>Ralph:It seems to me, too, that complexity should be more likely to
>arise through intelligence rather than chance.
>
>Silk here: There appear to be three factors at play here.
>(1) Intelligence (2) chance & (3) your interpretation of them? If
>there is an "uncreated creator" (god to many)
>who is responsible for all then I believe that this unproduced
>producer (god to many) must be magnanimous [relative to us] &
>capable of "anything""
>N' est-ce pas? Therefore if this "capable of anything entity" is the
>designer then it would, given the above postulates, not be out of
>the realm of possibility that this designer designed all to do what,
>when & where it is doing how it is doing it & there is no
>intelligence nor chance to it, only those adjectives you ascribe to
>it?
Figuring out what we are seeing and what reality consists of is the
project here. Obviously if the omnipotent being created everything it
was created to look just like this. Of course, it would also look
just like this if it *weren't* created.
>In other words all is doing what it does exactly how it is doing it
>because it was programmed to do it that way
>& none other & thats why it does what it does! Period!!
Dembski disagrees with you. This is from part 4 of his "Intelligent
Design Coming Clean"
------
7. Must All the Design in the Natural World Be Front-Loaded?
But simply to allow that a designer has imparted information into the
natural world is not enough. There are many thinkers who are
sympathetic to design but who prefer that all the design in the world
be front-loaded. The advantage of putting all the design in the world
at, say, the initial moment of the Big Bang is that it minimizes the
conflict between design and science as currently practiced. A
designer who front-loads the design of the world imparts all the
world's information before natural causes become operational and
express that information in the course of natural history. In effect,
there's no need to think of the world as an informationally open
system. Rather, we can still think of it mechanistically -- like the
outworking of a complicated differential equation, albeit with the
initial and boundary conditions designed. The impulse to front-load
design is deistic, and I expect any theories about front-loaded
design to be just as successful as deism was historically, which
always served as an unsatisfactory halfway house between theism (with
its informationally open universe) and naturalism (which insists the
universe remain informationally closed).
----------
Kenneth Miller disagrees with Dembski (and so do I for somewhat
different reasons). Miller thinks that a designer who "front loaded"
intelligence would not be deistic at all. Miller's God created
everything and then waited 14 billion years (or however long) for a
being to evolve who could detect His presence. At that moment God
became fully involved in the lives of those beings. An omniscient God
would know that such a being *would* eventually evolve and an eternal
God would consider 14 billion years to be a brief afternoon.
>It is however true that there are "things"going on that we mere
>mortals can observe but let none dare call it chance nor
>intelligence yet treason! Year 2000. State of the art thinking:
>
>Psychiatrists delve into our brains & physiologists map out our
>bodies & geneticists trace our DNA & the iron grip of heredity & as
>they do so they discover how little control or responsibility, if
>any, we have over our actions but yet most continue to cling to this
>"free will" nonsense .
Randomness exists on a quantum level. Frankly, I think randomness
exists on every level for almost the same reasons. This knowledge
gives us the freedom and the responsibility to make choices and know
they are true choices. Our genetics and our DNA *do* have an
influence but part of that influence is--in humans anyway--extreme
behavioral flexibility. We can't choose to flap our arms and fly, but
we can make all kinds of choices that other animals cannot make. We
can choose to kill ourselves. We can choose to never reproduce.
BTW: "My genes made me do it" is not really a better excuse than "the
Devil made me do it." In fact it may be worse since there are more
people who believe in the Devil than DNA.
Susan
-- ----------I am aware that the conclusions arrived at in this work will be denounced by some as highly irreligious; but he who denounces them is bound to shew why it is more irreligious to explain the origin of man as a distinct species by descent from some lower form, through the laws of variation and natural selection, than to explain the birth of the individual through the laws of ordinary reproduction.
---Charles Darwin
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