Uncommon Descent Serving The Intelligent Design Community

No good theology, you say? Oh yes there is!

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Over on his Evolution Blog, Professor Jason Rosenhouse has written a post (which has been highly praised by Professor Jerry Coyne) entitled, Where can I find the really good theology? Part one. Apparently he really believes there isn’t any to be found:

We New Atheist types are often lectured about the need for studying theology. The idea is that if we tuned out the distressingly popular and highly vocal forms of religious extremism and pondered instead “the best religion has to offer,” then we would not be so hostile to religion.

…I have read a fair amount of highbrow theology. I have read my share of Augustine and Aquinas, Barth and Tillich, Kierkegaard and Kuhn, just to pick a few names. I have read quite a lot of Haught and Ward and Swinburne. I did not go into this expecting to be disappointed. Conversion seemed unlikely, but I expected at least to find a lot of food for thought. Instead, with each book and essay I read I found myself ever more horrified by the sheer vacuity of what these folks were doing. I came to despise their endlessly vague and convoluted arguments, their relentless smugness towards nonbelievers, and, most seriously, the complete lack of any solid reason for thinking they weren’t just making it up as they went along. I thought perhaps I was just reading the wrong writers, and that I would eventually come to the really good theology. But I never did.

Well, Professor Rosenhouse, I’ve been reading theology for over three decades myself, and I’ve compiled a collection of the “best of the best”: a dozen or so online articles which, when taken together, constitute a very strong philosophical case for belief in God. I’ve asterisked the ones which I think are the most important. I can assure you that the philosophers who wrote these articles are not just making it up as they go along: they’ve done a lot of hard thinking about their beliefs. If you think their arguments lack intellectual merit, I should very much like to know why.

I would also urge you to read Professor Edward Feser’s book, Aquinas. It’s about the best defense of Aristotelian Thomism that you are ever likely to read, it’s less than 200 pages long, and its arguments merit very serious consideration. You would be ill-advised to dismiss it out of hand.

Anyway, without further ado, here’s my list.

It’s your move, Professor Rosenhouse.

The modal cosmological argument

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Job Opening: Creator of the Universe — A Reply to Keith Parsons (2009) by Professor Paul Herrick. Argues that philosophical theism, far from being vulnerable to the continued progress of science, rests on a rationally satisfying and philosophically attractive logical basis that cannot, in principle, be overturned by the continued progress of natural science.

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Lecture notes and bibliography from Dr. Koons’ Western Theism course (Phil. 356). An excellent introduction to the modal cosmological argument, with a refutation of criticisms by Hume, Kant and Mackie. Also covers the design argument.

Koon’s paper, A New Look at the Cosmological Argument is more technical but definitely worth reading, especially for its rebuttals to common criticisms of the modal cosmological argument.

The cosmological fine-tuning argument: the case for the Universe having a Designer

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The Teleological Argument: An Exploration of the Fine-Tuning of the Universe by Dr. Robin Collins. In The Blackwell Companion to Natural Theology. Edited by William Lane Craig and J. P. Moreland. 2009. Blackwell Publishing Ltd. ISBN: 978-1-405-17657-6. The most up-to-date refinement of the fine-tuning argument. Comprehensive and very rigorously argued.

The Case for Cosmic Design (2008) by Dr. Robin Collins. With a reply by Dr. Paul Draper. Clarifying the Case for Cosmic Design (2008) by Dr. Robin Collins.

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The Fine-tuning of the Cosmos: A Fresh Look at its Implications by Dr. Robin Collins.

God’s simplicity

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Making Sense of Divine Simplicity (forthcoming in Faith and Philosophy) by Dr. Jeffrey Brower, of Purdue University. A number of contemporary philosophers have argued that divine simplicity is at least a coherent doctrine. For all their ingenuity, however, contemporary defenses of the doctrine continue to fall on deaf ears. Brower’s purpose in this paper is two-fold: to explain why this is case, and to mount a new defense, one that succeeds where the others have failed to resolve contemporary concerns about the doctrine’s coherence, once and for all.

God’s timelessness

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Eternity by Professor Paul Helm. Article in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

God’s foreknowledge

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Foreknowledge and Free Will by Professor Norman Swartz. Article in the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
(See also Foreknowledge and Free Will by Professor Linda Zagzebski. Article in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.)

God’s goodness

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God, obligation, and the Euthyphro dilemma by Professor Edward Feser. (October 26, 2010.)

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C. S. Lewis and the Euthyphro Dilemmaby Dr. Steve Lovell. Please scroll down to read the article.
The article addresses the question: are actions good because God commands them, or does God command them because they are good? According to what Lovell calls the Divine Nature Theory, morality is rooted not in God’s commands, but in God’s necessary and immutable nature, which is essentially good.

God as the Grounding of Moral Objectivity: Defending Against Euthyphro by Dr. Steve Lovell. Please scroll down to read the article.
Abstract: The Euthyphro Dilemma (is x good because God says it’s good, or does God say x is good because it is good?), has been used as an argument against Theistic Ethics for hundreds of years. Plato was the first to use it. Since then Bertrand Russell, Kai Nielsen and many others have sought to really push it home. My aim in this paper is to show that the dilemma (as posed by both Russell and Nielsen) is a false one. Theistic ethics does survive the Euthyphro dilemma. I take up and defend Aquinas’ position: that God himself (or his nature) is the standard of goodness, and not his commands. This position avoids the dilemma since God’s commands / morality will not be arbitrary (since they are/it is rooted in God’s nature), and Goodness will not be in any sense anterior to God either.

