It’s still a bad example for reasons already given. It would only work if Christians were supposed to depend on God to show them science rather than actually doing science.
This is an inaccurate conclusion: “forbidden by methodological naturalism” does not equate to “cannot see through science God’s handiwork”. That’s like saying that because an artist’s religious views have no impact on how he places brushstrokes then the artist has no religious views.
Thank you. You have uncovered some misunderstandings that need clarification.
First, there differing forms of causality, different kinds of “whys” with different kinds of answers. Yes, Jane “acquired” a sunburn. So she went to the dermatologist with her friend Jim. The dermatologist tells her she acquired the sunburn as a result of laying in the sun too long without adequate protection for her skin. But Jim her friend asks a different “why.” “Please explain to me why skin sunburns?” The dermatologist doesn’t explain that “acquiring” sunburns is what skin does—that would be nonsense. The dermatologist rather answers, “The UV light damages skin cells. The immune system reacts by increasing blood flow to the affected areas, which causes the inflamed skin (erythema) known as sunburn.”
These are two different kinds of explanations for two different types of “why” questions. The proximate cause is lying in the sun without protection. The scientific explanation tells what UV light does to skin and how the immune system responds.
There is also a difference between an observation and an explanation. Let’s take the volcanic island as an example. “A volcanic island emerged.” Great, that is an observation of what happened, but it is not an explanation of how it happened. If we asked a geologist why the volcanic island emerged, and he explained that it emerged because emerging is what volcanoes do, we would rightly question his expertise. But he doesn’t say that because he is a real geologist. He explains to us the processes of how and why volcanoes work.
This is how evolutionism falls short. When evolutionists just use this words as observations, then not problem. But when evolutionists use these words I have listed, they use them not as observations of what happened, but as explanations of how evolution works. When these words are used as explanations of how evolution works, as in “nature selects” and “nature favors,” these are deceptive word plays which appear to be explanations but which are really personifications of nature.
If time permits during the short lifetime of this conversation, I will search for some of the helpful quotations I read from evolutionists in which they express these same concerns and further clarify this issue.
You skipped the use of the term in numerous other branches of science.
And Christian meteorologists cannot see the hand of God in their science because to see is forbidden by their methodological naturalism. Spot on. Good grief.
Or if God is the artist, because we can see the resultant brushstrokes scientifically that removes God from the picture. Great thinking. (The paintbrush is in another realm that we are not privy to because we have no divinometer™.)
How does ID determine that design is the best explanation?
Because that is what science is. You don’t have to use science if you don’t want to. If you don’t like MN then don’t use it. However, don’t pretend that what you are doing is science.
Why?
That’s like saying if we acknowledge invisible pink fairies as the cause of gravity then we will see gravity as the product of invisible pink fairies. I think we all agree that if you believe in a conclusion then you believe in a conclusion. The big question is how you get to that belief. What evidence led you there, and what was the method that you used.
You are also a methodological naturalist for 99.999999999% of your beliefs. If you feel sick you go to the doctor to get antibiotics because of Germ Theory, a naturalistic explanation constructed through methodological naturalism. If you throw a ball in the air you expect it to obey the naturalistic law of general relativity, a theory constructed through methodological naturalism. I could go on and on and on. So why is it that you stop using this method when it comes to biodiversity?
We atheists have yet to see evidence of the hand of God.
Sure, ok.
That’s a naturalistic explanation constructed through methodological naturalism. Why do you believe that? Why don’t you think a supernatural explanation is best?
That’s just semantics. Humans use anthropomorphic terms and personification to help other people understand their ideas. So what? That doesn’t make theories false.
What these lines convey is that it is legitimate to see the hand of God in an amazing world mediated by natural law - the rotation of the earth, refraction of light, crystallization, the wonder of birth. Play the tape forward and the eagle soars; play the tape backwards and witness the common ancestry of life.
That is a beautiful and creative metaphor. I’ll give you that.
But let’s try again for a more accurate metaphor:
“Play the tape backwards, and witness the common common design from the divine designer of life.”
DNA is by far the most dense information storage system known to man. Material processes–matter in motion–can’t create that. Human intelligence can’t do that. Only God can.
Since I can’t find a source to document this, let’s call this a prediction from creation science: when reading the genetic code forwards, the cell get one set of instructions. When reading it backwards, there is yet another set of instructions. And when reading every third “letter,” yet another? “Forming a meaningful heteropalindromic sentence or other longish text, that can be read in either direction, is beyond challenging.” David Klinghoffer.
We can only metaphorically and imaginatively get different messages from hymn when playing it backwards and forwards, and although beautiful, it’s a stretch. But soon we will understand that is what God’s creative power does with genetic information.
