Is atheism a scientific perspective?

[Angrboda]

For the third time, human intelligence is not capable of producing the complexity seen in a cell.  The complexity of the cell is the product of chemistry.  A chemical system that is beyond the capacity of human designers to design.  Since "intelligence" isn't a known cause of the complexity of the cell, you can only mean something else.  That something else is spelled out in the terms complex, specified information.  Complex information is ubiquitous.  All systems produce 'information'.  So it can't depend on it merely being complex information.  And the term specified is vacuous, so that adds nothing to the equation.


I'm not concluding that it is false, I'm concluding that it is an invalid argument for your conclusion.  That isn't due to my ideological biases, that's due to the structure of your argument.  If you don't like the fact that you have made an invalid argument, then get another god damned argument.


I've been through this.  The word function doesn't apply specifically to designed systems.  The rain has a function in the hydrological cycle.  Rocks on a beach sort themselves hydrologically; that's sequential information.  None of the terms you've supplied apply exclusively to designed things, so by consequence you will have false positives.  For an example, I'd give the checkers playing neural nets of Chelapilla and Fogel. (here)(See here for a complete exposition.)


I don't give a flying fucking damn that you resent it.  You're nothing but an evolution denier and evolution is established science.  Your made up distinction between speculative and empirical science is just your ideological bias looking for a way to worm itself to your already formed conclusion.  All science is a mix of both empirical observation and speculation.


Already dealt with.


All processes lead to 'information'.  It's the kind of information that is at issue, and you haven't been able to specify the kind of information in a way that unambiguously leads to designing intelligence.

You don't understand that the information of DNA is based on the chemical properties of the bases, the mRNA sequence that results from the process, and the chemical properties of the amino acid building blocks. It's not that there is not information, there is chemistry. It is that there is information derived by the cell from chemical properties of the characters that make up a sequence. They are the same thing. And you're right. We cannot produce cells yet. But information can (when accompanied by the appropriate enzymes (which themselves are the result of DNA sequence being interpreted by preceding enzymes)). Here's what you seem to be saying now: "cells are too complex to be produced by intelligence. Therefore design is not a tenable argument and we must appeal to an undirected process to explain it."

Your grasp on "what I seem to be saying" is lousy at best. You're arguing that human intelligence is adequate for the design processes seen in the cell. Since this is not true, you can only be arguing from analogy. Ergo, "The results of the human design process are similar to what we see in the cell in a certain well prescribed way." (Well prescribed or you get false positives.) William Dembski's well prescribed way turns out to be a lot of mathematical mumbo jumbo. You're arguing that producing information which is functionally specific is the description. You've already been given a counter-example to that in the evolutionary algorithm which gives rise to functional checkers playing neural nets (which I note you didn't respond to). The point is that you're not comparing to human design traits, you're comparing to a proxy for designer traits. And therefore your argument stands or falls on the ability of your proxy to pick out design in human and non-human systems. Specifying function doesn't do it because function is just a loose concept which can be applied to both natural and designed things. Your criteria are not well prescribed and they produce false positives.

And you cannot just assert that all systems exert complex information. That is a ridiculous assertion and you know it. You have to address the fact that undirected processes have never been observed to produce a sequence of characters capable of accomplishing a specific function. You complain about my definition of information, then basically go on to define information as some ubiquitous feature present in everything. DNA is what it is. You can object to it being defined as irregular sequential information that accomplishes a specific purpose if you want, but then you would be disagreeing with every (this is one of the few times I feel comfortable using such an inclusive word as "every") scientist on either side of the debate. You then go on to tell me that I am denying science as though you have an understanding of biology that I don't.

I never stated that all systems produce complex information. DNA accomplishes nothing by itself, it is part of a chemical system that translates the DNA into specific things. Information is a system property. Regardless, what is at issue is not whether in some loose sense DNA is information, but rather whether your definition of information leading to a specific function uniquely picks out intelligent design. For the reasons stated, as well as the counter example, it does not.

Do you want to explain the term argument of ignorance to me then? Can we draw any conclusions on any topic that we do not know everything about (which ironically would be every topic), or would a conclusion just be a statement of ignorance? I'm having trouble understanding how any claim not rooted in empiricism can not be considered an argument from ignorance by you.