Comments
F/N: It seems I come up even when absent, and it seems that objectors too often cannot seem to summarise accurately and fairly, ending up tilting at strawmen of their own making. I am beginning to think that speaks volumes about the want of solidity of their case. A genome of 100,000+ bits worth of info (4 states per base, 50k bases, low relative to what we have seen), would have 2^100,000 possible configs as simple chains of bases. That is a very large space of possibilities indeed. In practice, we see functional forms from a much smaller part of the overall field of possibilities, from islands of function. There is of course a pretence that any and every config has a large chance of being functional in relevant ways, so let us just remind objectors that when you have multiple part complex function dependent on the right parts in the right arrangement, interfaced correctly and acting on the right sequence of steps, you have imposed a huge, information-rich array of constraints, leading to tightly specifying the acceptable zone in the field of possibilities. That is as commonplace as that the right part is needed to fix a car and it needs to be put in right too. If you dispute this, which is abundantly supported by a vast body of experience, it is you who have the burden of proof. Which has not been met. In this context, incremental variation within an island of function is irrelevant to how to get to that island from scratch. With OOL as the first exhibit. And with OO body plans as the second. The easy rhetorical extrapolation of microevo within existing islands of function as if that explains getting to such islands in light of the info challenge, needs to stop. As in, black/white moths or big/small beaked finches do not explain how we get moths or birds in the first place, absent some very powerful and complete observational warrant that shows getting to islands of function in large config spaces by the scale of atomic and temporal resources available in the solar system or observed cosmos. Which simply has not been done. If you claim otherwise, SHOW it on good and sufficient empirical evidence, for OOL and OOBP. Or else, it is rhetorical blue smoke and mirrors. As, sadly, all too usual (especially at the more notorious objector sites). KFkairosfocus
January 6, 2013
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WHY BOTHER? Does no one understand why they believe? Did anyone in the first or 2nd, 3rd century and on have good theology to read so they could sit back behind their judges throne to either be amused or converted? People were converted from one single line from Paul at times. This is about the heart and will. These people have heard the gospel and repeatedly rejected it. They have probably heard the gospel at least 300 times in one form or another and each time they turned their backs. They have more chances than in any other era. Dont encourage them by listing more books. This isnt a detective mission. Christs message opens the hearts of God's children and closes the hearts of the wicked. Why isnt that enough for some of you? This person needs to go to christ--thats it..not read more clever arguments. Please dont tell me your belief is based on such things --and not the fact the Holy Spirit put in your mind when you went to God in faith.serious123
January 6, 2013
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dmullenix:
Mung at 89: If I say, “You’re right,” will you admit that Dembski and kairosfocus (and all the other ID mavens who throw those huge search spaces around) are wrong?
I might. I'm not shy about such things. Would you care to point me to a specific quote or provide me with a cite? But we're agreed about the size of the search space and how to calculate the size, right? Just to be sure, could you give an example? Thanks.Mung
July 26, 2011
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PMFBI, but "search" and "search space" are metaphors that fit into a larger analogy and it's important to keep a hold on what is doing what in the larger analogy. "Search" implies a "searcher". So what is doing the "searching" when a single nucleotide in a gene undergoes a mutation? Not the mutation. What is doing the "searching" (to maintain the teleological metaphor) is that spot in the sequence. And, as dmullenix says there are four steps in "search space" that it can probe - it can take one of four nucleotides. However, it starts from one that works in the current context (otherwise it wouldn't be there). Let's say it "tries" a second: Answer: "useless" i.e. new organism dies without issue. And a third: Answer: "just as good" i.e. new organism functions just as well as the old one. And the last: Answer: "not so good, but still viable". And it "tries" the fourth: "better". So after those three trials, the original is still around in the population; the second is not; the third is, although struggling; the four is doing even better than the original. The search for an optimum genome has progressed.Elizabeth Liddle
July 26, 2011
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Mung at 89: If I say, “You’re right,” will you admit that Dembski and kairosfocus (and all the other ID mavens who throw those huge search spaces around) are wrong?dmullenix
July 26, 2011
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dmullenix:
The search space is very large. The portion that each individual explores is very small – 4 for a single point mutation.
How does a single mutation in a single base pair explore four different locations in the search space? And how is this consistent with your prior statement that each genome represents only a single point in the search space? Are all four points in the search space in reality a single point in the search space? If a given organism has three offspring, and each one of those three offspring has a mutation to the exact same base and no other, and the mutation in all three is to a base that is different from that in the parent, and distinct and different to that in the siblings, then we have explored four points in the search space. But that requires four genomes, not one. And three mutations, not one. This is so obvious that it should go without saying, but apparently it needs to be said.Mung
July 25, 2011
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Mung at 85: “So you have claimed that the search space is both very very large and very very small.” The search space is very large. The portion that each individual explores is very small – 4 for a single point mutation. Mung at 86: “You don’t know what you’re talking about.” Afraid I do in this case.dmullenix
July 25, 2011
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Ipadron at 84: 1: Nobody has any idea of how the metaverse came to be, just as they have no idea of how God came to be. Religious apologists say that God “always existed” or is a “necessary Being” or give some other non-answer. We say, “Whatever it was, the metaverse is simpler than God and hence more likely to exist.” 2: It would depend on how much more complex God’s mind is than the metaverse. We don’t know, but the human mind is awesomely complex and God is supposed to be much smarter than any human. 3: All of quantum mechanics is hard to believe, but virtual particles are very well established and their effects can be measured in the lab. They exist because of Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle. The way it works, if there’s any energy in the vacuum at all (and there always is), they will tend to appear and then immediately annihilate each other and disappear. The heavier the particles, the shorter the time they can exist before they annihilate each other. In theory, if a heavy enough pair of particles is produced, they may collapse into their own personal black hole and serve as the seeds of a new universe. They are also responsible for draining the energy from black holes. A pair of virtual particles are produced from the energy at the event horizon. One particle disappears into the hole and the other flies in the other direction and escapes, carrying away a tiny bit of mass.dmullenix
July 25, 2011
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dmullenix:
GAs are started with KNOWN VIABLE genomes. They have to be or they’d all die after the first generation and the GA would be dead in the water. Once they are started, each individual organism explores areas in the search space that are close to its’ starting (known valid) area by only changing one or a few bits of its genome at one time. They do NOT explore the greatest possible region of the search space because the great majority of those regions are lethal. They aim to explore as much of the viable areas of the search space as is needed to accomplish their objectives.
