"david ford" <dford3@gl.umbc.edu> wrote in message news:dford3-b1c67abe.0410091016.63198b7@posting.google.com...

"Bob Pease" <robertjp@askmeinapost.com> wrote in message news:<ck4qjd$6ch@dispatch.concentric.net>...

"Prospero" <magicprospero@yahoo.com> wrote in message news:ee0b7858.0410071013.60126207@posting.google.com...

I am an English teacher (with a strong interest in science and
evolutionary theory). I have been debating with a chemistry teacher
at my school about his claims that there are convincing rational
arguments for the existence of a creator.

I would like to quote one of his recent emails to me, and get your
advice on the best line of response. My inclination is to attack the
whole notion the theists "probability" argument against life emerging
from non-life (as per Smith's argument in Atheism: The Case Against
God_). But perhaps the folks on talk.origins understand this argument
better than I.

Thanks for any help in advance. --Prospero

Here it is:

"As I view the evidences of science it actually points me toward a
creator not away. For example there are micro-machines that are within
cells that direct the division and then replication of DNA to
successfully replicate. These micro machines had to be in place in
order to for the FIRST successful division to occur. Now here we have
a major problem. These cells had to have the correct micro-machines
necessary to do that first replication. The information needed to make
these machines is within the DNA that is being replicated ? which is
circular and illogical. In other words, the mechanisms needed to
correctly replicate a cell must have been in place before the cell
could have replicated.

One must conclude that since the proper replication of a cell
necessitates all the working components needed for the replication to
be present, that the first cell had to exist in a complex form before
it could successfully replicate.

The adherence to classical Darwinian origins is therefore flawed I
reject this idea based upon logic.

Let us suppose that aliens brought these "ready-to-replicate" cells to
earth, or that a meteor brought them to earth in their complex forms.
This idea is actually circling and considered in modern academia.
Could these single cell organisms break the 2 nd Law of
Thermodynamics, not only one or two or seventy times, but to an
astronomically and statistically crippling number of times? Logic and
current scientific academia are not comfortable with this idea."

There are at least five things wrong with his argument.

Part 1. (Accusations of circularity) is a classical Straw Man.
It contains a false premise which is then shown to lead to circular
reasoning.

What is the [BP]"false premise"?

Part2 ( Whirlwind in a junkyard)
Slightly stronger..Even if the parts of a Cadillac are lying around, how is
it possible to i have it auto-assemble by random rearrangement and then
inspire it to run without someone grinding just the right key, get gasoline
of the right octane rating, and start it up.
You might check out why this argument is ludicrous.

Hume intended that besides accounting for the
existence of order, his reshufflings would also give rise to the
"parts in animals or vegetables, and their curious adjustment to each
other."143 Given our current awareness of the immense complexity of
even the 'simplest' living organisms, Hume's suggestion is ludicrous.
Regarding this complexity, Monod stated in 1970, "the simplest living
system known to us, the bacterial cell, [is] a tiny piece of extremely
complex and efficient machinery."144 The extent of this complexity
had begun to be grasped by at least as early as 1921; reports
origin-of-life researcher A.I. Oparin,
He [S. Kostychev in 1921] argues that even the most simply
organized living things possess a very complex, delicate and
perfect protoplasmic structure. The various vital processes are
made possible by this protoplasmic structure and perfect
functional differentiation. The metabolism of matter and energy
characteristic for living things would be entirely impossible
without a specially adapted apparatus, and it is highly
improbable that such a complex apparatus could have arisen
fortuitously. If the reader were asked to consider the
probability that in the midst of inorganic matter a large factory
with smoke stacks, pipes, boilers, machines, ventilators, etc.
suddenly sprang into existence by some natural process, let us
say a volcanic eruption, this would be taken at best for a silly
joke. Yet, even the simplest microorganism has a more complex
structure than any factory, and therefore its fortuitous creation
is very much less probable.145

More recently, biophysicist Harold Morowitz imagined taking a living
bacterium, breaking it up into individual atoms through the
application of heat, and allowing the mixture to cool slowly so as to
permit the atoms to form new bonds. Morowitz calculated that at the
end of the cooling, the chances that a living bacteria would be had is
1 in 10^100,000,000,000.146 To give you a vague idea of those odds,
there are 10^80 atoms in the visible universe, and our universe has
been in existence for 10^17 seconds. In short, it is impossible for
Hume's postulation of matter repeatedly being "thrown into any
position by a blind, unguided force" to produce even a _bacterium_ in
our 12-billion-year-old universe, much less the complexity seen in
plants and animals.

A similar illustration can be provided using Paley's watch.
Suppose we took the watch apart and placed the pieces in a box.
Philosopher Nancy Cartwright describes how the experiment would
proceed:
in a controlled experiment it is possible to deliberately set
things up so that the initial arrangement of parts is unplanned.
We could, for instance, shake the parts in a box.... There is no
doubt what the outcome would be. The probability of getting a
bunch of gears shaken together in a box to come out in fine
adjustment to any end whatsoever is as near zero as it can be.
It is because of this that the argument from design is a powerful
one.147

Cartwright later expresses doubt about the validity of the thought
experiment:
We may shake the gears together a million times and never get a
watch. But what if we shook them together a million times for 12
billion years a time. How many watches would we get? It is an
experiment that we cannot perform.148

Actually, we can perform calculations just as Morowitz did, and
conclude that even 12 billion years of rapid shaking of numerous
dismembered watches will not make a dent in the odds against our
getting a functional watch. We can also sensibly conclude that the
pieces will eventually turn into dust with all that shaking.149
Moreover, suppose we did get a functional watch-- with our next shake
of the box, that watch will disappear: Hume's blind mixing force will
not know when to stop mixing, and it is not clear how the appearance
of a bacterium would prevent the mixing force from continuing to mix,
thereby destroying the very bacterium it gave rise to. I submit that
it is much more reasonable to ascribe a bacterium's complex
arrangement to the work of an intelligence(s) than to say the
bacterium fell together through the work of a blind, unguided force
constantly rearranging the arrangement of matter.