The argument from ignorance is committed when you argue that something is true based upon what we don't know rather than upon what we do know. You stated that when we can't find any other cause for certain properties we should conclude design. That's arguing on the basis of what we don't know, and therefore an argument from ignorance, aka appeal to ignorance.

And evolution is an established science if you accept that the word evolution is merely referring to a change in gene frequencies over time. If you are going to try to tell me that it is established science that all living things have descended from a common ancestor and that this process has led to an increase in complexity and functionality of the genetic code, I will be disappointed. You already implied (you might have even actually stated) that you do not believe that there is a working definition of complexity or functionality, so I'm curious why you would accept that there is a process that can lead to it. If you don't think we have properly defined what it is we are trying to explain the origin of (functional DNA sequences), then why do you accept any conclusion for its origin?

Again your lack of reading comprehension astounds me. I never stated that there is no workable definition for complexity or functionality. I argued that function isn't specific to design. Neither is complexity as defined by IDers, but that's another matter. If CSI is to pick out design, then it has to be specific to designed things and it isn't. Not with Dembski's morass of technical jargon, nor your simplistic attempt to replace that jargon.

---

Counter example #2:

In radio communications, an evolved antenna is an antenna designed fully or substantially by an automatic computer design program that uses an evolutionary algorithm that mimics Darwinian evolution. This sophisticated procedure has been used in recent years to design a few antennas for mission-critical applications involving stringent, conflicting, or unusual design requirements, such as unusual radiation patterns, for which none of the many existing antenna types are adequate.

The computer program starts with simple antenna shapes, then adds or modifies elements in a semirandom manner to create a number of new candidate antenna shapes. These are then evaluated to determine how well they fulfill the design requirements, and a numerical score is computed for each. Then, in a step similar to natural selection, a portion of the candidate antennas with the worst scores are discarded, leaving a small population of the highest-scoring designs. Using these antennas, the computer repeats the procedure, generating a population of even higher-scoring designs. After a number of iterations, the population of antennas is evaluated and the highest-scoring design is chosen. The resulting antenna often outperforms the best manual designs, because it has a complicated asymmetric shape that could not have been found with traditional manual design methods.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolved_antenna

Note in particular that the evolved design is often superior to human designs, just as the cell is beyond the capability of human designers.

[Tonus]

I agree that they don't need to treat all ideas the same. But if you are aware that they don't, then you can't demand that I publish ideas in a scientific journal before you will consider them.

I'm aware that they don't treat all ideas the same because some ideas don't deserve to be taken seriously. If you feel they do, then the way to demonstrate it is via peer-review in a scientific journal. If you're avoiding legitimate peer-review, I will remain suspicious of your ideas.

I'm confused by your second question. I do think that different topics lead to differential journal subscription rates, which leads to different profit.

You feel that if ID gets attention in scientific journals, they will lose enough subscriber revenue to refuse to consider papers for publication?

And I agree that it is a way to keep scientists honest. They are not avoiding the system. They have published several articles, and peer-reviewed books as well.

And these haven't rocked the foundations of biology?

[Esquilax]

DNA has not been demonstrated to arise naturally. It comes from pre-existing DNA in every observed instance, unless you are going to give me something about how nucleotides have been found.

"DNA has not been demonstrated to arise naturally. It's just been demonstrated to come about via the natural process of reproduction."

So, to recap, what we have here is DNA originating from a natural process, over and over and over again, countless trillions of times, across the entirety of human history and well before that point... and you've decided that it can't possibly have come from natural processes, on the basis that you can't imagine how it could have, and because in the most recent of times scientists have figured out how to intelligently manipulate DNA.

Millions of years of natural replication on one side. A decade or so of artificial manipulation on the other. And you've just so happened to take that as evidence of the thing you already believed. Uh huh.

This is not the same as DNA. They must still be linked into a functional sequence, and have enzymes and a translation system for it to be functional. And you came late, us getting DNA to do what we want to (by inputting sequence) is evidence that intelligence is capable of leading to DNA. This by itself is not reason to believe that it is the only cause capable. You'll have to read the rest if you want.

Sure, modern DNA needs that. What makes you think we're talking about modern DNA when it comes to the origin of this? Since we know life evolves, we also know their genes change over time... why do you think we'd be starting with modern DNA at the first point?

