Richardthughes
Posts: 11178
Joined: Jan. 2006
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http://www.firstthings.com/blogs....nt-6993
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Front-loading, which seems to be Mike Behe’s preferred idea for how ID happened, would not be a natural mechanism, if I understand correctly what he means by that term. The front-loading idea is that the designer injected certain genetic information long before it was needed by any organism. That injection would require a tuning of the configuration of matter to a state that it would be extremely unlikely for it to have if it were left to chance, so to speak. That, indeed, is the whole point of their claim that “information” doesn’t just happen by itself, it has to be injected into the syetem by an intelligent agent.
There is nothing unreasonable with that idea, but it is invoking what almost anyone would call a miracle. To explain why I say this, I will have to explain some physics to the audience.
Take a film of a wineglass falling off a table and shattering on the floor. Now watch that film in reverse at the same speed. It would show fragments of glass jumping off the floor and assembling into a wineglass that leaped up onto the table. Impossible, you say? NOT impossible in the sense that it violates the laws of physics! Just fantastically improbable. For that “un-shattering” event to happen, all the countless number of particles and fields that make up the glass shards, the floor, the air in the vicinity, etc. would have to be moving in just EXACTLY the right way, and that is absurdly improbable. But an omnipotent Designer certainly could decree that the particles and fields were doing just the right things to make the un-shattering of a wineglass happen without violating the mathematical laws of physics in any way. Similarly, any “thermodynamically irreversible” process (to use the physics jargon) could be made to occur backwards if one had complete control over the initial movements of the particles and fields. A dead and decayed dog could be made to come to life in that way, to take another example. Now, to intelligently adjust of the motions of particles and fields to what would otherwise be fantastically improbable configurations is PRECISELY to inject or front load “information” into the system.
I think almost everyone would call the unshattering of a wineglass or the undecaying and coming to life of a dog a “miracle”.
There is nothing fundamentally different from the kind of “front-loading” of “information” in those examples and the front loading of information to produce biological complexity that the ID people talk about. Indeed, a dead dog “undecaying” would be an instance of biological complexity being produced.
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