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Author Topic:   ID - How Many Designers and If ID, Macro or Micro Designer(s)?
CK
Member (Idle past 4127 days)
Posts: 3221
Joined: 07-04-2004


Message 31 of 40 (184375)
02-10-2005 8:57 AM
Reply to: Message 30 by lpetrich
02-10-2005 8:30 AM


just a quick one?
Let me pose a question that may already have a answer worked out for it.
While ID don't tend to mention God, doesn't ID logically eliminate the christian god from the picture? Doesn't the "complexity" of the christian god mean that he must have had a designer? If he had a designer surely he can't be the guy in the bible?

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Replies to this message:
 Message 35 by LDSdude, posted 02-13-2005 9:21 PM CK has not replied
 Message 36 by LDSdude, posted 02-13-2005 9:24 PM CK has not replied
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Ooook!
Member (Idle past 5815 days)
Posts: 340
From: London, UK
Joined: 09-29-2003


Message 32 of 40 (184516)
02-11-2005 5:54 AM
Reply to: Message 30 by lpetrich
02-10-2005 8:30 AM


Re: Archdeacon Paley and the Museum of Watches
Hi,
The way I see it, there are a couple of glaring problems with the MDT as explained by you and the Pandas thumb article.
Firstly, it seems to have no more scientific basis that traditional ID. Although it attempts to answer some things that can be used as criticisms of having a single designer (parasite/host relationships, crap designs etc), it seems to be just as shy of actually suggesting ways to detect the actions of all of these competing, muddling designers.
From the article:
MDT subsumes mainstream ID and provides an actual research program.
I suppose you could say that it tries to accommodate the available evidence. But I still can’t think of a testable hypothesis from it!
Secondly, it totally and utterly fails to explain the evidence that supports common ancestry. In your post you say:
If you people find it hard to keep yourselves from laughing, you have my sympathy, because that argument is almost absurdly weak. It's like Archdeacon Paley maintaining that all those clocks and watches had a single master desginer because they all measure time in the same units -- 1 day = 24 hours, 1 hour = 60 minutes, 1 minute = 60 seconds.
That’s a bit of a poor analogy. It’s more like finding a vital piece of the machinary inside every clock and then being able to lay them all out depending on how similar they are to each other:
"Well the pocket watch and wristwatch are closely related, and then they in turn are more related to the carriage clock than the atomic clock, but we can still find common aspects from all of these timepieces that are clearly from primitive sundials"
How many designers are there? Is there one in charge of all great apes, or is there one in charge of mammals? Or is there a Department of Mammal Design, with an open plan office? It all just seems a little silly to me. I think one of the correspondants in Pandas thumb sums it all up quite well:
quote:
Brenda the Designer - "I have made crocodiles! But their teeth keep decaying and falling out due to rotting flesh stuck in them. I have to start all over again!"
Rob the Designer - "Hey, Brenda! Don’t start over! Let me give you a hand! I’ve already got a ‘small bird’ design template, I’ll just modify it to pick the dead meat out of your croc’s mouth!"
Brenda - "Oh, thank you!"
It's seems to be a string of ad hoc explanations. Of course, I might be being a little too critical and have missed some key part of the idea. If you do think that there is some way of testing it I’d be keen to discuss it
This message has been edited by Ooook!, 11 February 2005 11:03 AM

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tsig
Member (Idle past 2908 days)
Posts: 738
From: USA
Joined: 04-09-2004


Message 33 of 40 (184986)
02-13-2005 8:28 PM
Reply to: Message 32 by Ooook!
02-11-2005 5:54 AM


Re: Archdeacon Paley and the Museum of Watches
that’s a bit of a poor analogy.
Pretty much describes ID, the whole thing is an analogy between living thing and non-living things.
Why would anyone compare a baby to a mousetrap?
If you can detect god's design, then you are god.

