Is The Genetic Code Proof Of Intelligent Design?

You are not qualified to know what the reality is because you know precisely zero about how life started on this planet. You might as well be a baker trying to explain quantum dynamics.

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I think you might probably want to read the OP, rather than lie about there being no evidence.

 

Science is, as you say, a process. It's not hostile to spirituality, it just doesn't deal with it.

All science says about religion, basically, is that you can't say, "well, God just makes it that way" when you want to explain something you can't explain otherwise. It doesn't say you can't believe in God, it's not inherently atheistic or theistic either, the existence or nonexistence of God is simply out of science's venue.

It is reasonably arguable that a God who could be SCIENTIFICALLY proven to exist, WOULDN'T BE GOD, as God is a being who, by definition, transcends understanding

If you want to see a sort of Intelligent Design that science can and has accepted as a valid theory you should read The Phenomenon of Man, by Teilhard de Chardin. Teilhard was one of the leading theorists of evolutionary theory in the early 20th century and a Jesuit priest. His theories were regarded as controversial by the Church at first but finally accepted by the Vatican in 1955. Science, AFAIK, never had a problem with them.

Also, I'd like to know where you got that statistic of how many scientists are self-declared atheists

 

You might wish to study some chemistry. Not knowing how life got started is something quite different from knowing what life is made of and how it works.

Depends on what there's no evidence for. In science, evidence is something quite well defined. I read and responded to the OP. The genetic code is NOT like a human code at all. My example compared transmission of diseases with transmissions in cars. Same word, but using the same word doesn't mean that we're talking about the same kind of transmissions.

 

None of this is true.

[quiote]Science is openly hostile to the possibility of intelligent design[/quote]This is also not true. All that's required is evidence.

What I can never understand is why the concept of selection, the notion of a feedback process, is so hard to grasp.

Science seeks to understand how reality works, based on evidence and testing. So far, it has been very successful. The concept of purpose only matters where it can be observed - science does not "make up" purpose where it can't be found.

There are many many many species of sharks. There are who hierarchies of sharks. The shark clade has existed for millions of years, but no particular shark species has lasted more than a small fraction of that total time.

Until only a few hundred years ago, humans lived without science. Has science improved our lives? In the short term, most people think so. In the longer term, science will probably prove inadequate to our needs.

Science is not dismissive of any explanations. Science TESTS all candidate explanations. Some fail the tests, some do not. But if testing is not possible, then what you have is not an explanation. In science, to BE an explanation, a proposal must be testable.

 

Among the 12 oldest animals on Earth:

12. GOBLIN SHARK - 118 million years old

10. FRILLED SHARK- 150 million years old

source: http://www.pawnation.com/2013/04/22/12-oldest-animal-species-on-earth/#photo=1

I should say..."some" sharks have survived as a species...and indeed some are millions of years old and remain largely the same as they were over 100 millions years ago.

That's amazing to me how they've resisted mutations, perhaps the cure for cancers is within these older species that do not mutate.

 

You might want to stop saying stupid things. If you cannot explain how life started then you cannot determine that it is the result of chemical chance.

A six year-old boy could ascertain this.

 

OK, so long as we understand that even these older species of sharks have been evolving, even if those species haven't gone extinct. They aren't the same as sharks of the "same" species of 100 million years ago, and surely could not interbreed with their ancestors.

The first sharks apppeared on earth maybe 400 million years ago, so no shark species, even with evolutionary changes within that species, has lasted even half that time.

 

You are entirely correct. But SOME people learn stuff after the age of 6.

I didn't say life started as the result of chemical chance. I said life follows the rules of chemistry.

I don't think "chance" as used in biology, means what you think it means. I may be wrong, but you'd need to explain yourself much more clearly.

 

Correct. And many (most) of them learn how to abandon common sense as a result of continued repetition of ideological fallacies. One upmanship being a good example. Even when demonstrably wrong, you are taught not to concede it because it hinders people's opinion of you, and thus your worth to the employment market.

You attacked the notion that the building blocks of life are carried upon comets. You told me "the reality is much simpler than that". Since you do not know how life began, you cannot therefore know "the reality" of how life arrives.

Please stop trying to change your argument from one sentence to the next to avoid having to concede that you said something stupid.

Thanks.

 

The "language" speaks to a designer and order.

 

I have been studying these things most of my life. Nothing I said has been wrong. But we may not be having the same conversation.

Please go back and read. I did not say reality is simpler, I said it is more SUBTLE than that. And it is. Yes, amino acids have been found on comets and meteors generally. I tried to explain that such organic molecules form quite easily under fairly common conditions, because that's the nature of chemistry.

Why do you assume that anyone who knows FAR more than you do, must be stupid because he says something beyond your understanding?

If you wish to actually discuss these things, I'd be delighted. If you are here to preach some sort of religion, you are in the wrong place.

 

Yes, I agree that it does. But just because there is a designer and an order, doesn't mean that the designer works the way humans do, or that the order is what humans would produce. Evolution is an intelligent process, in the sense that there are multiple options and the aspect of selection means that decisions are made. The result is fairly orderly, although biology generally is variable and messy.

 

I don't know that the genetic code has anything to do with intelligent design, but it is pretty spooky. And amazing. Same with the cosmos.

 

Once again, the genetic "code" is not like any human code. It is qualitatively different. But I'll agree that it's fascinating. What I also find fascinating is both that natural processes can produce mind-boggling complexity, and that it seems to be human nature to see that complexity and somehow take it for granted that natural processes could not have produced it. Not using feedback, not using billions of years, not nohow. This called the "argument from incredulity" and is generally summarized as "I personally can't imagine how this happened naturally, therefore it DID NOT happen naturally, therefore there must be some sort of magical entity very much like a person who did it."

