Summations Only

Creation Science is the attempt to put literalist Protestant Christian teaching back in public schools. The courts have ruled outright creationism to be teaching a specific religion and so inappropriate for public school.That's why the big push to discredit old earth & evolution - to be able to proselytize in public schools and/or to protect specific religious beliefs from contradiction. Actually proving that creationism is scientific is not the point.What creationists don't seem to get or just don't care is that disproving old earth & evolution doesn't automatically prove creationism. Both could be wrong.I'm with Tangle on "Why the big fuss?" I think living up to "Love your neighbor" (Matthew 22:39) and "Do for the least" (Matthew 25:40) requires more than enough time & effort.I think that some of it comes from people who just HAVE to be right whether they are or not. The topic doesn't matter, just winning the argument.

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It's always puzzled me why believers give a toss for scientific or even philosophical argument.
  —Tangle

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Because they want their fairy tale taught in science classes, especially in public science classes, and they have learned through the years that that won't happen unless it's enough like science to fool a few judges.That's really all it boils down to.

Wrong, demonstrably wrong.Complexity is anathema to design. I know that because, as an engineer, for 34 years I have worked professionally with design, both in creating designs and maintaining designs. Complexity in design is like a cancer. Instead, we seek elegance, which involves simplicity, which is unlike life. And modularity, which seeks to prevent everything in the design from being tightly intertwined, as life is tightly and intricately intertwined. And the ability to replace entire sections of the design with entirely new "pin-compatible" parts, unlike living organisms which just keep modifying what they had inherited. And the ability to take changes made in one line of products and implementing them in unrelated products, unlike how living organisms work.Complexity, including intricately intertwined complexity, is produced by evolution, not by intelligent design. We know that it is a product of evolution because that is what we observe happening in experiments where we perform design work using evolutionary processes. This is my response to a local YEC activist who tried to equate complexity with design:

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Now, the biggest problem with making the claim of design is in determining that something is actually the product of design. We're both engineers (mechanical and software, respectively) and we have been been involved in the design process. We know that the design process will affect what the final product looks like. We also know how we need to approach a design in order for it to work. We should put that knowledge to use in determining whether something was designed or not. BTW, there is a branch of science that does deal with having to identify design: archaeology. When an archaeologist digs something up, he needs to be able to determine whether it is an artifact or had occurred naturally. You should look into that field and learn from them.

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Parsimony is important. If we allow a design to become too complex and to have too many entangling interdependencies, then the design will become unwieldy and prone to bugs. Modularity and reusability is also important. We want to be able to reuse the same parts and subassemblies instead of having to redesign each one from scratch. We will try to save time by taking existing parts and modifying them to serve a similar but different function, but at some point we just have to give up and completely redesign a part or subassembly from scratch. And we can pull in parts from other totally unrelated systems and modify them to work in this new system.

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Is that what we see in your examples of "design"? I believe not.

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Most of the time, I see IDists and YECs point to some feature or organ and proclaim that it's too complex to have evolved so that is proof of design. They especially love to point to "irreducible complexity." The first problem that raises for that claim is that it violates design's requirement for parsimony. When we design something, we want to keep the design clean and simple; we want to avoid high degrees of complexity as much as possible, especially if they involve complex interdependencies.

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The other problem for that claim is that it makes the false assumption that the products of evolution would be simple, whereas in reality the products of evolution are very complex, even irreducibly complex. We know this empirically through engineering experiments in design using techniques modeled after evolutionary processes (eg, genetic algorithms, Evolutionstechnik). In one experiment, a transistor amplifier circuit was designed via genetic algorithms. The result was unconventional, unlike anything a human designer would have produced, and even had some additional components that did nothing (vestigial remains?), but it was fully functional. In another much more interesting experiment, a field-programmable gate array (FPGA) was used to design a differential amplifier. The population of codes for the FPGA were allowed to "evolve" with selection being performed by loading them into the FPGA and seeing how well each performed. The end result was highly complex, unlike anything a human designer would have ever dreamed of, and fully functional. In fact, it was irreducibly complex, such that trying to change anything at all about the design would break it. But what was most fascinating was what the design was based on. FPGAs are digital circuits -- if you do not understand electronics and the difference between digital and analog circuits, then please ask me some questions; I am also a USAF-trained digital electronics technician, albeit long out of practice. But the design was not a digital design, but rather an analog design. The design made use of and depended on the minute differences in the electronic characteristics of the FPGA's individual component devices, something that no human designer would have been able to access, let alone work into a design. Incredibly complex and irreducibly so to boot!

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So whenever somebody tries to deploy the ID "it's so complex that it must be intelligently designed!" claim, my first reaction is always, "Well, that must mean that it had evolved." Complexity is anathema to design, whereas it's the natural result of evolution.

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Therefore, whenever you want to try to play the "it must be intelligently designed!" card, you must also be able to point out specific structures that indicate design and not evolution. Just pointing out how complex and intricate something is will only prove the point you're trying to argue against.

