paper against evolution, for intelligent design

Hi, sweetstuff I'm glad you dropped by. Just a warning here - people here love to debate, so be careful what you ask for! If you don't know something, or you need people to back off and give you some time to think about your responses or read up on new information, just say so, and we will let ya I'll start you off with what I wrote to another student who posted today, concerning the age of the earth (a good starting point):Also, for references, probably the two best sites you can visit are TalkOrigins (evolutionist) and TrueOrigins (creationist). Be sure, on a given point, to visit both of their comments on the issue, so you know what is poorly defended and what is well defended.Missing Isotopes: Why are they missing? Of course God could create the earth making it look old, but is he one big cosmic prankster?Stellar age limit: It is perfectly possible for stars to live far longer than ~14 billion years. And yet, not a star in the universe is older than that - even though many of them currently out there *will* live longer than that. Is God pulling a joke on us?Distant Stars: Why would God create parts of the universe and make them billions of light years away, but create light "en route" (including star deaths that would place the star's death before he actually created the universe) to make people think that the universe was old? Is he a prankster?Fossil ordering. Why are there *never* crustaceans lower than trilobytes? Why are there never grasses lower than the top few layers? Why are sharks and mammals sorted so that they generally trend to larger the higher up you get, but other lines taking the opposite path? The entire fossil record (literally millions upon millions of fossils) is sorted consistantly without regard to size, shape, and habitat - only with regard to *layer*. It is consistant to the extent that the initial explanation (proposed back when all scientists were creationist) was that there had been "multiple creations", each one made to look like the previous one with slight changes. Why would God make it look that way?Impossible layers: How would a flood deposit footprints, delicate egg cases, age-old coral reefs and their entire delicately balanced ecosystems, chalk, salt, etc? More tricks from God?Isochron dating: Learn about isochron dating, and be prepared to explain why isochron dating, along with mixing tests, ensures that there was not simply a ton of daughter product in the original. Is God trying trick us somehow?Radioisotope confirmation: Why do multiple methods *almost always* confirm each other? Thousands of samples are dated annually, and the method keeps coming back with consistant results (permian dates as permian, precambrian dates as precambrian, etc). We have all sorts of isotopes with different half lives, but *they return the same value* almost always (with known exceptions). Why would they do this? If the answer is "radioisotopes all decayed faster in the past", do realize that this would reduce the planet to molten slag. Is this some cosmic joke?Just mull over that for a bit, and we can discuss whatever you want about it, or we can move on to the fossils themselves. The age of the earth is important, because evolution could not occur quickly enough in a young earth. Likewise, an old earth would falsify a literal reading of the genesis account.------------------
"Illuminant light,
illuminate me."[This message has been edited by Rei, 12-09-2003]

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God does not tempt, as the Bible says, only satan does.

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Actually, God tempts quite a few people in the bible, and tricks quite a few people; for example, read in Numbers 22 about how God told Balaam to go somewhere, and when Balaam went there, God got mad at him for going there and put an angel in his path. However, he made the angel invisible, so Balaam would get mad at his donkey for not going in the right way when the donkey saw the angel. Then, the angel could chastize him for being mean to his donkey.

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So all of these apparent arguments for an old earth and factoids which would lead one to suppose that the earth is old, are not road blocks or tricks put up by God, but are merely things which we as humans cannot comprehend.

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But why would God purposefully deceive us? We're not just talking about one measurement of the universe: we're talking about every measurement of the universe. Why did God choose to hide *exactly* the right radioisotopes so as to make the earth look ancient? Why did he put light en-route from distant stars showing them dying before he created the universe? Why would he sort out the fossils so as to put smooth gradients, and always put them in exact layers, everywhere on earth - *and* match up their radioisotopes to look ancient? Why would he match up radioisotopes and non-radiogenic elements in just the precise manner to throw off isochrons? Why on earth would he attempt to trick us with *every last measurement* of reality that we do?If only Satan tricks, than Satan created the heavens and the Earth - all of it. He created billions of stars, and billions of fossils. He managed the flood, and he created every isotope in every rock on the planet. He staged microwave echoes across the entire universe. He balanced the radioisotopes in the sun, he created the vaccum of space itself. In short, if your argument is correct, Satan created the universe. Do you really want to go down this line of argument?------------------
"Illuminant light,
illuminate me."[This message has been edited by Rei, 12-09-2003]

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But since you brought up irreducible complexity, how would you explain the evolution of an organism such as the eye, which does not function if one part is missing?

