Originally Posted by OrdinaryClay 
I was referring to the paragraph containing the sentence you quoted.
Irrelevant. As I said, you referred to the wrong paragraph.
Then you were very unclear in identifying the paragraph you were referring to. We were speaking of the syllogism in the OP, specifically the 2nd premise, and I took that syllogism as a whole to be the three sentences you intended to refer to. If it was not, what paragraph were you referring to?
You have evidence that evolution modified the DNA in the prokaryote cell. You don't have evidence evolution produced the initial machine.
Right, and I do wish people would remember that evolution is always about modification. It is a process of modifying existing species that generates new species; of modifying existing structures (such as a jaw bone) to produce new structures (such as ear bones). The theory of evolution does not cover the origins of life or any pre-biotic process.
The origin of life from non-living matter may also have involved evolutionary mechanisms, but we don't have a clear theory of abiogenesis yet and there are many open questions. If you want to lodge intelligent design there, fine, but that is really no more than a stop-gap position until the mechanisms of the origin of life are understood more fully.
Yes, I know all about never say never. Any hypothesis only holds as long the evidence supports it. You are being evasive, and not answering my question directly. Please give evidence evolution produced the DNA in the prokaryote cell.
Do you mean how was the DNA in the cell produced or did evolution put DNA into the cell?
In the first case, DNA was produced by chemistry, not by biology, and I always hated chemistry so I can't answer how DNA came to be. But since DNA is a self-replicating molecule, then very likely evolution was involved in placing DNA into early prokaryote cells. They would have inherited it from their pre-biotic ancestors---some of the forms of replicators that existed between free molecules and full-fledged cells.
I think what you are asking is probably "how did the first prokaryote cell come to be?" And as we do not yet have a complete theory of abiogenesis, the current answer is we don't know. But "we don't know" is a more honest answer than "A miracle happened here."
You are side stepping. Nothing more. The material that carries the signal is electromagnetic waves. These can be studied with complete abandon as to how they were produced. In fact, the waves themselves have no memory of how or what produced them. All they have is modulation and the natural characteristics of the waves. The carrier of the intelligence and its premodified position have nothing at all to do with the agent that modifies it.
Well at least we have got agreement that the agent has to modify the medium to make it carry information. And since ID agrees that we do not study the agent directly--we study the design in the medium--that means detecting design means detecting the modifications in the medium and ascertaining how they were caused.
Christian theology says no such thing. Christian theology completely supports natural and special revelation as distinct. God is the creator of the universe. That is completely separate from how He acts within the universe. He intervenes as evidenced by special revelation. These interventions are planned and designed as per God's intelligence.
You jumped to an irrelevant distinction. I was speaking about nature, which is general revelation. I wasn't saying there is no special revelation. But special revelation has a different origin and a different function that is irrelevant to the ID propositions.
Special revelation refers to that given to the prophets directly from God and eventually recorded in the scriptures. Special revelation is given to reveal what nature cannot reveal about God. Nature reveals God's power, majesty, glory , etc. but not his choice of Abraham as father of the Israelites, or of Moses to led them out of slavery, of David as their model king, or of his plan to send his Son into the world to redeem us from our sins. These things have to come by God himself, for nature as such does not reveal them: hence special revelation.
The created world itself, what we call nature, is general revelation and there is nothing in Christian theology that justifies divvying up nature into what was and was not produced by intelligence, because it all was.
Which is proof of my point that the signs of intelligence are independent from what produced it. The second modifier could have been intelligent and not an animal. Therefore you can study the signs of intelligence independently and distinctly from how they were produced. Saying that the study of a signal apart form its source is not science is ludicrous.
I don't think so. In the first place you are saying the animal is not intelligent, and that is begging a huge question right there. All we know is that it is not human. In the second place, even if we accept that the animal is not intelligent, note that we have ruled out intelligence as the originator of the markings, because it is evident it was made by an animal (i.e. because we know what the agent is and how it produced the marks on the bones).
The study of a signal is not abstract. It is the study of a material phenomenon. Note I am not saying information is material. Information is transferable from one material to another and so transcends materiality. But detectable information, a signal, is material and the only way we know it is not produced by some natural agent, (like the animal) is by knowing what we can expect to be produced by natural agents. And that involves knowing the mechanisms used by natural agents.
So we identify some markings on a bone as produced by a natural agent (a predatory animal) because we know how teeth mark bones. We identify others as produced by humans, because we know both how human made tools mark bones and that such marks do not occur in nature apart from human activity. In either case we are looking to how the modification was produced.
