For me, despite 43 years of indoctrination in atheistic materialism and Darwinian orthodoxy, it was a very simple logical exercise to conclude that living systems are the product of intelligent design.
The simplest living cell includes highly sophisticated, functionally integrated information-processing machinery, with error-detection-and-repair algorithms and their implementation.
The notion that random errors, whether filtered by natural selection or not, can produce such technology, is a transparently absurd proposition.
It’s really just that simple.
The great Arthur Eddington once said that, philosophically, the notion of an abrupt beginning to the present order of nature was repugnant (referring to the Big Bang). It might have been philosophically repugnant, but it was true.
Only those who find the notion that living systems are designed to be philosophically repugnant can deny the evidence.
I also found the evidence to be philosophically repugnant, but I considered the denial of obvious truth to be even more philosophically repugnant, so I changed my philosophy.
I am with Gil on this one, and I never even believed materialism or atheism. Believe me, it bothers me that I think the existence of an intelligent designer such an obvious and inescapable conclusion. But, I simply do not understand how someone chooses to believe in materialism and atheism. I can’t see the other side of the argument. There are two main ideas that really make the conclusion of ID inescapable for me.
1. It seems obvious that I have a some kind of autonomous liberty to my will, otherwise, how can I decide to believe or not believe.
2. The odds of random chance creating the structures necessary for life seem to be just completely improbable no matter how computed.
My confidence in the correctness of propositions 1 and 2 are encouraged by none other than the community of materialistic scientists by —
A. The assignment of the term “emergent” to consciousness. This is a garbage term that does not increase any understanding of how consciousness happens. When investigators of a phenomena are so stymied by a problem that they start considering merely assigning a new term and using bad analogies as progress, it seems reasonable that they are asking the wrong question. It seems that proposition 1 is most probably correct.
B. The promotion of the “multiverse” as a viable scientific theory. This makes me believe that most scientists agree that the odds of random occurrence of life is really as improbable as it seems, and they must do something radical to increase the odds – such as positing something we can never observe even indirectly. In other words, proposition 2 seems most likely correct.
For me the following evidence was the game changer.
1.) Irreducible Complexity, It is not only evident in biology but in everything, Our solar system, the Eco-system, living systems. These things are based on straight forward engineering principles and its not only about the parts but what the sum of the parts accomplish. I I still don’t understand why some people don’t grasp this simple truth, maybe its because they are not from an engineering background? Or they really just don’t like the idea of a creator? Whatever their reason, it does not take away the empirical obvious truth.
I disagree. For me, philosophy has nothing to do with it.
Until college, I believed in evolution.
I had no problem with the idea of God setting evolution in motion. I rationalized my belief in the Bible with a day-age approach and noticed that fish and birds (which I speculated might have included the dinosaurs) appeared on day five, while the rest of the animals, including humans appeared on the sixth day.
Some cracks in my belief in evolution appeared when I noticed that Biology and Geology seemed to depend on each other for dating estimates. Also, I thought the experiment that disproved Lamarck by cutting off the tails of mice for generations was bogus—this was an external intervention that didn’t result from an internal need or drive.
But when I went to college, there were three things that finally destroyed the credibility of Darwinism for me:
– I recognized that Von Helmont’s “recipe” for spontaneously generated mice was analogous to what was being proposed as the recipe for life on Earth.
– The profoundly complicated, interdependent chemical cycles necessary for life (ADP-ATP was one) astonished me. My lab TA told me that they used to have a wall filled with representations of chemical cycles present in a living cell. This was billions and billions of times more complex than than coacervates, protoplasm, tiny organelles such as vacuoles, and magic DNA that I’d been told made evolution such a natural process.
The bottom line was that I simply couldn’t see how something this incredibly complex could possibly ratchet itself up from some chemicals in solution, a weird atmosphere, electrical discharges, and the sunlight needed to bake the goo on the rocks. I don’t care how many billions of years it might have taken. You’re not going to ever get DNA (or RNA), for one thing.
I also learned at the time that every human generation has about 150 new genetic errors in their DNA–if anything, we were going backwards!
– Finally, I read an article that demolished the warm pond origin of life, proposing a clay matrix instead.
The guy’s arguments made a lot of sense to me, but his theory was pretty much rejected, at least partly due to the similarity to what was written in Genesis about Adam being formed from clay. Too bad.
