Irreducible Complexity (Introduction)

by dhw, Sunday, January 10, 2010, 17:11 (5430 days ago) @ xeno6696

MATT: Since chance exists at the most fundamental nature, state, and time of our universe, chance can never be excluded from any explanation.-MATT: We know for a fact that matter was created by chance, and life is made of matter, how could life NOT be made by chance, as it requires matter? How could we exclude chance? -As an agnostic, of course I'm not excluding chance, but that is a long, long, long way from the statement that "all order arose by chance. Literally." In the first part of the second quote above, it seems to me that there's a wide gap in the reasoning. Even if it's true that matter was created by chance, it doesn't mean that what's created out of matter is made by chance. If you saw a wine glass in the middle of the desert, you would immediately assume it had been made by a human, and not put together by wind, sand, sun etc. The ingredients may be chance-made, but the combination is not. In the context of life, again it comes back to complexity (see below), and if you accept the definition 'many interconnected parts', there's no escaping the complexity involved in the process of reproduction/ heredity/evolution. The same argument could be applied to the universe. If chance-made matter is in order, that doesn't automatically mean that chance is responsible for the order.-You have actually acknowledged this: 'However complex the chemistry is to go from nonlife to life, all things that exist came from that big bang where the randomness of quantum fluctuations predominate. We may not know the mechanism...' Isn't that the whole point? An atheist believes that chance is the mechanism, a theist believes the mechanism is too complex to have arisen by chance, and an agnostic doesn't know what to believe. It's the mechanism that creates the order, and if we don't know what it is, how can you say that all order literally arose by chance? -Complexity is so important to this whole argument that I'd like to clarify my badly phrased remark: "the greater the number of parts, the more intelligence is needed to do the combining". You've quite rightly pointed out that "the scientists of today are no more intelligent than the scientists of 200 years ago; they just have the advantage of standing on the shoulders of those that came before them." What I was trying to say was: the greater the complexity, the greater the need for intelligence. A theistic analogy to human progress, then, would be God's progress as he learns from his experiments. -Once again, my thanks for your Herculean efforts to make these complex (again!) arguments comprehensible.