On Tue, 10 Mar 1998 10:14:12 -0500, Bill Hamilton wrote:
BH>At 06:42 AM 3/10/98 +0800, Stephen Jones wrote(quoting from a Discover
>Article):
>SJ>"Evolutionists seem to be especially prone to this mistake. The
>>claim that evolution is purposeless and undirected has become almost
>>an article of faith among evolutionary biologists.
BH>Forgive me for beating on this drum ad nauseum (but I'd stop if someone
>were willing to acknowledge that this is a real issue :-)). That statement
>cannot be anything other than an article of faith. We can speculate that a
>process has no purpose, or we can declare that we can find no purpose in
>it, but establishing that it truly has no purpose to me implies eliminating
>all possible purposes. Even in a relatively simple system (compared to the
>complexity of living organisms anyway) like a computer program, claiming
>that something is without purpose is wildly speculative, as any maintenance
>programmer knows. That little piece of code that you can't figure out why
>it's there is guaranteed to reach out and bite you (or rather its absence
>is) if you decide it serves no purpose and remove it.
Agreed. That naturalistic evolutionists cannot see (or won't admit)
any purpose does not mean there is none. A classic example is given
by Johnson from Heinz Pagels' "The Dreams of Reason":
"So powerful is [the scientific-experimental] method that virtually
everything scientists know about the natural world comes from it.
What they find is that the architecture of the universe is indeed built
according to invisible universal rules, what I call the cosmic code- the
building code of the Demiurge. Examples of this universal building
code are the quantum and relativity theory, the laws of chemical
combination and molecular structure, the rules that govern protein
synthesis and how organisms are made, to name but a few. Scientists
in discovering this code are deciphering the Demiurge's hidden
message, the tricks he used in creating the universe. No human mind
could have arranged for any message so flawlessly coherent, so
strangely imaginative, and sometimes downright bizarre. It must be
the work of an Alien Intelligence!...Whether God is the message,
wrote the message, or whether it wrote itself is unimportant in our
lives. We can safely drop the traditional idea of the Demiurge, for
there is no scientific evidence for a Creator of the natural world, no
evidence for a will or purpose that goes beyond the known laws of
nature. Even the evidence of life on earth, which promoted the
compelling "argument from design" for a Creator, can be accounted
for by evolution...So we have a message without a sender." (Pagel
H., "The Dreams of Reason", 1988, pp156-58).
Johnson comments:
"The first paragraph of that passage tells us that the presence of
intelligent design in the cosmos is so obvious that even an atheist
like Pagels cannot help noticing it, and rhapsodizing about it,
dubbing the Creator "the Demiurge." The second paragraph offhandedly
remarks that there is no scientific evidence for a Creator. What
makes the passage a good illustration of the scientific naturalist
mentality is that Pagels assumes all the critical points. What
seemed to be evidence of a Creator turned out to be no evidence at
all... Naturalistic philosophy controls his mind so completely that
Pagels can stare straight at evidence of intelligent design, describe
it as such, and still not see it." (Johnson P.E., "Darwin on Trial",
1993, pp118-119)
Steve
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Stephen E (Steve) Jones ,--_|\ sejones@ibm.net
3 Hawker Avenue / Oz \ Steve.Jones@health.wa.gov.au
Warwick 6024 ->*_,--\_/ Phone +61 8 9448 7439
Perth, West Australia v "Test everything." (1Thess 5:21)
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