> > Which again raises the question: Where did the information in DNA/RNA come from. Since we find it in the simplest organisms it had to be there with the first life.
> > > 
> 
> But we know the origins question lies in the middle ground between organic and biochem. However it arose.-Information in code requires an underlying code language to develop first, which then can be encoded or decoded. Code must be applied to the language which already exists. You haven't answered how that might work in the interval between organic and biochemical. I have no answer and think the question is unanswerable, unless language comes first and coding second. And then the issue of mistake correction. Evolution goes nowhere if trranslation is 99% correct. It needs to be 99.9999% or better. Did the correction modules exist from the moment early translation began? And how about the epigenetic rapid-change modules. Were they present in the earliest organisms at 3.5 bya when the Earth was still cooling, asteroids were still bombarding and volcanic activity was still in violent eruptions? All of the genome suite must be present or it won't work.
> 
 As far as I am concerned and comfortable with, He is concealed.
> > > 
> 
> On who's authority and knowledge? What makes your claim stronger and better than your Hasidic counterparts, -I'm so far from a Hasid in thinking. My sideburns could never curl! ) -
> > > A better question is to ask you how you know God is concealed? Where is the evidence of this? Where did you get this information? -My answer is no one has found Him far and proved it by any means, epecially the ones you demand. The only proof as I think about it is a negative proof: design is the only way that can work in the finite time alloted, given the two choices of random chance or design. 
> 
> I'm content to state that He is a universal intelligence at a quantum level of reality, which we can't get to anyway.
 
> 
> On a personal level, believing in Leprechauns is just as fair.- 
We know Leprechauns don't exist in any form, except imagination. I have given you reasons why I think design is the only way to go in understanding evolution. 
> 
> You should rephrase that as "Can I decode your thoughts?" Thoughts can be detected, we just don't understand the coding principle behind it. In my estimation this has never been done, so either God doesn't influence the world or...-You are correct, 'decode' is a better way of stating my point. PET scans will never find God any more than further scans will ever interpret thought, only detect it. -I don't know of anyone who has declared that God, if He exists, is detectable by any method, other than by disproving any other source of what we observe in reality.


> > you need to detect the intelligence you claim, otherwise it's a "lazy induction." What other processes in the world do we accept claims with as little direct evidence? 
> 
> I'm not inducting anything. Except for Abraham and the burning bush, God doesn't appear much. But since I don't except the fairy tales in the Bible, I know we won't find the bush's ashes anywhere. I don't need to do what you need to do. I'm very content with my position. God is concealed, and He wants it that way. You need absolute proof, I don't.
> > > 
> > > The argument about chance is time vs. chance. Chance stumbles along slowly. Is there anough time to have all the mutations and other layers of the genome create what we now see in the tme allotted? My argument is: were did that speed come from, just as the Cambrian raises the same issue in spades?
> > > 
> > 
> > If chance "stumbles along slowly" then why do cryptographers use it to solve some problems in a more rapid manner?
> 
> Again a simplistic answer that doesn't explain the speed of the Cambrian Explosion. Cryptographers can use huge computers and use some approaches at random and de-code or en-code at will.
> -Touche, but unanswered is the challenge to the increase of information via a random process. -> 
> >
> > And if you learn more about mathematical chaos theory, you also learn that some things simply *appear* random. 
> 
> I read a couple books on Chaos and I know your point. Butterfly effect, fractal formulas, etc., but chance is by definition at random, as I view it.
> 
> 
> >
> > That recent finding in network coding is going to reap big rewards and I think that it can be applied to biological information transfer as well. 
> 
> Which again raises the question: Where did the information in DNA/RNA come from. Since we find it in the simplest organisms it had to be there with the first life.
> > -But we know the origins question lies in the middle ground between organic and biochem. However it arose. -> > 
> > > As for proving the 'intelligence' behind all this, God is concealed. 
> > 
> > A euphemism for "God works in mysterious ways..."
> 
> That is your interpretation, not mine. As far as I am concerned and comfortable with, He is concealed.
> > -On who's authority and knowledge? What makes your claim stronger and better than your Hasidic counterparts, when it is ultimately based on a "lack" of evidence? And don't give me the cop out that its your personal belief only, we've advanced it into public scrutiny at this point. I want to hear your answer on this. How is your claim to theistic knowledge any superior?-> > A better question is to ask you how you know God is concealed? Where is the evidence of this? Where did you get this information? 
> > -> God is not creation. He is God. Creation was the big Bang. I don't understand the question. 
> > -Again, on who's authority? As for the deeper question, if you assert that God influences life, then you have to demonstrate the physical nature of God, plain and simple. -> > I've pieced together Adler's argument from how he reasoned in "The Difference..." and it isn't a logical conclusion to draw; if God has a physical component--and you're directly suggesting this--then you need to demonstrate it, plain and simple, or it isn't acceptable to believe it. 
> 
> It is acceptable for me to believe it. I'm content to state that He is a universal intelligence at a quantum level of reality, which we can't get to anyway.
> > -On a personal level, believing in Leprechauns is just as fair. But this is the realm of public discourse: Why should I be convinced? I've gotten more of a "divine influence" while reading about my ancestors' gods, why is yours any better? -> > If God influences the world still, there will be evidence of it. Anything that happens in our physical world is detectable, and if God exists and interacts--there WILL be direct evidence for it. Otherwise it's more likely that if a theism exists it'll be of my old Deist type.
> 
> Can you detect my thoughts? They happen in MY physical world, but hidden from YOUR physical world.-You should rephrase that as "Can I decode your thoughts?" Thoughts can be detected, we just don't understand the coding principle behind it. The physical component is what can be detected on PET scans. I won't go so far as to say that the story ends there, but I'd like to think so. If God influences the world we should be able to trace a physical phenomenon just like PET scans. In my estimation this has never been done, so either God doesn't influence the world or...


