Intelligent Design

[The Grand Nudger]

AAA's thought process: "not a winnable soul.  Next victim."

Think you might be right. Kind of puts the lie to all of this "science" bullshit, huh? Used to be that we unwinnable souls would crush their skulls with our clubs, so they couldn't ignore us, it was either conquest or death.

@ AAA

Yeah, but even the atheist/evolutionist agrees that things have a designed.

Uh..no? I only allowed it personally because it became apparent that you were far too ignorant to even have a discussion of the subject unless I let you use language you were comfortable with. A point which I made explicit before lowering my comments to your level.

[Whateverist]

AAA's thought process: "not a winnable soul.  Next victim."

Think you might be right.  Kind of puts the lie to all of this "science" bullshit, huh?  Used to be that we unwinnable souls would crush their skulls with our clubs, so they couldn't ignore us, it was either conquest or death.

That reminds me of your personal meaning of life.

[Whateverist]

Try this:  
"Do we have to eliminate every possibility except design before we can accept a designer to account for the way things are constituted?"

The answer then is clearly yes, just as it is for the way you answered it .. but less confusing for having chosen a less prejudiced way to express "the way things are constituted".

Yeah, but even the atheist/evolutionist agrees that things have a designed. They just disagree on if that design arose by undirected natural processes, or by an actual intelligence. The say the former.

No one denies that there is structure.  The only bone of contention is calling it someone's design.  That really is just absurd.

[BrianSoddingBoru4]

Exactly, life is everywhere we look on Earth. Yet it is nowhere we have seen yet in the rest of the universe

I can't think you're serious. We haven't tested anything remotely approaching 'the rest of the universe'. Using this as a counter is quite a bit like a 10th century Polynesian denying the possibility of the existence of Europe because he can't see it from his canoe.

(i know we don't have a large sample size yet, but still).

'But still' me bony white Irish arse - there's no 'but still' involved. It isn't that we don't have a large sample size, but that our sample size - except for scratching a few centimeters into the surface of Mars - is non-existent.

This could easily point to the fact that they were designed to live in all conditions.

If so, then it plays merry hob with the 'fine tuning' argument. If life can exist in all conditions, what is there to fine tune?

If we have archaea that live in Mars-like conditions here on earth, then why aren't there bacteria on mars.

Do you know that there are no bacteria on Mars? I certainly don't, and neither does anyone else.

When you look at how complicated the mechanisms that allow extremophiles to survive in these areas, it begins to look more like design (at least to me),

Of course it looks that way to you, since you have an admitted bias to find design in anything. But if life is designed, it requires a Designer, as your lot never seem to get tired of saying. But apparent design can't be attributed to a Designer unless you prove the Designer first. If we can find an explanation for complicated living systems that does not require a Designer, then your speculation is required to take a back seat to a verified, explicable mechanism for complexity. Fortunately, we have one. It's called 'natural selection'.

Boru

[Mr.wizard]

I don't know how someone can argue that life is designed and also argue that life is unlikely? If life was designed then it's not unlikely at all, why would a engineer design something that was unlikely to work?

[Cyberman]

He wants to carry tea and no tea at the same time. Bonus points if you get the reference without resorting to the google machine.

[God of Mr. Hanky]

Actually, life is extremely, amazingly plastic.  Sure, we may be used to finding it in damp, warm, oxygenated environs, but there are organisms - right here on good old Terra - that live and thrive in dessicated environments; frigid environments; anaerobic environments; environments so rich in sulfur compounds that they'd kill any mammal of our acquaintance; environments of low enough pressure to kill a bird; environments of high enough pressure to crush a human skull (or even a car); environs so loaded with toxins that humans couldn't survive in them without very special equipment; and so on.

Give the number of different conditions under which life thrives on Earth, it is utterly silly to think that live could not survive in the environments of other planets.

Boru

Exactly, life is everywhere we look on Earth. Yet it is nowhere we have seen yet in the rest of the universe (i know we don't have a large sample size yet, but still).

So why aren't you helping NASA look for it on Mars, instead of shitting all over their efforts to sort out the truth?

 This could easily point to the fact that they were designed to live in all conditions.

There's a very simple way of finding out: Dive to the bottom of a mid-Atlantic hydrothermal vent and collect samples of the many fish, crustaceans and eels which survive there off food sources which are not based on photosynthesis, but chemosynthesis from highly toxic hydrogen sulfide. Take them home, put them in your aquarium, and feed them OTC fish food, then see how long they last.

Can't afford to rent a deep-sea submersible or robo-diver? Here's an easy way - take a fish out of water anywhere, and see how long it lasts out of the water.

Well, why else, short of utter desperation, would you post anything nearly so stupid as that idea?

