Life's Irreducible Structure (DEBATE THREAD)

CMI ^ | Alex Williams

[GodGunsGuts]

Are you saying that scientists should stop looking for cause and effect relationships? This would completely destroy the scientific method.

[tacticalogic]

No sir that isn’t true- IC is designed to handle change-

And yet it seems to be submitted that within any given species there can be none that would be consistent with evolutionary mechanism.

[CottShop]

[[The fact that something exists does not necessarily imply a creator. Your logic is based on a false assumption.]]

Yes it does! it proves beyond a reasonable doubt that a creator is needed and that naturalism is absoluely incapable of creating hte intelligently designed object in question. Who or what hte intellgient causer is is not the quesiton, but rather establishign beyond a reasoanble doubt that an itnelleignet agent was behind the causation of the object in question is what is beign established. If nature is incapable, and could not possibly have caused the evidence we are examining, then there is only one other possible cause- an intelligent causation- it’s either caused naturally, or intelligently- there is no other reasonable explanation

[Titus Quinctius Cincinnatus]

There is no scientific Law of Cause and Effect. It is a philosophical argument.

And why do you think the two have to be artificially separated? Or do you not realise that the only reason you have "Science" is because of this philosophical argument?

Interesting. If science disproves a law of causality engineered by philosophers, but yet the entire methodology of science is based upon the assumptions of causality, then does the lack of causality negate the results of the experiment in science which supposedly disproved causality in the first place?

Of course, nevermind that fact that the assumption that causality breaks down merely because of quantum mechanics is in all likelihood spurious to begin with.

[LeGrande]

Much more likely is just that we don't understand the underlying nature of the mechanism of causality presented in those results. Ergo, you are drawing conclusions as if they were confirmed, but doing so on the basis of extremely insufficient grounds. Ergo, your logic is fallacious.

Actually I do understand the underlying nature of the double slit experiment. You are the one that doesn't want to accept it. We don't live in an Aristotelian Universe. Deductive reasoning is not the scientific model.

[GodGunsGuts]

==I don’t know of any that have even attempted to make such a subjective argument.

Creation, ID and Evolution are all subjective sciences in that they are all forced to make inferences about the unrepeatable past. What Williams is positing is that ID is the ONLY acceptable historical inference with respect to the laws of cause and effect. If you can think of a better historical inference, I would love to hear it.

[Titus Quinctius Cincinnatus]

Actually I do understand the underlying nature of the double slit experiment.

Well no, I doubt that you really do.

[CottShop]

[[The entire basis for the determination seems based on a subjective evaluation of the curent state of knowlege - we don’t have a way to explain this as a natural phenomenon so it is reasonable to assume that there isn’t one.]]

You are tryign to downmplay the seriousness of what was discussed- The article does hsow hwy, and it is not only reasonable to conclude that nature isn’t capable, but it is also unreasonable to keep thinking nature could in light of htis added argument agaisnt naturalistic methods.

The reason why nature isn’t capable is because hte chemical compnents that supposedly started life are not in themselves endowed with the information necessary to keep creatign more andm ore ifnromation until the end results is arrived and that the end informaiton could not have happened naturalistically because it had no higher informaiton to draw from durign hte supposed stepwise process of attaining the end ‘mega-informaiton’.

[Fichori]

Good morning.

Something interesting I came across in part two:
(bold emphasis mine)

Objective knowledge and historical inference

Science gets results by observation and experiment upon repeatable phenomena. Its most valued products are general laws that are observed repeatedly which we can confidently call ‘objective knowledge’. These general laws may be incomplete or even false, but they are objective in that they are open to testing by others. New information may cause them to be modified or discarded. Meanwhile, this objective knowledge is usually useful in curing disease, improving technology and food production, etc.

But the subject of origins is quite different. It deals with unique sequences of unobservable and unrepeatable past events. No one can develop general laws about unique, unobservable and unrepeatable past events. Our general laws can tell us what might have happened in the past but they cannot tell us what did happen. Nor does anyone have a time machine to go back and observe what actually happened.

The best that science can do is extrapolate backwards in time from present day objective knowledge, using the principle of uniformity. This principle says that the laws of nature remain the same through all of time and space.

Note that this principle is not objective knowledge—we cannot visit all of time and space to verify it, so it is just a convenient but necessary philosophical assumption. Most people do not realize that this principle underlies all of evolutionary theory, nor do they realize that it is potentially an anti-God assumption because it assumes that God has never intervened in history.

Historical inference is thus quite different to objective knowledge. We cannot test it by observation or experiment, so it is only as good as the assumptions it is built upon. If the assumptions are wrong, the ‘knowledge’ will be faulty.

In the following discussion, the objective knowledge of life is available to all sides. Surprisingly, there is universal agreement on the fact that at present there is no naturalistic explanation for the origin of life. The controversy lies entirely in the historical inferences about what might have happened in the past. The only way we can evaluate these historical inferences is to examine the assumptions used to make those historical inferences and test the logical connections for internal consistency.

[LeGrande]

So you don't believe in science, right?

