Originally posted by amannionI have tried (repeatedly) to point out to Kelly the difference between religious belief (or faith) and the same words when used by a scientist. A theist believes from the heart, irrespective of proof. A scientist argues from the head BASED upon the evidence.
Okay, I see your point, and in one sense you're right.
ALL of science is a faith, but it's a faith of a different kind to a religious faith. It's a faith built on experience. We see the efficacy of scientific theories and models in explaining and predicting the way the world works over and over again and in time we come to accept that the scientific proces ...[text shortened]... rnative, or do you accept no scientific theories, since they are based on this 'faith'?
Originally posted by sonhouseAt the risk of sounding like an apologist for religions (which I'm not) I think you're overstating the point just a little and doing what we're constantly railing against the theists for doing - preaching dogmatism.
The main thing about this kind of 'faith' is conditionality.
Its a fickle faith, unlike religion, which demands unconditional faith.
Scientific faith can change, religion can't. Science can improve, religion can't, it by definition, HAS to stay static or die. Religion has no room for innovation, for fear of losing that which made a religion what it is.
Science can make EVERYTHING better. Religion can make NOTHING better only static.
Religion can change as a galnce at the history of Christianity over the last couple of thousand years will show.
Can you really show me a definition of religion that requires it to remain static or die?
Unfortunately you're confusing religion with fundamentalism which perhaps might better fit your statements. Equally unfortunate is the way that statements like these only serve to alienate athiests and the religious - I would rather we debate and discuss and come to a better understanding of each other's perspectives.
Originally posted by amannionWell I disagree that it is a faith of a different kind, since I think it
Okay, I see your point, and in one sense you're right.
ALL of science is a faith, but it's a faith of a different kind to a religious faith. It's a faith built on experience. We see the efficacy of scientific theories and models in explaining and predicting the way the world works over and over again and in time we come to accept that the scientific proces ...[text shortened]... rnative, or do you accept no scientific theories, since they are based on this 'faith'?
is simply faith nothing more, nothing less. It is reached through
different means, but in the end it is still the same thing. We are
all walking in faith, and our trust is where we put it.
Kelly
Originally posted by KellyJayI guess it's in the foundations of that faith.
Well I disagree that it is a faith of a different kind, since I think it
is simply faith nothing more, nothing less. It is reached through
different means, but in the end it is still the same thing. We are
all walking in faith, and our trust is where we put it.
Kelly
For me, science is built from observation, experiment, educated guesses, asking questions, making predictions, correcting mistakes, and so on.
Religion seems to be built from one (or maybe a few, depending on the faith) authoritative texts.
Science doesn't work - can't work - from the perspective of a text being completely invulnerable. (Mind you, some - Nazi Germany and Stalin's Soviet Union spring to mind - have tried.) Newton's Principia, Darwin's Origin, Einstein's Electrodynamics, might all be treated as invulnerable and inviolable, but in the end there are always scientists that will question and tinker and experiment and suggest refinements and alternatives.
I suppose the same thing happens in theological research to an extent, but it seems to be me to be much more tightly constrained.
You're probably right though.
But rejection of Evolution seems to me, certainly by your arguments, to suggest a rejection of all science, and to my mind that would be a disaster. Science has opened up a way of seeing the world that is not available to religion. (You could say the reverse is true of course, and that's probably true.) It's a process that has generated an - for me anyway - exciting understanding of the natural world, and a thirst for knowledge and education that I hope to be able to pass on to my kids, and to my students (I'm a science teacher, by the way.)
While I'm fascinated by religious viewpoints (hence my involvement in these threads) I find the religious viewpoint to be stale and sterile and very very scary by contrast.
So the question is how can errors (mutations) introduced by the faulty DNA polymerase enzyme produce an exquisite biological structure over geologic deep time e.g. an eye in the usual framing of the counter-hypothesis unless it was directed or designed in some way and the implication is (large unsubstantiated leap) an omniscient and omnipotent creator, God.
This present debate is irreducible complexity by another name as others have said and is answered by incipient structures where simply put 1% of an eye is better than none from a survival perspective. It rests on a number of misunderstandings principal among them is that evolution generates perfect solutions to problems in evolutionary design-space. It does not operate this way so far as we know and is best thought of as the molecular co-option of pre-existing functions themselves individually also not perfect (whatever that is). The lens of the eye is encoded for by a gene that also makes a liver enzyme is telling. Read multifunctional, redundant and adaptable systems.
