Exactly.

As I said: [The] point here is that ID theory is more consistent with our uniform experience than Chemical Evolution.  And uniform experience is how we draw conclusions about events in the distant past.

good to see ya still working chris. 

-killobob

Or, you know, you could use uniformitarianism in the scientific sense. Things evolved, so it's logical to assume the first life form was the product of an evolutionary event.

But new information is not generated.  That's the crux of the issue.  You can't just paint with the broad stroke of "things evolve, so chemical evolution happened!"  You're just absorbing the actual issue into an over-inflated evolutionary balloon.

darkwolfofvoid,

For being such a definition nazi, you don't put much effort into understanding the terminology of your opponents.  You kicked IC in the teeth in a previous discussion, but you obviously didn't know what you were kicking at.  And here again, you are criticizing something that you are ignorant of.  As GOODGREY said, information is specified complexity.  Nature produces complexity, but it does not produce specification.  Natural events can be recorded as information, but whatever you write or record to a floppy is not information if it's not specified by something else (that is, it isn't information if it is not recognizable in some way).

Chris, neat video!   What video is it excerpted from?

DarkWolfVoid, your question about bacteria is actually quite perceptive.  Let's go back to a software/computer analogy for a moment.   If one computer running a certain piece of software sends a "packet of information" to another computer running software, it would obviously not be correct to say that the computer is "intelligent" in itself; rather, there is undoubtedly a "source of intelligence" that created the computer/software/messaging system at some initial point, after which it could subsequently proceed using the designed characteristics and abilities.  

Same for the bacteria.... whether or not it posesses "intelligence" in itself is not the question... rather, from whence came the specified complexity necessary to set up the system for successful messaging?

BTW, Chris, one common rebuttal to these arguments by informed evolutionists is that specified complexity can indeed be formed by natural/chance processes, through the mechanisms of random mutation and natural selection, or through chaos theory, or through phenotypic/structuralist evolution, or whatever their favorite method is.   And they'll have "examples" - antibiotic resistance, nylon digestion, lactase "evolution", genotypic similarities between organisms, etc etc.   So we really have to understand the details... it's not enough just to hit this discussion at a "high level", imho. 

Astrocreep
[God not being part of our uniform experience must lead to his nonexistence according to your logic.]
If God is not part of our experience, then yes. But that simply can't be claimed, because by the very definition He is part of our experience whether we see it or not. He's Spirit, not matter.

[I guess you have your cop-out for the whole time deal. God exists out of time right?]
God may seem like a copout, but that's because He's God... Just because His existance provides answers for any question doesn't make Him any less real, by any logic.

    Specification, as used in the video, ONLY works with respect to the agent that receives the message.  To a bee or some other organism that doesn't know human faces the faces on mount rushmore come AS RANDOM as that of the shape of a tree.  For an ant a person's writing on a seashore work as complete random and unspecified.  For people the sounds that birds make in the summer in the morning work as random.  We simply don't understand the communication signals just from hearing them what sort of information birds communicate to each other.  Consequently, that information comes as unspecified to us.
     Small probability will NOT lead to information.  The probability that a computer executes its program comes as very, very high.  Your posting of that video and my posting of this message both indicate that we both regard that the probability of the information within our messages actually getting transmitted to each other is high.  We have high probability here and we still have information.
     Aside:... now I get why you guys talk about SETI so much.  If SETI actually found extraterrestrial intelligence it would find some sort of non-human intelligence.  This would mean that some sort of human-centered story couldn't work as realisitic.  That sort of finding by SETI would totally discredit the human-centered notions of Christianity, since it would mean such a "God" would have to have created OTHER creatures in "His image."
     And finally we simply do NOT understand the cause and effect structure of the world.  NO ONE does.  We don't even have a complete theory of cause and effect.  We don't literally observe causes in the world, we ONLY observe constant conjunction of events AT BEST.  We don't know that the future will be like the past.  We ONLY know that SOME events in the present APPEAR like they've worked as the same way as in the past (this is rather Humean, but he's basically correct here).  People guess at causes, and test their hypotheses.  But, even a test doesn't conclusively give us knowledge of something, for the testing method could have not worked out as realistic.

manonfire_reasons,
[As I said: [The] point here is that ID theory is more consistent with our uniform experience than Chemical Evolution.]
     Speak for yourself.  It might work as consistent with your own experience(s) (or perception thereof).  It simply does NOT work as consistent with mine.  We can have different exepriences, so no contradiction exists here.