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This is known as an "irreducible complexity" argument. Irreducible complexity arguments fail because of "intermediates". For example, humans living in modern society. We farm with gasoline-powered equipment; we are reliant on gas and electricity to ship this food to cities. Gasoline and electricity take complex processes to make that require a sizable number of people's efforts - and even more when you consider all of the people needed to manufacture all of the parts and raw materials. Using the "irreducible complexity", one could argue that humans have to have always existed as they do now, because if someone took away modern technology, we'd all starve, and there's no way we could have created all of our modern technology at once; and yet, it exists. How? Because we passed through intermediate stages.The specific example of the eye was actually brought up by darwin himself. Intermediates have been shown mathematically (see Nilsson and Pelger, who actually modelled the visual quality of everything ranging from a simple cluster of light-sensitive cells to a fully formed human eye), and through study of other species eyes. There actually *exists*, in the real world, every significant intermediate step of eye development, from an eyespot, to an eyespot with a transparent sheath, to a concave pit with a transparent sheath, to a thickened sheath that forms a partial lens... (etc). In fact, some animals with strong natural selection for vision in certain attributes have further evolved than us. Our nerves actually connect on the *front* of our rods and cones, partially obstructing the vision, something that squids have no problem with. Several birds have two focal points in each eye. Note that no animal on the planet has telescopic vision, however. Why? Because there is no smooth evolutionary gradient to telescopic vision.

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or how about the blood clotting process

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What about the blood clotting process do you see as not having a smooth natural selection gradient in the development of it?

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or protein synthesis,

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Name your protein. Proteins actually are easily modified, in both small and large ways, by mutation and selection. In fact, one feature that plays out often is the fact that genes get copied to other portions of the DNA strand, and the copy mutates faster than the original - thus, keeping the original protein while adding a new one. This is not just speculation, by the way - it's frequently observed in the lab.------------------
"Illuminant light,
illuminate me."[This message has been edited by Rei, 12-09-2003]

That was a very good post, and you're very articulate for your age. And it was definitely on subject, in my opinion at least...

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The school does have people who have been accepted into colleges such as Penn, Purdue, and Taylor, and it is accredited. The school does consider biology to be science; that is what Matt is studying now. The school looks at both sides of the evidence, and pretty much allows you to pick your own views, though Matt is a creationist.

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Those aren't particulary impressive colleges. Do you know what the rate of college acceptance is? I suppose you could probably get into Bob Jones or somewhere like that...

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And an interesting way I have come to accept in view of what you call miracles is that God has instituted what we call laws of science. We need to remember when we say this that science is really actually limited, and cannot use logic deductively, meaning that it is not able to prove anything. So these laws are not truely set then?

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Correct. However, one of our greatest abilities as human beings is the ability to notice trends (and consequently take advantage of them). It is this abilility to notice that, without fail, gravitation keeps bodies in space moving as we would predict them, subject to the limitations of available data, chaos theory, and quantum mechanics. It lets us notice that, without fail, E equals M * c ^2. And it is this that lets us notice that, without fail, the archaeological record shows steady lineages of species, and that current species continue to change.

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Does gravity apply in space? Black holes? The laws we all refer to, if instituted by God, then why shouldn't God be able to go outside of that order he has put in the universe? This action of breaking away from the "set laws" of the universe, is what people might call miracles.

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Of course a God, as you've defined it, could do anything it wanted. But we have to look at the situation reasonably.I could also define an omnipotent pink unicorn who I believe created the universe. What would make my concept less likely? The only thing that you have going for yours over the unicorn - since neither are supported by the evidence - is that yours has a few millenia-old collection of the transcribed oral traditions and legends of a particular desert shepherd tribe, assembled and merged by committee. Please understand why many people see the need to look for more evidence than that.For ages, scientists worked *under the assumption* that the bible was infallable. And it really hurt science. The elaborate hoops people had to jump through, because the bible said the sun orbits the earth! The elaborate hoops they had to jump through, because the Bible places Earth at the center of all creation! Even the fact that the moon was put there as a "light" in the night for humanity caused huge problems when Gallileo found similar "lights" orbitting another planet.Scientists struggled to keep "creationism" going. In fact, when the fossil record contradicted it, their initial solution was not evolution, but in fact multiple creations. However, they had to keep adding in new creations to try and reconcile the fossils that kept being discovered... and eventually, they had to abandon that theory all together.Yes, a God could have faked all of this. God could fake everything to make the unverse look ancient. He could do it. The question is: Why? Why would God choose to deceive us? Or did God hand creation over to Satan afterwards, and say "now, YOU create!"? Both of these concepts are rather hard to bear, wouldn't you say?

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Finally, to tie this all back to the main topic so that I don't get accused to following rabbit trails again, this type of stuff will be in the paper the ashley and matt are doing, and we need to consider such ideas as the allowance of the Bible in schools, because it is being used in schools, as Matt has seemed to prove.

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I'm all for allowing the bible in public school - as long as it's taught as a work of literature. Everyone's religious book should be allowed to be taught in this manner. The problem arises when it is taught in a non-objective manner, or when it is imbalanced.------------------
"Illuminant light,
illuminate me."

