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New introduction to intelligent design at YouTube, Part 2: Molecular biology

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1: Introduction Part 2 (October 12, 2021), by John and Sandy Palmer

Part 2 introduces the foundational concepts of Intelligent Design. Evidence from molecular biology over the past 60 years completely upends Darwinism.

You may also wish to see: New introduction to intelligent design at YouTube Part 1. Palmer: Part 1 begins with the basic concepts of Darwinian Evolution. Darwin’s theory related to heredity, but the science behind genetics was a mystery in his day. Darwin’s assumptions about heredity have proven to be mistaken.

Comments
I find it interesting that atheists attack ID because they think it is tied to theism, all the while ignoring the fact that they support Darwinism because it is aligned with atheism. If our theism is enough to discredit ID, then why is your atheism not enough to discredit neo-Darwinian theory?Fasteddious
November 17, 2021
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CD, yes the Christian faith believes in the necessary being, maximally great Creator God. That has precisely nothing to do with the focal design theory concern, a simple matter of empirical evidence and inductive warrant:
Specifically, it is whether observable entities can display signs that reliably mark them as designed. In many scientific fields that is non controversial, indeed I have long observed on a key telecommunications figure of merit, signal to noise ratio. The obvious, trillion case supported answer is yes, things such as functionally specific, complex organisation and associated information beyond 500 – 1,000 bits. In the case of cell based life we have uncontroversial cases of extensive, coded, algorithmic information in D/RNA. Coded information is linguistic, and we know the source of language. Algorithms are goal directed processes. The notion that extensive code, storage and execution machinery assembled itself out of blind dynamic-stochastic processes is absurd on its face and frankly it is defended in key part because this discovery came long after the Darwinist school of thought became dominant. And a fine tuned cosmos set up for such life is a further major case. That’s why I have now declared intellectual independence from those committed to defending an absurdity, too often by playing motive mongering.
It is noteworthy that you are clearly motivated by hostility to God and to the Christian faith, which has so warped your thought that you fell into precisely the motive mongering warned against. Yes, projection of hostility and nefarious intent in the teeth of unanswered warrant invites inference on cognitive dissonance, that the clash between your preference and evidence as summarised leads you to psycho-social defences by blame projection. I only point that out to show that I could infer to motive on much stronger grounds. My focus remains simple: we have LANGUAGE at work through considerable ALGORITHMIC CODE in the cell. This, in a cosmos fine tuned in dozens of ways that facilitates such cell based life. Fine tuned from its roots. It's over, there is no reasonable, responsible doubt that I and others have a perfect epistemic right on inductive logic and an observational base of trillions of cases [start with the Internet and artifacts such as nuts and bolts and books] to infer to design as key causal factor i/l/o evidence such as FSCO/I as noted. Your ideology does not hold my mind hostage. Nor do your patent hostility to God and trotting out of narratives of tainting projected in the face of a far more obvious innocent account. Has it ever dawned on you that others are perfectly capable of understanding with Crick, that the cell has code in it then concluding on the known source of algorithmic code and associated execution machinery? Game over, punto final. If you choose to keep on accusing and trying to taint, you will duly be noted as an uncivil slanderer. One who fails to even have decency to respect the dead who cannot answer for themselves (and were cognitively impaired for years before passing). Do you understand what that sort of insistent incivility tells us and the watching world? KFkairosfocus
November 15, 2021
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#18 Kairofocus The very first line of the Nicene Creed (First Council of Constantinople, 381) is:
We believe in one God, the Father Almighty, the maker of heaven and earth, of things visible and invisible. (my emphasis)
The "core design theory" you reference is explicit in the Nicene Creed. This is simply one more example of the Christian origins of ID. ID was spawned primarily by Phillip Johnson in the early 90s and he took the concept to the Discovery Institute as the "Wedge Strategy" in the late 90s with the express intent to replace the teaching of evolution in public schools with creationism cum ID. Johnson was dubbed the "father of ID" as a result of his 1991 book Darwin on Trial. ID can neither escape nor deny this history.chuckdarwin
November 15, 2021
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Please be warned: Chuckdarwin's troll @9 has been refuted repeatedly in this forum. It's been explained to him many times, but he always rehashes his ignorance of the difference between the Creationism as a religious position and Intelligent Design as a scientific paradigm. Not to mention that he still refuses to acknowledge his misconception of transpiration in plants. If he can't be convinced that transpiration concerns water loss from leaves, what hope would anyone have of explaining to him how Intelligent Design is a far more functional and successful paradigm than Darwinism? -QQuerius
November 15, 2021