> you need to detect the intelligence you claim, otherwise it's a "lazy induction." What other processes in the world do we accept claims with as little direct evidence? -I'm not inducting anything. Except for Abraham and the burning bush, God doesn't appear much. But since I don't except the fairy tales in the Bible, I know we won't find the bush's ashes anywhere. I don't need to do what you need to do. I'm very content with my position. God is concealed, and He wants it that way. You need absolute proof, I don't.
> > 
> > The argument about chance is time vs. chance. Chance stumbles along slowly. Is there anough time to have all the mutations and other layers of the genome create what we now see in the tme allotted? My argument is: were did that speed come from, just as the Cambrian raises the same issue in spades?
> > 
> 
> If chance "stumbles along slowly" then why do cryptographers use it to solve some problems in a more rapid manner?-Again a simplistic answer that doesn't explain the speed of the Cambrian Explosion. Cryptographers can use huge computers and use some approaches at random and de-code or en-code at will.-
>
> And if you learn more about mathematical chaos theory, you also learn that some things simply *appear* random. -I read a couple books on Chaos and I know your point. Butterfly effect, fractal formulas, etc., but chance is by definition at random, as I view it.-
>
> That recent finding in network coding is going to reap big rewards and I think that it can be applied to biological information transfer as well. -Which again raises the question: Where did the information in DNA/RNA come from. Since we find it in the simplest organisms it had to be there with the first life.
> 
> 
> > As for proving the 'intelligence' behind all this, God is concealed. 
> 
> A euphemism for "God works in mysterious ways..."-That is your interpretation, not mine. As far as I am concerned and comfortable with, He is concealed.
> 
> A better question is to ask you how you know God is concealed? Where is the evidence of this? Where did you get this information? 
> 
> This is where the 'leap of faith' comes from. There will never be the proof you want. Only Adler's approach 'by a preponderance of evidence', which, by the intelligence concealment, means it is a positive proof that chance can't work in the time allotted and therefore, negatively, since design is the only other choice, there must be an intelligence doing its job somewhere. I think that won't satisfy you, and I don't think you will ever satisfy yourself. There will never be hard proof. I've accepted that as did Adler.
> 
> We're getting into theological hot water here. Why hide creation? Especially if God had no idea where things were going to take it like you or dhw has suggested. The only reason to hide something is if you have a plan and don't want someone to find out. I'd find it more likely that creation got away from him. -God is not creation. He is God. Creation was the big Bang. I don't understand the question. 
> 
> I've pieced together Adler's argument from how he reasoned in "The Difference..." and it isn't a logical conclusion to draw; if God has a physical component--and you're directly suggesting this--then you need to demonstrate it, plain and simple, or it isn't acceptable to believe it. -It is acceptable for me to believe it. I'm content to state that He is a universal intelligence at a quantum level of reality, which we can't get to anyway.
> 
> If God influences the world still, there will be evidence of it. Anything that happens in our physical world is detectable, and if God exists and interacts--there WILL be direct evidence for it. Otherwise it's more likely that if a theism exists it'll be of my old Deist type.-Can you detect my thoughts? They happen in MY physical world, but hidden from YOUR physical world.


