Dawkins - FISH!!!

[NotReady]

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Suppose I rolled a 360-sided die and then chose the resulting number as the angle at which to swing the pendulum. Would you still consider this nonrandom?


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The point is that if your choices are well-defined and finite your analogy doesn't serve to illustrate absolute chaos.

[NotReady]

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why would he then NOT use the same form for the SAME function in other cases?


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He is the Creator and tends to be creative.

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I notice that you skipped over this second point, which is really much more powerful than the first. Your explanation for "same form, different function" clashes with the existence of "same function, different forms."


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I'm not skipping anything. I may not have understood your point but what I was getting at is that God uses the same materials for the different parts of His creation. Like an artist would use the same paint and even the same colors but produce radically different paintings. Chaos can't paint anything. At least not anything intelligible.

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Two absurd arguments I've heard today:
1) One time, this guy said that God was simple, so Dawkins must be wrong.
2) One time, this anonymous scientist said that people should stop using vestigial organs as evidence. Therefore, I will not explain them in any way in the context of design


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The only thing absurd here is your mischaracterization of what Plantinga and I said.

[Magic_Man]

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I notice that you skipped over this second point, which is really much more powerful than the first. Your explanation for "same form, different function" clashes with the existence of "same function, different forms."


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I'm not skipping anything. I may not have understood your point but what I was getting at is that God uses the same materials for the different parts of His creation. Like an artist would use the same paint and even the same colors but produce radically different paintings. Chaos can't paint anything. At least not anything intelligible.


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Actually, randomness creates beautiful things in nature all the time. Randomness can create this:


Also, I made two points about evidence of randomness:
1) Same form, different functions
This you covered, by saying that it makes sense for God to reuse parts.

2) Same function, different forms.
This you skipped, because if God is reusing parts in (1), it makes no sense that he doesn't reuse parts in (2), where it is even more obvious that a designer should do so. If I am designing a wing, it's not at all obvious that I should use the same structure as a hand. But if I'm designing two wings, it's clear that they should be similar in structure. Unfortunately, in nature, they sometimes are, and sometimes aren't, which is evidence of randomness.

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Two absurd arguments I've heard today:
1) One time, this guy said that God was simple, so Dawkins must be wrong.
2) One time, this anonymous scientist said that people should stop using vestigial organs as evidence. Therefore, I will not explain them in any way in the context of design


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The only thing absurd here is your mischaracterization of what Plantinga and I said.

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Here is what you said:
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I'm really not interested in pursuing it again. What I most remember is I found an evolutionary scientist who wished other evolutionists would stop using vestigial organs as evidence of evolution.

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If that's not the same as (2) above, then we have a serious failure of communication here.

[NotReady]

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Actually, randomness creates beautiful things in nature all the time. Randomness can create this:


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Before I continue tell me what that is.

[Magic_Man]

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Actually, randomness creates beautiful things in nature all the time. Randomness can create this:


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Before I continue tell me what that is.

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It's "Sierpinski's Gasket", a pretty fractal (one of several invented by Sierpinski), which can be produced from random processes. According to wiki, some researchers even managed to make a self-assembling version from DNA.

[Magic_Man]

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How is this a strawman, again?


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Well, for example, the irreducible complexity idea was from a scientist. So how does that square with your caricature and Dawkins' statemement?

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I square it by saying that that scientist (I assume we're talking about Michael Behe), is deluded. He is allowing himself to be satisfied with not understanding the universe, as Dawkins feared. Credible scientists mock and scorn him, just as credible Christians mock and scorn Hitler and don't consider him to be representative of the Christian belief system. (NOTE: I don't want to start a discussion about Hitler, just thought this was appropriate given the other thread that's running right now.)

[NotReady]

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It's "Sierpinski's Gasket", a pretty fractal (one of several invented by Sierpinski), which can be produced from random processes. According to wiki, some researchers even managed to make a self-assembling version from DNA.


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You're making the same mistake Dawkins' makes with his weasel program. There is no pure randomness. There is a designer behind the result.

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2) Same function, different forms.
This you skipped, because if God is reusing parts in (1), it makes no sense that he doesn't reuse parts in (2), where it is even more obvious that a designer should do so.


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I would like an example of what you mean by this but I don't see why it's obvious God has to proceed according to your plan. If it was designed but the design itself isn't precisely the way you would do it that doesn't make it less obviously designed.

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Here is what you said:

Quote:

I'm really not interested in pursuing it again. What I most remember is I found an evolutionary scientist who wished other evolutionists would stop using vestigial organs as evidence of evolution.

If that's not the same as (2) above, then we have a serious failure of communication here.


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It's not the same because I was referring to a fairly extensive thread where the VO concept was debated and the scientist isn't anonymous because she is named and linked in that thread.

[NotReady]

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I square it by saying that that scientist (I assume we're talking about Michael Behe), is deluded. He is allowing himself to be satisfied with not understanding the universe, as Dawkins feared.


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The fact that you disagree with his theory doesn't mean that he is satisfied with not understanding the universe. He's a scientist whether you admit it or not and I'm not here defending his position - I'm just stating that Behe doesn't prove the Dawkins' quote, but just the opposite. I could just as easily say Dawkins is satisfied with not understandng the universe because he has such a truncated understanding of history and philosophy.

I posted recently somewhere, maybe in this thread, about the great debt people like Dawkins owe to Christianity for preserving knowledge, founding universities and supporting science. The quote from Dawkins is a typical inane polemic spewing from a mind lacking knowledge of his own antecedents and the debt he owes to the instituions he attacks - the ingrate.

[Alex-db]

Wouldn't that debt be to the institutional systems, and not to the belief systems linked with them?

Sure, funding, librarys and universities with religious origins helped advance society, but ironically only towards the realisation that the fictional parts were unneccesary.

While organised religion may have helped establish the infrastructure, happening to believe in a God who actively punished scientific enquiry and open-mindedness can only have retarded the rate of progress.

[NotReady]

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While organised religion may have helped establish the infrastructure, happening to believe in a God who actively punished scientific enquiry and open-mindedness can only have retarded the rate of progress.


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What?