Examples of irreducible complexity?

[St.Roymond]

@rsewell

@cewoldt

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.

…or it might not be a literal account.

The light in Genesis 1 is the light from the Egyptian and other creation stories; in those stories it existed independent of the gods, existing on its own, opponent to the darkness. The Genesis writer announces the light right at the start of the story just as those other creation stories did, but demotes it, declaring that light, too, is a creature of YHWH-Elohim. It’s the first polemical point of the account. This is expanded on when God calls out a name for the light – important in a culture where naming things involves having power over them.

But yes, it isn’t meant to be literal in its details. It takes the Egyptian creation story and re-tells it, giving it a different structure – using “days” to set up that structure – a structure that people back then would have recognized as an account of a mighty deed of a great king. The account continues polemically as well, one by one demoting all the important Egyptian deities to the status of creatures of YHWH-Elohim.

This is exactly the sort of story that would have been appropriate for a nation coming out of captivity, declaring that the gods of their captors are subservient to their own deity while at the same time declaring that YHWH-Elohim is King – and not just their King, He is King over all creation.

[Dale (evolutionary providentialist)]

@cewoldt

But to the extent that theistic evolution is materialistic, then it denies that God is at work in natural processes.

Exactly like meteorology.

[rsewell (RON SEWELL)]

@cewoldt

Wow. Exaptation. An incredibly “sciencey” sounding concept. So it must be science.

Technobable does not make science, but science does utilize well defined conceptual terms.

@cewoldt

“Acquiring” is something an agent does by intention.

Not necessarily. “Acquiring” can be intentional, unintentional, or involuntary.

@cewoldt

“Features” are not agents, and so can acquire nothing.

The agency is mutation, drift, and natural selection. “Features” are the outcome, not the agency.

@cewoldt

“Darwin’s sacred imposter” is the personification of nature

“my car engine is acting up”

“hey man, do you think this is some Disney animation?” Cars are not people, they do not act up!"

The language of natural processes and activity can overlap. Personification can be overdone in nature documentaries and such, at times, but it is ridiculous to characterize evolutionary mechanisms as some sort of conjuring

@cewoldt

No other field of science would use these “magical” terms.

Are you serious??? Off the top of my head…

the pigment selects in the UV spectrum
the rusty color was acquired from oxydation
precipitation is favored
a volcanic island emerged
the star radiated into the surround gas

[St.Roymond]

@cewoldt

We examine a Ford motor car and find that the bolt used to fasten together the two halves of the engine crankcase is the same bolt used to fasten the two halves of the transmission. Did that happen through material causes? Of course not. An engineer, who is an agent, decided (agency) to use the same bolt for both applications. The features, the engine and transmission, didn’t “acquire” the bolt.

That’s not even close to an equivalent situation.

@cewoldt

“Acquiring” is something an agent does by intention.

Not in science. In geology, glaciers acquire sediment loads, as do rivers. In meteorology, air masses acquire moisture. In astronomy, planets acquire moons. Heck, in relativity, particles boosted to speeds near that of light acquire mass.
Or at least that’s how my professors and our textbooks used the term.
For that matter, rivers are supplied with sediment – is that term also something that “an agent does by intention”?

Application of such terms does not require or indicate agency. You can’t take a meaning from ordinary life and insist that the ordinary meaning is the one true meaning.

@cewoldt

personification of nature through words like select, favored, acquire, arise, burst onto the scene, appeared, emerged, arose, gave rise to, evolved itself, modified itself, radiated into, all terms used in evolutionary literature. No other field of science would use these “magical” terms.

Actually the terms I put in bold are used in other fields of science, including astronomy, cosmology, geology, and meteorology.

@cewoldt

illegitimate personification of nature.

When using such terms avoids long and clumsy ways of speaking, the use is not illegitimate. The problem with using them, though, is that the general public takes them in and concludes that scientists are attributing agency to evolution.

[St.Roymond]

@rsewell

“Acquiring” can be intentional, unintentional, or involuntary.

As in “I acquired quite the painful sunburn while at the beach”.

[Dale (evolutionary providentialist)]

@cewoldt

–to your satisfaction. You may not be satisfied regardless of the mountain of contrary evidence.

And you may not be satisfied regardless of how mountainously ironic that is, speaking of the mountains more of evidence for evolution.

@cewoldt

@Dale

Examples of evolutionary vestigial structures are abundant as well.

