Tag Archives: Design

News

California Senate minority leader launches probe of ID censorship

Leave a comment

Story from Evolution News.

Excerpt:

California Senate Minority Leader Dennis Hollingsworth has sent a letter to the California Science Center (CSC) requesting documents related to the Center’s cancellation of a screening last October of the pro-intelligent design documentary “Darwin’s Dilemma.” The screening was sponsored by the American Freedom Alliance (AFA), a private group that had rented the Center’s IMAX theater.

Senator Hollingsworth’s letter follows two lawsuits filed against the state government-operated Science Center charging that it violated both the First Amendment and California’s open records law in its effort to stop the screening and then cover up the real story behind the cancellation.

“The constitutional implications of [the Science Center’s] actions are concerning” wrote Senator Hollingsworth in the letter, citing various court decisions protecting private parties against viewpoint discrimination. “It is fundamental that when a governmental entity or sub-unit (such as CSC) opens its facilities as a public forum, it is not constitutionally permissible to censor speech based on viewpoint or content.”

Hide the decline, Darwin-style.

Mentoring

Does God exist? Is there any scientific evidence to prove that God exists?

4 Comments

Since I haven’t talked about science in a while, I thought that now would be a good time to list some of the more common arguments for a Creator and Designer of the universe and/or intelligent life. I like to use arguments drawn from mainstream science that do not assume the Bible or inerrancy or anything specifically religious. The arguments below all show that the reality we live in exhibits effects in nature that are not explained by particles in motion, chance and the operation of natural laws.

First, here’s the list of a few of the better-known arguments:

The average knuckle-dragging atheist will not be familiar with any of these arguments, will have never seen them used in academic debates, and will not even click through to read about them. That’s atheism these days – it’s non-cognitive. Atheism is all about escaping from moral values and moral obligations, which are not even rationally grounded by atheism.

The point of being familiar with these arguments is to show that religion and science are virtually identical. Both are trying to explain the external world. Both are bound by the laws of logic. Both use evidence to verify and falsify claims. For example, the discovery of the origin of the universe falsifies Hinduism, Buddhism and Mormonism, but it leaves Christianity, Islam and Judaism unscathed. All religions make truth claims and those claims can be tested against what science tells us about the world.

What is the significance of scientific progress for Christians?

Some general points to know when presenting these arguments.

1. You need to emphasize that atheism is in full flight away from the progress of science. Each of these arguments has gotten stronger as the evidence grew and grew. For example, scientists had to be forced to turn away from the eternal universe as new discoveries arrived, such as the cosmic microwave background radiation measurements. Scientists had to turn away from the view that the cosmological constants are nothing special, as more and more fine-tuned quantities were discovered.

2. Christians need to pay attention in school and score top grades in mathematics and experimental sciences. Science is God-friendly, and we need to have Christians doing cutting edge research in the best labs at the universities. Think of the work done by Doug Axe at Cambridge University in which he was able to publish research showing that very few sequences of amino acids have biological function, so getting functional sequences at random is virtually impossible. One of Doug’s papers is here. We need more people like him.

3. Each of these arguments needs to be studied in the context of polemics and debates. The best way to present each of these arguments is by presenting them as a struggle against opposing forces. For example, when talking about the big bang, emphasize how atheists kept trying to come up with eternal universe speculations. When talking about the fine-tuning, talk about the unobservable multiverse. When talking about irreducible complexity, talk about the co-option fallacy. Don’t preach – teach the controversy.

4. Don’t make lazy excuses about how scientific evidence doesn’t persuade non-Christians. Science is absolutely the core of any argument for Christianity, along with the case for the resurrection of Jesus. Christianity is about knowledge. Christians who refuse to subject their faith to science are probably just trying to make sure that Christianity isn’t so true that it dictates how they should live. They like the uncertainty of blind faith, because it preserves their autonomy to disregard Christian moral teachings when it suits them.

