To atheists: a museum analogy regarding Creationism

[CrystalDragon]

A friend of mine brought this up: saying that the universe and all the life on the Earth arose from randomness without a designer is like saying that when you go into an art museum and see all the paintings, you say "Oh, I don't think people made all these beautiful prices of artwork, I think paint cans just exploded to make them".

How would you respond to this?

 

[pitabread]

I would ask them if they are familiar with the works of Jackson Pollock

 

[Tree of Life]

I would ask them if they are familiar with the works of Jackson Pollock

In the case of a Pollock it is arguably unclear whether or not intelligence was behind the work (assuming one is unfamiliar with Pollock). When you look at the world, do you feel the same way?

 

[AirPo]

A friend of mine brought this up: saying that the universe and all the life on the Earth arose from randomness without a designer is like saying that when you go into an art museum and see all the paintings, you say "Oh, I don't think people made all these beautiful prices of artwork, I think paint cans just exploded to make them".

How would you respond to this?

That it is a really bad analogy.

 

[And-U-Say]

A friend of mine brought this up: saying that the universe and all the life on the Earth arose from randomness without a designer is like saying that when you go into an art museum and see all the paintings, you say "Oh, I don't think people made all these beautiful prices of artwork, I think paint cans just exploded to make them".

How would you respond to this?

This is easy. It is like saying that when you see a snowfall and look (under a microscope) at the wonder and beauty of each snowflake, that there must be an army of angels "painting" the billions of snowflakes in each snowfall. All carefully done so they are all beautiful and unique.

What? You don't believe this? Of course you don't, because it is an idiotic concept. Snowflakes form naturally as a consequence of the physical properties of water and the winter environment. They are not designed, they have the appearance of being designed.

The universe and life on earth are the same thing. They are natural consequences of the properties of matter and the environment. No design. No information. Just matter doing what it does.

There, that wasn't so hard!

 

[pitabread]

The fundamental issue with the analogy is if the entire universe is the result of design, then what are you comparing it to?

We can compare things that are human designed with non-designed (i.e natural objects) precisely because we know natural objects aren't the result of human design.

But when comparing the entire universe we only have the one; we don't have multiple universes for comparison.

 

[Halbhh]

A friend of mine brought this up: saying that the universe and all the life on the Earth arose from randomness without a designer is like saying that when you go into an art museum and see all the paintings, you say "Oh, I don't think people made all these beautiful prices of artwork, I think paint cans just exploded to make them".

How would you respond to this?

The laws of nature -- Physics -- is amazing, elegant, beautiful.

The ultimate design we have been able to find, in all of human experience so far.

His.

His magnificent Universe, with on the order of 100 billion galaxies stretching across tens of billions of light years, and shining through billions of years of time to us here on Earth....

Truly amazing. His design.

Physics.

 

[HitchSlap]

How would you respond to this?

I just smile and say, "that's nice."

 

[HitchSlap]

The laws of nature -- Physics -- is amazing, elegant, beautiful.

The ultimate design we have been able to find, in all of human experience so far.

His.

His magnificent Universe, with on the order of 100 billion galaxies stretching across tens of billions of light years, and shining through billions of years of time to us here on Earth....

Truly amazing. His design.

Physics.

I'm inspired by the mystery of it all.

 

[Halbhh]

I'm inspired by the mystery of it all.

Yes. Einstein had that wonder. He at times referred to it with the phrasing "the music of the spheres" to try to communicate what he was talking about to people. Awe and wonder.

 

[quatona]

A friend of mine brought this up: saying that the universe and all the life on the Earth arose from randomness without a designer is like saying that when you go into an art museum and see all the paintings, you say "Oh, I don't think people made all these beautiful prices of artwork, I think paint cans just exploded to make them".

How would you respond to this?

"No, it isn´t."

 

[Paulos23]

A friend of mine brought this up: saying that the universe and all the life on the Earth arose from randomness without a designer is like saying that when you go into an art museum and see all the paintings, you say "Oh, I don't think people made all these beautiful prices of artwork, I think paint cans just exploded to make them".

How would you respond to this?

How do you know natural thinks are designed? What are you comparing it to?

Which is where this falls down. We can tell what is man-made because we have other examples to compare it to (paintings to paintings, sculpture to sculpture, etc.). We don't have that for something natural.

 

[xianghua]

A friend of mine brought this up: saying that the universe and all the life on the Earth arose from randomness without a designer is like saying that when you go into an art museum and see all the paintings, you say "Oh, I don't think people made all these beautiful prices of artwork, I think paint cans just exploded to make them".

