Awkward Fingers
Omphaloskeptic
Very well, then what is the falsifiable test for ID then, it the empirical evidence?
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Why aren't the creationists being charged?
- Thread starter Bunyip
- Start date
Very well, then what is the falsifiable test for ID then, it the empirical evidence?
A father and his son walking in the woods come upon a small house, with artful designs on the shutters. But the house is in disrepair, without a front door, and the windows have no glass. The young son asks, "who made this house, Daddy?"
"Why, no one did, Son. It is the natural outcome of fundamental laws of nature."
"No, Daddy, someone built this house" the boy replied. They walked on together, in silence. (Hebrews 13:4)
And yes, the Bible is a book, completed some 2,000 years ago. Yet, what a book!
The world's all-time best seller, translated in more languages than any other, a book that has changed the thinking and lives of millions for the better. The object of unceasing attacks, both physical and intellectual, the Bible survives and thrives as what I believe it truly is, God's Word. History has proven the truth of Isaiah 40:7,8: "Surely the people are but green grass. The green grass dries up, The blossom withers, But the word of our God endures forever.
I wonder whether the child would be any more accepting of the answer if the father said "yes, son - it was built by someone who is his own father."
Actually, I believe the front runner based on copies printed is still Mao's Little Red Book. If you're counting only books actually sold, then there are other candidates for all-time best seller (Don Quixote and a Chinese dictionary are two front runners, apparently) and you'd have to deduct all the copies of the Bible that are given away for free... and there are a lot of those. I know I didn't pay for either of my two Bibles... or my Book of Mormon. I did pay for my Qur'an.
Dean Kenyon? Really? :sarcastic
If the air conditioning of that house had a pipe going 200 miles away to get back in the house, then the question that the father should have asked is: what kind of incompetent designer designed that?
Yes. Hope springs eternal, as it seems.
With the possible exception of North Europe, where the word of God is practically extinct.
Ciao
- viole
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Here's the quote in context:
Thoughts in a Haystack: Bill Gates Quote Mined
IOW, his meaning was something like "in high school, I thought biology was boring, but now I realize that there are things in biology that would have appealed to me."
That's all. Nothing about DNA needing a "programmer".
Ouroboros
Coincidentia oppositorum
Also, more complex does not equate more designed. More complex can also mean more mess, more chaos, more non-design. Good design is efficient, not messy.
I used to program in BASIC. It was famous for producing spaghetti code. Spaghetti code programs tended to be very complex, but less maintainable. To fix one thing usually caused problems somewhere else. A complete mess. So complexity isn't a good thing in design.
I used to program in BASIC. It was famous for producing spaghetti code. Spaghetti code programs tended to be very complex, but less maintainable. To fix one thing usually caused problems somewhere else. A complete mess. So complexity isn't a good thing in design.
So your argument against intelligent design is software designs itself
Show one example of software being created without human intelligence being involved
Werner Gitt professor of information systems
"The basic flaw of evolution is the origin of the information in living beings. It has never been shown that a coding system and semantic information could originate by itself. The information theorems predict this will never be possible"
A purely material origin of life is thus ruled out.
The amount of information in human DNA is roughly equivalent to 12 sets of the Encyclopedia Britannica all placed in proper sequence as a genetic instruction manual.
Quite an achievement for a pile of dead lifeless dirt
Caves aren't built by people, and they serve as good shelter.
I personally like The Silmarillion better.
Woopie. You know what was also a best seller? Twilight.
Or for the worse.
The same could be said for pretty much any religious book.
Something that touches the heart of a culture will never die so long as that culture exists.
Bill Gates, founder of Microsoft, provider of pretty much the worst software on the market.
The best software has many intelligences behind it, working in tandem with each other, constantly correcting each other, and constantly updating the software to make it keep up with hardware(which software programmers have no hand in building, yet are basically non-existent without).
Therefore, many Gods.
Except that the actual origin of life as we know it has nothing to do with evolution. A house might have been built by human hands, but the natural forces of wind, rain, snow, and heat can easily change its properties. Furthermore, my house is this year 100 years old. It has at least one room that was only added a few decades ago by the previous owner, new windows put in by my my mom, several changes in room function from owner to owner and even since I was born (my parents bought this house while my mom was some months pregnant with me), and the laundry machines are at the complete opposite end of the house from when they were first installed. Intelligence-guided evolution to keep up with changing times, owners, and circumstances, without which this house would have ceased to exist long ago.
Besides, as has been pointed out, complex design is BAD design. Therefore, if the complexity of life indicates intelligent design, then the complexity indicates a BAD designer. "A designer knows he has achieved perfection, not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away." -Antoine de Saint-Exupery
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Besides, as has been pointed out, complex design is BAD design. Therefore, if the complexity of life indicates intelligent design, then the complexity indicates a BAD designer. "A designer knows he has achieved perfection, not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away." -Antoine de Saint-Exupery[/QUOTE]
Its only a bad design if it fails to accomplish the purpose for which it was created
Its only a bad design if it fails to accomplish the purpose for which it was created
Speaking as a designer, that's incorrect. It's also bad design if it succeeds but in a very roundabout way, is highly inefficient, has several points of failure, and is effectively unmaintainable(four reasons why Microsoft software is so terrible).
Have you ever done computer programming yourself?
