Uncommon Descent Serving The Intelligent Design Community

My Proclivity for Inspiring Long UD Threads — Part Deux

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At this writing I see that my post here has 122 responses, and that my post here has 81 responses.

After examining all the dialog one thing seems clear to me: The ID versus Darwinian-materialism question must inevitably invade and challenge the core of the human soul.

Don’t tell me that anyone doesn’t at least eventually ask the only substantive and meaningful questions: 1) Why am I here? 2) Where did I come from? 3) Is there any ultimate purpose or meaning in my life?

If Darwinism is true, the answers to these questions are obvious:

1) No reason.
2) Chemistry and chance, which did not have you in mind.
3) No. You are an ephemeral product of 2).

The problem is that Darwinism is obviously not true, and the scientific evidence mounts every day that its mechanisms are catastrophically inadequate as an explanation for what we observe.

The philosophical, theological, ethical, and existential ramifications of this debate cut to the core of the human soul, which is why it inspires so much passion.

Comments
warehuff, It is not I who is demanding what must be explained, it is reality making those demands. If you find those demands exasperating in the presence of applied rationality, then so be it. Empericism can be a bitch to daydreamers, no matter what stripes they wear. Life operates from meaningful information instantiated into matter. I don't care if you want to suggest that its the 1st or the 101st thing to happen, the simple fact is that at some point, meaningful abstractions of the structure and processes that make up a living thing are going to have to become instantiated into matter. Not only that, but a decoding system will also need to become part of the abstraction. That is what must be explained. Now let's turn it around. In your eagerness to show how out of touch I am, you suggest that (contrary to 100% of observations and data) information is not actually necessary for life, indeed, life can begin without it.
DNA is thought to have come long after RNA and RNA may or may not have been in the first living thing.
DNA and RNA are information carriers. You have now postulated that living things can come about without information. Fine. Exactly how a living thing can intake energy, convert that energy to usable products, distribute those nutrients, respire waste, make repairs to systems, and so on - you do not say. Are you suggesting that a living thing does not need these systems, or are you merely suggesting a new kind of life - one wihout the need of metabolism? But wait! Before you answer that question, please tell us exactly on what data this new life form is based? Is there any? By all means Warehuff, fill this IDiot in - just make sure you doing it with actual evidence, and not speculation driven by ideology. If you do that, I can guarantee you I will call you on it. That's how it works when you must stick to what is actually known to be true. As for the remainder of your positioning piece on me, as well as the ad hom you threw at Gpuccio, well...I suppose it could be encapsulated in a simple thought you want to share with the readers here: "Them Jesus people needs to start thankin right 'bout thangs. They ain't thankin right." Does that about cover it?Upright BiPed
September 21, 2010
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"I really don’t see how the opinions of three professional scientists writing about their field of expertise in what scordova would call a very prestegious science magazine can possibly match up against the opinion of gpuccio writing at Uncommon Descent." Geez man. I'm glad I don't have this mentality.HouseStreetRoom
September 21, 2010
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BA: I would definitely say that LUCA was not simple. What came before, is still mystery...gpuccio
September 21, 2010
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warehuff states this: 'Creationists and ID Theorists are also the only people I know of who think that the first living things were as complex as simple modern cells. No scientist I have ever heard of believes anything like this.' Apparently warehuff, as with your directly misquoting me. researching a point before you state it as fact is not a strong point of integrity for you either... Was our oldest ancestor a proton-powered rock? - Oct. 2009 Excerpt: “There is no doubt that the progenitor of all life on Earth, the common ancestor, possessed DNA, RNA and proteins, a universal genetic code, ribosomes (the protein-building factories), ATP and a proton-powered enzyme for making ATP. The detailed mechanisms for reading off DNA and converting genes into proteins were also in place. In short, then, the last common ancestor of all life looks pretty much like a modern cell.” http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20427306.200-was-our-oldest-ancestor-a-protonpowered-rock.htmlbornagain77
September 21, 2010
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warehuff: in my world, ideas count for themselves.gpuccio
September 21, 2010
