In a message dated 10/5/2000 5:11:39 PM Pacific Daylight Time,
sejones@iinet.net.au writes:
> IY>I'm not aware of an example of anything that can be labeled CSI. I've
> >seen claims by Dembski and others but have never seen any explicit
> >justification for such a claim.
>
> How about the genetic code for starters? Dawkins says of this:
>
> "After Watson and Crick, we know that genes themselves, within
> their minute internal structure, are long strings of pure digital
> information. What is more, they are truly digital, in the full and
> strong sense of computers and compact disks, not in the weak sense
> of the nervous system. The genetic code is not a binary code as in
> computers, nor an eight-level code as in some telephone systems,
> but a quaternary code, with four symbols. The machine code of the
> genes is uncannily computerlike. Apart from differences in jargon,
> the pages of a molecular-biology journal might be interchanged
> with those of a computer engineering journal." (Dawkins R., "River
> out of Eden," 1996, pp.19-20)
>
> How does unintelligent natural processes write "machine code" which is so
> "uncannily computerlike", that it could be "interchanged with" human
> designed code in "a computer engineering journal"?
>
Begging the question.
[...]
> Materialist-naturalistic evolution could not even explain the original DNA
> "triplet code for amino acids" but now it has "many different genetic codes
> in addition" to explain.
>
And? Can ID explain this? What are the ID pathways to these systems?
Is it Behe's?
"During the Q & A, Simon Conway Morris was the moderator. When my hand
went up he called on me. [I took this as evidence supporting the
hypothesis that he liked my question during his talk :-) --grm] I
asked Behe that he has spent a lot of time talking about what wouldn't
work and asked him to tell us what would work--if not evolution, what,
then? Miracles? Behe stumbled around a bit and finally said that God
inputs information into living system all along the way."
http://home.flash.net/~mortongr/wacoday2.htm
> Science's universal experience is that only intelligent designers write
> codes.
> There is nothing in non-living nature which even remotely resembles
> a *code*. This is the whole premise that SETI is based on.
>
Again you are begging the question. Conflation of terms such as "intelligent"
and "codes" with actual design in nature requires first that ID can eliminate
natural selection as an intelligent designer and second show that there is
evidence of a designer in nature. Without pathways and explanations
intelligent design is meaningless since it cannot say anything more than "it
is designed" but design is merely a "purposeful arrangement of parts", does
this mean that NS cannot lead to a purposeful arrangement of parts ? Of
course not and therefore ID is powerless to eliminate NS as an intelligent
designer unless some hard work is done to provide pathways that eliminate NS
and support ID. So far I have yet to see attempts to present pathways for ID,
unless you count Behe's attempt as a credible one.
> And the good old `Swiss army knife', `one-explanation fits all observations'
> favourite of Darwinian RM&NS doesn't work here, because these
> molecular and cellular level codes are needed before RM&NS will work at
> all! This is the same problem as trying to use RM&NS in prebiological
> evolution:
>
So RM&NS cannot work in the era before evolution but that's hardly a problem
for evolution. Although as some of the other ID'ers have shown on this
reflector, hypotheses of abiogenesis can include RM&NS as a mechanism.
[snip]
IY>Of course, Dembski wants to demonstrate the existence of miracles.
> >Wesley's genetic algorithms will, probably, not be deemed an
> >adequate substitute.
>
> This is a common misunderstanding. ID in general and "Dembski" in
> particular, do not propose (or even need) to "demonstrate the existence of
> miracles":
>
So would Dembski's genetic algorithms be accepted by Dembski? So far he seems
to be avoiding this by defining apparant and actual CSI?
[snip]
> To obtain such a meaningful arrangement requires an intelligent
> cause. Whether an intelligent cause is located within or outside
> nature (i.e., is respectively natural or supernatural) is a separate
> question from whether an intelligent cause has acted within nature.
> Design has no prior commitment to supernaturalism. Consequently,
> science can offer no principled grounds for excluding design or
> relegating it to religion." (Dembski W.A., "Intelligent Design,"
> 1999, p.259)
>
>
Of course not, ID cannot even eliminate natural selection as the intelligent
designer. What science can do is show that ID does not propose any
alternative pathways to designed systems. Instead they remain focused on
systems that appear to be designed in the hope to find evidence that they
were actually designed by an intelligent designer other than natural forces.
If ID wants to argue that there are systems out there that have the
appearance of being designed and might actually have been designed then it
should do the hard work to support this. Let they take notice of Behe's words:
"At no step --not even one-- does Doolittle give a model that includes
numbers or quantities; without numbers there is not science."
Behe pp. 95 Darwin's Black Box
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Thu Oct 05 2000 - 21:20:50 EDT