Anyway, I now consider Darwinism a relic of 19th century Science and neo-Darwinism as a less-dogmatic rehash. Stupid assumptions such as made regarding “junk” DNA have only reinforced my skepticism.
Not true for me either.
Nor for the very large number of people who believe that the world came into being at the will of a divine creator, and yet accept the idea that living things are a result of consistent laws within that world, not of special intervention.
Gil, I understand that you don’t understand how an intelligent person not philosophically opposed to the idea of a designer could accept any alternative to interventionist design, but the fact is a large number of those people do.
Gil, I am with you as always.
Elizabeth,
I do know that “a large number of those people do”. And, like Gil, I don’t understand. Not all facts can be easily explained, as darwinists should well know đ
However, as I get great satisfaction from being part of a minority, I can’t complain!
GilDodgen, whose qualifications are not insubstantial in regards to recognizing superior design when he sees it:,,
,, is referencing this quote which gildodgen has in its entirety here,,,
For me the most telling part of the entire quote is this part,,,
And indeed, at the beginning of time, this ‘anti-chance’ comes back in a big way to bite the atheists in the rear end philosophically, and scientifically, speaking. Dr. Bruce Gordon touches on that high wall that comes crashing down on atheists here:
In fact, the appeal of atheists to a virtual infinity of possible universes to explain away the fine tuning of this universe, i.e. the untestable multiverse, much to the consternation of atheists, guarantees the success of the ontological argument for God’s existence:
i.e. In the materialist/atheist appeal to the multiverse (an infinity of possible worlds) to try to âexplain awayâ the extreme fine tuning we find for this universe. The materialist/atheist, without realizing it, ends up conceding the necessary premise to the ontological argument and thus guarantees the success of the argument and thus insures the 100% probability of Godâs existence!
I like the concluding comment by Alvin Plantinga about the ontological argument from the following video:
Alvin Plantinga has also shown the epistemological failure of naturalism inherent within Naturalism with his formulation of the argument from reason (CS Lewis) in his ‘Evolutionary Argument Against Naturalism’:
Perhaps some may say ‘Oh, that’s just philosophy, that has nothing to do with science’, but I would beg to differ:
How this random postulate plays out in science can be traced out further. This following quote is very informative in that regards:
And when we try to ‘be a little more explicit’ in regards to randomness we find:
Moreover, in our attempt to ‘be a little more explicit’ in regards to randomness, it is interesting to note that if one wants to build a better random number generator for a computer program then a better source of entropy is required to be found to drive the increased randomness of the program:
Moreover:
Interestingly, the maximum source of entropic randomness, i.e. disorder, in the universe is found to be where gravity is greatest in the universe,,,
It is also interesting to note the explanatory reach of entropy, i.e. ‘randomness’
But what is devastating for the atheist who wants âRandomnessâ to be the source for all creativity in the universe, is that randomness, (i.e. the entropic processes of the universe), are now shown, scientifically, to be vastly more likely to destroy functional information within the cell rather than ever building it upâ
,,having a empirically demonstrated direct connection between entropy of the universe and the information inherent within a cell is extremely problematic for Darwinists because of the following principle,,,
and is also extremely problematic because this principle is born out empirically:
Thus, Darwinists are found to be postulating that entropic events, which consistently destroy information, are what are creating information in the cell. ,,, It is the equivalent in science of someone (in this case a âconsensus of scientistsâ) claiming that Gravity makes things fall up instead of down, and that is not overstating the bizarre situation we find ourselves in in the least with atheistic Darwinists.
Also of important note, as to the subject at hand of more precisely defining the word random, as Darwinists would wish to use it as being separate it from Godâs will, it is interesting to note that Ludwig Boltzmann, an atheist, when he linked entropy and probability, did not, as Max Planck a Christian Theist points out in the following link, think to look for a constant to entropy:
I hold that the primary reason why Boltzmann, an atheist, never thought to carry out, or propose, a precise measurement for the constant on entropy is that he, as an atheist, had thought he had arrived at the ultimate explanation for how everything in the universe operates when he had link probability with entropy. i.e. In linking entropy with probability, Boltzmann, again an atheist, thought he had explained everything that happens in the universe to a ârandomâ chance basis. To him, as an atheist, it would simply be unfathomable that the ârandom chanceâ (probabilistic) events of entropy in the universe should ever be constrained by a constant that would limit the effects of entropy in the universe. Whereas on the contrary, to a Christian Theist, it is expected that even the seemingly random chance events of entropy in the universe should be bounded by a constant, i.e. that ârandomnessâ would have its ultimate cause based in God!:
Also of interest to ‘randomness’, here is a piece of evidence that solidly demarcates the randomness, i.e. entropy, of the material particles of the universe from the randomness that would be necessarily inherent within ‘conscious’ creatures with mental attribute of free will:
Since material particles are held to ‘randomly’ decay, why in blue blazes is conscious observation putting a freeze on ‘random’ entropic decay, unless consciousness was/is more foundational to reality than ‘random’ entropic decay is? This point is really driven home when we realize that the initial entropy of the universe was 1 in 10^10^123, which is, by far, the most finely tuned of initial conditions of the universe.