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That creationist's response was to run away from the discussion, terrified.For that matter, a customary engineering practice is to take an existing design as a baseline and then modify it to perform a different function; in effect, we use an evolutionary approach create the new design. We copy and modify parts, then do it again and again and again. As we "evolve" ever more designs descended from that original baseline, they become ever more complex until they reach a point where it's almost impossible to maintain them anymore. Either we can no longer understand what they are doing or why or else so many interdependencies have developed that you cannot change any part of the design without causing highly undesirable side effects.That's what evolution does. As YEC geologist Dr. Kurt Wise (no relation to me) has said (quoted indirectly by science writer Robert Schadewald):

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"[Wise] told the audience that evolution is a powerful theory, and that anyone who claims otherwise simply doesn't understand evolution. He said point blank that if it weren't for his religous beliefs -- if he had only the scientific evidence -- he would accept evolution himself."

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Come to think of it, you should send your ideas about geology to Dr. Wise. He is so staunchly YEC that he was a YEC before attending college and remained a YEC as he earned his PhD Geology from Harvard, where he also studied under Steven Jay Gould, and he continues to be staunchly YEC. He is also a stickler for the truth and for practicing science honestly and truthfully.So if you send your ideas about geology to him for evaluation, his rejection of them will not be because of any OE bias, but rather because of their own merits.

I suppose one way to look at this thread is that on proponent is claiming that saying God can do anything is science, while the other proponent is claiming that essentially the term science is meaningless and therefore whatever he claims is science.You say you are with Faith on this?

Hi Tangle.I don't think that anyone here has much of an objection to someone believing that goddidit.But the OP claimed creationism is science - and for that, we need to get all semantic on their ass !

Only when she finally throws in her cards and reveals her hand and says stuff like "if it contradicts the bible, then it's wrong" and "design needs a designer and that's the end of it". They're just statements of belief. I can understandand accept those sorts of statements.

But don't you ever grow tired of the hopelessness of arguing with seriously deluded people who will never be convinced by anything? If Apollo appeared in front of Faith and introduced his father Zeus, mother Leto, and sister Artemis whilst healing her poor sight, she'd find an utterly spurious argument against.

I suppose. It's just not an issue outside the USA - it's a very long lost fight. Even in the US it seems to be a settled legal issue now, every time it pops up it's kicked down pretty easily.

No. They're not the only ones reading this thread. Right now there are 290 visitors on this site. We know many of them are searchbots and indexbots but at least some are real bots here with interest to learn something. Can't leave them thinking both Dawn and M'Lady Faith are anything more than loonies with really stupid ideas about the reality of the world around us. They deserve better.

In that case EVC should shut down and we should argue our case on the creationist sites where they actually live rather than arguing repetitive nonsense with Faith and, if we're lucky, one other loonie for the benefit of a few robots.

There isn't any more to the design argument than "design requires a designer." Design is easy to spot, it's just denial that says it's not.And again, there is no evidence that design could be the result of evolution, just assertion based on belief in the ToE, nothing more than that. And if you want to go on to argue Irreducible Complexity, the claim that it could have evolved just because there are lots of different versions in nature of, say, the eye, all totally unrelated to each other, you're really fooling yourself.But the design argument isn't my own argument. It's the main argument on this thread so I chimed in, and there's really nothing more to say than design is obvious, easy to spot, and design implies a designer.I prefer YEC arguments myself, especially my own, something to sink your teeth into.

Gosh I sure do.

One of those obvious things, like the fact that the Earth is flat and stationary, and that the sky is a solid firmament, and that the stars are smaller than the Earth, and that the Moon is a light ...Edited by Dr Adequate, : No reason given.

As I've said a number of times, microevolution is the designed system for the variation of a Species, it's a design itself, and as a design it had to have had a designer. There is no evolution beyond microevolution. As most creationists put it, you run out of information. I like to say you run out of genetic material. Same thing. Either way nature can't evolve anything beyond the genome of the Kind. You can get specialized breeds of the Species/Kind and that's the end of it. ABE: Ah yes, moving too fast here. These are most likely those extremely rare mistakes in replication that do something beneficial or at least not deleterious, or perhaps the recovery of a former variation by the same accidental process, mutations being, after all, just a rearrangement of the parts of a gene. The nylon-eating bacteria, however, lost a lot of other functions to make that possible, not exactly a good thing for the organism. And it's all on the level of microevolution anyway. /ABEIt's the system of microevolution that's designed, the plane itself, variations that occur within that system are like the plane that functions as designed without further human input to its working parts. Once the heart and the circulatory system are functioning in a healthy body they work naturally without further input. That's all you're talking about, the working of a healthy system. But the system itself was obviously designed, and design requires intelligence to put it together in the first place, a designer. Edited by Faith, : fix quote codeEdited by Faith, : No reason given.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

All this time talking about genetics and you don't know any better than that?Maybe you should have listened instead of talking.Edited by Dr Adequate, : No reason given.