Sunday, December 15, 2013

God evidence

For your Sunday contemplation, check out this essay, which seeks to convince that there is no explanation for life other than intelligent design!

Nuggets:

The first key point is that Darwinian theory does not even attempt to explain the origin of life. Rather, Darwinian evolution only attempts to explain the diversification of life from a putative common ancestor. The Darwinian mechanism of random mutation and natural selection, quite obviously, applies only to that which has genes to mutate and reproductive offspring to naturally select…namely, living things. So the key question pertinent to God’s existence, here, is not how life diversified, but how it originated. How did the first life emerge from non-living matter? To answer this question, one must first determine just what life is.

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At this point, one might ask what IS known by the scientific community regarding how unintelligent natural processes could have brought about life. The answer is simple: Absolutely nothing! Zero, zip, zilch! The reader will please forgive me for recycling quotations from another essay at this website, but here it goes:
Francis Crick, the Nobel Laureate well known as the co-discoverer of the DNA double-helix, has stated in his book Life Itself:
“An honest man, armed with all the knowledge available to us now, could only state that in some sense, the origin of life appears at the moment to be almost a miracle, so many are the conditions which would have had to have been satisfied to get it going.”
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From my online debates with atheists, I know that many skeptical readers are now shouting at the top of their lungs, “You are committing the logical fallacy of argument from ignorance!! Just because science doesn’t currently know how unintelligent natural processes could have produced life doesn’t mean that it never will! We can’t just give up and say, ‘We don’t know how life emerged, so God must be responsible.’ You are using God-of-the-gaps reasoning!!”
But the view that life could not have emerged from unintelligent natural processes is not an “argument from ignorance.” Rather, it is an argument from knowledge. 

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Meaning and symbolic representation are properties of mind, not of matter or energy. As an illustration of this point, consider the following: A song is a non-material, informational entity that can be stored on a compact disk, in an iPod, on a cassette tape, or in a musician’s head, etc. But these storage devices cannot account for the song itself. Rather, the song exists independently of any storage medium, and resulted from the activity of an intelligent, conscious mind (in this case, the composer of the song). Matter and energy are useful for the transmitting and storing of information, but the information itself is neither matter nor energy and can only be produced by a conscious and intelligent mind. Just as songs cannot created by unintelligent processes, coded information (such as that stored in the DNA of a living organism) cannot be produced by unintelligent processes.
A crucial point to be grasped is that the theories for the origin of life that have been produced cannot even in principle account for the origin of genetic information. Rather, they can only be used to address the origin of the storage medium for genetic information (or the material aspect of the organism). So, in reference to the above analogy, no theory for the origin of life that has been produced so far seriously confronts the issue of the songon the compact disk. Rather, they have only engaged the issue of the emergence of the compact disk itself
Discuss amongst yourselves.

Hat tip: American Digest

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