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CD, the core design theory issue is independent of the Nicene Creed which is about as direct a general historic definition of the Christian faith as one gets. Specifically, it is whether observable entities can display signs that reliably mark them as designed. In many scientific fields that is non controversial, indeed I have long observed on a key telecommunications figure of merit, signal to noise ratio. The obvious, trillion case supported answer is yes, things such as functionally specific, complex organisation and associated information beyond 500 - 1,000 bits. In the case of cell based life we have uncontroversial cases of extensive, coded, algorithmic information in D/RNA. Coded information is linguistic, and we know the source of language. Algorithms are goal directed processes. The notion that extensive code, storage and execution machinery assembled itself out of blind dynamic-stochastic processes is absurd on its face and frankly it is defended in key part because this discovery came long after the Darwinist school of thought became dominant. And a fine tuned cosmos set up for such life is a further major case. That's why I have now declared intellectual independence from those committed to defending an absurdity, too often by playing motive mongering. My motive here is simple, the evidence is clear to the point of being computer code. I am going to go with that pretty direct evidence until someone shows convincingly that FSCO/I at relevant magnitude can and does come about by blind processes. About as I reject perpetual motion machines and for similar reasons. KFkairosfocus
November 15, 2021
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I would say all Christians support at least the tenet that an intelligent being created the universe... they may disagree on evolution, the age of the earth, but I would say the main tenet of ID is that intelligence is responsible for the universe.zweston
November 15, 2021
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There’s a basic fallacy in ChuckDarwin’s reasoning which he continues to not address. That is, if ID is accurate science, then every religion would want to acknowledge it not just Christianity. The fact that some Christians in the United States have promoted it in no way limits ID to those individuals only. Or to any specific religion. ID is either good science or not. This would be true for every religion. It would be true for Deist too. Remember there is nothing in ID that points to Christianity. Also some Christians avidly oppose ID. Don’t expect ChuckDarwin to engage in any serious discussion. He knows he is wrong and doesn’t want to admit that. The real question is why is he here and dodging questions.jerry
November 15, 2021
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Only morons conflate ID with the personal opinions of some IDists.ET
November 15, 2021
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@Chuckdarwin :) If they have a valid point doesn't matter what agenda they serve. You protest again their "hidden agenda" because you can't attack their point. Why you are not capable to refute their point? Because evolutionary scientists have no clue and you know exactly what they know : nothing.Lieutenant Commander Data
November 15, 2021
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Should a Hindu, Buddhist or Jew not listen to ID arguments because of the level of Christian representation in the people involved? For that matter, should an atheist not do so?hnorman42
November 15, 2021
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mods... can we get a like/dislike button for posts? I want to say amen without having to post amen. :)zweston
November 15, 2021
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Chuck.... when you realize there is a creator, you realize that this creator may have communicated with man and demonstrated who he was... then you read history and realize that Jesus was God in the flesh. Not all IDers are Christian (this is fact) but all Christians espouse ID in it's various forms. CD, why don't you just deal with the evidence and critique the arguments and data? You are repulsed that people that are ID end up being Christians...that reveals your hostility toward faith, not your scientific literacy.zweston
November 15, 2021
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ChuckyD, in his Darwinian "zealotry", and although provided with plenty of evidence that his own worldview is based on religious presuppositions, refuses to even acknowledge that Darwinian evolution itself is the most theologically entangled science going. Apparently, honesty towards facts in evidence is the first casualty in maintaining a Darwinian worldview.bornagain77
November 15, 2021
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ID isn't "undercover" Christianity any longer. DI never really made any serious attempts to hide their Christian agenda, other than to parrot "ID isn't religion" over and over, ad nauseum. For those too naïve, thick, or ideologically wedded to ID to get it on the first go around, Meyer did you a favor and outed it earlier this year. Return of the God Hypothesis? How could it be any more clear?chuckdarwin
November 15, 2021
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ET Intelligent Design offers the only scientific explanation for our existence. ID doesn’t say anything about who or how to worship. That alone says it is not religion. Clearly chuckdarwin is just an ignorant troll and proud of it.
:) Atheists logic : ID is undercover Christianity therefore code can emerge from randomness ,we don't know how but it's a fact and certainly one day will discover that.Lieutenant Commander Data
November 15, 2021
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Van Til (perhaps Calvinism's most famous apologist) says:
In other words, the non-Christian needs the truth of the Christian religion in order to attack it.
