Life's Irreducible Structure (DEBATE THREAD)

CMI ^ | Alex Williams

[GodGunsGuts]

That’s ok, there’s already over 300 hits. Not bad for Gen/Chat.

[tacticalogic]

That’s fine, but it would be nice if you at least attempted to address the broader argument (i.e. autopoiesis as being a prerequisite for all life; inversely-causal, information-driven, structured hierarchy of autopoiesis not being reducible to the laws of physics and chemistry; the unbridgeable abyss between the dirty, mass-action chemistry of the natural environment; perfectly pure, single-molecule precision of biochemistry, etc, etc).

The requirement for autopoiesis seems intuitive. That declaration that particular molecular structures are not possilble except by design seems arbitrary.

[CottShop]

[[(A) All aspects of life (not just bacterial flagellums and blood clotting cascades) lie beyond the reach of naturalistic explanations,]]

This part needs to be stressed and adhered to without goign beyond- while it quite possibly does show it lies beyond the ability of naturalism, we shouldn’t say that it shuts off any other possible explanation (even htough reasonably, there really is no other explanation, as Macroevolution hypothesis, the whole basis for throwing God out of hte creation model, relies only on naturalism)

[CottShop]

[[Question: Is this presented as an argument that evolution is impossible, or that abiogenesis is impossible?]]

It is presented as an argument that naturalism is impossible, and can not account for what is discussed i nthe article

[shibumi]

Some of us have real jobs you know <;^)

See ya later!

[GodGunsGuts]

==The requirement for autopoiesis seems intuitive. That declaration that particular molecular structures are not possilble except by design seems arbitrary.

C’mon now. I gave you guys a couple of days to prepare. What specific arguments in the paper seem illogical or arbitrary?

[YHAOS]

"That’s ok, there’s already over 300 hits. Not bad for Gen/Chat."

I agree. It's neither in religion nor science. That way no one can declare exclusivity.

[count-your-change]

Cause and Effect is one of the first relationships humans learn as when a baby cries and receives attention.
Of course, in our experience cause and effect can be two sides to the same coin but scientists, astronomers and mathematicians, in their evolutionary world view, have conceived of a theory that is not hampered by human cause then effect experience, The Big Bang in the popular terminology.

It is all effect with no cause. The cosmos (the effect) is purported to have risen from dimensionless point because, well, because of nothing, no cause. But Materialism does allow for a cause, evolution, to come into existence only after effect.

At this point believers in the Bible may argue as did the apostle Paul at Hebrew 3:4, ‘that every house was constructed by someone but He who constructed all things is God’.

Distilled to its essence, that is the debate, not chicken and egg but First Cause or First Effect.
And it doesn't do to try and bridge the two. Materialistic evolution countenances no competition from a Creator/Designer.

As Carl Sagan said when his program, COSMOS, was running, materialistic cosmology (”the cosmos is all there is”) might allow for a god but only as he said, “A benign and indifferent one”.

The idea of a Designer, a First Cause, not design, is what materialistic evolutionary theory opposes. Say man created God and there would have been no contradiction from the evolutionary camp.

[GodGunsGuts]

I look forward to your comments once you have some free time. All the best—GGG

[CottShop]

[[That seems to imply that not only is creation of self-replicating molecules by naturalistic means impossible, but so is the actual replication process once they do exist.]]

Not really, because once created fully functional, it has all the ‘mega-informaiton’ in it’s purest form fro mwhich to draw on for replication- As species don’t need to ‘evolve higher’, they are thus not hampered by the impossibilities that face naturalism- and can and do go from completed to less fully functional via adaptions and mutaitons- which is exactly what we see in nature and the evidneces- going from pure to less pure as entropy results (Which perfectly follows the second law btw)

[Titus Quinctius Cincinnatus]

Where is the proof that life was created?

This is found in the very fact that it exists.

The question is: by what/Whom was it created.

[count-your-change]

Its existence is proof. The debate is the who or what created it.

[LeGrande]

This isn’t about positive proof.

Any evidence then, that life was created?

“only Intelligent Design meets the criterion of an acceptable historical inference according to the Law of Cause and Effect.”

Law of cause and effect? Are we discussing Philosophy? At the atomic level (where our discussion is), QM rules and it is definitely not causal. 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.

