nature as well as a physical. A man who denies this is deep in the mire of folly.,,” – Letter from Adam Sedgwick to Charles Darwin – 24 Nov 1859 “I have tried to make this intentional plan in the organization of the animal kingdom evident, by showing that the differences between animals do not constitute a material chain, analogous to a series of physical phenomena, bound together by the same law, but present themselves rather as the phases of a thought, formulated according to a definite aim. I think we know enough of comparative anatomy to abandon forever the idea of the transformation of the organs of one type into those of another.” - Letter from Louis Agassiz To A. Sedgwick. Neuchatel, June, 1845. In Elizabeth Cary Agassiz (Ed.). 1885. Louis Agassiz: His Life and Correspondence. Houghton, Mifflin and Co: Boston. P. 388 – 390 1 Thessalonians 5:21 but test all things. Hold fast to what is good.

bornagain77

AF at 46:

Nitpick, Whales share a more recent common ancestor with hippos than they do with coyotes. Whales, hippos, and coyotes are all mammals. Whales and hippos (hindsight makes me wonder why it wasn’t always thought obvious) are now classified as members of the clade Cetartiodactyla, whereas coyotes are in the Carnivora clade.

That is all unsubstantiated speculations and 'just-so stories' on the part of Darwinists. Apparently Darwinists believe that if they can simply imagine a coyote and/or hippo morphing into a whale, well then, that qualifies as irrefutable scientific proof that it must have happened that way. Sorry, but science just does not work that way.

“... another common misuse of evolutionary ideas: namely, the idea that some trait must have evolved merely because we can imagine a scenario under which possession of that trait would have been advantageous to fitness... Such forays into evolutionary explanation amount ultimately to storytelling... it is not enough to construct a story about how the trait might have evolved in response to a given selection pressure; rather, one must provide some sort of evidence that it really did so evolve. This is a very tall order.…” - Austin L. Hughes, The Folly of Scientism - The New Atlantis, Fall 2012

No matter how much they may imagine it to be true, Darwinists simply don't have any real time empirical evidence, nor mathematical evidence, that it is remotely possible to change one species of bacteria into another species of bacteria,

Scant search for the Maker - 2001 Excerpt: But where is the experimental evidence? None exists in the literature claiming that one species has been shown to evolve into another. Bacteria, the simplest form of independent life, are ideal for this kind of study, with generation times of 20 to 30 minutes, and populations achieved after 18 hours. But throughout 150 years of the science of bacteriology, there is no evidence that one species of bacteria has changed into another, in spite of the fact that populations have been exposed to potent chemical and physical mutagens and that, uniquely, bacteria possess extrachromosomal, transmissible plasmids. Since there is no evidence for species changes between the simplest forms of unicellular life, it is not surprising that there is no evidence for evolution from prokaryotic to eukaryotic cells, let alone throughout the whole array of higher multicellular organisms. - Alan H. Linton - emeritus professor of bacteriology, University of Bristol. http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/story.asp?storycode=159282 Top Ten Questions and Objections to ‘Introduction to Evolutionary Informatics’ – Robert J. Marks II – June 12, 2017 Excerpt: “There exists no model successfully describing undirected Darwinian evolution. Hard sciences are built on foundations of mathematics or definitive simulations. Examples include electromagnetics, Newtonian mechanics, geophysics, relativity, thermodynamics, quantum mechanics, optics, and many areas in biology. Those hoping to establish Darwinian evolution as a hard science with a model have either failed or inadvertently cheated. These models contain guidance mechanisms to land the airplane squarely on the target runway despite stochastic wind gusts. Not only can the guiding assistance be specifically identified in each proposed evolution model, its contribution to the success can be measured, in bits, as active information.,,,”,,, “there exists no model successfully describing undirected Darwinian evolution. According to our current understanding, there never will be.,,,” https://evolutionnews.org/2017/06/top-ten-questions-and-objections-to-introduction-to-evolutionary-informatics/ Robert Jackson Marks II is an American electrical engineer. His contributions include the Zhao-Atlas-Marks (ZAM) time-frequency distribution in the field of signal processing,[1] the Cheung–Marks theorem[2] in Shannon sampling theory and the Papoulis-Marks-Cheung (PMC) approach in multidimensional sampling.[3] He was instrumental in the defining of the field of computational intelligence and co-edited the first book using computational intelligence in the title.[4][5] – per wikipedia

,,, much less do Darwinists have any real time empirical evidence, or mathematical evidence, that it is possible to change a some coyote and/or hippo into a whale,

"Well, I told you we don't have the tail in Rodhocetus. We don't know for sure whether it had a ball vertebrate indicating a (tail) fluke or not. So I speculated (that) it might have had a (tail) fluke.,,, Since then we found the forelimbs, the hands, and the front arms, the arms in other words of Rodhocetus, and we understand that it doesn't have the kind of arms that can be spread out like flippers are on a whale.,, If you don't have flippers, I don't think you can have a fluke tail and really powered swimming. And so I now doubt that Rodhocetus would have had a fluke tail." Philip Gingerich paleontologist - Whale Evolution vs. The Actual Evidence – video - fraudulent fossils revealed (11:40 minute mark) https://youtu.be/VSmO4nQ717U?t=699 Evolution And Probabilities: A Response to Jason Rosenhouse - August 2011 Excerpt: The equations of population genetics predict that – assuming an effective population size of 100,000 individuals per generation, and a generation turnover time of 5 years – according to Richard Sternberg’s calculations and based on equations of population genetics applied in the Durrett and Schmidt paper, that one may reasonably expect two specific co-ordinated mutations to achieve fixation in the timeframe of around 43.3 million years. When one considers the magnitude of the engineering fete, such a scenario is found to be devoid of credibility. https://uncommondesc.wpengine.com/intelligent-design/evolution-and-probabilities-a-response-to-jason-rosenhouse/ Whale Evolution vs. Population Genetics - Richard Sternberg and Paul Nelson - (excerpted from 'Living Waters' video) (2015) https://youtu.be/0csd3M4bc0Q

