I am also a software engineer, and I too recognise code when I see it.
DNA is not code.
Code is abstract; DNA is physical.
Code is sequential; DNA is simultaneous.
Code is static; DNA is volatile.
Even if DNA was considered to be code, it wouldn’t be considered to be code that has been designed. It has no requirements, no architecture, no structure*, no authorship, no formatting, no comments, no constants or variables, no maintenance manuals, no syntax. It is convoluted and partly non-functional. DNA would be considered to be code that has been generated by a system such as tierra. Code that has evolved.
*Division into chromosomes could be considered a structure, but not one consistent with design.
I know of no such person. Everyone who rejects that possibility does it a posteriori. And they usually don’t even go so far as to reject even it’s possibility, but rather reject claims that it’s historical occurrence is grounded in undisputed facts. Even within the remits of the philosophy of theism, justification for it is ripe with controversy. All valid arguments for God’s existence rest on one or more dubious premises. Be those the nature of time, existence, causality, mind, intelligence, consciousness, or what have you. Heck, theists can’t even agree on what is or isn’t valid justification for belief.
To some of us theism just hasn’t met it’s burden of proof, and so rather than reject “a priori” the possibility of theism, we a posteriori(that is, on the basis of having considered the evidence) reject the claim that it is rationally grounded. And we don’t like band-aid answers, preferring instead to just admit when we don’t know something. Why is the universe the way it is? I don’t know. Neither do you.
Depends on what you mean by code. Under some definitions of code, DNA can very well qualify.
The problem appears if you use a question-begging definition of code. Suppose you define a code to be something like “a physical information storage medium and system for communication” (DNA then qualifies).
But now suppose you define a code to be “an intelligently designed physical information storage system and system for communication” - then when you categorize DNA as being a code, since codes are according to your definition intelligently designed, then your act of categorization just commits a question begging fallacy. You have not shown or argued that DNA is intelligently designed by categorizing it, you have just categorized it.
So much ID-creationist argumentation commits this fallacious appeal to over-reaching definitions and categories. We aren’t told what it is about codes that should cause us to conclude all codes must be intelligently designed, that seems to be always just assumed.
That is not my general experience at Biologos. There are some feisty atheists, yes, but more common are Christians knowledgeable of science. You friend may be conflating science with atheism.
It’s fairly natural for people who spend their lives designing things to interpret any pattern as design. This is thought to account for the high percentage of engineers on the DI’s “Dissent From Darwin List”. I got a BS in Computer Science before finding my way to Statistics, and I don’t see DNA as anything like computer code. For starters, the operating system is chemistry, and anything resembling logic operates with the randomness and fuzziness inherent to biochemistry. To me DNA more closely resembles a recipe, with various segments contributing ingredients and chemistry stirring the stew.
This is my opinion, and as a statistician I am trained to recognize and exploit randomness, so perhaps that is my bias. I still maintain my description is a better fit to the data than the programmer’s concept of “code”.
How do you distinguish “design” which is the result of an intelligent being such as those (presumably) human engineers of which you speak, and that which is the result of the evolutionary process?
To be clear: An answer to this question does not entail that you accept the theory of evolution as true. It just requires that you accept the obviously true proposition that the TOE exists and provides a model by which complex systems of the sort which is found in biology could arise thru undirected, natural physical/chemical processes.
But nobody whose mental habits are worth a damn EVER starts out by concluding that gods don’t exist and therefore concluding that the only “remaining” explanations for things must be non-goddish. When I read a summary like this it seems to me that it reflects a very, very poor set of mental habits, which you engage in yourself and then assume that other people must share. We do not. The idea of excluding divine intervention a priori is certainly not remotely the way I would ever proceed and it is bizarre to see anyone assume as much.
Once again you seem to be confusing atheism with actual biology. Actual biology is studied by many people, many of whom are not atheists. So you think that criticism of ID Creationism is criticism of religion and is an atheistic position. It’s not.
Were I to engage in the claim that all people who aren’t atheists are ignorant, stupid, or scoundrels (which I would not, given that I know such a claim to be false), I would get a lot of pushback from many people here whom I consider my friends. Certainly from the theists, first and foremost, but also from the atheists, who would wonder how I had devolved into such a bigoted and narrowed state of mind. The dishonesty of the principal proponents of ID Creationism is well established and there’s very little ground on which they can be defended in the slightest. But that this is so should not be taken as reflecting upon the honesty and good faith of religious believers as a whole, of whom IDC proponents are a tiny, tiny slice.
