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

[Laura]

{...}

What’s so fascinating about this new more detailed look at our biological structures is seeing the depth of ‘thought’ that is inherent in the design. From an engineering point of view, it’s like they’ve covered every scenario one could think of except here’s where it gets more interesting: it's not all them. From a 4D STS view, their aim appears to be a ‘body’ which can be easily and completely subjugated. And so far it looks like they’ve done a very good job of it too. However, they’re not the only game in town and there also seems to be a counteracting force that affects DNA to make changes for the better. So in some respects, it’s like the battle is quite literally through us and not so much an abstraction as I once thought it was.
{...}
There seems to be a very nuts and bolts element directly built into the universe at the most fundamental levels and we are at the stage where we can now directly observe some of it. What we see is demonstrating with even more clarity the intelligence of the universe. The beautiful irony is that the very same ‘materialism’ that denies anything spiritual or higher is also the same thing that brought us to closer to the spiritual through its search for its own validation.

Reflecting on the parts I've put in bold above, I want to say that for me, the end results of this last two years of reading has been nothing less than a sort of rebirth. It's one thing to argue the case for the hyperdimensional reality in which our own is embedded, or from which it is extruded, using more or less "gross physical anatomy", or things that can be easily seen or detected, and quite another to take it down to the atomic level, literally, and to see "the depth of thought" in the design. The Wave was a series of arguments from "gross anatomy" of our reality, so to say, and it was as satisfactory as it could be all things considered; but it was still leaving the fundamental level unaddressed. In the back of my mind has always been a passage from Romans chapter 1:

"19 since what may be known about God is plain to them, because God has made it plain to them. 20 For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that people are without excuse."

But I was using it in the same way that the ancient philosophers did: observing what my own gross anatomy could perceive and seeing the order and rationality in it. To some extent, my vision was expanded by telescopes and microscopes, but that still left many of the Cs explanations for things "hanging in the wind" so to say. Evolution seemed a good enough explanation for a lot of things, even including such things as "limbic resonance" and evolutionary psychology's explanations for "religious feelings" or "delusions of the paranormal."

Yes, I had my own paranormal experiences, but who was to say that some energy - that might be explained in Darwinian or material terms - was not at the root of it all? How did I know that I was not projecting meaning into things? How did I know that the Cs were not ultimately some complicated process of my own psychological need for meaning?

That sort of thing was always in the back of my mind, also, and one of the reasons I kept insisting that research is the key, the Cs are only inspiration. (I still think this is the correct approach, even more now after seeing where that research can lead). I was always very hard on the Cs, so to say.

The more I researched history and religion, the more convinced I became that there was some dark force in the world that was at work, but couldn't it just be the natural entropic factor? "Who needs aliens when you have psychopaths?" I would say. And psychopaths, as I understood it, were just part of the natural, Darwinian processes.

So, you could say that I was in something of a state of ambiguity about it all. There was all of the riches in the Cs material, but it was a matter of just setting big blocks of it aside, bracketing it off, and waiting to see how things would turn out.

But now, that quote from Paul, above, takes on an all-new level of meaning, though I still place the word "God" in quotes and emphasize the part that has new meaning:

"19 since what may be known about "God" is plain to them, because "God" has made it plain to them. 20 For since the creation of the world "God’s" invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that people are without excuse."

As fabric wrote above: "The beautiful irony is that the very same ‘materialism’ that denies anything spiritual or higher is also the same thing that brought us to closer to the spiritual through its search for its own validation."

As I've commented a few times recently, reading these books has made me acutely aware of the intelligence behind the design of life. I've thought about that in conjunction with the Cs remark that 4th density battles appear to us as "weather and earth changes". Those things are really ginormous in proportions and complexity and the Cs have also said that they are reflections of human activities on earth. That has made me even more aware of our position here on earth as the "battle ground", so to say. As fabric said "the battle is quite literally through us and not so much an abstraction as I once thought it was."

No kidding.

The "Battle Through Us" having taken on a whole new level of meaning, perhaps it is worthwhile to read the entire passage from Romans:

18 The wrath of God is being revealed from heaven against all the godlessness and wickedness of people, who suppress the truth by their wickedness, 19 since what may be known about God is plain to them, because God has made it plain to them. 20 For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that people are without excuse.

21 For although they knew God, they neither glorified him as God nor gave thanks to him, but their thinking became futile and their foolish hearts were darkened. 22 Although they claimed to be wise, they became fools 23 and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images made to look like a mortal human being and birds and animals and reptiles.

