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

Anthony said:
I guess this can be applied in general to our work on SOTT and work on our personal issues and our daily life activities. For Gurdjieff, it was never about the results, but the efforts we invest. So it's more process oriented.
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Nice find Anthony. It’s a very good perspective to keep in mind and I’ve found it helpful to take that attitude as well. Particularly when I feel like nothing I do or contribute is really helping in the grand scheme of things. But that’s the catch – we can’t really know. And I’ve seen it myself where some I’ve interacted with were really receptive at first but turned out to be rather disinterested any questioning of reality. Then there were those that didn’t seem like they cared but down the road things happen in their life that lead them back to that moment and things connect.

I think that’s partly where faith comes in, where we do the best we can with what we’ve got and trust in the process. In fact, to just do because it’s the right thing and not worry about the results is probably the best way to practice non-anticipation. A desirable trait to develop if one is to align oneself with an STO mode of being.
 
Another interesting discussion, this time with Stephen C. Meyer. I haven't yet read any of his work, but based on this talk he seems like a pretty sharp pencil. The interviewer is the same as in the previous video I posted with Behe (Eric Metaxas) and in a similar fashion, he likes his own voice a bit too much, but since Meyer is more outspoken than Behe, he gets to say more than one sentence at a time. :lol: Metaxas has some good questions, though. Meyer is coming out with a new book in 2020 called The Return of the God Hypothesis: Compelling Scientific Evidence for the Existence of God.

 
aragorn said:
Meyer is coming out with a new book in 2020 called The Return of the God Hypothesis: Compelling Scientific Evidence for the Existence of God.
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I notice both Behe and Stephen Meyer both have difficulty in accepting the "Space Alien" hypothesis. When you think about it that intermediate creator step is not going to be easily/ever accepted by most of the Creationist leaning ID scientists. Without the Cs explanation of a 4D level of creation there is no awareness of the possibility of a creation that shares higher creation attributes beyond what science does here in 3D.

I suppose it will be interesting if at some point this is "disclosed" in a way that becomes common knowledge.
 
goyacobol said:
I notice both Behe and Stephen Meyer both have difficulty in accepting the "Space Alien" hypothesis. When you think about it that intermediate creator step is not going to be easily/ever accepted by most of the Creationist leaning ID scientists. Without the Cs explanation of a 4D level of creation there is no awareness of the possibility of a creation that shares higher creation attributes beyond what science does here in 3D.
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Given the religious leanings of most of that crowd, it might go down easier if they think of it in terms of 'angels'. But just think of what the response would be then: "Not only do these guys believe in Jehovah, they believe in darned angels too!" So I'm not holding my breath. But you're right, until someone could present a suitably reasonable account of something like a hyperdimensional intelligence between us and the ultimate, it's unlikely to get any traction in either the ID or materialist communities.
 
aragorn said:
Another interesting discussion, this time with Stephen C. Meyer. I haven't yet read any of his work, but based on this talk he seems like a pretty sharp pencil. The interviewer is the same as in the previous video I posted with Behe (Eric Metaxas) and in a similar fashion, he likes his own voice a bit too much, but since Meyer is more outspoken than Behe, he gets to say more than one sentence at a time. :lol: Metaxas has some good questions, though. Meyer is coming out with a new book in 2020 called The Return of the God Hypothesis: Compelling Scientific Evidence for the Existence of God.
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Meyer has a couple of books that are recommended on the forum of which I've read one so far. It was a good read, so I'm happy to see him talking about some of the things publicly. I'm also looking very much forward to his new book, which sounds intriguing.
 
Approaching Infinity said:
Given the religious leanings of most of that crowd, it might go down easier if they think of it in terms of 'angels'. But just think of what the response would be then: "Not only do these guys believe in Jehovah, they believe in darned angels too!" So I'm not holding my breath. But you're right, until someone could present a suitably reasonable account of something like a hyperdimensional intelligence between us and the ultimate, it's unlikely to get any traction in either the ID or materialist communities.
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Yes, regarding this detail, it's surprising and frustrating to listen to the likes of Meyer, who brilliantly present the evidence of how the designer must be outside of space and time, but then see the 'Judeo-Christian God' as the most plausible model. Haven't these guys heard/read of hyperdimensional theories? They rule out 'space-aliens', because the problem of "...well, who created the aliens?" and "...the alien(s) couldn't have existed before the Big Bang". I was almost waiting for Meyer to quote the Bible as evidence, but luckily he didn't go that far...I don't know if he's done that in his writings.

There's clearly a need for an even more open minded researcher of intelligent design, who doesn't get stuck with the Bible stuff!
 
goyacobol said:
Without the Cs explanation of a 4D level of creation there is no awareness of the possibility of a creation that shares higher creation attributes beyond what science does here in 3D.

