Your keystrokes input illustration defeats this claim im afraid. In your illistration, there was a mind at work that purposefully made said keystrokes and did so with intent to be random…a mind can choose to do that (which is also demonstrating God given freewill btw).
Better use a different illustration i think because this one actually supports the ID camp and forms the basis of their main argument.
The problem with your reasoning there is that you ignore the other half of the claim and this is why your own view strikes massive problems.
Behee came to Christianity because he saw such complexity he could not accept it was from random process right (even you agree with this). The problem then becomes, if there is a designer behind such compexity, and one wishes to learn about and follow that designer philosphically, one must read the designers writings!
Here is the issue…if a designer is intelligent enough to create things so complex, how can you rationally support the claim the designer cocked up His own revelation of how He did all of this?
God describes the creation account using very straight forward words…its also referenced elsewhere in the bible by multiple writers and even by God incarnate Himself (Christ).
The bible consistently makes references to a literal 7 day creation. The most obvious example of this is found in the keeping the Sabbath. Every God fearing individual in the bible (im talking about men such as Abraham and Noah, the prophets, Chirst, the apostles…all of these indivudals kept the sabbath exactly as deacribed in Exodus 20…
Clearly they recognised the significance of a 7 day creation week.
Behe describes himself as a lifelong Catholic.
I was christened a catholic myself…and my family were not in anyway christian. Your point is?
As i said,
The sabbath keeping by all God fearing bible characters is highly problematic. Its the most significant part of the Christian world view and i think that is because without it, we dont have a Christian text from which to learn about Him…we have no manual.
Clearly these individuals all celebrated a literal 7 day creation week and its in both testaments of the bible and was even taught by the incarnate Creator Himself (Jesus Christ)
One example…
Mark 10:6 says, “But from the beginning of the creation, God ‘made them male and female.’”
Another statement from Christ…
John 5:45-47
For if you believed Moses, you would believe Me; for he wrote about Me. But if you do not believe his writings, how will you believe My words?
What is needed is a world view that maintains the consistency found in its philosophical writings. Tearing pages out and ignoring them is fruitless…there are other places in the text where the same themes popup again and again. Like for example the patience of the saints in Revelation…
Here are those who keep the commandments of God(10 commandments according to google) and have the Testimony of Jesus!
My point is that your claim that Behe came to Christianity because of biological complexity does not seem to have any basis in how Behe describes his own faith journey.
No, this is wrong. You didn’t make new information. You only hit some keys that evoked some symbols on your screen. You show it yourself, since to make it information, you had to type “I just typed xtk”. The essential part of information is, that is must have meaning. What you created was noise. But you think (I think) that noise transforms to information.
Yes, for the eye in general, ET can be pretty vague, and it is generally accepted. Therefore, I choose a small simple part of the eye. The lens. Is there a rational ET course for a lens to be initially formed? Or even something more simple: The vitrious body of the eye. What’s a reliable ET mechanisms that could have formed that? One year ago, I found not a single scientific reference.
I don’t think that something is offered. it’s only stated that evolutionary mechanisms can’t create highly complex biological systems. And that point stands. Biologists are clever, most of them even don’t try to explain complex biological systems by ET.
He made a sequence, and there is information in that, isn’t there, information about the sequence? It may or may not have wider ramifications, just like mutations in DNA.
Either Intelligent Design Theory is a theory or it isn’t. Which is it?
Right – that’s what’s stated. In the absence of any evidence supporting that statement, it remains a statement. I’ve yet to see any reason to take it seriously as a description of reality.
Most biologists are too busy doing science to attend much to ID claims. Quite a bit of what they do, in fact, consists of trying to explain the evolution of complex biological systems.
By that definition of ‘information’, then, there is no information in our genomes. The DNA doesn’t have any meaning – it’s just a chemical that interacts in certain ways. That doesn’t seem like a very useful concept for biology.
No, Erik. You are wrong. Not only that, you are wrong in ways that directly contradict things that I need to know in order to do my job properly. And that you need to know in order to stop hackers from ruining your day.