24 Therefore God gave them over in the sinful desires of their hearts to sexual impurity for the degrading of their bodies with one another. 25 They exchanged the truth about God for a lie, and worshiped and served created things rather than the Creator—who is forever praised. Amen.

26 Because of this, God gave them over to shameful lusts. Even their women exchanged natural sexual relations for unnatural ones. 27 In the same way the men also abandoned natural relations with women and were inflamed with lust for one another. Men committed shameful acts with other men, and received in themselves the due penalty for their error.

28 Furthermore, just as they did not think it worthwhile to retain the knowledge of God, so God gave them over to a depraved mind, so that they do what ought not to be done. 29 They have become filled with every kind of wickedness, evil, greed and depravity. They are full of envy, murder, strife, deceit and malice. They are gossips, 30 slanderers, God-haters, insolent, arrogant and boastful; they invent ways of doing evil; they disobey their parents; 31 they have no understanding, no fidelity, no love, no mercy. 32 Although they know God’s righteous decree that those who do such things deserve death, they not only continue to do these very things but also approve of those who practice them.

It sure sounds like a commentary on our times.

Even if the Cs have given us a pragmatic view of these things with hyperdimensional explanations, descriptions of densities, STS vs STO, and so forth, I don't think we can improve much on what Paul has written.

It's been a very long journey and I don't think that "Darwin's Black Box" would have had such an impact on me if I had not gone through the long process of looking for the pieces of the puzzle in all the evolutionary writings of the mainstream which always had such huge gaps, failed in terms of what was reasonable, and glossed over or flat-out denied what they could not explain.

I dived deeply into the pit of Darwinism and found Design to be the ONLY solution that makes any sense at all. Not only is it the only thing that makes sense, in strictly scientific terms, it is the only thing that explains ALL the phenomena. ALL. And in the end, the Cs explanations for things end up being the most rational of all.

Yeah, like being Born Again.

 

[gnosisxsophia]

Exactly. They are always bringing up the 'genius idea' of natural selection - they never say the genius idea of random mutations! And notice that when they try to refute arguments such as the irreducible complexity of the flagellum, what they really do is try to make neo-darwinism plausible, rather than impossible

Only half way through so far but have found it immensely refreshing that Behe chose to roll out, so early, the grenade (to Darwin) that is systems irreducibility!

...the double helix imagery and its associations with serpents (and other things as well) were found across many tribes all over the world. It’s like our higher density creators (or perhaps more like meddlers) had left their ‘calling-card’ in there to be found...

Intriguing isn't it?

Way back when (in my 20's) and with the zeal of a young turk, rather modestly I set out to prove to myself that there was no god. Unfortunately having chosen Natural Selection and Mechanical Evolution as a starting point, very rapidly I found the evidence and reasoning sparse and often ridiculous. Even more embarrassing was that with the rise of the Darwinian enfants terribles throughout the 90's, such as Dawkins, as a thinking person the realisation dawned that the emperor had no clothes. Ironically it was also while reading Dawkins Climbing Mount Improbable (which remains unread in its entirety) that the final nail went in the coffin of the theory of Random Selection as plausible - to my mind at least.

And it was the continued reluctance to reasonably address screaming examples of complexity, symbiosis and the unspoken pre-requisite simultaneity of uncountable positive mutative adaptation, that blew the Darwinist's own argument out the water.

Specifically (at the time) the failure to address the sublime and inconceivably complex functionality of DNA, particularly as it applies to heterosexual reproduction.

That a single celled organism could 'evolve' asexually, via uncountable iterations, developing wings and so on was perhaps conceivable on the probability level of winning lotto every weekend for a million years (though not looking too hard at irreducibly complex systems such as brains, eyes etc.) But in contrast the framing of the emergence of fully functioning gender specific organisms from within a chain of sexless organisms that must maintain viability - throughout uncountable generations - with no other causal factor than selection, seemed preposterous.

Throw into the mix the probability of successful genome recombination from these Adam and Eve organisms and the numbers surely went out the window.

Which led to only one intellectually defend-able position.

A: Yes, as third density bioengineered beings, you lead the smorgasbord parade of that which surrounds you in the physical realm.

And I can only agree with Laura's sentiment;

I dived deeply into the pit of Darwinism and found Design to be the ONLY solution that makes any sense at all. Not only is it the only thing that makes sense, in strictly scientific terms, it is the only thing that explains ALL the phenomena. ALL. And in the end, the Cs explanations for things end up being the most rational of all.

