Tuesday, July 31, 2007

Creationism, Evolution and Intelligent Design


1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Matthew- For what it's worth, here's an alternate viewpoint.

If life really does self-organize as a purely naturalistic process in the presence of the right environmental factors, then these same processes should be going forth on a million different worlds in our galaxy right? - never mind the untold billions of other potentially-habitable worlds out there in the entire universe.

And yet SETI has laid a big fat goose-egg so far, and the silence out there is deafening. I would suggest to you that if we apply occam's razor to the fermi paradox, the most likely answer is that there's nobody out there because life simply doesnt happen the way you guess that it does.

And I purposely use the word "guess" because objectively speaking, so far, we know of only one place in the universe where life exists, and we currently have NO explanation for how it came to be here. None.

Abiogenesis is a complete and total mystery. The spontaneous organization of self-replicating information processors ie. DNA, and the undirected creation of billions of lines of specified complex information written in it's memory( ie genetic code ) has never been duplicated or demonstarted to be true.

Further, no plausible pathway of the "small, sucessive steps" required of Random Mutation and Natural Selection has ever been proposed or put forward by ANYBODY to explain the non-linear, interwoven, interdependent and apparently irreducibly-complex structures and processes that make up human biology.

The system architecture of life is screaming design, not random self-assembly, and the more we come to view biology in terms of information and programmed commands, we are having a harder and harder time ignoring the liklihood of a programmer.

If we are to seek truth, we have to try to keep our minds open and be willing to accept the objective data without trying to fit it into an idealogical template- be it naturalistic or theistic. Let the data take us where it will, that's all we ID'ers are asking. Let "the winds of doctrine blow" and let's not eliminate obvious possibilities like design out of hand purely as a matter of dogma.

The hardest thing to do is to see what you see, not what you want to see.

Strictly speaking, the most likely explanation for the existence of an information processor of unknown origins containing billions of lines of complex, specified information in it, is that the processor was created, and the code stored in it was written. That's a simple and true statement.

Maybe Hamlet did write itself,but it's not the logical default assumption, and if you are going to make that claim, you had better be able to back it up with an explanation that gets us all the way from a pile of rocks to the human brain, don't you think?

Best Wishes...Here's an essay for you if the topic interests you.

http://tyharris.wordpress.com/2007/03/27/evolution-versus-intelligent-design-astronomy-may-soon-settle-the-matter-once-and-for-all/