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| Open Theism Discussion Board > Public Forums > Theological Q&A > The debasement of creation by determinism | Forum Quick Jump
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anewbeginning
Registered Member
Date Joined Jan 2002
Total Posts : 88
| Posted 2/7/2003 6:55 AM (GMT -6) |   | | | |
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Tom
Registered Member
Date Joined Jul 2001
Total Posts : 10353
| Posted 2/8/2003 9:32 PM (GMT -6) | | Nice article. I sped through it and wanna go back later and think through his four concluding remarks. I'm weak in science and usually struggle understanding stuff like this, but I found the article helpful.
Tom
Love never ends
Edited by - TGB on 02/09/2003 02:33:15 AM | | Back to Top | | |
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Alan Rhoda
Registered Member
Date Joined May 2002
Total Posts : 680
| Posted 2/10/2003 4:22 PM (GMT -6) | | I really liked the first half of the article (up to and including the discussion of the anthropic principle)--the part where he contrasts pre-Newtonian and Newtonian science with respect to their general outlook on the world. I thought the rest of the article was overly speculative and weak in some respects. First, he seems to completely buy into Darwinian evolution. That is problematic because, as creationist and intelligent design critics have argued (convincingly to my mind), naturalistic theories of the origin and development of life just don't work. Second, he mixes biological evolution together with a kind of cosmic evolution--man is the universe come to sentience. This is highly speculative and ignores serious differences between evolutionary accounts of speciation and the formation of stars, galaxies, etc. Third, he conflates organization/complexity with information. As William Dembski argues in his books ("Intelligent Design", "No Free Lunch"), information requires "specified" complexity--complexity and organization alone are not sufficient. Further, there is no known natural process by which information can be generated. The only sources that we know can produce information are minds.
Alan | | Back to Top | | |
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SeanG
Registered Member
Date Joined Dec 2002
Total Posts : 278
| Posted 2/18/2003 12:37 AM (GMT -6) | |
Professor Werner Gitt – Director and professor at the German Federal Institute of Physics and Technology – tells us that:“The highest information density known to us is that of DNA molecules…. The storage capacity of DNA, the information carriers of living things, is 4.5 x 10(to the 13th power) times more effective than a megachip!… The sum total of knowledge currently stored in the libraries of the world is estimated at 10(to the 18th power) bits. If this information could be stored in DNA molecules, 1% of the volume of a pinhead would be sufficient for this purpose. If, on the other hand, this information were to be stored with aid of megachips, we would need a pile higher than the distance between the earth and the moon.” The DNA molecule, of which even the simplest – some would say the most “primitive” – forms of life are composed, is thus 45 million million times more efficient at holding and conveying information than a megachip. This is because the DNA molecule is an incredibly complex three-dimensional information storage system, where the megachip is only two-dimensional. But the DNA molecules ability to store and convey such inconceivably large amounts of information so efficiently does not tell us where the itself comes from. What is the source of that?
Information Theory, of which Professor Gitt is one of the world’s leading exponents, is an important branch of scientific investigation which has shown conclusively and consistently that information cannot and does not arise from any state of non-information, just as life cannot proceed from non-life. Moreover, information has now come to be recognized as the Third Fundamental Quantity of the universe, which hitherto was thought to consist of merely two fundamental quantities, those of matter and energy. The DNA molecule is, of course, matter. Its activities are funded by energy. But the information that it carries is something else entirely. In other words, it is not sufficient to have only matter and energy for DNA to work. What is also required, at least to begin with, is a massive input of information for which matter and energy can give no account, and which neither of them can supply. Again, Professor Gitt:“According to Norbert Wiener, the founder of cybernetics and information theory, information cannot be of a physical nature, even though it is transmitted by physical means: ‘Information in information, neither matter nor energy. No materialism that fails to take account of this can survive the present day.’” Because of the increasing disillusionment with the role of chance, a shift took place in the late 60’s and the 70’s to the view that life was somehow the inevitable outcome of nature’s laws at work over vast spans of time. Terms such as “directed chance” and “biochemical predestination” have entered the scientific literature to mean that life was somehow the result of the inherent properties of matter.
But more discomforting still to the materialist, is not just the recent discovery of information to be the Third Fundamental Quantity, but rather the startling realization of its source:“If a basic code is found in any system, it can be concluded that the system originated from a mental concept, and did not arise by chance…. Meanings always represent mental concepts. They are distinct from matter and energy. They originate from an intelligent source. It is by means of language that information may be stored and transmitted on physical carriers. The information itself is invariant…. The reason for this invariance lies in its non-material nature.” It would seem then that while some materialists have been busy looking in all the wrong places, certain physicists have stumbled upon the Mind of God.
The problem with most of modern science is that the philosophy of reductionism is the ruling paradigm. According to George Williams, a scientist of some stature in the evolutionary community, the crucial object of selection in evolution is inherently non-material:“Evolutionary biologists have failed to realize that they work with two more or less incommensurable domains: that of information and that of matter…. These two domains can never be brought together in any kind of the sense usually implied by the term ‘reductionism.’ … The gene is a package of information, not an object. The pattern of base pairs in a DNA molecule specifies the gene. But the DNA molecule is the medium, its not the message…. Just the fact that fifteen years ago I started using a computer may have had something to do with my ideas here. The constant process of transferring information from one physical medium to another and then being able to recover the same information in the original medium brings home the separability of information and matter. In biology, when you’re talking about things like genes and genotypes and gene pools, you’re talking about information, not physical objective reality.” Perhaps evolutionary biologists have avoided noticing that information and matter are fundamentally different things because that insight is fatal to the whole reductionist project in biology. If the message is truly not reducible to the medium, then trying to explain the creation of the information by a materialistic theory is simply a category mistake. One might as well try to explain the origin of a literary work by invoking the chemical laws that govern the combining of ink and paper, and then proposing speculative hypotheses about how those laws (with boost from chance but without intelligence) might have generated meaningful sentences.
Compiled from three books:
After the Flood: The Early Post-Flood History of Europe Traced Back to Noah, by Bill Cooper;
Objections Sustained: Subversive Essays on Evolution, Law & Culture, by Phillip Johnson;
In the Beginning Was Information, by Werner Gitt.
SeanG!"Evolution is the substance of fossils hoped for, the evidence of links not seen."
“The problem with creation is not that it has been tried and found wanting, but that it has been found difficult, and left untried.” | | Back to Top | | |
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SeanG
Registered Member
Date Joined Dec 2002
Total Posts : 278
| Posted 2/18/2003 12:40 AM (GMT -6) | | I just got Dembski’s new book No Free Lunch, albeit I am a little lost with his math equations in explaining some of the concepts, I nonetheless find his writing genuinely original and well reasoned.
SeanG!"Evolution is the substance of fossils hoped for, the evidence of links not seen."
“The problem with creation is not that it has been tried and found wanting, but that it has been found difficult, and left untried.” | | Back to Top | | |
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