Thanks for the book recommendation

J

 

[Joe]

I was thinking about that as well with regards to what genero81 posted. At the same time too, though Peterson may loathe to consider it a possibility just as he is loathe to consider some psychopaths as being born that way a possibility, I wonder if there's a number of people for whom meaninglessness and nihilism are their essential nature. To put it another way, if we can suggest that what one chooses to support is a reflection of who they are on some level, then maybe for those who vehemently support the notion, despite or in spite of the contrary evidence, that all that exists is dead matter that maybe it is the case, for them, because that's all they really are. Which I think is something that Laura has proposed elsewhere on the forum.

This from a session last year is relevant to the above.

2018/06/09

(Joe) Is it true that people who gravitate toward that idea of relativism and that there's no truth, and then they effectively put themselves in the place of god, is it because they have no real inner connection or appreciation of anything higher than themselves?

A: Yes

 

[Joe]

In the circular reasoning so common among Darwinists, they will argue that the human capacity to map out our future and strive towards something better is in itself proof of Darwinism because it was advantageous to do so in the past. But either you can actually change the present by making decisions, gaining a “survival advantage”, and therefore are a conscious being with free will, and thus able to transcend material reality and biological programming, or you can’t. If you can’t, then your reasoning cannot ever produce an advantage. In fact, it would be a shameful waste of resources and should have been stamped out by natural selection long ago.

Good point. What do Darwinists say about random mutations at the human level? Shouldn't all of our choices be random, and we only manage to achieve anything useful, any progress, as a result of blindly and eventually stumbling upon it?

 

[Joe]

In other words, Dawkins argues that if chance is unlikely to create life, it's even more unlikely to create a God that created life!

Why not just remove chance?

 

[Joe]

Yesterday, I watched this documentary that was posted in another thread. WoW!. This documentary talks to many scientists/academia's (like Berlinski etc) who were "expelled" from their jobs for mentioning Intelligent design in their work and they also talk to proponents like Richard Dawkins etc. too.

In that video, Dawkins accepts that it's possible that some "previous high tech intelligence" may have designed life on earth, but that that higher intelligence must have come into being by the 'darwinian' process and that "it couldn't have just spontaneously jumped into being". If that's his main beef, then there is no beef at all! There is a consensus, because NO ONE, on any side of the debate, is arguing that life spontaneously jumped into being!

On the origins of the previous high tech civilization that could have designed life on earth, what if we just say that that high tech civilization was designed by some previous high-tech civilization, and they by some previous civilization, and so on and so on....who cares how it ALL started, but let's all agree that design is an intrinsic part of life.

 

[Joe]

What are they protecting by clinging on to Darwinism?

I think they are seeking to protect themselves from existential angst, which most darwinists would deny they even have of course, but then, people are strangers to themselves. While Darwinism might sound like atheism or that it may even lead to nihilism, it's not and doesn't. As many have said, its effectively a religious belief, not because it posits some kind of supernatural being - it obviously doesn't - but because it provides the comfort of apparently knowing in the face of the unknown, it's about control, really.

That's actually the main attraction for people to both religion and the religion of scientism. Belief isn't acceptance of not knowing, or acceptance that there is something beyond our capacity to know, quite the opposite, it posits that you can and do know something concrete, something real, something that persists unchanging, or if it must change it's only a development on what we already know. In that way it provides a sense of security. This is why beliefs that limit are a hindrance. Since we live in an ostensibly limitless universe, limiting beliefs will naturally be a hindrance.

Few, if any, are willing to discard their entire belief system in favor of something else that makes more sense of reality, it's just too scary, especially when it implies having to radically recast your entire conception of yourself and the universe in which you life. Strangely though, a new conception of that sort would likely provide people with a greater sense of comfort and less angst, even if it vastly expands the gamut of what you don't know. People want to constrain the universe to the limits of their own minds, rather than broaden their minds to try to encompass the limitless nature of the universe.

 

[luc]

Why not just remove chance?

IMO, because non-chance is information is knowledge is light, and vampires like Dawkins hate the light :)

Good point. What do Darwinists say about random mutations at the human level? Shouldn't all of our choices be random, and we only manage to achieve anything useful, any progress, as a result of blindly and eventually stumbling upon it?

Yes, that's one of the many problems with Dawkins' "selfish gene" and similar theories that posit we are mere automatons and our consciousness and free will are just an illusion. Some Darwinists acknowledge the role of consciousness half-heartedly, but the truth is, once you allow consciousness and free will in, materialism collapses, and so does Darwinism. It's inevitable. And I think this might be the very reason why people like Dawkins came up with their theories in the first place.

