Intelligent Design isn’t intelligent

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FrumiousBandersnatch

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So, you are saying that the design of animals, in large intelligent is no intelligent because a few 'defects'.
I think the argument, in general, is that living things are constructed and operate in many ways suboptimally, and in just the kind of ways that one would expect from a trial & error cumulative selection process like evolution, but not as one might expect if a competent designer had fashioned them de-novo.
 
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Erik Nelson

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Two gaping holes in that argument:
1. If God just magically poofed the first living things into existence, as Darwin assumed, evolution would act and look exactly the way it does now.

2. The Philip Johnson objective; "Gee, I can't figure out how it happened, and I'm a really smart lawyer, so it must be impossible", is merely argument from ignorance.

There's an important clue in the fact that the first organelle absolutely essential for cellular life is the simplest organelle in structure and chemical makeup. And yet, it's chemically self-organizing and spontaneously assembles into a functional organelle.

So the argument isn't taken very seriously by anyone with any familiarity with biology and biochemistry. Probably seems like an impossible thing to some incurious lawyers, though.
Did you listen to the podcast?
 
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The Barbarian

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Did you listen to the podcast?

Same answer I give to "did you look at the Amway video?" Tell me what you think the best argument might be. If you can't understand it well enough to do that, what makes you think it's worth playing?

But you might want to tell me what your explanation is for cell membranes being so chemically simple and self-organizing.
 
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The Barbarian

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Nature can teach you a thing or two about design, so good that is not easy to understand, look at us people, we think, have intelligence, what is more intelligent, what was capable of making intelligence, or the intelligent part?? eh??

So evolution works better than design. That was known a long time ago. Engineers are using evolutionary processes today, for problems that are too complex for design.
 
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OldWiseGuy

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I think the argument, in general, is that living things are constructed and operate in many ways suboptimally, and in just the kind of ways that one would expect from a trial & error cumulative selection process like evolution, but not as one might expect if a competent designer had fashioned them de-novo.

Or we were designed to function at this level and no higher.

Human 'evolution' is certainly a mockery of the 'evolution' of most if not all other species, and doubly so as we actually believe it.
 
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FrumiousBandersnatch

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Or we were designed to function at this level and no higher.
Sure; if you accept an entity that can do anything, any amount of special pleading is acceptable, including making all creatures exactly the same as if they had evolved. You could equally convincingly say, "It's magic"...

Human 'evolution' is certainly a mockery of the 'evolution' of most if not all other species, and doubly so as we actually believe it.
Sorry, I don't know what you mean by that.
 
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Silmarien

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It's a problem if you assume that God decided to get even with all living things because He was upset that man had sinned. It's not a problem if you realize the "death" and suffering He told Adam he would experience was a spiritual death and suffering because he was man. Notice the pains God talks about are because we are human, not something other living things endure.

I'm not sure what you mean here. Do non-human living things not suffer, or does their suffering not matter? How do we understand divine providence in light of the fact that life has been brought into existence through means of a process that requires untold waste and suffering?

"Atheistic evolution" is a sort of boogeyman. It doesn't really exist, but it's used to scare children. You might as well speak of "atheistic gravity."

There are absolutely dogmatic materialists working in evolutionary biology, and some of them are simultaneously atheistic polemicists. Richard Dawkins, Jerry Coyne, and PZ Myers come to mind, and they certainly like to sell their metaphysics as part and parcel to their science.

(Though I don't have any problem speaking of atheistic physics and atheistic chemistry as well, since I've seen people indisciminately mix science and metaphysics there also.)

I notice that those who make that argument usually eat meat produced in conditions vastly worse than we see in nature. So I'm less inclined to take the argument seriously.

I'm not sure why you replied to a six month old post to say that you aren't inclined to take the argument seriously. I am not a Creationist. I accept evolution, and my concern lies with Christianity. I find it attractive, but I am not sure whether its vindication of the poor and downtrodden is compatible with the way evolutionary processes weed the weak out. I know that cooperation is an important aspect in evolution as well, but the ugly side of things still remains, and it's frustrating if Christians can't be bothered to take the problem seriously enough to actually address it.
 
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NBB

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So evolution works better than design. That was known a long time ago. Engineers are using evolutionary processes today, for problems that are too complex for design.

i don't think that is true, make a computer make an airplane from zero without programming it to do so, that is basically evolution, just random change and death from zero, no help whatsoever, if simulated, that is a short code to program, and not helpful at all, i find hard to believe that evolution just changing some genes randomly could build humans when humans with great and effort and intelligence can't make something remotely close to humans.
 