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Upright BiPed @ 68: I'm not so much interested in showing that you're out of touch as I am in letting you know that declaring the genetic code to be a frozen accident is a big point against ID. If the code is accidental, then we're back to nothing but electromagnetic fields and we have no need whatsoever for a designer. On the other hand, if you allow that the code is remarkably efficient and arranged so that the most common errors either don't change the amino acid selected or select an amino acid that more or less duplicates the specified amino acid when it's incorporated into a protein, then the scientists can say the code is the result of evolution, but you can at least make the claim that, "An Intelligent Designer created that code." Of course, there are a couple of places where the genetic code could do an even better job of error correcting (the frozen accidents referred to), so you have to explain how the Intelligent Designer isn't totally intelligent, but you've still got a better case than the frozen accidents where no designer is needed, whether that designer is evolution or an intelligence. There is one place where you actually are seriously out of touch: Where you say that the earliest living things had DNA. So far as I know, only creationists and ID Theorists make this claim. I've never seen anybody on the science end make this claim at all. DNA is thought to have come long after RNA and RNA may or may not have been in the first living thing. Creationists and ID Theorists are also the only people I know of who think that the first living things were as complex as simple modern cells. No scientist I have ever heard of believes anything like this. Start thinking about sub-microscopic polymers, possibly RNA, maybe something else. Think of their one single "talent" as being the ability to self-reproduce and you'll be very close to talking about what scientists envision as the first living things. Forgive me for having just a wee touch of exasperation. It is forced upon me by people who argue against something that no scientist advocates.warehuff
September 21, 2010
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Pedant @ 66, thanks for the Yarus citation, but I really don't see how the opinions of three professional scientists writing about their field of expertise in what scordova would call a very prestegious science magazine can possibly match up against the opinion of gpuccio writing at Uncommon Descent.warehuff
September 21, 2010
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To all: I have already commented on Yarus' theory that a biochemical reason is behind the code. It is a theory. A very vague theory. IMO, a fairy tale theory. Not better than all RNA world theories. And what about the very specific Aminoacyl tRNA synthetases? You know, they are 20 classes of very complex proteins, and they are needed for the code to work. And they couple the right AA with the right tRNA. And I suppose they were already there, in LUCA. So, how did they evolve?gpuccio
September 20, 2010
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Dunsinane: If meaning requires perception and only life is capable of perception, then meaning must require life. We would then be forced to say: life requires meaning and meaning requires life. The only way out of this would be to say that something else is capable of perception. You are right. Indeed, meaning requires "consciousness", and more specifically "intelligent consciousness". There is no meaning outside of conscious beings. But there is no reason to equate consciousness with "life", at least if we equate life with the biological life we know. The point in ID is that some form of conscious intelligent being has originated and molded the biological life we known. Therefore, that conscious intelligent being, however we conceive of it, must at least predate life on our planet. But again, there is no reason to believe that consciousness can only exist as an expression of the biological life we know. Consciousness is observed in ourselves as a fundamental principle of reality. While materialists love to argue that it can be explained as a byproduct of matter (strong AI theory), there is really no reason to think that way. Indeed, there are a lot of reasons to believe differently. So, we can well assume that some form of conscious intelligence may exist independently from biological life on our planet, and predate it.gpuccio
September 20, 2010
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Dunsinane, I agree. "Life only comes from Life" has a rich history, but at one time there was no Life on this planet.Upright BiPed
September 20, 2010
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Warehuff, I know you are eager to position me as out-of-touch. You’ve mentioned twice that Crick’s “frozen accident” is a relic of by-gone days; so much the better to focus on the speculations du jour. Of course, this does not work. We know little more today than Crick did on this specific matter. Or perhaps it is more accurate to say that our knowledge has increased tremendously, but our insights as to how the code came to be are virtually unchanged. Koonin and Wolf wrote a paper regarding the evolution of the genetic code and made some statements you might find interesting. While their paper supports evolution of the code in some form or another (what else could it support?) they use a particular term in their conclusions. They speculate that the “evolution of the code can be represented as a combination of adaptation and frozen accident”. That paper was written in 2007. So your attempts to score rhetorical points by bemoaning the use of that term are perhaps unsupported. Perhaps it’s not time to retire the old girl just yet. I also notice that you (at least) seem to be fond of both the stereochemistry thesis of code emergence, as well as the evolution thesis. It’s an odd combination unless you are simple placing your bets. Koonin and Wolf also made some comments about that as well:
The stereochemical hypothesis that can be traced back to the early work of Gamow [3,25-31] postulates that codon assignments for particular amino acids are determined by a physicochemical affinity that exists between the amino acids and the cognate nucleotide triplets (codons or anticodons). Under this hypothesis, the minimization of the effect of translation errors characteristic of the standard code is thought to be an epiphenomenon of purely stereochemical constraints (e.g., similar codons display affinity to amino acids of similar bulk and PRS). This hypothesis implies that the code did not evolve or, in a weak form, that it evolved minimally, adjusting the stereochemical assignments. The stereochemical hypothesis, at least, in its strong form, is readily experimentally testable. However, despite extensive experimentation in this area [32], the reality and relevance of any affinities between amino acid and cognate triplets, codons or anticodons, remain questionable
So if you are a stereochemistry guy, you can go for the strong form which doesn’t have a chance in hell or you can go for the weak form, and have an untestable miracle on your hands. In any case, if you are going to say that the code is a product of evolution, then you have just added the additional weight of having to explain the evolution of the code to its current state of perfect optimization as perhaps the very first act of Life. Since all living things use the exact same code (with a couple of mere variations) then you’ve pushed back the completion of the code, the development of its entire translation entourage, and its error correction routines, back to before the very first divergence of organisms on this planet. This little feat of evolutionary engineering (remembering that Hurst and Freeland characterized the robustness of the code as “one in a million”) can then be added to the bucket where we keep the questions about the rise of metabolism. Not only did evolution figure out how to build and organize cell compartmentalization, convert energy sources, distribute nutrients, respire waste, connect regulatory networks, and so on, but it also perfected a code that was robust enough to last for the next 4.54 billion years without change. And all these were among the very first things it accomplished. Forgive me for having just a wee touch of incredulity. It is forced upon me by a need to believe that matter is all there is.Upright BiPed
September 20, 2010
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Upright BiPed You wrote "If DNA was stripped of its meaning, Life would immediate cease to exist. It is the central requirement for the existence of Life as we know it. Life requires meaning instantiated into matter." This seems reasonable. However, you then wrote "if that is so then meaning preceded Life" which seems to contradict your earlier definition of meaning: "This capacity (of perception and semiosis) necessarily limits the existence of meaning to the domain of living things. Assumptions: Meaning requires perception." If meaning requires perception and only life is capable of perception, then meaning must require life. We would then be forced to say: life requires meaning and meaning requires life. The only way out of this would be to say that something else is capable of perception.Dunsinane
September 20, 2010
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warehuff, our posts crossed. You might check out the Yarus paper. (Unfortunately, the full text is behind a paywall online, but you can read the abstract.)Pedant
September 20, 2010
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You are kicking the can down the road. The cdoe to “set up” the tRNAs is inside the DNA.
It is now, but its origin seems to have a stereochemical basis. See Michael Yarus, Jeremy J Widmann, and Rob Knight (2009) RNA-amino acid binding: a stereochemical era for the genetic code. J Mol Evol, 69(5):406-29. The money quote:
By combining crystallographic and NMR structural data for RNA-bound amino acids within riboswitches, aptamers, and RNPs, chemical principles governing specific RNA interaction with amino acids can be deduced.
Pedant
September 20, 2010
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It's late here too. Crick thought the association of CTA to Leucine was a random accident that "stuck". Ditto for all the other associations that make up the genetic code. That was in the sixties. Today most researchers in the field believe that the code evolved. If you think that the construction of the tRNAs is coded in the organism's DNA means something, you're right. The code couldn't evolve if it wasn't in the DNA. The actual associations are entirely arbitary, after all, CTA could just as easily have stood for lysine as for leucine. Google evolution of trna for some ideas on how the first arbitrary choices evolved to their present, nearly ideal state.warehuff
September 20, 2010
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WH, It's late here....I'll check in tomorrow.Upright BiPed
September 20, 2010
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"Once you have the tRNA types set up" You are kicking the can down the road. The cdoe to "set up" the tRNAs is inside the DNA.Upright BiPed
September 20, 2010
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Warehuff, Re-reading your post, I want to make myself clear. We have no disagreement that electrostatic forces (and others) are at work during protein synthesis. This is not even in question. The issue is that those electrostatic forces do not create the association of CTA to Leucine or any of the other amino acids. Neither does the tRNA - themselves requiring the code for their production.Upright BiPed
September 20, 2010
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I think you should google crick and "frozen accident" and catch up on the field. When Crick thought the genetic code was a "frozen accident", he meant that the codes that specify which amino acid is selected by which three base codon were randomly chosen and would never change. That was in the sixties, most people now think the code evolved. But this has nothing to do with how they work. Once you have the tRNA types set up, all of the work is done solely by electrostatic forces and no mentality or perception is involved.warehuff