Darwinists simply have no real time empirical evidence, nor mathematical evidence, to support any of their imaginary just-so stories. And as much as it may hurt Darwinists' feelings to know this, imaginary 'just-so stories' are NOT science. They are the antithesis of science. In fact, science is successful precisely because it separates the chaff of hypothetical imaginary conjectures about reality, from the wheat of what is actually true about reality. Moreover, to make it even worse for Darwinists, Darwinists, with their reductive materialistic framework, can't even define what a species, clade, or any other biological classification, actually is. You see, in order to classify organisms into specific groups, such as species, clades, or etc.., one is forced to abandon purely materialistic explanations about reality and reach over into the immaterial realm of abstract universals. As Logan Paul Gage states in the following article, ”In Aristotelian and Thomistic thought, each particular organism belongs to a certain universal class of things. Each individual shares a particular nature—or essence—and acts according to its nature. Squirrels act squirrelly and cats catty. We know with certainty that a squirrel is a squirrel because a crucial feature of human reason is its ability to abstract the universal nature from our sense experience of particular organisms.”,,, ” this denial (of true species) is a grave error, because the essence of the individual (the species in the Aristotelian sense) is the true object of our knowledge.”

Darwin, Design & Thomas Aquinas The Mythical Conflict Between Thomism & Intelligent Design by Logan Paul Gage Excerpt:,,, In Aristotelian and Thomistic thought, each particular organism belongs to a certain universal class of things. Each individual shares a particular nature—or essence—and acts according to its nature. Squirrels act squirrelly and cats catty. We know with certainty that a squirrel is a squirrel because a crucial feature of human reason is its ability to abstract the universal nature from our sense experience of particular organisms. Denial of True Species Enter Darwinism. Recall that Darwin sought to explain the origin of “species.” Yet as he pondered his theory, he realized that it destroyed species as a reality altogether. For Darwinism suggests that any matter can potentially morph into any other arrangement of matter without the aid of an organizing principle. He thought cells were like simple blobs of Jell-O, easily re-arrangeable. For Darwin, there is no immaterial, immutable form. In The Origin of Species he writes: “I look at the term species as one arbitrarily given, for the sake of convenience, to a set of individuals closely resembling each other, and that it does not essentially differ from the term variety, which is given to less distinct and more fluctuating forms. The term variety, again, in comparison with mere individual differences, is also applied arbitrarily, for convenience’s sake.” Statements like this should make card-carrying Thomists shudder.,,, The first conflict between Darwinism and Thomism, then, is the denial of true species or essences. For the Thomist, this denial is a grave error, because the essence of the individual (the species in the Aristotelian sense) is the true object of our knowledge. As philosopher Benjamin Wiker observes in Moral Darwinism, Darwin reduced species to “mere epiphenomena of matter in motion.” What we call a “dog,” in other words, is really just an arbitrary snapshot of the way things look at present. If we take the Darwinian view, Wiker suggests, there is no species “dog” but only a collection of individuals, connected in a long chain of changing shapes, which happen to resemble each other today but will not tomorrow. What About Man? Now we see Chesterton’s point. Man, the universal, does not really exist. According to the late Stanley Jaki, Chesterton detested Darwinism because “it abolishes forms and all that goes with them, including that deepest kind of ontological form which is the immortal human soul.” And if one does not believe in universals, there can be, by extension, no human nature—only a collection of somewhat similar individuals.,,, https://www.touchstonemag.com/archives/article.php?id=23-06-037-f

And as Dr. Michael Egnor explains, the reductive materialistic framework of Darwinian evolution simply doesn't do abstract, immaterial, universals. And as a result, Darwinian materialists, (with their implicit denial of the immaterial realm altogether), simply leave everything that is truly important, and interesting, about what it really means to be human on the cutting room floor.

The Fundamental Difference Between Humans and Nonhuman Animals - Michael Egnor - November 5, 2015 Excerpt: Human beings have mental powers that include the material mental powers of animals but in addition entail a profoundly different kind of thinking. Human beings think abstractly, and nonhuman animals do not. Human beings have the power to contemplate universals, which are concepts that have no material instantiation. Human beings think about mathematics, literature, art, language, justice, mercy, and an endless library of abstract concepts. Human beings are rational animals. Human rationality is not merely a highly evolved kind of animal perception. Human rationality is qualitatively different — ontologically different — from animal perception. Human rationality is different because it is immaterial. Contemplation of universals cannot have material instantiation, because universals themselves are not material and cannot be instantiated in matter.,,, It is a radical difference — an immeasurable qualitative difference, not a quantitative difference. We are more different from apes than apes are from viruses. Our difference is a metaphysical chasm.,,, Systems of taxonomy that emphasize physical and genetic similarities and ignore the fact that human beings are partly immaterial beings who are capable of abstract thought and contemplation of moral law and eternity are pitifully inadequate to describe man. The assertion that man is an ape is self-refuting. We could not express such a concept, misguided as it is, if we were apes and not men. https://evolutionnews.org/2015/11/the_fundamental_2/

bornagain77

Seversky do you remember our recent conversation on OoL ? I wrote, that you guys (Darwinists) still believe in spontaneous generation (of life). Like in 19th century. Spontaneous generation - Wikipedia:

Spontaneous generation[1] is a superseded scientific theory that held that living creatures could arise from nonliving matter and that such processes were commonplace and regular. It was hypothesized that certain forms, such as fleas, could arise from inanimate matter such as dust, or that maggots could arise from dead flesh.

Seversky, you have replied as follows:

Which is not what OOL research assumes. It does not propose that modern organisms spring fully-formed into existence from inanimate precursors. It is, however, what ID/creationists believe their designer/creator does. Although they have no idea how and apparently don’t care.