Here are some links I have found on human-chimp DNA matching, which is often used as evidence for common descent. One is from an evolutionist, apparently a friend of BioLogos. The other is from a creationist at ICR.
As it turns out, the correspondence between the chimp and human genomes is not 98 percent as previously published. Even at 98%, that would be far more genetic changes than can be accomplished over a relatively short evolutionary time frame. But new research shows that the correspondence is closer to 85%. That is far better explained by common design than common descent or common ancestry.
Sigh. Here we go again.
Isn’t the 85% figure the one from an algorithm that also showed the human genome was only 89% similar to itself?
Since they are downregulated, as was mentioned above for the healthy mice by Glipsnort.
V-genes frequently have codes in their germ line sequences for serine proteases.
https://doi.org/10.1128/IAI.00202-17.
“Naturally occurring catalytic antibodies with the D1-S27a-H93 serine protease-like triad represent perhaps the best-understood group, with several studies illustrating a VL germ line origin for these catalytic residues in several kappa V region gene families based on sequence alignments of proteolytic antibodies (25, 52, 53).”
Paul et al 1998 Applied Biochemistry and Biotechnology Vol. 75, 1998
“ORIGIN AND MECHANISM OF CATALYTIC ACTIVITY
Biochemical and structural characterization of Abs carried out by the author and other groups support the following hypotheses: A germline encoded peptidase activity resides in the V c domain. The magnitude and quality of the peptidase activity encoded by the VL domain is susceptible to maturation by somatic means, i.e., mutation and pairing with VH domains. Preferential utilization of this germline activity and/or dysfunctional somatic diversification mechanisms lead to increased synthesis of catalytic Abs in autoimmune disease.”
https://www.nal.usda.gov/research-tools/food-safety-research-projects/proteolytic-antibodies-biodefense
“A third of the human germline kappa light chain variable domain (V() repertoire contain canonical serine protease-like catalytic triads in their complementarity- determining regions (CDR) and many have detectable peptidolytic activity.”
To think that catalytic antibodies arise from random peptides is a mistake.
Do you really understand this issue? Based on the estimated mutation rate in humans, what single-base substitution rate would we expect when we compare human and chimpanzee genomes under a common-descent model? What do we observe? What difference would we expect under a creationist model? What is the common-descent expectation for structural variants between humans and chimps? What is the uncertainty on that?
Wait – you’re saying that proteins that have a completely different function can already contain code for catalytic activity? How does is this possibly consistent with the claim that catalytic activity is so rare that it essentially never arises by chance? Are you arguing that the possibility for catalytic activity was designed into antibodies, even though that activity is actually harmful when it occurs? What’s the actual argument here?
ETA: I just read more carefully what you quoted; you should do the same:
They contain protease-like catalytic triads – that’s a set of just three amino acids. That means that one out of every 8000 triads is a canonical serine protease-like catalytic triad, and that something like 5% of all proteins have them. You’re trying to argue that this couldn’t have arisen by chance – that argument just doesn’t work.
Isn’t the bacterial flagellar motor a good example of irreducible complexity?
How does Darwin address the issue of intelligent design, post mortem? He personifies and attributes agency to ‘natural selection’. Natural selection is Darwin’s designer.
“Darwin changed the way people view biology by doing two things. First, he inverts the cause of organic change from inside the organism to outside. That’s the externalistic view. And second, he personifies nature to act as a substitute agent in lieu of God. And he personifies it by projecting onto nature the ability to select for or select against creatures or to favor other creatures along those lines.” Dr. Randy Guliuzza, ICR. Much of the following commentary on these quotes is also from Guiuzza.
Here are some quotes from evolutionists who discuss Darwin’s personification of natural selection:
“A big scientific criticism against Darwinism . . . Darwin swapped one mystical agent, God, for another one, Natural Selection.” (source not known.)
Richard Lewontin critiques Darwin’s use of natural selection.
“The most famous and influential example is Darwin’s invention of the term ‘natural selection,’ which, he wrote in On the Origin of Species, ‘is daily and hourly scrutinizing throughout the world, every variation, even the slightest, rejecting that which is bad, preserving and adding up all that is good . . .”
Lewontin points out here that Darwin has personified of nature where it’s acting as if it’s an omnipresent, omniscient god, where it can see everything, selecting and favoring of certain variations. He is immediately pointing out this problem, which was also pointed out to Darwin right from the beginning. In 1859, Darwin wrote Origin of Species. By 1868, he’s backpedaling a bit. This is a quote from Darwin himself, where he says, “The term ‘natural selection’ is in some respects a bad one—as it seems to imply a conscious choice. But this will be disregarded after a little familiarity.” And it really wasn’t. Darin continues, “I have also often personified the word Nature; for I have found it difficult to avoid this ambiguity.”—because it’s almost impossible because creatures look like they were created.