You don't know what you're talking about.
There is something delicious when somebody calls you stupid and then demonstrates in the next sentence that they don’t know what they’re talking about. It’s probably sinful to enjoy it so, but I do.
Oh, the irony. Go ahead, revel in your ignorance.Mung
July 22, 2011
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dmullenix:
Because that’s the portion of the total search space that a genome with one mutated base pair actually explores and those four locations are very close to the parent’s location. In fact, one of them IS the parent’s location, which is known to work. Quite a difference from Dembski and KF’s 10^gazillion, isn’t it?
So you have claimed that the search space is both very very large and very very small. Actually, all of the possible permutations of the genome constitute the search space. but I know the difference between having to search a space of 10^301 and 4. And when I ask you to resolve that contradiction, in response you claim that the search space is the size of the space actually searched? Is that your response?
And I’ve been telling you that organisms don’t search the entire search space, like Dembski and KF assume. And that's a straw-man. No one assumes that a single organism explores the entire search space. The argument, as you now acknowledge, is that the search space is much too large, and that as you've also learned, a single genome can represent only one single point in the space.
Mung
July 22, 2011
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dmullenix, As before, I appreciate your taking the time to reply. Two quickies: 1. I don't see how a metaverse before time zero of the big bang solves anything. How'd that metaverse come to be anyway? 2. Exactly how much better are chances of a rather complex universe/metaverse popping into existence than those of a complex mind anyway? Finally, given what little we know of virtual particles and how little they last it seems positing those as a possible explanation for a multiverse full of so much physical stuff is believing in miracles without a miracle maker. Have a good weekend.lpadron
July 22, 2011
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nullasalus at 79: “Question-begging, pure and simple. You may as well tell me ‘it’s the 21st century, materialism is true’”. It’s not question begging. The ancients (anybody before about the mid 1800s – say anybody who lived before Broca) didn’t know diddly squat about how the mind works so they could call God (a Being who is claimed to have a mind) “simple” with a clear conscience. That’s no longer possible. Bring yourself up to date on the busy new field of cognitive science and you’ll be way ahead of even the smartest and most knowledgeable ancient Greek or 18th century European philosopher. I can recommend “How the Mind Works” by Steven Pinker for a good grounding on what we know about minds today. He’s a good writer and he knows the subject. “Things can pop into existence without cause” Why, as a matter of fact, yes. Haven’t you heard of virtual particles? They’re real. They pop into existence without cause. You can measure the force they exert on two closely spaced plates. It’s called the Casimir force and it was first measured in the 1940s. “Physical laws can be brute and apparently immaterial themselves” Physical laws are part of materialism and at some point we have to just have brute facts. Either a metaverse exists or some sort of God exists and the metaverse is the simpler and hence more likely – by an astonishingly large ratio. “we’ve had to radically revise our definition of matter”. I guess we have. “Earth, Water, Wind and Fire” don’t cut it any more. “but let’s not even examine arguments we find weird.” But that’s what we’re doing. The metaverse and God are both weird, God just turns out to be weirder. “You realize that nature is just another tool for this designer in question, right? ‘Nature or designer’ is a false choice, because nature is just one more thing for a designer to make, use, and work through in this case. This is a little like saying ‘who cares what software can do? I want to know what a software programmer can do!’” The choice is between nature alone or a designer and nature. Nature alone is much more likely and I’ve shown how poor a design this universe is if you’re designing it for life. DM: "Yeah, show me a life form that can live on vacuum in intergalactic space or on a sun." "You mean with a space station or a Dyson sphere?” Both of which contain air to breathe and are not incandescently hot. “Throw a baby on the moon and they’d be dead within seconds! I mean, in order for anyone to step on the moon, they’d have to have air to breathe – how in the world could we get air on the moon? It’s completely unrealistic and unfeasible!” It can be done and we’ve done it, but it was hard. The moon is part of the 99.99google99+ percent of the universe that is not hospitable to life. Which is odd if the universe was fine tuned for life, don’t you think? “why require suns at all? “Life can exist and doesn’t need energy!” Show me a living organism that doesn’t need energy and I’ll believe you. “You’re flailing, dmullenix.” No, I’m doing fine. KF at 80: Your metabolizing cell based life that embeds a digital tape driven von Neumann type kinematic replicator evolved from a much simpler polymer whose only property was self replication. Don’t believe me? Ok, tell us what the first living thing was then. Ipadron at 81: The people who believe that God has always existed necessarily give the odds of his existence as being 1. I think they greatly overestimate those odds because they underestimate the complexity required for thought, but in a universe where virtual particles can just pop into existence without cause, there has to be at least some tiny chance of a God popping up too. I think that a simple metaverse also has some small probability of existing too and those odds are better because the metaverse is simpler. “Prior to time zero” would mean before the Big Bang. At that time, the metaverse would exist and it would contain some information that it could impart to our universe at its beginning. Mung at 82: DM: Actually, all of the possible permutations of the genome constitute the search space. Mung: “Isn’t that what Demski et al. claim?” Yep. Mung: “How is this consistent with your claim that the search space has a size of 4.” Because that’s the portion of the total search space that a genome with one mutated base pair actually explores and those four locations are very close to the parent’s location. In fact, one of them IS the parent’s location, which is known to work. Quite a difference from Dembski and KF’s 10^gazillion, isn’t it? DM “That’s why sticking to known good spots (reproduction without mutation) or places very near known good spots (reproduction with only one or a few mutations) is such a good idea. You only get one chance.” Mung: “And how do organisms know they get only one chance? So it’s a good idea according to whom?” You’re not thinking this through, are you. More fun to just type out the first thought that strikes you, I guess. The organisms don’t know diddly. The new organisms have one genome each and that genome specifies which one spot they will investigate. Mung: “Massive search space. Too little time. You’re starting to sound more and more like those who you criticize.” DM: And I’ve been telling you that organisms don’t search the entire search space, like Dembski and KF assume. They explore a very limited subset of the total search space that is very close to the parent’s known good location. Mung: “You don’t know what you’re talking about. A typical GA will start out with a randomly generated genome for each member of the initial population. How does that put them close together in the search space?” There is something delicious when somebody calls you stupid and then demonstrates in the next sentence that they don’t know what they’re talking about. It’s probably sinful to enjoy it so, but I do. GAs are started with KNOWN VIABLE genomes. They have to be or they’d all die after the first generation and the GA would be dead in the water. Once they are started, each individual organism explores areas in the search space that are close to its' starting (known valid) area by only changing one or a few bits of its genome at one time. They do NOT explore the greatest possible region of the search space because the great majority of those regions are lethal. They aim to explore as much of the viable areas of the search space as is needed to accomplish their objectives. I think there's another reason for the confusion regarding Dembski/KF's humongus search space. They both seem to think that the very first living thing had to search the entire search space of modern organisms in order to find a viable spot, which would be vanishingly improbable. There are two problems with this: First, the first living things didn't have the huge genomes of modern life so that vast search space basically didn't exist back then. Second, being simple, the pre-biotic chemicals searched a very much smaller search space and there were enough of those polymers so that one finally found a sweet spot and started serious reproducing. At that point, Darwinian evolution took over and began to expand the genome and the search space to it's present size. BUT, once they started at a sweet spot in the search space, they only searched nearby areas as they expanded the number of viable genomes. It's Friday. See you all Monday.dmullenix
