Hash (imported) wrote: Wed Dec 16, 2009 4:46 pm
Trotted out the old creationist lies? What lie have a told? I tried to show that evolution is wrong and I'm a liar? Again an evolutionist who won't listen because he doesn't want to even consider that a creator could actually exist. Please open your eyes and your mind, complexity screams creator.
Hello. I regularly come to read stories at the Eunuch Archive but did not register for the forum until I was specifically disturbed by your posts in this thread, and will address all of them in this post.
In fact, complexity 'screams' evolution. At Darwin's time, a mechanical explanation for biodiversity was being sought after, and Darwin found it. The theory of evolution was specifically designed as an explanation for biodiversity and complexity.
You argument is old and is known from people such as Michael Behe, William Paley and Thomas Aquinas, and I can address the forms of this argument presented by all three of them.
Thomas Aquinas in his Summa Theologica wrote of five arguments in favour of God's existence known as the Five Ways. The fifth one is the teleological argument, although it being distinct from the other four in any way is dubious enough, but the explicit terms which match the argument you're referring to appear in the teleological argument. Teleology argues from the observation of complexity that there is a final purpose to existence, that the things in the universe are too well ordered, too beautiful, too complex, whatever word you want to assign, to have come into existence without a purpose and a first cause.
The teleological argument is nothing but an argument which contradicts itself in summary. "I have no explanation for the complexity, beauty and order of existence, therefor I can explain it." Saying a lack of explanation merits the explanation of a creator is merely a contradiction and does not merit consideration.
The other two forms share the exact same problem, also being teleological arguments. However, having their own take on it they add new problems.
William Paley in his work Natural Theology makes the same argument in the form of the Watchmaker Analogy. The watchmaker analogy again refers to complexity. It goes something like this, that if I were to come across a stone in nature and were asked to explain its origins I could with some plausibility argue that it had always been there, that it was simple enough not to have special purpose, but that if I had come across a pocketwatch that I could never argue that its intelligible purpose and complexity had come about at random, and that the universe shares this complexity, so as there must be a watchmaker, there must be a designer for creation. I will list the problems with this argument in numbered order;
1. This form of the argument presents another contradiction. The intelligence necessary to create something of complexity such as a pocketwatch is an intelligence demanded of something itself vastly more complex than its creation, a human being. Similarly, a creator would have to be itself vastly more complex than the universe, and by that token the creator suffers from the same deficiency the argument places on the universe, that it could not have come into existence by itself. The creator requires a creator, and that creator requires a creator, and this continues ad infinitum, providing no explanation for origin.
2. Pocket watches are clearly designed because they report the artificial human construct of time, and are actually not very complex in relation to nature.
3. Pocket watches do not reproduce and so the analogy does not work in reference to life.
4. The origin of rocks is not particularly simple.
Next comes Michael Behe who conceived of irreducible complexity, and coined the phrase 'Intelligent Design', which is no different than the previous two arguments except that it gives the example of the bacterial flagellum. Michael Behe argues that the bacterial flagellum, resembling an outboard motor, is composed of 'parts' with no independent function and that no assembly of the flagellum lacking any of the present 'parts' could function as anything else, making it impossible for it to have developed by means of evolution.
He is simply incorrect. The type 3 secretory system is a known assembly of the same proteins which is less complex.
So far I have merely established that you can not explain complexity. I shall now address your questions.
Entropy I can do away with in one sentence; the earth is not a closed system and so the second law of thermodynamics does not apply. If you would bother to go so far as to read even a wikipedia entry on the subject, you would not bring it up.
First I should clear you up on some elementary classifications in science so that you don't sound ridiculous. The 'occurrence of life in the primeval swamp' is the theory of abiogenesis, which is born of organic chemistry, a different discipline than biology which is where the theory of evolution comes from. Do not confuse them.
Then I must inform you that you don't understand anything about evolution. The 'will' of early organisms is irrelevant; it does not exist, such a notion is not even entertained in the theory of evolution.
What you must know is that all living things are composed of DNA, and that DNA replicates. It is our function to replicate our DNA, it is the function of every living thing on earth. In the replication of DNA there are sometimes errors, and your assertion that mutations do not result in productive change is simply incorrect. They result in slow change, but often productive, and this is known to be true by empirical observation. The change isn't even as slow as you might say in your rhetoric, eyes as we know them can develop in the conservative estimate of around 250,000 years.
I don't know why there is such flagrant ignorance in this country but it is the only means by which anyone could deny evolution. You must know that the process of evolution, even speciation, has been observed to occur. We know for a fact that evolution occurs.
You are in need of an eduction if you believe that over a million published, peer reviewed scientific papers on the subject of evolutionary biology in the past 150 years were crafted with an ignorance of physical laws you can cite with no education in the sciences. There is no debate, as far as any honest mind is concerned the debated ended in 1859 with Charles Darwin's publication, but since then the amount of additional evidence is overwhelming and does not come merely from the discipline of biology.
The discovery of DNA was irrefutable evidence of the accuracy of evolution, if you do not understand this then you need to be further educated. All living things on earth are composed of DNA, meaning that all living things on earth have a common ancestor. There is no argument against this.