You're playing with the hidden premise that the justice system only has humans as possible sources of intelligence. Which is in essence the problem with your position. A materialistic evolutionist excludes by definition any possible miraculous intervention by God. As a Christian I do not exclude the possibility of God's miraculous intervention in anything. If there is evidence for it I accept it. If there is not I do not.
Well, we are in the Christians only section and you will see that I have a Christian faith icon by my name. So we can leave materialistic evolution out of the picture. I do not exclude the possibility of God's miraculous intervention in anything either--including the process of evolution. If there is evidence for it I accept it. But there is no evidence for the miracles proposed by ID. They do not appear to be necessary either scientifically or theologically. They do not perform any duty of special revelation. They seem to have been invented out of thin air by people who need an extra crutch of miraculous intervention to sustain their faith that nature is indeed God's creation.
It certainly can. A SETI signal can be studied with out knowing anything at all about what instrument or how an ET intelligence produced it.
But it cannot be identified as a signal from an intelligent agent unless one can show that it was manipulated. One need not have precise knowledge of the instrument used, and need not know the agent at all, but one needs to distinguish a modified signal from a non-modified signal. And that distinction has to be in the material form of the signal itself. One needs to be able to cite the empirical differences between a modified and a natural signal and be able to say "no known natural process produces these modifications". And even then, one can simply be encountering something not met before in nature, not intelligence.
Wrong. ID excludes incidents of necessity and chance because the evidence shows that many things in nature are caused by them.
Another confirmation that ID is looking for miracles; ID proponents can't be satisfied with nature itself revealing God. No, they demand that God produce miracles for them because creation is not a good enough witness on its own. Well, St. Paul said it was a sufficient witness on its own, and I'll stick with that.
Undirected processes can not, by definition, design anything.
Begging the question of whether natural processes are undirected.
Don't confuse "random" with "undirected".
No biologist in their right mind would claim that there is any kind of plan or look ahead when an organism evolves. Each step is done with zero consideration of the next step. You are throwing the word design around for dramatic effect with no substance.
No biologist in their right mind would claim that genes have foresight or that natural selection plans for the future. And no biologist in their right mind would claim that God cannot foreknow what evolution will bring forth and even plan for evolution to follow a certain course. No Christian biologist would reject the possibility that God planted a certain mutation in a certain genome for future use. (They might reject that God actually did so, but not the possibility that he could if he chose to.)
It is simply impossible for science to decree that no divine plan guides evolution. All science can do is note that genes don't and that if God does, they have not found a way to detect how God does. If God plans evolution, God appears to do so through nature, not by manipulating nature out of its course. Nature is what God does.
And finally, no biologist in their right mind would deny that natural selection produces exquisite adaptations of species to ecology such that they appear to be designed for that ecological niche. We see designs everywhere in nature; but we have to study them to find the means by which nature produces them. In biology, that means is primarily evolution.
No, ID recognizes that intelligence is detectable without knowledge of how the effect was produced.
Intelligence is not detectable without knowledge of the material in which it is produced and the means nature has to manipulate that material, for these have to be ruled out before one can conclude a miracle has occurred. Since in biology, nature has means of producing replicas of intelligent design, it is not a simple matter of saying "this looks like a design" and assuming that no natural means produced it.
ID proponents readily admit they are Christians and they believe God is the designer, and that He uses miracles to perform actions.
How was Jesus raised from the dead?
By a miracle. And in this case, we have ample reason to hold that it must be a miracle for we know of no natural process that brings a person back to life.
But ID proposes miracles where we do have a natural process to produce the designs it calls on as evidence of miracles. This is a superfluity of miracles without testimony, necessity or theological purpose. Why invent unnecessary miracles?
This is a fallacious form of reasoning called stealing the concept. You are redefining what design means.
No, ID proponents did that by decreeing that design is a matter of how it got there, not just that it is present. Yet, ironically, it also insists we can establish that a design must have been produced by an intelligent agent even if we have no idea how the intelligent agent produced it. Only we do know, somehow, that the intelligent agent did not use an evolutionary process.
Very confused thinking.
Why do you deny the possibility of miracles?
I don't.
When there is sufficient reason to believe a miracle has occurred, I accept that. ID has not given me sufficient reason to jump to miracles as an explanation of biological designs when evolution seems quite capable of producing the same effects.
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