5. The purpose of linking your Christian faith to scientific arguments is to demonstrate to non-Christians that Christianity is real. It is not a personal preference. It is not something you grew up with. It is not something you inherited from your parents. When you link your Christian faith with scientific facts in the external world, you are declaring to non-Christians that Christianity is testable and binding on everyone who shares the objective reality we live in. You can’t expect people to act Christianly without showing that Christianity is objectively true.

6. Scientific arguments are tremendously useful even for believing Christians, because sometimes it is difficult to act in a Christian way when your emotions are telling you not to. When your feelings make it hard for you to behave Christianly, that is when scientific evidence can come into play in order to rationally justify acts of self-denial and self-sacrifice. For example, scientific evidence for the existence of God is a helpful counterbalance to the problem of apparently gratuitous evil, which often discourages Christians.

My complete index of arguments for and against Christian theism is here.

UPDATE: I notice that in the popular culture, people are not really aware of these arguments, and are still arguing for religious faith based on pragmatism and personal experience, not on evidence. Using reason and evidence is much better, and it’s what the Bible teaches, too.

Commentary

How do we know that some parts of DNA really are non-functional?

Leave a comment

ECM sent me this post from Uncommon Descent about DNA and software design.

Perhaps I should begin by explaining explaining how software is made. The customer gives you a list of use case, which are descriptions of things that you expect the finished software to do. This list of expected system behaviors is called the “functional requirements”. There are also “non-functional requirements” that the user will not see, such as how easily the components of the system can be maintained or tested.

Now consider the post by William Dembski. He writes:

One of the main arguments to support evolution appeals to shared non-functional structures between organisms. Since design entails design for function, shared non-functional structures would suggest common ancestry in the absence of common design. But how can we tell whether something is truly non-functional?

Then he cites an e-mail sent to him by a software engineer, who explains how a lot of code is included to address exception handling and non-functional concerns.

As a programmer, sometimes I spend a lot of time designing error-detection and/or error-correction algorithms (especially for dealing with user input). Some of these functions may never, ever be used in a real-life situation. There are also various subroutines and functions that provide either exotic or minor capabilities that, likewise, maybe be used very seldom if at all. But they are there for a reason. Good programming practice requires considerable extra design and implementation of features that may only rarely, if ever, be used.

If someone were to cut out and eliminate these sections of code, repairing what’s left so that the program still functions, the program may work perfectly well for just about all situations. But there are some situations that, without the snipped code, would create havoc if the program tried to call on a function that was no longer there or that was replaced by some different function that tried to take its place. (Ask yourself what percent of the functionality of your spreadsheet or word processor program you use, and then ask if you would even notice if some of the lesser-known functionality were removed.)

I think biological life is like that. It seems to me that if some DNA code can be successfully removed with no apparent effects, one possibility is that the removed portion is rarely used, or the impact of it not being there has effects that are masked or otherwise hidden.

Perhaps redundancy is what was removed, meaning the organism will now not be quite as robust in all situations as before. I can give a kidney to someone else and suffer no ill effect whatsoever… until my remaining kidney fails and cannot be helped by the redundant one that I gave up (which situation may never, ever really occur due to my general good health).

P.S. Being able to snip something with no apparent ill effect may in fact provide support for ID by showing that the system was so well engineered that it could automatically adjust to a certain degree, and in most cases completely (apparently). It would be interesting to see some ID research into some of the evo cases that are being used to support the various flavors of junk DNA, to see what REALLY happens long term with the new variety now missing something snipped.

Sometimes, I forget that most of the world is trying to assess where biological systems are designed without knowing what engineers know about how the process of engineering.

Consider the example of implementing caching in order to reduce the frequency of network and database calls. Making a call to a remote system over a network can be very slow if there is lot of traffic congestion. The same thing applies to reading from a database or the file system. Engineers have invented a solution to this problem called “caching”. This basically means keeping the data you use the most often, or the most recently, in memory. It helps you to avoid looking up the same data over and over.

Notice that caching doesn’t do anything for the functional requirements. Instead, engineers are writing a whole bunch of code to address a non-functional requirement: performance. That caching code still has to be designed, written and tested, but the user will never see it produce any external behavior. In fact, the user will not be aware of the caching module at all!