• Welcome to Religious Forums, a friendly forum to discuss all religions in a friendly surrounding.

    Your voice is missing! You will need to register to get access to the following site features:
    • Reply to discussions and create your own threads.
    • Our modern chat room. No add-ons or extensions required, just login and start chatting!
    • Access to private conversations with other members.

    We hope to see you as a part of our community soon!

The validity of intelligent design

Some things are so commonly asserted they don't usually need a reference - but here you go; from a Berkeley link given to me by a Darwinist here as 'proof' of evolution

Mutations
Mutations are random
Mutations can be beneficial, neutral, or harmful for the organism, but mutations do not "try" to supply what the organism "needs." In this respect, mutations are random — whether a particular mutation happens or not is unrelated to how useful that mutation would be.

This quote asserts that mutations are random, something that no biologist would deny. But then what is the thought process that leads you to deduce from that statement that evolution (from the Latin for "unrolling") is itself random?

Mutations may be seen as the manner that new traits or modifications are entered into the genomes of populations. The actual process of how these "unroll" in new forms of life however results from a kind of selection, which is not random at all. Without mutation and a number of other processes of exchange of genetic material within and between organisms, no life would have ever developed because nothing new could have been generated. On the other hand, though this constant creation of new raw materials from within existing ones is essential to how life unrolls or evolves, it does not tell us how it comes about.

Yes one could say that God or beings from outer space intervene, but then you are entering something from the outside which itself has to be explained. Perhaps we tend to think that way because we humans are always intervening in other things on our planet. But there is nothing to indicate that we aren't product of the same planet, and then everything else seems to be messing with us as well (for example what we call weeds, pests, pathogens, and not to forget domesticated cats). That natural selection requires no outside intervention and is derived from a few simple principles, allows all forms of life to be explained within one framework. Any kind of outside explanation in contrast requires adding more and more exceptions and rules to the explanation, somewhat in the manner that all kinds of amendments had to be added to a model of the solar system in which the earth was thought to be center in order to explain motions of the planets and other heavenly bodies that should not have happened in such a model.

Mutation alone would no more give proof to evolution than the fact that the materials made available in different locations could indicate how people developed the means to turn these into different kinds of houses. Nor would it explain why different groups of people in the same location build different kinds of houses.

In life, how this came about is what Darwin called "natural selection." Note he did not call it natural randomness. He developed it without even knowing of mutation, except as the appearance of changes so obvious that they were called "monstrosities" at the time. All he saw was evidence that more and more new varieties of life with more and more new traits were appearing over time in the manner of the unending growth and branching of a tree. Most changes taking place in populations of organisms, however, are so gradual and subtle that neither they nor their effects are easily noticed from generation to generation, except to the extent that they give such advantage that organisms carrying the changes will have more children and those more children in each generation than those without it, causing carriers to represent a greater and greater percentage of the population. Imagine the acquisition over time simultaneously of increasing numbers of such changes, causing all kinds of divergences in any population.

Look at all the kinds of dogs that came just from wolves, when their interbreeding was controlled by humans over the course of a mere 15 thousand years or less; or all different varieties of humans since they came out of Africa just within 300 thousand years (according to the latest evidence). Darwin used the analogy of our own selection of variety in domestic plants and animals as an analogy for how in nature, the appearance of new features affects the reproductive rate of descendants of different individuals in the population, leading them gradually over time to supplant other groups or else diverge within and across the landscape according to their migrations and the tendencies provided by their increasingly different capabilities.

And regarding proof, your friend did you a disservice if he said science "proves" things, because proof would require full knowledge of all variables involved, which is impossible. Science is a procedure for discovering and isolating variables, and making and testing assumptions or hypotheses or stories we have of the world and universe to better understand them and ourselves. It is what humans have done through time, with the primary difference being that science has developed a systematization of the testing, verifying, unifying, integration, analyzing, observing, proposing, and of the communication and acceptance of the many results of this testing within increasingly unified frameworks of understanding. As it engages with the world and is subject to human thought, furthermore, it also changes -- and so will it continue to change.
 
Last edited:

Milton Platt

Well-Known Member
Spirits are not a physical manifestation. Except maybe in the movie Ghostbusters.

Let me try and make it simple for you

If something exists then it is a thing. If something does not exist, then it is nothing. If there is a state of existence which does not require being, please demonstrate.

Look at the two words... SOMEthing versus NOthing. Is a spirit a something or a nothing? The answer is one or the other. Pick one, please instead of tap dancing. You are free to elaborate AFTER you answer the question.
 

Guy Threepwood

Mighty Pirate
This quote asserts that mutations are random, something that no biologist would deny. But then what is the thought process that leads you to deduce from that statement that evolution (from the Latin for "unrolling") is itself random?

Thanks for the detailed response!

As I said- I don't believe that all the changes needed to morph a single cell into a human being ..could be blundered upon by chance, and this is exactly what ToE proposes

Again survival of the fittest goes entirely without saying- nobody is debating that a significantly superior design will out perform an inferior one, and hence survive in greater numbers. That's why we have more surviving and reproductions of Ford Mustangs than Ford Pintos today.