What terms would you like me to define? It seems to be a defense mechanism by members of this thread to demand definitions, complain that they are not good enough for them, and dismiss the argument. Rather than defining these terms (which I can attempt to do if you want), would you like me to send you links to some peer-reviewed articles that I believe illustrate the concept of highly specific biological processes that do not rely on randomness. I can also give you plenty of articles related to the "junk" sequence functions if that's the part you are concerned about.

Yeah, no, that's what it is: a defense mechanism. Can't possibly be that the terms you're using haven't been well defined because they were manufactured out of whole cloth to prop up intelligent design. No, everyone secretly knows what you're talking about but we're pretending not to so we can deny ID, that's what's happening, you're right.

How about this: can you give me a single piece of evidence for intelligent design that doesn't route back to an argument from ignorance? Because, see, I went and looked up these terms before I wrote my last post, and every ID site I went to tended to just use terms like "specific" while defining them with themselves, which is why I called it mystic babble before; it's a term that exists because it connotes intelligence in a truthy sense, without actually meaning anything applicable. It's an incantation that sounds like science to the layman but doesn't have a meaning behind it that matters to the science. I have the feeling, based on what I read, though, that "highly specific biological processes that do not rely on randomness," really just means "I can't think of a way this could have arisen naturally (for a specific, strawmanned value of naturally that means entirely by random chance)".

I'll take the peer reviewed articles. However, if the articles themselves don't come to the conclusion of intelligent design, I'll have to ask you why that is, so you'd best have an explanation of why it is you think they support ID when the actual authors did not.

[AAA]

You don't understand that the information of DNA is based on the chemical properties of the bases, the mRNA sequence that results from the process, and the chemical properties of the amino acid building blocks. It's not that there is not information, there is chemistry. It is that there is information derived by the cell from chemical properties of the characters that make up a sequence. They are the same thing. And you're right. We cannot produce cells yet. But information can (when accompanied by the appropriate enzymes (which themselves are the result of DNA sequence being interpreted by preceding enzymes)). Here's what you seem to be saying now: "cells are too complex to be produced by intelligence. Therefore design is not a tenable argument and we must appeal to an undirected process to explain it."

Your grasp on "what I seem to be saying" is lousy at best.  You're arguing that human intelligence is adequate for the design processes seen in the cell.  Since this is not true, you can only be arguing from analogy.  Ergo, "The results of the human design process are similar to what we see in the cell in a certain well prescribed way." (Well prescribed or you get false positives.)  William Dembski's well prescribed way turns out to be a lot of mathematical mumbo jumbo.  You're arguing that producing information which is functionally specific is the description.  You've already been given a counter-example to that in the evolutionary algorithm which gives rise to functional checkers playing neural nets (which I note you didn't respond to).  The point is that you're not comparing to human design traits, you're comparing to a proxy for designer traits.  And therefore your argument stands or falls on the ability of your proxy to pick out design in human and non-human systems.  Specifying function doesn't do it because function is just a loose concept which can be applied to both natural and designed things.  Your criteria are not well prescribed and they produce false positives.

And you cannot just assert that all systems exert complex information. That is a ridiculous assertion and you know it. You have to address the fact that undirected processes have never been observed to produce a sequence of characters capable of accomplishing a specific function. You complain about my definition of information, then basically go on to define information as some ubiquitous feature present in everything. DNA is what it is. You can object to it being defined as irregular sequential information that accomplishes a specific purpose if you want, but then you would be disagreeing with every (this is one of the few times I feel comfortable using such an inclusive word as "every") scientist on either side of the debate. You then go on to tell me that I am denying science as though you have an understanding of biology that I don't.

I never stated that all systems produce complex information.  DNA accomplishes nothing by itself, it is part of a chemical system that translates the DNA into specific things.  Information is a system property.  Regardless, what is at issue is not whether in some loose sense DNA is information, but rather whether your definition of information leading to a specific function uniquely picks out intelligent design.  For the reasons stated, as well as the counter example, it does not.