A vestigial structure is one that either has reduced function from what it was originally designed to do or has no function at all. But that is an argument from ignorance. There are many claimed vestigial structures that have been found to have important functions even when it has been claimed there is none. And how would one ever know that function was reduced from its original designed function? Structures labeled as vestigial are regularly found to have even more functions than earlier known.

I meant to put scare quotes around ‘vestigial’ because we agree. That is not really an argument against evolution but actually it works fine with it, especially in light of God’s providential sovereignty.

[T_aquaticus]

@paleomalacologist

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.

Agree 100%. Codon usage does bear the marks of an evolutionarily optimized system. How that relates to “logical” is hard to suss out.

@paleomalacologist

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.

I can’t find the paper at the moment, but there were some findings that there are weak binding interactions between amino acids and specific triplets meaning that there may have been some chemical association between triplets and amino acids early in the evolution of codon usage. However, these findings were pretty speculative. Like almost everything in biology, the answer is very unlikely to be a simple answer and more likely to be a very complex interaction of a lot of factors.

[T_aquaticus]

@Vanengelen

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.

Then why don’t nearly all antibodies have the same catalytic function? Why are specific catalytic functions only found in a rare few?

Let’s compare this to Axe’s experiment. He mutated a very unstable beta-lactamase in a way that knocked out its lactamase activity. He then added mutations back to see if lactamase activity could be recovered. How is that any different than adding mutations to antibodies which didn’t start out with lactamase activity?

[T_aquaticus]

@cewoldt

–to your satisfaction. You may not be satisfied regardless of the mountain of contrary evidence.

The IC argument boils down to, “I can’t think of how these systems could evolve, therefore they couldn’t”. That’s not science.

@cewoldt

Wow. Exaptation. An incredibly “sciencey” sounding concept. So it must be science. Let’s take a closer look. We examine a Ford motor car and find that the bolt used to fasten together the two halves of the engine crankcase is the same bolt used to fasten the two halves of the transmission. Did that happen through material causes? Of course not. An engineer, who is an agent, decided (agency) to use the same bolt for both applications. The features, the engine and transmission, didn’t “acquire” the bolt.

“Acquiring” is something an agent does by intention. “Features” are not agents, and so can acquire nothing. Your statement is an illustration of the illegitimate personification of nature that is so rampant in evolutionism. It endows agency to nature which makes evolutionism sound plausible to those who don’t catch the linguistic sleight of hand.

A great example of why ID is not taken seriously within the scientific community. ID appears to be a long list of complaints of how words are used. It’s just semantic games. What ID proponents consistently refuse to do is deal with the evidence.

@cewoldt

A vestigial structure is one that either has reduced function from what it was originally designed to do or has no function at all. But that is an argument from ignorance. There are many claimed vestigial structures that have been found to have important functions even when it has been claimed there is none. And how would one ever know that function was reduced from its original designed function? Structures labeled as vestigial are regularly found to have even more functions than earlier known.

It really doesn’t matter if you consider them vestigial, without function, or rudimentary. What matters is how that feature is shared with other species. What we see with vestigial features is that they are consistent with the features found in the rest of the taxonomic group. We see whales with vestigial pelvises which is consistent with the rest of the mammal group. We see manatees with vestigial toenails which is consistent with the rest of the mammal group. What we don’t see is seals with vestigial feathers, or penguins with vestigial nipples.

[heymike3]

@Dale

Although if you could look at healings at the molecular level, there may not be any ‘laws of nature’ (scientific laws) actually broken

To what end? And does this naturalism apply as well to the miracles of Jesus? A “you are badly mistaken” feels forthcoming

[St.Roymond]

Hey – the discussion came back to something I can follow!

[Dale (evolutionary providentialist)]

Well, we’ve already talked about how no natural laws were broken when he calmed the storm on Galilee… also in the Israelites crossing the Red Sea.

[heymike3]

He spoke and the storm obeyed him. If he hadn’t said a word, the storm would not have stopped.

[glipsnort (Steve Schaffner)]

@cewoldt

That’s pretty weak. The argument for irreducible complexity is far more sophisticated than that.

The argument from irreducible complexity lacks both sophistication and rigor.

@cewoldt

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

While God certainly could do that, he seems (with a few exceptions) not to have done so, given the absence of any mechanism for there to be any programmed genetic adaptations.

@cewoldt

to your satisfaction

Or to the satisfaction of nearly all working Christian biologists.

