Junk DNA: goodbye!: Review article (Introduction)

by dhw, Saturday, March 14, 2015, 18:39 (3331 days ago) @ Balance_Maintained

Dhw: You and David see the absurdity of the atheist argument, but not that of your own: nobody knows how life and the universe came into being, so let's invent an eternal, all-knowing designer of no origin, who simply IS, and let's call him God. Unprovable, unknown, unknowable, devoid of any scientific basis, but providing an “easy” (David's word) answer to the mystery of our origins, as well as providing scope for the human imagination to work on (hence the vast variety of gods, and stories about gods). Life is a mystery, so we solve it by creating an even greater mystery.
That should not be taken as a sign of disrespect for your beliefs. I'm merely trying to explain why I keep seeing pots calling kettles black. One side has to be closer to the truth than the other, but reason certainly won't help me decide which one it is!-TONY: As David has pointed out many times, either everything was created, or it wasn't. It is a pretty short list of options. That means that there either is a God(s), or there isn't. There really is no middle ground. Finding the least absurd answer then mean's that it is most likely the correct on. 
In order to recognize design, there are some thing that we can typically look for....-You go on to offer us a brilliant résumé (thank you) of all the factors integral to design, most of which are incontrovertible when applied to human activity. I shan't repeat the above brief list of problems with what you consider to be the less absurd answer (God), but will explain how I think your own list can be drastically reduced. I will happily acknowledge that randomness as the initial trigger for life and the mechanism for evolution is every bit as absurd as a universal intelligence that had no beginning and (cop-out of cop-outs) simply IS. Six of one and half a dozen of the other. But from that initial step, once cells reproduced themselves and were able to combine and learn from one another (no more absurd than eternal, unsourced energy already knowing everything there is to know), the majority of your factors automatically come into play. Living organisms have the purpose to survive and propagate and improve their quality of life. Those that are efficient prosper, the rest fail; there is no randomness except through changing environments, to which successful organisms adapt, while some even change in order to exploit the new conditions. Simplicity is a keynote - only that which is necessary will be carried forward; balance will continually change as the environment changes, or individual species become particularly efficient. Aesthetics are a matter of subjective judgement. I myself do not find Mrs Hippopotamus irresistibly beautiful, but I'm sure Mr Hippo does (or did). You create a scenario in which every change and progression is random (and this, I agree, is a major fault in Darwin's theory), but it ain't necessarily so. Instead of an absurd eternal and universal intelligence, you now have an absurd initial concatenation of materials whose intelligence evolves. Once a form of intelligence is in place, it designs itself. That is why David is so bitterly opposed to the findings of many scientists that even single cells are intelligent, communicative, problem-solving, decision-making beings. But he grants that there is a 50/50 possibility that they are. Yes, the chance birth of that intelligence is as incredible as the non-birth of divine intelligence. But at least the former option confines us to the world we know, as opposed to a reality wildly beyond the scope of the imagination.-I'd better repeat that I am not championing atheism, and my intelligent cell hypothesis can also be viewed theistically. I am simply explaining my agnosticism, which in discussions with you and David inevitably entails putting my own case for atheism.