> > > > Only if scientists were able to prove through experiments that the components really could assemble themselves spontaneously (though "experiments" and "spontaneity" sound like a contradiction in terms), would materialists have a positive case. Otherwise, it's one faith versus another. 
> > > 
> > > 
> > > Even if scientists develop a way to produce life directly from inorganic material, it does not prove that this is the way it originally happened. It may be a parallel method. It only proves that human intelligence can produce life.
> > > 
> > 
> > So in other words, even if they manage to demonstrate that such systems were around some 4 billion years ago, it still couldn't be chance? I would say that at some point we'd have to let intelligence go as a cause. At what point would that be David, at what point would you be willing to set aside a designer?
> 
> I'd have to see a preponderance of proof that chance can accomplish it. 
> > 
> > It took intelligence and great ingenuity for man to be able to create lightning, but does that still mean that lightning requires a mind to happen naturally?
> 
> Lightning is simple stuff. Bad example.
> 
> Again, you misunderstand the point: we weren't there when life began. We can never relive it. Any production of life from inorganic matter by human intelligence is a method invented by human intelligence. It may not match the original method at all, or it might, but we can never know if it does. All that will be proven is intelligence, given the material at hand can create living matter. And remember starting with building blocks from living matter does not count. Currently science is working backward, the only way it can, but there are no guideposts. Did you read the quote I gave from Shapiro? He thinks most scientists in the field are on the worng track.-And his quote underlines the fact that it is a damn shame that it isn't a question that attracts more brilliant minds, whether or not it recreates the process or not.