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Erik Nelson

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Why necro a random thread with this spam?
why start a new thread reinventing the same wheel?

aren't all of the previous posts valuable and insightful for discussion?

if CF posts have nothing good to say,

why keep them on the forum in the search results at all?
 
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Erik Nelson

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Same answer I give to "did you look at the Amway video?" Tell me what you think the best argument might be. If you can't understand it well enough to do that, what makes you think it's worth playing?

But you might want to tell me what your explanation is for cell membranes being so chemically simple and self-organizing.
how do you get DOUBLE membranes to form around all the necessary genes and proteins? And to grow and divide in concert with their functioning

you are claiming the right to sidestep informed debate and experts who disagree with you

if you can neatly dodge expert opinion you don't like, why can't anyone else ignore your (non?) expert opinion?
 
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The Barbarian

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Barbarian suggests:
Same answer I give to "did you look at the Amway video?" Tell me what you think the best argument might be. If you can't understand it well enough to do that, what makes you think it's worth playing?

But you might want to tell me what your explanation is for cell membranes being so chemically simple and self-organizing.

how do you get DOUBLE membranes to form

Bilayers form spontaneously. It's just the nature of phospholipids.

around all the necessary genes and proteins?

They don't. What gave you that idea?

And to grow and divide in concert with their functioning

You'll have to be a little more specific. On what?

you are claiming the right to sidestep informed debate and experts who disagree with you

So far, you haven't presented any. What have you got? And "go look at a video" is not a debate. Again, if you don't know enough to present your argument, how do you know it's right? And how do you know your "expert" knows more than I do?

if you can neatly dodge expert opinion you don't like

You haven't presented any, so far. Let's see what you've got.
 
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The Barbarian

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i don't think that is true,

Doesn't matter.

make a computer make an airplane from zero
Evolution never makes anything from zero.

that is basically evolution, just random change and death from zero,

No, it's not. Maybe it would be helpful for you to learn what it is, before telling us about it.

i find hard to believe that evolution just changing some genes randomly could build humans

Darwin's great discovery was that it isn't random.
 
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Erik Nelson

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Barbarian suggests:
Same answer I give to "did you look at the Amway video?" Tell me what you think the best argument might be. If you can't understand it well enough to do that, what makes you think it's worth playing?

But you might want to tell me what your explanation is for cell membranes being so chemically simple and self-organizing.



Bilayers form spontaneously. It's just the nature of phospholipids.



They don't. What gave you that idea?



You'll have to be a little more specific. On what?



So far, you haven't presented any. What have you got? And "go look at a video" is not a debate. Again, if you don't know enough to present your argument, how do you know it's right? And how do you know your "expert" knows more than I do?



You haven't presented any, so far. Let's see what you've got.
The term is irreducible complexity. Phospholipids form bilayers let's except time. Where do the phospholipids come from?

Irreducible complexity. You have to have all of the parts all of the subsystems pre assembled before. The Organism can function. You need protein and jeans 2 code 4 enzymes that make phospholipids. But you can't have those genes and proteins nicely sheltered in the phospholipids to work away manufacturing phospholipids Before they make the phospholipids.

Chicken and the egg. Natural selection may be able to work on fully functioning single celled organisms.

But the claim of irreducible complexity is that evolution can't manufacture all of the separate subsystems separately because there would be no survival value, or survival survivability in the separate subsystems separately.

The claim is you get down to a level where the jump from organic chemistry 2 living bio chemistry is a quantum leap.

According to Lee Strobel and J Warner Wallace and John Lennox and other such authors. Even the best minds in the field. The Nobel Prize winning qemists in biochemists have no idea how to surmount that quantum leap from organic chemistry 2 fully living biochemistry.
 
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OldWiseGuy

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Sorry, I don't know what you mean by that - I know the phrase but not what you intend by it in this context.

It means that at some point the evolutionary process regarding man took a wrong turn. After millions of years of change we are only able to survive by destroying the planet and ourselves. It seems that evolution has provided a death wish for us.
 
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FrumiousBandersnatch

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It means that at some point the evolutionary process regarding man took a wrong turn. After millions of years of change we are only able to survive by destroying the planet and ourselves. It seems that evolution has provided a death wish for us.
There are no right or wrong turns with evolution - it's just a process; adapt and survive or go extinct. We wouldn't be the first species to change the environment to its own detriment or to wipe out millions of others; e.g. cyanobacteria. But we are the first to recognise that and to have the potential to avoid it.
 
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