July 22, 2011
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dmullenix:
Actually, all of the possible permutations of the genome constitute the search space.
Isn't that what Demski et al. claim? How is this consistent with your claim that the the search space has a size of 4.
Any individual’s genome explores exactly one point in that search space.
Isn't that what I said?
That’s why sticking to known good spots (reproduction without mutation) or places very near known good spots (reproduction with only one or a few mutations) is such a good idea. You only get one chance.
And how do organisms know they get only one chance? So it's a good idea according to whom? So to recap, you've been wrong twice now. But you still maintain Dembski and other ID'ers don't know what they are talking about?
It would take 50 million years to mutate every base pair once with a population of one or 200 million years to mutate all of them to all four possible states.
And that doesn't even begin to explore every possible permutation, does it.
But we still don’t go through every possible combination of 3 billion base pairs.
Now you're starting to get it. Massive search space. Too little time. You're starting to sound more and more like those who you criticize.
GA’s search like organisms do – they only change one or two bases at a time, so they are always searching only the tiny part of the search space that is immediately adjacent to the known good position where their parents are. That strategy works as well for GAs as it does for biological organisms.
You don't know what you're talking about. A typical GA will start out with a randomly generated genome for each member of the initial population. How does that put them close together in the search space? In fact, that strategy is designed to do just the opposite. In a GA you want to maximize your search, to explore the greatest possible region of the space. Because you have no idea where good solutions are to be found.Mung
July 21, 2011
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dmullenix: It seems to me that adding one zero to another zero can yield nothing but another zero. And no matter how many zeros I continue to add the likelihood never increases that I will get anything but another zero. If true, prior to time zero there were no bytes of information. How is one byte suddenly appearing any more likely than a thousand or a million or a trillion?lpadron
July 21, 2011
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DM: Above you are simply being evasive, resorting to a test tube or paper chemistry autocatalytic molecule, when what is to be explained is the origin of observed, metabolising cell based life that embeds a digital tape driven von Neumann type kinematic replicator, and to be explained on the sort of resources and cross-reactions likely to be met with in Darwin's pond or a volcano vent or a comet or a moon of Jupiter etc. That's a bait and switcheroo strawman. Wheel an tun an come again, with something betta dis time. GEM of TKIkairosfocus
July 21, 2011
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dmullenix, The complexity is in the “Being”. “Being” means something with a mind and it’s the 21st century nowadays. We understand enough about how minds work to know that they are incredibly complex and you won’t get one without tons of well-ordered information. Question-begging, pure and simple. You may as well tell me "it's the 21st century, materialism is true". Try another one: "If God were immaterial, he'd have to be very different from humans - we have bodies!" I tell you, that would have come as a shock - an absolute shock! - to Christians of the past. That’s something thought up by long dead theologians who literally had no idea of what they were talking about. Minds are not simple. It’s time to start dealing with that fact instead of finding new ways to deny it. So you have no argument and want to reject it out of hand. Gotcha, loud and clear. Things can pop into existence from nothing without cause, physical laws can be brute and apparently immaterial themselves, we've had to radically revise our definition of matter, but let's not even examine arguments we find weird. Who CARES what nature can build? The question is whether nature built this universe or whether it was designed by an Intelligent Designer. Who cares? How about nature's designer? You realize that nature is just another tool for this designer in question, right? "Nature or designer" is a false choice, because nature is just one more thing for a designer to make, use, and work through in this case. This is a little like saying 'who cares what software can do? I want to know what a software programmer can do!' My DESIGNED universe, on the other hand, is truly built for life and almost all of its resources are devoted to life’s care and feeding. This DESIGNED universe is truly built for life, you utterly shrugged off VJT's standards, and you didn't even see if what you were arguing was rational or feasible. You shrugged all that off with "I'm a designer I can do whatever!" Not impressive. Yeah, show me a life form that can live on vacuum in intergalactic space or on a sun. You mean with a space station or a Dyson sphere? ;) Think about it: I mentioned making uninhabitable areas habitable. Let me guess: The moon landing was staged, right? I mean, EVERYone knows the moon is absolutely lethal to human life. Throw a baby on the moon and they'd be dead within seconds! I mean, in order for anyone to step on the moon, they'd have to have air to breathe - how in the world could we get air on the moon? It's completely unrealistic and unfeasible! Really though, apparently even your own designed universe sucked by your standards. You didn't account for living on vacuum or on the surface of the sun! Why didn't you just design THAT by fiat too, like you did everything else? Hey, why require suns at all? "Life can exist and doesn't need energy! I'm the designer I can do what I want! It's just an infinite cube shoulder to shoulder with life down to the quantum level!" You're flailing, dmullenix. Take some deep breaths, think things through, and try again. Or don't. But your freakout doesn't speak well for your position.nullasalus
July 21, 2011
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Nullasalus at 77: The complexity is in the “Being”. "Being" means something with a mind and it’s the 21st century nowadays. We understand enough about how minds work to know that they are incredibly complex and you won’t get one without tons of well-ordered information. Forget divine simplicity. That’s something thought up by long dead theologians who literally had no idea of what they were talking about. Minds are not simple. It’s time to start dealing with that fact instead of finding new ways to deny it. Who CARES what nature can build? The question is whether nature built this universe or whether it was designed by an Intelligent Designer. If you want to see what nature can build, look around you. Life isn’t even a flyspeck compared to the universe around us. Most of the universe is outright lethal and nearly all of it is wasted as far as life is concerned. My DESIGNED universe, on the other hand, is truly built for life and almost all of its resources are devoted to life’s care and feeding. “What if the forms of life could find ways to make uninhabitable areas habitable?” Yeah, show me a life form that can live on vacuum in intergalactic space or on a sun.dmullenix
July 21, 2011