September 20, 2010
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Warehuff, I know you feel very certain of yourself, but I am sorry to inform you that you are completely mistaken. The sequences involved in genetic coding are chemico-dynamically inert. This is why Crick referred to it as a "frozen accident". This is hardly News inside origins research. There is nothing in the chemistry of C-T-A that neccesitates a connection to Leucine. You might have inferred as much from the number of researchers working on the "origin of the genetic code". Physical neccesity has nothing to do with it.Upright BiPed
September 20, 2010
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Upright BiPed, I think you’re a little mixed up in #38. You say, “This definition in itself would indicate that meaning cannot exist without perception…” but perception is a mental phenomenon and it has nothing to do with your DNA examples. For instance, you correctly note that the DNA combination C-T-A (Cytosine, Thymine & Adenine) codes for the amino acid Leucine. But the coding is done purely by electrostatic forces. To make a protein, the electrostatic forces in the DNA bases attract complementary bases to make a strand of messenger RNA. This is edited and then fed into a ribosome where three base triplets of mRNA bases electrostatically attract tRNA molecules which carry the corresponding amino acid on their other ends. The mRNA string then carries the tRNA molecule into the ribosome where the amino acid is attached to the protein that’s being manufactured. What’s important here is that all of the work is done by electrostatic forces. There is no mentality involved at all and hence nothing is ever perceived. Electrostatic forces don’t need minds or perception to work and there is no reason to think they haven’t been working as long as the earth has existed. Since life existed for billions of years before humans appeared and finally figured out how DNA builds proteins, Life preceded Meaning on this planet.warehuff
September 20, 2010
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Leadme, As I said earlier, welcome aboard. It is good to have you here. I think the sentiments you display in your comment #56 are highly admirable, however I do slightly disagree with one of your comments.
Mostly, I look around and see that precious few serious scientists (and this includes Christian scientists such as Ken Miller, Francis Collins, Denis Alexander, etc.) have given ID much notice, other than to speak against it, so I tend to interpret that as strong inferential evidence against ID
I would think the history suggests a rather tremendous response to ID, even if that response has been to say that all the ID arguments have been refuted, and then circle the wagons. In truth, Behe’s Black Box (along with many other publications) created quite a hole for the marketing arm of Darwinism. You can glean this from the comments and admissions which were made in response to its publication:
"There is no doubt that the pathways described by Behe are dauntingly complex, and their evolution will be hard to unravel. . . . [W]e may forever be unable to envisage the first proto-pathways." – Coyne
“There are no detailed Darwinian accounts for the evolution of any fundamental biochemical or cellular system, only a variety of wishful speculations” - Shapiro
“For none of the cases mentioned by Behe is there yet a comprehensive and detailed explanation of the probable steps in the evolution of the observed complexity. The problems have indeed been sorely neglected--though Behe repeatedly exaggerates this neglect…” - Cavalier-Smith
Miller and others were handy for filling this hole with useful rhetoric - but refute ID, that they did not do. In fact, the hole has done nothing but grow deeper and deeper with just about every discovery made. The simple truth is that none of the ID arguments have been refuted. IC stands. Dembski’s probabilities arguments stand. Behe’s arguments in the Edge of Evolution stand. The challenges made David Abel in his peer-reviewed papers are still unanswered. And last year Stephen Meyer’s book outlining the DNA enigma was an Amazon pick of the year – and is completely unrefuted. - - - - - - Again, welcome aboard.Upright BiPed
September 19, 2010
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Have I seriously and deeply grappled with details of the irreducible complexity argument? No I have not, and one of the reasons I'm here at this site is because I realize that I haven't. I'll freely admit that I've taken the "irreducible complexity stands refuted" argument mostly on authority, although the little research I have done into the topic seems to demonstrate that it has, indeed, been undermined. Mostly, I look around and see that precious few serious scientists (and this includes Christian scientists such as Ken Miller, Francis Collins, Denis Alexander, etc.) have given ID much notice, other than to speak against it, so I tend to interpret that as strong inferential evidence against ID. But have I explored this issue in depth for myself? No. I've been spending a lot of time haunting the biologos site, and have come to respect the crew over there quite a bit. But, none of us can ever really grow if we're not willing to step outside the comfort of our little boxes, at least every once in a while, right? So I'm here, and I appreciate the dialogue.leadme.org
September 19, 2010
