From the “What a small world” category, William Dembski points to Eshel Ben-Jacob as “someone you should know”. There are a couple good quotes if you want to check out the post. Funny — I do know him, and spent…

I think you don’t understand the arguments or the material if you think — as you wrote — “In fact I don’t really understand why it’s so objectionable to atheists since an intelligent designer of life on earth could have evolved through material mechanisms and worked consistently through known physical laws. Arthur C. Clarke put it succinctly when he said ‘Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.’ I can’t see anything in the nature of life’s design that defies logic or law and moves it into the realm of magic.”

(1) Nobody is advocating “magic” in advocating “intelligent design”: what is being advocated is that the term “natural selection” is itself an oxymoron. “Nature” does not “select” anything — and if it does, I’d be interested (as two examples) for you to demonstrate how nature selected survivors for the tsunami earlier this year, or is in the process of selecting survivors to the AIDS epidemic.

(2) That said, placing the causitive agency down one turtle doesn’t feather the nest of materialism. I’m sure you’ve heard Stephen Hawking’s anecdote of the old woman who told a famous scientist that what the Earth rests on is the back of a giant turtle, and that it is “turtles all the way down”. His point, of course, was that either the old woman or the scientist is wrong — and that is the case with ID versus any of the cousins in the family of evolution theories. If there is a creator for life on Earth, it doesn’t really answer the question to say, as you did, “an intelligent designer of life on earth is technologically feasible”. Pray tell, my friend: if life here was designed by a life form from another place here in the universe during what you call “a geological timespan”, what is the origin of that life? If it is turtles all the way down, simply say so. I will be glad to place the existence of my turtle against the “feasibility” of your turtle every day of the week.

(3) One of the striking characteristics of the essay posted here by Dr. Dembski is the contrast the author makes between the matter of possibility or speculation and demonstrable causation. Your responses simply overlook that distinction. The question is not “is it possible to come up with an metaphysical rube goldberg machine which removes the necessity of a creator in the way things in our universe work” but “does the evidence in-hand demonstrate that life requires design to exist at all”?

I’m not sure pointing these things out to you will change your mind. However, there you go. Be well.

Since that trip, I’ve read Lynn Margulis’ “Acquired Genome”, which proposes “symbiogenesis” as evolution’s driving force; and Goldschmidt’s “Material Basis for Evolution”, the 1940 classic. There he suggests that “macroevolution” is driven by “systemic mutations”, which are, more or less, changes in the chromosomal patterns within organisms; i.e., “micromutations” are simply Mendelian permutations of “alleles” (although Goldschmidt rejects the idea of the particulate (bead-like) nature of the gene–subsequently vindicated), whereas “macromuations” arise because subunits of chromosomal strands have re-arranged themselves. He writes, for example, that the difference between the male and female of many, if not most, animal species, is at the level of “macromutational” change; and, of course, this is due to “chromosomal” differences.

Anyway, I’m intrigued that Dave Scott is an agnostic. It seems to prove my point that, in the end, every person will be left to believe or not. God wouldn’t have it any other way. He doesn’t push Himself on us.

I think the ribosome is the ultimate testimony to irreducible complexity and complex specified information. The flagellum is trivial in comparative complexity but to give credit where credit is due, the flagella’s structure is more readily understood due to widespread understanding of motors and propellers whereas the ribomsome is most like a computer controlled 3D milling machine programmed to make all the parts required to build a duplicate of itself. I’m just partial to the ribosome because I’m a computer design engineer and understand all aspects of computer controlled machinery. The Darwinian replacement hypothesis that parts of the flagellum evolved for different purposes and were co-opted to make a locomotive device is ludicrous. That’s like saying a tornado ripping through a junkyard filled with refrigerators could produce an automobile. A clever engineer could scavenge parts from refrigerators to make an automobile but absent intelligent design it’s patently absurd on the face of it. Who do these Darwinian apologists think they’re fooling? It boggles the mind that trained scientists can glom onto such absurdities and keep a straight face. Maybe they can’t and that’s why they boycotted the Kansas hearings.

And this bible-toting image of ID proponents is exceedingly egregious to me. I’m an agnostic and ID is perfectly suited to that world view. In fact I don’t really understand why it’s so objectionable to atheists since an intelligent designer of life on earth could have evolved through material mechanisms and worked consistently through known physical laws. Arthur C. Clarke put it succinctly when he said “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” I can’t see anything in the nature of life’s design that defies logic or law and moves it into the realm of magic. An intelligent designer of life on earth is technologically feasible. How long before rational man himself can design life and seed a planet with it? At the rate we’re progressing it will only be an eyeblink on a geological timespan – if we don’t cause our own extinction before we get that far.

Speaking of what’s physically possible, has everyone here read “Engines of Creation” by K. Eric Drexler? I think it’s required background reading for anyone with an interest in nanotechnology and the limits of the physically possible. I read it in hardback in 1987 and consider it in the top few most important books I’ve ever read. It’s now freely available online here:

http://www.foresight.org/EOC/