How would you respond to this?

they will claim that the objects in this museum cant reproduce so we cant claim that they evolved by a natural process when a creature can because it able to reproduce. but this claim is false because even if those objects were able to reproduce they will still be evidence for design (and even more impresive because they have a replicating system). so you are actually right.

 

[xianghua]

We don't have that for something natural.

not realy. see here:

The Turn of the Screw: The Bacterial Flagellar Motor - ScienceDirect

More so than other motors, the flagellum resembles a machine designed by a human (Figure 1a).

 

[xianghua]

This is easy. It is like saying that when you see a snowfall and look (under a microscope) at the wonder and beauty of each snowflake, that there must be an army of angels "painting" the billions of snowflakes in each snowfall. All carefully done so they are all beautiful and unique.

What? You don't believe this? Of course you don't, because it is an idiotic concept. Snowflakes form naturally as a consequence of the physical properties of water and the winter environment. They are not designed, they have the appearance of being designed.

The universe and life on earth are the same thing. They are natural consequences of the properties of matter and the environment. No design. No information. Just matter doing what it does.

There, that wasn't so hard!

but a snowflake cant evolve naturally. but since when you have seen a living thing evolving naturlaly from a non-living thing?

 

[Paulos23]

not realy. see here:

The Turn of the Screw: The Bacterial Flagellar Motor - ScienceDirect

More so than other motors, the flagellum resembles a machine designed by a human (Figure 1a).

Just because it looks like a machine that requires a designer doesn't mean that it is. It could be at that scale it was very efficient way to make it move.

Evolution of flagella - Wikipedia

Evolution myths: The bacterial flagellum is irreducibly complex

 

[TBDude65]

A friend of mine brought this up: saying that the universe and all the life on the Earth arose from randomness without a designer is like saying that when you go into an art museum and see all the paintings, you say "Oh, I don't think people made all these beautiful prices of artwork, I think paint cans just exploded to make them".

How would you respond to this?

I'd respond by saying that the analogy is not comparable to the existence of life and/or the universe.

 

[Jimmy D]

not realy. see here:

The Turn of the Screw: The Bacterial Flagellar Motor - ScienceDirect

More so than other motors, the flagellum resembles a machine designed by a human (Figure 1a).

Good grief man, you're like a broken record.

Summary of the evolutionary model for the origin of the flagellum, showing the six major stages and key intermediates. White components have identified or reasonably probable nonflagellar homologs; grey components have either suggested but unsupported homologs, or no specific identified homologs, although ancestral functions can be postulated. The model begins with a passive, somewhat general inner membrane pore (1a) that is converted to a more substrate-specific pore (1b) by binding of proto-FlhA and/or FlhB to FliF. Interaction of an F1F0-ATP synthetase with FlhA/B produces an active transporter, a primitive type III export apparatus (1c). Addition of a secretin which associates with the cytoplasmic ring converts this to a type III secretion system (2). A mutated secretion substrate becomes a secreted adhesin (or alternatively an adhesin is coopted by transposition of the secretion recognition sequence), and a later mutation lets it bind to the outer side of the secretin (3a). Oligomerization of the adhesin produces a pentameric ring, allowing more surface adhesins without blocking other secretion substrates (3b). Polymerization of this ring produces a tube, a primitive type III pilus (4a; in the diagram, a white axial structure is substituted for the individual pilin subunits; all further axial proteins are descended from this common pilin ancestor). Oligomerization of a pilin produces the cap, increasing assembly speed and efficiency (4b). A duplicate pilin that loses its outer domains becomes the proto-rod protein, extending down through the secretin and strengthening pilus attachment by association with the base (4c). Further duplications of the proto-rod, filament, and cap proteins, occurring before and after the origin of the flagellum (6) produce the rest of the axial proteins; these repeated subfunctionalization events are not shown here. The protoflagellum (5a) is produced by cooption of TolQR homologs from a Tol-Pal-like system; perhaps a portion of a TolA homolog bound to FliF to produce proto-FliG. In order to improve rotation, the secretin loses its binding sites to the axial filament, becoming the proto-P-ring, and the role of outer membrane pore is taken over by the secretin’s lipoprotein chaperone ring, which becomes the proto-L-ring (5b). Perfection of the L-ring and addition of the rod cap FlgJ muramidase domain (which removes the necessity of finding a natural gap in the cell wall) results in 5c. Finally, binding of a mutant proto-FliN (probably a CheC receptor) to FliG couples the signal transduction system to the protoflagellum, producing a chemotactic flagellum (6); fusion of proto-FliN and CheC produces FliM. Each stage would obviously be followed by gradual coevolutionary optimization of component interactions. The origin of the flagellum is thus reduced to a series of mutationally plausible steps.

