Is atheism a scientific perspective?

[Mister Agenda]

So we have what humans make, which is a product of intelligent design. And we have some other things, not made by humans, which have some similarities to things humans make. And the argument boils down to 'if things humans make are the product of intelligent design, these other things MUST also be a product of intelligent design.'

Without knowing anything at all about the 'other things' being talked about, we've got a hasty generalization fallacy.

[GUBU]

a pretzel isn't near as much fun as  . . . .

True that, he's also member of a species that could choke on one of your hairballs, if not careful.

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JAYSUS

Found your inner Irishman?

[AAA]

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?

It isn't an argument from ignorance. How do you not understand how our repeated experience of the cause and effect relationship of information coupled with the presence of large amounts of information necessary for life is positive evidence of design? Pay attention closely, because it's about the 23243234th time it's been said: the conclusion that design is the only known cause for sequential information is based on WHAT WE DO KNOW about the origin of information.

All that you people do is shout that things are arguments from ignorance. let's get this settled now, so I don't have to keep addressing it. It's not "I don't know how it got there, therefore God". It's "despite a thorough search over the course of more than half a century by the world's brightest minds, not a single person has ever been able to propose another possible explanation to explain the origin of the sequential information contained within DNA other than that it was the product of intelligence. Intelligence is repeatedly shown to be capable of producing the phenomenon, therefore it is the best current explanation." 

And again, we aren't talking about temperature/positional information. We are talking about information in the form of a sequence of characters that is read to accomplish a desired function. You clearly haven't read Meyer's book. He goes to great lengths to describe the type of information in DNA. Information does not have to be read by minds. I know no biologist who disagrees with the proposition that DNA contains information. Titles of chapters in my textbooks about the DNA and RNA use words like "informational macromolecules". It's not something that the ID community just made up. And we've already talked about how information is hard to quantify, but that it is not necessary to quantify it to draw conclusions based on the qualitative nature.

As for the articles, don't even worry about distinguishing between speculation and empiricism if you don't want to. Just read them. I put them there because they use words in ways that you say were made up by the ID community. And yeah, I think we ought to have our own interpretation of the results. Why do you not?

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So we have what humans make, which is a product of intelligent design. And we have some other things, not made by humans, which have some similarities to things humans make. And the argument boils down to 'if things humans make are the product of intelligent design, these other things MUST also be a product of intelligent design.'

Without knowing anything at all about the 'other things' being talked about, we've got a hasty generalization fallacy.

Not really. We have a feature in something that humans did not make. We humans have produced this feature repeatedly with the input of intelligence. No other cause has stood up to scrutiny, which leaves intelligence as the only known cause for the feature. It also isn't that they MUST be the product of design. That was never part of the argument. We may find a better explanation tomorrow.

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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:

It actually is crucial to examining the analogy. These shape are predetermined as options. Life does not work that way. There is no predetermined shape/structure. Not only that, but every structure relies on probably hundreds (maybe even thousands by the time you consider the code necessary to produce the enzymes that manufacture it) of nucleotides. We aren't just adding structures at random. Any major structure would arise only after many mutations occurred in precise locations to the correct base within the context of a system capable of using this new structure once it somehow manages to form.

[Asmodee]

The first part of your argument seems really shallow. I think you know that we are not saying that "it looks designed therefore it was". It is "despite thorough search for another cause, only intelligence is a known cause that can produce what we see in designed systems". It is not that we are just appealing to our initial intuitions. These conclusions come after careful studying of the systems and proposed explanations. Your argument seems to be "because in the past we have seen apparent design turn out to be illusory, all apparent designs are illusory". 

I have cut out all of the post except the portion I am responding to in the interest of brevity and getting to the point.  I only skimmed rest, this part just caught my eye.

I believe I saw in this post that you were an undergraduate in biology.  Congratulations on getting higher learning.  But I think you need to pay a little better attention in class.  Particularly, what makes up a valid theory.  You cannot invoke a supernatural cause.  "Design" is a supernatural cause.  After taking college science courses it strikes me that you would have a little better understanding of science and would know that because a "thorough search for another cause" didn't turn up anything, whatever shit is leftover must be the answer.  That's how things work in the Sherlock Holmes universe, not in the real universe.  You don't find what's right by showing what's not.

Secondly, I'm sure you know a few ID believers.  What religion are each of those people you know?  Now be honest.  Do you really believe that their religious beliefs have no bearing whatsoever on their acceptance of ID?  Really?