Van Til, in his zealotry, overstates this childish truism. The non-Christian merely needs the Christian religion to exist in order to attack it. It doesn't matter if its true or not. Then Van Til's true agenda emerges--equating the non-Christian with the "unbeliever," thus revealing his chauvinism. The problem with Christian philosophers is that they are all so dismally second-rate......chuckdarwin
November 15, 2021
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Intelligent Design offers the only scientific explanation for our existence. ID doesn't say anything about who or how to worship. That alone says it is not religion. Clearly chuckdarwin is just an ignorant troll and proud of it.ET
November 15, 2021
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ChuckDarwin complains that his main problem with ID is that "it is religion masquerading as science." Funny that CD does not seem to notice, and/or refuses to acknowledge, the fact that that particular 'religion masquerading as science' criticism is much more aptly applied to Darwinian evolution itself than it is to ID:
Charles Darwin, Theologian: Major New Article on Darwin's Use of Theology in the Origin of Species - May 2011 Excerpt: The Origin supplies abundant evidence of theology in action; as Dilley observes: I have argued that, in the first edition of the Origin, Darwin drew upon at least the following positiva theological claims in his case for descent with modification (and against special creation): 1. Human beings are not justified in believing that God creates in ways analogous to the intellectual powers of the human mind. 2. A God who is free to create as He wishes would create new biological limbs de novo rather than from a common pattern. 3. A respectable deity would create biological structures in accord with a human conception of the 'simplest mode' to accomplish the functions of these structures. 4. God would only create the minimum structure required for a given part's function. 5. God does not provide false empirical information about the origins of organisms. 6. God impressed the laws of nature on matter. 7. God directly created the first 'primordial' life. 8. God did not perform miracles within organic history subsequent to the creation of the first life. 9. A 'distant' God is not morally culpable for natural pain and suffering. 10. The God of special creation, who allegedly performed miracles in organic history, is not plausible given the presence of natural pain and suffering. http://www.evolutionnews.org/2011/05/charles_darwin_theologian_majo046391.html Evolution as a Theological Research Program - by Cornelius Hunter - August 2021 ,,, theological claims are common in Darwin’s On the Origin of Species (Darwin 1859), where they are essential to his science. The religion is not a tangential message, and one need not read between the lines to see it. In the Origin, it would not be an exaggeration to say the religion drives the science. Darwin’s religion is not merely present, it is prominent and has primacy over the science. The religion is foundational. The importance of religion in Darwin’s theory is also apparent in the science he presented. As Section 5 shows, Darwin did not have sufficient scientific arguments and evidence to advance his theory. Finally, as Section 6 and Section 7 demonstrate, these roles and relationships between religion and science persisted after Darwin. This religious foundation was by no means peculiar to Darwin’s thought. It has remained foundational since Darwin in motivating and justifying the theory. What we find in Darwin continued in later evolutionary thought. Therefore, the thesis of this paper is that evolution is best understood as a theological research program. https://www.mdpi.com/2077-1444/12/9/694/htm Methodological Naturalism: A Rule That No One Needs or Obeys - Paul Nelson - September 22, 2014 Excerpt: It is a little-remarked but nonetheless deeply significant irony that evolutionary biology is the most theologically entangled science going. Open a book like Jerry Coyne's Why Evolution is True (2009) or John Avise's Inside the Human Genome (2010), and the theology leaps off the page. A wise creator, say Coyne, Avise, and many other evolutionary biologists, would not have made this or that structure; therefore, the structure evolved by undirected processes. Coyne and Avise, like many other evolutionary theorists going back to Darwin himself, make numerous "God-wouldn't-have-done-it-that-way" arguments, thus predicating their arguments for the creative power of natural selection and random mutation on implicit theological assumptions about the character of God and what such an agent (if He existed) would or would not be likely to do.,,, ,,,with respect to one of the most famous texts in 20th-century biology, Theodosius Dobzhansky's essay "Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution" (1973). Although its title is widely cited as an aphorism, the text of Dobzhansky's essay is rarely read. It is, in fact, a theological treatise. As Dilley (2013, p. 774) observes: "Strikingly, all seven of Dobzhansky's arguments hinge upon claims about God's nature, actions, purposes, or duties. In fact, without God-talk, the geneticist's arguments for evolution are logically invalid. In short, theology is essential to Dobzhansky's arguments.",, http://www.evolutionnews.org/2014/09/methodological_1089971.html