The Problem with Christians

[Esquilax]

The way I look at it, there is no such thing as a random code. Entropy takes care of that. Given that all life depends on very sophisticated code, I see that you have a problem with life getting off the ground in the first place.

Random activity = no code. No code = no life.

DNA is not a code. DNA is a series of chemical processes acting within a limited framework of actions and reactions. It is a code only in a post-hoc sense, as living minds long after the fact are able to predict the expressions of those chemical reactions due to their reliability and corresponding observations of the genomes of extant organisms. At the time that DNA forms- the relevant time for your argument- it is not a code, but merely chemicals pairing in ways that best assure their propagation as described in the theory of natural selection.

This argument from analogy isn't new to us, and it's no more fallacious the hundredth time we hear it than it was on the first. The only difference here is that you've front-loaded it with a bald assertion as to the impossibility of a random code with nothing to justify it. So you've taken a fallacy and then managed to make it worse.

Be that as it may, you have to assemble those building blocks in a meaningful sequence to make intelligent code and therefor life. This doesn't happen through random activity.

And equally, you never answered my question: if I had no answer to give you, do that mean that your god wins by default?

The problem here, that I suspect you might be aware of, given your earlier dodge, is that you're attempting to get to positive evidence only by subtracting. You're never going to demonstrate that your god was involved at all just by poking holes in the arguments of your detractors, but in the end, reducing the positions of others is all you have to make your own seem better. The purpose of my question was to show that, even if you were able to reduce our positions to zero, your own position isn't somehow the default we must return to: if you get us to the point that what we believe is wrong, the answer becomes "I don't know," not "god must have done it."

So, do you have any positive evidence for intelligent design, or does all of your support rest on one variation of "we can't explain this, therefore designer," or another?

Well that's an interesting argument but looking at a barren earth 4.5 billion years ago turning into a place that is literally teeming with incredibly complex life forms, it still represents a massive reversal of local entropy, especially considering that the contributions from outside the local system of the earth appear to be somewhat limited.

And I ask you: what seems more entropic to you: a barren, lifeless rock, or a world teeming with organisms that expend energy and change it and alter that rock in ever more chaotic ways?

Also, "somewhat limited" contributions from outside Earth? When we receive endless solar radiation from the sun, meteors and other space debris in our atmosphere, and a continual dose of radiation from space that's only really blocked out by that same atmosphere? Not to mention all the emissions from other stellar bodies that we continue to receive on Earth after traveling so many lightyears to get here. This is not limited, it's a bombardment from every side. It's just not all immediately detectable by any old guy with a keyboard.