NO ? then look here, what a 31-year-old MIT Physicist Jeremy England claims in his "A New Physics Theory of Life" article.

You start with a random clump of atoms, and if you shine light on it for long enough, it should not be so surprising that you get a plant

If this is not a spontaneous generation of life, then what is it ? :))))))))) Full article: https://www.quantamagazine.org/a-new-thermodynamics-theory-of-the-origin-of-life-20140122/?gclid=EAIaIQobChMIt9mPuezY-wIVM4FQBh2sEQKhEAAYASAAEgJ45fD_BwE martin_r

@ BA77 Phil, I made an exception and glanced at rather than scrolled through your comment 40. It's a mish-mash of scoffing at evolutionary strawmen. Where's the beef? How does Intelligent Design work? You forgot that bit. Alan Fox

...maybe you guys have discover a testing method since the last time I asked.

Depends when you last asked. Molecular phylogenetics is a recent addition to the evidence of common descent. It was important in confirming the relationship between Whales and hippos. Alan Fox

Actually whales share a common ancestor with hippos, not coyotes

Nitpick, Whales share a more recent common ancestor with hippos than they do with coyotes. Whales, hippos, and coyotes are all mammals. Whales and hippos (hindsight makes me wonder why it wasn't always thought obvious) are now classified as members of the clade Cetartiodactyla, whereas coyotes are in the Carnivora clade. Alan Fox

SEV at 30 , Dont just mock Dr Tours criticism of OOL research debunk it , ah thats right you can`t CD at 44, what is that common ancestor and how do you know its the common ancestor , seeing it cannot be tested , or maybe you guys have discover a testing method since the last time I asked. Marfin

AD/41 Actually whales share a common ancestor with hippos, not coyotes……. chuckdarwin

Ba77, In the late 1980s I stumbled across a book with a compelling title: Engines of Creation. This was a clear exposition of how nanotechnology might work to build a jet engine, among other things. A large container like an oil drum cut in half but much larger would contain water and molecule-sized "assemblers." Various metallic molecules would be injected into the water. The assemblers, under radio guidance, would begin building a scaffold and the engine. The assemblers could be be grouped to perform different tasks, building the inside and outside components of the engine. Various metals could be combined at the molecular level to create alloys as opposed to trying to melt them together at high temperatures. As the assemblers finished a section, they would back out slowly to complete what remained. The completed engine would be stronger, lightweight and better than what could be done by using more conventional construction processes. Once completed, various hooks would attach to lifting lugs. After the engine cleared the container, the remaining metal molecules would be flushed out and stored for reuse. Later, I saw a video of a computer that was built at the atomic level. It was not an actual computer but a theoretical model. The finished computer was square and about six inches on each side. It was explained that such a computer would be far more powerful than any commercial computer available. At first, the idea of nanotechnology was not accepted. The technology to create the things mentioned in the book did not exist but I was able to glimpse stories here and there about nanotechnology actually being applied as the years passed. It was being used by the military primarily. IF scientists attempt to do this with a cell, it would be a clear example of Intelligent Design, assuming they could make it work. relatd

AD at 41, I want photos of the transformation. relatd

Why, just yesterday Alan observed nearby coyote turn into a small whale in his backyard. Good thing he had a pool! AnimatedDust

"ID advocates have such a poor hand to play." The Black Knight has spoken, "Tis but a scratch"!

Monty Python - The Black Knight - Tis But A Scratch https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZmInkxbvlCs

Meanwhile, a few severed limbs laying on the ground beg to differ,,

"(Although atheists accuse Theists of making extraordinary claims) The truly extraordinary claim — indeed, the wildly and irresponsibly outrageous claim — is that a highly scalable, massively parallel system architecture incorporating a 4-bit digital coding system and a super-dense, information-rich, three-dimensional, multi-layered, multi-directional database structure with storage, retrieval and translation mechanisms, utilizing file allocation, concatenation and bit-parity algorithms, operating subject to software protocol hierarchies could all come about through a long series of accidental particle collisions. That is beyond extraordinary. It is preposterous. It is laughable." Eric Anderson https://uncommondesc.wpengine.com/intelligent-design/naturalism-intelligent-design-and-extraordinary-claims-part-ii/#comment-455980 Systems biology: Untangling the protein web - July 2009 Excerpt: Vidal thinks that technological improvements — especially in nanotechnology, to generate more data, and microscopy, to explore interaction inside cells, along with increased computer power — are required to push systems biology forward. "Combine all this and you can start to think that maybe some of the information flow can be captured," he says. But when it comes to figuring out the best way to explore information flow in cells, Tyers jokes that it is like comparing different degrees of infinity. "The interesting point coming out of all these studies is how complex these systems are — the different feedback loops and how they cross-regulate each other and adapt to perturbations are only just becoming apparent," he says. "The simple pathway models are a gross oversimplification of what is actually happening." http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v460/n7253/full/460415a.html "No human contrivance operates with either the degree of complexity, the precision, or the efficiency of living cells." James A. Shapiro, "21st century view of evolution: genome system architecture, repetitive DNA, and natural genetic engineering," Gene, Vol. 345: 91-100 (2005) How we could create life - The key to existence will be found not in primordial sludge, but in the nanotechnology of the living cell - Paul Davies - 11 December 2002 Excerpt: Instead, the living cell is best thought of as a supercomputer - an information processing and replicating system of astonishing complexity. DNA is not a special life-giving molecule, but a genetic databank that transmits its information using a mathematical code. Most of the workings of the cell are best described, not in terms of material stuff - hardware - but as information, or software. Trying to make life by mixing chemicals in a test tube is like soldering switches and wires in an attempt to produce Windows 98. It won't work because it addresses the problem at the wrong conceptual level. http://www.theguardian.com/education/2002/dec/11/highereducation.uk "The more I come to terms with the sheer engineering prowess of the cell, the more I am becoming convinced that the argument from biological design is perhaps the single most powerful argument for God's existence -- I now consider it to be stronger than even the cosmological and teleological arguments. It seems to be a rather under-used apologetic, however, particularly in Christian-atheist debates. ID as a scientific proposition, of course, doesn't necessitate God as designer. But it is certainly a very compelling part of a cumulative body of evidence for theism. Catching just a glimpse of the beauty and sophistication of the cell should be enough to render absolutely anyone without excuse." - Jonathan McLatchie - PhD in Evolutionary Biology. "Complexity Brake" Defies Evolution - August 2012 Excerpt: "This is bad news. Consider a neuronal synapse -- the presynaptic terminal has an estimated 1000 distinct proteins. Fully analyzing their possible interactions would take about 2000 years. Or consider the task of fully characterizing the visual cortex of the mouse -- about 2 million neurons. Under the extreme assumption that the neurons in these systems can all interact with each other, analyzing the various combinations will take about 10 million years..., even though it is assumed that the underlying technology speeds up by an order of magnitude each year.",,, http://www.evolutionnews.org/2012/08/complexity_brak062961.htmlhttp://www.evolutionnews.org/2012/08/complexity_brak062961.html Life Leads the Way to Invention – Feb. 2010 Excerpt: a cell is 10,000 times more energy-efficient than a transistor. “In one second, a cell performs about 10 million energy-consuming chemical reactions, which altogether require about one picowatt (one millionth millionth of a watt) of power.” This and other amazing facts lead to an obvious conclusion: inventors ought to look to life for ideas.,,, Essentially, cells may be viewed as circuits that use molecules, ions, proteins and DNA instead of electrons and transistors. That analogy suggests that it should be possible to build electronic chips – what Sarpeshkar calls “cellular chemical computers” – that mimic chemical reactions very efficiently and on a very fast timescale. https://crev.info/2010/02/life_leads_the_way_to_invention/ The Human Eye, Like The Human Brain, Is A Wonder https://uncommondesc.wpengine.com/evolution/from-philip-cunningham-the-human-eye-like-the-human-brain-is-a-wonder/

