Natural Order and Science

[Alex K]

Quoting Lee Strobel.  What a buffoon.  You must be desperate.  Strobel is a nutcase and hardly qualified.

Who cares about the qualification of Strobel, concentrate on the meaning of his statement.

"Meesa no understandy evolutions"

But more seriously, it is easy to imagine (and to construct!) systems which self-organize in a complex fashion that after a few iterations cannot be "understood" by human intellect any more than the entirety of how dna organizes embryological development or how the brain creates consciousness. Take a blank deep neural network and let it learn something. It will become a highly complex thing which accomplishes a task by seemingly magical and to our minds hopelessly intractable steps. My point is that our level of understanding of how a complex self-organizing system accomplishes things is by no means a measure of how likely it could have arisen on its own dynamically (and I am talking not about the construction of the blank network which is obviously designed by humans in my example, but of the learning process which creates the actual complexity which is entirely driven by experiencing the environment.

[Jackalope]

Quoting Lee Strobel.  What a buffoon.  You must be desperate.  Strobel is a nutcase and hardly qualified.

Indeed. I've read his shit. The man has the intellect of a burnt waffle.

[abaris]

Lee Strobel, former journalist/jurist, gone pastor.

Wow, that really makes him a science authority. I've yet to find any apologist with the credentials to know what they're talking about.

[Neo-Scholastic]

I've yet to find any apologist with the credentials to know what they're talking about.

Merely having credentials, like a PhD, does not mean you know what your talking about either. I know a PhD immunologist and very accomplished researcher that is also a YEC. People should not automatically assume that their expertise in one area makes them an expert in everything. At the same time many people without 'official' recognition do know what they are talking about. Lee Strobel however is not one of them.

[LadyForCamus]

OP, you forgot to mention irreducible complexity! That one's kills atheism completely!


yeah, just kidding, sorry.

Yeah! And also, Darwin said the human eye could have NEVER evolved on it's own! Oh, wait a minute...

[bennyboy]

Quoting Lee Strobel.  What a buffoon.  You must be desperate.  Strobel is a nutcase and hardly qualified.

Indeed.  I've read his shit.  The man has the intellect of a burnt waffle.

Wow DARE you, sir!?

Waffles have never been stupid enough to argue against evolution, burnt or otherwise.  Also, they are delicious.

Retract your statement, RIGHT NOW!

[Harris]

Who cares about the qualification of Strobel, concentrate on the meaning of his statement.

"Meesa no understandy evolutions"

But more seriously, it is easy to imagine (and to construct!) systems which self-organize in a complex fashion that after a few iterations cannot be "understood" by human intellect any more than the entirety of how dna organizes embryological development or how the brain creates consciousness. Take a blank deep neural network and let it learn something. It will become a highly complex thing which accomplishes a task by seemingly magical and to our minds hopelessly intractable steps. My point is that our level of understanding of how a complex self-organizing system accomplishes things is by no means a measure of how likely it could have arisen on its own dynamically (and I am talking not about the construction of the blank network which is obviously designed by humans in my example, but of the learning process which creates the actual complexity which is entirely driven by experiencing the environment.

Without having proper code of conduct for stabilizing and disciplining the action, ever-changing circumstances would transform into chaos in any structure of events in the universe. Not a single event in the universe is the conduct which is free of some coding system which specify explicit rules of action and specify the expected behaviour in accordance with those determinant set of rules. That is another story whether we have an understanding of that coding system or not but there is always a connection between action and certain laws which guide those actions and we cannot simply say that whatever can cause a representational state is represented by that state.

Unfortunately, lack of code of conduct obscures the clarity of Natural Selection’s distinction which by no means can disentangle itself from the ambiguity and able to fit into the world of terminology of the modern scientific traditions. Natural Selection is too weak to support a comprehensive mathematics and on other side system of virtual analogy are not exchangeable: the order of results makes a difference. That regrettably means that wheels of fortune do not constitute a technological (let alone a biological) kind for which you can use information about previously investigated instances. But if you had knowledge of a random sample of all existing wheels of fortune, then you would work on the average for a new, randomly drawn, one.

[Harris]

OP, you forgot to mention irreducible complexity! That one's kills atheism completely!


yeah, just kidding, sorry.

Yeah!  And also, Darwin said the human eye could have NEVER evolved on it's own!  Oh, wait a minute...

Creation is not possible without intelligent creator because nothing in the universe has created its own being.

[bennyboy]

Yeah!  And also, Darwin said the human eye could have NEVER evolved on it's own!  Oh, wait a minute...

Creation is not possible without intelligent creator because nothing in the universe has created its own being.

. . . said God on an internet forum, revealing that he knows everything that can be known.

Anyway, did God create Himself? Obvious special pleading for a fairytale is obvious special pleading for a fairytale.

[Whateverist]

“The six feet of the DNA coiled inside every one of our bodies 100 trillion cells contain a four-letter chemical that spells out precise assembly instructions for all proteins from which our bodies are made … No hypothesis come even close to explaining how information got into biological matter by naturalistic means.”

Lee Strobel
Former legal editor of Chicago Tribune

But does anyone think any hypothesis comes close to explaining how information got into biological matter by non-natural means? No. And why is that? Because "explaining" means precisely to show how a phenomenon fits continuously with everything else we think we understand. To show how it fits with the 'supernatural' isn't at all what we mean by "explaining". In fact the "unexplainable" is as good a synonym as any for the "supernatural", a category I strongly suspect is an empty set.