Comment on Revisiting God, Sky & Land by Fritz Guy and Brian Bull by Sean Pitman.
@Ron:
Yes. It is impossible to know what mindless nature has or has not been designed to do without some actual study and investigation of nature – or, as you put it, “by experimentation and experience.”
The trouble with that definition is that a small tree in a sunny field, a watch, and a supercomputer can all do the same thing, tell time… All three were designed by intelligent design. The tree was designed primarily by God with a small input from man, mostly measuring the length of the tree and the position of the shadow. The watch and supercomputer were still designed by both God and humans, but with more human involvement. All three are operational withing their design limits, so I don’t think I can categorize them accurately using your definition. In fact I am curious to see how you will define them.
You seem to forget that we’re asking if any apparently mindless process of nature can produce a functionally complex machine like a watch, a supercomputer, or a living thing like a tree. That’s the question here. Given our experience with mindless natural processes, the answer to that question is no. It’s never been observed at such levels of functional complexity…
I think you are going to define the tree as natural and the supercomputer as intelligently designed. But the tree in many ways is far more complex than the supercomputer in its basic design. Infact it is alive and the supercomputer is not.
Of course a living thing, like a tree, is vastly more functionally complex than the best supercomputer in existence. That is why a tree is even more difficult to explain via any mindless mechanism than a supercomputer. Yet, for some strange reason, when people see a supercomputer than automatically know that it was produced by deliberate high-level intelligence and technological know-how. They should come to the very same conclusion when they’re considering the origin of the functional complexity of a tree… something that is vastly more functionally complex and beyond the abilities of any mindless natural process to produce.
Also, the supercomputer can act very intelligently, even besting humans at Chess and Jeopardy. But it does that “naturally” within its design limits. It’s output is responsive to the input and is not random.
That’s right. A computer can only act “naturally” according to its programming…
I can say the same thing about an Evolutionary process. It was intelligently designed by God to respond to complex environmental conditions. It is responsive to it’s environment, and the output is not random and highly adaptive.
That’s true, but not without limit. While God evidently did design living things with a fantastic ability to adapt to new environments, this ability is not without clearly detectable limitations… limitations that are much more restrictive than what God gave to intelligent human beings.
In fact, the issue of randomness is one of the concerns I have about your theory of genetic evolution. I don’t think the process is at all random. Almost by definition evolution is not random. It highly goal driven to provide the best adaptation to the current environment.
Evolution is based on truly random genetic mutations that are not goal driven. And, natural selection, while a real biasing force of nature, does not actually have the power to preferentially select between random mutations, in a positive manner, until a random mutation happens to hit upon a novel genetic sequence that actually produces some new functionally beneficial reproductive advantage for the organism…
This is a significant limitation vs. what intelligence offers. Intelligence can imagine goals that are not yet realized and consciously work toward them with the use of a memory that actually remembers past mistakes, insight, intuition, induction, abduction, etc… all of which the evolutionary mechanism cannot do.
This is how you can tell that a highly symmetrical polished granite cube must have been deliberately designed while the amorphous rock next to it did not require the direct input of intelligence to produce – beyond the mindless abilities that have already been given to natural processes.
As I said before, I am not enough of a statistician to second guess your paper on the 1000aa principle, but the premise seems shaky to me. I guess I am not convinced we know enough to know if the system is truly random. I doubt that it is.
That means that God directly causes cancer and the like… because cancer is also based on the very same kinds of apparently random genetic mutations and function-based natural selection on a cellular level. It’s the very same mechanism. You simply can’t have your cake and eat it too…
Sean Pitman
www.DetectingDesign.com
Sean Pitman Also Commented
Revisiting God, Sky & Land by Fritz Guy and Brian Bull
Consider the following comments from the E.G.. White Estate regarding the origin of disease, suffering and death:
Suffering, other than sickness due to neglect of physical laws, is also caused by Satan and not the deliberate intervention of God. On many occasions she reinforced the teaching of Jesus on this point…
Her teachings regarding the cause of death, as well as suffering, flowed from the big picture of the great controversy between God and Satan:
“It is true that all suffering results from the transgression of God’s law, but this truth had become perverted. Satan, the author of sin and all its results, had led men to look upon disease and death as proceeding from God—as punishment arbitrarily inflicted on account of sin… Sickness, suffering, and death are [the] work of an antagonistic power. Satan is the destroyer; God is the restorer.”
Ellen White, The Desire of Ages, p. 471. and The Ministry of Healing, p. 113
http://www.whiteestate.org/books/mol/Chapt7.html
So, again, neither the Bible nor Mrs. White see diseases, like childhood leukemia, as being the result of a deliberate act or intervention of God…
Sean Pitman
www.DetectingDesign.com
Revisiting God, Sky & Land by Fritz Guy and Brian Bull
@Ron:
Where talking about the ability to detect the need to invoke intelligent design to explain various phenomena that exist in nature – regardless of if the intelligent agent is God or your wife or some alien from Zorg.
The loaves of bread that Jesus made by Divine power were the obvious result of intelligent design. They looked like regular loaves of bread that your wife might make. No one could tell the difference by looking at them if they were placed side-by-side. Yet, one loaf would have been made by God and the other by your wife. The fact is that God can make what humans can make. What would be obvious, however, is that both loaves of bread required intelligence to produce. In other words, they weren’t the product of mindless process of nature or natural laws that had no access to deliberate intelligence.
In short, just because your wife’s intelligence is “natural” doesn’t mean that all natural processes have access to intelligence or that every natural phenomena requires intelligence to explain beyond the basic non-intelligent laws of nature.
Sean Pitman
www.DetectingDesign.com
Revisiting God, Sky & Land by Fritz Guy and Brian Bull
@Ron:
So, you think that if God is directly responsible for the death of anyone that He is therefore the direct cause of all sickness, disease, death, and destruction? Every natural disaster is God’s doing? – a miracle of Divine design and creative power?
Do you not see the difference between the miracle of something like Lazarus being raised from the dead and a tornado wiping out an entire town the other day in the Midwest?
Sean Pitman
www.DetectingDesign.com
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