> > This might be considered semantic, but as you stated that you aren't a "great statistician" I feel I need to make this point. First, constraints make things more likely to happen, not less. I've yet to see a formal statistical treatment on the odds that you use all the time.
> 
> For statistics you'd have to read the books I've read or the quotes in my book.
> 
> In fact I read all the time and definitions of degrees of freedom include restraint as you say, but an article I just reviewed, from my interest in the Climategate scandal, was entited, "Degrees of Freedom at Copenhagan", and explained why the restraints made it fail. So I am continue to be confused by advanced mathematical terms.
> -I would have to read the formals--as you can expect, the general methods of statistics allow you to play logic games to your heart's content. There's an unlimited number of ways to phrase a question in order to match that "if A then NOT B" and that's where I suspect the constraints come into play with the climate issue. -> 
> > 
> > The two pieces of evidence you provide simply state that evolution can happen incredibly quickly--there is no formal justification to make the kind of conclusion that you make here. You need to do more than state that the current explanation is incomplete, you need to detect the intelligence you claim, otherwise it's a "lazy induction." What other processes in the world do we accept claims with as little direct evidence?
> 
> The argument about chance is time vs. chance. Chance stumbles along slowly. Is there anough time to have all the mutations and other layers of the genome create what we now see in the tme allotted? My argument is: were did that speed come from, just as the Cambrian raises the same issue in spades?
> -If chance "stumbles along slowly" then why do cryptographers use it to solve some problems in a more rapid manner? Why does a purely random selection of three different weak signals result in better reception? And if you learn more about mathematical chaos theory, you also learn that some things simply *appear* random. Maybe its just the different paths we have, but I don't see this as a black/white issue as you appear to. That recent finding in network coding is going to reap big rewards and I think that it can be applied to biological information transfer as well. -
> As for proving the 'intelligence' behind all this, God is concealed. -A euphemism for "God works in mysterious ways..."-A better question is to ask you how you know God is concealed? Where is the evidence of this? Where did you get this information? -This is where the 'leap of faith' comes from. There will never be the proof you want. Only Adler's approach 'by a preponderance of evidence', which, by the intelligence concealment, means it is a positive proof that chance can't work in the time allotted and therefore, negatively, since design is the only other choice, there must be an intelligence doing its job somewhere. I think that won't satisfy you, and I don't think you will ever satisfy yourself. There will never be hard proof. I've accepted that as did Adler.-We're getting into theological hot water here. Why hide creation? Especially if God had no idea where things were going to take it like you or dhw has suggested. The only reason to hide something is if you have a plan and don't want someone to find out. I'd find it more likely that creation got away from him. -I've pieced together Adler's argument from how he reasoned in "The Difference..." and it isn't a logical conclusion to draw; if God has a physical component--and you're directly suggesting this--then you need to demonstrate it, plain and simple, or it isn't acceptable to believe it. I will reiterate that there is no other phenomenon in existence that we use this method of argument for, it directly attempts to use empiricism to back up a non-empirical claim. Adler comes from the Aristotelian line of thinking that it is enough to be able to reason about a phenomenon, that empiricism is optional. -If God influences the world still, there will be evidence of it. Anything that happens in our physical world is detectable, and if God exists and interacts--there WILL be direct evidence for it. Otherwise it's more likely that if a theism exists it'll be of my old Deist type.


> This might be considered semantic, but as you stated that you aren't a "great statistician" I feel I need to make this point. First, constraints make things more likely to happen, not less. I've yet to see a formal statistical treatment on the odds that you use all the time.-For statistics you'd have to read the books I've read or the quotes in my book.- In fact I read all the time and definitions of degrees of freedom include restraint as you say, but an article I just reviewed, from my interest in the Climategate scandal, was entited, "Degrees of Freedom at Copenhagan", and explained why the restraints made it fail. So I am continue to be confused by advanced mathematical terms.- 
> 
> The two pieces of evidence you provide simply state that evolution can happen incredibly quickly--there is no formal justification to make the kind of conclusion that you make here. You need to do more than state that the current explanation is incomplete, you need to detect the intelligence you claim, otherwise it's a "lazy induction." What other processes in the world do we accept claims with as little direct evidence?-The argument about chance is time vs. chance. Chance stumbles along slowly. Is there anough time to have all the mutations and other layers of the genome create what we now see in the tme allotted? My argument is: were did that speed come from, just as the Cambrian raises the same issue in spades?-As for proving the 'intelligence' behind all this, God is concealed. This is where the 'leap of faith' comes from. There will never be the proof you want. Only Adler's approach 'by a preponderance of evidence', which, by the intelligence concealment, means it is a positive proof that chance can't work in the time allotted and therefore, negatively, since design is the only other choice, there must be an intelligence doing its job somewhere. I think that won't satisfy you, and I don't think you will ever satisfy yourself. There will never be hard proof. I've accepted that as did Adler.


> > > Only if scientists were able to prove through experiments that the components really could assemble themselves spontaneously (though "experiments" and "spontaneity" sound like a contradiction in terms), would materialists have a positive case. Otherwise, it's one faith versus another. 
> > 
> > 
> > Even if scientists develop a way to produce life directly from inorganic material, it does not prove that this is the way it originally happened. It may be a parallel method. It only proves that human intelligence can produce life.
> > 
> 
> So in other words, even if they manage to demonstrate that such systems were around some 4 billion years ago, it still couldn't be chance? I would say that at some point we'd have to let intelligence go as a cause. At what point would that be David, at what point would you be willing to set aside a designer?-I'd have to see a preponderance of proof that chance can accomplish it. 
> 
> It took intelligence and great ingenuity for man to be able to create lightning, but does that still mean that lightning requires a mind to happen naturally?-Lightning is simple stuff. Bad example.-Again, you misunderstand the point: we weren't there when life began. We can never relive it. Any production of life from inorganic matter by human intelligence is a method invented by human intelligence. It may not match the original method at all, or it might, but we can never know if it does. All that will be proven is intelligence, given the material at hand can create living matter. And remember starting with building blocks from living matter does not count. Currently science is working backward, the only way it can, but there are no guideposts. Did you read the quote I gave from Shapiro? He thinks most scientists in the field are on the worng track.