Do you want to explain the term argument of ignorance to me then? Can we draw any conclusions on any topic that we do not know everything about (which ironically would be every topic), or would a conclusion just be a statement of ignorance? I'm having trouble understanding how any claim not rooted in empiricism can not be considered an argument from ignorance by you.

The argument from ignorance is committed when you argue that something is true based upon what we don't know rather than upon what we do know.  You stated that when we can't find any other cause for certain properties we should conclude design.  That's arguing on the basis of what we don't know, and therefore an argument from ignorance, aka appeal to ignorance.

And evolution is an established science if you accept that the word evolution is merely referring to a change in gene frequencies over time. If you are going to try to tell me that it is established science that all living things have descended from a common ancestor and that this process has led to an increase in complexity and functionality of the genetic code, I will be disappointed. You already implied (you might have even actually stated) that you do not believe that there is a working definition of complexity or functionality, so I'm curious why you would accept that there is a process that can lead to it. If you don't think we have properly defined what it is we are trying to explain the origin of (functional DNA sequences), then why do you accept any conclusion for its origin?

Again your lack of reading comprehension astounds me.  I never stated that there is no workable definition for complexity or functionality.  I argued that function isn't specific to design.  Neither is complexity as defined by IDers, but that's another matter.  If CSI is to pick out design, then it has to be specific to designed things and it isn't.  Not with Dembski's morass of technical jargon, nor your simplistic attempt to replace that jargon.

---

Counter example #2:

In radio communications, an evolved antenna is an antenna designed fully or substantially by an automatic computer design program that uses an evolutionary algorithm that mimics Darwinian evolution. This sophisticated procedure has been used in recent years to design a few antennas for mission-critical applications involving stringent, conflicting, or unusual design requirements, such as unusual radiation patterns, for which none of the many existing antenna types are adequate.

The computer program starts with simple antenna shapes, then adds or modifies elements in a semirandom manner to create a number of new candidate antenna shapes. These are then evaluated to determine how well they fulfill the design requirements, and a numerical score is computed for each. Then, in a step similar to natural selection, a portion of the candidate antennas with the worst scores are discarded, leaving a small population of the highest-scoring designs. Using these antennas, the computer repeats the procedure, generating a population of even higher-scoring designs. After a number of iterations, the population of antennas is evaluated and the highest-scoring design is chosen. The resulting antenna often outperforms the best manual designs, because it has a complicated asymmetric shape that could not have been found with traditional manual design methods.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolved_antenna

Note in particular that the evolved design is often superior to human designs, just as the cell is beyond the capability of human designers.

I am not arguing that human intelligence is capable of producing cells. I am arguing that intelligence is capable of producing information. Information (as a sequence of characters that conveys a message that is interpreted in a way that allows specific function) is a feature that has only ever been found in living systems and intelligently designed systems. Based on this (WHAT WE DO KNOW), we conclude that intelligence is an adequate explanation for information. Moreover, we have created specific DNA and RNA sequences in the lab with the input of intelligence. Is this not evidence that intelligence is capable of producing the sequential information found in DNA? You say that I have lousy understanding of what you are saying, then go on to misrepresent the ID argument in the next sentence.

And again, I must defend against this being classified as an argument from ignorance on the basis of the nature of the claim. The ID claim is that intelligence is the only known cause capable of producing the type of sequential information found in living systems. Since you don't seem to be getting why you need negative evidence and positive evidence (and both were provided (yet you focus only on the negative)), I will use a simpler analogy that I used earlier. Imagine someone claims that Idea A is the only good idea. They must first demonstrate that A is in fact good (this is analogous to demonstrating that intelligence can produce information). They must then demonstrate that ideas B and C are bad ideas (this is analogous to demonstrating that chance and necessity are not adequate). Negative evidence is necessary to support this type of claim. Nobody is saying that we don't understand it, therefore was was designed, we are saying that we understand only one type of cause that is adequate. We make the argument based on what we do know, not what we don't.

Wouldn't you be interested to know how it adds antenna shapes? These shapes, I presume, are preprogrammed functional units, the differential combination of which leads to different function. This would be drastically different then the process of mutation, which most often takes the form of a single nucleotide change. If the mechanism of phenotypic variation among biological entities was simply the semirandom organization of preprogrammed units (lets say whole exons), then I would not be surprised to see enhanced function. It is only when you appeal to extremely small changes in the genetic code that the mechanism becomes hard to believe.

