Can you help me refute my Creationist/ID friend (re: DNA, amino acids, etc.)

Great Debates
21

The real question to pose to your debate opponent is:

By what authority does he claim to know enough about the nature of intelligence to say for sure what can or can not be accomplished without its help?

While science has neither explained the entire workings of the universe, nor disproved the existence of God, it has shown (so far) that God’s existence is not a necessary assumption to explain the universe as we currently understand it. That is, the universe seems to work quite well without assuming the existence of an outside intelligent force. That’s not to say that will always be the case, but so far, it has panned out as our knowledge has increased.

One religious leader (forgive me for not remembering his name) described this as the “God of the Gaps” fallacy. If you insist that the proof of God’s existence lies in the gaps in scientific knowledge, then as science closes those gaps, your case for God diminishes.

Science is an axiomatic system, and the mathematician Kurt Godel showed that any axiomatic system will not cover all truths. Suggest to your friend that he take comfort in the idea that God’s existence may lie in the realm of the unproveable but nonetheless true.

22

Yes, he does. It is not enough to prove that the natural emergence of both DNA and DNA-manipulating enzymes is “improbable.” Improbable things do happen. For an intelligent designer to be required, the naturalistic designer-free explanation has to be either completely impossible, or so monstrously improbable that its chances of happening (and the chances of any similar emergence having the same function happening) even in hundreds of millions of years are practically zero.

In this way, the IDer is arguing from a position of weakness, not of strength.

23

—It is not enough to prove that the natural emergence of both DNA and DNA-manipulating enzymes is “improbable.” Improbable things do happen.—

Even this is too far, because even talking “probability” is meaningless unless we know what sorts of processes we’re talking about.

Fill a clear glass with a few inches of salt. Then pour in some whole peppercorns, and use a spoon to mix them into the salt, evenly distributing them. Now gently shake the glass any which way you please. What you are doing is adding chaotic motion: apply forces to the salt and peppercorn grains that are pretty much as random as possible.

Now, let’s pretend you are thinking about what will happen, and you create a computer simulation of this situation. You find that the odds of the salt and the peppercorns, simply by the application of random force, ending up all the salt on the bottom and all the peppercorns on the top is infintesimally small: virtually impossible. You run the simulation again and again, and you never ever see it happen.

But when you actually do this experiment, the peppercorns and the salt end up separated out every time: the peppercorns rising to the top, coming up through the salt as if by magic.

What happened was that your calculation of probability was ignorant of the particular physical processes going on: it didn’t include any representation of the effect of gravity, density, and geometric based “ratchets.” So the calculation of “impossibility” was pretty much utterly irrelevant to the situation.

In the same way, when we are ignorant of exactly what happened in regards to the origin of DNA/DNA-manipulating enzymes, we can’t even begin to talk about how probable or improbable any given result will be. We can only do that once we’ve hit upon a particular model: and even then our calculations, like the peppercorns and salt, could be totally irrelevant because we’re missing a key factor.

That’s why this argument is so weak: our ignorance of this puzzle is a weakness for ID, not a strength. Only if we had some sort of historical picture of how this result (interdepedance of DNA/DNA-manipulating enzymes) came to be could we start talking meaningfully about how impossible it would have been for this to happen by “chance.” And even then we wouldn’t have closed the issue entirely, because our picture might be incomplete.

24

I suggest you read this article. It’s about so called “Carpenter genes”. It’s a very interesting read.

http://www.madstone.org/Trilobite/carpenter.html
By the way, Darwins theory of evolution is still just a theory. Creationism/ID can never be proven to be right, because it reaches into the paranormal. Yet, Darwins theory has a very hard time to explain some things. That does not mean Creationists a right. It means that an alternate theory has to be put forth.

Read on and tell me what you think.

25

This is a misleading statement, indicating either ignorance or dishonesty regarding the meaning of the word “theory” in scientific discourse.

