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mo' ron wrote:

resedit wrote:

But there is not any credible evidence for evolution, which requires the violation of a law (biogenesis) and therefore should require extra scrutiny.

Why do so many scientist believe it then? Also, what reason, if both beliefs have no evidence, would scientists have to pick ID over evolution?

Why would they have to pick one over the other?
Why not teach the strengths of both and weaknesses of both?

Also, the law of biogenesis, as creationists view it, also conflicts with ID, because ID states god poofed life in to existence, where biogenesis says that life must have come from other life. So, unless you use the definition of biogenesis as it was meant to be used (applied to complex life), you have to also discount ID through the law of biogenesis.

Only if you confine the intelligent designer to laws of nature.
No ID proponent I know of believes the intelligent designer would be confined to the laws of nature.

IDers generally take the position that there is no logical reason to restrict everything to the natural realm.

From your own posts, objectively looking at the evidence, ID as you state it clearly can't be how things came about.

How so?

The thing is, nobody knows how the universe was created and how life sprung up on this ball of mud. 

Massive questions like this are beyond the realm of science.  They can make their best guess and make it a theory (which remains a theory until it is proven wrong).  It's still only a best guess based on the available data, and the data can be wrong along with the theory.

It is also beyond the realm of religion.  There are literally thousands of creation stories out there, and who is to say they aren't all wrong? 

I guess what I'm trying to say is that science can't accept blind faith and faith can't accept blind science.

The Big Bang, an event nobody was able to witness, is mapped out to the second, yet it isn't ridiculous...

So you're saying I can witness the Big Bang RIGHT NOW?  No?  Then it still hasn't been witnessed...

Chickenhawk wrote:

resedit wrote:

Only if you confine the intelligent designer to laws of nature.
No ID proponent I know of believes the intelligent designer would be confined to the laws of nature.

IDers generally take the position that there is no logical reason to restrict everything to the natural realm.

Well, then you can't try to pass off ID as science. Science is the logical, rational explaination of the natural realm. Religion describes the metaphysical realm. Two seperate things.

ID proponents say the only logical explanation for the natural world is the supernatural.
It is illogical to deny the supernatural, and illogical to use a natural explanation that has problems and assumptions just because you do not want to consider the supernatural as a possibility.

resedit wrote:

Chickenhawk wrote:

resedit wrote:

Only if you confine the intelligent designer to laws of nature.
No ID proponent I know of believes the intelligent designer would be confined to the laws of nature.

IDers generally take the position that there is no logical reason to restrict everything to the natural realm.

Well, then you can't try to pass off ID as science. Science is the logical, rational explaination of the natural realm. Religion describes the metaphysical realm. Two seperate things.

ID proponents say the only logical explanation for the natural world is the supernatural.
It is illogical to deny the supernatural, and illogical to use a natural explanation that has problems and assumptions just because you do not want to consider the supernatural as a possibility.

Ok. My own philosophical mind train lets me think there is/might be something/body outside the natural realm. However, I do not let that thought discount stuff in the natural realm that is known to be true.

It is illogical to assume there is a supernatural force.

Chickenhawk wrote:

It is illogical to assume there is a supernatural force.

The book of Daniel is best explained by a supernatural force.
The "late date" interpretation causes severe conflict of internal evidence and is far less logical.

Therefore, it is logical to assume there is a supernatural force.

-=-
More on topic, a supernatural force is the only logical explanation for where life came from, since Biology has the Law of Biogenesis - which has NEVER been disproved despite attempt after attempt after attempt after attempt.

Chickenhawk wrote:

resedit wrote:

Chickenhawk wrote:

It is illogical to assume there is a supernatural force.

The book of Daniel is best explained by a supernatural force.
The "late date" interpretation causes severe conflict of internal evidence and is far less logical.

I'm jewish, so you're going to have to explain that.

The prophet Daniel prophecied with extreme accuracy the events leading up to the Roman empire.
It was very detailed, and very accurate.

The claim by some is that Daniel was written as prophecy but was really history, written shortly before Antiochus IV Epiphanes died. The problem with that though is that it contains prophecies going beyond that period - the four beasts, the statue, etc. only makr sense as history re-written as prophecy if you allow the medes and persians to be separate kingdoms, and even then - the symbolism doesn't make sense. But the text itself clearly identifies the medes and persians as one kingdom, so the late date interpretation doesn't fit the internal evidence of the text.

Also, the 70 weeks of Daniel is clearly specfied what the time frame is, and it clearly extends beyong the greek dominance of the region by several hundred years.

Finally, the book isn't really apocraphyl in style, but only partially so. All of the apocraphyl books that are history re-written as prophecy use a pseudo author who was a major character in Hebrew history. Without the book of Daniel, the person of Daniel is a nobody.

They use to claim that Daniel has some babylonian history incorrect, and it was incorrect according to secular history as we knew it - but digs later showed that Daniel in fact had the correct history. The correct history had been lost, except in Daniel, by 2nd century BCE - so either Daniel was written 6th/5th century (and thus contains detailed accurate prophecy) or there was a history source that no one knows about, including all known historians (mostly greek) in the second century BCE.

They use to claim that Daniel contained greek loan words indicating a late authorship, until they found a 5th century BCE greek document demonstrating that all of the loan words except three were clearly old words, and not new greek words. The three words that weren't found in the 5th century greek document were musical instruments that most likely did exist that long ago.

