Chris:
>It's not quite true that science cannot study design or purpose. However,
>it *is* true that it cannot study the purposes of an alleged *God,* whose
>background and context are inherently unknown to us. It is precisely
>*because* we cannot study such purposes that we cannot use the apparent
>*lack* of design to prove that things like the human wrist came about
>because of evolution. We can only point out that, functionally, for the
>purposes of survival and human wellbeing, the wrist (and much else) is
>either not designed or is *badly* designed (by a God with no knowledge of
>mechanical engineering).
Bertvan: Hi Chris:
I'm not ready to admit the wrist is badly designed. There may or may not be
tradeoffs. Even so, a an occasional "badly designed" (by your judgement)
organ is out numbered by the many superb designs of nature.
Chris:
>A theory may or may not include unprovable assumptions. If a theory
>pertaining to evolution includes unprovable assumptions (or at least
>assumptions with a good scientific basis), then it is not likely to be any
>good. It is certainly not acceptable as good science. Supernaturalism would
>be one of the worst possible assumptions because it disconnects theory from
>observable facts, and turns it into a kind of game of bad philosophy posing
>as science.
Bertvan:
Anything we don't understand is supernatural. At the moment I include
consciousness, free will, mind, intelligence, etc. I'm sure you are going to
claim you understand all of these, but you haven't yet convinced the rest of
the world. Are you are not only going to set yourself up as judge of what is
good and bad science, but what is good and bad philosophy?
Chris:
>*If* there were evidence of design, rather than merely evidence that
>non-functional genes have generally been weeded out by the physical
>requirement that *functional* genes promote the survival/reproduction of
>the genome, then it would be quite possible to study it scientifically. We
>could ask, and pose hypotheses as to why the designers made certain choices
>rather than others, and we could *then* say of a particular hypothesis,
>"Given this hypothesis, what *other* empirically observable facts should in
>fact be the case?"
Bertvan: You can state what you consider "reasonable", but if nature is
designed, I doubt we have any understanding of the origin of the design, much
less the motives of any designer. Maybe the purpose of the design was not
perfection. After all, a "perfect" organism would not evolve. There would
be no way to improve upon perfection. Maybe growing and changing is the
purpose of the design.
Chris
> Thus, if we find the first ten million digits of pi
>encoded in the human genome, we might suspect that it was an attempt on the
>part of the designers to communicate with us. Then, we might ask: "If this
>is true, what *other* communications should we find? Should we expect to
>find e (the base of natural logarithms) also thusly encoded?" If we found a
>large tome of clear English prose thus encoded, we could just read it and
>possibly determine its purpose (or at least a plausible purpose for it). If
>it said, "This message is encoded here in the human genome so as to provide
>you with evidence that you are a designed species, and to communicate to
>you the facts about your design and why we chose to design you as we did."
>And, if the rest of the message did in fact provide empirically verifiable
>facts about our genome and our morphology, etc., we could reasonably
>suspect that the specified purpose of the design was in fact the *actual*
>purpose of the design. And then we could, possibly, make predictions as to
>what other facts should also be the case if the claimed purpose is real,
>and then seek to determine if those suspected facts are the case.
Bertvan:
If this is the type of evidence for design you would consider, I agree that
you will remain unconvinced. Please believe me when I say I am not trying to
change your beliefs, but I do enjoy expressing thoughts which occur in
reaction to yours.
Bertvan:
>>By the
>>way, your insistence that supporters of ID are "creationists" might be
>>counter productive, as the public gradually discovers that most are not.
But
>>why should I complain.
Chris
>Actually, they *are* creationists. They may not be as uneducated as
>conventional creationists, but they believe (with extremely few exceptions)
>that God created the Universe and life. They just aren't quite as lame as
>those who try to take Genesis absolutely literally. Creationists are also
>ID-theorists. They believe that God created the Universe according to a
>*design*, not either randomly or *merely* by specifying a Universe with
>laws of physics and such that merely accidentally *happened* to yield life.
>The differences are fairly superficial; the core beliefs in common are
>fundamental and the beliefs not in common are secondary.
Bertvan:
This is what I would like to see stated loud, clear and publicly.
ANYONE WHO BELIEVES THE UNIVERSE WAS CREATED ACCORDING TO A DESIGN, AND DOES
NOT BELIEVE LIFE OCCURRED ACCIDENTALLY IS A CREATIONIST. (Hope its OK if I
leave God out of it, since I'm agnostic about how the universe got created.)
I don't mind being called a creationist if this is the definition. I'm sure
other people will also willingly admit to being creationists by this
definition. I'm not sure you can make your definition official, but if you
want to try I'd cooperate.
Chris:
>I doubt that you would find *any* naturalistic explanation of life
>acceptable, regardless of its scientific backing, because you wouldn't
>bother to learn the *thinking* skills necessary to properly evaluate it.
>Science is highly conceptual, and bad concepts tend to get weeded out in
>science just as they do within mathematics, etc. You do not bother to
>rigorously define concepts like those of spontaneity, creativity, free
>will, etc., in a way that would make them capable of *any* meaningful
>explanation, and yet you insist on believing in them as basic facts of
>existence and as somehow distinct from the implications of physics,
>chemistry, thermodynamics, and so on. You have allowed yourself to become
>trapped in an inherently anti-scientific world-view determined by
>fundamental flaws in how you establish and manage such concepts, so we
>should not expect even a *perfect* (and perfectly true) description of life
>in naturalistic terms to make headway in your mind until you realize that
>this kind of basic conceptual fog needs correction. Would you be willing to
>learn computer programming so you could try out various critical ideas
>about evolutionary processes? This would not be a necessity, but my point
>is that, if it *were* a necessity, you would probably not do it. Defining
>ideas specifically and rigorously enough to build them into a computer
>program would not be something you'd be willing to do. Nor, I believe,
>would you be willing to learn enough computer programming to unambiguously
>examine a computer program written by someone else and published with the
>claim that it represents a crucial model of how real-world evolution might
>work.
Bertvan:
Thanks. Whatever my assessment of your intellectual limitations are, I think
I'll keep them to myself. I'm afraid I don't believe computers bear much
resemblance to life. Regardless of how you define free will, spontaneity,
consciousness and creativity, do you actually expect to encounter them in a
computer?
Chris:
>I'm not saying you are dishonest, or even stupid, but you *are* blinded to
>the enormously rich possibilities of naturalistic explanations by your
>mind-set and your foggy concepts.
Bertvan:
Any one can dream up fantastic, enormously rich, naturalistic explanations,
but is that what really happened? Perhaps we all have "mind-sets" in spite
of all efforts to avoid them. My confidence in the open mindedness of ID
people is supported by the fact that they rarely become angry if someone
disagrees with them.
Bertvan
http://members.aol.com/bertvan
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