This message is a reply to:
 Message 32 by Ooook!, posted 02-11-2005 5:54 AM Ooook! has not replied

  
LDSdude
Inactive Member


Message 34 of 40 (184993)
02-13-2005 9:17 PM
Reply to: Message 1 by thegenie
12-04-2004 1:39 AM


Intellegence and knowledge.
First you have to define intellegence. There are really two ways you could go with it(I'll tell you which one is my way later). The first way you could define intelligence is as knowledge. At that point you have to ask yourself, what is knowledge? Can you see knowledge? Can you hear knowledge? Knowledge is information. Information is everywhere. A car is a combination of matter, energy, and information. It has patterns and symetry easily interpreted by our minds. Everything has information to it. So is it possible to know every bit of information? Is information an actual existing thing? The question is, if God knows all information, is it becuase he learned it(I doubt it), or because he wrote it? Hmmmm? We think of natural things so... natural. Gravity is a "natural" thing, a characteristic of all matter. But is there matter in the universe without the characteristic of gravity? Maybe there is matter in the universe that doesn't follow any of the physics and/or laws we are so used to. It's deep thinking, and is something we don't usually probe our minds into(it can give you quite a headache), but an all-powerful God could do such things.
So Macro intelligent design is not impossible assuming that God created the laws that govern us, and then created us.
quote:
______________________________________________________________________
while numerous arguments based on hard fact, as opposed to hearsay, can be made supporting the existence of micro intelligence, beginning with molecular intelligence and rising hierarchically to cellular, tissue and organ (the human brain is an organ) intelligence.
______________________________________________________________________
Those are some huge jumps I must say. Molecules naturally form, with no outside forces acting on them, into entire working cells with all of their irreducibly complex systems, and then, the cells begin to grow into living tissue formations which somehow over time flops around until it becomes organized organs that work together as a system, relying on one another to keep the whole thing alive. Wow! No way there was intellegence involved! I just planned and mapped out the entire theory in it's simplest terms! I should pack my things, get a new name and move far enough from home so that no one would recognize me, call myself an expert and then write a book that will make me rich and famous in the history books, and all because I posted on a web site. WOW! I wonder if this is what Darwin did to get famous!
Now the multiple designers question is not a weakness to Design, because Intellegent Design does not say how many designers there were. If talking about roman Gods, hundreds! If talking about little green men from mars, maybe thousands! If talking about Jews, one God. So although we can't determine how many designers there were, there still remains the fact that it was designed by a higher intelligence.
William Parley I don't believe literally referred to just ONE supreme God, just that everything was made by the same creator(s).
Finally, the other way you could go with all of this is that intellegence is the ABILITY to grasp information. The ABILITY to learn. Unfortuneately for this argument, in your little essay, which was well written(I commend you), the problem is that Molecules don't have the ability to comprehend and understand things around them; they are non-living matter. It is the same for cells and tissue.
So I can only interpret your post with the understanding that intellegince = information, and that information was written by God for Macro designing.
Thanks for your insights, thegenie!

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 Message 1 by thegenie, posted 12-04-2004 1:39 AM thegenie has replied

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LDSdude
Inactive Member


Message 35 of 40 (184995)
02-13-2005 9:21 PM
Reply to: Message 31 by CK
02-10-2005 8:57 AM


Re: just a quick one?
Quote:
______________________________________________________________________While ID don't tend to mention God, doesn't ID logically eliminate the christian god from the picture? Doesn't the "complexity" of the christian god mean that he must have had a designer? If he had a designer surely he can't be the guy in the bible?
______________________________________________________________________
Why not? God didn't come out of nothing. It says somewhere in the bible that as man is now God once was, so couldn't there be a "family tree" of Gods going back through the eternities?

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LDSdude
Inactive Member


Message 36 of 40 (184996)
02-13-2005 9:24 PM
Reply to: Message 31 by CK
02-10-2005 8:57 AM


Re: just a quick one?
By the way, congrats on your one thousand, two hundred and twelve posts since you first signed in july of 2004! That's alot of posting, baby! (:
(I am NOT being sarcastic, I just felt bored enough to say that)

This message is a reply to:
 Message 31 by CK, posted 02-10-2005 8:57 AM CK has not replied

  
thegenie
Inactive Member


Message 37 of 40 (185994)
02-16-2005 7:46 PM
Reply to: Message 31 by CK
02-10-2005 8:57 AM