etc.. etc.. etc..

Romans 1:20 For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that people are without excuse.

bornagain77

*chuckles* It's mean of me, sorry. But ID advocates have such a poor hand to play. I can summarize the basic tenets of evolutionary theory in a sentence or two. There's an expanding data base of evidence on evolutionary biology. Field observation of species on their natural habitat is incredible with developments in recording devices. Heck, I can do my own observations in my own backyard. It must be tough to be an ID proponent without even a hypothesis to promote. Alan Fox

CD at 34: The worldview precedes the scientific theory. Remember Lewontin. The commitment to materialism is absolute, for a Divine foot cannot be allowed in the door. In case you forgot. AnimatedDust

Related at 33: And the worst part is, at the moment they take their last breath, they will have to answer for their deeds. What is absolutely true is that they won't be able to claim they didn't have enough evidence. AnimatedDust

CD at 34, Are living things designed? Or do they only look designed but are not actually designed? relatd

Evolution is a religious belief that a Magical Force named Evolution turned mud to men. Sound familiar? Andrew asauber

Relatd/33 Evolution is not a “world view,” it’s a scientific theory……. chuckdarwin

Seversky at 30, So what is the solution to people who insist on holding onto a worldview called evolution? And that's all it is at this point. Regardless of what is written here that shows it to be false and usually supported by atheists and to promote atheism. You rail against God, and judge Him. JVL insists on 'unguided evolution' ONLY - no matter the evidence to the contrary. AF is the Town Rabble-Rouser whose only apparent purpose is to show off his dodging and weaving skills here. He avoids answering questions that would reveal evolution to be the wrong answer to how and why living things are the way they are. For the record, I expect all of you to soldier on. Whenever evidence contrary to unguided evolution appears, you will all continue to hold up a sign that reads 'Evolution is a fact,' as if that were true. All of you are here to cause confusion and to help sell a product called evolution. If you were not here then ID would become popular, it would get into public schools. I know none of you want that to happen. relatd

I commented on Farina's first video after Tour's first series of responses. I pointed out a factual error that was very elemental, and one of the main points of his perspective on origin of life. He just deleted it. AnimatedDust

Seversky, in regards to a belligerent and condescending manner, perhaps you might find this interesting,

civilized discourse is not Farina’s cup of tea. In the first five minutes of his new video, he calls ID proponents “clowns,” “charlatans,” “frauds,” and “liars,” and calls ID arguments “pseudo-science,” “rubbish,” “horse manure,” and “dishonest tripe.” His personal agenda is revealed by the ridiculous statement [TC 3:00] that genocide, infanticide, eugenics, and other evils are “all the heinous acts that historically have been the exclusive domain of religion.” Has he never heard of Hitler, Stalin, Mao, or Pol Pot? Apparently, Farina thinks the best way to deal with anybody he disagrees with is to bully and berate them with hate speech and gutter language. Here is an example of what I mean from one of his comments on YouTube (I’ve replaced certain letters with asterisks to make the profanity more tolerable to read): "Um, I’m pretty sure I would make Meyer cry. He’s a f****ing moron, as I demonstrated in this video you didn’t watch. Why are all you creationist tools such cowardly sh**bags?" When a commenter on his video against Stephen Meyer criticized his harsh language, Farina responded with even more over-the-top vituperation: "They are liars. I show how they are liars. That’s all it is. And for f****’s sake, I’m exposing the agenda of what is essentially a terrorist organization that wants to drag America back to an authoritarian theocracy and ruin millions of lives, and you have the balls to call me nasty and mean-spirited for speaking out against them? You’re f****ing stupid. I suggest you work on that." [“They” refers to Discovery Institute and ID proponents.] What Is Wrong with This Guy? This is not how a sane and reasonable adult writes. Since when are academic questions and intellectual debates settled by lobbing f-words? I can only pity the school kids who suffered under such an intolerant and rude person as a science teacher. Farina seems to have some significant anger management issues. He certainly is not the type of person any reasonable parents would like to have around their kids! This has nothing to do with intelligent design vs. materialism or religion vs. science. Farina’s immature pottymouth should disqualify him from any serious discourse about anything with anyone. He really needs a “time out.” What is more, nobody who knows his stuff and is confident about his position talks or writes like Farina does. The only reason I bother to address his erroneous arguments is to equip viewers of his video with some accurate information about the scientific evidence. https://evolutionnews.org/2022/11/debunking-professor-daves-hit-piece-against-stephen-meyer/

