Examples of irreducible complexity?

Faith & Science Conversation
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Relatively similar codons do tend to code for similar amino acids. That makes a lot of sense evolutionarily. It would be favored by evolution to have mistakes less likely to cause problems. Conversely, in the initial evolution of the system, the similarities between groups of tRNAs suggests evolution from a simpler system with fewer distinguished amino acids. Specialization from a more generalized system will produce a pattern of similarities.

However, I don’t think there is any known reason why a particular set of similar codons might not code for a different set of amino acids instead. As far as we can tell, it is an arbitrary option out of the range of possible codons.

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What I find curious about their positions is that they don’t seem to believe in miraculous interventions in the real world. I’ve never seen one suggest that God is intervening in laboratories or in processes that are observably going on around us. It’s always at some vague place at some vague time in the fairly distant past. For example, they may ignore or dismiss as unimportant some evolutionary change that we’ve observed or that must have happened in the last 100 years, but they never argue that such events were the result of divine intervention. My own suspicion is that they don’t believe in the past as a concrete reality.

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Now that’s an intriguing thought! That they deny anything but “historical” science definitely fits.

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Your description of this paper is more precise than my description.

However, it doesn’t help your stance. The catalytic functions of catalytic antibodies are not situated in the hypervariable regions of the antibody but in the framework regions. Highly conserved functional parts. So they are not random peptides. The researchers knew on beforehand that there were catalytic coding regions, not generated randomly.

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Um, what? Antibodies aren’t catalysts – they’re proteins that have quite a different function. When you randomly change parts of antibodies, however, it turns out that they can become catalysts. So what if the catalytic activity doesn’t occur in the part that changed – this is still the emergence of a specific catalytic activity as a result of random changes to a protein. If Axe were correct, we should never see this.

Here’s a suggestion: apply one tenth of the skepticism you’re employing on these papers on Axe’s study. Were these antibodies with beta-lactamase function counted in his 1/10^50? Were metallo-beta-lactamases?

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You’ve been around here long enough that you have probably seen Maggie’s testimony or as it was reprised in Factual evidence for Christians to rejoice in, remember and recount, and for true seekers to ponder.

I would say that the orchestration of those events and all of the necessary precursor events (myriads of them) so that the resulting consequences affecting Maggie’s life resulting as they did should qualify as being irreducibly complex. The probabilities are beyond calculation and the likelihood almost less than vanishingly small, comparable as noted to winning five different and independent lotteries in a day (was it actually two days in her case?), and winning them in the same order that the tickets were purchased. (Don’t forget the detail that only one ticket was purchased in each lottery.) If God can do that without breaking any natural or scientific laws, then he certainly can providentially guide mutations in DNA as well, and no ‘irreducible complexity’ need be postulated or result from the logical fallacy of incredulity.

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How did I miss that when it was first posted? It’s a testimony that is nothing short of amazing. Just reading it has made my day.

It’s also a reminder that our view of God is clearest when we look at what He is doing today. Focusing on the past, with debates about evolution and the age of the earth, misses Him altogether.

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I completely agree! 100%.

Do you propose an Alvin Plantinga type of organic evolution?

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@St.Roymond this is an intriguing thought, the question is also whether one believes it’s concrete or natural all the way down

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The testimonies and medical documentation for modern day miracles Craig Keener references are also relevant for considering how God also acts contrary to nature at times.

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I haven’t read any Plantinga for literally a couple of decades, so I can’t say that I know what that means. Do you have a link that would steer me to something about it? (Of course I can search too.)

(ETA: I’ll be looking at the Wikipedia article Evolutionary argument against naturalism - Wikipedia after a bit.)

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Although if you could look at healings at the molecular level, there may not be any ‘laws of nature’ (scientific laws) actually broken. But the timing and placing and of course the speed of the outcome are certainly ‘contrary to nature’ and preternatural, and hence miraculous. Call it ‘God’s providence accelerated’ without the ‘usual’ orchestration of myriads of necessary precursor events?

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How can we see the incredulity fallacy being used by ID advocates?

Ha Ha. Recently I read a comment that conflated flat earth and evolution as equally nonsensical.

Origen’s comments

In another post on this thread, someone quoted Origen, who asked how there could be days before the sun was created, as though this settled the issue of days in Genesis 1. But God created light on Day 1, so there must have been a light source that allowed for day and night, light and dark prior to the creation of the sun.

Wait a minute. The Creator God is the core of theology, and in that sense, creation is also at the core. “In the beginning God created . . .” “In the beginning was the Word (Jesus). . . all things were made by Him, and without him, nothing was made that was made.” That which we first learn about God in both Genesis 1 and John 1 is that he is the Creator.

Of course, theistic evolution beliefs form a spectrum. That would be an interesting discussion to follow.

What! Meyer denies no such thing. You have to posit that Meyer is a theistic evolution advocate to attribute that denial to Meyer. But to the extent that theistic evolution is materialistic, then it denies that God is at work in natural processes.

