Response to Comments: The Problem With Miracles

_{Cornelius Hunter
July 7, 2011

Intelligent Design

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Intelligent Design}

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Imagine if a police detective was told his theory had to be strictly natural. The evidence at the crime scene was obvious, but the boss wants no criminals indicted. The cause of the crime must be limited to the wind, rain, earthquakes, polar shifts, whatever. Absurd you say? Welcome to evolution. Read more

Comments

The last time I checked, anything done by a criminal or other human would be considered ~~natural~~ artificial (as opposed to ~~super~~ natural).
Fair enough. But that's a very different meaning of "natural" and of no relevance to the ID vs. evolution debates. It perhaps might be relevant to the claims of some Thomists, that anything that is intelligently designed would necessarily be an artifact.Neil Rickert_{July 7, 2011
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Wish there was an edit button-that should have read "man-made" is not synonymous with supernatural or miraculous.DrREC_{July 7, 2011
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Upright- Interesting you've used 'artificial' as in man made. I don't think that is the opposite of supernatural or miraculous. Perhaps it shows why Dr. Hunter's analogy is a bit contorted. I think mine is the better one for the purpose. So, how would the prosecutor win against the demon defense? Would a judge invoke naturalism we seem so comfortable with in many aspects of our lives?DrREC_{July 7, 2011
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But Alas Neil and REC, how come I know natural processes did not produce your posts? Am I to consider you supernatural??? ================ The Letter Black - music video http://vimeo.com/6772944 ================= Book Review - Meyer, Stephen C. Signature in the Cell. New York: HarperCollins, 2009. Excerpt: As early as the 1960s, those who approached the problem of the origin of life from the standpoint of information theory and combinatorics observed that something was terribly amiss. Even if you grant the most generous assumptions: that every elementary particle in the observable universe is a chemical laboratory randomly splicing amino acids into proteins every Planck time for the entire history of the universe, there is a vanishingly small probability that even a single functionally folded protein of 150 amino acids would have been created. Now of course, elementary particles aren't chemical laboratories, nor does peptide synthesis take place where most of the baryonic mass of the universe resides: in stars or interstellar and intergalactic clouds. If you look at the chemistry, it gets even worse—almost indescribably so: the precursor molecules of many of these macromolecular structures cannot form under the same prebiotic conditions—they must be catalysed by enzymes created only by preexisting living cells, and the reactions required to assemble them into the molecules of biology will only go when mediated by other enzymes, assembled in the cell by precisely specified information in the genome. So, it comes down to this: Where did that information come from? The simplest known free living organism (although you may quibble about this, given that it's a parasite) has a genome of 582,970 base pairs, or about one megabit (assuming two bits of information for each nucleotide, of which there are four possibilities). Now, if you go back to the universe of elementary particle Planck time chemical labs and work the numbers, you find that in the finite time our universe has existed, you could have produced about 500 bits of structured, functional information by random search. Yet here we have a minimal information string which is (if you understand combinatorics) so indescribably improbable to have originated by chance that adjectives fail. http://www.fourmilab.ch/documents/reading_list/indices/book_726.htmlbornagain77_{July 7, 2011
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The last time I checked, anything done by a criminal or other human would be considered ~~natural~~ artificial (as opposed to ~~super~~ natural). There ya go.Upright BiPed_{July 7, 2011
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Wouldn't criminals be considered part of the natural world (as opposed to the miraculous, as in the title)? DNA, blood, hair...seems the stuff of matter to me. On the other hand, a police chief or a judge might be right in strictly forbidding starting with supernatural explanations for a crime. How would one ever rule out a demon committing a crime, and planting evidence to frame a suspect, in a manner that left no traces discernable by humans? A supernatural hypothesis. Probably can't be falsified. Is it a perfect defense? Or do forensics and our courtrooms favor methodological naturalism?DrREC_{July 7, 2011
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The last time I checked, anything done by a criminal or other human would be considered natural (as opposed to supernatural).Neil Rickert_{July 7, 2011
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