bornagain77

Professor Tour's work as a synthetic chemist is not the issue. His attack on OOL research - and by extension, evolution - is. And for me Tour, like Egnor, displays a belligerent and condescending manner which really doesn't help his case. Seversky

I find Suppressor Dave incredibly annoying. The kind of sneering, condescending atheism I know it all attitude that he displays constantly in his videos. And he doesn't attempt to refute the science of Professor Tour. AnimatedDust

BA77 yes, these videos are exceptional ... when you consider that such a honored and busy scientist spends his valuable time to shoot these videos. Hours of videos .... martin_r

Yes Martin. I am very much expectantly waiting for Dr. Tour's take down of the three 'experts', one by one, coming Dec. 6. I guess It is kind of like a series of world championship prize fights for geeks. :) bornagain77

BA77 when you mentioned 'professor' Dave Farina .... As you may know, this clown attacked Dr. Tour as well. Dr. Tour will release ANOTHER series of rebuttal videos on OoL (starting DEC 6). From what i could understand, what some 'professor' Dave says doesn't matter (which is self-evident), but Dr. Tour will go after those 3 OoL experts who were mentioned in Farina's videos ... Here is a video teaser: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4rwPi1miWu4 PS: by the way, perhaps you missed it, but in 2020, Dr. Tour received a very prestigious Royal Society price. I learned it only yesterday (from the teaser video) https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/678304 martin_r

OT: Professor Dave is the unfortunate recipient of a first class intellectual butt-whooping at the hands of Günter Bechly. I especially liked the closing remark, "Farina doesn’t have a grasp of the basics of cladistic terminology. Maybe he should study my online “Glossary of Phylogenetic Systematics” to learn something before he tries to teach others."

Untangling “Professor Dave’s” Confusion about the Cambrian Explosion - Günter Bechly - November 29, 2022 Excerpt: Farina doesn’t have a grasp of the basics of cladistic terminology. Maybe he should study my online “Glossary of Phylogenetic Systematics” to learn something before he tries to teach others. https://evolutionnews.org/2022/11/untangling-professor-daves-confusion-about-the-cambrian-explosion/

of related note:

The popular YouTuber, whose real name is Dave Farina, is neither a professor nor a PhD but just a failed ex-teacher who unsuccessfully tried twice to get a master’s degree in chemistry. These are simply facts about him. https://evolutionnews.org/2022/11/debunking-professor-daves-hit-piece-against-stephen-meyer/

bornagain77

This gem from Caspian is priceless:

The reductionism approach, while useful for gaining knowledge of the biological details, carries the risk of losing sight of the big picture.

The "biological details," indeed......... chuckdarwin

Per Alan Fox's paper,

"Modern examples, such as the emergence of enzymes that hydrolyse human-made pesticides, demonstrate that evolution can be extraordinarily rapid.",,, Modern examples of punctuated equilibria in enzyme evolution have been characterized in bacteria that are adapting to the impact of humans on their environment. The phosphotriesterase enzyme from Pseudomonas diminuta catalyses the hydrolysis of a range of synthetic insecticides and chemical warfare agents, none of which were synthesized until the 1940s [19]. Remarkably, phosphotriesterase hydrolyses the insecticide parathion with an efficiency that approaches catalytic perfection (kcat/KM = 4 × 107 s?1 M?1) [20]. The enzyme appears to have evolved from a lactonase ancestor with a very weak promiscuous phosphotriesterase activity (kcat/KM < 10 s?1 M?1), to near perfection, in approximately 50 years [21]. Similarly, Pseudomonas sp. strain ADP has evolved to use the herbicide atrazine, introduced into the environment in vast quantities beginning in 1958, as a novel carbon source [22–24]. An entire catabolic pathway has evolved to metabolize atrazine [25], co-opting three enzymes from the amidohydrolase family. The first enzyme in the pathway, atrazine chlorohydrolase [26], diverged from melamine deaminase, though it retains none of the original activity [27]. While it shares 98% sequence identity with the extant melamine dehydrogenase, it has adapted to the novel substrate and hydrolytically dechlorinates atrazine with a catalytic efficiency that is within the range of ‘average’ enzymes [28] at 1.5 × 104 s?1 M?1 [25]. These examples demonstrate that enzyme evolution can be extraordinarily rapid, as shown in figure 2b. Similarly rapid bursts of enzyme evolution can be observed in laboratory studies. A canonical example involved experimental evolution of a Salmonella enterica strain that was incapable of synthesizing the amino acid tryptophan, because the trpF gene (encoding the enzyme phosphoribosylanthranilate isomerase, PRAI) had been deleted. This strain was forced to evolve a compensatory function in an homologous enzyme from the histidine biosynthetic pathway—the N-(5?-phospho-l-ribosyl-formimino)-5-amino-1-(5?-phosphoribosyl)-4-imidazolecarboxamide (ProFAR) isomerase, encoded by hisA—in just 500 generations of laboratory evolution [29]. When suitably strong selection conditions arise, these examples indicate that enzymes can evolve to near catalytic perfection in periods of time that are remarkably short, in the context of the history of life.

