Intelligent Design vs. Casino Universe

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Is our universe stupid (without intelligence) or is it arranged by some kind of intelligence - Intelligent Design (ID), no matter whether omnipresent (like for example the 'Mind of God' in the string theory of everything) or as handover of relay torch from one Intelligent Life Form (ILF) to another ... or as the classical understanding of God in a new light.
A lot of things in the living matter are too complex and too improbable to have happened by stochastic processes.
One thing is for sure - at least one case of intelligence exists (our own one) and even the fiercest enemies of the ID of the universe, the so called atheists, cannot deny that they posses intelligence and that their thoughts are not driven by casino mechanics.
For the sake of the truth even the classical understanding of the evolution is not entirely without intelligence. In order to operate the evolution should have some rudimentary intelligence (to perform the natural or artificial selection).

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@Herald,

Quote:

A lot of things in the living matter are too complex and too improbable to have happened by stochastic processes.

I think this is the key point you are trying to make, yet you don't provide any evidence to support this point. You just state it as an unsupported fact.

Since I don't accept this blindly as truth, the rest of your argument falls apart.

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@Herald,

The Butterfly - Emily Bronte August 11th 1842.
Originally written in French.

Quote:

In one of those moods that everyone falls into sometimes, when the world of the imagination suffers a winter that blights its vegetation; when the light of life seems to go out and existence becomes a barren desert where we wander, exposed to all the tempests that blow under heaven, without hope of rest or shelter - in one of these black humors, I was walking one evening at the edge of a forest. It was summer; the sun was still shining high in the west and the air resounded with the songs of birds. All appeared happy, but for me, it was only an appearance. I sat at the foot of an old oak, among whose branches the nightingale had just begun its vespers. "Poor fool," I said to myself, "is it to guide the bullet to your breast or the child to your brood that you sing so loud and clear? Silence that untimely tune, perch yourself on your nest; tomorrow, perhaps, it will be empty." But why address myself to you alone? AIl creation is equally mad. Behold those flies playing above the brook; the swallows and fish diminish their number every minute. These will become, in their turn, the prey of some tyrant of the air or water; and man for his amusement or his needs will kill their murderers. Nature is an inexplicable problem; it exists on a principle of destruction. Every being must be the tireless instrument of death to others, or itself must cease to live, yet nonetheless we celebrate the day of our birth, and we praise God for having entered such a world.
During my soliloquy I picked a flower at my side; it was fair and freshly opened, but an ugly caterpillar had hidden itself among the petals and already they were shriveling and fading. "Sad image of the earth and its inhabitants!" I exclaimed. "This worm lives only to injure the plant that protects it. Why was it created, and why was man created? He torments, he kills, he devours; he suffers, dies, is devoured - there you have his whole story. It is true that there is a heaven for the saint, but the saint leaves enough misery here below to sadden him even before the throne of God.
I threw the flower to earth. At that moment the universe appeared to me a vast machine constructed only to produce evil. I almost doubted the goodness of God, in not annihilating man on the day he first sinned. "The world should have been destroyed," I said, "crushed as I crush this reptile which has done nothing in its life but render all that it touches as disgusting as itself." I had scarcely removed my foot from the poor insect when, like a censoring angel sent from heaven, there came fluttering through the trees a butterfly with large wings of lustrous gold and purple. It shone but a moment before my eyes; then, rising among the leaves, it vanished into the height of the azure vault. I was mute, but an inner voice said to me, "Let not the creature judge his Creator; here is a symbol of the world to come. As the ugly caterpillar is the origin of the splendid butterfly, so this globe is the embryo of a new heaven and a new earth whose poorest beauty will infinitely exceed your mortal imagination. And when you see the magnificent result of that which seems so base to you now, how you will scorn your blind presumption, in accusing Omniscience for not having made nature perish in her infancy.
God is the god of justice and mercy; then surely, every grief that he inflicts on his creatures, be they human or animal, rational or irrational, every suffering of our unhappy nature is only a seed of that divine harvest which will be gathered when, Sin having spent its last drop of venom, Death having launched its final shaft, both will perish on the pyre of a universe in flames and leave their ancient victims to an eternal empire of happiness and glory.

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@Herald,

Ill try to join in later tonight. when im done with chores.

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@Herald,

Herald wrote:

A lot of things in the living matter are too complex and too improbable to have happened by stochastic processes.

That statement is incorrect. If you wish for it to be considered otherwise, please provide evidence.

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@Herald,

Herald wrote:

For the sake of the truth even the classical understanding of the evolution is not entirely without intelligence. In order to operate the evolution should have some rudimentary intelligence (to perform the natural or artificial selection).

The mechanisms for evolution do not require intelligence. Reproduction, Variation and Natural Selection are all purely natural, and sufficient just by themselves to result in biological evolution.

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@Herald,

HA1 no quorum so we adjourned (actually we couldn't adjourn because we had no quorum to even OPEN the meeting)

Before we get fr drift Id like to state emphatically that I disagree mightily that evolution is a stochastic (a scholarly attempt to say "Random") process.
We understand the mechanics, we make predictions and flsify it every dy. We understand the chemical reactions and bonding forces. We understand (pretty much) the workings and "series limitations" of the operant genes from specie to specie.

