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« Christian Worldview Resources | Main | Unbelievable Unbelief »

March 04, 2010

Comments

Comment on Part 1: belief may be based on sampling of predicted results, not indoctrination. Road atlases do not show the original research of the surveyors, but in my sampling of them, they tend to be reliable in indicating the existence of places I have never been too before.

Later comments after I have listened to parts 2, 3, 4, and 5.

I meant, "to", not "too".

Excellent presentation by Meyer. I love hearing his gracious responses when he is given time to give them as he is in this interview/dialogue.

Comment on Part 2:

I was hoping that when Meyer introduced his book _Signature in the Cell_ he would talk about the nonfunctionality of a signature. The signature on a painting is not part of the functionality of the painting, it is the identifying mark of its Maker. So I would look for something nonfunctional as evidence for design.

Three more parts to go.

Comment on Part 3.

Why does information have to come from an intelligent source? Rocks left behind by a glacier provide information about glacial movements and the source matrix from which the rocks were hewn. Gold placer deposits give information about a lode upstream.

On to Part 4.

Comment on Part 4:

The assertion that stood out to me here is that the cause of intellegence has to have greater intelligence than the intelligence of the thing that has been caused. Why do we have to believe this? Competitive markets, involving many buyers and sellers, tend to be better predictors of events than the individual buyers or sellers. That is because the market has more information than any individual buyer or seller has. Command economies seem to me to fit the concept of "design" better than do the market economies. But they don't perform better.

One to go.

Part 5.

I think that this is saying that at the cosmological singularity there is no longer an equivalence of matter and energy. And there was a mention about transcendence making something bigger than the whole universe. One can generate a singularity by shining a light into a half-filled coffee cup. Technical name: caustic. I think that transcendence is an attribute of singularities, but does that imply something outside the universe?

I'm getting pretty loopy here, but my loopiness is no greater than the loopiness of Part 5.

That is unfortunately what you get when non-scientists write books trying to talk about science.

http://sfmatheson.blogspot.com/


"Why does information have to come from an intelligent source?"

I was wondering the same thing after I read your complex specified information or better known as your posts.

I wasn't sure if the information typed by 'Johnnie' was a result of monkeys randomly typing on keyboards or there really was an intelligent source behind it.

What about information gathered by meteorologists? Every day they gather vast amounts of information; air pressure, wind speed, wind direction, and yet this does not come from the "an intelligent source," it comes from the environment. This is then used in models to make weather predictions. Likewise seismic wave data, the data that goes into the models is naturally occurring. There is no intelligent source behind its production. At least not as far as we can tell.

>>That is because the market has more information than any individual buyer or seller has. Command economies seem to me to fit the concept of "design" better than do the market economies.

The free market isn't random, it's intelligent agents making millions of intelligently designed decisions based on the availability of resources, their desires, etc.

Command economies fail because they're designed by a few people who try to manage all the information. Free markets succeed because they're designed by millions of agents, each of which acts according to a part of the information.

Amy,

I did not make the claim that the free market is random. Nor did I make the claim that all the millions of agents participated in the design of the market. To design the market, all you need is a set of rules that define the property rights in the things being traded, and a set of rules for trading, and you are ready to to go. Dow Jones and Co. was set up by two people. Dow and Jones. You could say that since Dow and Jones are intelligent designers, all the processes we see in the markets they set up are a product of intelligent design, even though Dow and Jones personally did not guide all the processes. But then you could say that evolution is a product of intelligent design because God set up a universe for it to happen in and set up some rules of physics and chemistry, but he does not personally guide the evolution process.

>>"That is unfortunately what you get when non-scientists write books trying to talk about science."

This is unfortunately what you get when ideological hostility supresses reason.

Correction:

In my last post I said that Dow and Jones designed the market. The actual market was set up by 24 brokers. So in the post replace "Dow" and "Jones" with "24 brokers. Dow and Jones were reporters on the market and their intitial publication later became the Wall Street Journal.

"This is unfortunately what you get when ideological hostility supresses reason."

David Hawkins - hello pot, this is kettle. Your hypocrisy is staggering.

David Hawkins

By the looks of previous posts, you deny evolution is a fact. So the chances of you holding a rational view on anything to do with science are close to zero.

SPQR

Johnnie and Jake,

Dr. Meyer discusses this difference of Shannon Information and Specified Complexity in other places. I would guess he talks about it in his new book The Signature in the Cell. He discusses this topic briefly in his video series TrueU.

It's hysterical. Seriously, I laugh when I read comments like, "that's what happens when non-scientists try writing books about science." But it is more of a pitied laugh than anything else.

Again, I love it. Evolution is a fact. If you deny it you are irrational. I mean, seriously? Come on man.

Jason,

I am not sure what the antecedent of the "this" is in your post. Is it something about a difference between something said by me and said by Jake?

A quick reference to specified complexity in that inspired source, Wikipedia, says that in systems that are not specified complex there cannot be an increase in information. I will show a counterexample. Consider the string EAST IN EDEN. Suppose by some random error in transmission that the string comes out as EAST EAST IN EDEN. This would seem to have more information because the meaning is refined: either being towards the eastern extremity of Eden or that Eden is a long way east.

EJ,

>>"hello pot, this is kettle. Your hypocrisy is staggering."

Whose the kettle?

What exactly did I assert that you found hypocritical? and why?

SPQR,

>>"By the looks of previous posts, you deny evolution is a fact. So the chances of you holding a rational view on anything to do with science are close to zero."

Thank you for providing us with a perfect (and pervasive) example of the macro-evolutionists' mindset: If you raise a question, put forth an objection, or disagree with the conclusions we have reached, then you will immediately be disregarded. Nice.

BTW, which type below are you asserting is a fact?

chemical evolution
cosmic evolution
stellar and planetary evolution
organic evolution
macroevolution
microevolution (We know THIS one to be fact; the others do not piggyback right along with it, although examples provided of microevolution are inserted to "justify" the others. No dice.)


While I would take issue with some of the statements asserted in the link below, it draws some distinctions you may not have considered -

http://scienceblogs.com/evolvingthoughts/2007/02/the_many_faces_of_evolution.php

Sorry, didn't capture...

http://scienceblogs.com/evolvingthoughts/2007/02/
the_many_faces_of_evolution.php

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