AF, you do realize that none of those examples are examples of proteins of one fold of one function evolving into a brand new protein of a new fold with an entirely new function, but are examples of preexistent proteins, with specific folds, making minor tweaks to peripheral loops to deal with environmental pressures? All of which underscores Tawfik's point, "Changes were not to central structures, but to peripheral loops",,, “In fact, to our knowledge no macromutations … that gave birth to novel proteins have yet been identified.”

Dan S. Tawfik Group – The New View of Proteins – Tyler Hampton – 2016 Excerpt: Tawfik soberly recognizes the problem. The appearance of early protein families, he has remarked, is “something like close to a miracle.”45,,, To the extent that Tawfik’s selection experiments were successful, it is because mutations were localized and contextualized. Mutation had a key but confined role. If evolution proceeded, the prevailing architecture of the active sites and protein shapes nonetheless remains intact. Changes were not to central structures, but to peripheral loops. A great deal of flexibility was discovered. Still, it is hard to see how any of this could build proteins—that is, in the sense of building their fundamental shapes, or scaffolds; and build proteins in terms of explaining the key catalytic strategies of each active site. Even in the impressive demonstration of a transition through nine orders of magnitude, in which a full exchange of a promiscuous activity for the primary activity was seen, the overall geometry of the protein was unchanged, and, although substrates had changed, the fundamental active site strategy stayed the same. ,,, “Modern neo-Darwinism and neutral evolutionary treatments,” remark Leonard Bogarad and Michael Deem, “fail to explain satisfactorily the generation of the diversity of life found on our planet.” It is not that they did not evolve, they say, but that “… most theoretical treatments of evolution consider only the limited point-mutation events that form the basis of these theories.” Their sober conclusion is that “point mutation alone is incapable of evolving systems with substantially new protein folds.”60,,, “In fact, to our knowledge,” Tawfik and Tóth-Petróczy write, “no macromutations … that gave birth to novel proteins have yet been identified.”69 http://inference-review.com/article/the-new-view-of-proteins

And the examples cited in your paper, (as well as the discussion on ancestral enzymes in the paper), also underscore Dr. Gauger's point, "some have said we should have used the ancestral enzyme as our starting point, because they believe modern enzymes are somehow different from ancient ones. Why do they think that? It’s because modern enzymes can’t be coopted to anything except trivial changes in function. In other words, they don’t evolve! That is precisely the point we are making."

“Enzyme Families — Shared Evolutionary History or Shared Design?” – Ann Gauger – December 4, 2014 Excerpt: If enzymes can’t be recruited to genuinely new functions by unguided means, no matter how similar they are, the evolutionary story is false.,,, Taken together, since we found no enzyme that was within one mutation of cooption, the total number of mutations needed is at least four: one for duplication, one for over-production, and two or more single base changes. The waiting time required to achieve four mutations is 10^15 years. That’s longer than the age of the universe. The real waiting time is likely to be much greater, since the two most likely candidate enzymes failed to be coopted by double mutations. We have now addressed two objections raised by our critics: that we didn’t test the right mutation(s), and that we didn’t use the right starting point. We tested all possible single base changes in nine different enzymes, Those nine enzymes are the most structurally similar of BioF’s entire family We also tested 70 percent of double mutations in the two closest enzymes of those nine. Finally, some have said we should have used the ancestral enzyme as our starting point, because they believe modern enzymes are somehow different from ancient ones. Why do they think that? It’s because modern enzymes can’t be coopted to anything except trivial changes in function. In other words, they don’t evolve! That is precisely the point we are making. http://www.evolutionnews.org/2014/12/a_new_paper_fro091701.html

In short AF, you receive an F on your homework assignment. Try again, and don't tell me the dog ate your homework. P.S. Also from AF's cited paper,

“The non-falsifiable nature of ancestral reconstructions places them in the realm of just-so stories, rather than hypotheses, and doubts have been raised about the ability of ASR studies to reach justifiable conclusions ”

Thanks for pointing their honest admission out Asauber, Their honest admission that their 'just-so stories' for ancestral proteins are unscientific 'just-so stories', put a huge smile on my face. :) bornagain77

Warts and all, Andrew. Alan Fox

AF, "The non-falsifiable nature of ancestral reconstructions places them in the realm of just-so stories, rather than hypotheses, and doubts have been raised about the ability of ASR studies to reach justifiable conclusions " Andrew asauber

Blimey, more homework. Phil, have a look at this paper. https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rsif.2015.0036 Alan Fox

Since Alan Fox at 16, like PMI at 5, finds it beneath his intellectual dignity to lay out the, (apparently simple for him), stepwise evolution of pregnancy, perhaps he can, at the very least, show us the very first, teeny-tiny, step of an evolutionary scenario? Perhaps he can show us the first 'teeny-tiny' step of a single protein of one type of function evolving into another protein of a different, but similar, type of function? Is that too much to ask of AF and PMI? Especially since they, obviously, consider themselves to be so much more wise than those of us who are foolish enough to believe in intelligent design?