The tricky part is how those significantly superior designs arrive in the first place. i.e. 'arrivial of the fitter' is a far bigger question than merely 'survival of the fittest'

For the car analogy, we know this algorithm works where superior designs are intentionally implemented- not left up to chance. But can they also arrive in sufficient numbers by pure blind chance?! This remains a tricky question

From the same '101' summary on evolution

Mutations are random
and
Mutation is the ultimate source of genetic variation

Yes one could say that God or beings from outer space intervene, but then you are entering something from the outside which itself has to be explained. Perhaps we tend to think that way because we humans are always intervening in other things on our planet. But there is nothing to indicate that we aren't product of the same planet, and then everything else seems to be messing with us as well (for example what we call weeds, pests, pathogens, and not to forget domesticated cats).

That's exactly why the primeval atom was mocked and rejected as the 'Big Bang' for so long, because of the unfashionable apparent implications of such a creation event- this should never deter us from following the evidence where it leads.

If you see 'HELP' written with rocks on a deserted island beach, no evidence of anyone ever being there... the simplest explanation is the most superficial materialistic one at hand- that the waves just happened to wash them up that way. But does that makes this the most likely explanation? why not?


In life, how this came about is what Darwin called the natural selection. He developed it without even knowing of mutation, except as the appearance of changes so obvious that they were called "monstrosities" at the time. Most changes taking place in populations of organisms, however, are so gradual and subtle that neither they nor their effects are easily noticed from generation to generation, except to the extent that they give such advantage that organisms carrying the changes will have more children in each generation than those without it, causing carriers to represent a greater and greater percentage of the population. Imagine the acquisition simultaneously of many such changes causing all kinds of divergences in any population. Look at all the kinds of dogs that came from wolves, when their interbreeding was controlled by humans over the course of a mere 15 thousand years or less, or all different varieties of humans since they came out of Africa just some 300 thousand years ago (according to the latest evidence).

It's interesting that you use an intelligently guided process like breeding as evidence for an unguided process.. But other than that, dog breeding is an excellent example of limited adaptation v macro evolution. After all this time, dogs are still dogs, and suffer extreme health problems when we try to push their body plan's capacity for adaptation beyond it's limits.

On top of that, 'dog from wolves' was one of many intuitive assumptions made in the Victorian age, based on superficial similarities, namely a leg at each corner and teeth at one end!

DNA evidence is revealing a different story, that superficial similarities are just that, they do not prove that one came from the other- far less through accidental changes

Dogs are not Domesticated Wolves | Accumulating Glitches | Learn Science at Scitable


And regarding proof, science does not "prove" things, because proof would require full knowledge of all variables involved, which is impossible.

we agree here, but you'd need to explain that to many Darwinists here who claim utter undeniable proof, - also this guy

“Evolution is a fact. Beyond reasonable doubt, beyond serious doubt, beyond sane, informed, intelligent doubt, beyond doubt evolution is a fact." Dawkins

Science is a procedure for making and testing assumptions or hypotheses or stories we have of the world, and eventually bringing basic premises under question. It is what humans and even other animals and plants have done through time, with the primary difference being that science has developed a systematization of the testing and of the unifying of the many results of this testing within increasingly unified frameworks of understanding, which themselves are constantly considered, questioned and tested. And so on.

Agree again, I have no problem with science; the method- we all know and love, where we must reject the temptation to call any conclusion 'undeniable' even where as intuitively 'immutable' as classical physics once was. the simplest explanation is usually the most tempting one, but reality does not seem to obey our wishes so far!

But science; the institutionalized academic/political consensus... is another animal entirely- one which is often diametrically opposed to those core scientific principles, as in the Dawkins quote above.
 
This is not my answer to your well-considered post, except to say that your initial two points -- that a single cell could not have morphed into a human being and that this could not have been blundered upon by chance are well taken and true, but neither are proposed by natural selection. (I prefer Darwin's term "natural selection," which addresses the development of species. Evolution, or unfolding, in my mind only occurs in relationship to everything else, and thus in its most immediate form is planetary. In the broadest sense it encompasses the universe. These two, natural selection and evolution consist two entirely different levels of organization, of which the latter can't be understood in terms of the former. Can get into that later too.)

Anyway, I'll work on my full response when I have time. I'll say that, though I can't fault Dawkins for lack of certainty, I'm not a particular admirer of him. I'm more taken by people like the philsoopher and theologian Alfred Whitehead and those influenced by him, including the ecologist J. Stan Rowe (ecospherics.net), the many people in the orbit of the Land Institute in Salina, Kansas, including Wes Jackson who, following Whitehead, says that if humans have a strong suit, it is their ignorance; the evolutionary microbiologist and planetary scientist Lynn Margulus and her ilk, etc. Although I measure nowhere on the scale of these people, I am impressed by their humility and expansiveness.
 
Top