And now for something completely different. Logic according to John …

Comment on “Blindingly Obvious Artifacts” of Intelligent Design by Pauluc.

And now for something completely different. Logic according to John Cleese;

Rabble; A witch. We have a witch. Burn her! burn her!
Rabble; We have found a witch may we burn her?
Benamere; How do you know she is a witch?
Rabble; She looks like one
Witch; Im not a witch
Benamere; But you are dressed like one
Witch: They dressed me like one
Rabble No No Yes well a little bit. We put on the nose.
……
Benamere; What makes you think she is a witch
Rabble; She turned me into a newt.
Benamere; A nnnewt?
Rabble; I got better
Rabble: Burn her. burn her anyway.
Benamere; There are ways of telling whether she is a witch
Rabble; Are there?
Benamere; Tell me. What do you do with witches?
Rabble; Burn her! burn her!
Benamere; And what do you burn apart from witches?
Rabble; More witches. Wood.
Benamere; So why do witches burn?
Rabble; —— Because theyre made of wood?
Benamere; Goooood. So how do we tell if she is made of wood?
Rabble; Build a bridge out of her
Benamere; Ahhh But can you not make bridges out of stone?
Rabble; Oh yea.
Benamere; Does wood sink in water?
Rabble; No It floats. Throw her into the pond.
Benamere; What also floats in water?
Rabble; Bread, apples, very small rocks, cider, gravy, mud, cherries, churches, lead
Stranger; A duck.
Benamere; Exactly! so logically?
Rabble; If she weighs the same as a duck then she is made of wood.
Benamere; And therefore?
Rabble; A witch, a witch
Benamere; Very good! We shall use my largest scales.

Benamere; And who are you who are so wise in the ways of science?
stranger; I am king arthur

(Dialog from Monty Python and the holy grail).

What on earth does that have to do with the blinding obviousness of the artefactual nature of a granite cube? The problems is that like monty python you confuse categories. You argue from an obvious artefact to suggest that anything that appears designed for a purpose must have a divine creator.
You are arguing that a molecular “machine” is precisely the same as an artefact and therefore must accept the same implications of design. That is not at all established. Now or when Paley made the teleological argument based on a watch. It is an assertion just like the many assertions that populate this blog. We have all the usual suspects here.
SETI; You manage to find supportive Shostak and manage to get him to say something that supports your position even tho SETI supporters have specifically dissociated themselves from IDC and its modus operandi as you will find from a simple google searh. You specifically miss his comment;

…the champions of Intelligent Design make two mistakes when they claim that the SETI enterprise is logically similar to their own: First, they assume that we are looking for messages, and judging our discovery on the basis of message content, whether understood or not. In fact, we’re on the lookout for very simple signals. That’s mostly a technical misunderstanding. But their second assumption, derived from the first, that complexity would imply intelligence, is also wrong. We seek artificiality, which is an organized and optimized signal coming from an astronomical environment from which neither it nor anything like it is either expected or observed: Very modest complexity, found out of context. This is clearly nothing like looking at DNA’s chemical makeup and deducing the work of a supernatural biochemist.

You repeat your usual assertion without novelty or explication;

1] “.. there is no known mindless natural mechanism that is able to produce any kind of mechanical machine, biological or otherwise, beyond very very low levels of functional complexity.”

2] “…natural selection is a real force of nature, it is more of a preserving force for what already exists rather than a creative force of novel biomechanical systems. Of course, random mutations can change the letters of DNA and natural selection can select among these changes for the ones that happen to survive or reproduce better than their peers. However, this process is very very limited to low levels of functional complexity..”

3] “…because of what happens to “sequence space” with each step up the ladder of minimum size and/or specificity requirements. With each step up this ladder of “functional complexity” the ratio of what is potentially beneficial, but not yet discovered, within sequence space decreases exponentially relative to the number of non-beneficial sequences.

4] “..random mutations and natural selection is .. statistically limited to very low level systems this side of a practical eternity of time..”

5] “Even someone like Richard Dawkins is dimly aware of the basics of this fairly obvious concept.” This is something new. Dawkins does not know but Sean Pitman does.

6] “The only question that should be asked is if there is any known natural mechanism that can really explain the common ancestry and diversity of all living things on this planet over just a billion years or so? The problem with the Darwinian mechanism of random mutations and natural selection is that this mechanism is statistically limited to very low level systems this side of a practical eternity of time (i.e., nothing that requires more than 1000 specifically arranged amino acid building blocks). Without a viable mechanism the only thing that comes close, as with the SETI artefacts, is an appeal to a very intelligent designer.”