Ouroboros
Coincidentia oppositorum
There are software that can create software automatically. The most curious kind of software is the one that uses evolutionary algorithms (or genetic algorithms) that immitate the principles of how evolution works to create software solutions. It has been used since the late 80's in real production in many different applications.
Now, you might say, "intelligent humans created that evolutionary algorithm software," which is true. But that would suggest... that God can do the same thing. This means, a smart and intelligent God (about the same intelligence as a modern programmer) could create a world that produces life by using evolutionary/genetic algorithms. It's folly to argue that God can't do it or didn't do it just because some old ancient books seems to claim that he didn't. The evidence in nature points strongly to that evolution is true. We know that evolutionary algorithms works (quite well in fact and sometimes a lot better than "thought out" algorithms), so there is no reason to fight against the obvious truth.
Well, Gitt is wrongly equivocating information and physics/chemistry. How the world works is how the world works. Let's say God created the world. Then he created the world the way he created it, and the world works the way God made it to work. Now, we can see all the chemical reactions and how it works. So it's quite silly to argue that chemical reactions can't happen because there's this magical term "information" that doesn't fit to it. In fact, the world is not made out of peanut butter either, so therefor it must not be peanut butter.
Ok. Wikipedia contains about 27 billion characters. The human DNA consist of some 30 billion bps. A basepair can only be two different combinations (like one bit), while a character is represented in at least 8 bits (mostly 16 bits now in unicode). So, Wikipedia is about 8 to 16 times larger than the human DNA...
Or put it this way, 30 billion bp can be represented in 30 billion bits. That's 3.75 billion bytes. One billion bytes is one gigabyte. So, human DNA can be stored in 3.75 GB. That's the size of a single-side DVD. Your cellphone can at least store 3-4 times more than that.
On top of that, only some 10% (I think it is) of the DNA is coding. Most of it is not. Most of the rest of the DNA only serves as some kind of "hidden" reserve or structural help, but not to produce proteins. Essentially, it's not as impressive when you start to compare to modern technology.
The quote you used from Bill Gates I suspect is 20 years old (or more). Technology has advanced several lightyears since.
It's not dirt according to biology. The "dirt" thing comes from the Bible. Humans are created by dust according to Genesis. Biology doesn't say that. So perhaps you need to get your analogies right first?
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Ouroboros
Coincidentia oppositorum
There are literally thousands or more genes in our DNA that don't work.
We share 22 unique endogenous retroviral genes with the chimpanzees. One, very peculiar one has to do with c-vitamin synthesis. Humans (and chimps) have to eat fruit to get C. All other animals (except 3 other species for other genetic reasons) have to consume things with C vitamin to get it. Our gene is malfunctioning because of the ERV. And we have the exact same modification ("mis-spelling" of gene) that the chimps have. The only way to get that is to share mom and dad at some point. We both come from a common donor that had this malfunction. How is that for a design that accomplish it's purpose?
Looncall
Well-Known Member
Argumentum ad crackpotum (does anyone know a good latin word for crackpot?).
So you found some kook who agreed with you. So what?
It is well known how new genes can arise.
The "That's complex, therefore god(s)." argument is merely pathetic.
I wonder whether the child would be any more accepting of the answer if the father said "yes, son - it was built by someone who is his own father."
Actually, I believe the front runner based on copies printed is still Mao's Little Red Book. If you're counting only books actually sold, then there are other candidates for all-time best seller (Don Quixote and a Chinese dictionary are two front runners, apparently) and you'd have to deduct all the copies of the Bible that are given away for free... and there are a lot of those. I know I didn't pay for either of my two Bibles... or my Book of Mormon. I did pay for my Qur'an.
Not even close. If you were Chinese and living in China during Mao's rule, you had better have your copy of his little red book.
Various The Holy Bible c. 1451-55 More than 6 Billion
Mao Tse-Tung Quotations from Chairman Mao 1966 900,000,000
Noah Webster The American Spelling Book 1783 Up to 100,000,000
Mark C. Young Guiness Book of World Records 1955 More than 90,000,000
World Almanac Editors World Almanac 1868 73,500,000
William Holmes McGuffey The McGuffey Readers 1836 60,000,000
Benjamin Spock The Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care 1946 More than 50,000,000
8
Elbert Hubbard A Message to Garcia 1899 More than 40,000,000
9
Charles Monroe Sheldon In His Steps, What Would Jesus Do? 1896 More than 30.000,000
10
Jacqueline Susann Valley of the Dolls 1966 More than 30,000,000
Source: http://home.comcast.net/~antaylor1/bestsellingbooks.html
So, is it your position that the Windows operating system needed an intelligent designer and programmer, but the vastly more complex and superior programming in DNA did not? That is the real import behind Mr. Gate's statement, IMO. Knowledge stored in any encoded way, whether written words, Morse code, C++, or DNA demands an intelligent source.
I also believe evolutionists charge of quote-mining is simply a ploy to keep inconvenient facts (to evolution) from being distributed.
Surely you are not comparing the elegant design of DNA to the spaghetti code produced by human programmers. And even spaghetti code requires an intelligent designer. Regarding the program or genome to produce a human, It is about three billion letters, or nucleotides (bases), long. If it were transcribed onto paper, the book would fill 200 volumes the size of a 1,000-page telephone book, according to the Human Genome Project. Yet, DNA is so efficiently packaged that it is estimated one gram of DNA has the storage capacity of a trillion compact discs (CDs). The evidence for an intelligent Designer grows with increasing scientific discoveries, IMO.