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My point is that a universe is more likely to appear than a Being because it’s less complex, at least at the beginning. This assumes that beings need to be material or defined in terms of bytes, which is questionable. How many bytes are in a natural or physical law? How many bytes are in the laws of logic? I submit the answers to this aren't clear. So your answer would be, “We don’t know the details, but things would be simpler at the beginning than they are now. Maybe a LOT simpler.” This sounds a lot like an unintentional endorsement of the doctrine of divine simplicity. However, I notice that most of his objections are of the “We have no way of observing this” so they’re valid, but they work equally well when talking about Beings and the multiverse is still simpler and hence more likely than any Being. Again, that's disputed - would you care to admit that if the doctrine of divine simplicity is true, that we should infer a being as the source of nature? Likewise, 'a being' and 'a multiverse' aren't in the same categories. One difference between a multiverse and a being is that another universe is sealed off from interaction with our universe (otherwise it'd just be part of our universe). But a creator of our universe is under no such restrictions. They may leave marks. They may communicate. The two are in very different potential states of verification - so much worse for the multiverse. Ah! DESIGN a universe! Don’t rely on nature to produce one, design one. Great idea. And if my designed universe turns out to be more hospitable to life than the one we see, I would call that evidence that our universe wasn’t designed. After all, if I, a mere fallible mortal, can build a better universe, then God should be able to build a MUCH better one. And you proceed to not give what was requested by VJT: You dodge the request of showing that nature could build such a universe and apparently swap in justified fiat, and you ditch the kolg complexity request. But if the rules of your universe didn't make any sense and just seemed slapped together, it would arguably be inferior to this universe. But really, your entire plan could be summed up with one quote: "I'd think of something." Why not just say "I'd make one that's better than this, I tell you, so nyeh."? Because that's pretty much what you did here. Either way, I don't think VJT's request gets honored by you ignoring his stipulations and saying 'I'm designer I can do what I want'. Finally: You say 99.999999% of this universe is utterly lethal for any kind of life. I have a simple question: What if the forms of life could find ways to make uninhabitable areas habitable? Plenty of places on this planet would have once been considered uninhabitable in and of themselves - that changed. Consider what that means. Life can be its own solution to habitability problems. I mean, what drives the point on this front home is your talk of a Dyson Sphere - that is, however far-fetched, a proposed project for humanity to engage in. Why construct a Dyson sphere from the get-go when you can have your life do it for you, eh?nullasalus
July 21, 2011
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Ipadron at 75: What’s more impossible to bring forth from nothing – 1 byte or 2 bytes? 1 byte, obviously. My point is that a universe is more likely to appear than a Being because it’s less complex, at least at the beginning. As for “known” laws, what were they at time zero? We know that of the four main forces, gravity, electro-magnetic, and the strong and weak nuclear forces, the weak force and electromagnetism merge together at high energies. This has been experimentally confirmed and Steven Weinberg, Sheldon Glasgow and Abdus Salam won the Nobel prize for it in 1979. (Wiki has an article on this (with math) at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electroweak_interaction ) It’s thought that the strong nuclear force will merge with the electroweak force at higher energies. As for gravity and the other laws, we don’t know if they were the same or merged at the Big Bang. So your answer would be, “We don’t know the details, but things would be simpler at the beginning than they are now. Maybe a LOT simpler.” Mung at 74: The search space of size 4 is for an individual organism which has had one basepair mutated. Some basics: When Dembski, Kairosfocus and others say “search space”, they mean every possible combination of base pairs in the genome. For a 1 base pair genome, that’s 4. For a 301 base pair genome, that’s 4^301 or 1.66 E 181. For the human genome, that’s 4^3,000,000,000 or a Mighty Big Number. If you read what they say, they actually believe that each organism has to search that entire vast search space to find a viable DNA pattern. They claim this is nonsense and can’t possibly work. They’re right that it could never work, but each mutated organism actually searches only the minuscule portion of the search place that is immediately adjacent to the known functional place where their parent lives. That changes the odds from impossibly high to maybe 1 in a 1000. That’s much more doable. “If any base can mutate at random, then how do you say that some points in the search space are not reachable?” Try to generate a DNA combination of three billion “C”s in a row starting at a viable combination (say the one in your DNA), changing only one base at a time and keeping every step viable. Good luck getting that last "C". I can’t tell what Smith means without the context, but he probably means that every base in the bacterial DNA gets changed to all four possible combinations in that time. Note that that’s not the same as generating every possible combination of bases, from “CCC…CCC” to “GGG…GGG”. As an example, the human genome contains about 3,000,000,000 base pairs and the typical human is born with about 60 mutations according to a recent News post. It would take 50 million years to mutate every base pair once with a population of one or 200 million years to mutate all of them to all four possible states. But we have about six billion people alive right now, so our genome gets churned much more often. Of course, most of those changes make no difference and tend to get lost or make things worse and tend to get lost a lot faster. But we still don't go through every possible combination of 3 billion base pairs. GA’s search like organisms do – they only change one or two bases at a time, so they are always searching only the tiny part of the search space that is immediately adjacent to the known good position where their parents are. That strategy works as well for GAs as it does for biological organisms. dmullenix at 73: Re: August 2011 “Scientific American: “How Math Works” is an interesting article. It answer’s Wigner’s question by saying it’s a combination of the universe incorporating some strong symmetries and other mathematical principles into its construction and humans designing math to cover problems they find or think up and discarding solutions that don’t work. The “Questions About the Multiverse” article should be of interest to ID fans because the author is very pessimistic about the possibilities of their being a multiverse. However, I notice that most of his objections are of the “We have no way of observing this” so they’re valid, but they work equally well when talking about Beings and the multiverse is still simpler and hence more likely than any Being. KF at 68: “…OOL requires — per observation of simplest cell based life forms [the only observed biological life forms], > 100 k bits of functionally specific, complex info, to implement a metabolizing automaton with an embedded von Neumann kinematic self replicator facility…” Why are you looking at existing biological life forms? They are all the product of billions of years of evolution. If you have an objection to OOL research, at least criticize ACTUAL OOL research. Actual OOL research is looking at short polymers and other SIMPLE things. And remember, if a short polymer manages to self reproduce, then it either doesn’t need an embedded von Neumann kinematic self replicator facility or you haven’t fully thought out what it takes to have one. Example: a von Neumann replicator needs a store for the pattern to be reproduced. What would fulfill that function in a short polymer? Answer: the polymer itself. See if you can think of what would fulfill the rest of the von Neumann functions. “Apart from being utterly ill-bred and a repeat willful resort to a smearing conflation of two distinct movements [which underscore earlier problems DM has had, and carry him to a strike two level . . . ],” Why don’t you spend a relaxing evening going over your posts for the last year or so and count the gratuitous insults and invective that have become your stock in trade. Then read Ecclesiastes 11:1 and think, “Hmm, I don’t seem to get much respect lately. Could it possibly