Return to David's theory of evolution PART 2 (Evolution)

by dhw, Wednesday, May 25, 2022, 10:59 (911 days ago) @ David Turell

dhw: Each of my alternatives allows for God as the creator, so please stop telling us (a) that your combination of theories makes sense to you, although you admit that you can’t explain it, and (b) that your inability to find any sense in it is due to my agnosticism.

DAVID: My sense of it all butts heads with your rigid agnosticism. I criticized your human form of God enough in the past not to repeat it again. Above and elsewhere I have described my concept of a designing mind. That mind may know and understand human emotions and desires, since that mind created us, but may have no human emotions itself. 50/50 still means yes or no!

Correct. And if there is a 50/50 chance of a yes, it is absurd to reject a theory solely on the grounds that you believe the answer is no.

Source of information
QUOTES: "Since the information content of the entire physical universe has always been lower than that found in even the simplest living organism, we can conclude that no scientific examination of the initial conditions of the universe or of planet Earth could yield a naturalistic prediction of life (with its fantastically high information content) at any later time in the history of the universe. In consequence, since life came into existence on Earth, a reasonable conclusion is that the source of this exponential jump in information content comes from beyond nature—from a super-natural source.
“If a skeptic demands a miracle as a reason to believe, consider that God has provided just such a confirmation of his reality in the abundance of life abounding on planet Earth."

DAVID: Note at times ID sneaks in God. It is on their not so 'private' website. What is important in this article is a clear discussion of the use of information theory as ID views it. dhw seems to think information is a dirty word, based on past discussions. Understanding the theory based on Shannon's initial work is a vital part of understanding how to view ID theory.

The whole article supports the argument that life is too complex to have arisen by chance. If you like to say that life requires too much “information” to have arisen by chance, I really couldn’t care less. Yet again: I accept the logic of this argument, so please stop dodging behind it whenever I challenge your illogical theory of evolution.

Second article:
DAVID: Highly technical article. I've plucked out the meat. T repeat the old point: life uses provided information to run its systems. That life had to have an original source of useful information when life started.

It’s amazing the extent to which some people can cloak the simplest of arguments in masses of jargon to make it sound more scientific and impressive. The “meat” remains the fact that the mechanisms which enable materials to live, reproduce and evolve are so complex that it requires blind faith to believe they could have come together by chance.

DAVID: Ed Feser again:
http://edwardfeser.blogspot.com/2022/05/the-hollow-universe-of-modern-physics.html#more

Pure physics
QUOTES: it made it possible for physics to become an exact science. But physics did so precisely by deliberately confining its attention to those aspects of nature susceptible of an exact mathematical treatment.
"And it is no less fallacious to infer from the success of physics that there is nothing more to material reality, or at least nothing more worth knowing, than what physics has to say about it (even if a lot of people who like to think of themselves as pretty smart are guilty of this fallacy).

Here is another piece on the same subject:

The limitations of science

Science can only concern itself with the material world as we know it. Science cannot speculate on matters beyond the scope of what can be tried and tested, and so by definition any belief in a non-physical world must be unscientific. But unscientific does not mean unreal or non-existent. There are many things in our lives that transcend the material world as we know it – love, art, music, beauty, premonitions and so on – but more importantly, the tools with which we examine the material world are inadequate. […] We are clever enough to devise instruments that hugely enhance our capabilities of perception, but even then, they will only be able to show us that which the human brain is able to perceive. How, then, can we know that there are no other forms of life and being that exist on a totally different plane? A deaf man might argue that because he can hear nothing, sound doesn’t exist. This is not to denigrate science. It is simply a denial of the right of science to exclude the possibility of phenomena outside its range. By extension, it is a denial of the right of an atheist to claim that religious faith is unscientific and therefore wrong.

You may be surprised at the source of this little article, which is my "Agnostic’s Brief Guide to the Universe”. You do not need to be a believer to understand arguments that support belief, just as you do not need to be an atheist to understand disbelief.