The Problem with Christians

[Minimalist]

One God in three persons, Father, Son and Holy Spirit.

What are the odds of one entity being three persons, do you think?  

1+1+1 = 1

xtian math.  Probably taught at schools where the degree comes from sending in cereal box tops.

[robvalue]

What kind of scientific conclusion is "it's designed" anyway? It tells us absolutely nothing, even if it were true.

[AJW333]

Ditto with neurons: they evolved from simpler analogues, in this case from electrical signalling cells from a function in single celled life forms.

Sounds simple. But is it?

"If the human brain were a computer, it could perform 38 thousand trillion operations per second. The world’s most powerful supercomputer, BlueGene, can manage only .002% of that." https://www.quora.com/If-the-human-brain...mputer-Why

So how does genetic mutation account for the fact that each one of these operations is intelligent and has a specific purpose?

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"Science is a systematic enterprise that creates, builds and organizes knowledge in the form of testable explanations and predictions about the universe." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Science

Science is an inherently probabilistic field, but it's not fair to call its results speculation: yes, nobody directly observed these changes happening, but it'd be childish to demand only that sort of evidence and nothing more, not to mention massive special pleading. You ask about how we "absolutely" know something, which indicates a lack of understanding of the basic, probabilistic nature of science, because we don't absolutely know, nor are we required to. We infer that eyespots evolved into the eye in the same way we infer a relationship between Samotherium and modern Giraffes: through data and observation. Is it perfect? No, and nobody has ever claimed it was. Is it the best possible conclusion we can come to at the time, based on the evidence available to us? Yes. Yes it is.

Science depends on precision. If a claim cannot be verified by testing and observation, it should not be declared to be fact, it should be declared to be hypothetical. But this isn't what evolutionists do, they declare all too often, with absolute certainty that a whole train of radical species developments occurred with certainty.

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What kind of scientific conclusion is "it's designed" anyway? It tells us absolutely nothing, even if it were true.

If it is true, then there must be a designer.

[Cecelia]

What if the designer is non-sentient, and is the universe itself?

[Silver]

AJW continues to show his ignorance. No surprise.

[pocaracas]

Entropy applies to closed systems, which the earth is not. The earth receives energy from outside on a literally constant basis. In terms of the universe, we can't even tell if it is a closed system, but on the off chance that it is, there's nothing within the description of entropy that disallows the possibility of small- which is what stuff happening on a single planet would be, on the scale of a universal closed system- increases in order within a net increase of disorder... and bear in mind that we're talking about molecular disorder anyway, which isn't altered just by pushing together certain collections of molecules so that they do stuff on a macro-level while remaining the same on a molecular one.

And would you even consider life to be a decrease in disorder anyway, considering what life tends to do? Are you seriously suggesting that life is more orderly than a lifeless rock floating in space?

So basically, you recognize design because you misunderstand how entropy works. Great.  

If we look at entropy from an informational point of view we have;

"in data transmission and information theory, a measure of the loss of information in a transmitted signal or message."

Given that living systems with DNA have shown a progressive and very large increase in information, we can say that evolution requires entropy to be reversed in a step by step fashion over millions of years. If you want to deny that this is the result of design, you can cry "open system,"  but how does the application of heat and cosmic rays,  plus the occasional space rock add to the pool of information within the DNA?

If you stop being wrong, you may become right!

Entropy is entropy. Not information.
The term entropy can be applied to information as you pointed out, but that's not the physical entropy to which you allude when you desire to make "change of entropy" always positive.
Know where the analogy fails and you may come to realize how wrong you've been.

Living beings have become more complex at the expense of energy. Energy that mainly comes from the sun. And the sun is increasing the entropy of the solar system much more than any local dip in entropy on the surface of this planet.
That's it. Stop trotting out your ignorance of what entropy is and how it works.

Ditto with neurons: they evolved from simpler analogues, in this case from electrical signalling cells from a function in single celled life forms.

Sounds simple. But is it?