be (gasp!) something I’M doing?” Then, to test that idea and also just as an exercise in self improvement, try to post politely for one full day. We’ll all be rooting for you. Mung at 65: “A genome represents a single point in the search space. No matter how many mutations occur in a single genome only one additional point in the search space is explored.” Actually, all of the possible permutations of the genome constitute the search space. Any individual’s genome explores exactly one point in that search space. That’s why sticking to known good spots (reproduction without mutation) or places very near known good spots (reproduction with only one or a few mutations) is such a good idea. You only get one chance. VJT in 64: “Here’s a challenge. Build me a universe where only 99 per cent of this universe is hostile to life. Or at least, demonstrate mathematically that nature could produce such a universe. Moreover, I’d like a demonstration that this alternative universe has the same amount of Kolmogorov complexity as our own. If its description is wordier than the description of ours is, then that in itself might be a reason for God not to build it.” Ah! DESIGN a universe! Don’t rely on nature to produce one, design one. Great idea. And if my designed universe turns out to be more hospitable to life than the one we see, I would call that evidence that our universe wasn’t designed. After all, if I, a mere fallible mortal, can build a better universe, then God should be able to build a MUCH better one. I don’t see your point about complexity, though. As an Intelligent Designer, complexity is no problem. It’s not like I’m going to use chance to create the universe, after all. And why prove that nature could produce such a universe? It probably can’t. That’s why I’m turning to design. Ok. I’d start with a “Dyson sphere” for the basic design. Wikipedia has an article on them. Instead of power stations, I’d surround the sun with a sphere of earth the diameter of earth’s orbit that was a few hundred kilometers thick (give the miners something to dig in) and jigger gravity so everybody living on the inside of that sphere was pushed down onto it with 1 G of force. If anybody objects to this on the grounds of physics or whatever, I’ll just remind them that as an Intelligent Designer I sustain this universe, so I can do whatever I want. A sphere that size would probably give us room for every intelligent being in the galaxy (I go by “Rare Earth” here and think intelligent organisms are very rare.), so I’d build one for every galaxy. Maybe two or three if some of the races couldn’t get along or if there just turned out to be a lot of intelligent beings in the galaxy. The sun would start as pure hydrogen. None of that extra helium it got from the big bang because we wouldn’t need a big bang. I would create the other elements that are needed for life and put them where they’re needed instead of messing around with fusion and supernovas to make them in stars, where they aren’t needed. I would put all the hydrogen in all the other stars in the galaxy into balls about 50 times Jupiter’s mass (too light to start fusion) and have them in storage orbits around the Dyson Sphere. I’d have to jigger some sort of mechanism for getting waste helium out of the sun and dropping one of those balls of hydrogen into it from time to time, but I’d think of something. Repeat for every galaxy. How’s my design so far? A lot better than the universe we observe in my humble opinion. Nearly every atom in the universe is directly contributing to intelligent life or is in reserve to do so in the future. That should give us habitable conditions for trillions and trillions of years. If it’s that easy to design a better universe than the one we live in, what does that say about our universe? It doesn’t look very designed now, does it?dmullenix
July 21, 2011
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dmullenix, Even if the information that comprises a multiverse is simple compared to that of a mind I see no clear reason why it is more likely to exist. Even 1 byte or bit of information is impossible to spring forth from nothing. Also, I'm curious about the *known* laws that govern that universe. How do they figure into the complexity of that universe. Do they raise the quantity of information significantly or not at all? Thanks again for taking the time to reply.lpadron
July 20, 2011
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dmullenix:
but I know the difference between having to search a space of 10^301 and 4. Even Mung seems to have figured that out. (Sorry I mixed up the 1 possibility explored with the total size of the search space – 4.)
Ah, it was kind of buried in there, but I found it. How do you come up with a total search space of size 4? Maybe you should lighten up a bit on criticizing ID types until you get this figured out. Any conclusion you drew from your prior mistake is obviously wrong. Have you revised your former opinions? Apparently not:
Dembski and KF (and everybody else in ID) seem to think that an organism searches a search space that is 4 raised to the number of base pairs in its genome. It’s hard to find words to describe how stupid that idea is! To search that entire search space, the organism would have to mutate every single base pair in its entire genome and they very definitely don’t do that!
So let's start with some basics. What is the size of the search space? It's certainly not 4. You do understand, don't you, that no one claims that a one single organism searches the entire space. That's a straw man. A single organism represents a single point in the search space. If any base can mutate at random, then how do you say that some points in the search space are not reachable? But I have previously quoted John Maynard Smith here at least twice saying in effect that bacteria have searched the entire space repeatedly. So what do you have to say to that? "If, remembering that for most of the time our ancestors were microbes, we allow an average of 20 generations a year, there has been time for selection to program the genome ten times over." And GA's search in just the sort of manner you say doesn't work. So shall we discard all talk of GA's proving evolution, including Avida?Mung
July 20, 2011
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One other thing - the August 2011 Scientific American came today. Haven't had a chance to read it, but the cover story is "Questions about the Multiverse" (the author doesn't seem real enthusiastic from the little bit I was able to read). Another article is "How Math Works" and I noticed a reference to Eugene Wigner on the first page.dmullenix
July 20, 2011
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Ipadron at 57 If you’re typical, you’ve been told, both directly and indirectly, that an intelligent God exists by nearly everybody that’s important and authoritative for your entire life, so it’s no wonder that it seems very likely that such a Being exists. That’s the default position for most people. The point I’m trying to make is that we’ve learned a tremendous amount about minds and how they work in just the last century and it’s now obvious to those familiar with that knowledge that any mind is inherently extremely complex and hence extremely unlikely. The smarter the mind, the more the complexity and the less the likelihood of it’s “just existing”. It’s true that I can’t describe how a universe or a multiverse might come into existence, but I can see that a multiverse is much simpler than any kind of a being and is thus proportionately less unlikely. KF at 59: By all means, ignore me and get on with your life. BA77 at 61 and 62: I was afraid that you were talking about “In contrast to a classical bit, the description of a (photon) qubit requires an infinite amount of information.” when you said that “it takes a infinite amount of specified information just to create a single photon.” vjt at 63: I’m sorry, I did miss Collins. I’ll read him tonight. “You couldn’t get a more contingent cosmos than ours if you tried. As far as we can tell, there is absolutely nothing in it which has to be the way it is. Any explanation in terms of laws of Nature, or even meta-laws, just pushes the contingency back one level; it doesn’t make it go away. A theistic explanation is appealing because it can do just that.” That is my objection right there. You push it back to a level that is less likely than the level you’re attempting to explain. “Your argument presupposes that God keeps an index so that He can access information that will enable Him to respond to every possible question from an interlocutor.” A being needs much more than