Stochastic, in my book would be things like predicting your blood pressure over 20 years or fluctuations of the stock market.
SO my starting point is that evolution is deterministic.
punct

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@farmerman,

Does it not bother you fm that a slender young waif of a Yorkshire lass did one of your mantras--God is a bastard--nearly 200 years ago and with a style and panache that is entirely beyond your reach? Probably beyond anybody's reach. And in a language she had only studied for a few weeks.

Quote:

Scientists should be on tap; not on top.

Winston Churchill.

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@farmerman,

Following along, because it deterministic DOES NOT men its "intelligent"> For the same reasons we know that when , say, bilateral symmetry made its appearance in the late Vendian, ALL life then developed from that root. The basic body plan was thus established and follow on "bauplans" used that as a template. (NO INTELLIGENCE REQUIRED)

Non bilaterally symmetric fossils were seen in the Paleozoic and these were apparently "fiddlings" with a unique body plan that apparently didn't prove successful wrt to the environment. Many of these "trial body plans" are seen in the Edicara, Flinders, The Martinsburg, and the Burgess Formations. ALL of those fossil assemblages became extinct SAVE 1, a little thingy that looked like it hAd a backbone . We named itPikaia. It became extinct but did it serve as a model Bauplan for notochords?
Placoderms , in their sternsides, were very similar to Pikaia, except that they had armored "head ends" and, although they were bearers of true notochords, they produced annelid-like larval forms that were later abandoned in the Mississippean when true bony fish became dominant.

Once a body form is set into play, it usually does NOT die away , that would be random. However, as we study the forms based upon their fossils, we can see that subsequent body forms were "pre-determined" by ancestral forms.
We see the same things in species in which we can study their genomes. (Watsons book DNA) gives an excellent discussion of the dependent genomes and percentage of retained genes in daughter species nd higher taxa.

However, its on you to explain your evidence that shows INTELLIGENCE is behind evolution. Scientific evidence does strongly support a deterministic natural selection that is environmentally controlled , is opportunistic, and shows inheritance of characteristics. By genetics, all things are related, and genomes of totally different Phyla (where they've been worked out) show descending ancestral relationships

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@maxdancona,

Quote:

... the rest of your argument falls apart.

What evidences exactly will you need for our intelligence, for example ... in order for my arguments not to 'fall apart'?

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@spendius,

Quote:

In one of those moods that everyone falls into sometimes ...

I can also write in that melancholic style:
In one of those moods that everyone falls into sometimes ... when the average annual CO2 of the air have remained steadily above 400 ppm, when the oil and coal industry (although having reached the center of the Earth) could not stop digging further, when the dust in the air was teasing my respiratory tract to the lowest part of my lungs ... and the lungs were struggling the breathe in the oxygen from the CO2 dissolved in the sulfuric acid of the air, when the automobile industry was commenting on the mass media how to boost further their production & sales, and when the so called atheists could not stop denying & misrepresenting the facts and the information that was dangerous to their profits and professional career, in one of those moods I was thinking that we must be missing something, there is no way we are not missing something, how did it happen that are we missing something ... & what that missing something might be? In one of those moods while watching the echolalia of the endless business interpretations of the Bible on the satellite TV ... when the story tellers of the Bible were conducting business as usual ... all of a sudden and out of nowhere it struck me like a thunder, it struck me that we are missing ... the Point - what is the whole story all about?

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@farmerman,

farmerman wrote:

SO my starting point is that evolution is deterministic.
punct

Have you any evidences (with or without punct) in support of your claims. You claim that the functions and the principles driving the evolution are deterministic, but can you prove that the relations between the theoretical functions and the observable properties of the system (evolution events of any kind) are deterministic as well. Or it is a big variable X ... without even a domain of definition.

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@Herald,

Herald wrote:

What evidences exactly will you need for our intelligence, for example ... in order for my arguments not to 'fall apart'?

Let's start with the intelligent design actually being intelligent.

I would expect that an intelligent designer would make teeth that don't fall out, and knees that don't fail so easily.

An intelligent designer wouldn't dangle an appendage off the large intestine that has no use but gets inflamed and bursts unexpectedly. An intelligent designer wouldn't make the reproductive system so susceptible to disease.

And an intelligent designer wouldn't wire war into the brains of humans. Even now, the most civilized human societies spend a substantial part of their resources developing the capability to kill each other.

The Judeo-Christian explaination for why the creation is so screwed up involves a talking snake. It doesn't make sense.

There is no real evidence for an intelligent designer. If there is an intelligent designer, it is clear that He is completely inept.

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@Herald,

Ive presented several above and we can make predictions without uses of statistics.
For example, we can predict where "intermediate" fossils of major animal groups would be found basd upon environment and geological time scale.
The finding ofTiktaliik rosacea by Shubin and Daeschler was such an example. They had fossils of fih and full amohibians but were interested in fonding the intermediate "fishopod". They did this by simple geological field science qnd stratigraphy that underpins the specific fossil record.
No statistics were needed.