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Okay, I will let you in on the college thing. This is the first year the school has a senior class, and it has 5 guys. At this point, it already has 3 colleges wanting students, and I know more will come in March.

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Aaah, ok That explains it then.

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I will have to visit the section of the fossil record, because as far as i know, multiple layers can form in minutes, and there have been layers that scientists have hailed as thousands of years of history, with trees running up the middle of it all! Not to get off topic though...

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I'll direct you to the appropriate threads, if you wish to join us there Polystrate fossils (and telephone poles!):
http://EvC Forum: Polystrate Telephone Pole and Bridge Observed in PhilippinesRapid depositing of layers:
http://EvC Forum: Rapid generation of layers in the GCAnd the talkorigins FAQs for these:
http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/polystrate.html
http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/icecores.html
CD241: Are varves annular?

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I agree that the view of the world was wrong in Gallileo's day. Now that we know so much more about the way the universe works, wouldn't it be reasonable to forgive those past faults, and work with the knowledge we know now?

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Of course, one can forgive those faults. The problem remains that people are insistant on adhering to their reading of the bible as absolute truth about the physical nature, even today. I have no problem with people turning to it for spiritual guidance, but to inhibit scientific advancement and discovery because of a reading of it is very unfortunate. If something is the truth, it should stand up on independent scrutiny - regardless of whatever religion the person doing the research is (and researchers are all religions!)

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Finally, your idea of God purposefully deceiving people, and acting as some sort of jokester argument (imho) is stretching things.

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If you would like, you can join me over at:http://EvC Forum: What is the YEC answer to the lack of shorter lived isotopes?I brought up a topic that I have yet to see someone who believes in a Young Earth explain: The missing isotopes. You can be the first, if you have an explanation. Otherwise, we're just left with the notion of God deliberately deceiving people, which is very unpalatable..------------------
"Illuminant light,
illuminate me."[This message has been edited by Rei, 12-15-2003]

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Why? Because the things in nature that cause me to suspect ID happen to be things that look like products of advanced bioengineering.

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Ah. Like these beautiful design elements?How about you hear what geneticists think of the beautiful design of DNA (i.e., that it is complete and utter spaghetti code).Have you ever worked with a genetic algorithm before? That's just what it's like.

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It's my contention, for example, that viewing bacteria as integrated technology is a better perspective for understanding how bacteria function than viewing them as random goo.

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How many times do we have to correct creationists about this strawman? Natural Selection != Randomness. The changes are random; the selection is based on a well defined criteria (long-term reproductive success). "Random goo" would die out and be replaced by "less random goo". After millions of generations, what you have is not really describable as goo at all, because it has continually been the subject of pruning by selective factors.

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Viewing biological things as random and purposeless hinders scientific progress.

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Random? No. Purposeless? Yes. Could you please elaborate on the purposes of things enumerated here, for example?

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Viewing them as designed machines is a superior paradigm operationally regardless of whether there is an intelligent designer.

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It is completely and utterly faulty for something that is, for all effects and purposes, spaghetti code filled with jury-rigged design and cooption.If *humans* with superior biotech were to go in and design organisms, they would have things like telescopic vision. They would utilize things like RF communication. They would have coprocessors and other hardware to help out on tasks that neural nets are far less efficient and accurate at (such as mathematics and data storage), while utilizing neural nets for the rest of thought. Their "code" would be all in one place in cells, and be well documented and orderly instead of the piecemeal garbage-filled atavism-rich jury-rigged stuff we find in DNA. Nerve cells would attach on the *backside* of rods and cones (if we even bothered to use rods and cones at all), like it does in *more effective* vision systems in nature. All eyes would use the dual focal point eyes of birds, and . Etc.

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I suspect you are assuming that my ID perspective is that everything in nature is the direct result of ID. Not so. Currently my ID inference is constrained to the origin of life: the original life forms were designed and followed by evolution. This perspective certainly allows for imperfection in nature.

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And so how did the human lower back evolve to more resemble a quadraped's back, and our pelvis (which makes it harder to give birth) more like a quadraped's? I'll offer you a solution: perhaps it was the atavisms that we have hiding in our genes! Of course, that still won't explain our reverse-wired rods and cones, our faulty pain system, etc.

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Science is built on the belief in repeatability. Repeatability is not a property of purely random processes.

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It depends. The exact mechanism is often not repeatable, but the result is almost always repeatable (in a small context - in a larger context, chaos theory takes over). For example, if you remove the gene for metabolizing lactose from bacteria and leave them in an environment where most of the food source is lactose, they'll re-evolve it, from a completely different gene. Is the gene that it will evolve from guaranteed? Nope - even if you could get the initial starting conditions *precisely* the same, the Heisenburg uncertainty principle, magnified by chaos theory, would throw you off. Will it evolve it, though? Always.If you're requiring exact long-term predictability, then meteorology, chemistry, and all of physics in general aren't sciences. Only mathematics is.