> > Only if scientists were able to prove through experiments that the components really could assemble themselves spontaneously (though "experiments" and "spontaneity" sound like a contradiction in terms), would materialists have a positive case. Otherwise, it's one faith versus another. 
> 
> 
> Even if scientists develop a way to produce life directly from inorganic material, it does not prove that this is the way it originally happened. It may be a parallel method. It only proves that human intelligence can produce life.
> -So in other words, even if they manage to demonstrate that such systems were around some 4 billion years ago, it still couldn't be chance? I would say that at some point we'd have to let intelligence go as a cause. At what point would that be David, at what point would you be willing to set aside a designer? -It took intelligence and great ingenuity for man to be able to create lightning, but does that still mean that lightning requires a mind to happen naturally?


> > On the other hand I still don't see how a chance process can get where we are today. The degrees of freedom then reach infinity.
> 
> No, because it isn't possible for say, an amino acid to spontaneously convert to benzene or some other component; there is a stiff restriction in the degrees of freedom here. Plants also don't spontaneously sprout legs and move. There are restrictions on the degrees of freedom, and they can be enumerated.-I must apologize, I mispoke in the use of the term 'degrees of freedom'. I'm not a great statistician as you know. The restrictions of degree of freedom really make my point as I view it. Like Gould, I view evolution as a series of contingencies. The more restrictions at each step, the slower the process. This eats up much of the available time for life to appear, or to get from original life to us. 
> 
> All this boils down to, if a design hypothesis is valid, we must be able to differentiate it from chance, which becomes harder and harder to do the more randomness allowed in a given scenario, and the more restriction faced via degrees of freedom, the harder to argue intelligence over chance. (Or chance over intelligence.) -I would state just the opposite,. Degrees of freedom limit the probabilities that chance alone can get the evolution process from inorganic material to us. If DNA is designed to push forward, with all the layers of epigenetic help that have turned up, in place, that solves the problem of limited time. Darwin and Einstein thought the universe was eternal. Hubble changed all that. The Darwin theory developed against that background of belief. George's recent post indicating that eukaryotic cells (with nucleus) developed at 3.2 billion years ago, is startling, a tremendous speed in covering that step toward multicellar organisms. I still find the Cambrian Explosian even more startling. Both points support my idea of a driving force behind evolution built into the genome, that is, design.