[Cool... it's good to see the same arguments for intelligent origins of life being presented by scientists.]
     None of those people work as a scientist at a university anymore.

[Or, you know, you could use uniformitarianism in the scientific sense. Things evolved, so it's logical to assume the first life form was the product of an evolutionary event.]
     I've tried to do something like this by talking about "degrees of life" in previous discussions.  That sort of idea simply hasn't gotten discussed enough yet.

[But new information is not generated.  That's the crux of the issue.  You can't just paint with the broad stroke of "things evolve, so chemical evolution happened!"  You're just absorbing the actual issue into an over-inflated evolutionary balloon.]
    Yes, new information DOES get generated.  It just gets generated by DEGREES.  It happens in non-integers.  It doesn't suddenly jump from 6 units to 7 units of information.  It goes from 6 to 6.00000001 to 6.00002 units, and so on.  Since you guys have applied the "principle of uniformitarianism" so broadly she can similarly apply it so broadly.  She doesn't avoid the actual issues you guys bring up.  She provides a different sort of solution to the issues you guys bring up.

[If it's the FIRST life form, how could it have evolved from anything - there is nothing it could have evolved from. From what we know so far, life can only evolve from life.]
    Yes, because you talked about life only coming from life.  If you talk about totally living structures coming from highly living structures coming from medium high living structures... all the way down to very little or not living structures, then you stop going around in circles.  It's simply to look at this somewhat numerically in terms of degree of life.  If we talk about something with degree of life (dol) of 1 coming from something with dol of .9999 from something with dol of .998 with dol of .98 ... (meaning lots of steps) from something with dol of .1 from something with dol of .09 and so on, then we stop going around in circles.

[If God is not part of our experience, then yes. But that simply can't be claimed, because by the very definition He is part of our experience whether we see it or not. He's Spirit, not matter.]
     No.  Look, you don't have an experience of Allah, even though supposedly Allah always works as part of your experience also by the same definition process.  The same goes for Jehovah.
    Moreover, experience doesn't mean quite as how you've used it.  Experience always work as something conscious for the subject experiencing.  One simply doesn't experience a football game without first having some sort of awareness of such.  We only have experience once we have some sort of consicousness with respect to that which gets experienced.  I simply don't have any experience of your "God" as real... and if you want to try to persuade me to "experience" such, you would be advised to give up the gravest sin of trying to convert other people to what you believe.

Spoonwood,

What would be an example of something with "degree of life 0.09"?   Or of anything other than "degree of life zero" or "degree of life one" ?

prettyinpink:

[Or, you know, you could use uniformitarianism in the scientific sense. Things evolved, so it's logical to assume the first life form was the product of an evolutionary event.]

But "evolution" by defintion, always refers to the evolving  of a pre-existing simple life-form into a more complex one. Prebiotic, non-living chemicals cannot evolve. As the phrase implies, natural selection can only "select" from the genes of pre-existing living organisms. As the evolutionary biologist Theodosius Dobzhansky has explained, "Prebiological natural selection is a contradiction in terms."  Natural selection requires a preexisting mechanism of self-replication. Yet self-replication in all cells depends upon functional proteins and nucleic acids. But the origin of these molecules is precisely what needs to be explained! So by appealing to evolution, you are presupposing the very thing that you are trying to explain the origins of. As Cormack said, we are dealing with the first life form here. There are no pre-existing life-forms for it to evolve from. Evolution simply doesn't provide any sort of answers when dealing with the origin of life.

darkwolf:

[I see a bird's nest. I don't attribute that to necessarily being formed by the wind and rain over the years. I attribute it to an organism that built it. ]

Exactly! You have just made an inference to design! When you see a bird nest, you recognize a pattern that is not naturally occuring, and can infer that the pattern was designed.

[But do I say the bird is intelligent?]

Of course a bird is intelligent. The nest you alluded to is proof of this. Not to mention that birds, like humans, also have the ability to communicate with each other via their own language system. Go here.

tim223:

[Chris, neat video!   What video is it excerpted from?]

Yeah, I thought so too. Its actually excerpted from a video called Unlocking the Mystery of Life that was produced by a company called Illustra Media. You can find the entire video which is a little over an hour long on YouTube. Just do a key word search.