---

DNA has not been demonstrated to arise naturally. It comes from pre-existing DNA in every observed instance, unless you are going to give me something about how nucleotides have been found.

"DNA has not been demonstrated to arise naturally. It's just been demonstrated to come about via the natural process of reproduction."

So, to recap, what we have here is DNA originating from a natural process, over and over and over again, countless trillions of times, across the entirety of human history and well before that point... and you've decided that it can't possibly have come from natural processes, on the basis that you can't imagine how it could have, and because in the most recent of times scientists have figured out how to intelligently manipulate DNA.

Millions of years of natural replication on one side. A decade or so of artificial manipulation on the other. And you've just so happened to take that as evidence of the thing you already believed. Uh huh.

This is not the same as DNA. They must still be linked into a functional sequence, and have enzymes and a translation system for it to be functional. And you came late, us getting DNA to do what we want to (by inputting sequence) is evidence that intelligence is capable of leading to DNA. This by itself is not reason to believe that it is the only cause capable. You'll have to read the rest if you want.

Sure, modern DNA needs that. What makes you think we're talking about modern DNA when it comes to the origin of this? Since we know life evolves, we also know their genes change over time... why do you think we'd be starting with modern DNA at the first point?

What terms would you like me to define? It seems to be a defense mechanism by members of this thread to demand definitions, complain that they are not good enough for them, and dismiss the argument. Rather than defining these terms (which I can attempt to do if you want), would you like me to send you links to some peer-reviewed articles that I believe illustrate the concept of highly specific biological processes that do not rely on randomness. I can also give you plenty of articles related to the "junk" sequence functions if that's the part you are concerned about.

Yeah, no, that's what it is: a defense mechanism. Can't possibly be that the terms you're using haven't been well defined because they were manufactured out of whole cloth to prop up intelligent design. No, everyone secretly knows what you're talking about but we're pretending not to so we can deny ID, that's what's happening, you're right.  

How about this: can you give me a single piece of evidence for intelligent design that doesn't route back to an argument from ignorance? Because, see, I went and looked up these terms before I wrote my last post, and every ID site I went to tended to just use terms like "specific" while defining them with themselves, which is why I called it mystic babble before; it's a term that exists because it connotes intelligence in a truthy sense, without actually meaning anything applicable. It's an incantation that sounds like science to the layman but doesn't have a meaning behind it that matters to the science. I have the feeling, based on what I read, though, that "highly specific biological processes that do not rely on randomness," really just means "I can't think of a way this could have arisen naturally (for a specific, strawmanned value of naturally that means entirely by random chance)".

I'll take the peer reviewed articles. However, if the articles themselves don't come to the conclusion of intelligent design, I'll have to ask you why that is, so you'd best have an explanation of why it is you think they support ID when the actual authors did not.

I figured by saying that DNA arises naturally you were talking about abiogenesis. And the only reason that it replicates in the first place is because of the sequence of characters that instruct the sequence of the daughter strand. Not to mention the helicases, single stranded binding proteins, topoisomerases, primases, DNA polymerases, and all the other estimated 100 + enzymes necessary for its replication in vivo. Don't forget the need for it to be protected from its environment. Thank evolution it happens to have a cell wall made of peptidoglycan which are produced via a biochemical pathway involving many enzymes. Thank evolution it has the ability to ligate them together and regulate what comes in and out. All of this is based on pre-existing information. The question being addressed is the ultimate origin of information. Obviously it is there now. The question is whether intelligence is the only known cause capable of producing it.

And the positive evidence (as I have repeated) is this. Cells contain information in the form of a sequence of characters that is read and interpreted to produce a desired function. (If you disagree with this, then you are disagreeing with every biology student/professor/textbook I have ever encountered (which is fine if you have good reason)). Intelligent input is repeatedly shown to be capable of producing sequential information. No other mechanism has been shown to be adequate. Therefore, based on our uniform and repeated experience, intelligence is the best current explanation (you should read Stephen Meyer's Signature in the Cell. He develops this argument). 