@cewoldt

“Darwin’s sacred imposter” is the personification of nature through words like select, favored, acquire, arise, burst onto the scene, appeared, emerged, arose, gave rise to, evolved itself, modified itself, radiated into, all terms used in evolutionary literature. No other field of science would use these “magical” terms.

What fields of science are you familiar with? Try looking at titles of physics preprints on arXiv:
‘select’: a technical term, e.g. ‘Selection rules in the excitation of the divacancy and the nitrogen-vacancy pair in 4H- and 6H-SiC’
‘favored’: another common technical term, e.g. ‘Low-velocity-favored transition radiation’
acquire: Not technical but often used, e.g. (from an abstract), ‘We study the phenomenological viability of chiral extensions of the Standard Model, with new chiral fermions acquiring their mass through…’
‘arise, arose’: Also not technical but also commonly used, e.g. ‘Magnetic dynamics driven integer and fractional high harmonic generation arising from highly nonlinear instantaneous energy levels’

I’ll skip ‘burst onto the scene’, ‘evolved itself’, and ‘modified itself’ because those aren’t the sorts of things I’ve ever seen in technical evolutionary biology papers.

@cewoldt

Now before you start in on this idea of evolutionist’s personifying nature being an ignorant and biased rant by a young earth creationist, these same concerns–the illegitimate use personification–have also been voiced by several if not many evolutionists. They have not abandoned evolution, but have scuttled “natural selection” as a workable mechanism and are searching for a new mechanism by which evolution works. (alluded to by Steven Meyer in one of the attached videos.)

Could you provide citations (I don’t watch attached videos), please? I’m not familiar with any evolutionary biologists who have discarded ‘natural selection’ as an important factor in evolution.

[T_aquaticus]

@glipsnort

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.

I’ve wondered the same thing. It’s as if the God of the Gaps argument has such strong inertia within ID that they fail to consider possible positive evidence for ID. ID proponents will ask for examples of irreducible systems evolving in the lab, but why wouldn’t they cite that as an example of ID happening in real time? Why don’t they expect guided mutations to occur in living species in the here and now? It seems they assume everything we observe happening in the present is natural and not intelligently designed. Curious that.

[St.Roymond]

@glipsnort

Could you provide citations (I don’t watch attached videos), please? I’m not familiar with any evolutionary biologists who have discarded ‘natural selection’ as an important factor in evolution.

I spent an hour online trying to find even one, but the only objections to the process turned out to be YEC advocates (and their arguments wouldn’t pass a university freshman science course).

[St.Roymond]

@T_aquaticus

It seems they assume everything we observe happening in the present is natural and not intelligently designed.

I never thought about that before, but I think you’re right. And my first thought here was back to a lab exercise in a geology course where we were given samples and asked to date them: if no one supernatural is intervening in that sort of lab work, how do they explain the lab-based conclusions that the rocks we were dealing with with hundreds of thousands of years old at a minimum?

[glipsnort (Steve Schaffner)]

@T_aquaticus

I’ve wondered the same thing. It’s as if the God of the Gaps argument has such strong inertia within ID that they fail to consider possible positive evidence for ID.

I think the reason it’s so engrained is that they, like just about everyone living in a modern society, are so used to looking for naturalistic causes in daily life and so used to it working. Anything else has to happen somewhere far away.

[Dale (evolutionary providentialist)]

God is sovereign over timing and placing. Timelessly… or ‘timefully.’

[cewoldt (Craig Ewoldt)]

@T_aquaticus

The IC argument boils down to, “I can’t think of how these systems could evolve, therefore they couldn’t”. That’s not science.

@T_aquaticus

The IC argument boils down to, “I can’t think of how these systems could evolve, therefore they couldn’t”. That’s not science.

That is very far from the Intelligent Design position. ID believes we must embrace the best explanation, and not be restricted to naturalistic answers only. ID finds that intelligent design is a far better explanation of the evidence, not that it “can’t imagine how a system might evolve.”

Let’s begin with some definitions to keep this discussion on track.

First, here’s a definition of philosophical naturalism from Encyclopedia Brittanica as an authority. If you disagree with this definition, please take umbrage with EB rather than me:

“Naturalism, in philosophy, (is) a theory that relates scientific method to philosophy by affirming that all beings and events in the universe (whatever their inherent character may be) are natural.”