Look at the facts.  A 2009 poll by the Pew Research Center found that evolution had reached 97% consensus while just 2% say evolution doesn't happen.  Of the 97% consensus, 8% say that evolution was guided by a supreme being.  There are 4x more scientists who accept evolution and believe it is guided by God than scientists who reject evolution altogether.  So if 97% of scientists agree evolution is a reality and 99.999% of those who reject evolution hold similar religious views, what does that tell you?  That is a clear indication of a bias.  Do you think these people came to their creationist beliefs after learning about evolution or before?

ID is creationism.  It was designed by creationists to replace overt creationism in schools immediately after the courts struck it down.  The original book created to support ID, Of Pandas and People was originally intended to be a creationism textbook.  It uses the exact same definition for ID that it used for creationism in an earlier draft.  That was the founding of intelligent design.  It is a religious belief made by people with religious beliefs to support their religious beliefs.  They started with their religious beliefs, came up with a few ideas why the science they didn't like was wrong and created a faux science based entirely on their religious beliefs.  There is no way in hell good science can possibly come of this, much less completely unchanged from the original biased, completely unscientific, religiously tainted origins.  Irreducible complexity is not part of a scientific theory.  It's and early idea they had which they then shoehorned into a faux scientific theory.  It's a produce of a religious think-tank group with the purpose of sneaking creationism back into schools after the court ruled it unconstitutional.

Which brings us full circle to my claim that I have to watch everything Christians say.  Here you are treating intelligent design like it's no different from any other science.  You must know its origins.  There is no way you don't know that intelligent design, which invokes a supernatural cause, is the brain-child of creationists trying to disguise creationism as some new science to sneak it back into schools.  The very founding of ID, itself, was a deception.  The claim they made that it was science, not creationism was a deception.  The book which introduced it was going to be a creationist book originally and was rewritten, saying exactly the same thing, to remove overt mentions of creationism and replace it with intelligent design.  ID is a lie.  That is its origin story.  It was a lie told to sneak creationism back into schools.  This is absolutely irrefutable.  You can look up the Dover court case and see the previous versions of the book which use creationism instead of intelligent design. You treat it like it's a real science, but it's not.  I know you really want to believe that it is, and I realize you aren't feeding me false information on purpose, but to treat ID like any real science is a deception, and someone with education in biology should know better.  A lie doesn't turn into science because it's a really good lie.  The chances that a bunch of people trying to deceive us all accidentally created good science from the lie they wove are laughable.  I know you think it sounds good, but that's because it's exactly what you want to hear.  The best lies always sound good.  But they're still lies.

It's not that I think you are inherently untrustworthy, or even stupid.  Honestly, I do think you're ignorant by choice.  That's not an insult, just an honest evaluation.  You probably think something similar of me, and I understand that.  It's the nature of our difference of beliefs.  It's not you I distrust, it's the things you choose to believe and the things you must ignore to maintain your belief system.  I don't think you intentionally try to deceive me.  I do think you make the choice to deceive yourself.  ID is shit.  I'm sorry, but that is absolutely true.  A turd of a lie does not become a gem just because it's a really good lie.  A lie is a lie and ID is very much a lie.  That's all it will ever be.  And by advocating ID you are spreading that lie.  Unintentionally, I'm sure, but when you say "ID has merit" you are saying, "It's not a lie".  I can show you its origins.  I can show you that it's creationism in disguise.  I can show you early drafts of the book which introduced ID which use "creationism" in place of "intelligent design".  I can show you the court transcripts which have the people behind ID claiming that it had nothing to do with creationism, even though early drafts used the word "creationism".  I can show you that ID started as a big fat lie.  Yet you seem to believe this lie was somehow miraculously scientific, pretty much unchanged from the original work of deception it was intended to be.  It wasn't intended as a science, it was intended as a lie.  But somehow it was scientific.  Through some magical miracle the lie they intended to tell was accidentally the science they claimed it to be, even though "science" was never their intent.  I'm sorry, but good science simply doesn't spring out of deceptions intended to present religion as science.  The very fact that it invokes a supernatural cause alone disqualifies it as scientific.

[AAA]

The first part of your argument seems really shallow. I think you know that we are not saying that "it looks designed therefore it was". It is "despite thorough search for another cause, only intelligence is a known cause that can produce what we see in designed systems". It is not that we are just appealing to our initial intuitions. These conclusions come after careful studying of the systems and proposed explanations. Your argument seems to be "because in the past we have seen apparent design turn out to be illusory, all apparent designs are illusory". 