From
Hume on inferring from seeming-design the attribute of
intelligence
http://www.google.com/groups?selm=b1c67abe.0407200317.df80612%40posting.google.com

Part 3. Panspermia or "Aliens" doesn't refute, simply transfers the
location or time


Part 4. 2LT

He doesn't understand the 2LT but uses a fuzzy consequence of it.

The usual Creationist version is
"Things don't get more orderly without intelligent intervention"
They also intertwine Ideas from abstract information theory with 19th
century physics without interest in scope or applicability.

Part 5

Notion that improbability equals impossibility. ( Really false!!)

Agreed. It is improbable-- which _doesn't_ equal impossible-- that
all of the molecules in a concrete statue's hand will happen to move
in one direction at a particular moment, and then move in the opposite
direction the next moment, resulting in the concrete hand "waving."
The claim that concrete hands can't wave on the grounds of
"improbability" is an erroneous claim.

He's shot himself in the foot 5/5

It seems that he doesn't know enough about the subject to recognize
boring and jaded arguments which are roundly refuted at least
monthly in this newsgroup.

Also as an English Teacher, the semantic and rhetorical minor-league
stuff ought to be easy pickings for refutation.

I think he could build a better case for
"God did it, and the Bible sez so !!" than he has for an attempt at a
secular justification.

The Search for a Loophole to the Beginning of the Universe
in the Big Bang and to the Seeming-Design of Physics
http://www.google.com/groups?selm=Pine.LNX.4.10A.B3.10005292327160.25513-100000%40jabba.gl.umbc.edu

thanks for interesting and cogent post in rebuttal to item 2.

While I don't concede the need for "Intelligent design" it raises questions
about the axiomatic denial of teleology.

The false premise in #1 is the "Original machine" idea
This has been refuted by another poster

dford3@gl.umbc.edu (david ford) wrote in message
news:<dford3-b1c67abe.0410091016.63198b7@posting.google.com>...
[snip]

More recently, biophysicist Harold Morowitz imagined taking a living
bacterium, breaking it up into individual atoms through the
application of heat, and allowing the mixture to cool slowly so as to
permit the atoms to form new bonds. Morowitz calculated that at the
end of the cooling, the chances that a living bacteria would be had is
1 in 10^100,000,000,000.146 To give you a vague idea of those odds,
there are 10^80 atoms in the visible universe, and our universe has
been in existence for 10^17 seconds. In short, it is impossible for
Hume's postulation of matter repeatedly being "thrown into any
position by a blind, unguided force" to produce even a _bacterium_ in
our 12-billion-year-old universe, much less the complexity seen in
plants and animals.

I would like to posit the oscillatory model of the universe: It starts
with a big bang, it ends with a big crunch, but then starts anew with
all physical and mathematical laws as well as initial conditions
randomly rehashed. Reality then is an infinite sequence of random
universes.

Would you agree that:

1. It it turns out that our universe does have a beginning and an end,
then it is not possible to argue against this oscillatory model based
on laws we have discovered for our own universe, because such laws are
valid only for the present iteration.

2. This model answers some of the questions that are still unanswered
such as the anthropic principle (the weird fact that the fundamental
physical constants of the universe we inhabit seem to be fine-tuned
for the evolution of stable planets and life) and for the origin of
life (in some iteration of the oscillatory universe the first living
cell will indeed appear by pure chance, even if it is 1 in 10^10^11).

In other words, even if it turned out that the universe we inhabit is
indeed extremely unlikely in itself, one will always be able to use
the oscillatory model to argue that this is not evidence for an
intelligent creator but only means that we happen to inhabit a very
rare iteration.

Please allow me to push this argument further. The best possible
evidence for an intelligent creator I can imagine would be for us to
discover a message within the expansion of the number pi (an idea I
took from Sagan's Contact - a highly recommended read). In fact
imagine that a supercomputer working away at computing pi, detects
some strange statistical irregularities. At closer inspection it turns
out that after the one billionth digit in base 26 the entire King
James's version of the Old and New Testament is included letter by
letter in the number pi. Under the oscillatory model even this would
not amount to evidence of an intelligent creator of the universe, but
just that we inhabit a 1 in 10^gadzillion iteration universe.

In other words, not only have we not found any evidence for the
existence of an intelligent creator, but under some plausible models
of reality such evidence is impossible.

Please allow me to push this argument further. The best possible
evidence for an intelligent creator I can imagine would be for us to
discover a message within the expansion of the number pi (an idea I
took from Sagan's Contact - a highly recommended read). In fact
imagine that a supercomputer working away at computing pi, detects
some strange statistical irregularities. At closer inspection it turns
out that after the one billionth digit in base 26 the entire King
James's version of the Old and New Testament is included letter by
letter in the number pi. Under the oscillatory model even this would
not amount to evidence of an intelligent creator of the universe, but
just that we inhabit a 1 in 10^gadzillion iteration universe.