(July 29, 2015 at 3:20 pm)lkingpinl Wrote: Are saying that if you see your full name carved clearly on a tree you could logically assume it is by pure natural means? I've heard the arguments before about seeing a few letters formed out of sticks or in the clouds, what one can perceive to be letters therefore proof that not all language requires a creator. But I'm talking about a full word written clearly or a sentence, something as simple as "Hello Esquilax" on a rock face. You can them assume that no one wrote that but it's purely nature and your mind's perception?
If so, we are at an impasse. Any time we see language (clear written words that carry meaning) we deduce a mind.
The problem, mainly, is that you're wrong about how we deduce the presence of intelligent agents behind the appearance of language, and you're being overly simplistic in the process. The metric we use is not the binary "complexity/presence of language= design" equation you're using, it is a direct comparison with the natural, something the example you gave perfectly illustrates. We can see individual letters formed out of clouds, or rocks, and be reasonable in not inferring design from that, because we know that these things can occur naturally. If we see a full name written like that, we can reasonably infer design in that not because it's complex, but because the complexity involved is above the threshold of what we know can happen naturally. At a certain point design becomes more feasible because it's more parsimonious than expecting that each individual letter formed on its own, but the reason that is so is because we have evidence of the beings that could write the words themselves.
But you're proposing that a mind created DNA, despite the fact that we have no evidence at all of this occurring, nor a mechanism for how it could occur, or even a reason to think that it could be so, as we know how DNA forms. You keep calling it a code, but the fact is that if it is, it's not a very complex one; it's just four letters, shorthand attached to chemicals, and the way they bond together. That's all it is, really: pairings of chemicals, attributed names after the fact by human beings. We know those chemicals can form naturally, we know they pair up naturally, and we have a readily demonstrable mechanism for how they build up in complexity, all without a creator needed. In this case, we only have evidence of these things forming naturally, and none at all of them needing design, so your comparison to words isn't really apt; what this is more like is you finding a rock and asserting that every time we see rocks, we deduce design.
Also, everything I said about emergent complexity also applies to DNA: early DNA was not as complex as current DNA, and current DNA is complex relative to its makeup, not complex on its own. Like I said, a strand of DNA is just four chemical letters, paired up: in simpler animals the DNA is also simple. The complexity you're seeing is the result of many combinations of that DNA added together, the longer strands that form more complex life, but in that case the complexity is a matter of numbers, not the individual DNA strands: 222 is more complex than 22, but only because I pressed the key one more time. The individual 2s aren't terribly complex, and in the beginning, as with DNA pairing, there weren't that many of them. The complexity you see emerged over a long period of time from interactions between simpler things.
Since I suspect that you're about to reassert that if we see language it means it was designed, let me ask you one final question: say we watch a new planet form in our solar system. We watch it, from every angle and at all times, without ever visiting it ourselves, and we see that no life has ever touched the surface. Nevertheless, when we finally do decide to go up there ourselves, the first living beings to ever set foot on this planet, we see the words "Hello Esquilax" written in the dust there.
Do you deduce design there, even in the face of incontrovertible evidence that no mind has ever been in proximity to the planet?
"YOU take the hard look in the mirror. You are everything that is wrong with this world. The only thing important to you, is you." - ronedee
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Want to see more of my writing? Check out my (safe for work!) site, Unprotected Sects!