just an index of information. For instance, I have no problems with a god just “looking” at the universe to get his information except that being able to “just look” requires an astonishing amount of information processing. We don’t notice it because it’s all beneath our consciousness, but when you start to investigate what goes into “just looking” at, say, a bird on a branch there is a tremendous amount of information processing going on just to distinguish the bird from the background. (I read once that people who are born blind and then have their vision restored are often so disappointed that their suicide rate skyrockets because the ability to separate items from the background require functioning eyes to develop and can’t develop even with eyes after a certain age. They “see” the world, but they can’t make sense of it. They can’t tell the bird from the branch.) Then more processing is necessary to tell you what a bird is and all the facts that seeing a bird calls to our consciousness. And after that you need more processing to know what to do with your sighting. We’ve been ignoring all of this through history because it happens beneath consciousness, but now we’ve learned enough so we have to face it. There’s no problem accounting for humans and their mental abilities because evolution accounts for that, but where does God get that information from? What is the mechanism? On the other hand, the material universe is as simple as dirt, relatively speaking. “You also write: When investigating omniscient beings, watch out for the “knows the future” trap. If something knows the future, the future is fixed and free will goes “poof”. My reply: please define “fixed”. Do you mean “determined”? If so, then you are begging the question. And if not, what do you mean?” Like the past. Everything that will be done is already done before you do it. If God knows you will wear a red tie on Saturday, He can only know that if your decision is fixed. Causality wouldn’t really come into it since everything that will ever happen in the entire universe is fixed in place before it even happens. If you remember that cylinder of circular instants I mentioned in a previous post, all of the events on every disk are filled in before time even starts. And nothing like free will is even possible because you HAVE to do what is already in place. “On a philosophical level, I think you’ve succinctly made quite a good case that Darwinian evolution could generate a small amount of CSI. However, the empirical evidence suggests that Darwinian evolution is unable to generate more than 400 bits of CSI, even over billions of years. That’s what Dr. Stephen Meyer has argued in his recent work, Signature in the Cell.” I’ve got that book on my Kindle, but it keeps getting pushed down on the stack, perhaps because I’ve read so much of Meyer on line and maybe because he doesn’t seem to have an index, at least in the Kindle edition. What reason does Dr. Meyer give for this? You mention empirical evidence. I don’t know of a single biogenesis investigator who thinks the first life was anything like a modern cell. I’m sure you’ve all heard of the RNA world hypothesis, if only from people dissing it. That low level of complexity is what investigators assume for first life. A simple self replicating molecule isn’t much compared to modern life, but if it self-replicates and allows evolution, it’s all the start we need and a small polymer would do it. Don’t worry about proteins, they come later. Don’t worry about metabolism – that’s also for advanced life. For first life, reproduction with the possibility of Darwinian evolution is all we need and a short polymer will do the trick. “Next you write: You [Kairosfocus] and Dembski and most of the rest of the ID/Creationist crowd don’t know how to do applied math. This is a very serious charge. Kairosfocus is a qualified physicist and Professor Dembski has a Ph.D. in mathematics from the University of Illinois at Chicago. May I ask why you think you’re better qualified to address problems in applied math? What’s your academic background by the way, Dave?” My background is modest. High school algebra and geometry, scientific notation in the Air Force and then I skipped a semester of college and bought a TI scientific calculator (same cost for both back in the 70’s) to “complete” my mathematical education. I’m sure that both Dr. Dr. Dembski and Kairosfocus are better mathematicians than I will ever be – but I know the difference between having to search a space of 10^301 and 4. Even Mung seems to have figured that out. (Sorry I mixed up the 1 possibility explored with the total size of the search space – 4.) Yet Dembski returns to his huge numbers over and over and over. Evolution never works that way. Dembski and KF (and everybody else in ID) seem to think that an organism searches a search space that is 4 raised to the number of base pairs in its genome. It’s hard to find words to describe how stupid that idea is! To search that entire search space, the organism would have to mutate every single base pair in its entire genome and they very definitely don’t do that! They would die every time if they did because then the odds of finding a workable genome truly would be 4^301 or whatever. Instead, organisms suffer one or two base pair mutations. Any more (unless they’re moving a stack of pre-existing CSI around) and they tend to die. This gives them a search space of four or 16 – much, much more feasible. In search space terms, this means they only search a very tiny portion of the total search space and that portion is very near to where they started. If you want to see what happens when the entire 4^(very big number) search space is searched, go back in the UD records to where Salvador Cordova got hold of a copy of Avida. Not knowing jack about it, he cranked the “cosmic ray” setting to max – and smugly announced that the built in instrumentation showed the digital organisms were thriving and increasing all over the place! Somebody actually had to contact one of the Avida authors to find out what was happening. It turned out that the onslaught of mutations Sal turned loose blasted every single digital organism to smithereens. They were all dead the next generation, every one of them. But the counters in Avida weren’t set up for this totally non-realistic event and they were counting the chunks of organisms as being alive. And yet Dembski, KF and all the other ID biggies claim that this is how evolution works – they think that those organisms are exploring the entire genomic search space and they smugly point to their math that proves it’s impossible! Is it any wonder that ID gets no respect from people who actually understand how evolution works? I'll try to write more tomorow - a couple of electricians have messed up my data center testing their generators.dmullenix
July 20, 2011
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"these ideas are not subject to empirical test." The boundary of empirical evidence and natural law ends at the breakdown of GR. Where the laws of nature are obliterated as the point goes to infinity. That's all we got. Beyond which is metaphysics and philosophy. I find many atheists use the theoretical multi-verse a little loosely in the same way hippies like to massacre the uncertainty principle. Shut up hippies!: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1iiW4uMSY4c&feature=relatedjunkdnaforlife
July 20, 2011
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F/N: As a part of DM's cross threaded objection to 28 above, he seems to want to dismiss the point that a multiverse speculation -- even if done while wearing a lab coat -- so long as there is not reliably repeatable observational evidence, is a cross-border foray into philosophy. That happens to be the case, whether or not DM likes this (it is obviously advantageous rhetorically to wear a lab coat while speculating philosophically, claiming the aura of science for one's speculations). The actual -- and in many cases, the potential as well -- observational data base for the multiverse speculation is NIL, i.e these ideas are not subject to empirical test. So, they are philosophical speculation. (So also, DM seems to be philosophically challenged as well as mathematically challenged, Mung.) However that may be, once one is in the province of philosophy, the rules and method of investigation are different. The proper method is comparative difficulties across ALL reasonable options, not just those one prefers. As of right, not sufferance. And so the cluster of unanswered phil issues that has dogged evolutionary materialism for ever so long, begin to bark, loud and long, starting with Plato in The Laws Bk X. Cf the previous and onward linked for more details.kairosfocus
