Labeling someone is a very childish way to ignore one's argument, and it is a logical fallacy. So your an Atheist?Rolling eyes Oh well in that case I better ignore everything you're saying...please lets not stoop that low. My beliefs have always been internally realized as my own.
I didn't mean to associate you with an organized group. Most people in the world are ID'ers and don't even realize it. I was actually just asking if you really believed the universe was designed by an intelligence so I could formulate a response without misinterpreting your previous response. I knew you weren't a creationist and most creationists made up term intelligent design as political ploy but it actually describes the beliefs of most people rather well without calling it 'god'. Anyway my apologies if it was said in the wrong way.
burnt wrote:
if you type long enough maybe you'll make a word. thats kinda like evolution.
I could fill book upon book with enough randomly typed letters and or numbers (efoi3jr3-09jufeklfm) to fill every bookstore and library in the world and not one of those books would have more than a mouthful of randomly produced information in any human language let alone genetic language. There would be no spontaneous occurrence of mathematical display, no epiphany of physics, no sacred spiritual revelation. Nothing. Zilch.
Yea I was joking about that one but I didn't make it clear that I was but anyway...Next is what I really want to discuss
inanimate forces have never had a knack for generating information. The ocean waves don't write Shakespeare in beach sand, fire does not build molecular machines, elements on the periodic table do not talk about getting together with a bunch of friends to make Life happen, because inanimate matter cannot communicate. It makes no decisions to survive in one formation or another. Inanimate matter will never create anything animate. It's like dropping a rock in a hot tub, and asking it to do something smart. Will it do anything? Hmm...you might say not in my lifetime...but what if we say lets give it some time to think like 1 billion years then what? Am I being too generous? Okay, 30 million years...what do you think?
This is perhaps the central confusion people have with Darwinian evolution / natural selection.
But first information..
Every single piece of matter is a form of information. If we take it as low as we can now go (subatomic particles) they have information in them. A quantum state (like spin) is a bit of information. Therefore all inanimate forces have information contained within them.
I'll get back to the rock question.
It doesn't matter how many planets have life on them, the question will remain the same. What is the most logical explanation for the creation of the most "primitive" life on any planet? We all know what intelligent beings are capable of accomplishing. Artificial intelligence is already here. It is only a matter of time before people (intelligent beings) understand how to engineer life from scratch. The key word is ENGINEER. No, scientists are not still doing the equivalent of placing amino acids with random elements in a hi-tech oven, and waiting around scratching their heads wondering if something will ever leap out. They are decoding the physical genetic INSTRUCTIONS that all life contains which is far more technologically advanced than anything man's most gifted minds can think up.
Yes and this is exactly why an intelligence cannot design a universe or life without having first evolved by a darwinian / natural selection process. To just claim a designer is to forget to ask what designed the designer?
What you are saying is that even though understanding information requires intelligence, creating information does not require intelligence. This might be true for the creation a few randomly created phrases spread out between many pages of gibberish, but the secrets of life can't be found in a book for toddlers titled, The Clock Goes Tick Tock. My theory is that the generation of highly-advanced technology which is communicated through genetic information requires the meticulous handiwork of highly intelligent beings. My theory is completely logical and functional not only on paper but it is also functioning on the very brink of new scientific breakthroughs. If there were a contest to see who could create life given a million years I would put my money on Atheist Scientists, not their brainless pet rock. It is ironic that those who downplay life most will be those who prove life's most sacred power.
Creating information does not require intelligence because as I said information is just a bit. At the edge of what we know it takes the form of quantum states. In computers information is binary.
The highly advanced technology communicated via highly intelligent beings manipulating genetic material is why I asked if you were an Id'er. This is 100% contradictory to everything that evolution has taught us and is thus a denial of evolution. Complexity can always arise from simpler building blocks via a kind of evolutionary process. This can be done with living and even non living things. It can even be observed with simple computer programs (although thats not proof its just proof of concept) the real proof is everywhere.
Lets take a non living example. Stars. Most stars started as balls of individual hydrogen atoms that eventually gathered together via gravity and reached enough pressure to start a nuclear fusion furnace. This creates helium which is something different then hydrogen so we therefore have increasing complexity because technically there is now more information in that system because we've created something new. There are obviously more technical details that would take a long time to type out so I hope you can see the point (if not lets discuss further). After the star runs out of enough fuel and collapses it can explode into a supernova which creates from the previous atoms even more complex atoms and molecules which again is an overall increase in complexity within that system.
In a sense its an evolution of information and information that is not stable changes into information that is capable of continuing until it changes again from the unavoidable laws of nature. Just think of the hydrogen atom it changed once it became a helium atom because it could not stay a hydrogen atom under the pressure and temperature, that helium atom could not sustain the supernova so it became another atom and on and on and on everything over time works like this.
Life if afflicted by this same kind of process except it has genetic material that is not perfect so it changes and thus can evolve into new more complex life. Life has qualities that non life has too but I won't go over them all (unless we really need too?). Where many people get confused is the inanimate to animate part. But this is all a construct of the human mind. Where does life begin and where does it end? Nature doesn't need such fine boundries and things such as virus's, prion's, and catalytic RNA are proof of that. They have some life like qualities but they don't have enough of them to be considered alive.
Concerning the origin of life. Personally I think one day someone will observe something like catalytic RNA form from a random soup of nucleotides (which we already know can form spontaneously from simpler building blocks) under the right conditions. Something like RNA that could catalyze chemical reactions was very likely the first thing to have life like qualities. This is all life needs to evolve into all the complex forms we see today. There's no question of the evolution of life after something like like starts. To say that just because no one has observed something like this refutes evolution and thus requires intelligent beings doing all the real work is a terrible argument because your facing a weight of evidence that is overwhelming and presenting a theory with no evidence at all.
