ID: What’s it all about, Darwin?

My mother says she is a Darwinist. I’m not sure of all the things that could or should imply. I take it to mean the she does not believe that the Cosmos and all that it contains is the result of the will of a Supreme Being. Nature just exists and that is all there is to it. Asking what is the purpose of human existence is a nonsense question. It has no meaning. As we have no conscious origin, we have no conscious destination. Hence no purpose.

This idea is quite troubling to many humans as we are quite reluctant to attach no meaning to the thoughts and desires coursing through the synapses of our brains. And so, for most of human existence, the idea that there was no God was a heresy to be condemned, punished, reviled, tortured and even burned at the stake.

When our social institutions evolved to the point where asking such a question wasn’t as quite as painful or harmful to one’s health, science, in the sense that we use today, began to blossom. And it bloomed because of its explanatory power, its predictive power. If you combine A, B, and C – bingo! – you get D. And no one had ever seen, heard or thought of D before!

One of the best and most widely known examples of this is Einstein’s famous equation, E = mc^2. Exactly what this means is not, for the purposes of this discussion, important. What is important is that this conclusion results from a very simple postulate. Namely, that the speed of light is constant relative to an observer – hence the term “relativity” theory. The other postulate is that we are only dealing with non-accelerated frames of reference. That means constant velocities and no gravitational fields. Hence the term “special” relativity. General relativity, dealing with accelerated frames of reference, is, both conceptually and mathematically, a great deal more abstract and difficult. And, unfortunately, I’m not one of those privy to its secrets.

We still believe, given compliance with the postulates, that the mass-energy equivalence equation is an accurate description of physical reality. For someone with an undergraduate’s knowledge of physics and fair skill with the calculus, it isn’t even very difficult to derive. But that is not the reason for its endurance. Our “faith” in this equation is borne out by innumerable observations, experiments and even a couple of unfortunate events in Japan that took place just about sixty years ago. Though the details of specific processes may, to some extent, still elude us, we have an explanation for the enormous energy levels and extreme duration of the power generated by stars. It was this question that stumped some of the greatest scientific minds of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Einstein’s answer still has no competing theory and it does not leave unanswered questions as to its validity lying about unaddressed.

The same cannot be said of evolutionary theory. There are unanswered questions. Evidence that does not fit. “Facts” that have proven illusive or false. Fabricated evidence. Explanations that are logically incomplete. Jerry-rigged computer models – oops! – sorry, that’s global warming. Result? A competing theory, Intelligent Design or ID, has been proposed as an alternative to Darwin’s rumination. Is this “unscientific” as many wail and gnash in their haste to keep “God” out of science? No. It’s an alternative hypothesis. A competing theory. Not religion. Not superstition. Not a conspiracy by those pesky right-wing, Christian fundamentalist – fundamentalist Christians, if you prefer. A proposed theory. This is how science advances. If one never questions, there are no answers to be had.

If you would like to bone-up on the fundamentals of ID, I suggest that you read Dan Peterson’s piece in the American Spectator, “The Little Engine That Could...Undo Darwinism.” He gives a rundown of the main players in the ID debate along with their academic backgrounds and achievements as well as the main arguments supporting their positions. For an opposing view by a man of science in the field of evolutionary theory, read Jerry Coyne’s offering in the New Republic Online, “The Case Against Intelligent Design.” This was at one time linkable without a subscription as I have a copy saved. But alas, one now seems mandatory.

Based on my brief acquaintance with the subject, there seems to be two fundamental lines of argument used by ID theorists. The first is that which asserts the probability of the complex molecules that form our DNA occurring by chance is infinitesimally small and therefore unlikely to have ever happened by chance. This is the argument put forth by the mathematician and physicist William Dembski.

Michael Behe, who popularized the flagellar motor found in e. coli and other bacterium as an example of intelligent design, is a professor of biochemistry at Lehigh University in Pennsylvania. His arguments are based on the concept of irreducibly complex processes or structures as opposed to those that are cumulatively complex. Those that are irreducibly complex do not lend themselves without great difficulty to explanation by a theory of evolution. For Darwin himself stated that if one could show that a blind, incremental process could not explain a natural phenomenon, his theory would fall apart.

Darwin’s theories are being questioned, but here we are not talking about religious zealots making the inquiry. We’re talking about real, live, grown-up scientists, who, because of our advancing knowledge of the molecular basis of life, and not just bible stories, are asking legitimate and profound questions that are undermining the basis of Darwinism. And they’re not doing so with the desire nor intention of substituting scripture for textbooks. God, as the Jews or Christians or even Muslims perceive Him, is not being offered in place of Darwin.

No, what you mean is that the data you are interpreting is based on a evolution paradigm, a paradigm which you have not even established as being possible.

You would seem to be trumpeting a science that knows nothing, nothing, nothing and can never learn anything.

Variation including mutation within species exists. We know this.
Some variations work better than others and preferentially thrive and reproduce. We can see this and it would make sense at any rate.
So populations figure to change over time if there are pressures from the environment to do so.

Where are the improbable elements that need to be demonstrated? Here's a clue. Your RELIGIOUS HORROR is not science.

The only liars are the evolutionists who are so intent to deny God's word that they will conjure up a fantasy that man came from rocks.

No. That's your version. Man from dirt in one afternoon. You don't know yours from ours. You are giving pig-ignorance a bad name.