 

And again we come back to the bizarre denialism in face of proof to the contrary which defines your own indoctrination. What is the point of debating if you cannot concede when you are wrong? How can you learn if you cannot concede mistakes?

It does not matter whether you said the reality was "much simpler" or if you said the reality was "more subtle". The subject of the sentence was "reality", and this is unaltered by your straw man reference to auxiliary adjectives. You cannot comment on "the reality" because you do not know what "the reality" is. You do not know how life is spawned in new places. Please go back and learn to admit when you are wrong.

 

But you have zero evidence that evolution is a natural process!!! That is the very point of this thread. Evolution could well be artificial for all you know. Even if you find it happening somewhere else, it could still be artificial because there may have been a primary source.

 

Who said anything about the genetic code being produced by a magical entity very much like a person? I'd submit that a magical entity cannot be much like a person at all. I've never been able to pull off anything but a few card tricks.

 

Forgive me for being skeptical here. But "Intelligent Design" has never been anything other than a beard for Biblical Creationism, invented as part of a "wedge strategy" to get around the First Amendment's separation of church and state. It is the most recent version of what I call "The Incredible Shrinking Creation Model." As Creationists lost again and again in front of the Supreme Court, they progressively tried to strip away more and more of the "offensive" religious overtones until you now have the vacuous, essentially meaningless canard of "Intelligent Design."

Nobody is really fooled by the "unknown party or race" subterfuge.

This is at its heart and argument from ignorance. "As far as I know" is the sort of qualification that immediately requires us to dismiss the premise. Why would anyone have confidence in an argument that commences with the admission that it is limited by the experience of the arguer? Like a "black swan," it only takes a single contradiction to render the premise false. How do we know that other codes are intelligent designed? Why... because we have witnessed the act of artifice. We have no corresponding witness to the creation of the DNA code. In this way DNA is itself the example that would disprove the premise.

But worse, the analogy is not an appropriate one at all since DNA is not really a code after all. At least not in the sense of the intelligently designed codes with which we have actual experience.

A code is a symbol or group of symbols that signifies an abstract idea or thought. Written language (for example) is visual code for spoken, and spoken language is aural code for ideas such as "I love you" or "please pass the salt". But the DNA molecule doesn't mean anything, any more than does the H2SO4 molecule, the CN− anion, or a boulder perched on top of a cliff. None of those things have any abstract meaning; they are physical objects that have a certain structure and energy potential and that behave in certain ways given particular environmental conditions. They effect other physical objects through ordinary and unintelligent processes of energetic causality. But that's physically no different from the boulder rolling downhill.

If we are to call DNA a code, then every other natural law would also have to be considered a code of some sort... even though (again) no meaning is attached. What is gravity the code for? Or conservation? Or causality? The "Intelligent Design" assertion that DNA is a code requiring intelligent artifice devolves on closer inspection into a bald assertion.

The only thing sure here is that the assertion that it is "surely" anything rather egregiously overstates the case.

An infinite regress is not an objection to "the notion" only because it really has nothing to do with it one way or the other. No infinite regress is necessary to explain the artifice of anything. If (arguendo) DNA was intelligently designed, who's to say that the designer had DNA themselves? If you were trying to pose a Cosmological Argument for the existence of god, perhaps it would have made sense to bring it up. But you're not, so it isn't.

Your statement of faith is noted.

 

Gong.

There are exactly zero scientists who consider DNA to be "a product of randomness." Natural law is the opposite of random. It is invariant.

 

Ignoring the gratuitous hyperbole, your primary error here is that you ignore the topology of inheritance. The "low probability" events of which you speak do not have to take place in any single given sequence. Once such an event has occurred, it is passed on through a branching number of descendent paths and further conserved through natural selection. These multiple paths multiply the number of subsequent opportunities for additional "low probability" events to occur in a selectively advantageous sequence. In this way, what would be a vanishingly low probability in a single linear descent becomes a statistical inevitability. The probability is further enhanced to at least another order of magnitude by the ability of these paths of descent to recombine via sexual reproduction.

The math here is not complex. When you have millions or billions of coin flips, every conceivable sequence has a probability approaching 100%.

 

It was a bogus claim. According to the Pew Research Center, it's about 50-50.

http://www.pewforum.org/2009/11/05/scientists-and-belief/

 

Until such time as you can sequence the DNA of a 100 million year old individual, you have no foundation for the bizarre contention that they've "resisted mutations" at all.

 

Aaahhhh. Well that didn't take long did it? The abandonment of actual argument in favor of an appeal to "common sense," combined with an accusation of brainwashing. This is of course a classic symptom of scientific crack-pottery.

Remember... for every crank and charlatan that was eventually validated by history as prescient or correct, several thousand others resolutely remained cracks and charlatans.

 

It's the Dunning-Kruger Effect.

 

And as the temperature of the debate rises, the pretense of non-dogmatic advocacy falls away. What was first an intuitive speculation has now evolved to "proof" through an intermediate stage of "evidence." None of the three stages have ever actually been justified by anything you've posted, and it is breathtaking how you resolutely refuse to even understand the points being made against your argument prior to their rejection.

It appears my initial skepticism regarding the OP's non-religious naure has been fully justified.

One day a Creationist will say something that is not ironic, and I will throw a party. With cake.

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And finally, a retreat to pure solipsism.