I suppose it will be interesting if at some point this is "disclosed" in a way that becomes common knowledge.
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Yes, I watched the video yesterday. Close to the end where the discussion was clearly leaning towards, 'it must be God,' I decided to turn it off. I was definitely thinking that without the C's cosmology these otherwise intelligent guys are going to veer off course. So yeah, I think the materialist/ atheist are dead in the water, they just don't know it yet. But without knowledge of higher densities, we're in real danger of just going back to the same errors of religious thinking. So we're certainly not out of the woods by any stretch.

It's clear to me that awareness of the hyperdimensional realms is the key to reaching new levels of objective understanding of life as we know it. An understanding with the potential to thwart the plans of 4D STS. No wonder they're so adamant about squelching any propagation of that awareness, whether in the form of a completed Unified Field Theory or just a greater awareness of densities by the general population. osit
 
The other day I was reading Dawkins's The Greatest Show on Earth, his only book where he even tries to explain why Darwinism is true. (In all his other books, by his own admission, he simply assumes it's true and starts from there.) Here he mentions something from Lenski's experiment with E. Coli. He says one of the groups of the bacteria evolved mutation A, which on its own "did absolutely nothing", and then later evolved mutation B, which on its own also did absolutely nothing, but because there was already mutation A present, they did something together.

According to Dawkins, this shows evolution "right in front of our eyes", shows that "new information can enter the genome", and "undermines the dogma of irreducible complexity". Amazing, right? Yeah, except:

  1. He doesn't tell us anything about what A and B were and what they did together. (Unlike Behe, who explains everything to the last detail, maybe because he has nothing to hide.)
  2. He fails to mention what "new information" appeared and how it was really new, rather than just a modification of the old.
  3. His idea of complexity is two (2!) parts.
  4. He says nothing about how "mutation A" passed through natural selection when it did "absolutely nothing" without mutation B. (This is the greatest offense here.)
  5. Of course it wouldn't occur to him to even wonder how the genetic code might have been damaged by whatever happened there.

Sadly, many people read his books with barely basic understanding of the topic, and so they're easily convinced by his conclusions, never noticing all the manipulation, inconsistencies, fallacies, and omissions, and they think he's a genius who shows those dumb Christians how things really work.

Earlier in the book he talks about dog breeding and concludes with, "if this can happen within a few centuries, imagine what can happen in millions of years" (paraphrasing). Never mind dog breeding is by design, and never mind the assumption that changing the shapes and colours of dogs can somehow lead to creating, I don't know, gorillas?

His reasoning is always full of holes, he ignores 21st century science as well as any other details that would be inconvenient for his point, but people gobble it up because they don't know any better, and often because they just want a scientific-sounding confirmation that Creationism is wrong. Reading Icons of Evolution, I can see Dawkins is exactly the pestilence that promotes these icons and presents false "facts" as evidence of evolution, while carefully avoiding the details surrounding the issues. Literally every aspect of Darwinism is controversial at the very least (often just patently false), yet he acts like there's so much evidence for evolution that we need not look for more, and anyone who doesn't believe in it should really read his books and keep up.

Dawkins is the epitome of what's wrong with science today in general and Darwinism in particular. His books are more ideology than science, and it's hardcore materialist ideology. I've read his The Magic of Reality, which turned out to be basically indoctrination into materialism for children. (Pretty horrible.) He is a persuasive propagandist who keeps repeating that "evolution is a fact", evolution is amazing, humans are just animals, everything is random, and there's no meaning. He writes "popular science", which means there is very little actual science in it, so it's hard for the layman to judge how accurate anything he says is. Sadly, his books are quite readable (that is, if you don't know the real facts that he constantly misrepresents) and, I suppose, entertaining, and he has a lot of fans. And again, they flock around him largely because they think Creationism is stupid and nobody has told them that Darwinism is not the only alternative.

Somehow we need to get the public from seeing "Darwinism vs Creationism" to the notion of "There's Creationism, there's Darwinism, and then there's the truth."
 
Mandatory Intellectomy said:
Somehow we need to get the public from seeing "Darwinism vs Creationism" to the notion of "There's Creationism, there's Darwinism, and then there's the truth."
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I get what you're saying and I don't disagree, however there's a lot we still don't know. What we do know is that Creationism and Darwinism are only theories, and not very good one's at that. We also know, because it can be deduced, that biological life is most certainly designed. If there's an appearance of evolution, it's because the designers, whoever they are, were essentially experimenting and using what worked and leaving behind what didn't.

It's interesting how cosmology plays into all of this. The whole atheist shtick is based on the wrong assumption that there is no God because of all the bad stuff that happens in this world. Therefore, no God = no design.

