This episode of ID the Future tells the story of how philosopher of science Stephen C. Meyer first began his quest for the origin of life. How did one of the architects of the intelligent design movement move from the oilfields of Texas to the study halls of Cambridge to pursue the mystery of where biological information originated? Listen in and find out. (MP3 file)
On this episode of ID the Future philosopher of science Stephen C. Meyer continues the story of how he became involved in intelligent design, sharing some of what he studied while at Cambridge University. What methods do scientists use to study biological origins? Is there a distinctive method of historical scientific inquiry? Meyer set off to investigate not only the history of scientific ideas about the origin of life, but also questions about the definition of science and about how scientists study and reason about ancient events in the past. Listen in and learn, and check out Dr. Meyer’s new book, Signature in the Cell, which tells more of the story, the culmination of over 20 years of study and research on the origins of life. (MP3 file)
On this episode of ID the Future CSC Director Stephen C. Meyer explains the problem that information presents to origin of life researchers within a naturalistic paradigm. Information within the cell presents a daunting challenge to Darwin’s theory — and provides significant evidence for a signature of a designing intelligence, as Meyer explains in his new book. (MP3 file)
On this episode of ID the Future philosopher of science Stephen C. Meyer responds to critics of intelligent design, such as Richard Dawkins and his book, The God Delusion. (MP3 file)
UPDATE: Welcome readers from 4Simpsons! Thanks for the link Neil!
In cosmology, we had to wait decades for the theism-friendly big bang theory to beat out atheism-friendly theories like the eternal universe model, the steady-state model, the oscillating model, etc. Piles of taxpayer money wasted trying to prove atheistic flights of fancy. But in the end, the evidence for the big bang was too much for the atheistic theories, and we beat them out.
Junk DNA
And here is another example of how atheism is bad for scientific inquiry: “Junk DNA”.
The purpose of the genome is to contain the instructions that allow the cell to build functional sequences of smaller components. If the sequences are done right, you get a folded-up protein that can be used for all kinds of things.
But what those parts of the genome that don’t code for proteins? Well, atheists have been calling them “Junk DNA” and hailing it as proof that there is no designer to life. I can remember Christian groups like Reasons to Believe predicting that a purpose for “Junk DNA” would be found. But atheists pooh-pooh’d that idea. Gee, I wonder who was right? The same people who are always right: THEISTS.
Now researchers from Princeton University and Indiana University who have been studying the genome of a pond organism have found that junk DNA may not be so junky after all. They have discovered that DNA sequences from regions of what had been viewed as the “dispensable genome” are actually performing functions that are central for the organism. They have concluded that the genes spur an almost acrobatic rearrangement of the entire genome that is necessary for the organism to grow.
…The term “junk DNA” was originally coined to refer to a region of DNA that contained no genetic information. Scientists are beginning to find, however, that much of this so-called junk plays important roles in the regulation of gene activity. No one yet knows how extensive that role may be.
She’s got a stack of other related links at the bottom of the post.
Commenter ECM also sent me this story from Cornelius Hunter’s new blog.
Excerpt:
One problem with evolution is its strong bias toward viewing everything in biology as a kludge. When a newly discovered structure is examined, evolutionists take one look and conclude it is leftover junk. After all, blind, unguided mutations and other processes just happened to produce everything we see. The evolutionist’s going in position is that biology is a fluke. We’re lucky anything works.
Hunter then cites this passage from some naturalist researchers who study “junk DNA”:
Here we have a molecule that serves an important role in how cells function and survive, but it contains these puzzling ‘junk’ sequences that don’t seem to have any apparent purpose. Our work suggests that this disorder is really a way of creating flexibility, allowing the protein to function as a molecular switch, a process that is thought to go wrong in certain diseases.
Evolution has provided researchers with convenient modular structures, areas that are repeated over and over again to make up proteins, and so we tend to dismiss the interspersed disordered sequences that don’t seem to have any definable structure. Here we show that the weak molecular interactions in a disorganized protein sequence are essential in giving this protein its unique attributes.
Know what? If you substitute “Flying Spaghetti Monster” in there for “Evolution”, it makes just as much sense! Try it! Evolution causes toothpaste to come out of the toothpaste tube when you squeeze it, and Shakespearean rhyming couplets to rhyme, and my Java code to compile. It’s all evolution!
Conclusion
Atheists, always remember this quote from agnostic NASA astronomer Robert Jastrow, regarding the progress of science:
For the scientist who has lived by his faith in the power of reason, the story ends like a bad dream. He has scaled the mountains of ignorance; he is about to conquer the highest peak; as he pulls himself over the final rock, he is greeted by a band of theologians who have been sitting there for centuries.
In the 1920s, there was no theory about a universe that begins to exist out of nothing, no fine-tuning, no DNA, no Cambrian explosion, nothing. Then science progressed, reducing atheism to a kind of childish delusion, still believed by ignorant snake-handlers and people with certain persistent moral, … ah… issues. But that’s what psychiatrists are for!