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San Antonio Rose (quoting me): As a child, at age seven, I remember the exact moment I figured out that life was ultimately meaningless and purposeless, based on the atheism and Darwinism with which I was raised. San Antonio Rose: That is really sad, Gil. I hope you have been able to forgive your mother and father for raising you in such a bad environment. In a sense it was a bad environment, but in the end it all worked out to be a blessing. I'm a big believer in Romans 8:28, and I believe that this promise can work retroactively. My father is an atheist, but he is the most Christ-like person I have ever known. Although my father taught me atheism and Darwinism, he also taught me to follow the scientific evidence wherever it leads. His field is chemistry and physics (he worked on the Manhattan Project during WWII, was founder and director of an experimental nuclear reactor, became a professor of physical chemistry, established the chemical physics Ph.D. program at WSU, and was engaged in NMR research for many years), and gave little thought to origins. He just took it on faith that the materialists had origins all figured out. My father has always been concerned with real science -- with tangible, empirically validated results -- and to this he has devoted his life. Here's the kicker: Although my father is an atheist, he modeled Christ for me. He is impeccably ethical, compassionate, giving and self-sacrificing, and the greatest scientist I have ever known. I can't imagine having grown up with a greater and more wonderful father on earth.GilDodgen
September 19, 2010
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Gee Gil, I think I may have actually killed your thread. My bad.Upright BiPed
September 19, 2010
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leadme, ID is not oppossed to evolution, defined as change over time. ID is oppossed to the unsupported notion that unguided forces can explain what we find at the molecular level. If you are genuinely curious, I suggest reading a minimum of "Signature in the Cell" by Stephen Meyer and "The Edge of Evolution" by Michael Behe. And by the way, irreducible compexity stands unrefuted.Upright BiPed
September 19, 2010
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Lars, Forgive me for the long post. In the interest of brevity, I’ll move directly to your observations. You say:
(1) My posts have tried to get more meat around the idea of “ultimate meaning.” Your points don’t seem quite connected to it, but I could make some guesses about possible connections
Yes, of course, your posts were dealing directly with ultimate meaning. I recognize that. My post, again, dealt solely with your observation that we build tools to aid us in gaining access to reality, and that the use of those very tools have now intractably challenged the notion that unguided chemistry is the origin of what we find today. As for connecting the dots, it might be valid to suggest (from a purely empirical perspective) that even though the origin of life on this planet required more than just unguided chemistry, that observation has no bearing on ultimate meaning. Observers would be open to interpret that how they wish.
(2) I am not sure I see your case for meaning preceding life. Just for kicks: why could we not talk about meaning and life as simultaneous, co-dependent emergences? I’d be interested here in your take on current research.
If DNA was stripped of its meaning, Life would immediate cease to exist. It is the central requirement for the existence of Life as we know it. Life requires meaning instantiated into matter. Now, if that is so (and it certainly is) then meaning preceded Life, or else Life doesn’t need meaning in order to exist. If one thing is contingent and the other is necessary, then the latter must exist in order to be the cause of the former. One could say that at some point in the past, an unknown chemical reaction was underway which somehow gloriously gained the capacities necessary to explain Life as we know it. That certainly is a fair research program for science to embark upon. What is not reasonable is for science to formally institutionalize the notion that it already has the answer. They do not have that answer, and they don’t even have so much as a conceptual pathway to it. Instead, they act by means of institutional power against all evidence to the contrary. Of course, all of that is part of the political sideshow which has no bearing on the readily observable evidence; meaning instantiated into matter is the cause of Life on this planet. As for the notion of emergence, I think it is no more than an answer given when one must give one. Its sole intention is to stop the questions. Look at it this way; let us say for a moment that no “emergence” was necessary. We could look at the properties of matter and (against all intuition) we could see the way in which matter could create semiotic relationships, and could therefore offer an explanation of Life. What that would entail is that we could look at the four fundamental forces that exist in nature and see a pathway to semiosis. But that is not the case. Proposing “emergence” is not a proposition of a fifth force, it is just saying that the answer will emerge from an interesting combination of the four. Well, no duh. The combination of those forces is in full effect right now, and they offer no possibility of an answer. And when I say “no possibility” I am saying that its a category error – physics cannot explain meaning.
(3) I’m not comfortable with your use of the word “perception.” What is the relationship between perception and interpretation?
Lightwaves of various lengths and intensities strike my retina producing a signal of a specific pattern to be transmitted down my optic nerve to my brain. My neural system interprets the pattern of that signal to be an abstracted representation of what I saw.
(4) I realize you have given a partial definition of meaning (although I seem to understand Shannon differently than you do), but I find it strange to talk about meaning without also talking about whose meaning it may be. So, in your usages, whose meaning are we talking about?
