Darwin's Black Box - Michael J. Behe and Intelligent Design

OMG! I hope you throw in a couple questions to the C's about this in the next session for verification, although we probably don't need it. So yeah, I'm completely on board; biological life is engineered period. The C's gave it to us straight when they said that the only reason anything exist at all levels is for lessons. The only thing 'evolving' is the progression of awareness through lessons learned and everything else conforms to that awareness! So this is all the ultimate mind game, the ultimate maze to follow Ariadne's thread out of. Although we still don't know exactly what that's going to look like but we may be getting an idea! OSIT
 
Our inheritance from this period includes world-images, scientific traditions, and legal concepts flavored with the shoddy ingredients of a schizoidal apprehension of reality.

It gives a new meaning to that feeling of being trapped in a schizoidal nightmare! After being raised in a hard core materialist environment and household, this thread is like an answer to my prayers.

I finished Berlinski and now I'm reading Stove. His writing really does a great job in waking one up from that schizoidal reality! His arguments are so simple and logical, yet instead of feeling stupid, I feel relieved. Like that feeling that "you shall know the truth and the truth shall set you free". We can look back to hundreds of years of heavy programming with one heck of a fresh new perspective!
 
Indeed! At one point Behe suggests that Darwinism can still explain microevolution even if it's ridiculous for macroevolution. I'm not done with his book yet, but I just don't see how even that could be true. His own compelling arguments are saying that nothing happens by chance. Even the slight changes would have to be engineered, I think. A different color, a different beak, etc. requires A LOT of changes due to irreducible complexity. So, just because one is more "suitable to a specific environment" or is better equipped to hide from its prey, that's not a sign of evolution. It could simply have been put there with a specific intent.

Just to add to that - Perry Marshall makes a great point (don't remember where he got it from) about "natural selection being blind". I reformulated it in my own words (see below). Point is: even if random mutation could somehow lead to something "beneficial", there's no way natural selection can "see" it and preserve it!

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One of the favorite sentences Darwinians use is “this produced an advantage to the survival of the species and was therefore selected”. But think about it: how exactly does a small mutation, leading to a small improvement, help an organism survive? The problem here is that small improvements, or even large improvements to specific systems, don’t necessarily translate to survival or more offspring in any straight-forward way.

Imagine for example that by some evolutionary process, you improve your eyesight by 5%. What are the odds that this will help you survive? It would require a very special situation where, let’s say, a tiger is about to eat you but thanks to the small improvement, you see it a second earlier than you would have without the improvement, and the situation was precisely such that this difference of 5% in eyesight saved you. That’s an extremely unlikely scenario. What’s more, the small change in eyesight does nothing to protect you from freezing to death, breaking your leg and dying, or the uncountable other reasons you might not survive. So how, exactly, can natural selection “select” this mutation?

Or think of a giraffe: perhaps by some random mutation, the neck of one animal gets a tiny bit longer. Does this help it better reach its food? Maybe in some very rare situations. But if it’s a weak fellow to boot, this won’t help. And again, this won’t help a bit against the myriad of other threats. How, then, should it “pass on its genes” better than other giraffes?

All we ever get from Darwinians is wild speculation, often using misleading language such as “giraffes needed to reach higher trees, therefore they evolved their long necks”, as if the collective mind of the giraffe-species somehow decided it would be a good idea to “evolve” a long neck. And perhaps that’s really how it happens, who knows? But of course, this isn’t at all what Darwinism proclaims.

There might be some cases where such scenarios could work, but you get the point: it’s not that a random mutation that produces something slightly beneficial in some way is somehow magically preserved or “selected”. A whole lot more needs to happen, and it is incredibly unlikely. The signal of the tiny piece of new information is drowned out in a sea of noise: namely the vast majority of scenarios where this specific, tiny advantage doesn’t help one bit.
 
A comment about Gandalf's quote from the book:

As science developed in a Western society that was predominantly Christian, its empirical reasoning filled gaps in our understanding of natural phenomena and progressively removed the need for supernatural explanations. Thus the Earth was no longer something God had created as the centre of the universe and the Sun was no longer something God had created to illuminate the Earth between periods of darkness.

The realm of the gaps—and hence the realm of the transcendent creator God—continued to diminish as science’s explanatory power increased, and God was continually pushed back towards being the ultimate, rather than the direct, cause of natural phenomena.
This is the "God of the gaps" objection. It basically says that it's pointless to invoke God to explain something we don't understand, because science will catch up eventually, so the "gaps" get smaller and smaller. And it's not a bad argument, because when it comes to the material world, this seems to have happened historically. Like: the planets move, God does it! Oh no, it's gravity... and so on.

However, this argument is nonsense IMO when it comes to Darwinism. It's the reverse actually, a "Darwin of the gaps": the more science progresses, the less Darwinism can explain! Or rather, the more Darwinism crumbles to dust.

But there's a deeper issue here. I think when you talk about life, the God of the gaps argument is self-contradictory:

The Darwinian might say (against all evidence!) that "oh, there are some gaps in my theory, but these will be filled by science, as they always do. No need for a designer". But the thing is, the genetic code is information. And information cannot be produced by "dead matter", only by intelligence. So if the Darwinian (who is of course also a materialist) assumes a dead universe with dead matter floating around according to natural laws, he by definition cannot explain the generation of information. The gaps cannot be filled in the materialist context; and it's not because we don't know enough yet or don't have enough empirical data, it's because it's impossible in principle.

