Intelligent Design Theory: Science or Religion?

Well, there's a leap of logic.

Information could very well be an integral part of the world without the need for a middleman, intelligent actor, as per Ockham's razor.

Blue, Occam's Razor, like Pascal's Wager, is philosophical silly putty. Using it, you get the sun, moon, stars, and planets circling the Earth...rather than the truth.

In any case, I agree, there is no need for a middleman/intelligent actor. At least, I agree that there is no need for one that humans can see. But that does not mean there isn't one...it just means there is no need for one.

There is no need for gnats that we humans can see...but the golf course was filled with 'em this morning...and one managed to commit suicide in my eye just as I stroked an important putt.

My God, the profound ignorance of the mainstream science of molecular biology demonstrated by you and farmer has me baffled. I must have been giving you more credit than deserved. At least farmer has once grudgingly acknowledged the presence of Information in it.

Do you know what in that field of biology is called "The central dogma of molecular biology" ? Look it up sometime.

Farmer calls it 'inanity' , and you dismiss it as occams razor without any 'Simpler explanation' offered. Oh the irony of this empty rhetoric offered as a defense of 'science', no less.

recognizing symbolic information stored within xline structural elements provides no information re an id workplan.. Youve been tap dancing on trying to sell me your "big idea" tht Base structures and sugars in the Nucleic acis were akin to "Bar codes". Thats where I called you out since you had neither idea nor a clue in methodology with which you could expand on that. THEREFORE it is you who have no ******* idea about the contents and structuers and reactivity and various bonding in organic chems an prebiotic chems in the spectra of tars. you are clueless (but not lacking in opinions).To conclude that an outside intelligent agent is responsible for the myriad of reactions and chemical environments is whre Ive called your thinking precious , quaint, and flat idiotic.
Ive aked you tens of times to pick up a real organic chem and molecular biology text and just see the way reactions occur "just on their own" an what compounds are "Self replicating" and which are not. What are the support means in which reactions occur while being assisted by other neighboring elements or compounds whose structures do NOT change at all,
Then, on top of that, you mis the entire nature of the planets life and how evolution i affected by such things as oceans opening and closing, or ice sheets, or flood basalts due to incoming impactors. (not to mention available liquid water )
You seem to pick out on thing, dwell on it, fixate on it, to the total denial of the rest of tim n space. Both you and your newest frind have that in common.
I have to laugh because what you criticize me for is a result of your profound ignorance of P-chem, organic and inorganic chem.

When youve spent a medium 10 yr career like i have, among the chemical labs, produce numbers of papers and patents, Ill feel youre wotrth a thought, until then, all I can do is try to politely offer up sources from where you can learn. ive tried to do that but youre id assertions are in your head without any quality control

imagine All these dumass scientists blindly researching away and missing your obvious blinding thoughts as our " stableGenius" whose conspiracy hypotheses involve gods oversseing geology, biology, physics and chemistry.

As i explained in my argument, it was the SIMPLEST way I could explain the roadblock to life arising 'naturally' and in the context of an online public discussion. Which you have totally failed to address btw.

And your absurd argument that i have not addressed the 'wider picture' is just that, absurd. If there are roadblocks in that one tiny corner of biology in my argument, there are MANY MORE when considering the whole picture. You don't solve the problem by adding MORE complexity, you just make it that much harder to solve.

And if you claim that they have all been solved, you are simply lying.

no, you imply haven't taken th time to understand the mountains of overlapping evidence that argues for randomness and doesn't support some intelligent designer
1. Think about all the genetic data no available to us. It all shows the myriads of genetic variability within a single species, and, where we have evidence through time, we can actually observe natural selection within the gene pool and its higgeldy piggeldy (a non anageneis of the evolution of species ("three steps forward and two back".

2 Guys like you have ignored the paleo history of species genetics. You only judge by the present. Heres where the fossil record (An obvious natural demonstration of changes in genomes through time. Over the last 100 years weve learned a whole lot about the earth's history, and how life has been knocked around by incoming bolides, growing continental ice sheets, drifting continents etc. All of which has resulted in us and all other life being here Random singular events in the earths history could just as easily NOT have happened. AS weve studied human genomics to probe our own recent history, weve seen how these random singular events (volcanoes, ice bridges, centuries of drought) have caught our species tween a hairy line of life or extinction. Weve seen actual hominid species, some on the "common ancestral line of H sapiens and H idaltu.