"If the human brain were a computer, it could perform 38 thousand trillion operations per second. The world’s most powerful supercomputer, BlueGene, can manage only .002% of that." https://www.quora.com/If-the-human-brain...mputer-Why

So how does genetic mutation account for the fact that each one of these operations is intelligent and has a specific purpose?

LOL!
Does your brain work like a computer, now?
A good deal of it is dedicated to vision analysis - how many computers out there can see and recognize stuff like our brains can?
And, in parallel, process sound, smell, touch, balance, sense of self, keep track of where all our parts are and what they're doing.... keep track of the requirements of our own bodies.... and think.
Not to mention all the memory. How many neurons are dedicated to memory storage, recall, updating, etc?
Also... redundancy and poor evolutionary design... There are brains out there with more neurons per sq-inch than our own... we could be even better.

Science is an inherently probabilistic field, but it's not fair to call its results speculation: yes, nobody directly observed these changes happening, but it'd be childish to demand only that sort of evidence and nothing more, not to mention massive special pleading. You ask about how we "absolutely" know something, which indicates a lack of understanding of the basic, probabilistic nature of science, because we don't absolutely know, nor are we required to. We infer that eyespots evolved into the eye in the same way we infer a relationship between Samotherium and modern Giraffes: through data and observation. Is it perfect? No, and nobody has ever claimed it was. Is it the best possible conclusion we can come to at the time, based on the evidence available to us? Yes. Yes it is.

Science depends on precision. If a claim cannot be verified by testing and observation, it should not be declared to be fact, it should be declared to be hypothetical. But this isn't what evolutionists do, they declare all too often, with absolute certainty that a whole train of radical species developments occurred with certainty.

Well.... maybe, if you were to read the actual scientific papers, you'd find that the language employed is much more in line with "we think that", "this could be", "it looks like", "the analysis suggests", etc...

What kind of scientific conclusion is "it's designed" anyway? It tells us absolutely nothing, even if it were true.

If it is true, then there must be a designer.

If there is a designer, then there is a designer.
Congratulations!
You've graduated from circular logic 101.

[Esquilax]

If we look at entropy from an informational point of view we have;

"in data transmission and information theory, a measure of the loss of information in a transmitted signal or message."

If you're not talking about thermodynamic entropy, then there's no sense in which an increase in entropy is impossible, nor even a firm demonstration that the terms of your definition apply to genetics. To be clear, "information" is not some inherent property or quantity of an object, it's a post hoc meaning applied after a string of potentially unguided characters or processes are interpreted by a mind and scanned for repeating patters and so on. There's information in a rock, sitting on the ground, in terms of positional data, chemical composition, etc: you've mixed up your definitions and are now no longer discussing something which even hints at design.

Given that living systems with DNA have shown a progressive and very large increase in information, we can say that evolution requires entropy to be reversed in a step by step fashion over millions of years.

... Except that now we're talking about a definition of entropy that is not physically impossible, and is hence not an argument against evolution. In fact, I'm beginning to suspect you have no idea what either definition of entropy means, because the fucking Wikipedia article provides an absolutely mundane example of a decrease in informational entropy right there in its introduction.

I mean, strictly speaking, entropy in information theory is a measure of unpredictability within transmitted information content, which is why I would suggest that next time, before you make a statement, you do more than look up the definition on dictionary.com, like, say, actually doing a little research, because information within this context is entirely different than what you're making it out to be. Entropy in information theory refers to uncertainty in deriving predictions about information, it fully accepts as a foundational principle that information can be naturally occurring, and that the entropy inherent in that information can rise and fall depending on numerous factors influencing the results: the person who coined the usage and came up with its measurements used coin tosses as the primary unit of measurement (are you saying that the outcomes of coin tosses are intelligently designed, because in this context they have information?) and demonstrates how entropy within that set up can both increase and decrease . In the case of a coin toss making entropy decrease is as simple as weighting the coin such that one outcome is more probable than the other, decreasing the level of uncertainty in predicting the outcome of any given toss.

