Re: I admit I'm over my head on this one.


Annie.Orange@xxxxxxxxx wrote:
I am new to evolution and I have a 2 year old child. I like to debate
this on a different message board as a way to exercise what I know and
to learn more as I debate.

There is one woman who just likes to pile article after article..it's
very annoying. This article has me baffled though, I don't even know
where she got this from or what point she is trying to make.

Here it is, I would love opinions,

I think it's hard to be depressed on sunny days.

explainations,

I don't jog as much as I used to 'casue I weigh 15 pounds too much and
my toe hurts where I got punched a few years back.

jokes,

A priest, a preacher, and a rabbi walk into a bar. The bartender says
"What is this, some kind of a joke?"

or you can tell me to STFU if you'd like.


I'll take a raincheck...

Thanks

*****

Perry Marshall vs. 30+ Skeptics:


From August 2005 to December 2005 March 2006 July 2006, I have
successfully defended the Information Theory argument for Intelligent
Design on Infidels, the world's largest atheist discussion board.



Information Theory stands as perhaps the strongest argument against
scientific naturalism - because there is no naturalistic explanation
for the existence of information.

On August 30, 2005, a member of the infidels online forum (screen name
"wdog") posted the following on the Internet Infidels Discussion Board
at http://iidb.org/vbb/showthread.php?t=135497&page=1

I have been emailing back and forth with Perry Marshall, the author of
this site
http://www.cosmicfingerprints.com/ifyoucanreadthis.htm
and since it quickly expanded in scope I invited him to come here and
present his 'evidence' and proof. You might find the site amusing
anyway. Feel free to critique his statements as i am sure he may at
least read this since i will make him aware of this thread.
please be polite. Thanks

My first post:

Gentlemen:

The starting point of this discussion is my central thesis, which is:

1) DNA is not merely a molecule with a pattern;

Trivial and obvious.

it is a code,

No it's not. It's a molecule that does stuff, as all molecules do.

a language,

No it's not. Nobody speaks it.

and an information storage mechanism.

I'll let this one go. But I am no expert.

2) All codes are created by a conscious mind; there is no natural
process known to science that creates coded information.

Depends on definition of code:
"noun: a coding system used for transmitting messages requiring
brevity or secrecy
noun: (computer science) the symbolic arrangement of data or
instructions in a computer program or the set of such instructions
noun: a set of rules or principles or laws (especially written ones)
"

First definition seems to apply to human speech. There is no evidence
that it applies to any other species.The next two do not seem to apply
to DNA.

3) Therefore DNA was designed by a mind.

Does not follow, unless one accepts the unsupported premisses.


If you can provide an empirical example of a code or language that
occurs naturally, you've toppled my proof. All you need is one.

English.



Perry Marshall

The discussion continued for more than 4 months and 300 posts. At the
end, nearly all participants dropped out, having failed to topple my
proof or produce any new objections that had not already been
addressed. In the course of a very detailed and vigorous discussion my
argument did not suffer the slightest injury.

I suspect Mr. Perry is impervious to evidence or reason. That's not
quite the same as failed to topple his proof.

Synthetic statements (assertions about the universe), BTW, are never
proven; they are supported by evidence. They are *always contingent on
the evidence. They are to some degree tentative.


There were six major counter-arguments to information as proof of
intelligent design. You can follow these links for a thorough summary
of the discussion threads:

1. The objection that DNA is not a code (it is, by universal
definition)

I guess anyone who thinks DNA is code could think that his unique use
of language is a universal definition.


2. The objection that information is not real (it is, because it
produces real effects)

Salt kills slugs. Does that make NaCl information?


3. The objection that information has no objective meaning (it
does, because a message produces results that are just as objective and
specific as the message itself)

Um... what? Does he mean medium & message, or what?


4. The objection that random processes can create information (they
can't)

Evidence?


5. The objection that codes do occur naturally (they don't)

DNA does. Sounds like a circular argument at work here.


6. The objection that the nature of the Designer cannot be
determined (in very broad terms, it can)

I agree that the nature of the designer can wait for another day,
anyway, if the evidence for design is sufficiently strong. But lack of
a designer's methods and motives only requires stronger evidence to
justify taking it seriously.

<snip brag>

Let's review where we've been in this thread. I have said:

(1) The sequence of base pairs in DNA is a code.

Much effort has been made to discredit this statement, unsuccessfully.
This statement is fully and explicitly supported in virtually all of
the scientific literature since the 1960's.

(2) All codes that we know the origin of come from a mind.

Much effort has been expended to discredit this statement as well.
Assertions have been attempted that gravity, snowflakes, magma flows
and the like are codes. But none accurately conforms to Shannon's
communication model. Most of the examples cited do not contain an
encoding system, and none contain a decoding system.