I follow the evidence. If you claim that all swans are white because you have seen thousands and thousands of white swans and not a single black swan, and I find a black swan, that is evidence that you are wrong. Science is based on falsification, not deductive reasoning.

[GodGunsGuts]

EXCELLENT! Thanks for digging that out.

[CottShop]

[[The agrument seems to be that all species are irreducibly complex, as they exist. Any change - whether you call it evolutionary or de-evoulutionary - is not tolerable to the organism as a whole.]]

No it isn’t- you are reading somethign into it that simply isn’t htere- ID possits no such thing, nor do natural laws prevent such htings- infact, it predicts it- the devolution of lifes reducible parts- just as we see in the records. You are trying to assign somethign to IC that is incorrect- and Miller did htis too, and it was intellectually dishonest. As I explained, IC syatems do NOT have to be made entirely of all IC parts- it is the IC parts themselves however that can not be taken out- As well IC systems have levels of tolorances- BUT IF those tolorance parameters are exceeded, then Yes, at that point the IC parts of hte system would render the whole system innoperable.

IC does NOT state that it can’t be reduced or corrupted- it DOES have tolorance parameters that again, are designed and built in, and which help to try to preserve the actual IC parts, but which can noly be modified just so far before the part breaks down and renders the hwoel system- the IC parts and hte non IC parts, innoperable

[GodGunsGuts]

Are you going to engage the affirmative, or are you going to confine yourself to talking about double slit experiments and black swans all day?

[LeGrande]

Yes- there is evidence life was created- the very article listed by GGG is evidence

The "evidence" from the article is that existence proves a creator, it doesn't.

The author seems to be presupposing that there is a cause and effect the assumption being that a creator is the cause and life is the effect.

Please keep the discussion about hte article and not about Who God is- you are deviating from the article’s claims

Maybe you should read the article.

It is showing evidnece for IC, and it is statign that naturalism is incapable of creating htis IC in a stepwise manner- This article is attemptign to establish a ‘law’, not create an arguemtn for cause and effect proving God.

First you must support and provide evidence, with no contradictions before you can have a "law."

[js1138]

A scientist mixes chemicals that came from a supply house in beakers made by a glass blower and shocks it with electricity delivered by a grid, all intelligently designed as is the very experiment it’s self.

Are you suggesting that if a chemist demonstrates a reaction in the laboratory, that this implies the reaction cannot occur outside the laboratory?

[GodGunsGuts]

I would hasten to add that Williams is positing that the autopioetic structure of ALL LIFE is beyond the reach of naturalistic explanations, and that ID is the ONLY acceptable historical inference with respect to the laws of cause and effect. So far, I haven’t met a single evolutionist who can falsify this claim, let alone come up with a better explanation than ID.

[CottShop]

[[This is speculating on things that cannot happen, based on an absence of evidence. ]]

again you are attempting to downplay the seriousness of the article- This isn’t ‘speculating’ but rather directly observing that it is impossible for nature to do the things mentioned. It is showing WHY things can not happen naturally, and is not simply relying on ‘the absensce of’ evidnece, but more so showign hte evidnece and showing why nmaturalistic means are wholly unreasonable- IF dirty chemicals can not be sparked into pure chemicals, and then result in hte complexities discussed i nthe article, then this is not speculating, but observing the science that hsows it can not happen. As mentioned i nthe article, we are only capable of purifying to 99.98% or so, and only after much manipulation and careful refining, while isolating and carefully preventing contamination, but nature supposedly soemhow, purified dirty chemicals perfectly? And kept htem pure through literally trillions upon trillions of mutations adding hteir corrupting influences through the process of megaevolution? No- Again this goes back to entropy, and hte contaminating effects of entropy-

[Fichori]

“Are you saying that scientists should stop looking for cause and effect relationships? This would completely destroy the scientific method.” --GodGunsGuts replying to LeGrande

Remember, LeGrande claims that Geocentric model physics applies to a Heliocentric model also.

Specifically, there is no difference between the Sun orbiting the Earth, and the Earth rotating on its axis, or, the Sun's apparent position is 2.1° away from its actual position due to a combination of: the distance of the Earth from the Sun, the speed of light, and speed at which the Earth rotates on its axis.

His claims have been refuted by science over and over, but he still refuses to concede that he was wrong.


Something worth keeping in mind.

[Fichori]

“Forensics involves things that have happened, based on observation of available evidence. This is speculating on things that cannot happen, based on an absence of evidence.”

An apt description of Darwinian Evolution.

[CottShop]

[[I would hasten to add that Williams is positing that the autopioetic structure of ALL LIFE is beyond the reach of naturalistic explanations, and that ID is the ONLY acceptable historical inference with respect to the laws of cause and effect.]]

BUT let’s be clear here that the article ALSO shows the why both statements are correct, and that it’s not just assumptions, but evidences and verifiable expriments backign htese statements up. I do htough think the article should include a part 3 showing more evidnece to back these claims up- showing thta nature is not capable of hte chemical purity and megainfo creation needed at every step of a supposed megaevolutionary model- but even htese 2 articles establish I think very reasonable laws, and also establish the unreasonableness of naturalistic causes.