What can be said however is when a phenomenon violates expectation of a random distribution. A random distribution could be generated by a designed random number generator.
Even under these parameters we can make statements about what would be an extraordinary event far outside expectation (i.e. the tails or outliers of the distribution). The Design argument (at least my version) says “certain objects and/or events are at the tails of the distribution.” That is scientific. Whether the Desinger is real is likely outside repeatable experiments and thus outside of science.
Yes. IIRC, Eddie, in discussing Denton, used the analogy of a designer that wanted to ensure that the universe had Chryslers, but not necessarily Dodge Chargers.
And in doing so, the designer may not have any idea of what would emerge, nor would the designer have any control over what did emerge. A roulette wheel is designed to produce random distributions of numbers, but the people who designed it and run the game are not in control of the outcome.
Without any calculations or facts, it isn’t scientific. From what I have seen, all you have is personal incredulity.
Hmm. So to determine that the arrangements of uniformly shaped shaped rocks into the shape of a pyramid found at Giza was created by a particular group of human beings falls outside the range of scientific knowledge? That seems weird to me.
We have plenty of facts and distributions from physics and chemistry. At the very least abiogenesis would have operate at the tails and outliers of known distributions. Similar arguments could be made for some transitions in evolutionary theory.
In order to make these calculations you would need to know all of the possible combinations of elements that can lead to life. We don’t have anything approaching that knowledge, so you can’t calculate those probabilities.
If that’s the case one has even less reason to assert as fact that abiogenesis and evolution happen naturally, one only appeals to faith because these things do not agree with ACCEPTED distributions determined experimentally and by inference. That’s why we don’t expect tornados passing through a junkyard to make functioning 747 jetliners.
You don’t have any accepted distributions for either abiogenesis or evolution determined experimentally and by inference. You have personal incredulity, full stop.
For evolution, we can appeal to mountains of evidence, such as the nested hierarchy.
I can also point to the distribution of transition, transversion, and CpG mutations with respect to the human and chimp genomes. They match what we would expect from observed natural processes:
The nested hiearchy is not proof evolution agrees with accepted a priori distributions of chemistry and physics. In fact the strength of consevered forms (like prokaryotes vs. eukaryotes) in the nested hierarchy can actually serve as evidence that the transitions are miraculous – and that’s somewhat Behe’s position (though he uses the word “design” rather than “miracle”).
How likely does anyone here think a eukaryote will emerge from prokaryote or vice versa. Like none. Observations agree with my claim.
One could of course appeal to untestable unknowable common ancestors of eukaryotes and prokaryotes. But those are faith statements, not direct science in the highest sense, in fact science that lurks somewhere at the bottom, far closer to the pseudoscience of phrenology than to physics.
Front-loading to the extent being hinted at here has a major theological issue: it implies that God designed the initial state of the universe to unfold the way he wanted it to. This not only eliminates free-will (and hence removes any justification theists might have for complaining about non-theists), it also plays havoc with the idea of hell, since anyone committing sins sufficient to damn them is doing so because God designed the universe so that they would.
About as likely as the specific location and crystal formation of each snowflake in my yard this morning. But there you go, it happened with no hint of design.
I’m impressed that you were able to discern enough meaning in Sal’s claim to formulate a response. To me, it just looks like sciencey-sounding words randomly arranged into gobbledygook. Not much sign of intelligent design, ironically enough.
Grab a deck of cards and shuffle them thoroughly. From the top of the deck, deal out each card onto a table. The order of those specific cards has a 1 in 8x10^67 chance of happening. That is an extremely, extremely improbable outcome, and yet it happened. You can keep doing this over and over, and each time you will get an almost impossible order of cards.
Once you understand this concept, you will understand why calculating the odds of just one outcome out of many requires a serious misunderstanding of how probabilities work.
Or we could point to the evidence of the nested hierarchy which supports common ancestry.