Damned if You Do and Damned if You Don't - Steve Dilley- 2019-06-02 The Problem of God-talk in Biology Textbooks Abstract: We argue that a number of biology (and evolution) textbooks face a crippling dilemma. On the one hand, significant difficulties arise if textbooks include theological claims in their case for evolution. (Such claims include, for example, ‘God would never design a suboptimal panda’s thumb, but an imperfect structure is just what we’d expect on natural selection.’) On the other hand, significant difficulties arise if textbooks exclude theological claims in their case for evolution. So, whether textbooks include or exclude theological claims, they face debilitating problems. We attempt to establish this thesis by examining 32 biology (and evolution) textbooks, including the Big 12—that is, the top four in each of the key undergraduate categories (biology majors, non-majors, and evolution courses). In Section 2 of our article, we analyze three specific types of theology these texts use to justify evolutionary theory. We argue that all face significant difficulties. In Section 3, we step back from concrete cases and, instead, explore broader problems created by having theology in general in biology textbooks. We argue that the presence of theology—of whatever kind—comes at a significant cost, one that some textbook authors are likely unwilling to pay. In Section 4, we consider the alternative: Why not simply get rid of theology? Why not just ignore it? In reply, we marshal a range of arguments why avoiding God-talk raises troubles of its own. Finally, in Section 5, we bring together the collective arguments in Sections 2-4 to argue that biology textbooks face an intractable dilemma. We underscore this difficulty by examining a common approach that some textbooks use to solve this predicament. We argue that this approach turns out to be incoherent and self-serving. The poor performance of textbooks on this point highlights just how deep the difficulty is. In the end, the overall dilemma remains. https://journals.blythinstitute.org/ojs/index.php/cbi/article/view/44 Nov. 2021 - The reason why Darwinian Atheism is itself crucially dependent upon false theological presuppositions is that ALL of science is based upon Judeo-Christian presuppositions, indeed is crucially dependent on them, and is certainly not based upon, indeed science cannot possibly be based upon, the presuppositions of Atheistic Naturalism. https://uncommondescent.com/intelligent-design/and-now-david-hume-cancelled-jerry-coyne-reports/#comment-740103
Darwinists, with their vital dependence on false theological presuppositions, instead of on any compelling scientific evidence, in order to try to make their case for Darwinian evolution are, as Cornelius Van Til put it, like the child who must climb up onto his father’s lap into order to slap his face.
“In other words, the non-Christian needs the truth of the Christian religion in order to attack it. As a child needs to sit on the lap of its father in order to slap the father’s face, so the unbeliever, as a creature, needs God the Creator and providential controller of the universe in order to oppose this God. Without this God, the place on which he stands does not exist. He cannot stand in a vacuum.” Cornelius Van Til, Essays on Christian Education (The Presbyterian and Reformed Publishing Company: Phillipsburg, NJ, 1979). https://uncommondescent.com/evolution/external-testicles-another-instance-of-bad-design/#comment-658600
bornagain77
November 15, 2021
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Yesterday, in a (somewhat exasperated) response to Origenes, I once again articulated my problem with ID, namely, that it is religion masquerading as science. As evidence, I directed him to the 1998 Wedge Document and Stephen Meyer's current God hypothesis book. Today, another gem of a piece of evidence is dropped in my lap with this video. Look closely at the cover art for the video and you will see what is perhaps the single most famous detail in Michelangelo's painting of the Sistine Chapel, God's creation of Adam. ID as religion masquerading as science, once again, couldn't be more obvious....chuckdarwin
November 15, 2021
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Jerry: He’s the most original thinker out there on ID but is getting older. Whether you like his ideas or not, it's obvious that WJM is the most original thinker around here. Everyone else is some variation of religious or atheist sycophant-ism. (Not that there's anything wrong with any of that.) --Ramram
November 15, 2021
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News, You obviously read some of these OPs. Why don’t you try to contact Stephen Blume to be an author. He’s the most original thinker out there on ID but is getting older. He might have a few years left. I believe he would lead the discussions into a more fruitful area. As above, ID has become mainly Darwin bashing. It just goes in endless circles. He came here over 7 years ago to comment but was ignored. Barry would love him because their politics are in sync.jerry
November 15, 2021
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I love these Palmer videos. I'm learning all sorts of things that I had glossed over before.polistra
November 14, 2021
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