Re: just a quick one?
The ID proponent's answer to your query would most probably be that ID only applies to created living organisms, so could not apply to God, as He was not created but has always existed. However, as Cousin Vinnie might say, does the argument that God has always existed hold water?
One has only to read the first sentence of the Bible, which is alleged to be the word of God delivered through the Bible's authors, to spot a leak. Speaking in the third person, God's first statement in explanation of the creation of the Cosmos (by which I mean the universe and everything else beyond it which might exist) is "In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth." Heaven is interpreted to mean "space" and earth is interpreted to mean "matter". Since God would have to have existed for some period of time before He could create space, by clear implication God, in this first sentence, alleges that time existed before space was created. This is in contradiction to Einstein's Special Theory of Relativity, which holds that time and space are linked in an inseparable continuum and one cannot exist in the absence of the other.
This contradiction is significant not only in itself, it is also significant in that a real creator of the universe (if such there could be) would have known it, but the authors of the Book of Genesis would not. As we continue reading the entirety of God's explanation of the creation of the cosmos , and specific things within it, this latter significance is magnified. God's explanation of the creation contains an absolute dearth of information of the nature of the cosmos. How can you explain the creation of something without linking the creation with the nature of the thing created? Any such explanation would be incomplete and imperfect. Yet the allegedly perfect God of the Bible does just that. He renders a totally incomplete and imperfect explanation of the creation and nature of the cosmos. Not only does He not explain the correct relation of time and space, He also doesn't touch on energy, sub-atomic particles, atoms, molecules, the weak force, the strong force, the elecromagnetic force, gravity or their interrelationship. A perfect God would be able to explain such concepts in language understandable to anyone. He doesn't touch on anything concerning the nature of the cosmos unknown to the authors of the bible. This fact renders the reason for His failure to explain any thing concerning the nature of the cosmos beyond the knowledge of the authors immediately obvious. He couldn't because the God of the Bible is the creation of the authors of the Book of Genesis, and as such could be endowed with no greater knowledge than held by the authors. Ironically, the God of the Bible is a creation of the Authors of the Book of Genesis who evolved through the contribution of authors of subsequent books of the Bible into a three-in-one God, i.e., God, Jesus and the Holy Ghost. The God of the Bible has not always existed, He has only existed, and only as a fictional personage, since the time that the authors of the Book of Genesis wrote it. That exact date is unknown, but is certainly not earlier than 10,000 BCE.
But this doesn't answer the larger question, which is whether or not the cosmos was created by a god, or supreme being, of any kind. The cosmos either always existed or had a beginning. If it has always existed, it obviously wasn't created by any such entity because there was no creation. If the cosmos had a beginning, that beginning was also the beginning of space/time. Space/time is the foundation of existence. In the absence of space/time nothing can exist. Since the beginning of the cosmos would also be the beginning of space/time, nothing, embodied or unembodied, could exist prior to the emerging existence of the cosmos. Therefore, there was no god or supreme being of any kind prior to the beginning of the cosmos who could have created the cosmos; there was no "prior to the beginning of the cosmos". This raises the question: If there was nothing before the beginning of the cosmos, what created it? If the Cosmos had a beginning, that beginning was initiated at the quantum level. At the quantum level, actions can occur which are not the effects of causes. The answer, therefor, is that nothing caused the beginning of the cosmos; the beginning of the cosmos was an action at the quantum level which was not an effect of any cause. The answer to the larger question is that whether the cosmos has existed forever or had a beginning, it was not created by a god, or supreme being, of any kind.
My best guess is that the cosmos has always existed and is infinite in size, and our universe is just one of an infinite number of universes that exists, has existed and will exist within the cosmos. One objection voiced to this position is that the cosmos could not have existed forever because then everything that could happen would have happened. Not if an infinite number of things can occur. The set of things within an infinite cosmos is infinite, and both the set of universes within the cosmos and the set of things which can occur within the cosmos are subsets of the set of things within the cosmos. An infinite set can have subsets which are also infinite, so within an infinite cosmos infinite universes can exist and infinite things can occur.
My answer to your query is that ID does not apply to the God of the Bible, because ID only applies to real living organisms and the God of the Bible is a fictional personage.

This message is a reply to:
 Message 31 by CK, posted 02-10-2005 8:57 AM CK has not replied

  
thegenie
Inactive Member


Message 38 of 40 (185995)
02-16-2005 7:49 PM
Reply to: Message 34 by LDSdude
02-13-2005 9:17 PM


