Irreducible Complexity (Introduction)

by xeno6696 , Sonoran Desert, Monday, January 11, 2010, 01:53 (5430 days ago) @ dhw

MATT: Since chance exists at the most fundamental nature, state, and time of our universe, chance can never be excluded from any explanation.
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> 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? 
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> 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. 
> -Let me try and clarify my position... this is delicate stuff and I'd rather put this in a form that we can agree to whether or not my reasoning is sound or not.-Lets take the number 120; to get it lets say we multiply 1 x 2 x 3 x 4 x 5-For the sake of my argument, the beginning of the universe is 1, and the chance random fluctuations that created matter is 2. 3 is the formation of our planet, and 4 is life, 5 is consciousness. -My argument in this analogy, is that in order to say something ISN'T by chance, we have to be able to exclude chance from the explanation. But since all of these events are irrevocably linked, removing any single factor destroys the result we're trying to find. -In the sequence that gives us 120, removing any part means we have something less than 120. In this instance, by removing chance random fluctuations, we can't say that anything beyond that point in time happened, because it is absolutely vital to all things that come after it. -But in order to exclude chance as a cause, you have to demonstrate that 4 or 5 happened by the result of some will. Which--I believe is systematically impossible. --
> 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? 
> -I feel that to answer this I'll just be repeating myself... but I'll try again.-The probabilistic nature of quantum mechanics, literally means that *nothing* is deterministic at the most fundamental scale of our universe. There is no way to deny this--it is fact. -Maybe this will work better: Chance is the consciousness of the universe; just as you or I wouldn't be humans w/o a consciousness, neither can the universe be the universe without 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. 
> -The problem here, is that complex interactions always arise with many moving parts. If, I grab 100 chemicals and toss them into a pot, is what I did complex or not? Is it more complex if I individually string these reactions together? Or less? What if the result is the same either way?-And to borrow a page from your own book, how do we know that these things require more intelligence to build--when we only have a paradigm of human intelligence to follow, and life obviously doesn't use our design methodologies? -> Once again, my thanks for your Herculean efforts to make these complex (again!) arguments comprehensible.-What I need to do, is find a way to learn more about chemistry at the quantum level. After I do everything else here, like read the 2 books that David has on my plate, heh.

--
\"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.\"