Of course. If the evidence leads to supernatural causes, and doesn’t fit at all with natural causes, then we should follow the evidence. It is not as if we are invoking the God of the gaps–“we don’t know, so God must have done it.” Rather we are reasoning from what we do know, which is that in our uniform and repeated experience, when we find information like biological information, when traced back to its original source, it is always a product of intelligence.

Why should we accept that explanations for scientific evidence must be always be limited to material causes when intelligence is the better explanation?

Exactly. Did the person in question die because he accidentally fell on the knife–a material cause–or did he die because an agent, another person with intention, thrust it into his chest? If we need to follow methodological naturalism in our search for answers, the only cause we can explore is the naturistic one.

It is interesting to see how YEC is discussed when the issue is ID.

Way off topic again.

And do we reject the incarnation because it is not subject to naturalistic scientific investigation? Then why should we reject intelligent design as a method of creation which is also not subject to naturalistic science investigation? Seems like invoking methodological naturalism when it filters out what EC doesn’t want, but ignoring it when EC does want incarnation.

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It is easily inferred, first because no ID advocate has ever proven that ID is scientific – they just claim it, and second, because mutations do generate new information. Neutral drift and the neutral theory of evolution also demonstrate that a lot of functional new information can be introduced quickly, and there have been eons of time.

Exaptation is cool, too – the bacterial flagellum and the injectisome are good examples of related nanomachines. Examples of evolutionary vestigial structures are abundant as well.

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That’s pretty weak. The argument for irreducible complexity is far more sophisticated than that. For your argument to be valid, what appears to be incredible could not be actually incredible. But maybe they actually are incredible, beyond any reasonable boundary of probability.

That is rather like Dawkins’ argument (and that of other evolutionists) that just because organisms look like they are designed for a purpose doesn’t mean they were, only that they appear to be designed. Have you ever considered that organisms not only appear to be designed but that they are actually designed.

We all rejoice when anyone enters into a genuine saving relationship with Jesus. But a testimony does not validate a scientific view. If that were the case, YEC is also validated by testimonies of that scientific view leading to salvation.

And God can equally engineer organisms with internal sensors to assess environmental conditions and adapt to that environment with programed genetic adaptations.

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…and execute that engineering and design providentially via biological evolution. Hence I am a lowercase ‘id’ advocate, not an uppercase ‘God of the gaps’ one.

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YEC is to the temporal what flat earth is to the spacial.

…or it might not be a literal account.

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This line struck me:

That is because if God has created us in his image, then even if he fashioned us by some evolutionary means, he would presumably want us to resemble him in being able to know . . . .

That was the primary argument in our informal intelligent design club that if there is indeed a Designer then it is logical to look for communication from it/him/her. Interestingly, most of those former atheists and agnostics came to accept at the least the Old Testament as the most likely candidate for being such communication for the reason that only in those writings was there a real foundation for doing science.

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This is the truly foundational statement: the Word is prior to Creation, and the Word became flesh, and the Word is the light of the world. Thus the Incarnation is the foundation of theology.

Two different Orthodox priests I knew asserted this in a different way, both saying that if you’re not talking about Jesus you’re not doing theology, that all theological positions must start with the question, “Who is Jesus?”

Recall John Walton’s point about the first Creation account really being about functionality. Thus all the functions of the world are from God, and so what they do is God in action.

An atheist would affirm your statement, but a Christian should recognize that it contains a false dichotomy, that there is no world apart from God’s ongoing and immediate activities – so at most the distinction is between God acting through the laws He chose for Creation and God acting a bit differently at times.

This is a generalization from insufficient premises. We have really just one example of intelligence, i.e. human intelligence, and a sample size of one is insufficient to make even a rudimentary hypothesis.

Because for fallen humans, material causes are all we can detect and reason from – we are by nature limited to methodological naturalism.

It was perfectly on-topic for the post it responded to.

Faulty identity/equivalence: the two propositions are not equivalent. The matter of the Incarnation falls into the category of VFA, “view from above”, since it is revealed truth. “Intelligent design” is VFB, “view from below”.
The problem with ID is that it is difficult to find someone advocating it who does not have an agenda they are using ID to support.

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Yes. Even the former atheists and agnostics in our informal intelligent design club recognized that the moment you conclude there is a Designer and operate from that conclusion you stop doing science.

In all my days in higher education I never once saw anyone come to Christ because of YEC – the movement was always the opposite: students who’d been raised YEC following its logic and abandoning the faith. Those I did see come to Christ were in response to evangelism that noted that abandoning science is not required.

Useful distinction! That makes our informal club a lower-case id group.

Though actually they were pretty unique in that they were atheists and agnostics who due to their studies of cosmology and evolution concluded there must be a Designer and mostly ended up as Christians – and I’ve never seen an ID argument lead anyone onto that path.

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