Of supplemental note, I think that Dr. Antoine Suarez does an excellent job in the following article of associating the randomness inherent in quantum mechanics with the mental aspect of ‘free will’ (and thus separating it from entropy)
Verse and Music:
Gpuccio, Gil
I think part of the answer is that what seems “obvious” ain’t necessarily so.
Intuition just isn’t a reliable guide.
However, I will make it plain, as I regularly do, that I don’t think it is “obvious” that life was not designed either. Nor do I think that science has demonstrated (nor could demonstrate) that it was not.
All science can do is flag up possible alternative mechanisms that can be operationalised as testable hypotheses.
‘… but the fact is a large number of those people do.’
Wrong. Elizabeth. Plain wrong. It would be a relatively minuscule number – unless of course, you discount people who use their common sense and believe their lying eyes, but are not academically-educated. Rather like belief in ghosts.
The educated experts, by the way, have a record of madness second to none; bizarrely in inverse proportion to the obvious of the truth concerned.
I think my favourite is possibly, the good doctor who coined the term, ‘drapetomania’, for the cruel pathology driving certain slaves so out of their minds that they sought to escape their captors.
Look at your post #9, Elizabeth.
Your primary m.o seems to be equivocation. Have you ever conceded a point without equivocation. Or indeed MADE one? Shifting your ground a little, shifting it a little there.
You know that’s how the security services obfuscate the truth, when the government’s been up to no good; misleading the public with equivocal, planted ‘evidence’. Putative evidence to contradict such real evidence as exists.
There was one famous case decades ago, and an actuary calculated that the odds against the occurrence of certain events within a certain time span ensuing from different causes, (but which actually happened), without large-scale interventions under a vast conspiracy, were astronomical. It would have pointed to a massive government conspiracy.
Statistics is usually the way they nail fraud, as it is very hard to prove in the courts. The falsity of materialism and all the evolutionary nonsense that goes with it, has been proved statistically, in spades, and is routinely reiterated here, but alas the courts that have any bearing on these scientific battles are politically motivated, as was the one involving the massive conspiracy I very sketchily adverted to above.
EL,
Well, Lizzie, I guess that means you are in a world of (rude word), cuz everything we know is based on what is obvious.
For example, things like A being superior to B necessarily meaning that B cannot be superior to A come to mind, although, strangely, I have found many people who don’t believe that on a blog called TSZ. But trust me, most people really do believe that because, well, it’s obvious.
“Obvious” is a bit problematic — a better term would be “intuitive,” though that’s not without its own pitfalls.
The right way of putting the point — though not pithy — would be that not everything that we ordinarily or intuitively take to be case, with regard to the empirical world of causal regularities, is actually the case.
That distinguishes our discourse about causal regularities from our discourse about logical necessities. In some cases, logical necessities are ‘obvious’.
(Quine famously defended the notion that logic is a theory of the obvious, and a professor of mine in grad school once claimed that if a student cannot just see that modus ponens is valid, there is nothing you can do for them. I still ponder whether that’s right or not.)
On the other hand, there are cases where our intuitions are not even reliable guides to logical possibility and necessity — for example, when it comes to zombies and Swampman. In those cases we have to sit down and think about whether what our intuitions seem to indicate really stands up to logical scrutiny; one person’s a priori limitation is another person’s failure of imagination.
When you know the answer to something, then it becomes “obvious.”
– One of my chemistry profs used to paraphrase Mencken like this: “For every problem, there is a solution. Neat. Plausible. And wrong.”
– I seem to remember that the concept of a ring structure for benzine was inspired by a dream.
– Somebody once said that the greatest discoveries aren’t accompanied with “Eureka, I found it,” but rather with “Hmmm, that’s funny.”