[BTW, Chris, one common rebuttal to these arguments by informed evolutionists is that specified complexity can indeed be formed by natural/chance processes, through the mechanisms of random mutation and natural selection]

Yes, you may have noticed that prettyinpink used this exact rebuttal in her comment which I addressed above. Simply stated, prebiotic evolution is a contradiction in terms because only living organisms can evolve. And natural selection cannot explain the origin of the first life form because prior to the first life form there was nothing for natural selection to "select" from. So those who appeal to natural selection and mutations to explain the first life form are pre-supposing the existnce of the very thing that needs to be explained. Its completely circular.

TheAstrocreep:

[I would have to agree with you somewhat since a certain mixture of chemicals will not "evolve" into a self replicating molecule.]

Yes! Thats what I'm trying to get prettyinpink and darkwolf to understand here. Thank you for being perceptive.

[Creationists like GoodgreyPoet believe that evolution happened but after the creation of the first single celled organisms, is this right GGP?]

Yes, exactly. As I said before, I'm not disputing that simple living organisms evolve into more complex ones. Evolution does  a good job of explaining that. But before things can evolve they must first exist. And evolution is no help in this area. What must be explained is where the first living, self-replicating molecule came from, and all the evidence we have suggests that it was designed.

[This argument is so weak. I could say the same thing about your God. Since when has God been part of our uniform experience?]

I don't see where manonfire said anything about God. What he said was that our everyday, uniform experience of the way the world operates is the key to understanding how it operated in the distant past. He was merely summarizing the principle of uniformity. Our uniform experience in the present demonstrates that every time we encounter information, it can be traced back to an intelligence source of some kind.

[I think that a self replicating molecule originating on its own is possible. I'd just give it time until they come up with a neat theory for the origins of life.]

This is a classic example of an argument to the future, arguing that evidence will someday be discovered which will (then) support your point.

spoonwood:

[Specification, as used in the video, ONLY works with respect to the agent that receives the message.  To a bee or some other organism that doesn't know human faces the faces on mount rushmore come AS RANDOM as that of the shape of a tree.  For an ant a person's writing on a seashore work as complete random and unspecified.]

Yes, but the point is that we can recognize specified complexity even if it was designed by a non-human intelligence. Darkwolf provided a good example above: a birds nest. Other examples would be a spider's web or a beaver dam. When we see a spider web or an bird nest, we immediately recognize that these things do not occur naturally. Rather, we recognize a pattern which signifies that that bird nest and the spider web were both designed by an intelligent creature of some kind. Now, when a bee sees a human made structure such as a house, does the bee also recognize that the house is not naturally occuring, but rather, a product of human design? I suspect they would. Unfortunately though, we haven't learned how to communicate with bees yet so we can't be certain of this.

[We simply don't understand the communication signals just from hearing them what sort of information birds communicate to each other.  Consequently, that information comes as unspecified to us.]

Actually we have deciphered much of the language that birds use to communicate to each other. Go here. For instance, the clicking of the beak is a bird's way of communicating that it is threatened or protecting something. And birds also use chirping and songs as a way to communicate to other birds a mating call. So yes, this informatin IS highly specified.

[now I get why you guys talk about SETI so much.  If SETI actually found extraterrestrial intelligence it would find some sort of non-human intelligence. ]

Yes, the SETI program proves that we can recognize specified complexity and information from non-human sources of intelligence. This is what I was trying to explain to prettyinpink when she made the claim that we can only recognize instances of human design. Clearly that is not the case, since we can recognize instances of animal design (the bird nest, spider web, beaver dam, etc.). That is what I menat when I said that information speaks a "universal language". If we only had the ability to recognize human design, then why does the US government spend millions of dollars a year funding a program like SETI which is constantly searching for non-human design in the form of radio signals?

[It's simply to look at this somewhat numerically in terms of degree of life.  If we talk about something with degree of life (dol) of 1 coming from something with dol of .9999 ]

Again, there is no such thing as "degrees of life" within the scientific community. Either something is alive or it is inanimate. If I'm wrong then show me one peer-reviewed article that describes these so called "degrees of life". I suspect this is just some concept you made up in order to get around the problem of explaing the origin of the first living organism.  In order to be considered “alive,” an organism must be autonomous, possess the ability to metabolize and assimilate food, to respirate, to grow, to reproduce and to respond to stimuli (a trait known as irritability).