Greg Graffin, professor of biology at UCLA, wrote in his article, “Darwin was a Punk” (Scientific American October 1, 2010), “The trick is: How do you talk about natural selection without implying the rigidity of law? We use it as almost an active participant, almost like a god. In fact, you could substitute the word ‘god’ for ‘natural selection’ in a lot of evolutionary writings, and you’d think you were listening to a theologian. It’ a routine we know doesn’t exist, but we teach it anyway: genetic mutation and some active force choose most favorable one.”
Robert Reid, a famous evolutionary biologist from Canada, provides another frank admission. In Biological Emergences, Evolution by Natural Experiment, 2007, He writes, “Indeed the language of neo-Darwinism is so careless that the words ‘divine plan’ can be substituted for ‘selection pressure’ in any popular work in the biological literature without the slightest disruption in the logical flow of the argument.”
Robert Reid isn’t the only one. Another scientist who saw this mysticism in Darwin’s use of selection, Lynn Margulis, states incisively that “Darwin was brilliant to make ‘natural selection’ a sort of godlike term, an expression that could replace ‘God’—who did it–created life forms . . . He (Darwin) made it easy for his contemporaries to think and verbalize Mr. Big Omnipotent God in the Sky picking out those He wants to keep. He has been conceived of as The Natural Selector—He throws the others away.”
Here is an extensive, perceptive quote. Stephan Talbot is a critic of evolution is also an evolutionist in the Darwinian sense. Yet he sees the problem with natural selection. He comments (in Let’s Not Begin with Natural Selection, 2008), “Natural selection is always doing things. And so we hear about the mechanism of selection, as well as the forces or pressures that operate in it. We learn that natural selection shapes the bodies and behaviors of organisms, builds specific features, targets or acts on particular genomic regions, favors or disfavors (or even punishes) various traits…” Talbot points out all of these verbs that are attributed to nature by evolutionists as real, causal forces in their best scientific literature. Yet most people are completely missing this.
Jerry Fordor, a philosopher at Rutgers University wrote a very insightful book, What Darwin God Wrong. At the end of the book he points out that Darwinism was basically a substitute agent. He and his fellow author, Massimo Piattelli-Palmarinia, point out that “What breeds the ghosts in Darwinism is its covert appeal to intentional biological explanations… . Darwin pointed the direction to a thoroughly atheistic-theory of phenotype (trait) formation; but he didn’t see how to get the whole way there. He (Darwin) killed off God, if you like, but Mother Nature and other pseudo-agents (selection) got of scot-free. We think it’s how to get rid of them too.”
Michael Hodge, again from Key Words in Natural Biology- “One source of trouble was that Darwin liked the term ‘natural selection’ because it could be ‘used as a substantive governing a verb’ (From Darwin, 1887, vol. 2, p. 46). But such uses appear to reify, even deify, natural selection as an agent . . .” Reify and deify means a concept that can actually do things. Hodge also writes about the difficulty of agreeing on what ‘natural selection’ means–in a book titled Key Words in Natural Biology.
From New Scientist magazine, article, Intelligent Evolution, How life’s processes act like an all-knowing brain. Nature’s brain” A radical new view of evolution. “How does natural selection create so much complexity so fast? A bold new theory says it learns and remembers past solutions just as our brains do.” Wow, an imaginative and brave new world.
Someone might say that metaphor abuse disappears with the correct definition of natural selection . . . Right? Who has the correct definition? More on that later if I have the time to put together a post.
Yes, this is what I argue. Not for all antibodies but for a subset, may be. Catalytic activity can be useful. To have catalytic antibodies can be very powerful in not only binding but also break down the substrate. However, for these two functions, the optimal backbone is a bit different. For optimal binding (antibody function), you best have a rigid backbone, but for catalysis (enzyme function), this needs to be more flexible, since you must cope with both substrate and products. Abzymes by far don’t reach the conversion rates from normal enzymes.
4 posts were split to a new topic: Is natural selection superseded by other factors?
I don’t think so.
Evidence that catalysis is actually functional in living systems?
And yet the dipeptide seryl-histidine shows catalytic activity, as do random 12-AA peptides when attached to phage (Discovery of Catalytic Phages by Biocatalytic Self-Assembly - PMC). Catalytic activity seems to pop up all over the place.
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