Let me take the liberty of simplifying the authors argument. The "effect" (existence or anything) has to have a cause. Therefore "existence" (effect) proves a "creator" (cause). If the assumption is correct then this theorom would be correct.

So the question simplified again, becomes, is there a scientific Law of Cause and Effect. In science there are no proofs only falsifications any exception falsifies the "Law". In QM, the double slit experiment or pair creation, is not causal, thereby falsifying the Law of Cause and Effect.

In summary, the authors premise has been falsified, presupposing a "cause" for everything is not correct.

[GodGunsGuts]

==we shouldn’t say that it shuts off any other possible explanation

That’s why I posted this debate thread. This whole thing got started because I kept sending the Williams papers to Evo after Evo, and none of them could shoot it down. So I thought I’d open it up to a debate to see if any of our resident FRevos could knock it down. I even sent them the papers in advance to prepare. To be honest, I am a bit taken aback by the silence on the other side. Perhaps things will pick up as the day grows on. Under normal circumstances this thread would be filled with replies by now. Could it be that Williams’ argument is as air-tight as I think it is????

[tacticalogic]

Not really, because once created fully functional, it has all the ‘mega-informaiton’ in it’s purest form fro mwhich to draw on for replication- As species don’t need to ‘evolve higher’, they are thus not hampered by the impossibilities that face naturalism- and can and do go from completed to less fully functional via adaptions and mutaitons- which is exactly what we see in nature and the evidneces- going from pure to less pure as entropy results (Which perfectly follows the second law btw)

The requirements of this irreducible complexity thoery seem to be that any change in the form will render the organism unsurvivable. That would apply to de-evolution as well as evolution. Every species is already "irreducibly complex" as it exists.

[LeGrande]

Its existence is proof. The debate is the who or what created it.

See post 53. No creator needed.

[Titus Quinctius Cincinnatus]

In QM, the double slit experiment or pair creation, is not causal, thereby falsifying the Law of Cause and Effect.

Not necessarily. More likely is that we simply don't understand the mechanism of causality yet.

[LeGrande]

This is found in the very fact that it exists.

The question is: by what/Whom was it created.

You are falsely assuming that a creator is necessary. See post 53.

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

[GodGunsGuts]

==So the question simplified again, becomes, is there a scientific Law of Cause and Effect. In science there are no proofs only falsifications any exception falsifies the “Law”. In QM, the double slit experiment or pair creation, is not causal, thereby falsifying the Law of Cause and Effect.

I don’t see what the double slit experiment has to do with the argument at hand. They don’t know nearly enough about the particle/wave aspects of light to do away with cause and effect. To do so would completely destroy the scientific method.

[Ha Ha Thats Very Logical]

My main issue with the paper is that, as far as I can tell, his argument about living organisms is based on the capabilities of nonliving things. Life demonstrates irreducible structure and autopoiesis; nonliving things don't show IS and AP unless it's designed in; therefore life can't show them unless they're designed in. I think we can all agree that living things have unique capabilities, so claiming restrictions on what life can do based on what nonliving things can do strikes me as an unwarranted logical leap.

I also have an issue with his section on inverse causality. He mistakes the result for the cause. "Stegosaur plates begin forming in the embryo but only have a function in the adult"--yes, but the function in the adult is not the cause of their formation in the embryo, though it may be the reason for them. The cause is the action of genes and chromosomes, which indeed takes place before the effect.

And then there's the whole question of what "before" means anyway. I know that there's ongoing discussion in physics about the relation between time and causality--for example, "Can an effect precede its cause? A model of a noncausal world," whose abstract reads

The world appears causal in the sense that the result of a measurement may depend on the past history of the observed system, but not on what the experimenter will do with the system after the measurement. This raises the question whether noncausality at a macroscopic level would necessarily lead to an unreasonable world. The study of a model world with axiomatically well-specified properties shows that noncausal systems can be discussed in a logically consistent manner so that noncausality might well exist in the real world as a weak, but so far overlooked, effect.

Apparently there's also a point of view that time is a property of causality rather than the other way around. I'm not going to pretend I can discuss the nuances of all this intelligently, but it does seem that what appears to be inverse causality to us may just be a function of our being trapped in linear time.