Abiogenesis is a separate topic from how life evolved after it got started. Needs different mechanisms, that kind of thing. It may never be possible to know we've recreated the actual historical scenario, as there may be more than one possible. And if science created life from scratch next week, that would be trumpeted as "proof of ID." The Catch-22 there being that what isn't reproducible in humanly engineered lab experiments isn't science at all and what IS is ID. Tah-Dah! And, of course, you don't really want to know anything about abiogenesis research. You don't want to know anything about anything in the non-magical real world.

What abiogenesis research has shown is that life cannot come from non-life.

Even under ideal conditions, man cannot produce life from non-life.

That means (drumroll please) evolution could not have happened.

But that won't stop the evolutionists from pretending that life can évolve'from non-life, but that is all self-delusion to avoid dealing with their very real Creator.

Professing themselves to be wise, they became fools

The proofs of pig-ignorantism:

What abiogenesis research has shown is that life cannot come from non-life.
Even under ideal conditions, man cannot produce life from non-life.
That means (drumroll please) evolution could not have happened.

No. That science has not produced new life, or even found out how current life formed on Earth as of close-of-business last workday is simply irrelevant to whether all the life we do have is related by divergence from common descent.

You not only abhor facts, but logic. Your little syllogism above is absurd, drumroll or no. This isn't creationism, it's cretinism.

Rounding out the information in my previous posts, here's another poster's presentation of the fish-to-elephant transitional series. The final paragraph is of interest here.

Also note that the changes between any two sequential transitionals are small enough that most creationists would write them off as only "microevolution" -- and yet those 50-or-so "microevolutionary" steps turn a fish into an elephant, which even the most stubborn creationist would have to concede is "macroevolution".

A perfect parallel would be accepting the "micro-" plate tectonics we can measure year to year but not accepting despite massive evidence the "macro-" plate tectonics which say that the continents have been drifting large distances over large times.

Its not!

What you mean is that you still hope that abiogenesis can be proved to be possible, because if its not, then evolution is a myth.

The Improbability of Abiogenesis According to the theory of evolution, taken in the broad sense, living matter arose at some point in the past from non-living matter by ordinary chemical and physical processes. This is called abiogenesis. Creationists often attempt to calculate the probability of this occurring, which is difficult to do. However, it is possible to give an estimate based on reasonable assumptions. Amino acids and nucleic acids are the building blocks of life, and they come in two forms, which spiral left and right. All life consists of only one of these forms. Since both forms are generated equally by inorganic chemical processes, it seems hard to imagine that life could have originated having only one of these forms. Recently it has been claimed that meteorites have an excess of one form over another. But due to racemization, these forms tend to equalize over time, so we can expect that in a primitive earth, there would have been essentially equal numbers of both forms. Biologists currently estimate that the smallest life form as we know it would have needed about 256 genes. (See Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences Volume 93, Number 19, pp. 10268-10273 at http://journals.at-home.com/get_doc/1854083/8551). A gene is typically 1000 or more base pairs long, and there is some space in between, so 256 genes would amount to about 300,000 bases of DNA. The deoxyribose in the DNA ``backbone'' determines the direction in which it will spiral. Since organic molecules can be generated in both forms, the chance of obtaining all one form or another in 300,000 bases is one in two to the 300,000 power. This is about one in 10 to the 90,000 power. It seems to be necessary for life that all of these bases spiral in the same direction. Now, if we imagine many, many DNA molecules being formed in the early history of the earth, we might have say 10 100 molecules altogether (which is really much too high). But even this would make the probability of getting one DNA molecule right about one in 10 to the 89,900 power, still essentially zero. And we are not even considering what proteins the DNA generates, or how the rest of the cell structure would get put together! So the real probability would be fantastically small. Biologists are hypothesizing some RNA-based life form that might have had a smaller genome and might have given rise to a cell with about 256 genes. Until this is demonstrated, one would have to say that the problem of abiogenesis is very severe indeed for the theory of evolution. http://www.cs.unc.edu/~plaisted/ce/abiogenesis.html

You not only abhor facts, but logic. Your little syllogism above is absurd, drumroll or no. This isn't creationism, it's cretinism.

No, it is your logic that is flawed, if evolution is going to occur it had to have a beginning, which means that life had to start from non-life.

If that is not possible, then evolution is not possible.

Rounding out the information in my previous posts, here's another poster's presentation of the fish-to-elephant transitional series. The final paragraph is of interest here. Also note that the changes between any two sequential transitionals are small enough that most creationists would write them off as only "microevolution" -- and yet those 50-or-so "microevolutionary" steps turn a fish into an elephant, which even the most stubborn creationist would have to concede is "macroevolution".

Yea, if a fish ever did become an elephant, which it didn't.

LOL!

So in a few posts we have the obvious logic that evolutionary change is inevitable ("microevolution") and supposedly accepted by everybody. Nobody ever seems to identify anything that would stop microevolution from continuing indefinitely, as an absurdly large preponderance of evidence indicates has indeed occurred. Considerable samples of such have been given and waved away already, enough to make it abundantly clear what is going on. A perfect parallel would be accepting the "micro-" plate tectonics we can measure year to year but not accepting despite massive evidence the "macro-" plate tectonics which say that the continents have been drifting large distances over large times.

Well,I do not know what evidence you have for the drifting of the continents, but you have no evidence for Macro evolution.

Evolutionary biologists will often argue that evolution has been observed. By this they mean tiny changes in species that have been seen in nature or in the laboratory. Because we have seen such tiny changes, they argue, given enough time, large changes could also take place. However, this line of argument is not logically correct. Just because I can jump an inch does not mean I can jump to the moon. Just because I can walk an inch does not mean I can walk around the world. http://www.cs.unc.edu/~plaisted/ce/science.html

Now stop your lying for Lucifier!

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