This is a fundamental failure of research on your part, man. You're using a definition that's entirely irrelevant to what you're attempting to prove, you're even representing that definition wrong, and frankly, I'm willing to bet that this is due to a lack of research beyond the basic dictionary definition. You can read the Wikipedia article if you like, or any number of other educational outlets that can explain how this aspect of information theory works, because as of right now you clearly have no idea at all what this entails.

If you want to deny that this is the result of design, you can cry "open system,"  but how does the application of heat and cosmic rays,  plus the occasional space rock add to the pool of information within the DNA?

See, I was being charitable and assuming that you were discussing entropy in its common usage, where it's at least vaguely connected to the subject of evolution. It turns out that instead you're misusing an arcane and irrelevant technical definition, but I don't think I can be blamed for not predicting your abject, random failure of understanding here. Decreases in entropy are not precluded in information theory and are, in fact, trivially easy to come across: the lynchpin of your argument falls away, if you're using this definition and, if you switch to thermodynamic entropy then my observations about cosmic rays are perfectly apt.

[Esquilax]

I am fully accepting of the fact that species will adapt to their environment and to threats to their survival. Genetic variation and the appearance of random and occasional positive mutations isn't an issue either. But to take isolated cases of such occurrences as proof that simple cell bacteria evolved into fish, dogs, birds crocodiles and humans is a completely different argument. On the one hand you have small changes to the genetic code that don't change the identity of the organism, and on the other you have a complete change of one organism into a completely new species. You're arguing apples and oranges here.

"I am fully accepting that you can walk a step. I just don't accept that taking steps will allow you to walk a mile."

That's what you're saying here. You're asserting that small changes to organisms are acceptable, but that a collection of small changes, accumulated over many generations, will never result in an organism sufficiently different from its ancestor all those generations ago to qualify as a new species, which is a weird position to take given that we derive species definitions based on the morphological and genetic changes that you've already agreed occur in organisms. If you agree that organism 1 can have offspring and that that offspring (organism 2) will be slightly different from 1, and that slight differences across generations is a consistent pattern such that each organism is slightly different from its parent (and thus progressively more different than organism 1) then why is it that you don't think organism 1,000,000 will be extremely different from organism 1? What mechanism are you proposing to prevent small changes from continuing to accumulate, and how do you intend to demonstrate the existence of that mechanism?

[Esquilax]

Sounds simple. But is it?

"If the human brain were a computer, it could perform 38 thousand trillion operations per second. The world’s most powerful supercomputer, BlueGene, can manage only .002% of that." https://www.quora.com/If-the-human-brain...mputer-Why

We've been developing computers for less than a century. The human brain is the product of millions of years of evolution. I feel like there's a numerical discrepancy between those two spans of time that might have something to do with why one is more advanced than the other.

So how does genetic mutation account for the fact that each one of these operations is intelligent and has a specific purpose?

Um, they've evolved that way? Haven't you been paying attention?

Science depends on precision. If a claim cannot be verified by testing and observation, it should not be declared to be fact, it should be declared to be hypothetical. But this isn't what evolutionists do, they declare all too often, with absolute certainty that a whole train of radical species developments occurred with certainty.

The observation that evolution occurs is tested and verified. The observation of common ancestry is tested and observed; fields like morphology and genetics do exist, you know, and they provide us with observations of consistent phenomena in the natural world that suggest common ancestry. The fact that you aren't sufficiently conversant with these facts is not my problem, nor is it my problem that you'll reduce yourself to puppeting strawman "evolutionists" rabbiting on about certainty, as though I haven't just dismissed certainty as a scientific concept out of hand. If it's not my position, why bring it up to me? Why does "some people exaggerate stuff" mean that the mountains of observations and tests that we do have confirming evolution suddenly don't count? This is just another irrelevant point and, again, not my problem.

Your unwillingness to research is well demonstrated here, but I am not your biology tutor, and your ignorance is not an argument against evolution.

[Pat Mustard]

That's not what I'm saying. Complexity suggests design because a reduction in entropy is observed.

And what we're saying is that your bullshit both stinks to high heaven, and has been refuted multiple times on this thread alone.

One question, why do you persist in revisiting discredited bullshit? It is neither intelligent nor edifying.