The aramaic in Daniel is old eastern royal Aramaic, it is not second century palestinian aramaic - and it uses many aramaic words (such as chaldaen) in a manner that had stopped being used completely in the 4th century BCE or so. It also uses grammar in a way that was no longer used.

All the evidence - both internal and external - points to Daniel being a 6th/5th century BCE work, in which case it is very strong evidence of supernatural because it contains accurate detailed prophecies that were spot on about events that were hundreds of years later.

It also predicts that the Messiah (anointed one) would be cut off and have nothing, and that Jerusalem would be destroyed after that. And it gets specific about the date - 69 weeks of years (69 * 7 years) after the edict goes out to rebuild Jerusalem. That comes to about 29 AD - when Jesus was crucified, clearly after Daniel was written.

Last edited by resedit (2005-09-09 7:07 pm)

Paul98 wrote:

Ok lets say life comes from same type of life. So no matter what changes come about the life came from that type of life. Now lets look at this over a long period of time with many changes is there a point that what you started with isn't the same as what you currently have? Or do they have to be the same.

Small changes don't explain evolution.
Take dinosaur to bird - the body type has to change, the breathing style has to change, it not only needs feathers (which are quite different than fibers) - it needs primary and secondary feathers in order to get lift, etc. Intermediate form would be less likely to survive than dinosaur or bird - it would have to lose the ability to move well on the land before it gained the ability to move well in the air.

How are you defining life, what do you have is life compaired to none life, is a virus life?

Life in the biological sense has a metabolism, life span, reproductive mechanism, responds to stimuli, I think there are a few other parameters. Whether a virus is alive or not is often debated, but one thing is certain - a virus needs a life form to reproduce, so a virus could not be a proto life form, they need actual living cells.

Like how about if you have a small pile of sand and you are adding a single grain of sand at a time.  At what point it the small pile of sand no longer small?

What does that have to do with anything?

Some of the dinosaurs already share a similar body style with birds, and supposedly, some dinosaurs also had the same breathing and reproductive systems as current birds.

resedit wrote:

Chickenhawk wrote:

Well, they have the big bang mapped out to a very minute fraction of a second......

Haven't they changed that number numerous times?

Changed what number?

But, what happened during the big bang is still highly theoretical. What they have mapped out is almost pure speculation based on what very little we know about physics in a singularity, and quantum physics. In the next hundred years, the supposed process of the big bang will likely change dramatically.

But, this is what galaxy M81 looked like 11.8 million years ago: http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap020620.html

it would be nice if you provided some links that were from a different website that you have been posting from. Maybe try and find something that is a scientific website or mathmatical but isn't directly talking about evolution( this way it would be unbiased both ways). For such topics as information theory.

"But, what happened during the big bang is still highly theoretical. What they have mapped out is almost pure speculation based on what very little we know about physics in a singularity, and quantum physics. In the next hundred years, the supposed process of the big bang will likely change dramatically."

Yeah it should be interesting, with that new atom smasher being built maybe we will see some more support for string theory, which would make things very interesting. Also might give us some more insight into the way the universe came to be.

Yeah I did look but missed it. Looked again and now I found it.


From http://www.matheory.info/chapter1.html
1.8 The Law of Diminishing Information

We revert to the Englishman trying in vain to read a Chinese newspaper. When he gets the help of an interpreter, he finds out that after all there is a lot of information in the paper. We can conclude that he is not the ideal receiver (knowing all languages) because his understanding could be improved by an interpreter as an intermediary. This argument can be turned around and used to define an ideal receiver: A receiver is ideal if no intermediary can improve its performance.



I. A-->-[ ]-B-->-[R]

II. B-->-[ ]-C-->-[R]

III. A-->-[ ]-B-->-[ ]-C-->-[R]

IV. A-->-[ ]-B-->-[ ]-C-->

Fig 1.3 The ideal receiver R demonstrates the validity of the principle of diminishing information.

A reasoning in four steps, Figure 1.3, will lead from the ideal receiver to the Law of Diminishing Information:

   1. Let R be an ideal receiver, who receives a message B about the event A.
   2. Another receiver is constructed by adding a channel between the signal B and R, with the output C as the input to R. This receiver, consisting of an intermediary channel and R in series, cannot be a better receiver of B than R alone, because R is already an ideal receiver.
   3. Hence, any intermediary channel making the information from C greater than the information from B, would contradict the premise that R is an ideal receiver. Thereby it would also contradict the principle that the information of a message should be measured as if it were received by an ideal receiver (Section 1.7).

   4. Thus, the information that C gives about A cannot be greater than the information B gives about A:

(1.8.1.) inf(C@A) <= inf(B@A) if A_B_C

This is the principle of diminishing information where A__B__C means a transmission chain, Figure 1.3, step IV.

The Law of Diminishing Information reads: Compared to direct reception, an intermediary can only decrease the amount of information.

The Law (1.8.1) will be given a mathematical form in Section 2.7 based on probability theory. In this formulation it will be used as the fundamental axiom of the mathematical theory of information. The Law is the pruning knife of information theory: we will argue that the Law is the necessary and sufficient condition for a mathematical function to be accepted as an information measure, i.e. qualify as inf(B@A).