Reciprocating Bill
Posts: 4265
Joined: Oct. 2006
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DaveTard would like to participate in our Bathroom Wall discussion. But he can't.
| Quote | What aspect of life on the Earth requires supernatural powers?
DaveScot
Some people who support ID doggedly hold that life on the planet earth requires a supernatural agency to make it happen. Others who don’t support ID also doggedly hold that ID requires a supernatural agency.
I’ve asked, many times, what is it about the construction of organic life on this planet that requires supernatural intelligence to make it happen? What laws of physics or chemistry must be violated to produce any aspect of any living organism thus far examined?
I admit that the origination and diversification of organic life on the earth seems best explained by participation at some point or points by an intelligent agency but I don’t see where a supernatural intelligent agency able to bend or break the laws of physics and chemistry is required.
I concede that the creation of the entire universe out of nothing seems to require an agency with capabilities that go beyond the laws of physics and chemistry as we understand them today but my question isn’t about the creation of a whole universe. My question is just about the creation of organic life on this planet. |
It follows from the assumption (yet to be demonstrated) that OOL occurred absent agency of any kind nothing supernatural is demanded for OOL from a scientific stance. Indeed, no one operating from a scientific perspective states that it does. Only IDiots attempt to introduce the supernatural into biology.
But DaveTard's favorite ID model, front loading, would require essentially supernatural abilities of any designer. As I previously observed:
Front loading would require pre-storage of the countless adaptations, speciation events, ecological interactions, arms races, and even extinction events that have characterized the story of the survival of life on earth, such that countless biological adaptations remain tightly coupled to an endless succession of changing environments and ecosystems over billions of years. Yet the environmental transitions that demand these changes result from physical processes (planetary, geological, meteorological, astronomical, etc.) that are themselves inherently contingent and unguided and cannot themselves possibly have been "arranged," "planned," or "predicted." This includes the changing microenvironments and apposite adaptations of every extinct and every extant lineage that has taken its place among the astronomical number of ramifications of the tree of life.
This problem stands regardless of the storage capacity of DNA, the action of imaginary error correction methods, even a mechanism to limit the triggering of the expression of adaptive features such that they conform to the nested patterns we would expect to result from descent with modification. It would require the designer, as he assembled the first organisms and stuffed them with all this information, to either exercise complete foreknowledge of, or anticipate sustaining complete control over, the output of the sun, the timing and consequences of asteroid impacts, the tectonic formation and reformation of continents and oceans, along with the accompanying geological events, climatological changes, advancing and receding ice sheets, and countless other factors, over billions of years.
Does Dave think that these are acts within the reach of anything resembling a natural actor?
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Myth: Something that never was true, and always will be.
"The truth will set you free. But not until it is finished with you."
- David Foster Wallace
"Here’s a clue. Snarky banalities are not a substitute for saying something intelligent. Write that down."
- Barry Arrington
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