"Enzyme Families -- Shared Evolutionary History or Shared Design?" - Ann Gauger - December 4, 2014 Excerpt: If enzymes can't be recruited to genuinely new functions by unguided means, no matter how similar they are, the evolutionary story is false.,,, Taken together, since we found no enzyme that was within one mutation of cooption, the total number of mutations needed is at least four: one for duplication, one for over-production, and two or more single base changes. The waiting time required to achieve four mutations is 10^15 years. That's longer than the age of the universe. The real waiting time is likely to be much greater, since the two most likely candidate enzymes failed to be coopted by double mutations. We have now addressed two objections raised by our critics: that we didn't test the right mutation(s), and that we didn't use the right starting point. We tested all possible single base changes in nine different enzymes, Those nine enzymes are the most structurally similar of BioF's entire family We also tested 70 percent of double mutations in the two closest enzymes of those nine. Finally, some have said we should have used the ancestral enzyme as our starting point, because they believe modern enzymes are somehow different from ancient ones. Why do they think that? It's because modern enzymes can't be coopted to anything except trivial changes in function. In other words, they don't evolve! That is precisely the point we are making. http://www.evolutionnews.org/2014/12/a_new_paper_fro091701.html Dan S. Tawfik Group - The New View of Proteins - Tyler Hampton - 2016 Excerpt: Tawfik soberly recognizes the problem. The appearance of early protein families, he has remarked, is “something like close to a miracle.”45,,, To the extent that Tawfik’s selection experiments were successful, it is because mutations were localized and contextualized. Mutation had a key but confined role. If evolution proceeded, the prevailing architecture of the active sites and protein shapes nonetheless remains intact. Changes were not to central structures, but to peripheral loops. A great deal of flexibility was discovered. Still, it is hard to see how any of this could build proteins—that is, in the sense of building their fundamental shapes, or scaffolds; and build proteins in terms of explaining the key catalytic strategies of each active site. Even in the impressive demonstration of a transition through nine orders of magnitude, in which a full exchange of a promiscuous activity for the primary activity was seen, the overall geometry of the protein was unchanged, and, although substrates had changed, the fundamental active site strategy stayed the same. ,,, “Modern neo-Darwinism and neutral evolutionary treatments,” remark Leonard Bogarad and Michael Deem, “fail to explain satisfactorily the generation of the diversity of life found on our planet.” It is not that they did not evolve, they say, but that “... most theoretical treatments of evolution consider only the limited point-mutation events that form the basis of these theories.” Their sober conclusion is that “point mutation alone is incapable of evolving systems with substantially new protein folds.”60,,, “In fact, to our knowledge,” Tawfik and Tóth-Petróczy write, “no macromutations ... that gave birth to novel proteins have yet been identified.”69 http://inference-review.com/article/the-new-view-of-proteins A Dentist in the Sahara: Doug Axe on the Rarity of Proteins Is Decisively Confirmed - Brian Miller - February 18, 2019 Excerpt: evolutionists argue that each protein comprising a flagellum resulted from the duplication of an existing gene which then continuously mutated until it stumbled upon a new flagellar function. However, research over the past several years has shown this claim to be implausible.,,, Overly Optimistic Estimate Actually, the previous analysis is overly optimistic since, as demonstrated, most proteins become entirely nonfunctional after less than 10 percent of their sequences randomly change. The probability of a trial finding such a target (c=.10) would often be over 10^300 times less likely than finding the protein family (c=.50 ) target. That number is a 1 with 300 zeros behind it, which is greater than the ratio of the volume of the entire universe to that of a single proton. As a result, the protein targets represent remote islands of functionality very diffusely scattered throughout the larger target region which dramatically decreases the probability for success. https://evolutionnews.org/2019/02/a-dentist-in-the-sahara-doug-axe-on-the-rarity-of-proteins-is-decisively-confirmed/ Right of Reply: Our Response to Jerry Coyne - September 29, 2019 by Günter Bechly, Brian Miller and David Berlinski Excerpt: David Gelernter observed that amino acid sequences that correspond to functional proteins are remarkably rare among the “space” of all possible combinations of amino acid sequences of a given length. Protein scientists call this set of all possible amino acid sequences or combinations “amino acid sequence space” or “combinatorial sequence space.” Gelernter made reference to this concept in his review of Meyer and Berlinski’s books. He also referenced the careful experimental work by Douglas Axe who used a technique known as site-directed mutagenesis to assess the rarity of protein folds in sequence space while he was working at Cambridge University from 1990-2003. Axe showed that the ratio of sequences in sequence space that will produce protein folds to sequences that won’t is prohibitively and vanishingly small. Indeed, in an authoritative paper published in the Journal of Molecular Biology Axe estimated that ratio at 1 in 10^74. From that information about the rarity of protein folds in sequence space, Gelernter—like Axe, Meyer and Berlinski—has drawn the rational conclusion: finding a novel protein fold by a random search is implausible in the extreme. Not so, Coyne argued. Proteins do not evolve from random sequences. They evolve by means of gene duplication. By starting from an established protein structure, protein evolution had a head start. This is not an irrational position, but it is anachronistic. Indeed, Harvard mathematical biologist Martin Nowak has shown that random searches in sequence space that start from known functional sequences are no more likely to enter regions in sequence space with new protein folds than searches that start from random sequences. The reason for this is clear: random searches are overwhelmingly more likely to go off into a non-folding, non-functional abyss than they are to find a novel protein fold. Why? Because such novel folds are so extraordinarily rare in sequence space. Moreover, as Meyer explained in Darwin’s Doubt, as mutations accumulate in functional sequences, they will inevitably destroy function long before they stumble across a new protein fold. Again, this follows from the extreme rarity (as well as the isolation) of protein folds in sequence space. Recent work by Weizmann Institute protein scientist Dan Tawfik has reinforced this conclusion. Tawfik’s work shows that as mutations to functional protein sequences accumulate, the folds of those proteins become progressively more thermodynamically and structurally unstable. Typically, 15 or fewer mutations will completely destroy the stability of known protein folds of average size. Yet, generating (or finding) a new protein fold requires far more amino acid sequence changes than that. Finally, calculations based on Tawfik’s work confirm and extend the applicability of Axe’s original measure of the rarity of protein folds. These calculations confirm that the measure of rarity that Axe determined for the protein he studied is actually representative of the rarity for large classes of other globular proteins. Not surprisingly, Dan Tawfik has described the origination of a truly novel protein or fold as “something like close to a miracle.” Tawfik is on Coyne’s side: He is mainstream. https://quillette.com/2019/09/29/right-of-reply-our-response-to-jerry-coyne/ Watch: Videos Now Available from the Recent ID Conference In Austria Günter Bechly - October 24, 2019 Excerpt: Dr. Brian MILLER, “A Thermodynamic Analysis of the Rarity of Protein Folds” (May 30, 2019). Abstract: “Research by Douglas Axe demonstrated that amino acid sequences that correspond to a functional beta-lactamase protein fold are extremely rare. In response, critics have raised questions related to the accuracy of his analysis. This presentation describes how more recent research on the effects of mutations on the thermodynamic stability of protein folds has confirmed Axe’s result and its general relevance to most proteins. The presentation also applies the results of an evolutionary time-scale study by Chatterjee, Pavlogiannis, Adlam, and Nowak, and discusses the implications for the argument that co-option can explain the appearance of irreducibly complex molecular machines.” https://evolutionnews.org/2019/10/videos-available-from-the-id-conference-in-austria/