The Creationist/ Bible advocates are saying design is obvious therefore, design = God of the bible must be real.

Now I think we must have the crucial missing element. There are other realities just as real as this one which are intricately interacting with this reality through the intelligent agents residing there.
 
Mandatory Intellectomy said:
The other day I was reading Dawkins's The Greatest Show on Earth, his only book where he even tries to explain why Darwinism is true. (In all his other books, by his own admission, he simply assumes it's true and starts from there.) Here he mentions something from Lenski's experiment with E. Coli. He says one of the groups of the bacteria evolved mutation A, which on its own "did absolutely nothing", and then later evolved mutation B, which on its own also did absolutely nothing, but because there was already mutation A present, they did something together.

According to Dawkins, this shows evolution "right in front of our eyes", shows that "new information can enter the genome", and "undermines the dogma of irreducible complexity". Amazing, right? Yeah, except:

  1. He doesn't tell us anything about what A and B were and what they did together. (Unlike Behe, who explains everything to the last detail, maybe because he has nothing to hide.)
  2. He fails to mention what "new information" appeared and how it was really new, rather than just a modification of the old.
  3. His idea of complexity is two (2!) parts.
  4. He says nothing about how "mutation A" passed through natural selection when it did "absolutely nothing" without mutation B. (This is the greatest offense here.)
  5. Of course it wouldn't occur to him to even wonder how the genetic code might have been damaged by whatever happened there.
Sadly, many people read his books with barely basic understanding of the topic, and so they're easily convinced by his conclusions, never noticing all the manipulation, inconsistencies, fallacies, and omissions, and they think he's a genius who shows those dumb Christians how things really work.

Earlier in the book he talks about dog breeding and concludes with, "if this can happen within a few centuries, imagine what can happen in millions of years" (paraphrasing). Never mind dog breeding is by design, and never mind the assumption that changing the shapes and colours of dogs can somehow lead to creating, I don't know, gorillas?

His reasoning is always full of holes, he ignores 21st century science as well as any other details that would be inconvenient for his point, but people gobble it up because they don't know any better, and often because they just want a scientific-sounding confirmation that Creationism is wrong. Reading Icons of Evolution, I can see Dawkins is exactly the pestilence that promotes these icons and presents false "facts" as evidence of evolution, while carefully avoiding the details surrounding the issues. Literally every aspect of Darwinism is controversial at the very least (often just patently false), yet he acts like there's so much evidence for evolution that we need not look for more, and anyone who doesn't believe in it should really read his books and keep up.

Dawkins is the epitome of what's wrong with science today in general and Darwinism in particular. His books are more ideology than science, and it's hardcore materialist ideology. I've read his The Magic of Reality, which turned out to be basically indoctrination into materialism for children. (Pretty horrible.) He is a persuasive propagandist who keeps repeating that "evolution is a fact", evolution is amazing, humans are just animals, everything is random, and there's no meaning. He writes "popular science", which means there is very little actual science in it, so it's hard for the layman to judge how accurate anything he says is. Sadly, his books are quite readable (that is, if you don't know the real facts that he constantly misrepresents) and, I suppose, entertaining, and he has a lot of fans. And again, they flock around him largely because they think Creationism is stupid and nobody has told them that Darwinism is not the only alternative.

Somehow we need to get the public from seeing "Darwinism vs Creationism" to the notion of "There's Creationism, there's Darwinism, and then there's the truth."
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This post, put together with some material from your previous posts, would make a great sott article, I think!!!
 
From the Worm to the Butterfly.

I have never believed in the Darwinian evolution of the species, the species have remained the same with changes they call varieties, but there could be an exception, the Worm species that becomes another species: the Butterfly.
 
Laura said:
This post, put together with some material from your previous posts, would make a great sott article, I think!!!
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OK, that is certainly something I can work on. I've finished all three of Behe's books, The Scars of Evolution, Icons of Evolution, I'm reading Darwinian Fairytales and Evolution 2.0, and I'm taking lots of notes. Also I've checked a few of Dawkins's books to see what the poster boy for Darwinism has to say. I think the biggest challenge would be to follow my own advice and not make it too long and complex. Like luc, I feel like I have too many ideas for one article. So for this, I'd focus on the idea that Darwinism and Creationism aren't the only options, what the scientific problems of Darwinism are, and what's left when we remove what doesn't work. Sort of to crush the idea that if you think one of the two camps is stupid, you must go to the other one. I think it's what Evolution 2.0 is doing, but I only started reading that one yesterday, so maybe I should read a bit more first. At any rate, there's definitely a lot going on in my mind regarding this, so I'll work on it.
 
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