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There are too many correspondences and linguistic relationships in the laws of physics that do not correspond to purely random processes. There is too much repeatability!!!

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Please rephrase this; I can't tell what you're trying to claim.

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We take repeatability for granted, but as math and information theory advance we realize this is a 'miracle'.

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"We" meaning you and the handful of other creationists on the planet, and the ever-dwindling number in the scientific community. If the scientific community were realizing this, given that 45% of scientists in this country are theists, don't you think that creationism would be taking up a steadily *larger* percentage of their beliefs instead of a steadily *smaller* percentage? It's down to 5% now.

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The reason for this is that modern quantum theory is becoming better described by information theory

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There are several "information theories" out there, and they're all utterly different. The "information theory" that applies to quantum theory relates to how much spin data can be stored on a particle or pair of particles - and all of its information is created randomly!

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and we are noticing repeatable phenomeon, and even if there are non-repeatable phenomenon, they may be at least describable algorithmically.

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You citing quantum theory, and you clearly know nothing about it. Do you know what a wave function is?

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F=ma is an approximation, but such universal approximations do no easily emerge out of chaos.

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Are you trying to state that the establishment of the laws of physics have anything whatsoever to do with evolution?

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If not an ID hypothesis, science succeeds at least on an operationally pragmatic Design hypothesis that believes in repeatability to some degree.

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"To some degree". Yeah. It died with classical physics. The universe is random. Deal with it.

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For Evolution to proceed, even the "randomness" must be algorithmically constrained like a search heuristic. With unbridled randomness, you get chaos.

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It depends on what you call "unbridled". Do you consider a wave function to be unbridled? What about chaos theory, wherein minor changes to starting conditions amplify themselves over time?

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The ability to replicate must be guaranteed at some point for evolution to succeed. Replication and repeatability are vital components, and it is these qualities (replication and repeatability) that are the antithesis for purely random processes.

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That's abiogenesis. Not evolution. 40% of scientists, 43% of the US population as a whole, and far higher in the worldwide population, believe in theistic evolution, which typically includes God creating the first life.

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Air is molecularly chaotic, but we are able to build airplanes because molecularly chaotic phenomenon are algorithmically constrained.

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Set a helium balloon flying, and using incredibly precise coordinates, geographic, and climatic data, estimate its position in 1 year. You'll be completely wrong. Why? Chaos. Your argument only works on brief time periods in many systems.

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Science succeeds because we can make sweeping generalizations on faith without testing every special case.

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And it fails in high-tech applications. That's why generalizations, while useful, can't be relied on for every situation. They utterly fall apart on systems where errors can be amplified (such as the weather)

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Theories succeed if we can at least constrain randomness or get randomness to drop out of both sides of the equation so to speak (as in the case of Bernoulli's equations).

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They're still subject to randomness. Sorry! If you make something in which iterative errors can build up, chaos theory takes over, and two sets of results will diverge.

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For evolution to succeed it must be isomorphic (analogous) to an alogorithmically constrained process.

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And you get that from... where?

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We can let randomness into the mix, but it must be tightly constrained. We actually do see this in antibiotic resistance and B-Cell hypermutation. The mutation can be modelled as random phenomenon being algoritmically constrained. The randomness in B-Cell hypermutation is localized to only a part of the B-Cell. It's not the whole thing that mutates.

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Yes. Because the chemistry of the cell functions to induce mutation in a small subset of the genes more often than for the average gene (the average gene still mutating at a lower rate). Your point?

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For evolution to succeed, the randomness is constrained and localized.

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No, it's not. The high-rate mutation is localized.

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the fundamental design spec is constraining the extent randomness can propagate through the system. It cannot allow pure chaos.

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What "pure chaos" are you referring to? The ability of any piece of DNA to mutate in the number of different methods that are chemically possible?

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That's why I believe, "Random Variation" is a misnomer. We credit success of evolution too much to Randomness rather than the 'design' constraints on the randomness.

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You mean the chemical limitations of cells, which in some cases have adapted proteins which preferentially encourage the mutation of other parts of the genome, and otherwise altered the mutation process to make it more effective at adaptation. If you're more effective at adaptation, you're more "fit", and you survive.

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but information theory is challenging that view severely as well as experimental evidence.

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Which information theory - the one that discusses how much data you can compress without losing content (and how to compensate for a noisy communication channel), the one related to the spin of particles, or any of the other information theories?

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The best example I think is Dawkins Weasal, and Avida programs. Evolution succeeds because the random elements were algorithmically constrained. The programs were not pure chaos.

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How are they algorithmicly explained? As someone who has used Avida, I would be quite amused to hear your response (I've never heard of Dawkins Weasal before, though).------------------
"Illuminant light,
illuminate me."[This message has been edited by Rei, 12-17-2003]