And this is not a classic God of the Gaps argument because..? I guess because you say it is not.

You seem to completely miss the point that not only Judges and Scientist but most everyone appreciates that Intelligent design or more properly IDC or Intelligent design creation is a restatement of literal creationism for the 20th century.

1] Do you admit that this is the origin of the term? Do you admit any history of this term at all?
2] Do you accept that there is a difference between the natural and the supernatural. They are categorically different so the method of one cannot be use for the other.

3] You believe in an old earth and universe because of the bible not because of any science.

4] Yet you believe in a recent literal creation around 6000 years ago not just because of the bible but because the scientific evidence for it.

5] You seem to believe that artefacts of humans and machines are directly comparables

6] You believe that biological systems are biological machines and just as machines are created by intelligent people so therefore must all biological machines.

7] You make no distinction between a molecular machine and a physical machine or an artefact.

8] If we take you logic to its extreme it is completely reductionist. Biology is just mechanics. This is certainly consistent with your incredulity about emergent properties.

Pauluc Also Commented

“Blindingly Obvious Artifacts” of Intelligent Design
@Gene Fortner:

Im not following your logic. You cant have it both ways. Either

1] peer review is inadequate and letting anything be published as science as you seem to suggest here or

2] It is being highly selective in excluding from publication lots of critical novel data that is rejected because it does not fit some arbritrary idea of science.

I think you need to have a united front on this. Sean and Bob are saying peer review is much more difficult than it was 100 years ago and Einstein Wegener would not be published today. You are saying that lots of things that are wrong are being published.

Some real data or evidence would be helpful. A rejection letter from Sean for a publication on his theory of 1000FSAAR would certainly help me be convinced that papers are really being rejected because of ideology not poor quality science.


“Blindingly Obvious Artifacts” of Intelligent Design

Gene Fortner: The ability to detect design is God given.

Send a couple of 10 year olds through a field looking for artifacts, they will come back with arrowheads, broken pieces of pottery, nails, ……

I am glad you agree with the position on design I have previously articulated.

http://www.educatetruth.com/featured/gary-gilbert-spectrum-and-pseudogenes/comment-page-2/#comment-41560

Design is simply pattern recognition. No science involved. It is simply a function of a brain. Ants and insects can recognize unusual variants from their natural world. Humans have at least the same capability. It is built into a brain at an early point and is reflected in the imputation of purpose in our cognition. This is evident by the studies of teological thinking in Kids
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/10384737

Adults
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19200537

And even scientists and academics in the arts.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/?term=23067062

Intelligent design is really just pattern recognition. A deep psychological comfort that is built into our brains to see purpose in the natural world and atefacts as comforting reminders of our presence and volition


Recent Comments by Pauluc

Avondale College Arguing in Favor of Darwinian Evolution?

Bob Helm: With that said, I find your views to be spiritually dangerous and often scientifically weak. I detect a lot of smoke in your posts, but very little light. I hope you will continue to ponder these issues and try to have an open mind.

You are most welcome to your opinion and I know you would like nothing better than that anyone who takes Christianity and the Bible seriously but not literally to just go away. It is much better not to know of any possible problems with one current views. It very hard to get to the science when we cannot even agree on what is science. What passes as science on this site is so completely dismissive of its methodological basis and history and is entrained in a specific supernatural world view that allows arbitrary acceptance of any observation as miraculous. I think Roger’s paper may well be relevant to Adventist that believe that Christianity has and must respond to a careful study of physical reality by reconsidering its interpretations of the word of the Lord, but as Sean has indicated you are exception to that characterization. I still do not really understand why you should be interested at all in any science. It seems a bit messy to worry about facts. It really seems an unnecessary bother to argue whether the precambrian/cambrian boundary or the upper cenzoic (is that really what you meant?) as the evidence of a divine intervention.

Dont worry I do have an open mind which is why I still peruse this site to see how more knowledgable fundamentalist Adventists think. I wont worry you further.


Avondale College Arguing in Favor of Darwinian Evolution?

Sean Pitman: So, you do see the need for a police force and a military to maintain civil society, but somehow Christians should not provide what is an otherwise necessary part of that civil society? I’m with Abraham Lincoln on this one when he noted the inconsistency of such a position – like Orthodox Jews paying others to turn their lights on for them on Sabbath

On that logic you should not have any issue with working on Sabbath in any profession serving 24/7. Be that computer support, utilities firefighters. Those giving up those jobs because of inability to have sabbath observance were all deluded. They as Christians should be prepared to “provide what is otherwise a necessary part of civil society”

You cant have it both ways. You cant because of a moral postion claim that Adventists should have exception from working on Sabbath and at the same time deny me the right to consider immoral some occupations that may be very utilitarian in a world full of selfishness and the human acts of evil that comes from that.