Original citation for intellectual honesty: Please see Reverand William Paley http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Paley
From wikipedia above:
"Reverand Paley is best remembered for his contributions to Christian apologetics. In 1802 he published Natural Theology, or Evidences of the Existence and Attributes of the Deity collected from the Appearances of Nature, his last, and, in some respects, his most remarkable book. In this he described the Watchmaker analogy, for which he is probably best known".
In modern day parlance if you found a Mac G5 in the back of your garden shed and it is the year 1934 then you would have to impute a great architect for the device as the only logical possibility applying the principle of parsimony for the existence of this technological wonder?
The creationist argument about hurricanes and junkyards producing 747s comes to mind also and is another species of this critique.
The crux of the matter is that there is an inbuilt error prone nature to the essential enzyme DNA polymerase which replicates DNA so new daughter cells have a newly synthesized nuclear DNA genome. Enzyme = loosely a biocatalyst that makes biochemical reactions proceed quicker than spontaneity in a thermodynamic sense from "enzymen", German "in yeast" after Buchner who worked in 1900s with yeast extracts to isolate the first examples of these recyclable protein machines.
This one in a million value for the error rate of DNA polymerase for most species (~1 x 10e-6 in scientific notation) is in fact the very molecular engine for generating the requisite genetic diversity i.e. mutations (defined as heritable alterations in the nucleotide sequence of an organism) that natural selection operates on in design space-time so new incipient structures can appear and perpetuate through geologic deep time.
Evolution does not generate perfect solutions to problems and it has an intrinsic/inbuilt flexibility so as to adapt to local rapidly changing circumstances. For example the arrival of a new disease then cannot then wipe out a species completely because of the existence of sufficient genetic repertoire to deal with the new threat. This hypothesized extinction of quasi-clones with insufficient diversity actually does happen too of course in isolated genetic populations with limited individuals and is local extinction where simply put the unfit are selected out.
This is one reason why incest is a very bad idea for all species without being insensitive because the accumulation of deleterious alleles (defined as alternative forms of a gene) in homozygous (double) gene dosage generated by the inbreeding scheme above possess limited immune effector genes that unfortunately cannot deal with the new invader. Essentially limited genetic repertoire from this “inbreeding depression” (same mating with same) there then exists no backup and the protein is oftentimes also malfunctional or simply embryonic lethal. Selection from the pathogen would adapt the genetic population to the new "resistant" state in this envisaged scenario and they would become the new observed variant with no record normally observed of their genetic forebearers.
Any examples from the wild wild world?
A gay guy in New York walked into a leading HIV research institute or so the story goes and said all his gay lovers were dead from AIDS and he had unprotected sex with them and did not contract the illness so he thought, clever chap, that he must be naturally immune and someone did eventually look at his blood and HIV amazingly could not get into his white cells which are simply put the main arm of the immune response against viruses.
See original paper Dragic et al. HIV-1 entry into CD4+ cells is mediated by the chemokine receptor CC-CKR-5. Nature. 1996 Jun 20;381(6584):667-73.
So a mutant will exist in the wild population fortuitously generated by the intrinsically error prone genetic variation generator DNA polymerase that is in effect naturally immune to the invading disease by mere chance (the microorganism itself is error prone too so it is important to remember so think multiple and complicated countermeasures and essentially an immune war).
This is technically termed a fixed or balanced polmorphism in the wild ("many form" from Greek) reflecting diversity at a nucleotide locus changing in many occasions an encoded amino acid in a protein like on the surface of this white cell above arisen under Darwinian natural selection.
So to attempt to explain in Africa there exists examples of just such a fixed genetic error where an inbuilt and heritable genetic disease is better than death to be frank. Ingram did pioneering work in initial studies of sickle cell haemoglobin in sickle cell anemia patients (haemoglobin is in red cells that transport O2 for respiration). Here the environmental selection is from the Anopholes mosquito containing the Plasmodium protozoan that cause malaria in endemic areas in Africa. The mutant haemoglobin (Hb) cannot be infected by the Plasmodium parasite so readily but with the down side of having damaged red blood cells with a chronic clinical course so these overtly bad genes perpetuate even though sub-optimal to non-sickle cell Hb in oxygen transport. Another example is the Celts having CF to prevent bacterial infection judging by the work in Chapel Hill, NC it is argued.