Evolution of the bacterial flagellum





Last year, Pallen and Matzke (2006) presented a discussion of how bacterial flagella may have evolved, based in large part on comparisons of sequences from the various protein components. Many of the proteins that make up a flagellum have homologues that serve non-flagellar functions, strongly suggesting that they were co-opted from pre-existing proteins during the evolution of flagella. (See Matzke’s detailed model of flagellar evolution here and a video based on it here, and Ken Miller talking about flagella here). Specifically, there is ever-mounting evidence that bacterial flagella and the type III secretory system (TTSS) that toxic bacteria use to inject their prey are descended from the same ancestral structure. The fact that the TTSS lacks many of the proteins in flagella but remains functional (for toxin injection rather than locomotion) clearly indicates that not all the parts need to be present for some function to be carried out by the structure.

Genome sequences reduce the complexity of bacterial flagella. « Genomicron

 

[Halbhh]

Few in my way of thinking would believe in God as just a science theory in order to explain how things got to be the way they are, even though some will.

In any case, we learn that's not the way we are told to find Him.

So, even if you discover the interesting situation in fundamental ('high energy') physics right now, with the very odd situation with the Higgs Boson mass, which in turn allows this Universe to be as it is, and also life bearing, instead of quickly collapsing or quickly expanding into entropy death, but that the Higgs is very oddly just right without any good explanation, and the beautiful theory that was suppose to help fix that isn't working out so far....no data to support it where expected, nor again recently after the LHC upgrade.... all of that, even all of that isn't really the reason to believe in a Designer. Not even with physicists surprisingly now using the words 'unnatural' for this situation, and now in speculation about multiverses that will likely never be observable, so that the competing new speculative theories likely can never be supported with observation.....ever..... Still, this situation, even if convincing for a soul or two out there somewhere that understands all the science. It's not really the reason to believe.

Not it.

The reason to believe in God is because if you truly seek Him with all of your heart, you can find Him.

And learn of the One Whom He sent to us to teach us and save us from our worst -- Who said these:

"A new command I give to you, that you love one another as I have loved you."

"Forgive not just seven times, but seventy times seven."

"Love your neighbor as yourself."

“You have heard that it was said, ‘Love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ But I tell you, love your enemies..."

And then He gave us a way to begin to even do that....

That God, the only one, the Something you already can find, deep within --

"You will seek me and find me when you seek me with all your heart. I will be found by you," declares the LORD, "and will bring you back from captivity...."

 

[AirPo]

Few in my way of thinking would believe in God as just a science theory in order to explain how things got to be the way they are, even though some will.

In any case, we learn that's not the way we are told to find Him.

So, even if you discover the interesting situation in fundamental ('high energy') physics right now, with the very odd situation with the Higgs Boson mass, which in turn allows this Universe to be as it is, and also life bearing, instead of quickly collapsing or quickly expanding into entropy death, but that the Higgs is very oddly just right without any good explanation, and the beautiful theory that was suppose to help fix that isn't working out so far....no data to support it where expected, nor again recently after the LHC upgrade.... all of that, even all of that isn't really the reason to believe in a Designer. Not even with physicists surprisingly now using the words 'unnatural' for this situation, and now in speculation about multiverses that will likely never be observable, so that the competing new speculative theories likely can never be supported with observation.....ever..... Still, this situation, even if convincing for a soul or two out there somewhere that understands all the science. It's not really the reason to believe.

Not it.

The reason to believe in God is because if you truly seek Him with all of your heart, you can find Him.

And learn of the One Whom He sent to us to teach us and save us from our worst -- Who said these:

"A new command I give to you, that you love one another as I have loved you."

"Forgive not just seven times, but seventy times seven."

"Love your neighbor as yourself."

“You have heard that it was said, ‘Love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ But I tell you, love your enemies..."

And then He gave us a way to begin to even do that....

That God, the only one, the Something you already can find, deep within --

"You will seek me and find me when you seek me with all your heart. I will be found by you," declares the LORD, "and will bring you back from captivity...."

You do understand that your way of thinking only applies to you?