You will probably not be shocked to learn that “Potter Stewart in a porno theater” is not generally regarded, even within its original domain, as a credible epistemological method.
The most important criterion is abstraction. The whole point of a code, as in “secret code,” is that there is some arbitrary abstraction involved. There is no such thing going on in biology. “Genetic code” is used metaphorically.
You can consider particular codons to be abstractions for particular amino acids. I don’t see why codes have to be totally arbitrary in the relationship between the entities of communication, to qualify as a code. And in any case the funny thing about language is that if people use the word code to include the genetic code, then the genetic code really is a code.
The real question is one of origins, not categories. What is the genetic code - and how did it originate? - are two separate questions. Turns out some codes evolve, and the genetic code, which really is a code, evolved.
Apparently he doesn’t want to defend anything he says, and is deeply pained that forums where he goes to state his opinions contain atheists who ask him to do so. He just wants to regurgitate his faith. The world would be so much better if everywhere he went he could just declare that God made something without anyone questioning that.
No, the only abstractions are the letters we humans use. There is nothing abstract about the biology, therefore no literal code.
It’s just the definition. And they don’t need to be TOTALLY arbitrary, as poor codes can be broken if the person designing the code left some nonarbitrary clue. If you use your dog’s name as a password (code), that’s an abstraction but not an arbitrary one.
The key is abstraction.
What is striking about this is that on some level they realize that the data are important, but never get to the data themselves. It’s almost always the case that reviewing the data means reviewing what someone else has said (hearsay) about the data.
AAU= Asparagine… 3.2 billion DNA base pairs= a human…transcription… translation…alternative splicing…mitosis… myosis…Living cells function based on exponential and combinatorial mathematics… There is nothing abstract about biology?
Perhaps this conversation has diverged enough from @Bryar_Kader 's original post such that I’m too late to the party but I’d like to share a few thoughts if I may.
It seems to me that the Bible makes empirical claims. If those claims are true then they should be confirmed (or at a minimum not excluded) by our observations and experiments.
When those observations differ from the Bible then we of course are left with at least the following possibilities:
The observations are correct but our reading of the Bible is incorrect and needs revision.
The observations are correct and our reading of the Bible is correct. The Bible is in fact wrong about the claim.
Our observations and evaluation of the data is incorrect.
I think that in order to be intellectually honest we need to consider all three. I find that very few Christians are willing to even entertain the second. I would prefer to see a proper harmony or reconciliation of the Bible and our current scientific consensus on these topics but I think that I owe it to myself to consider all three of these options.
And I can still just consider three nucleotides to be an abstraction for an amino acid. You just aren’t telling me why I can’t do this.
That just doesn’t follow.
No, it actually isn’t the definition of a code that the mapping has to be arbitrary, in any degree at all.
It is of no concern to me whether a code can be easily broken, for me to consider it a code. That just makes it’s function in secrecy of communication poor, that doesn’t make it not qualify as a code.
Word salad is not abstraction. Everything you have described (with the exception of the last thing, which has no clear meaning) is a set of chemical interactions. AAU is asparagine because it binds to the anticodon of a rRNA charged with asparagine. Simple chemical bond. How that tRNA became charged with asparagine is another set of chemical interactions. No abstraction involved except for the abstraction of describing it all in human language.
Because in the biology, there are no abstractions at any step.
Definition:
“a system of symbols (such as letters or numbers) used to represent assigned and often secret meanings”
The assignment part is the abstraction. If the assignments are arbitrary, codes can be used to communicate secretly.
I didn’t claim it did! I claimed that it was a poor code, never that it wasn’t a code.
I was challenging your straw man of “totally arbitrary.” I never included “totally,” you did! The abstraction is the essential aspect; the deliberate use of arbitrary abstractions is what makes others unable to understand a code. Computer code contains abstractions, but most of them are not arbitrary.
Given your repeated inability to distinguish between “its” and “it’s,” perhaps you should reconsider picking fights about definitions with native speakers?
I agree and suggest a fourth that is frequently ignored: the Bible is presenting the observation metaphorically. The most obvious case of this is the mustard seed in Matthew 13:29 - 13:32.
As a discipline, yes. But the physical reality of biology, which existed well before our study of it, is not an abstraction. An Asparagine molecule does not “know” it is Asparagine, or AAU, or what its role in life is. It is just an electrostatic shape which responds to other electrostatic shapes, therefore its function as a code element cannot be transferred, or abstracted, to any other substrate. Therefore, it is essentially physical, which is opposite of abstract, and cannot be a layer of independent abstraction such as would fit the OSI communication model.