Of course, our Darwinian could expand the definition of materialism - he could for example invoke some unknown natural force that produces information, or some new natural law that transmits information etc., but that's just another way of invoking an intelligence of some sort. But if you just take the natural laws governing the material universe, in the sense it's understood by materialists, then these cannot produce information! Patterns, yes, but not information. For that, the "signal" would have to be modulated by a mind.
 

Well, isn't that interesting.

I think we need to campaign against Darwinism - the Satanic worship of the Material universe - every opportunity we get.
 
As a quick side comment...I noticed that there's a persistent troll (Anonymous) answering recent review's at least on DBB and Heretic on Amazon. At least Gaby and I seem to have got our share from this guy. Not at all intelligent, but persistent...probably a schizoid. :cool2:
 
As I'm reading Stove at the moment, and about the ridiculous 'selfish theory', I came to think of something. I've always been wondering why the MSM has little scruples publishing news (which undoubtedly are true) about these catholic priests abusing children, when most other cases are suppressed and never heard of. This might be quite a stretch, but could it be, that since the 'Darwinist-materialistic-evil-STS' gang needs and wants everyone to believe in this selfish theory, that everyone is at their core selfish, it is to their advantage to publicize these news about how men devoted to religion are...aha!...selfish and self serving, after all. Just a thought...
 
As a quick side comment...I noticed that there's a persistent troll (Anonymous) answering recent review's at least on DBB and Heretic on Amazon. At least Gaby and I seem to have got our share from this guy. Not at all intelligent, but persistent...probably a schizoid.

Someone is definitely watching. That troll replied like within a day after I posted my review.
 
Imagine for example that by some evolutionary process, you improve your eyesight by 5%. What are the odds that this will help you survive? It would require a very special situation where, let’s say, a tiger is about to eat you but thanks to the small improvement, you see it a second earlier than you would have without the improvement, and the situation was precisely such that this difference of 5% in eyesight saved you. That’s an extremely unlikely scenario. What’s more, the small change in eyesight does nothing to protect you from freezing to death, breaking your leg and dying, or the uncountable other reasons you might not survive. So how, exactly, can natural selection “select” this mutation?

The problem is that no one really talks about these slight or progressive improvement and if they really are improvements at all in the moment. Sure in the process of 'selection' only VERY minor additions are made that don't really improve anything but are one step on the way to improvement. But for that to happen, a conception of the final, fully fledged improvement would have to be conceptualized IN ADVANCE! In that case, what is "it" that makes that decision with foresight?
 
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Just to add to that - Perry Marshall makes a great point (don't remember where he got it from) about "natural selection being blind". I reformulated it in my own words (see below). Point is: even if random mutation could somehow lead to something "beneficial", there's no way natural selection can "see" it and preserve it!
Sanford's book goes deeper into this subject. He shows that vast majority of all mutations are either harmful or nearly neutral, and says that mutations are akin to randomly changing letters in an instruction manual. How can such a process create anything? It's just rearranging things that are already there and destroying information in the process. There basically are very few beneficial mutation, if there are any at all. As shown by Behe, experiments with random mutations create broken machines, not something better. And to add even more issues, if there are beneficial mutations, natural selection can't even select them due to their tiny percentage, and there's also the problem of natural selection being "blind" (according to their own materialistic theory) , that is, it cannot see the future, so how could it select something that will be beneficial for the organism in the future?
 
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But the thing is, the genetic code is information. And information cannot be produced by "dead matter", only by intelligence. So if the Darwinian (who is of course also a materialist) assumes a dead universe with dead matter floating around according to natural laws, he by definition cannot explain the generation of information. The gaps cannot be filled in the materialist context; and it's not because we don't know enough yet or don't have enough empirical data, it's because it's impossible in principle.

Of course, our Darwinian could expand the definition of materialism - he could for example invoke some unknown natural force that produces information, or some new natural law that transmits information etc., but that's just another way of invoking an intelligence of some sort. But if you just take the natural laws governing the material universe, in the sense it's understood by materialists, then these cannot produce information! Patterns, yes, but not information. For that, the "signal" would have to be modulated by a mind.
Right, but this is where Gurdjieffs "merde" souls in fertilizing re-production of information comes in. Much like when a plant dies and rots back into the soil to fertilize the ground to enrich it for new plants, it will be the same principle with "intelligence", except not fertilizing soil, but some kind of 're-fertilization' of "intelligence" via planetary electro-magnetic fields or something or other, something that might 'fit' with redistributing information back into "life" without taking it away from what is conceptually scientifically accepted within the materialist realm. Something along the lines would have to be determined at some point in future for Darwinism to keep up with it all.
The concept of "rotting souls" after death keeps things mechanical enough and ideologically materialistic in nature because it still manages to avoid any concept of personal development of Higher Self leading onto something "higher" that exists beyond the material realm, which is what Darwinists/materialists are at the heart really afraid of and avoid like the plague. (I attempted to explain this angle in my response to Ursus Minor, but poorly)

I think Darwinists will next try to hijack the terminology and actual definition of the very meaning of the word "soul" to be redefined, have watered down, corrupted, and made into pulp - to be explained away as "some unknown natural force that produces information, or some new natural law that transmits information etc." necessary to "expand the definition of materialism"... And they will likely use something akin to Gurdjieffs definition of OP "shit souls" to try pull it off and stay ahead of the game. Damage limitation.

The "genetic memory" factor will also be used in conjunction.

Essentially we could soon face a new war fighting to preserve the very literary definition of "soul" and "spirituality".
 
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