Besides practicing my arithmetic, I think I stumbled onto a great new test for Homo sapiens. đ
In defense of Elizabeth, I’d say that “equivocation” is too harsh. I very much prefer responsive, non-dogmatic, qualified statements to rigid, dogmatic ones.
I’d point out that a common courtroom technique is to demand non-qualified yes/no answers from a witness to force them into extremes. An academic application is the observation that all non-trivial, true-false questions are false at some level.
That God might have used agencies and natural mechanisms is more likely than not. For example . . .
– Why is it written that God said, “Let the land produce vegetation”? Why didn’t God simply create plants ex nihilo?
– Why is it written that God created Adam from the dust of the ground and Eve out of Adam rather than from the dust of the ground or ex nihilo?
Incidentally, Elizabeth might appreciate noticing in the crescendo of creation, the result of God’s final act of creation.
I’m not saying that any of this supports evolution, which in my opinion strains credibility to the point of giggling. I do believe in ultimate ID, but the ID likely involved efficient, previously designed natural processes, and that those designs also included mechanisms for adaptability.
It also seems to me that in Genesis, God is issuing orders.
Perhaps, the preincarnate Messiah, oversaw a creative effort involving other beings. As evidence of this, I’d draw your attention to the genome of the platypus, which bears all the earmarks of a class project, together with some plagiarism. đ
Wouldn’t it be totally cool to try to design a stable ecosystem with feedback and adaptation features?
I tried this once programatically. Even with liberal hacking, all my results quickly and inevitably crashed, destroying my virtual organisms together with the carrying capacity of the mini-biome. This is another dynamic that remains poorly addressed by Darwinism. There’s nothing that I can think of in evolution that prevents organisms from becoming too successful and *quickly* destroying their ecosystem.
From Andre:
If we are talking about the practices of science and engineering then what’s important here is not what individuals personally believe, what’s important is what assumptions have been found to be useful in doing the work.
We engineers, when doing engineering, do not assume that the universe was engineered (not any more than scientists do when they are doing science.) In other words, the engineering sciences do not contain design hypotheses. (See an earlier UD post, Design Inference vs. Design Hypothesis which is here: http://tinyurl.com/lpzrx6n .)
Since we don’t use these hypotheses in our work, do you think therefore that engineers are ideologically biased? Do you think we don’t like the idea of a creator, that we even find it to be philosophically repugnant?
-Freelurker_
Sure they do. Unless you’re engineering things that won’t be used.
From Mung:
Please tell me of an engineering science that postulates, as Dr. Demski says, “an intelligence operating in nature.”
RE #19:
Any engineering discipline postulates an intelligence operating in nature. You know of one that doesn’t?
I’d hate to think that I was trusting in non-intelligent engineers.
But as to a specific engineering discipline, software engineering.
Anytime I write a program, I try to keep in mind the users. They may not be as intelligent as I’d like, but they are still assumed to be intelligent. And they are assumed to be “in nature.”
Re: #20
Clearly, the central claim of Dr. Dembski, Gil Dodgen, Andre, and the rest of the ID movement is not that human intelligence is operating in nature. They are not calling for engineers to be intelligent or for programmers to keep their users in mind.
IDist are calling for people to believe that certain features of the universe and of living things are attributable to a [non-human] intelligent cause. Many people do believe this, including people who are scientists and engineers.
As he described in the linked articles, Dr. Dembski’s beef is that such beliefs don’t appear as hypotheses in the natural sciences. He also makes reference to the engineering sciences, and my reading of it is that he understands that the engineering sciences (such as engineering physics) don’t use such hypotheses either. (That is the most charitable reading.)
Then the interesting questions are, I think:
(1) Do IDists attribute the lack of design hypotheses in engineering to an ideological bias on the part of engineers?
(2) Do IDists think we could do a better job of engineering if we were to assume that a non-human intelligence was acting in nature?
(3) Do IDists think that that it is detrimental to our general culture for engineers to be neglecting design hypotheses in their work?
Why would you assume that alien intelligence, non-human intelligence or our own intelligence, might not be intelligible to any type of intelligence? Is the ability to understand not the precise Hallmark of intelligence? Why then bother with SETI are they only scan for human intelligent signals?
Andre, perhaps your comment is not addressed to me, but I have no idea what point you are trying to make.
Andre, you seem to be talking about design inferences. I’ve been talking about design hypotheses. Dr. Dembski explains the difference in the linked article.