Supernatural information supplier

mike the wiz sez:

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I think the design even evolution shows is amazing.

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Well, so do I, but the "design" is only impressive if we make the assumption that it's a process with no foresight or plan. If there's a God in evolution, it's God the Destroyer, wiping out the vast majority of organisms so that local fitness can increase. The struggle for existence that drives evolution is anything but creative and beautiful.regards,
Esteban Hambre

mike sez,

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If new traits are beneficial to the species, how is that destroying?

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Nature doesn't reward the fit except at the expense of others, Mike. The predators succeed by becoming more deadly. The prey succed by escaping more efficiently or camouflaging themselves, thus depriving the predators of sustenance. Lots of parasites survive by having their hosts pass them onto other hosts, preferably before the hosts themselves die. Are the new weapons for this kind of biological warfare the type you'd like to attribute to your loving deity?In your, uh, hypothesis, are only the good mutations God-given? Well, how would you characterize the sickle-cell mutation of the hemoglobin molecule? It rewards many with malaria-resistance at the expense of a few who die of sickle-cell anemia.I'm just trying to point out the moral problems in trying to attribute purpose and design to this process. Can you deal with them?regards,
Esteban Hambre

mike the wiz,

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Even if nature is indifferent, God's purpose for animals is limited.

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Glad you presume to speak for the Big Guy now. However, virtually everything in the biosphere bears proud witness to how complex, ingenious, and painstaking Nature's design work is. It doesn't seem ethical or pre-ordained unless you do all sorts of moral somersaults trying to 'explain' it, which you do. We come back to the old intelligent-design conundrum, though: if the designer meant to make an inspired, wonderful creation in humanity, why is it so obviously cobbled together out of bits from previous creations? And if the designer has a limited purpose for all the rest of life on Earth, why does it look like plenty of the exact same design work went into the bacteria, beetles, and bison that went into humans?There is certainly a moral aspect to your view of Nature, since you assume that a creator either designed the process, guides it, or at least doesn't interfere with the waste and cruelty it involves. I don't ascribe moral meaning to, say, the fact that cholera is much more deadly now than it ever was. Yep, thanks to evolution. See, the disease couldn't benefit from being so deadly it killed its host in the middle of nowhere, but nowadays the host merely has to make it to a toilet to be able to infect thousands of others. This keeps extant varieties of the disease that would never have survived in days of old. Your creator is letting a lot of his ingenious-but-deadly designs (like cancer and the AIDS virus) kill plenty of his most adored creations. And you say he's not indifferent.regards,
Esteban Hambre

dshortt,

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Why would He need to come up with new parts if the old ones suit the purpose? And He managed to "cobble together" a creature that reasons, writes beautiful music, creates art, has relationships, and has a conciousness far surpassing any other creature. If you were GM and wanted to create a Hummer and could do it with parts off the shelf, would you retool and construct a brand new factory instead?

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The point is that it doesn't seem like a creator either had to or did. After a few billion years of evolution, we humans sure do neat things. However, it's clear from our morphology and our genetics that we're tinkered from the same materials as every other life form on Earth. The additional "information" necessary for our big brains and agile hands came from countless iterations of the DNA copying process, not the purposeful insertion of info by a great celestial programmer.In other words, if we knew Hummers gave birth to little Hummers (and there was fossil evidence of millions of varieties of proto-Hummers), I'd doubt that there had to be a GM in the first place. You're asking me to believe that humans were the purposeful creation of a great designer, and it only appears that we have a vast evolutionary history. I ain't buying it.regards,
Esteban Hambre

mike the wiz,

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We know you ain't buying it. But that doesn't mean it isn't true.

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Oh. Kay. But if you don't give me any convincing reason to think it's true other than that, don't call me stupid for not swallowing the claim.

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It all comes back to unavoidable purpose and intent - which you're unable to refute.

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All except for the things that don't appear to reflect any purpose or intent, which you keep avoiding. Like I said, the burden is on you to tell me why viruses and waste and cancer and extinction reflect a purpose. You can tell me that God's intention in creating thousands of species of tapeworm is above human reason, fine, but at least admit that it could just as easily be said that the intention is something you're making up.

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People just aren't stupid enough to think that there is no God, and that humans have all the answers through accumulative knowledge, or that naturalistic means explains the universe.