If I close my eyes and smash on the keyboard, I may be doing so for a very good reason: to create a password, or a secret key to secure an API. In fact I’ll usually use something that is even more strongly random and more strongly noise than just smashing on the keyboard. A string such as hb5K7YDyf$bfKsHyXu4Pa~np3 may look like gibberish, but if you type in hb5K7YDyf$bfKsHyXu5Pa~np3 – different by just one character – instead, that is the difference between your code working and it not working.
Then there’s encryption. The whole aim of encryption is to take information, transform it into noise, and then transform it back to information again. A well designed encryption algorithm will make it impossible to tell, without knowledge of the encryption keys (which themselves are random noise), whether or not something has meaning or not. That’s what the whole discipline of cryptography is about.
So yes, noise very often can and does transform to information. In fact, random noise is the strongest, most concentrated source of information that you can possibly get. People who don’t get this are the kind of people who think that “password”, “letmein” and “123456” are strong passwords, use them on every website where they have logins, and then wonder why their Facebook account keeps getting hacked.
I’d suggest that before you try to discuss subjects that you clearly don’t understand any further, that you download and install a password manager such as KeePass or Bitwarden, and familiarise yourself with what its password generation feature does.
That was stated in the introduction to a university course called Physics of Sound and music, which shows how “simple” things we deal with all the time can actually function in ways contrary to what we would expect.
Bible concordances have nothing to do with translation.
For that matter, Bible concordances are horrible for studying the Bible because they aren’t based on the original languages very often.
No, I’m trying to get through to someone who already thinks he knows it all but whose knowledge is actually the modern mythology of a very small group.
If so, he’s going at it wrong – his examples are mostly easily shot down, though some are trickier (e.g. the human immune system).
Actually the problem then becomes, “Has this Designer ever attempted to communicate with the intelligent beings on this world?” Assuming the answer is “Yes” (which seems reasonable), then the question becomes, “Which of the proffered candidates is the most likely to be from a Designer?”
Only then does one reach “one must read the designer’s writings”.
You’re the only one saying that, which makes it a straw man.
No, it isn’t. The “most significant part of the Christian world view” is the Incarnation.
Google as a source is a joke. Besides that, Jesus reduced the number to two, and the Holy Spirit reduced the entire Old Testament to just four.
You have to put Christ in the center or you’re not doing Christian theology. Putting the Sabbath in the center instead is idolatry.
why don’t deleted posts vanish?
That’s odd given that when I was student teaching years ago the (high school) science textbook gave explanations for every part of the eye and had footnotes to actual publications for each part.
Also odd, given that every single biology professor I had in college and university happily tried to explain every biological system via evolutionary theory! and research biologists publish papers trying to explain them all the time!
= - = + = - = † = - = + = - =
I say it isn’t – it’s not rigorous enough despite some valiant efforts. Behe is very nearly convincing but his criteria aren’t well-defined, and I think he’s in the top few best advocates.
I was going to make the same point but note that the Hawking radiation from black holes has been classed as “information”. Your illustration is more practical!
I had a high school biology teacher teach evolution but never mentioned the word. Of course in those days if she had she would have been canned.
All I remember from high school biology is having to write an actual paper on earthworms, and once being the only student who answered four of the test questions right and the teacher asking me if I would mind if he threw those out for calculating grades. I suspect, though, that the situation was similar to what you say, that any teacher actually mentioning the word evolution would have been in trouble.
It’s curious that one person argues that my random hitting of keys is information but isn’t really random and another argues that it is random but isn’t really information. Although it is true that I had a purpose behind the action, the exact outcome was not predetermined by me. If you want a less ambiguous lack of purpose form the immediate agent, a rainstorm creates lots of information: “a raindrop hit right there at this particular instant.” That, like random typing, is a piece of information. Although information about one raindrop is generally not that important, the cumulative information “this place gets a lot of raindrops” is extremely important for both human and non-human life and also has significant effect on the landscape.
My research includes both paleontological work on fossils and analyses of DNA sequences, so I have a fair level of acquaintance with the topics invoked by ID. Note, however, that ID as a self-identified “big tent” includes a wide range of positions. Being able to get along across a range of views is a good thing, but often ID is marketed as agreeing on the particular view held by the target audience rather than including an assortment of disparate positions.