1. For some definitions of "Code", DNA is a code.
2. For all of these codes whose origin we know, they were created by
humans.
3. Therefore, DNA was invented by humans.


(3) Therefore DNA came from a mind.

No, it came from humans. Reread the premisses.


Thus we have, right here on the Infidels discussion forum, after more
than 300 posts, robust evidence that life was intelligently designed.

No, we have robust repeated assertions.


It is not possible for me to persuade people to believe in God if they
do not want to; that is not my job. But one can hope that some will
follow the evidence, wherever it leads.

But htis is only a path down Humpty-Dumpty's private morass of
definitions.


Perry Marshall

At this point the moderator, RBH, said:

"I've pretty much abandoned this thread as hopeless, but recently ran
onto the Evolving Code Wiki run by Stephen Freeland's bioinformatics
lab. A good resource for those who wish to 'follow the evidence'."

Mr. Freeland's site doesn't answer the questions I raise either, but
skeptics are free to pursue that line of inquiry if they wish. Let's
not forget that the entire enterprise of scientific inquiry during the
last 500 years has been the ongoing discovery of underlying order, not
the assumption of accident. For that reason I think it's more
productive to hypothesize design in DNA and devote our energies to
discovering all its wonders.

Mathematicians speak of the order that arises from a few simple rules.
Scientists will not be surprised to find out they have been studying
order. Rather pointless to study anarchy and disorder, eh wot?


Open Challenge. As of this writing (July 3, 2006) the discussion thread
is still open on IIDB and discussion resumed in late February. I
welcome anyone who understands information theory, and has a rigorous
argument, to come forward and present it. No doubt people will
editorialize about this elsewhere, attempting to dismiss it as 'arguing
by failed analogy' or whatever. But to whoever says I'm wrong, I say:
log on to the Infidels forum, step into the ring with me and prove I'm
wrong. Note: Before you do this, do your homework. (I've done mine.)
Carefully read every single post and make absolutely sure you're not
just repeating what somebody else has already said.

Argumentum ad tedium.


Personal Comments After Debating Information Theory for Nearly 1 Year
and Proving Intelligent Design to 30+ Atheists:

Having successfully run through the gauntlet with this argument,
here are some brief observations.

One major clue that he is a goofball is that he took this to an atheist
forum rather than a science newsgroup, or at least talk.origins :P

Did he eer take it to a mathmatical newsgroup, f'rinstance?


First of all, the vast majority of "evolution vs. creation"
arguments are fundamentally incapable of reaching a conclusion because
99% of the evidence is subjective and anecdotal. If you argue about
fossils, for example, the evidence is extremely fragmentary and people
see the evidence through their presuppositions.

ToE is the only model that fits all the data. I'd be surprised to hear
that there is another "interpretation" out htere which fits and is
testable. You'd think someone would have voiced it by now.

An endless debate that
never reaches a conclusion is a great way to sell books, because
skeptics buy evolution books and creationists buy creationist books and
nobody really listens to each other anyway.

He clearly thinks this is a religious issue - which is why he took it
to an atheist forum. If he thought it might actually be science, he
would have taken it to scientists. Maybe he did already, and got
trounced.


But Information Theory is different. The arguments I make here,
and the arguments Hubert Yockey makes in his book Information Theory,
Evolution and the Origin of Life are not subjective at all. (Yockey is
not a creationist or even an advocate of Intelligent Design, by the
way, and nowhere do I reference anything other than widely accepted,
non-controversial scientific literature.)

The information theory argument is based on rigorous logical and
mathematical definitions, and long-standing conventions in Electrical
Engineering. The pattern in DNA is not like a code, it is a code, by
definition. So information theory applied to DNA is not an analogy and
actually has a possibility of making real progress in this debate.

As you will see here, the only resource the skeptic can use to
fight this is confusion and obfuscation. Observe the skeptical attempt
to take my simple argument and make it impossibly complicated and
confuse people, including the skeptics themselves.

Right.
1. DNA is code.
2. Humans made some code.
3. Therefore, Jesus saves.

Is that it? Perhaps three is true, but it doesn't follow.What else can
he conclude from the first two premissess?


Information Theory really isn't all that complicated. But... it
is sufficiently abstract that you can throw up smoke screens, and the
smoke screens will work for quite awhile. Notice how tirelessly these
guys argued that DNA doesn't actually contain a code. (Also notice
that at the very same time they also try to argue that gravity is a
code!) And although they don't explicitly admit it, their argument does
ultimately fail. The pattern in DNA is a code.

I wonder if this fella actuallly tried to talk to some geneticists.


My argument is inductive. It does not explicitly identify God as
designer, it just leaves God as the only available possibility.

God, of course, being defined as "the designer".

