There is order and there is design in the world around us. It did not get that way by itself. If there is no Designer or Creator, then how did the world get to be the way it is?
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CF has always been a site that welcomes people from different backgrounds and beliefs to participate in discussion and even debate. That is the nature of its ministry. In view of recent events emotions are running very high. We need to remind people of some basic principles in debating on this site. We need to be civil when we express differences in opinion. No personal attacks. Avoid you, your statements. Don't characterize an entire political party with comparisons to Fascism or Communism or other extreme movements that committed atrocities. CF is not the place for broad brush or blanket statements about groups and political parties. Put the broad brushes and blankets away when you come to CF, better yet, put them in the incinerator. Debate had no place for them. We need to remember that people that commit acts of violence represent themselves or a small extreme faction.
Order and Design
- Thread starter JohnR7
- Start date
Jet Black said:
By design I mean mostly Symmetry but also: Porportion, Balance, Equilibrium, Harmony, Aesthetic arrangement, as in a design, marked by proper distribution of elements.
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Jet Black said:
Oh come on, you have never looked at a sea shell and seen that there is a design on the surface of it. What about your body, two arms, two legs, that is a design. If you were nothing but a glob, then maybe that would not be a design. How about a leaf on a tree, that is a design, that is how you can tell one tree from another tree, just look at the shape and the general design of the leaf.
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J
Jet Black
Guest
it's a pattern, that doesn't make it a design* though.
*I am taking design to mean designed by a designer.
*I am taking design to mean designed by a designer.
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Jet Black said:
That would be a logical conclusion, that there was a Designer, because there is a "pattern" or a design to the world we live in.
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lucaspa
Legend
JohnR7 said:
We've done this before just 6 days ago. http://www.christianforums.com/showthread.php?t=43471
Natural (Darwinian) selection is an algorithmic process to get design. It takes Order and makes Design.
What you are saying is a repeat of the philosophy pre-1859. It is a top-down system (like an upside-down pyramid) where you have an intellligent entity (Creator) at the top, then intelligence depending on that, then Design the next level, and then Order, and then Chaos.
Darwin's discovery of natural selection cut that pyramid loose from Creator and let it stand on it's own. Order gives rise to Design through natural selection and Design gives rise to intelligence, also thru natural selection. Chaos gives rise to Order by the self-organizing properties of matter and energy under the laws of physics and chemistry.
I had a thread "Design by Darwinian Selection" at http://www.christianforums.com/showthread.php?t=26491. I've bumped it up.
The answer to your question is that biological organisms got their designs by natural selection. The physical universe got to be the way it is thru the processes of physics and chemistry. There is no room for a "Designer" to manufacture entities in their present form.
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Nathan Poe
Well-Known Member
JohnR7 said:
Snowflakes have all of these things. Does God craft each and every single one before he lets it fall?
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Mechanical Bliss
Secrecy and accountability cannot co-exist.
In mineralogy, crystals are classified according to their varying degrees of symmetry. Crystals are symmetric, but they form as a melt cools, not because they are designed.
Similarly there is the snowflake example above.
Similarly there is the snowflake example above.
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There is no evidence of any designer or creator, patterns occur naturally, such as in snowflakes or crystals.
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Nathan Poe said:
When it is cold enough than the ice will crystalize. The crystal is a part of the creation. Somehow it is a little hard for me to grasp the concept that crystalized ice is just there or that it created itself. I can not grasp the concept that there was no creator for the world we live in.
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lucaspa said:
Ok, can you show me how what you call natural selection created a design? I used the example of shells, but we could use snow flakes or crystals if you want.
Where did physics, chemistry, or the natural laws come from?
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Mechanical Bliss
Secrecy and accountability cannot co-exist.
JohnR7 said:
So it's hard for you to grasp that water evaporates and combines with dust particles as clouds in the atmosphere and then freezes at very low temperatures in crystal shapes according to the molecular structure of water and falls back to the ground as ice?
Crystallized ice "creates" itself quite frequently, especially in the winter months. That is quite clear.
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lucaspa
Legend
JohnR7 said:
Shells would do fine. After all, I did limit natural selection to designing biological organisms, because it doesn't apply to snowflakes.
I haven't had a chance to research the data behind the shells yet, so let me use two examples where the data is more complete.
1. "Intense matural selection in a population of Darwin's finches in the Galapagos" by Boag, PT and Grant, PR appeared in Science vol 214 pp 82-85, 1981. This study tracked the effects of drought on finches on Daphne Major. During the drought plants with small seeds died for lack of water. The plants that were left had large seeds. Only the design of a large bill on a bird will crack the large seeds. Therefore, over the course of drought (which lasted several years), natural selection designed larger bills such that the birds alive at the end of the drought were both statistically significantly larger than the pre-drought population and had larger bills. This is directly related to changes in the food supply during the drought.
2. Toxic Tailings and Tolerant Grass by RE Cook in Natural History, vol 90(3): 28-38, 1981 This one discusses selection pressure of grasses growing on mine tailings that are rich in toxic heavy metals. Normal grass won't grow on these tailings. Natural selection designed a species of grass with enzymes capable of working in the presence of heavy metals.
In the field of human use of Darwinian selection, we have
3. 2. AI Samuel, Some studies on machine learning using the game of checkers. IBM Journal of Research Development, 3: 211-219, 1964. Reprinted in EA Feigenbaum and J Feldman, Computers and Thought, McGraw-Hill, New York, 1964 pp 71-105. In this one Samuel random computer codes with random modification of the code and the inheritance of code that was present when the program won checkers games. Then the program played checkers. At first it lost, but eventually it won a game. As more iterations passed the program won more and more. Eventually the program, designed by Darwinian selection, got so good that it beat the human checkers champ. The proof that Samuel didn't design the program is that, when he finally looked at the program after it was all done, found major stretches of code that he couldn't figure out.
4. 20. Breaker RR, Joyce GF.A DNA enzyme that cleaves RNA. Chem Biol 1994 Dec;1(4):223-9 Joyce and Breaker wanted a DNA that would also act as an enzyme. Although RNA can do this, there is no known DNA that will do this and they didn't have a clue how DNA could be made into an enzyme. So they started with 50 random DNA molecules and tested them for enzymatic activity. They selected 10 that had 0.00001% activity -- hardly enough to measure. The DNA molecules then went through 500 generations of random modification and selection, with only the modifications having the most enzymatic activity in each generation being kept. By the end of the sequence, there were 5 DNA molecules that had very high enzymatic activity -- higher than RNA molecules and almost as high as protein enzymes. Only at that point did Breaker and Joyce analyze the DNA molecules to see what their structure and base sequence was. A brand new molecule -- a DNAzyme -- uncreated by God or human but created by natural selection.
The May 2003 Scientific American has a story on electronic devices designed by Darwinian selection that are getting patents.
You can also find my thread "evolution of feathers" to see how natural selection designed feathers.
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