The DNA polymerase could easily be better imagined to be, and would intuitively thought of being, "perfect" than the observed error every one in a million. This in itself (the inbuilt error of the very DNA replication machinery to perpetuate life at a molecular level) is to my mind at least an elegant imperfection at the very heart of life on this planet. Importantly it is also testimony to the requirement for variation to try to adapt to some unforeseen event coming ahead to preserve genetic diversity in a large out breeding population. Better i.e. non-error prone producing DNA polymerases are in the wild and engineered in the lab also for research and other studies.
It has also been seen in the lab by bacteriologists, that were also independently observed and confirmed, quasi- or perhaps best described as pseudo-Lamarckian phenomena in bacteria. The perceived consensus now however is these data to be still events that fall within Darwin's scheme of natural selection of a fortuitously generated mutant. A very important note here is that even if we found a non-Darwinian mechanism for propagation of genetic entities over time under a selection process that was not undirected from variation generated by error prone DNA pol but Lamarckian or directed then it would still not invalidate all the datasets and studies of independently observed Darwinian natural selection in the lab and in the field.
What they saw in these experiments was when employing as a simple model system conditions where a newly introduced stress namely the absence of a so called essential sugar like lactose that some bacteria exhibited a hypermutator phenotype to presumably generate rapidly new variants (so called accelerated evolution or "survival of the quickest"😉 that can survive and expand while their forebearers die off and are supplanted in the new environment. This is simply quick Darwinism where genetic systems present more blueprints to the blind watchmaker of natural selection.
It is a truism but important none-the-less to say that all life descends in an unbroken chain to the universal common ancestor (the hypothetical original replicator) as extinction is a full stop without descendents obviously.
The fact that the 3' to 5' prime exonuclease proof reading activity of the DNA polymerase enzyme itself is not perfect is eloquent testament to the blind watchmaker of natural selection scything through unfit progeny.
If a creator God envisaged by Paley wanted to produce fixed and immutable entities to populate this world ad infinitum then why is the very system for replicating them at a molecular level intrinsically error prone?
Worms are Phylum Nematoda and whales are Phlyum vertebrata so that question is meaningless.
Originally posted by micarrNice one.
So the question is how can errors (mutations) introduced by the faulty DNA polymerase enzyme produce an exquisite biological structure over geologic deep time e.g. an eye in the usual framing of the counter-hypothesis unless it was directed or designed in some way and the implication is (large unsubstantiated leap) an omniscient and omnipotent creator, God.
...[text shortened]... ylum Nematoda and whales are Phlyum vertebrata so that question is meaningless.
So just to summarise for the less technically inclined (or interested) - life is full of flaws; unneccesary flaws. An intelligent designer might be expected to construct living things without such flaws.
Another way to consider this point is: if a creationist were to argue that the flaws in living things were deliberately created, then why would this be the case? To enable evolution could surely not be their response. So what is the purpose of such flaws?
By the way, your hurricane, junk yard, 747 point is not actually a creationist argument. It was first put forward by Fred Hoyle as an attempt to explain the difficulty of life forming on Earth by chemical abiogenesis.
Originally posted by amannionYes, and it was rubbish back then too. Lots of inanimate things fly around - like empty shopping bags, rubbish and the like. None of which were designed to fly. A 747 has lots of design features that the early planes (that Hoyle should have been comparing with the first bacteria) didn't have. Likewise, in the evolution of life (abiogenesis) the early "attempts" at life didn't have to work.
By the way, your hurricane, junk yard, 747 point is not actually a creationist argument. It was first put forward by Fred Hoyle as an attempt to explain the difficulty of life forming on Earth by chemical abiogenesis.
So, give me a planet sized junk yard containing all the pieces that i need to complete my plane. Give me a mechanism that lets me keep good bits, even if they're not part of a whole plane, a tornado supplying a reasonable amount of energy to a large proportion of that junkyard, and a hundred million years, and I'll give you a plane. Just to make Hoyle's analogy a bit more true.
Originally posted by micarrWorms are Phylum Nematoda and whales are Phlyum vertebrata so that question is meaningless.
[b]So the question is how can errors (mutations) introduced by the faulty DNA polymerase enzyme produce an exquisite biological structure over geologic deep time e.g. an eye in the usual framing of the counter-hypothesis unless it was directed or designed in some way and the implication is (large unsubstantiated leap) an omniscient and omnipotent creator, God.
he very system for replicating them at a molecular level intrinsically error prone?
