Turns out Random is Better (Evolution)

by xeno6696 , Sonoran Desert, Saturday, February 20, 2010, 19:00 (5199 days ago) @ dhw

dhw, -It turns out that your issue with my thrust is the same issue I have with Dembski's thrust. -He attacks evolution in terms of looking at all the parts we have NOW. He has no more access to abiogenesis (whatever its form) than we do. He glosses over that fact. The real question SHOULD be "How did these processes form in the first place," yet at least in his case, he's more concerned with showing that life is directed, and essentially extrapolating this all the way backwards to abiogenesis. -He attempts to circumvent this by advancing arguments in a proof-like mathematical language to try to demonstrate once and for all that if life has this property 'x,' and this property is essential to life, then it isn't possible to remove or reduce this feature because the system breaks. The issue is a classic one, that has changed time and time again; Dembski argues that there's no way such a system could "evolve" because all the components needed to maintain life have to exist together. He would never call it this, but his Baptist background provides the answer he claims: Life was created at one time, and by God Almighty. -The problem is that he is studying life as it is now and trying to apply that backwards all the way to the beginning, to a time that is presently clouded in mists. -It is also important for me to note that these objections are outside of an attack on some of his blatantly wrong application of Kolmogorov and Shannon information theorems. I won't discuss those here (just not in scope). -The divide between "Chapter 1" and "Chapter 2" is what I'm stating that Dembski doesn't cover either. If he asserts that life is too complex to have evolved, then he needs to provide us with a mechanism... in short, he needs to provide more than the same problem restated. He needs to explain how inorganic and organic components come together in a way that *doesn't* involve a similar process to evolution.-Part of the problem on this debate as that both sides assert that their positions are default. "Because life was either created or evolved, all we need to demonstrate something in the other position that is flawed, thus our position is proven. While mathematically, this is something that can be used to gain bits of data on the mechanism of origins (a separate problem) we don't have the capability to generalize from that data--in a real sense. -Not in the current thought process is that both positions need to not only demonstrate holes in their opponent's line, but to build the case for their own. This is where in my view ID (as in Dembski and Behe) begin to fail because though they poke relentlessly at what they view as an evil scientific paradigm--they aren't actually finding out how their mechanism of creation actually works. Both sides are guilty of gross over-generalization, but at least on the "materialist" side, they are actually working to tease out these mechanisms. In short, ID advocates are bitching about the problem without actually providing a solution. Dembski has even argued that our designer could be space aliens--but "coulds" don't fill the explanation gap. Another way I'd phrase it is that ID advocates seem more interested in attacking materialism than they are in finding out more about how things are working.-With those bits of qualification handled, I'll address your question in how I'd rephrase the question.

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\"Why is it, Master, that ascetics fight with ascetics?\"

\"It is, brahmin, because of attachment to views, adherence to views, fixation on views, addiction to views, obsession with views, holding firmly to views that ascetics fight with ascetics.\"