Further, cladistics , based upon both genetics and paleontology have provided us with clear " descent trees " of organisms (protists, plants, and animals)
Nothing stochastic about any of that

The only stochastic process Im aware of is in the basis of determining whether Punctuated Equilibrium is valid for any specific species.

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@maxdancona,

maxdancona wrote:

If there is an intelligent designer, it is clear that He is completely inept.

I found this amusing, to the point and well worth repeating.

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@Setanta,

Setanta has obviously not read the thread, short as it is.

It wasn't even worth saying in the first place never mind being repeated.

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@rosborne979,

rosborne979 wrote:

The mechanisms for evolution do not require intelligence.

Everything depends on how you define intelligence. The generally accepted definition of intelligence comprises: (Wiki) 'logic, abstract thought, understanding, self-awareness, communication, learning, having emotional knowledge, retaining, planning, and problem solving. Intelligence is most widely studied in humans, but has also been observed in animals and in plants. Artificial intelligence is the simulation of intelligence in machines'.
I cannot say whether the storage of bio-code in the genes is intelligence or not, but the development of the body by using the code of the genes is a masterpiece of the intelligent design ... and we with our GMOs are not even close to it. Besides if the creation of GMOs is viewed as intelligent design, the appearance of the genes (out of whatever) must also be acknowledged as intelligent design.

further wrote:

Reproduction, Variation and Natural Selection are all purely natural.

Reproduction, Variation and Natural Selection can be artificial as well, but I am not sure what do you mean by 'natural':
- That exists and evolved within the confines of an ecosystem.
- Of or relating to nature.
- Without artificial additives and external interference.
- As expected.
- Without, or prior to, modification or adjustment.
- ... or something else.

further wrote:

... and sufficient just by themselves to result in biological evolution.

What does 'sufficient just by themselves' mean?

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@maxdancona,

maxdancona wrote:

Herald wrote:

What evidences exactly will you need for our intelligence, for example ... in order for my arguments not to 'fall apart'?

Let's start with the intelligent design actually being intelligent.

I would expect that an intelligent designer would make teeth that don't fall out, and knees that don't fail so easily.

Why?

Why not expect that an intelligent designer would simply set things in motions and allow everything to sort itself out?

If there is a GOD...and if the GOD did intelligently design things...apparently this is the way the GOD did it.

Which, by the way, seem perfectly reasonable to me. I wonder why it doesn't to you...and I suspect that has to do with you wanting there to be no gods.

Quote:

An intelligent designer wouldn't dangle an appendage off the large intestine that has no use but gets inflamed and bursts unexpectedly. An intelligent designer wouldn't make the reproductive system so susceptible to disease.

Why not?

Herald is simply stating things as though they are irrefutable truths. You are doing the same thing, Max.

Quote:

And an intelligent designer wouldn't wire war into the brains of humans. Even now, the most civilized human societies spend a substantial part of their resources developing the capability to kill each other.

Why not?

Quote:

The Judeo-Christian explaination for why the creation is so screwed up involves a talking snake. It doesn't make sense.

Yeah...that does seem to be weird.

Quote:

There is no real evidence for an intelligent designer. If there is an intelligent designer, it is clear that He is completely inept.

There indeed is no real evidence for an intelligent designer...which we all realize is not evidence that one does not exist.

And the intelligent designer, if it does exist...can be considered completely competent...so long as you get rid of the atheistic prejudice. The fact that a GOD might not do things the way a human thinks it should be done...is completely understandable.

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@Herald,

Quote:

A lot of things in the living matter are too complex and too improbable to have happened by stochastic processes.

C'mon...tell us why.

1 Reply

@Herald,

Herald wrote:

rosborne979 wrote:
The mechanisms for evolution do not require intelligence.

Everything depends on how you define intelligence.

No it doesn't. Without even bothering to define intelligence, we know that the three underlying mechanisms of evolution happen without any intelligent input. The three basic processes are Reproduction, Variation and Natural Selection (as defined within the Theory of Evolution). None of those processes require any intelligent input. Reproduction happens all the way down to bacteria (and beyond to viruses and replicative molecules), Variation is a result of copying errors and merging (as in sexual reproduction), and Natural Selection is merely the disproportionate ability for a population to reproduce under differing environmental conditions. No intelligent input is required to make any of the base processes work, or to make the resultant effect (of evolution) work.

Herald wrote:

further wrote:
Reproduction, Variation and Natural Selection are all purely natural.

Reproduction, Variation and Natural Selection can be artificial as well, but I am not sure what do you mean by 'natural':

See above. "Natural" as in not requiring an intelligence as a guiding or selective force.

Herald wrote:

further wrote:
... and sufficient just by themselves to result in biological evolution.

What does 'sufficient just by themselves' mean?

"Sufficient just by themselves" means that nothing else (like intelligence) is required to allow those processes to function, and nothing else is required for their cumulative effect to result in Biological Evolution.

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