Letting that slide, Darwin’s theory of Natural Selection has, so far, never been disproved, while it has provided excellent predictions for a wide variety of natural phenomena–which is exactly what a good scientific theory should do.

26

By the way, hlujarn, the following quote from your linked article (which pretty thoroughly ignores the fairly extrensive debunking of Behe’s attempts to claim “irreducible complexity”) is simply a lie.

Certainly, there are explorations of abiogenesis by evolutionary scientists and the known cosmology does strongly suggest an abiogenetic origin of life at some point, but it is not taught and preached as Truth–certainly not by the actual scientists exploring the actions of evolution in Earth’s history.

27

"You are standing in front of me.

"I saw you come around the corner, wave, and walk up to me. I don’t know where you were before that. I assume, since I saw your car drive past the house and around the corner, that you were walking from your parked car to my location.

"I don’t know where you were yesterday, or the day or month before. I assume you were at home part of that time, or at your job. Based on the fact that you do not appear to be starving to death, I can assume that you ate regular meals, so you either went to a grocery store or a restaurant on some or most of those days. And based on the fact that you’re wearing a New York Rangers jersey, I might hypothesize that you attended a hockey game, or watched one on TV.

"I don’t know where you were the twenty years prior to that, but I conclude from the jewelry on your finger that you were one of two primary participants in a wedding of some sort at some point. I can also assume parenthood, based on the type of vehicle I saw you driving and the crumbs and stains on your clothing.

"I don’t know where you spent your childhood, or where you were born. I can make a variety of inductions and deductions based on your speech patterns and other data.

"But, since I have no direct evidence of any of those hypotheses, I feel that it’s just as reasonable to suggest that, ten seconds before you appeared from around the corner, you were deposited there by a trans-warp neutrino beam generated by silver-eyed Worm Dancers from their Disco Palace under the ice of Europa.

"What? You don’t think that’s a reasonable hypothesis?

“Fine. Prove it’s not true.”

28

You do realize, I am sure, that Darwin’s theory has been greatly modified from since 1859. While his logical core remains, evolutionary science as a whole encompasses many more theories than just those proposed by Darwin. There were many things which Darwin was unable to account for precisely because knowledge was limited, and, some of his theories (e.g., speciation via anagenesis) have been largely abandoned in light of new information.

As such, claims that “an alternate theory has to be put forth” based on the shortcomings of (original) Darwinian theory is missing the point that several such theories have been put forth - and have since been incorporated into the whole of evolutionary science.

All of which ignores the fact that many of the suppositions about Darwinian theory (whether representative of past theory or current theory) made by Mr. Pye in his article are just plain incorrect.

29

Don’t be too sure that the proponents of Intelligent Design realize this.

Their favorite book is a work of Holy Scripture that is supposed to be eternal and unchanging. They probably have an a priori assumption that the books used by their “enemies” are treated in the same fashion.

30

But…but…it would be intellectually dishonest to argue against that with which one is not familiar! Wouldn’t it?

31

The way I think of it is that Darwin discovered a door to a room which contained a lot of answers to some age-old questions. At the time Darwin discovered it, the room was rather dark and shadowy, and Darwin didn’t have the technology to light the room up very well and take a thorough stock of its contents. He had to guess at some things. maybe something that he thought was shaped like a piano turned out to be a harpsichord. Maybe he was even further off on some things, but he did the best he could with the technology and the data that he had. In later years, other scientists have been able to shine more powerful flashlights into that room, make some more detailed inventory and correct some mistakes by Darwin. The fact that Charles Darwin may have made some mistakes in his inventory of the room does not alter the fact that the room is very real, and he found it. Pointing out that what he thought was a lamp turned out to be a sewing machine, does not make the room, itself, go away.

32

An understandable mistake, considering that the modern piano and the modern harpsichord both evolved from a common ancestor in the recent past. Keyboard homology proves it. In fact, a few instances of a “transitional” form called the fortepiano have even been discovered!