If we have archaea that live in Mars-like conditions here on earth, then why aren't there bacteria on mars. When you look at how complicated the mechanisms that allow extremophiles to survive in these areas, it begins to look more like design (at least to me),

Ok, first it was the fine-tuning argument based on asserted impossibilities, and now with that can of shit unpacked for you life is just too complicated. YOU are the one who's complicated (profoundly so), and to say something so pathetically weak as that shows how desperate you are to go on believing what you say.

Life is not too complicated, it simply evolves in any way that it can, and we probably don't know all the possible ways that it can do this on our own planet. It does not look like design, not one bit. It looks like what happened because it had to, just as the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics calls for it. Life increases entropy (now there's your meaning of it for you)!

[Esquilax]

If we have archaea that live in Mars-like conditions here on earth, then why aren't there bacteria on mars.

Off the top of my head, Mars-like conditions may be sufficient for supporting pre-existing life, but not for generating life. I don't think I'm saying anything crazy if I suggest that Earth's development and Mars' were quite different.

When you look at how complicated the mechanisms that allow extremophiles to survive in these areas, it begins to look more like design (at least to me),

So, you live on a planet where, almost uniformly, every example of design you experience is continuously streamlined and simplified for ease of use and manufacturing- your Iphone has as few parts as possible, they don't add new bits and pieces to aircraft arbitrarily, technology has veered inevitably toward convergent functionality and plug-and-play simplicity of use and installation- and yet for some reason you've come to the conclusion that complexity is a hallmark of design? The entirety of human design has focused on producing designed objects easier, cheaper, with less materials, faster... how is it that you can look at the history of design on Earth, superimpose that over the complexity, redundancies and flat out poor architecture found in nature, and see any kind of similarities at all?

For that matter, how exactly did you determine that complexity isn't a hallmark of nature too? I see a lot of people pointing to complexity and saying therefore it must be designed, but they never stop to explain how they ruled out the possibility that nature can produce complex things too... and you all must have a way to do that, yes? If you've just appointed complexity as a quality of designed things then you're begging the question in a huge way to see complexity in nature and thus conclude design because you haven't demonstrated complexity as the sole domain of designed objects... which is the thrust of the argument you're making by using complexity at all.

Again, if you believe that every living thing in nature is designed, then where is your point of contrast, your "natural life," which informs you of the differences between natural and designed life, such that you can make the distinction at all?

[AAA]

I was going to leave this thread alone, but this was an interesting question. We can't tell much about the designer based solely on observations of the design, but there are several possibilities. We could assume that it was some natural intelligence like extra terrestrials. They would have to have a much simpler biological setup in order to make it more reasonable to assume that they could have potentially formed from abiotic materials. The reason I object to our life forms having arisen from abiotic materials and evolved is due to the fact that DNA replication involves dozens of proteins. Proteins are produced with the help of hundreds of different proteins (each of which needs previous proteins to be built). The molecules needed to build proteins and DNA also need to be synthesized with the help of other proteins. It's a lot of chicken or the egg problems. If some extra terrestrial life forms had a simpler setup, we may see a more reasonable way that they could have gotten there naturally. 

If you're already allowing the possibility that life can arise via unguided abiogenesis, then isn't it also true that life on Earth could have evolved from simpler abiotic setups, similar to what you're envisioning with the aliens? Who's to say that life on Earth evolved strictly from DNA as we currently understand it, or as it currently functions?

In fact, simply removing the middle man of abiotic beings designing life on Earth is far more parsimonious, since you've gotten rid of an unnecessary intervening step. Since we don't know how life formed on Earth, nor whether it passed through intermediate stages- as evolution would facilitate- before reaching our current genetic makeup, there's really no need to posit design for Earth life while simultaneously accepting the possibility of undesigned life elsewhere; just remove the irrelevant step and accept that, if your worldview allows for it to happen on other planets, it could happen on Earth too.

Of course I don't think this is the case. I think there is some form of intelligence outside of our universe that designed the universe and life. The big bang theory seems to point to the fact that there are other things outside of our universe.

Not necessarily. The big bang postulates that everything that comprises out current universe was once a singularity, and the general physics consensus is that measurements beyond or outside of that point, if they're even possible, would require an entirely new lexicon just to discuss it. It is equally possible that there is nothing outside of our universe, or that such terms don't even apply within what is, I don't think this is controversial to say, a model of reality totally unlike anything we've ever known or experienced.

A cause that led to our universe. Obviously it is impossible to try to explain these extra-universal ideas (unless they are capable of entering into our universe). Based on our current understanding of physics, nothing should be eternal, but the fact that things exist shows that something must always have existed.

I'm sorry, bridge the gap for me: what logical steps lie between "things exist," and "therefore, something must have always existed," because I'm not seeing that.