I have cut out all of the post except the portion I am responding to in the interest of brevity and getting to the point.  I only skimmed rest, this part just caught my eye.

I believe I saw in this post that you were an undergraduate in biology.  Congratulations on getting higher learning.  But I think you need to pay a little better attention in class.  Particularly, what makes up a valid theory.  You cannot invoke a supernatural cause.  "Design" is a supernatural cause.  After taking college science courses it strikes me that you would have a little better understanding of science and would know that because a "thorough search for another cause" didn't turn up anything, whatever shit is leftover must be the answer.  That's how things work in the Sherlock Holmes universe, not in the real universe.  You don't find what's right by showing what's not.

Secondly, I'm sure you know a few ID believers.  What religion are each of those people you know?  Now be honest.  Do you really believe that their religious beliefs have no bearing whatsoever on their acceptance of ID?  Really?

Look at the facts.  A 2009 poll by the Pew Research Center found that evolution had reached 97% consensus while just 2% say evolution doesn't happen.  Of the 97% consensus, 8% say that evolution was guided by a supreme being.  There are 4x more scientists who accept evolution and believe it is guided by God than scientists who reject evolution altogether.  So if 97% of scientists agree evolution is a reality and 99.999% of those who reject evolution hold similar religious views, what does that tell you?  That is a clear indication of a bias.  Do you think these people came to their creationist beliefs after learning about evolution or before?

ID is creationism.  It was designed by creationists to replace overt creationism in schools immediately after the courts struck it down.  The original book created to support ID, Of Pandas and People was originally intended to be a creationism textbook.  It uses the exact same definition for ID that it used for creationism in an earlier draft.  That was the founding of intelligent design.  It is a religious belief made by people with religious beliefs to support their religious beliefs.  They started with their religious beliefs, came up with a few ideas why the science they didn't like was wrong and created a faux science based entirely on their religious beliefs.  There is no way in hell good science can possibly come of this, much less completely unchanged from the original biased, completely unscientific, religiously tainted origins.  Irreducible complexity is not part of a scientific theory.  It's and early idea they had which they then shoehorned into a faux scientific theory.  It's a produce of a religious think-tank group with the purpose of sneaking creationism back into schools after the court ruled it unconstitutional.

Which brings us full circle to my claim that I have to watch everything Christians say.  Here you are treating intelligent design like it's no different from any other science.  You must know its origins.  There is no way you don't know that intelligent design, which invokes a supernatural cause, is the brain-child of creationists trying to disguise creationism as some new science to sneak it back into schools.  The very founding of ID, itself, was a deception.  The claim they made that it was science, not creationism was a deception.  The book which introduced it was going to be a creationist book originally and was rewritten, saying exactly the same thing, to remove overt mentions of creationism and replace it with intelligent design.  ID is a lie.  That is its origin story.  It was a lie told to sneak creationism back into schools.  This is absolutely irrefutable.  You can look up the Dover court case and see the previous versions of the book which use creationism instead of intelligent design. You treat it like it's a real science, but it's not.  I know you really want to believe that it is, and I realize you aren't feeding me false information on purpose, but to treat ID like any real science is a deception, and someone with education in biology should know better.  A lie doesn't turn into science because it's a really good lie.  The chances that a bunch of people trying to deceive us all accidentally created good science from the lie they wove are laughable.  I know you think it sounds good, but that's because it's exactly what you want to hear.  The best lies always sound good.  But they're still lies.

It's not that I think you are inherently untrustworthy, or even stupid.  Honestly, I do think you're ignorant by choice.  That's not an insult, just an honest evaluation.  You probably think something similar of me, and I understand that.  It's the nature of our difference of beliefs.  It's not you I distrust, it's the things you choose to believe and the things you must ignore to maintain your belief system.  I don't think you intentionally try to deceive me.  I do think you make the choice to deceive yourself.  ID is shit.  I'm sorry, but that is absolutely true.  A turd of a lie does not become a gem just because it's a really good lie.  A lie is a lie and ID is very much a lie.  That's all it will ever be.  And by advocating ID you are spreading that lie.  Unintentionally, I'm sure, but when you say "ID has merit" you are saying, "It's not a lie".  I can show you its origins.  I can show you that it's creationism in disguise.  I can show you early drafts of the book which introduced ID which use "creationism" in place of "intelligent design".  I can show you the court transcripts which have the people behind ID claiming that it had nothing to do with creationism, even though early drafts used the word "creationism".  I can show you that ID started as a big fat lie.  Yet you seem to believe this lie was somehow miraculously scientific, pretty much unchanged from the original work of deception it was intended to be.  It wasn't intended as a science, it was intended as a lie.  But somehow it was scientific.  Through some magical miracle the lie they intended to tell was accidentally the science they claimed it to be, even though "science" was never their intent.  I'm sorry, but good science simply doesn't spring out of deceptions intended to present religion as science.  The very fact that it invokes a supernatural cause alone disqualifies it as scientific.

ID does not make a supernatural claim. Intelligence needs not be supernatural. I would agree with you that trying to identify the designer is not a scientific endeavor. Moreover, science can be defined as appealing to only undirected processes for answers, but that would render anthropology, archaeology, forensic science, and the search for extraterrestrial inteliigence (SETI) unscientific as well (the ideas for this sentence were largely from Meyer's book so as not to plagiarize). Similarly, you must ask if you want science to truly seek truth. If you do, then why should you start off with the notion that certain ideas cannot be considered, even if they are soundly based in the method of comparing competing hypothesis (which is not merely a Sherlock Holmes approach).

And I've already addressed the fact that religious scientists have a bias, but so do nonreligious scientists. But that doesn't present us from understanding biological systems or doing good science. In fact, because we have such an obvious bias, we must be more careful. Appealing to those statistics is a good way to avoid the actual arguments though.

And I don't think that you can just dismiss the arguments that ID proponents make by asserting that it is a conspiracy theory set up by the religious to corrupt science. That would be like me claiming that Darwin devised his theory because he was mad at God and wanted to instill a natural worldview into society. When you actually read the ID literature (instead of reading about ID from a biased website, which I presume you did), you will see a clear outline of the theory. They address why it fits within the parameters of science, they use scientific methods to arrive at their conclusions, and they defend against common attacks like those that you have thrown out. The difference between ID and creationism is that creationism uses the Bible as a starting point and works to fit all data into that. ID merely supports the statement that some aspects of life and the universe are best explained as the product of intelligence.

 And I'm glad that you are so far above the delusion that I clearly suffer from. And you're right, It goes both ways. I could sit back and say that you deny the scientific viability of the arguments because you don't want to acknowledge the implications. I could even go as far as to say that you are mad at God, that you fear His judgement, and that you would rather live in a world without being held morally accountable. How do you know it isn't you who has deceived yourself? You might have even deceived yourself to the point that you are willing to believe that everyone else has deceived themselves so that you can feel a personal sense of cognitive superiority. You said that you were not trying to be offensive, but I think that you have displayed a remarkable level of arrogance by implying that I am willingly ignorant of science.

[GUBU]

<snipping the nonsense>

I see you're too chicken to tackle anything I've posted in this thread. Maybe you are learning after all.

[Angrboda]

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:

It actually is crucial to examining the analogy. These shape are predetermined as options. Life does not work that way. There is no predetermined shape/structure. Not only that, but every structure relies on probably hundreds (maybe even thousands by the time you consider the code necessary to produce the enzymes that manufacture it) of nucleotides. We aren't just adding structures at random. Any major structure would arise only after many mutations occurred in precise locations to the correct base within the context of a system capable of using this new structure once it somehow manages to form.

What does that have to do with the point being made? You're babbling about life and I'm addressing a key point in your argument. Intelligent design claims that intelligence is the only known force capable of producing complex specified information. These counter examples show that non-intelligent processes can do the same and therefore ID is wrong. And you've yet to coherently respond to a single one of the three examples.

[Cyberman]

I have cut out all of the post except the portion I am responding to in the interest of brevity and getting to the point.

Would that more prople did this. I'm definitely voting for you as best member.

[Asmodee]

I have cut out all of the post except the portion I am responding to in the interest of brevity and getting to the point.

Would that more prople did this. I'm definitely voting for you as best member.

Awe, thanks.  I feel the need to mention it every time because I have twice been accused of cherry picking, censoring and taking things out of context.

[Angrboda]

ID does not make a supernatural claim. Intelligence needs not be supernatural.

ID must at some level assert a non-natural designer or it succumbs to an infinite regress, with designed requiring designer, and designer requiring uber-designer, and so on infinitum. It makes no sense as a program without a supernatural designer, as it becomes self-refuting. If at the end of the chain of designers is a naturalistic process which yields a designed creation, then you have refuted your main hypothesis. So this ID does not make supernatural claims is bullshit. It has to, or it is hoist on its own petard.