True, but the inclusion of “myosis” is a master stroke of salad prep.
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A pinch of salt and lots of myonnaisis makes for the best salad.
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Well, this process is one of the best tools we have and it will come down to the weight of the evidence. Some ideas have more support than others. To some degree it is going to be subjective. As knowledge increases lower-case truth approximates capital-T truth.
As evidence accumulates the expectation that it will be radically overturned grows smaller. What I want to avoid is putting my head in the sand or to make excuses when I don’t like what science tells me.
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I guess I might include that as part of the first option. To discuss this further would quickly become a complex conversation about hermeneutics and the like. I do agree with you however that such language must be considered.
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I don’t see how that means the genetic code can’t be considered a code. The fact that the genetic code is physically implemented in molecules and that there is some physical explanation for why a particular codon represents a particular amino acid does not mean you can’t abstract from nucleotide to amino acid sequence.
I notice that there was no substantiation that the assignments need be arbitrary for something to qualify as a code.
Ohhh okay, so when you said “genetic code is used metaphorically”, you meant “used literally”. It’s literally a code, but a poor one?
I have now considered that and I will not be taking your advice. Thanks. That was extremely silly @Mercer.
You appear to think that because something is in principle tentatively concluded then it might as well be baseless guesswork. Surely you can’t be suggesting something that inane, can you? I mean, the germ theory of disease, and the atomic theory, are ultimately tentatively held consensus views, but does it seem likely or reasonable to you that those conclusions will change one day? Will we one day discover that things like rocks aren’t made of atoms?
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Would a book not be abstract based on your argument?
It’s not abstract in biology.
I saw what you did there. That was silly.
Nothing in the chain connecting the codon to the residue is abstract. Abstractions made by people are irrelevant.
Correct. Did I not explain that clearly, as well as why your adding “totally” to arbitrary was a straw man?
No, it’s literally not a code, because there’s no abstraction involved. You appear to be repeatedly conflating abstraction with arbitrariness. Do you realize that those are very different characteristics?
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Paper bound together can be imprinted with any content. Conversely, content can be conveyed on a variety of mediums, including paper, optical disks, flash drive, magnetic disks, telegraph, animal hides, cave walls, and so forth, with identical messaging. The user might not even be aware of the physical layers. Thus, although books are physical, the content in books is independent of the medium and is abstract, or not identical with a physical layer.
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That’d be a case of #1.
What you need to consider are the rules of science such a methodological naturalism. This can be a factor in the consensus opinion as Genesis 1 is not considered a null hypothesis.
How tentative is the scientific consensus concerning the shape and movement of the earth? The three responses laid out in the OP have featured in church history.
That science is tentative is axiomatic in principle, but unless one capitulates to complete epistemological nihilism, eventually many scientific concepts become such a part of our everyday and commonplace lives that they nearly cease to be even thought of as particularly scientific questions, although the evidence may have been once novel and disputed. Is there any chance that electricity and magnetism are not coupled and AC motors work due to some other principle we missed? Is it possible that elements such as iron are infinitely divisible after all? Might stars navigate the firmament daily above a stationary earth? Are we still waffling between the Pumbaa conjecture that stars are burning balls of gas, and Timon who hypothesized that they are fireflies that became stuck on the great Velcro in the sky?
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I don’t see the relevance of this question to whether biology is abstraction. Nor do I see the relevance of combinatorics.
There’s certainly exponential growth involved, if you are indeed referring to cell replication. But what does that have to do with abstraction? More word salad, unfortunately.
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Can you translate that into ordinary English?
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Doesn’t seem that way to me, as the observation is technically correct, but is being used metaphorically.
Methodological naturalism excludes special creation that is implied in Genesis. We don’t consider how the evidence fits special creation based on the rules of methodological naturalism.
The content of the book is based on an arrangement of letters. Protein amino acids sequences are based on the arrangement of gene nucleotides.(DNA). There are a lot of ways to arrange letters in a book but a limited amount of ways for content to emerge. There are a lot of ways to arrange DNA but there are a limited number of arrangements that form a functioning gene which encodes a functioning protein.
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So what? Code is not abstract in my computer either.
What did I do? Totally genuine question. Please elaborate.
So what? A software program running on a computer that translates morse code to alphabet wouldn’t be abstract either.
Well thanks for at least conceding that the definition of a code did not support your statement that it had to involve arbitrary assignments. And it really doesn’t matter whether you think arbitrariness is required to be total or not, you claimed it was pretty much definitional to codes that they require arbitrary assignment, and yet that just isn’t the definition of a code.
You wrote:
The most important criterion is abstraction. The whole point of a code, as in “secret code,” is that there is some arbitrary abstraction involved.
Which prompted my response, both to your point about abstraction and about arbitrariness. To which you replied “it’s just the definition”. And it’s just not the definition. Your continued focus on whether you meant arbitrariness to be total is a red herring, as it doesn’t matter what degree above zero you think it has to involve. You wrote arbitrariness was required for a code, by definition, and you were wrong. If you want to retract that and focus only on abstraction, fine. But I believe I explain why your reasoning fails there too.
Then innumerable other man-made codes would fail to qualify as codes in your view, because they have physical implementations in mechanical or electronic hardware somewhere, and thus there’s no abstraction since the mapping of one type of physical signal to another, has some physical explanation.
What you’re saying is effectively that in so far as someone takes the concept of some code and implements it in some physical hardware, then right there it stops being a code because now there’s some physical explanation why one physical thing(such as particular sequences of electric pulses) maps to another.
And so it appears you are arguing that what prevents the genetic code from being considered a code is that it is physically implemented in the translation system so that the mapping assignments from particular codons to particular amino acids have physical explanations instead of being abstractions that take place in our heads.
I think my reductio ad absurdum revealed why that kind of argument doesn’t work, as now many man made-codes with physical implementations would stop being codes. I think it would be absurd to say such a thing. Clearly we can still consider a code that is physically implemented in some sort of hardware to be a real code.
If you don’t agree you’re going to have to explain why man-made codes with physical explanations for their mappings still qualify as codes but the genetic code does not.
No, I really do not appear to be doing that anywhere. I really do understand the difference, I have not conflated them anywhere.
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Codes are abstractions. I have yet to come across an abstraction that hasn’t originated in someone’s mind. I presume this is why ID’ers are so obsessed with code.
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So the observation is correct, but the reading of the Bible is incorrect because the Bible is being read literally instead of metaphorically?
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