ID tends to invoke two different general claims. One is the anthropic principle - the claim that having natural laws just right for intelligent biological life to exist is highly unlikely, pointing to a designer behind the laws that exist for our universe. The other is the claim to scientifically detect evidence of gaps in the natural order that cannot be bridged by natural laws. These two are somewhat in conflict with each other - to what extent does having a gap not bridged by natural law imply a failure of design in those laws? It would be better to design a computer program to have flexibility and to work well to begin with than to be constantly putting out updates, for example.
The claim that both of these are scientific is also problematic. We don’t understand what happens as you get extremely close to the singularity of the Big Bang. As far as I can tell, scientific ideas of what might lead to the Big Bang are entirely speculative, beyond the possibility of any direct tests. We can only study the universe that we are in and can’t compare it to known designed or undesigned universes to see if it matches one or the other. Although one can reasonably say “It looks pretty unlikely to me that all the laws would just happen to work out” (and multiverse arguments are not a very satisfying counter), science can’t help there… If we know something about the designer and the reasons for designing something, then we can see if a proposed designed object fits the purpose. For example, one early reason to be skeptical of the Piltdown finds was that one object was a mammoth bone carved into what looked like a cricket bat. That seemed unlikely to actually be something that a prehistoric human would take the time to do. But that requires knowing something about the designer; it does not fit with the ID movement’s claims to find evidence of some designer without further specification. Although the ID movement also markets itself as Christian apologetics, in fact the movement includes an assortment of atheistic, deistic, and theistic positions that are generally not well thought through for theological implications. ID often claims to just be science detecting some designer, the task of filling up the blanks they’d rather leave to you.
The approach of ID seems to be “Oooh, complex molecular systems are amazing! Let’s look for ways that they resemble human-designed systems.” In reality, randomness is the most complex possibility. Next time you’re filling out tax forms, consider whether complexity or simplicity is a better mark of intelligence. Biological systems are often complex, but the complexity tends to be more along the lines of Rube Goldberg’s designs rather than what we should expect for engineering-style design. In reality, biological molecules have functions. The basic premise of irreducible complexity that the intermediates aren’t functional can’t be proved for any biochemical system.
Note that both proving and disproving intervention-style design is quite difficult. Although I don’t see any reason either theologically or scientifically to expect to find any gaps in evolution as a good description of the natural patterns used by God to create new kinds of organisms. it’s not impossible that God might have used a more miraculous approach at some point.
Again, the creation accounts in Genesis are perfectly reasonable as theological narrative in an ancient Near Eastern context; it is the modernistic misinterpretation of the accounts as using a modern historico-scientific style that is flawed.
Intelligent design is also about willful intent. The fact is, the keystrokes you make are intentioned…it does not matter what the outcome is …its not the product of unintelligent, undirected random processes!
Personally i dont see your argument as being relevant…my understanding is Christians dont really disagree on an intelligent God, they disagree on how much input he had on Creation.
Here is the issue…if a designer is intelligent enough to create things so complex, how can you rationally support the claim the designer cocked up His own revelation of how He did all of this in order to support naturalism by discrediting the Christian bible?
God describes the creation account using very straight forward words…its also referenced elsewhere in the bible by multiple writers and even by God incarnate Himself (Christ).
The bible consistently makes references to a literal 7 day creation. The most obvious example of this is found in the keeping the Sabbath. Every God fearing individual in the bible (im talking about men such as Abraham and Noah, the prophets, Chirst, the apostles…all of these indivudals kept the sabbath exactly as deacribed in Exodus 20…
Clearly they recognised the significance of a 7 day creation week
Now that I read this it seems obvious.
Exactly. And unless one starts there, the result will entail reading personal beliefs into the text.
YECists are blind to the fact that they’re imposing a tenet of scientific materialism onto the text.
And if a set of keystrokes comes because my cat tipped over the jar full of marbles on my lamp table so that cat and marbles both bounced across my keyboard, would that be “intentioned”? A sequence generated that way would still be information.
Not that I’ve ever seen!
No one but you is stating any such claim. Do you always interact by making up things the other person is supposed to be saying?
“Let your conversation be always full of grace, seasoned with salt, so that you may know how to answer everyone.” -Colossians 4:6
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