So a
person is still free to reject the God conclusion and suppose that
there must be some other explanation.

Natural law?
Random mutation, acted upon by natural selection, resulting in varying
degrees of reproductive success, leading ot spread of some alleles and
supression of others froma population's genepool.

Who here is trying to obfuscate simple concepts?


But what is interesting is that almost nobody on this forum is
willing to even acknowledge they don't have an alternative explanation.
This strikes me as self-deception. Hey, if you don't know something,
why not just admit it? How else can rational inquiry move forward?

I'd wager several alternates were offered, over and over.


As you see here, not many infidels were willing to make that
admission. Fact is, "skeptics" take a whole bunch of things on faith,
too - faith that science will fill the ever widening gaps of the
origin of life question for example. Skepticism fails to satisfy its
own criteria - because every worldview invokes a miracle, somewhere
along the line.

So it's a church doctrine issue, and not scientific?


Another thing you'll quickly see on the infidels forum is extreme
hostility. The gentleman who invited me to the forum asked his
colleagues to be polite, but as you see many were not. (At some
points, he wasn't all that polite either.) At least one of the
participants had his posts heavily edited by the moderator and was
eventually kicked off. These guys hate intelligent design and
everything it stands for. The contempt for religious ideas and
religious people, especially Christians, is palpable.

Gasp! On an atheist site?

Have you tried Wahabi newsgroups? Perhaps they would be friendlier.


But again, the infidels failed to put so much as a dent or scratch
in my argument.

He is conflating his mind with your argument. Heh. I see I started
talking to this guy directly. He's not here, is he?

They may have enjoyed this discussion even less than I
did. Because the greatest failure of materialism is that it simply
cannot explain the existence of information!

So this expert in information does not, or cannot, differentiate
between philosophical materialism and methodological materialism.

Decades ago this would
have seemed like an odd and abstract argument, but living in the
digital information age as we do now, with computers and credit cards
and cel phones, even a child can easily grasp it.

Bill Gates is God?


It is not my intent to embarrass, humiliate or "show up" anyone
here. Nobody likes to be publicly made a fool.

Some will even go so far as to deny when it happens.

Nonetheless truth does
matter. And if naturalism is false, then the faster we put a fork in
it, the faster we can get to the truth. After all, if there is a
pre-designed order in living things, then the most unproductive
assumption science could possibly make would be that it is random,
accidential or purposeless.

So he suggests instead that science drop methodolgical materialism, and
go with sophomoric syllogisms?


Ultimately the outcome of this discussion reinforces what the
great mathematician Norbert Weiner said almost 50 years ago:

"Information is Information, neither matter nor energy. No materialism
that fails to take account of this can survive the present day."
-Norbert Weiner, MIT Mathematician and Father of Cybernetics

On this discussion board I rigorously demonstrated that an
Intelligent Designer is the only avaialable explanation for the genetic
code in DNA. I did so in the same manner that we assert the truth of
other scientific theorems, like the laws of thermodynamics. But I
couldn't get a congregation of hard-core atheists to accept it - which
just goes to show that Dale Carnegie was right: "A man convinced
against his will is of the same opinion still."

No, you kind of skimmed over the part where
"all information whose origin we know came form humans, therfeore God".


Here, atheists show themselves to be just as devout in their
beliefs, and just as steadfast in the face of reason, as the adherents
of any world religion.

-Perry Marshall

Marshall != reason

Annie, this guy is nothing to fear, unless you afraid of being bored to
death. Tell the person you're arguing with that she should be able to
put these ideas into her own words, or she doesn't have a case. She
should say something like:
You are wrong, because of X.
I learned this at this link:
http://blahblah.blah
if you want more information.

Kermit

.

Relevant Pages

  • Re: The Cosmological Argument
    ... Evidence is made irrelevant. ... You have to explain why DNA is evidence of design. ... unspecified but non-reproductive feature of living organisms are ...
    (talk.origins)
  • Re: The Cosmological Argument
    ... Evidence is made irrelevant. ... You have to explain why DNA is evidence of design. ... you pointed out somewhere is evolution, not abiogenesis. ...
    (talk.origins)
  • Re: The Cosmological Argument
    ... I offered DNA as a possible instance of design ... What you really did was offer DNA as *evidence* that life ...
    (talk.origins)
  • Re: The Cosmological Argument
    ... I offered DNA as a possible instance of design both because of its ... posters have pointed out to you, there's nothing that DNA does that RNA ... evidence that contradicts the explanation, ... just another molecule and nature makes molecules all the time. ...
    (talk.origins)
  • Re: What is Intelligent Design?
    ... You have been told AT LEAST a dozen times that that is not the main ... The main objection to the possibility of design is that it ... arranging your evidence and arguments accordingly. ...
    (talk.origins)