> Only if scientists were able to prove through experiments that the components really could assemble themselves spontaneously (though "experiments" and "spontaneity" sound like a contradiction in terms), would materialists have a positive case. Otherwise, it's one faith versus another. -
 Even if scientists develop a way to produce life directly from inorganic material, it does not prove that this is the way it originally happened. It may be a parallel method. It only proves that human intelligence can produce life.-Look at this article. Science has advanced to the point where a group of RNAzymes can feed and reproduce with some changes. Whether or not those changes are beneficial is not being tested against a challenge. Natural selection can only test life, not pre-life chemicals.-http://www.cosmosmagazine.com/news/3325/life-evolution-a-test-tube -
Dr. Robert Shapiro, a self-declared agnostic and opponent of ID theories, wrote the following in his book Planetary Dreams (page 102) in 1999 regarding the future engineering of self sustained RNA systems:-"When that event takes place, the media probably will announce it as the demonstration of a crucial step in the origin of life. I would agree with one modification. The concept that the scientists are illustrating is one of Intelligent Design. No better term can be applied to a quest in which chemists are attempting to prepare a living system in the laboratory, using all the ingenuity and technical resources at their disposal...the search for ribozymes invokes the same feeling of achievement and beauty in me that I get when I see a skilled golfer playing a difficult course at well under par. To imagine that related events could take place on their own appears as likely as the idea that the golf ball could play its own way around the course without the golfer."-
On 1/26/2010, Dr. Shapiro posted the following comment to an article by Carl Zimmer on the SCIENCE Magazine website under the heading "Origins, a history of begnnings". "Despite the clarity of his prose, Carl Zimmer has fallen into a trap that has impeded progress in the origin of life field for the last half century. He has confused the process of total organic synthesis with the abiotic chemical reactions that may have taken place on the early Earth. Total synthesis involves the preparation by skilled chemists in laboratories of substances that we isolate from biology. The late Nobel Laureate Robert Burns Woodward was a master of this endeavor... On the early earth, however, there were neither chemists nor laboratories. No driving force has been demonstrated that would direct complex mixtures of organic chemicals of modest size to assemble themselves into a functional RNA. According to Gerald Joyce and the late Leslie Orgel, such an event would constitute a near miracle..." (Taken from Uncomon Descent, 2/21/10)-
I certainly agree. What we are seeing in the work done on RNAzymes is intelligence at work, human intelligence. It is an enormous jump from inorganic molecules, lying around, to a feedback mechanism supplying energy to organic compounds (amino acids) that can then receive the energy to combine in a non-enzyme world, to the appearance of simple enzymes, to finally some RNAzyme. Again, the probabilities against this are enormous, looking to chance as the only mechanism.


> > If you assert that life was designed, your overall problem to solve is to demonstrate that randomness simply doesn't exist in the internal process; you have to prove that life *always* goes in the *intelligent* direction. But there's many complexities to this, and I will try to illuminate what I think are the valid points. 
> > 
> > 1. You have to prove that the underlying system has a distinct goal in mind.
> > 
> > 2. You have to prove that their is a large number of possible actions (degrees of freedom) to reach the goal. 
> 
> 
> But it appears to me that there is randomness in the process, if not in the directionality. In the application of convergence, for example, there are 5-6 different type of eyes, not to talk about different forms of light-sensing spots. What if there is an internal guidance system to direct the evolutionary process toward the goal of H. sapiens? But the system allows random attempts to get there? That gives us a fixed non-random control mechanism at the core of the process, but randomness in seeking the goal. 
> 
> On the other hand I still don't see how a chance process can get where we are today. The degrees of freedom then reach infinity.-No, because it isn't possible for say, an amino acid to spontaneously convert to benzene or some other component; there is a stiff restriction in the degrees of freedom here. Plants also don't spontaneously sprout legs and move. There are restrictions on the degrees of freedom, and they can be enumerated. -All this boils down to, if a design hypothesis is valid, we must be able to differentiate it from chance, which becomes harder and harder to do the more randomness allowed in a given scenario, and the more restriction faced via degrees of freedom, the harder to argue intelligence over chance. (Or chance over intelligence.) The system becomes a tangle of vicious knots that restrict what we can ultimately say about the system under investigation.


> If you assert that life was designed, your overall problem to solve is to demonstrate that randomness simply doesn't exist in the internal process; you have to prove that life *always* goes in the *intelligent* direction. But there's many complexities to this, and I will try to illuminate what I think are the valid points. 
> 
> 1. You have to prove that the underlying system has a distinct goal in mind.
> 
> 2. You have to prove that their is a large number of possible actions (degrees of freedom) to reach the goal. -
But it appears to me that there is randomness in the process, if not in the directionality. In the application of convergence, for example, there are 5-6 different type of eyes, not to talk about different forms of light-sensing spots. What if there is an internal guidance system to direct the evolutionary process toward the goal of H. sapiens? But the system allows random attempts to get there? That gives us a fixed non-random control mechanism at the core of the process, but randomness in seeking the goal. -On the other hand I still don't see how a chance process can get where we are today. The degrees of freedom then reach infinity.