I believe I did “counter your claim” on whether neodarwinian mechanisms could explain the origin of novel body plans and organs a few comments ago. Remember this:
I hope this dispels your amnesia.
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When it comes to abiogenesis and evolution, in Atheism Land, motors and machines design and build themselves - no intelligence or even purpose needed. You know, just like how the first television wasn’t designed; it just appeared out of nowhere.
Here we go again: Trying to avoid discussing the absurdity of natural abiogenesis by inventing ambiguities over definitions. You employed the same tactic with the word “complexity”.
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No Edgar. I am not saying “in effect” that. This is because a television is a bad analogy for primitive life, for almost identical reasons to those I gave for why computers are:
The reason why bad analogies are unhelpful can be seen from this example:
Do please tell me what we can learn about our galaxy from observing a pizza.
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Correct. That was not my intention in writing it.
So I take you have no response to what I actually wrote there. Better to just admit that, rather than try change the subject. We might respect you more if you were intellectually honest for once.
About as much as we can learn about how natural, biological structures and systems were formed by investigating artificial, non-living things.
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Perhaps I misunderstood the purpose of your original question. Where were you headed with your question?
Chernobog?
Darkseid is the name of that “dark God”, the ruler of Apokolips.
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I posted a series of such commentary citations in a previous post—but you didn’t respond:
I went on to quote from the NET Bible translation and various other commentaries. Yet, you have not retracted or corrected your false assertion:
So I will ask you again:
You see, I want to know: (1) Does evidence matter to you at all? (2) Are you willing to retract false statements when your errors are explained to you?
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Well, since novel body plans and organs don’t require any other processes, that would be a case of good ole “personal incredulity.”
I’d give you a reading list, if you were a reader. But I think it’s clear where this is going: down the path of a thousand discussions on this subject with creationists. The more people explain to you how we can see the homologues between lineages in developmental regulatory genes, the more people explain to you how ordinary mutation and selection can result in modifications either to the processes or outcomes of development regulation, the more people show you how the separate branches of a split in some ancient phylogeny aren’t nearly so separate in the early going as in the later, and so on, the more you will jump up and down and insist that none of that will satisfy YOUR personal incredulity.
Two answers to that: (1) it’s up to everyone to decide what will or will not convince him of a fact staring him in the face; but this does not mean that any decision on that point is reasonable or is worthy of any particular deference, and (2) we know where this is going. Sooner or later it boils down to you demanding that someone put E. coli in a test tube under some set of conditions and, after eight weeks or so, open the tube to find a thriving population of walruses.
Since this is standard creationist time-wasting, could we just go with the numbering convention? This particular bacteria-to-walruses argument is known, in the ISO standard, as CA127 (Creationist Argument #127). When you wish to invoke it, don’t bother explaining. Just shout “CA127!” and we will all know what is meant, and that no reply is required.
No, I’m trying to explain to you that Patterson didn’t mean what you think he meant. Now, if he had meant what you think he meant, he’d have been wrong, but I am too respectful of the dead to even imagine that Patterson meant anything that foolish. If you would simply familiarize yourself with Patterson’s views, you’d realize that he is of no help to you.
As for “cherished” theories, not really. I’m happy to see any credible account of things displace any part of the current evolutionary paradigm. But “credible” is the key.
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That evolution has occurred - the change and diversification of life on Earth over deep time - is a well established scientific fact. The theory of evolution explains mechanisms which produced the empirically observed fact of evolution. If ToE was totally disproved tomorrow that evolution has occurred would still be a scientific fact.
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Definitions in science are critically important to correctly communicate ideas. ID-Creationists keep things as vague as possible by never providing concise definitions so they can’t be pinned down. It’s just a sad rhetorical ploy by the IDC crew.
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this looks design too:
(image from https://www.pinterest.com/pin/825636544158982588/)
this is an assumption.
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I would expect it does to you but for many others it looks like what would be expected from natural processes.
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Indeed, and I would add that simplified drawings of these things, like this one, always look more “designed” (in part because the drawings are indeed the work of a designer) than the thing itself.
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Take our sun, for example: It is a gigantic nuclear fusion reactor, that just happened to arise by chance out of an explosion (the Big Bang). We humans, with all our intelligence and scientific knowledge, can’t build a viable nuclear fusion reactor - but mindless nature can!
In a similar way, mindless nature can produce, by sheer good luck, a highly complex factory full of highly complex biological machines all working in unison, that also reproduces itself (otherwise known as a cell).
Think of these miracles of nature as a modern take on spontaneous generation and it will all make perfect sense. No need for some intelligent designer in the sky - that’s just childish, irrational, superstitious nonsense.
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It would seem that we should add Cosmology to the list of scientific fields that Edgar is happy to ignore the research and make Arguments from Personal Incredulity about.
It would be more accurate to characterise the Sun as a fusion reaction rather than a fusion reactor. It lacks the electromagnetic tokamaks characteristic of such reactors. It relies simply on the interplay of gravity and nuclear forces for its energy. Likewise, stars do not rely on massive feats of precision engineering for their creation, but rather upon huge gas clouds being acted upon by their own gravity.
Another bad analogy therefore.
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Why do you limit what a God is capable of like creating the laws of nature to take care of the grunt work?
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if a motor doesnt looks design for you then we can say the same about your PC.
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No we can’t because my pc doesn’t look like the bacterial flagellum. There is no such thing as “a motor”, there are different motors, some of which “look designed” by humans, and some of which do not look designed at all.
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This is what bacteria with and without flagella look like.
We know the Stepwise formation of the bacterial flagella system
Putting together our knowledge of evolutionary processes and what we observe we can conclude the images represent a natural process and not design. In other words how we view things is built on previous experience and knowledge.
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