Wednesday, May 21, 2008

Does Crediting Death With Having Divine Creative Powers Eventually Lead To The Worship Of Death?

I liked this comment at Uncommon Descent:

There is a constant harping from people like Bob O’H on how to calculate CSI [complex specified information, i.e. the hallmark of design] but the real issue is how big the exponents are and not that they are big or not. If CSI is limited to those systems that refer to other functional systems such as computer programs and machine operations, alphabets and language and DNA and proteins then the numbers are so astronomical it is inane to challenge them.

So Bob, while there may not be a precise number to quantify CSI, the number is so large that it is meaningless to challenge it as not being large enough to be the result of chance.

Nit pick away but you know and we know the specific number is incredibly large for each case of CSI. Pick a protein and the instructions that refer to it. Do the calculations and show us how this could result from chance by a process of your choice. Lay out the argument for chance and then maybe we can have a discussion that is not nit picking over trivialities.

I find it ironic that an evolutionary biologist such as Bob or biologists such as specs or leo never defend their positions with facts but who seem to delight in finding slight inconsistencies in often minor arguments by proponents of ID.

Step up to the plate and swing away instead of hurling insults from the rafters that the opponent’s game isn’t going perfectly.


The comment inspires the following line of thought. If Darwinists really could justify the idea that cooperative protein complexes could have come about by unguided means (i.e. probabilistically), then they would simply show the probability calculations that support such a conjecture. One would think that doing so would be a scientific duty for someone putting forth the conjecture. However, what generally happens is this: if a Darwinism doubter begins to do the calculations (which invariably show the absurdity of an unguided genesis for the proteins under question), he is shouted down with the retort (popular with Dawkins and his disciples), "But natural selection is the very opposite of chance!"

So, it seems that natural selection must have some sort of power that makes the creation of biological designs possible (possible?!? hell, virtually certain!) in a way that chance alone could never accomplish. But this is patently absurd. What is the very essence of natural selection, after all? It is death. Organisms that would have gone on to reproduce are instead rendered dead by natural selection.

Let's see how this works. Here I have my huge ensemble of monkeys, typing away, all in the hopes of producing Hamlet. Eventually (bear with me), they will succeed. But I want to use a little natural selection to help things along. I'm getting a little impatient with chance. So I occasionally shoot some fraction of the monkeys. Now, is this really going to bring me closer to getting Hamlet?

Again, "natural selection" is another name for "death". Death is a destructive process. How can chance plus a destructive process improve on chance?

And yet, the Darwinists attribute creative power to this destructive process. In fact, rather than attributing the creative activity to life's intelligent designer, they instead attribute it to death. In short, they make a god out of death. It is ironic (or perhaps fitting) that our culture, which--using Darwin as an excuse--has essentially thrown God overboard, now finds itself in the position of worshiping death via human sacrifice, using the vehicles of abortion and (soon enough) euthanasia.

The Darwinists tell us that death was our creator. As we believe, so shall we worship.

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