Back to irreducible complexity (PART TWO) (Introduction)

by dhw, Tuesday, February 09, 2010, 11:42 (5400 days ago) @ xeno6696

PART ONE-Matt, you've raised a lot of interesting points in this exchange, and although David has given you a comprehensive answer, I'd like to follow up myself on some of your responses to him and to me. Unfortunately, I'm always chasing you two because of the time lag!-MATT:......we can't reasonably compute the statistic without a known mechanism. -David has responded that a good deal of the mechanism of genome reproduction is known, and our knowledge lengthens the odds against chance. However, I'd just like to add that, as with many of the arguments, the above cuts both ways. Until the mechanism is fully known, it's impossible to say that Chance has a chance! I agree with you that you can't base belief on negative evidence, but nor can you base it on the hope that positive evidence will be found ... and that applies as much to chance as to design. In your latest post you explain why you prefer the materialist approach. That's fair enough, but the fact that we can study chance won't guarantee us any "ultimate truth". It simply gives us something more manageable, which makes us feel better (an argument often used against people's religious beliefs).-MATT: Even more probable (when considering a creator) is chance plus design. -David agrees and so do I. If chance was not built into the whole fabric, it would all be incredibly boring. It would be like knowing the result of every game before it's played. I really like your reference to song-writing. Some authors and composers do plan in advance, but they usually find their plans have to be abandoned: the melody/characters take over. Personally, if I know what's coming, I'm bored and I can't go on. The whole process is a voyage of discovery, and if there is a God, that's how I would imagine his process to be. Your observation about music also raises our old question of where the ideas come from. One set of cells tells you your melody should go in this direction, and another set tells you it should go in another direction? And which set of cells makes the final choice? And what cells bring you the melody in the first place, and why, and how?-MATT: ...since the creator still influences life, then that means that you are arguing that biochemical components are expressing attributes of consciousness.
I would argue the exact opposite. If there is a creator, the biochemical components will be shifted around by HIS intelligence until they can function independently according to the programme HE has built (which allows for the vagaries of chance). If there is no creative intelligence, and the molecules do the work all by themselves, that's when they need to have their own form of consciousness. Then they alone supply codes which require extraordinary intelligence just to understand, let alone create.-Continued in Part Two