[/b]I see, so you know what the whale was related to when all of the
largest life forms of the day were all as large as a modern day
worm? At some point in time if it all started from a simple single
cell or something along those lines, life would have had to mutate
from the very small and get larger. At some point a couple of
inches would have been it, at that point in time what did turn into
a whale, did the same thing split into an oak tree later in time too?
Do you have a test that can give us that answer, maybe an
observation, or a prediction, what can be said with certainty,
besides whales didn't come from worms?
Kelly
Originally posted by amannionYou're probably right though.
I guess it's in the foundations of that faith.
For me, science is built from observation, experiment, educated guesses, asking questions, making predictions, correcting mistakes, and so on.
Religion seems to be built from one (or maybe a few, depending on the faith) authoritative texts.
Science doesn't work - can't work - from the perspective of a te ...[text shortened]... ind the religious viewpoint to be stale and sterile and very very scary by contrast.
But rejection of Evolution seems to me, certainly by your arguments, to suggest a rejection of all science, and to my mind that would be a disaster.
Man, you sure put a lot on the shoulders of evolution! You don't
think it is possible for that to be wrong, and at the same time
all the positive things that came out of that theory to be just as
valid? It seems to me that you have made it a doctrine, and it
is as important to you as God is to me.
Kelly
Originally posted by amannionReligion seems to be built from one (or maybe a few, depending on the faith) authoritative texts.
I guess it's in the foundations of that faith.
For me, science is built from observation, experiment, educated guesses, asking questions, making predictions, correcting mistakes, and so on.
Religion seems to be built from one (or maybe a few, depending on the faith) authoritative texts.
Science doesn't work - can't work - from the perspective of a te ...[text shortened]... ind the religious viewpoint to be stale and sterile and very very scary by contrast.
If Christianity were nothing but authoritative text, I would have not
bothered with it. The best part of Christianity is God, text is good,
but God is better. Reality is where I believe we all want to be a part
of in our faith, observations, experimentation, educated guesses,
asking questions, making predictions, correcting mistakes are vital
parts of trying to understand reality. For me that is the bottom line
for science and religion, reality! If we discern it correctly that will see
us through better than if we don't. I believe that God is reality in the
fullest, and Christ bridges the gap between man and God. That is my
take on faith, religion, and science. I have to say that I have really
enjoyed our exchange.
Kelly
Originally posted by scottishinnzI doubt it.
Yes, and it was rubbish back then too. Lots of inanimate things fly around - like empty shopping bags, rubbish and the like. None of which were designed to fly. A 747 has lots of design features that the early planes (that Hoyle should have been comparing with the first bacteria) didn't have. Likewise, in the evolution of life (abiogenesis) the earl ...[text shortened]... million years, and I'll give you a plane. Just to make Hoyle's analogy a bit more true.
Kelly
Originally posted by KellyJaySo you think God is reality...yet on my other thread you have failed to define a single property of God.
[b]Religion seems to be built from one (or maybe a few, depending on the faith) authoritative texts.
If Christianity were nothing but authoritative text, I would have not
bothered with it. The best part of Christianity is God, text is good,
but God is better. Reality is where I believe we all want to be a part
of in our faith, observations, experi ...[text shortened]... on faith, religion, and science. I have to say that I have really
enjoyed our exchange.
Kelly[/b]
You must have a pretty weak grip on reality!
Originally posted by KellyJayYou misunderstand. I'm not putting all of this on evolution - as far as I'm concerned it's just one more scientific theory. It's you who seem obsessed with it's demise.
[b]You're probably right though.
But rejection of Evolution seems to me, certainly by your arguments, to suggest a rejection of all science, and to my mind that would be a disaster.
Man, you sure put a lot on the shoulders of evolution! You don't
think it is possible for that to be wrong, and at the same time
all the positive things that came out ...[text shortened]... to me that you have made it a doctrine, and it
is as important to you as God is to me.
Kelly[/b]
And I'm still not sure why ...
Originally posted by scottishinnzSure, you can have the next hundred million. 🙂
just give me a hundred million years - no problems, and a junk yard the size of the earth. And a selection pressure for planes. All these things have, of course, evolved - what else is a bird? Or a flying insect?
Better yet, get a bunch of monkeys to type out 'Gone with the Wind'
without error by random chance, how many years do you think that
would take, would a hundred million be enough?
Kelly