The Probabilty of there being an Intelligent Designer

by cantleave 140 Replies latest watchtower beliefs

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  zoiks

  Wobble - the "sudden explosion" of life in the Cambrian actually took place over 50 million years or so. And we're not talking about complex life forms in today's terms. One of the reasons that so few precambrian fossils exist is because most precambrian life was soft-bodied, which does not fossilize well.

  Cantleave - the probability arguments become far less daunting when considering the fact that millions upon millions of reactions, combinations, and pairings were happening at the same time. Flipping a coin and getting heads a thousand times in a row is highly improbable. Flipping a million coins concurrently over millions of years, once every few seconds, drastically increases those odds.

  Edit: one resource that I find immensely helpful is the Talkorigins Archive. Especially interesting is the index of creationist claims. A really nice resource for early and surprising fossils is Stephen Jay Gould's Wonderful Life.
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  AK - Jeff

  Where did the self-replicatiing molucules come from?

  We are concerned that self-replication of molecules is issue - but eternal existence of a being never formed or created does not? HMMM

  I believe in God not magic.

  Same thing. Sky-daddy did it - we don't know how, we don't know why, but it was the magic work of Sky-daddy whom we never get to see, hear, or feel. Sky-daddy is magic.

  As once sung: Illusion never turns into something real.

  Jeff
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  villabolo

  Wobble: ". . .why the sudden explosion of complex life forms in the Cambrian period with no evidence of their ancestors, more simple or not ?"

  Wobble, the "sudden appearance of complex life forms in the Cambrian period" is a common misunderstanding. My understanding of the Cambrian period is that life before it did not fossilize too easily because it was soft bodied for the most part. Then, the explosive evolution of predators led to the rather rapid evolution of defensive armor, sea shells in other words. These hard body parts would fossilize very easily and thus give the impression, in the fossil record, that there were many more of them, in quantity and variety, than before. In fact the soft bodied life forms are simply "underrepresented" in the fossil record because they decompose much more easily before being able to fossilize.

  I highly recommend the book Science and Earth History: The Evolution/Creation Controversy by Arthur Strahler. It's 500 large pages, fine print, full of information on both sides of the issue and well worth the price.
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  Paralipomenon

  People who say that the chances of life forming are just too remote really don't have the math supporting them.

  They usually take the Earth and roughly 6000 years and then laugh at the odds.

  I did the rough calcuations once based on the estimated number of stars in the visible universe, planets per solar system and estimated age of the universe.

  Not motivated enough to search my post history for it, but needless to say, the result dwarfed the figures that the "Creation" book provided. I didn't even factor in multiple chances per planet due to lack of calculating power... and again lack of motivation.
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  PSacramento

  We are concerned that self-replication of molecules is issue - but eternal existence of a being never formed or created does not? HMMM

  Don't understand the question, sorry.
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  bohm

  Zoiks, Villabolo on the cambrian periode: . If i may give another perspective: There is a field of computer science/physics called genetic algorithms. Basically you apply the principles of evolution to simple 'programs', let them evolve, and you get new more complex programs that solve some problem 'better'. This is not just an artificial 'academic' excersize, it is a videly used optimization method and is used in many places in industry; for example, matlab (a leading numerical software) comes with a really cool genetic algorithm package.

  Because of this, saying something like 'evolution cannot create complex stuff, nananana' is just as wrong as saying you cannot build an automobile. Its an industry, doh!

  So what does that have to do with the cambrian periode? The thing is, if you work with genetic algorithms, you will for many programs see that for a long time nothing really happends with the programs, then suddenly a *lot* of thing happends (in the sence that new, different, programs quickly evolve), then nothing happends for a while more, then a new burst of activity, and so on... this is especially true on very large, difficult, problems with many very different solutions. Life certainly meet those criteria.

  So thats just my 2c. The cambrian periode is not really a good evidence against evolution. on the other hand, a continious 'linear' evolution would really be strange to explain.
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  zoiks

  Bohm - interesting stuff indeed. That reminds me a bit of the E coli long term evolution experiment. Particularly interesting in this experiment was the bacteria's evolving the ability to use citrate as food, which in turn seems to have relied on earlier mutations that had been neutral, or at least non-deleterious. So this accumulation of mutations happened over hundreds of generations with no tangible results, and then led to a sudden change in the population.

  Neat-o
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  bohm

  " The law of causality states, that every effect has a cause. God is not an effect so He does not have a cause."

  I studied physics. There are no law of causality in the sence you apply it, at least no physical law.Causality is first and foremost an assumption secondly, its an observation that we appear to have causality at our time/energy levels/etc. But if you want to apply it to the big bang, you got to show some evidence. so thats the first part of the argument.

  Seconly, god is not an effect so he does not have a cause? what kind of argument is that! How do you define effect and cause and how can you prove

  * that effects have no cause (or is that an axiom in your theory?)

  * that god is an effect (or is that a convenient definition?)

  * that your theory does not apply to the flying spaghetti monster.

  So far you got nothing more but a rethorical proof resting on an unproven physical law....
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  Elsewhere

  > God is not an effect so He does not have a cause.

  How do you know this?
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  villabolo

  Bohm:

  "The thing is, if you work with genetic algorithms, you will for many programs see that for a long time nothing really happends with the programs, then suddenly a *lot* of thing happends (in the sence that new, different, programs quickly evolve), then nothing happends for a while more, then a new burst of activity, and so on..."

  This sounds like Stephen Goulds Punctuated Equilibrium theory but on a larger level than mere species.

  villabolo