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Ease up, Mike. If the mantle of 'irrefutable' is getting tougher to claim when you're being refuted at every turn, don't get pissy at me. If there is a purpose for the phenomena in biology that seem random and meaningless, let's hear it. But if you're going to call me stupid for not acknowledging purpose if there are substantial questions that need to be answered, then your position looks pretty desperate.regards,
Esteban Hambre

dshortt,We're getting a little off the topic here. Proto-humans were around millions of years ago, but I'm not just talking about the human species. Our genes bear witness to common ancestry with all other life on Earth, and I assume that's not what's being debated here. The question is whether the "additional information" that allowed humans to evolve was due to supernatural intervention.The point about "agile hands" is pertinent here, because the Hox genes that control the development of the human hand are the same that control the development of wings in bats, fins in cetaceans, and paws in other land mammals. The cumulative changes in the DNA of our lineage, sculpted by natural selection, are exactly what accounts for the human hand.If you're "not willing" to assign such power to the mutation-selection machine without the benefit of divine tinkering, you share this fear with others. Again, we run up against the dilemma of intelligent design: how much waste and cruelty can we recognize in the workings of Nature and still assert that there's a divine order to the process? And are we ignoring a lot of evident purposelessness in our mad search for things that look intentional?regards,
Esteban Hambre

dshortt,

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As far as this waste and cruelty you speak of, aren't you trying to put your perameters on nature. A gazelle goes down, but the lion gets fed. To say there is waste and cruelty implies there is a standard to which nature should live up to. Who set this standard? Where could one read about it?

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Actually, I'm taking Nature on its own terms. At times it seems beautiful and ingenious, other times cruel and wasteful. I don't say there's anything morally significant about the fact that the vast majority of organisms alive are bacteria, or that there are thousands of species of tapeworm, or that children die of birth defects and diseases all the time. It's just what we'd expect from an indifferent universe like ours.However, the believer assumes that there's a loving creator, an intelligent designer whose universe testifies to his handiwork. In that case, why does your designer inflict pain and suffering on his most beloved creations as a matter of course? If you and Mike believe that Nature is a testimony to an intelligent designer, then you must believe that malaria, tapeworms, and birth defects are all part of his abiding love for mankind.regards,
Esteban Hambre

mike the wiz sez, again,

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That's your priori asumption, that if there is a bad thing - then God must have made that thing to attack us.

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It's just the flip side of the a priori conclusion that you make, Mike, when you say that everything has to have a divine origin. You answered Percy's post about natural vs. divine origin of natural phenomena by asserting that all those things actually have a divine origin, regardless of whether we can explain them using naturalistic methods. I guess you only thank the creator for the neat things he creates, because he might be embarrassed if we pointed out his responsibility for all the not-so-nice things in the world. So lightning, heredity, and rainbows come from God, but not cancer, tapeworms, and birth defects? Explain the logical consistency there, Mike.It's just that simple. If you want to believe that all things come from God, then you have to include the bad with the good.regards,
Esteban Hambre

Mike,

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I'm saying those bad things will have purposes

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I'm all ears. Start with birth defects and crib death.

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The circle of life mean necessary nasties happen in nature - they're still not intended for us by God though, they are part of the system.

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And you're so sure that God loves us if he stuck us amid this "circle of life"? You realize, of course, that this means there's no discernible difference between a universe that is meaningless and random, and one that is presided over by a loving creator.It's up to you to establish why your creator exists. This is because everything we've been able to understand about his universe we've done through naturalistic research, under the assumption that a divine creator doesn't exist or is irrelevant to the investigation.regards,
Esteban Hambre

dshortt,

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I think my question is a valid one, how do you test for design in your everyday life? And wouldn't those tests be applicable to the rest of the "natural" world?

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Loudmouth will certainly provide answers to the questions you asked him, but I hope he doesn't mind if I address one issue that bothers me about the ID movement. Behe and Dembski have centered the debate on "testing for design," coming up with attributes of intelligent design like complex specified information or irreducible complexity which we can supposedly use to determine design in an artifact.Unfortunately, this is a smokescreen. The "test for design" hinges on our independent knowledge of the designer and designing process, contrary to the assertions of ID theorists that information about the designer is irrelevant to determining ID. There are, in fact, no qualities or attributes that we can use as hallmarks of the intelligent design of objects or systems.The ID brand of creationism tries to assert that if an organism, a biological system, or a natural structure displays a certain attribute derived from human designs, we can conclude that this natural organism, system, or structure is the product of intelligent design. Regardless of our inability to conceive of a being capable of designing and creating such a natural artifact, the ID theorist says that this logic is sound: we conclude the existence of a designer with astonishing and unprecedented capabilities, merely because we decide that the design must have emanated from an intelligence.However, the existence of designs in nature that display our hallmarks of intelligent design should be regarded in a different light: as evidence against using the attribute as a hallmark of intelligent design in the first place.regards,
Esteban Hambre

Mike the Wiz sez,

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The true and valid position that we take - is that God created all things.

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But then he sez,

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Schraf: Tell me what work God is doing when he causes birth defects, cancer, crib death, and tapeworms, please.

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Mike: That's funny. Have you any evidence God caused those natural things?

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regards,
Esteban Hambre

Mike,If crib death kills ten thousand babies every year, then there is a God.See how easy this is?regards,
Esteban Hambre