bornagain77

On reflection, I'm quite interested in the evolution of "pregnancy" so I'll do a bit of reading and report anything that I find that might interest others. It may take a while. Of course pregnancy, wombs, placentas, long gestation, and giving birth to well-developed young is a shared trait of a whole clade of mammals, Placentalia and it is in the lineage of the common ancestor of this clade that is the place to start. Alan Fox

Pleased to see you making an effort, Martin_r. Alan Fox

Sorry to disappoint you, Barry. Whilst there's a mountain of information on all aspects of biology, nothing is going to convince you that evolution is an explanation for the variety of life that has existed on Earth and what remains today. You can lead a horse to water... Though as, as far as I am aware, this is the only place left where I can interact with proponents of "Intelligent Design" who all seem remarkably reticent about alternative explanations for observed biology. Questions are easy to ask but hard to answer. Alan Fox

Darwinian fantasy world:

Sex chromosomes are derived from autosomes and have evolved independently many times in different lineages . For example, the human X and Y chromosomes originated about 200-300 million years ago in eutherian mammals1,2 after the split of monotremes, and sex chromosomes evolved independently in birds, snakes, and multiple times in other reptiles, amphibians and fish; they also formed repeatedly in many invertebrate taxa and plants ... https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4120474/

martin_r

I’ve just ordered a copy of Your Designed Body and I look forward to reading it

I ordered a copy too. I was wondering what a fellow engineer has to say. I really hope, that I will learn something new, and not what I have heard 1000 times before. martin_r

Alan Fox, If you can point to me to any article that lays out the stepwise evolution of pregnancy, that would be sufficient. Everyone get ready for Alan's literature bluff. Barry Arrington

just pointing out that you are a coward and a fraud.

Oh, classy! Alan Fox

Does Mr Arrington require a stepwise explanation from the evolution of sex, evolution of gametes, differentiation into sperm and eggs, wind-borne pollination, motile gametes in ferns, egg-laying in dinosaurs and monotremes, marsupials (the genitalia in kangaroos is interesting) transitional placental mammals, human biology? Alan Fox

PyrrhoManiac1

you’re trying to bait me into saying something intemperate

No, just pointing out that you are a coward and a fraud. Barry Arrington

"Nobody has ever addressed a problem like that." And they still haven't. Andrew asauber

@7 Nice try, but if you're trying to bait me into saying something intemperate that would justify banning me, you'll have to be far more clever. This "translation" schtick is just quaint. PyrrhoManiac1

PyrrhoManiac1 writes

No, [the OP is] far too stupid to merit a response. And no, I won’t explain why. If you don’t know enough biology to understand why the OP is inane, I don’t have the time or inclination to hold your hand.

For the uninitiated, I will translate from Internet troll speak into plain English:

No, I have not the foggiest idea how pregnancy could evolve in a stepwise basis. But I am a coward and will not admit that.

You're welcome. Barry Arrington

"No, it’s far too stupid to merit a response." lol Oooh. You are quite the intellectual. Andrew asauber

@3

Do you really believe the nonsense you type out? Examine your verb again: reverse engineering. How does reductionism accomplish any of that? It wouldn’t even be an assemblage of Disconnected parts. Even an “assemblage of disconnected parts” requires an assembler, and a designer of those parts.

My point was that intelligent design should have no objections to reductionism as scientific method, since the intelligent design advocate can happily regard reductionism as reverse-engineering design. I was not endorsing this view -- I think I've made my criticisms about reductionism perfectly evident in the past few weeks. @4

How about addressing the issue in the OP?

No, it's far too stupid to merit a response. And no, I won't explain why. If you don't know enough biology to understand why the OP is inane, I don't have the time or inclination to hold your hand. PyrrhoManiac1

PM1, How about addressing the issue in the OP? Andrew asauber

PM @1. Do you really believe the nonsense you type out? Examine your verb again: reverse engineering. How does reductionism accomplish any of that? It wouldn't even be an assemblage of disconnected parts. Even an "assemblage of disconnected parts" requires an assembler, and a designer of those parts. Your designer is chance and the laws of nature. Not possible. That's why being an atheist requires so much more faith. We are faithful because of the evidence. Your faith requires you to suppress the evidence. The evidence surrounds you. AnimatedDust

PM1 at 1, Forget the ism's. Useless. Intelligent Design shows that the complexity of living things exceeds man's current level of technology. That it exceeds blind, unguided chance. So, EVOLUTION is incapable of the planning and engineering involved in creating living things. relatd

It's weird to see a criticism of reductionism in a post defending intelligent design. Intelligent design requires the idea that organized complexity cannot be "bottom-up" (spontaneous and emergent), but always "top-down" (some intelligent control). This entails that in the absence of design, a mere assemblage of disconnected parts is all that could exist. So reductionism is just revere-engineering intelligent design: the reductionist breaks things down into their constituent parts in order to disclose what the designer had to do in order to construct the organized whole. In other words, any advocate of intelligent design ought to champion reductionism. PyrrhoManiac1