July 20, 2011
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Look, let's not lose sight of this. We're being lectured about our inability to do applied math by someone who thinks that if a single base pair mutates to a different base four different possibilities have been explored.Mung
July 19, 2011
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F/N: DM decided to snip some of my remarks in 28 above, and go to a different thread that would make the context obscure, to there pounce with some very ill informed, intemperate comments, at 20 in the cosmological fine tuning thread: [Cites KF:] “At just 1,000 bits, W has in it 1.07*10^301 possibilities, where our observed cosmos has in it a capacity to scan through just 10^150 Planck time quantum states [PTQS's], or less than 1 in 10^150 of the space.” [DM comments:] You and Dembski and most of the rest of the ID/Creationist crowd don’t know how to do applied math. Living things don’t search through any “1.07*10^301 possibilities”. To do that, they’d have to construct the next generation’s DNA randomly, from scratch, every time they reproduced. Apart from being utterly ill-bred and a repeat willful resort to a smearing conflation of two distinct movements [which underscore earlier problems DM has had, and carry him to a strike two level . . . ], the just clipped remark reveals a basic failure to read in context with understanding. FYI, DM, W -- as 28 above specifically states [how easy it is to snip off proper context to set up and knock over a strawman] --is the space of possible configs for 1,000 bits, which is indeed 2^1,000 or 1.07*10^301. And in turn, that is 10^150 times the number of Planck time quantum states for the 10^80 or so atoms of our observed cosmos across its thermodynamic lifespan. Where also 10^30 PTQS's are used up in the fastest, ionic, chemical reactions. So, life systems cannot credibly carry out an exhaustive search of a space of at least this size, or -- more to the point -- a credible blind random walk rewarded by trial and error search for a needle in a haystack. Or more familiarly, a search for an isolated island of function. Samples tend to represent the bulk of a space of possibilities, not the unusual configs that are associated with codes, language, algorithms and the like. All of which are found in the living cell. This is the reason why the spontaneous generation of required FSCI, which comes from narrow and UN-representative zones T in W, is unlikely without intelligent guidance. And remember, 1,000 bits is 125 bytes, a rather small quantum of functional info, equivalent to about 20 ASCII character typical English words, a reasonable sentence or two. Not much room to implement serious control action. Had DM bothered to look in context, he would have also seen that the first challenge to evolutionary materialist accounts is that OOL requires -- per observation of simplest cell based life forms [the only observed biological life forms], > 100 k bits of functionally specific, complex info, to implement a metabolising automaton with an embedded von Neumann kinematic self replicator facility. And, Darwin's warm pond or a volcano vent etc will be most definitely controlled by thermodynamic forces, which would at best give us random configurations of polymers; the notion that there are super forces written into nature that would program life chemistry would directly point to design of the laws of physics and chemistry. So, what is being reverted to is explanation on chance driven configs rewarded through trial and error. But immediately that runs into the FSCI limit -- which turns out to be a reasonable application of math after all, despite the sort of rudeness clipped above from DM -- and the observed cosmological resources are hopelessly too small. For novel body plans beyond a so-called simple unicellular organism, we are looking at the need to create embryologically feasible genomes and host cells that are in excess of 10 - 100 Million bits. An even worse challenge. One underscored by the empirical evidence on the Cambrian life revo, on the usual geochronology: TOP-DOWN BODY PLAN ORIGIN, NOT A BRANCHING TREE PATTERN. As Meyer aptly summed up:
One way to estimate the amount of new CSI that appeared with the Cambrian animals is to count the number of new cell types that emerged with them (Valentine 1995:91-93) . . . the more complex animals that appeared in the Cambrian (e.g., arthropods) would have required fifty or more cell types . . . New cell types require many new and specialized proteins. New proteins, in turn, require new genetic information. Thus an increase in the number of cell types implies (at a minimum) a considerable increase in the amount of specified genetic information. Molecular biologists have recently estimated that a minimally complex single-celled organism would require between 318 and 562 kilobase pairs of DNA to produce the proteins necessary to maintain life (Koonin 2000). More complex single cells might require upward of a million base pairs. Yet to build the proteins necessary to sustain a complex arthropod such as a trilobite would require orders of magnitude more coding instructions. The genome size of a modern arthropod, the fruitfly Drosophila melanogaster, is approximately 180 million base pairs (Gerhart & Kirschner 1997:121, Adams et al. 2000). Transitions from a single cell to colonies of cells to complex animals represent significant (and, in principle, measurable) increases in CSI . . . . In order to explain the origin of the Cambrian animals, one must account not only for new proteins and cell types, but also for the origin of new body plans . . . Mutations in genes that are expressed late in the development of an organism will not affect the body plan. Mutations expressed early in development, however, could conceivably produce significant morphological change (Arthur 1997:21) . . . [but] processes of development are tightly integrated spatially and temporally such that changes early in development will require a host of other coordinated changes in separate but functionally interrelated developmental processes downstream. For this reason, mutations will be much more likely to be deadly if they disrupt a functionally deeply-embedded structure such as a spinal column than if they affect more isolated anatomical features such as fingers (Kauffman 1995:200) . . . McDonald notes that genes that are observed to vary within natural populations do not lead to major adaptive changes, while genes that could cause major changes--the very stuff of macroevolution--apparently do not vary. In other words, mutations of the kind that macroevolution doesn't need (namely, viable genetic mutations in DNA expressed late in development) do occur, but those that it does need (namely, beneficial body plan mutations expressed early in development) apparently don't occur . . . [PBSW article, which passed proper peer review by "renowned" scientists.]
In short, the evidence is that we need a proper account for the origin of major body plans; the finely graded incremental transformation so beloved of darwinists, and as pictured since Darwin in the tree of life is lacking in empirical warrant. Rudeness on DM's part does not substitute for empirically observed facts and cogent reason relative to those facts. Strike TWO, DM . . . GEM of TKIkairosfocus
July 19, 2011
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Pardon, wrong thread.kairosfocus
July 19, 2011
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Mung: There will be no "test" on this thread, as I will not tolerate a thread-hijack. (Already, what should be discussed there is being pushed elsewhere, that is beginning to look like a strategy.) I have already pointed where such should go. GEM of TKIkairosfocus
July 19, 2011
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dmullenix:
If a bacteria with a million base pairs in its genome has a single base pair mutate, it explores exactly FOUR possibilities. NOT 10^300, just 4.
If a single base pair mutates to a different base, precisely one possibility is explored, not four.
You and Dembski and most of the rest of the ID/Creationist crowd don’t know how to do applied math.
And you do? A genome represents a single point in the search space. No matter how many mutations occur in a single genome only one additional point in the search space is explored. A population of organisms allows a parallel search.Mung
July 19, 2011
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2011
12:04 PM
12
12
04
PM
PDT
1 2 3 4

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