 

[Pierre]

Dawkins accepts that it's possible that some "previous high tech intelligence" may have designed life on earth, but that that higher intelligence must have come into being by the 'darwinian' process and that "it couldn't have just spontaneously jumped into being". If that's his main beef, then there is no beef at all! There is a consensus, because NO ONE, on any side of the debate, is arguing that life spontaneously jumped into being!

Dawkins and other neo-darwinians do, but there's a sleigh of hand.

We can sometimes find an apparent consensus concerning who created us. But then, they shift the whole problem one step higher and the fundamental question remains: who created our creators?

That's why Dawkins while conceding that we might be the result of intelligent design quickly adds that, if it's the case, our designers are the result of blind darwinian 'evolution'. This way Dawkins saves the core of his ideology: scientist atheism.

Notice however a huge paradox, and that's why so few neo darwinians would accept Dawkins' concession.

Claiming that human beings are the results of random mutations and natural selection is already very weak scientifically because of the humans stunning (irreducible) complexities.

So such a darwinian claim would be even more unconvincing for the supposed creators of the human beings who, logically, should be even more complex than their human creatures.

 

[thorbiorn]

[...]Nowhere in Maxwell's equations does he set out to prove or disprove the existence of God, or in Newtonian physics, etc. [...]

I could not resist looking up Maxwell (1831-1879) and his opinion about life and evolution. On one page Man of Science, Man of God: James Clerk Maxwell which might have a plan of their own, but still cared to ask a similar question found that:

From an early age, James Clerk Maxwell had an astonishing memory and an unquenchable curiosity about how things worked. His first teacher, his mother, encouraged him to "look up through Nature to Nature's God":

His knowledge of Scripture, from his earliest boyhood, was extraordinarily extensive and minute....These things were not known merely by rote. They occupied his imagination, and sank deeper than anybody knew.1​

After growing up mostly on an isolated country estate, young Maxwell entered the Edinburgh Academy in 1841.

"look up through Nature to Nature's God" - it took me a moment to get the unusual wording, but it is basically a beautiful idea, one that many teachers of natural sciences are now expected to leave out or know nothing about.

Darwin's Origin of Species was published during Maxwell's lifetime. Maxwell was not convinced evolution was a viable theory of origins, nor was he afraid to speak on the matter:

No theory of evolution can be formed to account for the similarity of molecules, for evolution necessarily implies continuous change, and the molecule is incapable of growth or decay, or generation or destruction.…Science is incompetent to reason upon the creation of matter itself out of nothing.2​

Maxwell is to this day held in high regard in the scientific community, but few know or acknowledge his strong Christian roots or his faith in the authority of God's Word. Virtually every part of his brief, but remarkable, life was spent exploring the wonder of God's creation.

Some scientist have considered themselves to be so much wiser than Maxwell and perhaps in a few areas they were, but in view of the latest discoveries of the complexities of evolution it can only be confirmed that Maxwell showed good reason an proved that his approach to the study of Nature was both valid and fruitful.

 

[genero81]

People want to constrain the universe to the limits of their own minds, rather than broaden their minds to try to encompass the limitless nature of the universe.

I like how you put that. Some things come to mind; Castaneda speaks of life as an unfathomable mystery. He also speaks of the fear that comes when facing the unknown and the unknowable. The 'assemblage point' is a fixed point of awareness that people automatically maintain through a constant internal dialogue and inventory, according to him. And the C's and other sources talk about the limitations of 3rd density awareness and how the next density is essentially limitless by comparison.

 

[Joe]

Indeed, if it was provable, individuals would embrace this path, this alignment not because they fundamentally resonate with it, but because they know where it leads. This choice would not be a matter of faith or deep nature any more but a matter of bargain and anticipation.

Indeed, there's an inherent paradox here, and it's actually blindingly obtuse. If we, and all other sentient beings, in one way or another create reality, are "co-creators" of reality, then what's the point in looking for a 'creator' when the creator is, as the Cs have said, you and more or less everything else? Seeking something in all the wrong places, and never the right one, is a recipe for endless feckless theorizing and never reaching the answer.

 

[Joe]

iven what we know about quantum particles tells us that at these levels, ‘reality’ itself exists only in potential and probabilities of thought whereby our observation of what we expect brings it into the order manifested in the material. It’s also the junction between the spiritual and the material, where it is said that science and religion meet. So add that to the latest in molecular biology and the materialists’ “matter is everything” theory simply doesn’t hold up.