Jacques Monod, who won a Nobel in 1965 for developing a Theory of th working of our genes nd (what Gould later called "the bookkeeping of volution" ) wroteLe hasard et le necessite' which caused quite a stir among the creationist establishment. It presented the Monte Carlo analyses of human origins and our development with the environment in which our ancestral species resided. As Sean Carroll wrote recently about Monod's work
I(from Monod's work) I hope we are awed--awed by the power and drama of asteroids slamming into the planet, of colliding continents, the rapid rise and falling of ice and oceans; --awed by the realization that we live on, and are at the mercy of, a planet that is much more unstable than our short lives can perceive;-- awed by the knowledge of how mere chance is at the source of all the beautiful and wondrous creatures with which we share the planet;-- awed by the unique invisible accidents that made each one of us;-- and (finally )awedby the fact that we humans, recent descendants of hunter-gatherers who slogged through a period of exceptional planetary chaos, have, in the last 50 years or so, figured all this out

CONCLUSION: Science looks at it all as an interwoven system, governed chance, time, environment, and species uupon which it all happens. Jacques Monod isnt too well known outside of evolutionary genomics and paleoethology, yet the"Dr Hamms" loaded with nothing but donations from the "Anointed" preaches the evidence free stories of Creationism turned Intelligent Design in only 30 yers , and smart people like you buy it.

None of that explains how to get through the roadblocks I described, through which ALL paths to biological life must pass.

youre guilty of extreme one dimensional thinking. ALL life is interlaced in aweb and the web is further interlaced with time and the earths own curious properties and motions.
Yep, one dimensional thinking can be OK when your trying to pitch a baseball, but science has so many other things imposing themselves on your investigations.

Well, I'm not saying to employ Occam's Razor exclusively, for everything, e.g. science and nature, but in these theological arguments where all one has is speculation, what else is there?

Where do you get that assumption from?


It sounds like a creationist argument.


I did offer a simpler explanation.

You and farmer...

If you want to know how I know you are profoundly ignorant on this subject, the above is the proof.
That 'dogma' is straight out of text books on molecular biology. As are all the facts in my argument regarding proteins.

two months ago you were arguing that all I was interested in was "Molecular Biology" and prebiotic chemistry. now you tell me im deficient in a subject ive spenr many years in finding and keying fossil fatty acids

SO what do you think the CORE of a discipline called MOLECULAR BIOLOGY is about???
hint: its not forestry nor is it bumper stickers

Cite please, thank you.

Blue, I personally would not use Occam's Razor for any intelligent argument (at least not to arrive at or support a conclusion) and I would at least suggest that using it ought not to be done by anyone no matter the nature of the discussion.

In any case, in a theological argument, the question "what else is there?" is best answered with, "By simply acknowledging that one does not know and cannot determine a reasonable basis for a guess." That would, in my opinion be a much better option.

The ultimate objective of most "theological arguments" is to determine the answer to the question, "What is the true nature of the REALITY of existence?"

There is no way it can be determined at this time. We can only make guesses (hypothesize) and test those guesses as best as we can.

The notion that what IS right now can ONLY be the result of Intelligent Design is absurd. But the notion that what IS right now MIGHT be the result of Intelligent Design is NOT. (If it was intelligently designed, the designer obviously used the methods we are determining through our investigations into evolution.)

As I see it, best to argue those kinds of things on their merits...rather than unnecessarily invoking something like Occam's Razor. That was the point I was making with my comment.

I'm not here to do your homework for you.
Are you challenging the truth of what I said? If so, have the courage to say so.

I might have said that about 'chemistry' but not 'molecular biology'. I'm convinced you don't even know what Molecular Biology is about.

In case you haven't heard me say it before, it's about the flow of INFORMATION in biological systems. The chemistry is incidental to this.

If you learn by analogy, it's like cooking, yes, there is chemistry happening, but it's really all about the taste.

wronggedy wrong wrong, from what subject do you think my pre biotic chemicals(which you spent time poo pooing) was from? Purines and pyrimidines are the names of the oxy/ amino derivatives that serve in the structure of DNA/rNA (A, G are purinse and C,T and U are pyrimidines). Youve been talking with em all along and didnt even know it eh?

the chemical structure and positioning on the rNA or DNA double helix ARE the information. Youre thinking too much about BAR CODES.

The key word in that statement is 'positioning'.

A 'barcode' is nothing but the positioning of black stripes for the purpose of encoding Information, just as the positioning of nucleotides in DNA/RNA does.

Dammit, look at the implications of your own f'n words.
Nothing in chemistry determines that positioning.

You are the one that brought up "the central dogma of molecular biology," but you can't be bothered to provide a cite? Seriously? This isn't a matter of courage, it's a matter of intellectual incapacitation on your part.