And the articles that I will leave use the words specific and such to describe cellular processes. And do you really expect me to be able to tell you why a person believes what they do? Just read the article and think for yourself instead of being concerned with what the authors believe.\

http://www.jlr.org/content/54/5/1174.full.pdf+html
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19154003
http://www.pnas.org/content/105/2/716.short
http://emboj.embopress.org/content/20/14/3617

[Esquilax]

I figured by saying that DNA arises naturally you were talking about abiogenesis. And the only reason that it replicates in the first place is because of the sequence of characters that instruct the sequence of the daughter strand. Not to mention the helicases, single stranded binding proteins, topoisomerases, primases, DNA polymerases, and all the other estimated 100 + enzymes necessary for its replication in vivo. Don't forget the need for it to be protected from its environment. Thank evolution it happens to have a cell wall made of peptidoglycan which are produced via a biochemical pathway involving many enzymes. Thank evolution it has the ability to ligate them together and regulate what comes in and out. All of this is based on pre-existing information. The question being addressed is the ultimate origin of information. Obviously it is there now. The question is whether intelligence is the only known cause capable of producing it.

This is precisely the argument from ignorance I was talking about: name a bunch of things that seem complicated to a layman, and then because you don't know how they could have arisen naturally, there must have been an intelligence behind it. Not gonna fly here.

As I said before, though, just because DNA replicates a specific way now, does not mean that this is the only way it could replicate, nor even that it's a style of replication that would actually suit DNA if it arose in a different, less complex form than it takes today. You're making a series of entirely unjustified assumptions in order to suit your case, and while that might be comforting to your pre-established conclusions, if we don't know a thing, then there's no reason to just assume stasis in the way DNA works, in particular in light of the fact that we already see a trend of upward complexity in every other aspect of biology.

And the positive evidence (as I have repeated) is this. Cells contain information in the form of a sequence of characters that is read and interpreted to produce a desired function. (If you disagree with this, then you are disagreeing with every biology student/professor/textbook I have ever encountered (which is fine if you have good reason)). Intelligent input is repeatedly shown to be capable of producing sequential information. No other mechanism has been shown to be adequate. Therefore, based on our uniform and repeated experience, intelligence is the best current explanation (you should read Stephen Meyer's Signature in the Cell. He develops this argument). 

So, again: argument from ignorance.

Moreover, information is commonplace. Chemistry produces information, obviously, but it's hardly alone in this: physical matter, for example, produces positional information, temperature information, information regarding movement... information is a function of minds capable of seeing patterns and extrapolating from them, not some inherent quantity that needs to be "produced." I don't disagree that cells contain information, but I certainly disagree with your notions regarding what information is, and your claim that intelligent input is the only thing adequate for producing sequential information, because it's not. This is sort of the problem I have with these sorts of arguments, which is that Meyer simply decides that information is some special category of thing that DNA has but other things don't, relying on the idea that people won't consider what information actually is when they read it.

Information is not produced, it is "read" by minds after the fact. If you disagree, then please produce one objective quantity of information. Not a quantity of some other thing that contains information when read by a mind, but the actual information itself, as the objectively real thing your language is claiming it is. You can't, because you're just arguing from both ignorance and analogy.

And the articles that I will leave use the words specific and such to describe cellular processes. And do you really expect me to be able to tell you why a person believes what they do? Just read the article and think for yourself instead of being concerned with what the authors believe.\

Aaaaaand now you've tipped your hand.

Well, for the second time- let's not forget that you were dismissing the peer review process as biased against you just a few pages ago, yet now you're crowing about how peer reviewed your citations are where you think they support you- but that's just icing on the cake at this point. Because, see, the beliefs of the authors are actually kind of important here: they're trained to have educated, accurate conclusions on this subject, for one. For another, you're proffering the information in these papers as accurate and worthy of consideration, which necessarily means that their conclusions are worthy of that too. Far more worthy than your own conclusions, for that matter, owing to their education.

What you're saying here, if you don't mind me cutting through your pretenses to intellectual rigor, is that the writers of these papers should be trusted to provide accurate information... right up until the point that they begin to stray from your presupposed conclusion. At that point, oh, we should all make up our own conclusions and think for ourselves... isn't that convenient?

As to the actual papers themselves, I'm afraid you're arguing from ignorance again. Do you have an actual point regarding them, other than that you can't think of a way they could arise naturally?