Lets for a moment step back from lala land. Where are we and where did we come from on this thread?

1] You posted a rehash of all your usual arguments in response to an article about the more mainstream Adventist positions that may impact the way Adventism reacts to conventional science. All very straight forward.
2] The contention was that Adventism has accepted process for the orgin and evolution of the inanimate world. The birth and death of galaxys and stars and planets in black holes supernova and impacts of spiralling planets. This is where it gets really strange.
3] You contend that Adventism has always accepted the conclusions of that process but then expand on your view of the process which involves a little bit of order and natural law but large amounts of magic. God waited a few billions years until the interstellar material generated by the big band condensed into planets onto which God created life mature and complete. This included Heaven the place of his throne-room which he populated with physical being angels which it is implied have both mass and composition and metabolism.
4] When it was suggested that the same processes and natural law resulted in life on this planet this was claimed inconceivable and would never be done by any process involving life and death. Instead the life we see now is in reality designed to live for ever and has be chemically changed because it is deprived of a particular form of nutrient from a tree that existed on the Earth some 6000 years ago.
5] The inconguity of practicing medicine by the principles of process of natural law and the technology resulting from both the processes of the innanimate and the animate world rather than accepting the much more important process of divine intervention seems to be completely obsure.
6] When someone says that the process of life and death that gave us the physical substance of our universe is also the basis of the creation of life here he must be animal hating sadistic psychopath who cannot belieive in a God of love and grace and is lying when he says that non-violence characterizes the children of the heavenly father for one must always recognize that peace and freedom are only obtained over the bodies of 1/3 of the angels of heaven and the eternal physical and violent struggle against those who would practice violence.

I really cannot understand you Sean. Your ways are way beyond me. I am just sorry that Bob seems to be drawn into your twighlight zone.

Grace


Avondale College Arguing in Favor of Darwinian Evolution?
@Sean Pitman: sorry but your curious amalgam of magic and biology is not really comprehensible to me as a biologist or as a Christian . it. is neither logical or biologically feasible


Avondale College Arguing in Favor of Darwinian Evolution?

Sean Pitman: However, according to the Bible and Ellen White, before the Fall God specifically directed nature so that all sentient life was protected in a manner that there was no suffering or death. By eating from the “Tree of Life” God provided constant renewal and regeneration that worked against what would otherwise be inevitable entropic changes, decay, and death. It was by deliberately stepping away from the true Source of eternal life that mankind stepped away from God and into the full workings of mindless natural law alone – which does in fact inevitably lead to suffering and death.

And this interpretation is precisely why you need a theodicy. Where is the justice in killing all for the sake of the sins of one woman+man? It makes no sense logically. If they were conditionally immortal because of eating of the tree of life then did all the animals in all the world congregate around this tree like beasts around a water hole on the serengeti. how exactly do you as you are wont to do translate the account into a literal reality. And which beast had to come and eat. Or was it symbolic? Oh now that’s a thought.


Avondale College Arguing in Favor of Darwinian Evolution?

Sean Pitman: Come on now. Even I can imagine limitations to reproduction or the turnover of sentient carbon-based life. Surely you can at least imagine something similar? I know God can since such a world is described in the Bible and in the writings of Ellen White. Think about it…

Of course I have. This is not simply about reproduction. That is trivial. This is about metabolic process. Show me a carbon based life form that does not grow or metabolize anything and I will show you an organism in stasis as a spore “living” millions of year in amber. That is; effectively dead.

Real life cannot exist without metabolic process in a carbon based world and God has sanctified all this by a process of making good out of evil from the death of one comes life for others. Just as in the biological world so in the spiritual. By his death we have life. Just as God sanctified the practice of sacrifice of appeasement practiced by most cultures for thousands of years before and showed that in the Judeo-Christian tradition these same acts of sacrifice were emblematic of a monotheistic God that would become incarnate and bring life from death. So also he took the preceding accounts of creation derived as they were of the mesopotamian valley and recast it as an account of the monotheistic God who is above all but comes and dwells among us to become one of us. Participating in our life and death but showing us the importance of the transcendent life of the spirit that supercedes carbon based life and its inherent death. It is no fairy tale of 6 impossible things before breakfast. It is not pie in the sky by and by. It is rooted in a real world and it is about the transcendence of love and grace that is acted out in a real physical world by the incarnate God and us as we follow as His disciples.

That is the message I get from the images and visions of the Canon and EG White. But of course I read it for the message that it conveys not as a scientific text. That is where we fundamentally differ.