Re: Intellegence and knowledge.
Thanks for your response to my post.
One of Merriam-Webster's definitions of intelligence is:
"1 a (1) : the ability to learn or understand or to deal with new or trying situations."
When antibiotics were first introduced, they posed a new and trying situation to the bacteria they destroy. Over the years, a great number of strains of bacteria have developed resistance to the once deadly antibiotics. Is this not evidence that such bacteria had the ability to deal with a new and trying situation, one of the indications of intelligence?
As to intelligence on the molecular level, I would suggest "Ultimate Computing", Biomolecular
Consciousness and Nanotechnology, by Stuart R. Hameroff, a copy of which can be found at
http://www.consciousness.arizona.edu/...omp.htm#_Toc39584128
The definition of life has not yet been set in stone. There is no unanimous agreement on a single definition of life. Consciousness is certainly a factor to be considered as a quality indicating life. If certain molecules are indeed found to possess consciousness, it would be appropriate to classify them as living molecules. The possibility is open that some of the life-related molecules are themselves alive.
Single cell plants and animals, and the cells of multicellular plants and animals, whether considered singularly or in tissue or organ groupings, are all classified as living organisms.
"So Macro intelligent design is not impossible assuming that God created the laws that govern us, and then created us." That would be right, providing the assumption proved correct. For my view of this, please read my post of this date in response to Charles Knight's post of 2/10/05.

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 Message 34 by LDSdude, posted 02-13-2005 9:17 PM LDSdude has not replied

Replies to this message:
 Message 39 by crashfrog, posted 02-16-2005 10:36 PM thegenie has replied

  
crashfrog
Member (Idle past 1466 days)
Posts: 19762
From: Silver Spring, MD
Joined: 03-20-2003


Message 39 of 40 (186025)
02-16-2005 10:36 PM
Reply to: Message 38 by thegenie
02-16-2005 7:49 PM


Re: Intellegence and knowledge.
Over the years, a great number of strains of bacteria have developed resistance to the once deadly antibiotics. Is this not evidence that such bacteria had the ability to deal with a new and trying situation, one of the indications of intelligence?
No, because individual bacteria aren't adapting to the presence of the antibiotic; they're either born able to resist the antibiotic, or they die. Only as a population have they adapted to the antibiotic. Individually, none of them have reacted to the presence of the antibiotic at all.
The possibility is open that some of the life-related molecules are themselves alive.
Maybe you're working on a different definition of consciousness, but I don't see how a single molecule could possibly contain enough state to represent consciousness.

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 Message 38 by thegenie, posted 02-16-2005 7:49 PM thegenie has replied

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 Message 40 by thegenie, posted 02-18-2005 10:09 PM crashfrog has not replied

  
thegenie
Inactive Member


Message 40 of 40 (186657)
02-18-2005 10:09 PM
Reply to: Message 39 by crashfrog
02-16-2005 10:36 PM


Re: Intellegence and knowledge.
"No, because individual bacteria aren't adapting to the presence of the antibiotic; they're either born able to resist the antibiotic, or they die. Only as a population have they adapted to the antibiotic. Individually, none of them have reacted to the presence of the antibiotic at all."
That's not entirely correct. Some bacteria are naturally resistant to certain types of antibiotics. However, bacteria which are not naturally resistant may develop resistance in two ways: 1) by a genetic mutation or 2) by acquiring resistance from another bacterium. Neither genetic mutation or acquisition of resistance from another bacterium are acts of the entire population, they are the acts of individual bacterium. These individuals which develop resistance through mutation or acquisition then pass their resistance to all of their daughter cells and the daughter cells and all of their descendants do likewise, resulting in an antibiotic-resistant strain of bacteria emanating from a previously antibiotic sensitive strain.
The individual bacterium which develop resistance through mutation or acquisition demonstrate an ability to deal with a new and trying situation, which is clearly evidence (an indication) of intelligence sufficient to justify further investigation. In fact, such bacteria are frequently referred to as "smart bacteria" as a result of fact that they evince intelligence.
Molecular conciousness? In "Ultimate Computing" which I cited in the post to which you replied, the author, Stuart R. Hameroff, posits that conciousness is generated at the molecular level. Very briefly and simply, all animal, plant and bacteria cells contain a molecular cytoskeleton, comprised of microtubules, neurofilaments, microtrebecular lattice, centrioles and other molecular components. The cytoskeleton, apart from various other functions it performs, operates as the cell's nervous system/brain and does, in each cell, generate a level of consciousness sufficient for the purposes of the individual cell. In the human brain, the specialized cells, called neurons, are networked and the consciousness of each individual neuron, generated by its cytoskeleton, is amplified into the superconsciousness (as compared to cellular consciousness) we each experience, much as the computing power of individual computers can be increased by networking them in specific ways.
If, and I emphasize the if, bacteria do have the molecular analog of a nervous system/brain which generates consciousness, they would have the foundation for a level of intelligence sufficient to recognize the danger posed by antibiotics and take such steps as they could to counteract it.

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