In the second sentence of the second paragraph of Shannon’s famous paper on Information Theory, he made the only distinction that need be made regarding information and meaning. He did so from the perspective of information transmission, where noise could be introduced into a signal carrying information. He separated out a distinction. That distinction is that there is both a) meaning and b) noise. I have already given you the quote: “Frequently the messages have meaning; that is they refer to or are correlated according to some system with certain physical or conceptual entities.” Meaning is that which refers to, or is correlated according to some system with certain physical or conceptual entities. He further developed this idea in a schematic diagram, Fig 1, with five individually-named boxes. From left to right there is as arrow which passes through four of the five boxes in a specific order to indicate the flow of information. The flow begins at “Information Source” then passes through “Transmitter” to “Receiver” and finally to “Destination”. The fifth of the five boxes is tangentially tied to the flow of information between the “Transmitter” and the “Receiver”. The fifth box in entitled “Noise Source”. The information source entails meaning, the noise source does not. As for your question of whose meaning have we found instantiated into matter – I can only tell you there is nothing in the evidence and nothing in Intelligent Design Theory that can answer that question. However, the inability to answer that question does not indicate that mud can suddenly begin to assign meaning to itself. Each person is free to make of it what they will.Upright BiPed
September 19, 2010
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Leadme, I second the "welcome aboard." I apologize for being so confrontational in my post. I think my points were valid, but I could have been a little more polite in presenting them. I think you raised an issue that ID theorists agree with, and in-fact, have been saying all along. But it's a two way street. The fact is that Darwinism isn't presented completely divorced from ideology. In fact, it is ideology, which drives the science. Stick around, and I think you will discover how this is so. I recommend reading all of Dr. Cornelius Hunter's posts if you want to know how Darwinists start with the ideology. It may prove to be quite enlightening. And also pay attention to the positive ID arguments here as well as the scientific discussions with regard to Darwinian evolution. There's also a lot of discussion regarding world-view issues, and they are important for the very reasons I mentioned - because Darwinism starts with ideology and seeks to fit the evidence with it.CannuckianYankee
September 19, 2010
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Dear Leadme, I am wondering, have you actually read about the bacterial flagellum, and then have you read the Miller paper supposedly refuting it, and then have you read Dembski's response to the Miller paper? Or have you just been told by your new friends that Miller took care of it? Because I am a layperson too, and when I read Miller's almost silly paper, I saw right away how inadequate his arguments were, and these same ideas I had were then in Dembski's response. And I am just making the point that it was easy enough for me to see the inadequacy of the Miller paper despite my vastly inferior education to all three players. Have you read some good ID books? I think you will see that the arguments are of a scientific and not theological nature. Although I am a believer in God I never worried overmuch about evolution and never studied it. I only got interested when ID came along, and was fascinated by the way Darwinian evolution could be deconstructed using scientific arguments only. When I see the back and forth arguments, it always seems to me that the ID guys win hands down, and take the arguments to a deeper level. Common descent, thoughts vary. I believe in saltation. Jurassicmac, If you don't mind, I would like to know if your profession in any way involves science, scientists, or biology.avocationist
September 19, 2010
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The reason, Gil, that your posts generate many responses is the topics that you choose, i.e., metaphysics. I very much agree with posts 5 and 6 (that's as far as I've got so far)and would like to present a conversation I recently had with a very religious person of fundamentalist background. But of a sweet and open disposition. I mentioned that, as one of the doctors had pointed out, it is often the very religious who are most resistant to dying. She told me a long and distressing story of how difficult it had been for her very church going and religious mother in law to die peacefully and how she kept herself alive through force of will for a considerable time. I asked her why she thought that might be and she answered that it is always fearful because of the things you hear in church and you can't be sure you measure up. I mentioned how unfortunate I think that is, to teach people to fear God. And that I don't fear God. She thought that strange. I said, well, if we fear God and also fear the devil, we don't live in a very good universe, do we? And I said that I thought many atheists were rebelling against that negative religious doctrine, but that I could never understand how someone could WANT there to be no afterlife. She got a dreamy look on her face and said, Oh, I think that would be wonderful! What??? Just to stop and be done, she said. So there you have it. Better to cease than to have to worry about hell. And you know, I think they are right. A plan in which a substantial number of people are going to a place of anguish, despair and hopelessness forever, perhaps pain, well, I have tried and tried and tried, and I can't think of a worse scenario that could possibly exist. I think it is time for a change.avocationist
September 18, 2010
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