Science is always for us, it’s never for you. You have faith. Blind faith. We have all the evidence. We invented science, and every new discovery makes your materialism look more silly and naive… you bravely hold out hope for some hopeful Flying Spaghetti Monster to swoop in and rescue your atheism from the big, bad mind-independent reality. When will you grow up?
Commenter ECM alerted me to Cornelius Hunter’s new blog “Darwin’s God”. Cornelius is a software engineer like me who rose up the ranks of the firm through “sweat equity”, and was able to eventually pursue a PhD in Biophysics from the University of Illinois. I have his first book “Darwin’s God” and I read it. His thesis is basically that theological beliefs about what God would and would not do are the driving force behind evolution.
Alexander is a theist and Jones an atheist. But they both agree that God would not have created what we find in this world. Everything from programmed cell death to the extinction of so many species and the food chain points to a massive economy of death in nature. With this sort of evidence, “What kind of a designer,” asks Alexander, “are you going to end up believing in?
…According to Alexander, this problem of death and evil does not leave much room for a divine creator. Alexander concludes that God did not create the details of the world. He is thus absolved of the world’s many evils. He implemented a framework of sorts, but let unguided processes do the rest.
And here’s what the atheist evolutionist said:
As with Alexander, Jones also finds that biology does not meet with his expectations of divine creation. “The feeblest of designer,” Jones has written, could improve the design of the human eye. This and other examples, says Jones, shows that complex organs are “not the work of some great composer but of an insensible drudge: an instrument, like all others, built by a tinkerer [i.e., the evolutionary process] rather than by a trained engineer.” As with Alexander, Jones’ religious sentiment mandates some sort of evolution to be true.
So let’s think about what causes people to become evolutionists, beyond the normal answers of peer-pressure, career preservation, wanting to be thought of as smart, wanting to rebel against parents, wanting to have sex and drink alcohol, etc. Is it about science? No. It’s about knowing what God would do and observing that the world does not correspond to these ideas of what atheists think God would do.
Remember that post I wrote a while back about Christopher Hitchens’ case against God. None of his arguments against God were based on evidence, but only on his personal preferences. God wouldn’t have done it that way. God should have done it this way. I don’t like this theology. I don’t like that feature of the universe. It’s just a long-running temper tantrum against any kind of authority, regardless of the evidence.
Here’s Dawkins explaining how unobservable aliens must ave evolved, even if Dawkins doesn’t have any evidence:
He doesn’t even need to see the evidence that we evolved. He knows that God wouldn’t have created the life this way, and so the evidence is irrelevant.
Evolution and the problem of sub-optimal design
Another way that assume that evolution is true, other than childhood trauma and the desire to be morally evil, is by assuming that if material forces did not do the creating, then the design must be optimal. Now I am a software engineer, with undergraduate and graduate degrees, a published paper that I presented at the IEEE and a patent in wireless technology. My specialty is architecture. So I will tell you.
There is no such thing as an optimal design.
As part of my graduate course work, I had to study the work done at the Software Engineering Institute at the Carnegie-Mellon University. They have invented an entire methodology for designing software based on analyzing trade-offs between alternative architectural candidates. They use use case scenarios, disaster scenarios, maintenance scenarios and other scenarios in order to evaluate how well each architecture performs.
All of the architectures can satisfy the so-called “functional requirements”. But the architectures differ in their ability to satisfy non-functional requirements, the “-ilities”. These can include performance, maintainability, security, extensibility, testability, simplicity, re-usability. This is the bread and butter that software engineers like me have to deal with every day.
It is simply impossible for one architecture to have all the “ilities” because many conflict. For instance, if I want high “security” I am going to have to give up a good deal of “interoperability”. A large part of architecture is actually deciding what you are going to give up, which incidentally affects how the architecture can change in the future (i.e. usually it cannot “evolve” to conform to different “ilities”). This is all still fairly new, but we are now able to judge architectures in terms of the “ilities” they match and the “ilities” they do not match. A better understanding of the conflicts between certain “ilities” is gradually developing.
When I worked in the embedded space on operating systems like VxWorks, we regularly traded-off memory against speed. It’s the nature of the engineering business. And make no mistake – God is a software engineer. He writes code.
Conclusion
Hunter’s article concludes with this:
Have the theists sold out? Have the theists been duped? Are they afraid to stand up for themselves? Are the atheists taking over? No, no, no, and no. The theists and atheists are united in their religious beliefs about God and how he would interact with the world. They may have their differences, but regarding evolution those differences are irrelevant. Their shared religious convictions mandate evolution. Religion drives science and it matters.
I have an idea. Let’s keep religion out of science and decide how we really got here, no holds barred. Instead of blocking debates and persecuting dissent, let’s actually have a debate about origins, and not rule intelligent causes out before we look at the evidence.
WINTERY KNIGHT 