I wouldn’t go any further speculating about the intent of a designer based on a mathematical inference.
That kind of thinking leads down a rabbit hole of “why not make everything in one fell swoop”. Because. God can do everything perfectly well on His own, but He chooses to involve us in the process of creation as mouch as possible. Your kind of thinking makes the very concept of time obsolete.
I’m quting from Hugh Ross’s Improbable Planet
“There are no time lags. The moment conditions allow for a greater complexity and diversity of life, that complexity and diversity immediately appear. Furthermore, they appear up to maximal limits permitted by the improved physical and chemical conditions. These patterns of immediacy and maximal complexity and diversity raise the “why” question – a vital query this book will address.”
He claims this, and that’s enough for you to believe it?
George Gaylord Simpson, Tempo and Mode in evolution (1944); The major features of evolution (1953)
I recommend this because his books are very, very well referenced
Have you read those references? How is complexity quantified, how is it’s maximum allowed limit established?
Thanks for the info but I’m not sure this is what I was looking for. Correct me if I’m wrong, but it seems like inferences of evidence based on inferences and experiments similar the the 1952 Miller experiment that don’t really provide anything substantial.
I was hoping for some evidence that is directly accessible and verifiable observationally or experimentally similar to what Tour presented in his talk. He presents established observational evidence documented by scientists in the field of chemistry which create what I would consider tremendous obstacles for explaining OOL by known natural processes.
There’s over 600 references. I admit that I haven’t read them all.
Each chapter deals with these two questions in a different manner. One approach is that every major catastrophe in earth’s history was a blessing in disguise that allowed for new classes of plants and animals to arise.
Why would a Designer have to invoke 5 major mass extinction events in the past 450 MY just to get to the “desired” extant plant and animal life? Was the Designer so incompetent it had to erase and restart 5 times?
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Okay, but it is exactly what I said it would be: Evidence that is more consistent with life having originated from nonbiological chemistry, than by intelligent design.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but it seems like inferences of evidence based on inferences and experiments similar the the 1952 Miller experiment that don’t really provide anything substantial.
I’m not sure you’ve fully understood what the argument I made, or the evidence it is based on, even is. First of all there are multiple corroborating lines of evidence that show which amino acids would be most likely to be produced by nonbiological chemical processes. One of those is the Miller-Urey type(spark-discharge) experiments, another is observations of the contents of carbonaceous chondrites, another is physical calculations based on chemical thermodynamics, another still is in silico simulations, another is laboratory experiments mimicking hydrothermal systems of various kinds. These different lines of evidence converge on a so-called “consensus” set of amino acids one would expect to be produced.
Then there is the evidence from comparative genetics about what the amino acid composition of the oldest proteins were like, and scientists can show that as we go further and further back in time on the tree of life, the proteins increasingly are made of the “consensus” amino acids expected to be produced by abiotic chemistry, and decreasingly with age contains the “modern” set of amino acids we see in life today. So basically when looking at the constituents of proteins, the further we go back in time, the more it looks like they were made by abiotic chemistry, rather than being biosynthesized by cellular anabolism.
This is real concrete, observationally verifiable data, and evidence that points to life being the result of abiotic chemistry. It is not proof, it is not unassailable, it is not the case that one can’t imagine this evidence somehow being overturned in the future, it is not conclusive, but it is also no less evidence for that reason. That is in the nature of evidence.
I was hoping for some evidence that is directly accessible and verifiable observationally or experimentally similar to what Tour presented in his talk. He presents established observational evidence documented by scientists in the field of chemistry which create what I would consider tremendous obstacles for explaining OOL by known natural processes.
I think the only thing he establishes is that there are many things we don’t yet know, he then extrapolates this to an unsupportable conclusion.
Why not? Maybe he is more of an artist than an engineer.
To be clear, either way is entirely consistent with the doctrine of creation.
Maybe it’s a she, and went insane from boredom and loneliness 9 billion years ago?
That can only be the case if the doctrine of creation is vacuous. Like justnowism. It predicts nothing in particular but is compatible with any imaginable observation in typical ad-hoc fashion.
Whatever we see is what the designer wanted. It’s totally unexpected and nobody can make sense of it, but the designer is an artist, and you know how eccentric and weird they can be. How do you know the designer is an artist? Well because I need the designer to be an artist in order to preserve my belief in the designer in the face of a creation story that doesn’t make sense.
And so the rationalizations are allowed until the end of time.
It may be possible to make that inference from the data. But there’s an awful lot of data presented by Tour that creates major problems for natural processes as explanations for OoL. And I’m not sure, but it seems unlikely that your proposal would be able to surmount the preponderance of the issues in that data.
Actually I don’t think he’s making any conclusion other than we just don’t know. But if it is the case that we don’t know, it seems apparent to me that it would entail that there isn’t any plausible known natural explanation. And based on the evidence presented by Tour, I would say that it’s warranted to tentatively claim that it’s highly unlikely that there is one.
And based on that it would be justified to explore metaphysical explanations. And if explanatorily sufficient, until further evidence to the contrary, a warranted claim could be made that the proposed claim provides the best explanation of the evidence. Then it would be up to the meta-physicians to critique it and see if it passes muster.
No, not even close. “We don’t know” does not mean it’s impossible for there to be a natural explanation. It just means we haven’t found the explanation yet. Seriously, the God of the Gaps explanation for empirically observed phenomena was rejected as worthless by science some three centuries ago.
Just to bring to your attention, I didn’t say impossible, but implausible. That’s also what I meant by highly unlikely, highly implausible. Sorry if that wasn’t clear. There’s quite a difference between the two. And it’s members of the scientific community that are saying “we don’t know,” not me. And as I’m basing my argument on what we do know from science, and God of the Gaps is based on what “we don’t know,” i.e., an argument from ignorance, I contend that my argument is not a God of the Gaps argument since it is based on current scientific knowledge.
If you don’t know what the cause is how can you say it’s implausible?
The issue being raised is directed at known natural processes, not unknown causes. If there is evidence that could indicate that such known natural processes are highly implausible for OoL, then it’s justified to make such a claim.