It’s that probabilistic potential that lies in the most basic construct of everything else that exists provides the ever available potential to things to unfold. It removes absolute determinism from the equation. Another way to describe it is to say, "look this is your free will, built right into everything." When you make a choice, it collapses the function and reverberates right through everything else, starting with the sub-atomic particles which make your atoms then molecules which make your DNA and instruct your body to do certain things; make certain chemicals. This affects your thoughts, your moods and so on right up through ever higher level manifestations of said choices. It’s also true in reverse, where higher level influences make their way through in reverse order. In such a way can we see the effects of positive and negative feedback loops either improving one’s life in astonishing ways or the opposite - where they disintegrate so fast you won't even believe it.

I think you nailed it right there. This gets down to the level of 'quantum entanglement' or 'spooky action at a distance" of quantum mechanics. Thoughts can directly affect matter, at the most finite level. Our thoughts and the information we receive and process can have a direct effect on our physical bodies from the 'bottom up'.

 

[Aeneas]

Yesterday we watched this talk by David Berlinski:

The guy is very clever and hilarious! He gave an overview of his book 'The Devil's Dellusion', and although he didn't go too deep into his arguments, one thing he mentioned that I thought interesting, and that I think needs to be mentioned more, is that even neo-darwinian biologists admit that nobody really understands how you go from the DNA to the complexity of the fully functional organism.

I watched it last night and it is entertaining. In the question section he alludes to without going in to details that France had many darwinian ideas about evolution, but that all stopped with the French biochemist Jacques Monod ( 1910-1976) after which the French were totally in the Darwinian camp. Monod won the Nobel prize in 1965.

Here is a bit about him from wikipedia:

Jacques Lucien Monod

(February 9, 1910 – May 31, 1976), a French biochemist, won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1965, sharing it with François Jacob and Andre Lwoff "for their discoveries concerning genetic control of enzyme and virus synthesis"

He also had other interests:

Monod was not only a biologist but also a fine musician and esteemed writer on the philosophy of science. He was a political activist and chief of staff of operations for the Forces Françaises de l'Interieur during World War II. In preparation for the Allied landings, he arranged parachute drops of weapons, railroad bombings, and mail interceptions.

But a strong proponent of Darwinism:

Monod shows us a paradigm of how choice at one level of biological organization (metabolic activity) is generated by necessary (choiceless) interactions at another level (gene regulation); the ability to choose arises from a complex system of feedback loops that connect these interactions. He goes on to explain how the capacity of biological systems to retain information, combined with chance variations during the replication of information (i.e. genetic mutations) that are individually rare but commonplace in aggregate, leads to the differential preservation of that information which is most successful at maintaining and replicating itself. Monod writes that this process, acting over long periods of time, is a sufficient explanation (indeed the only plausible explanation)[those brackets and the comment belongs to wikipedia] for the complexity and telenomic activity of the biosphere. Hence, the combined effects of chance and necessity, which are amenable to scientific investigation, account for our existence and the universe we inhabit, without the need to invoke mystical, supernatural, or religious explanations.

He seems to think that Science should take the place of God and determine the truth, obviously a material god:

While acknowledging the likely evolutionary origin of a human need for explanatory myths, in the final chapter of Chance and Necessity, Monod advocates for adopting an objective (hence value-free), scientific worldview as our guide to assessing truth. He describes this as an 'ethics of knowledge', which disrupts the older philosophical, mythological and religious ontologies that claimed to provide both ethical values and a standard for judging truth. For Monod, assessing truth separate from any value judgment is what frees humans to act authentically, by requiring that they choose the ethical values that motivate their actions. He concludes "...man at last knows he is alone in the unfeeling immensity of the universe, out of which he has emerged only by chance. His destiny is nowhere spelled out, nor is his duty. The kingdom above or the darkness below; it is for him to choose".

Since he was a nobel prize winner and a war hero, then he was probably pretty much immune from any criticism in France and thus he functioned as a gate keeper firmly fixing France in the Darwinian camp.

Regarding the Berlinski lecture, then a someone from the audience correctly points out that the full title of Darwin's book never is used. The full title is: On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life.
One can see why Hitler, Stalin and the people around them were happy to have an accepted reason, Darwinism, for their war crimes. Churchill was no different (the following quote is from Twitter posted by someone with the handle, Crimes of Britain'.:

"I do not admit for instance, that a great wrong has been done to the Red Indians of America or the black people of Australia. A stronger race, a higher-grade race, a more worldly wise race to put it that way, has come in and taken their place.”- Churchill

 

[genero81]

It sure sounds like a commentary on our times.

Even if the Cs have given us a pragmatic view of these things with hyperdimensional explanations, descriptions of densities, STS vs STO, and so forth, I don't think we can improve much on what Paul has written.

I completely agree. How did he know these things?! It's positively astounding!