What I don't like about being told that I'm arguing from ignorance is that the person telling me that is making the assumption that their view is right. It seems to go something like this. The proponent of neo-darwinian evolution says something like:"just because we don't know now how abiogenesis occurred doesn't mean it didn't, we just don't know how it did and we will find out later. Saying it didn't happen is a premature conclusion when we will find the answer later." If this is not a good summary of the argument from ignorance, then please let me know.

The argument from ignorance is a logical fallacy wherein an area of ignorance is used as the justification for a separate, contrasting conclusion to the one being argued against. Thus, "abiogenesis cannot be true because we haven't solved X, Y, and Z problems," is an argument from ignorance because it is using our lack of knowledge in some areas to reach the conclusion that the concept cannot be true; the problem comes in the unspoken premise that X, Y, and Z areas will either never be solved, or will be solved with solutions that demonstrate design, before such solutions have come about.

Meanwhile, pointing out that, though we may not have the answers right now, there is nothing to suggest that those answers won't be revealed later is not an argument from ignorance because it doesn't take that extra step. Nobody is arguing that abiogenesis is true on the basis that the gaps in our knowledge may be filled in future, just that we allow the science to take its course and resolve those issues before coming to a conclusion, unlike what you are doing. This latter approach is a recognition that ignorance is not a justification for taking an opposing view: the point is to wait until there are answers to X, Y, and Z, not to come to the design conclusion merely based on the existence of the X, Y, and Z unknowns.

That kinda comes with the territory of science and probabilistic conclusions; abiogenesis is tentatively accepted by the scientific community because, A: it fits all of the available data without postulating anything as yet beyond the realm of our knowledge, and B: it has the highest probability of being true within the context of other theories that also work with A. But it is a tentative acceptance, contingent on the evidence as we discover it, not an unqualified embracing of the theory. Design, as a hypothesis, may rise and fall within that estimation, but it isn't going to rise merely due to the presence of mysteries, nor is abiogenesis going to fall for that reason; all areas of science have areas that aren't well understood, we haven't comprehensively solved any subject, but gravity is not false because we don't understand how it works, internal medicine isn't wrong because we haven't cured all diseases, and abiogenesis isn't false on the same basis.

Where did this being come from? I have no idea. What does it look like? I have no idea. The infinite regress leads to two possibilities. The original cause being intelligent, or the original cause being unintelligent. Neither makes sense, and it seems like there shouldn't be anything, but there is. Just because we aren't capable of studying this potentially higher dimensional being doesn't mean that it won't make sense if we had the chance to.

Why would you presume the existence of an additional complication not in evidence, solely on the basis that science hasn't provided an answer to your personal opinion that life is too complex to have arisen naturally that satisfies you?

I don't think abiogenesis can happen based on how complex a system we see here needs to be to be alive.  If somehow we found another set of life forms that operated with simplicity instead, then it may be plausible, but I don't think this is possible either. 

The big bang postulates that all the material in our universe was once in zero spatial volume. Can we really fit all the material in zero volume. It's paradoxical. Also, if you believe all the mass in our current universe was once in a singularity, then there would be enormous gravity holding that much mass together. It would take a large amount of energy to overcome that force of gravity. 

The gap about things that exist and something being eternal. I'm just following the need for a previous cause. If we do the infinite regress, we get to the need for something to not be caused. This something would have to be eternal. At least don't know how that would not be the case.

Ok, I think I had the argument from ignorance understood. It is not because we don't know a cause capable of producing specified sequences, it is because we do know a cause capable of doing it. That is why we think intelligence. 

You shouldn't equate our knowledge of gravity to our knowledge of abiogenesis. Gravity is a law of the universe that we observe repeatedly. The theory of gravity is the attempt to explain this repeated observation. There is a law of biogenesis, which states that life only comes from life. It is again based on repeated observations. We will see if they can break this law, but I don't think I should accept that it can happen when the simplest living system would need hundreds of proteins, which would mean thousands of nucleotides in a specific order (these are not my numbers). 

It's not my opinion that says it is too complex. If you look above at the numbers (I could try to find a reference if you like) you will see how complex it is. And this is all before it can enter the evolutionary pathway. There are about over 100 proteins involved in translation alone. If you can't translate mRNA, then you can't make proteins. It is a serious chicken and the egg problem that the scientific community recognizes.

[The Grand Nudger]

But who gives a shit whether or not you think abiogenesis can happen? BTW, that's clearly a lie....if you think that we were created by a designer..unless that designer was a biological entity you -do- think it "can" happen, in fact you think that it did.  Not only is this an argument from ignorance, in addition to being dishonest...... it's irrelevant to evolution.