Next, we have Methodological naturalism as defined by S. Joshua Swamidass:

Mainstream science seeks “our best explanation of the world, without considering God.” This limiting clause,“without considering God,” is the rule of Methodological Naturalism (MN).

Here is the big question: Why should we accept methodological naturalism’s mandate for naturalistic answers only in science? Clearly, intelligent design is by far the best explanation for the evidence we see in nature. It is not as if ID is invoking God to explain something we don’t understand. It is rather what we do understand that demonstrates intelligence in design. The answer to the big question is: We need to scuttle the “naturalism mandate” in science and replace it with searching for the best answers regardless of where they lead.

Now let’s apply these two positions on naturalism—philosophical and methodological—to what the Apostle Paul has written in Romans 1:18 – 20:

“The wrath of God is being revealed from heaven against all the godlessness and wickedness of people, who suppress the truth by their wickedness, 19 since what may be known about God is plain to them, because God has made it plain to them. 20 For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that people are without excuse.” (emphasis mine)

What is plain to all people is that “God’s invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen.” No one needs prior scientific or philosophical insights, education, or academic credentials to clearly see God’s eternal power and divine nature in his creation. When a person don’t see these, according to Paul and not me, it is because they have suppressed the truth by their wickedness. Every person can see this witness of nature… No experts or specialists are needed as intermediaries to enlighten and direct anyone to clearly see this witness of nature. Arcane discussions from scientists are superfluous and unneeded. Praise God, his Creation speaks clearly to everyone who will hear, from the most prominent scientists to those living in the most remote villages.

If we acknowledge God as the creator and designer of the universe, then we will see design in nature as a product of God’s intelligence—intelligent design. This is what Paul writes about in Romans 1. But how can we see God as creator when limited to looking through the lens of either philosophical or methodological naturalism?

How do these verses apply to atheistic evolutionists and how do they apply to evolutionary creationists. Atheistic evolutionists are in essence philosophical naturalists. So they are blind—willfully and wickedly ignorant—to the testimony of nature to God’s essence and creative power.

Evolutionary creationists, as are many in the BioLogos forum, are methodological naturalists (at least when it suits them—take the incarnation earlier in this thread as an example.) Using methodological naturalism, evolutionary and cosmological sciences—indeed all disciplines of science— are required to proceed as if only natural processes are involved. Yet if as this verse says, we can clearly see God’s eternal power and divine nature in what God has created, how can evidence of the non-material be excluded from our scientific conclusions?

So atheistic evolutionists cannot see the hand of God because for them there is no God. And evolutionary creationists cannot see the hand of God in their science because to see is forbidden by their methodological naturalism. Regardless of whether one investigates though philosophical or methodological naturalism, one cannot see through science God’s handiwork (his design) in his creation

So atheists willfully suppress the truth in wickedness, and evolutionary creationists can’t relate or identify through their science the truth from God’s creation as God’s handiwork. Either way, God does not receive the glory and honor that is due him. As a result of refusing to see or acknowledge God as Creator, our culture rushes down the path of destruction and deception that Paul unveils in the remainder of Romans 1:26 to 32. It is a desperate condition:

From Idolatry to Depravity

26 For this reason God delivered them over to disgraceful passions. Their women[n] exchanged natural sexual relations[o] for unnatural ones. 27 The men[p] in the same way also left natural relations with women and were inflamed in their lust for one another. Men committed shameless acts with men and received in their own persons[q] the appropriate penalty of their error.

28 And because they did not think it worthwhile to acknowledge God, God delivered them over to a corrupt mind so that they do what is not right. 29 They are filled with all unrighteousness,[r] evil, greed, and wickedness. They are full of envy, murder, quarrels, deceit, and malice. They are gossips, 30 slanderers, God-haters, arrogant, proud, boastful, inventors of evil, disobedient to parents, 31 senseless, untrustworthy, unloving,[s] and unmerciful. 32 Although they know God’s just sentence—that those who practice such things deserve to die[t]—they not only do them, but even applaud[u] others who practice them.

Let’s conclude on a higher note:

Creation sings the Father’s song
He calls the sun to wake the dawn
And run the course of day
Till evening falls in crimson rays
His fingerprints in flakes of snow
His breath upon this spinning globe
He charts the eagle’s flight
Commands the newborn baby’s cry

Hallelujah
Let all creation stand and sing
Hallelujah
Fill the earth with songs of worship
Tell the wonders of creation’s King

–Getty, Getty, Townend