From: Gary Collins (gwcollins@algol.co.uk)
Date: Thu Nov 06 2003 - 09:45:04 EST
--Original Message Text---
From: asa-digest
Date: Wed, 5 Nov 2003 05:20:01 -0500
Date: Tue, 04 Nov 2003 07:51:08 -0500
From: "Denyse O'Leary" <oleary@sympatico.ca>
Subject: Re: Intelligent design controversy in Canada
List members may be interested in an online interview with Kirk Dunston
of the New Scholars Society in Canada, where he talks about intelligent
design, Darwinian evolution, and genome mapping. The controversy is only
now spreading to Canada.
One of his comments:
http://www.canadianchristianity.com/cgi-bin/na.cgi?nationalupdates/031023evolution
Natural processes, over the history of the universe, have the potential
to produce up to 70 bits of information. Unfortunately, just one,
average 300-residue protein requires about 500 bits to encode. The
simplest theoretical life form would need somewhere in the neighbourhood
of 250 protein-coding genes.
There is also an interview with me at
http://www.canadianchristianity.com/cgi-bin/na.cgi?nationalupdates/031030evolution
One of my comments: I only discovered how much trouble Darwinism was in
when I took a year out of my life -- late 2002 to late 2003 -- to study
the situation. I was appalled. Darwinism has nothing like the support
that we are accustomed to for theories in physics or chemistry.
Denyse
I read these articles - thanks. One thing I was hoping to find, but didn't,
is some justification for the mysterious figure of 70 bits of information,
which appears as though it is a "given" for some reason.
I also recently came across an interesting essay by William Hasker,
entitled "How not to be a Reductivist." He quotes Thomas Nagel, who
'admits quite candidly,
"I hope there is no God! I don't want there to be a God; I don't want the
universe to be like that"'
as saying,
"My guess is that this cosmic authority problem is not a rare condition and that it is
responsible for much of the scientism and reductionism of our time. One of the
tendencies it supports is the ludicrous overuse of evolutionary biology to explain
everything about life, including everything about the human mind. Darwin enabled
modern secular culture to heave a great collective sigh of relief, by apparently providing
a way to eliminate purpose, meaning, and design as fundamental features of the world.
Instead they become epiphenomena, generated incidentally by a process that can be
entirely explained by the operation of the nonteleological laws of physics on the material
of which we and our environments are all composed."
and adds,
"Nagel himself, even though he shares in the "cosmic authority problem," strenuously resists this
facile appeal to Darwinism."
The whole essay can be found at
http://www.iscid.org/papers/Hasker_NonReductivism_103103.pdf
/Gary
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