[robvalue]

Are you ever going to admit what your own position is?

Do you believe humans were created in their current form by magic? Or did we evolve? Or something else?

You keep saying designer, but we know you mean "God". This is exactly why ID is creationism pretending to be science.

[Whateverist]

I'm pretty sure DNA is naturally occurring. Don't have a clue how far back it goes or from how simple a beginning. My human intelligence isn't sufficient to stitch together a likely origins story for DNA. It also isn't sufficient to judge what intelligence mega times greater than my own would or would not be able to design ... any more than yours is, AAA.

[Esquilax]

But the other thing is this, and this is sort of the meta-problem with intelligent design that kinda shows off the fundamental presupposition with the idea: so, you believe that an intelligent designer is the only possible explanation that adequately accounts for the complexity of life. Okay, let's go with that. What is that designer like? And where did it come from?

Is it a complex designer? A being capable of engineering DNA on a grand scale, with wants and purposes for that design? Wouldn't it then need a designer of its own, since the only thing capable of explaining complex information is intelligence? There's only a few options that can get through this dilemma: either you're left with an infinite regress of intelligent designers designing each other, which is absurd and doesn't leave any form of god any kind of advantage, or at some point the intelligent life which designed our life would have to have arisen naturally. In which case ID proponents also believe that complex systems can arise naturally... they've just arbitrarily shifted it back however many steps because they really want our life to be designed.

Now, they could also posit the supernatural, beyond time, misapplication of cosmology woo woo sort of designer, but if they did that, suddenly all those arguments about what is observable and evident have gone out the window, showing off that this whole endeavor was one big post hoc rationalization to begin with. There's really no way for an ID guy to justify positing a designer in any level of detail without either demolishing the argument or showcasing the assumed conclusion the whole edifice has been built around.

This is, I suspect, the main reason why speculations on the identity of the designer are suspiciously absent. Aside from the fact that the entire damn field is just rebranded creationism, that is. The conclusion simply is not tenable within reality, so the only option left is to just not talk about it.

[Tonus]

Is it a complex designer? A being capable of engineering DNA on a grand scale, with wants and purposes for that design? Wouldn't it then need a designer of its own, since the only thing capable of explaining complex information is intelligence? There's only a few options that can get through this dilemma: either you're left with an infinite regress of intelligent designers designing each other, which is absurd and doesn't leave any form of god any kind of advantage, or at some point the intelligent life which designed our life would have to have arisen naturally. In which case ID proponents also believe that complex systems can arise naturally... they've just arbitrarily shifted it back however many steps because they really want our life to be designed.

Now, they could also posit the supernatural, beyond time, misapplication of cosmology woo woo sort of designer, but if they did that, suddenly all those arguments about what is observable and evident have gone out the window, showing off that this whole endeavor was one big post hoc rationalization to begin with.

It also does not make the question of the origin of god invalid. If god lives outside of our reality, he still exists in some other reality... and in that reality, he is either created by an even greater intellect --so that it's intellects all the way up, to coin a phrase-- or it's possible for life of far greater complexity than we can imagine to occur naturally and evolve into a god. And if it can happen there... then it can happen. So why wouldn't it happen in our reality?

The idea that the question of infinite regress can be dealt with by shunting god off into another dimension isn't rational. If premise A is always true, but it's not true in setting B, then... premise A is not always true.

[Angrboda]

Wouldn't you be interested to know how it adds antenna shapes? These shapes, I presume, are preprogrammed functional units, the differential combination of which leads to different function. This would be drastically different then the process of mutation, which most often takes the form of a single nucleotide change. If the mechanism of phenotypic variation among biological entities was simply the semirandom organization of preprogrammed units (lets say whole exons), then I would not be surprised to see enhanced function. It is only when you appeal to extremely small changes in the genetic code that the mechanism becomes hard to believe.

Not the point. It's an example of a non-intelligent process leading to specified information in your sense of the terms. That makes your argument that intelligence and living systems are the only thing we know that produces this type of information incorrect. And you still haven't responded to the checkers playing neural nets as a counter example as well. (See https://ti.arc.nasa.gov/m/pub-archive/12...ornby).pdf for an example antenna construction sequence.)

Then there's the following: