At 10:29 AM 10/05/2000, you wrote:
>Chris
> >Finally, echoing Arnhart, the theistic ID position is based almost entirely
> >on ignorance. It's the "God of the Gaps," again. Since we do not *know* how
> >life originated, we *cannot* argue that it must have been design. Since we
> >do not have *any* specific evidence of an actual *instance* of divine
> >intervention (and just how would we know it was *divine* intervention,
> >anyway?), we cannot claim to know that such interventions have occurred.
> >The strongest claim we can make is that we are *ignorant* of such things.
> >And ignorance means *ignorance*, not an excuse to make any damn arbitrary
> >claim we happen to want to believe because it fits our desires or religious
> >beliefs. (This is something many of the *non-theistic* ID theorists need to
> >learn as well (Bertvan?).)
>
>Hi Chris,
>I have stated repeatedly that a profession of ignorance would be acceptable
>to me. And ignorance means ignorance, not an excuse to make such arbitrary
>claim such as, "We know exactly how it happened. It was random variation and
>natural selection," just because that is the only explanation we can think of
>that fits a materialistic philosophy.
Chris
The main reason for accepting the "materialist" explanation is that it
works (as much as we can tell, which, at present, is not terrifically
much), that it is radically more parsimonious than divine design, and that
it is a *scientific* theory, which divine design is not.
Bertvan
>I'm convinced there was a lot more to
>it than that simplistic explanation.
Chris
I'm not sure why you say it is simplistic. Simply inserting the word
"design" (without scientifically meaningful empirical definition), hardly
solves any problems, despite making the issue more complicated.
I suppose that even you would admit that many living things are very
complicated. This certainly proves that material things can be as complex
as we might desire. Further, one of the main *advantages* of the
naturalistic evolutionary theory is that the constant branching into new
variations is guaranteed to produce complexity unless one or more of the
following is true:
1. Variations are not sufficiently random or exhaustive, so that some
genetic structures are *logically* impossible to achieve by *any* series of
variations, no matter in what order they occur, etc. A hypothetical example
would be: If the variational process never permitted certain base-pairs to
occur, or never permitted the sequence "GATTACA" to occur, etc. Fortunately
for evolutionary theory, there do *not* seem to be any such limitations on
variations, despite the requirement of ID theory that there be such
limitations in order to *prevent* so-called "macroevolution."
2. Selection is specifically and seriously biased *against* the kinds of
complexity we see in modern-day life. Obviously, since selection does not
kill off all such life, and since complex life has been around for a long
time, *this* possibility is not the case.
3. Selection is simply so *severe* that populations never get large enough
to produce the required numbers of variations. This, too, is obviously not
the case.
Therefore, I conclude that the variational mechanism *is* sufficient to
produce the kinds of complexity we see today, and that the mechanism is
therefore *not* "simplistic."
Finally, I may as well point out that, if you understood the literally
*infinite* richness that derives mathematically from the principle of
repeated, cumulative variational branching, it's doubtful that you would
claim that the theory is "simplistic." Is it possible that it's your
*understanding* of it that is "simplistic"? Perhaps you should spend a year
or so developing computer programs that use such processes. The richness,
the complexity, accessible by such programs is truly surprising, and is
limited only by computer resources (disk space and processing speed,
mainly). The limitations of these resources are many, many orders of
magnitude more severe than the limitations imposed by physical reality on
the same sorts of processes in Nature, but, even so, it might give you a
sense of the underlying logical richness and potential of such a method to
generate complex structures.
I would attempt to represent it visually, but the "branching" is so rich
that it soon would fill the page with black. Thus, only a few "branchings"
can be visually represented (and this is even before sexual genetic
recombination and inter-organism genetic exchanges are allowed to occur).
And, again, since we don't have a well-developed and objectively based idea
of what divine design would be, the best that might be argued from the
available evidence, even if we grant that it indicates design, would be
some sort of naturalistic design, design by beings that are in a basic
metaphysical sense like us. Of course, your way of defining "design" makes
it so broad that largely randomly-occurring structures would be considered
to be designed (i.e., most human societies, etc.).
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