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Bingo. So, it's an issue of demarcation, and I find that apologists often want to knee cap science according to its inability to disprove God's existence, but then they'll act like science can prove God's existence.


I agree completely.


I agree with this as well. I think that categorically distinguishing between consciousness and goal-directedness is hard to do. I think that we're going to have to admit goal-directedness into nature somehow; there is more going on with evolution than random change and blind selection by what survives and what doesn't.


I'm not even opposed to using the same evidence here as part of a cumulative case for the existence of God. The question is really what sorts of assumptions we're making about God. If the way we want to define God is just to say that there is a more primitive cause of the universe that can't be quanitifed along with anything in the universe itself, I'm probably game for that sort of theorizing. But I know that the guys over at Discovery Institute have a specific agenda, which is to promote Christianity. If molecular genetics provides positive evidence for Christianity, it does it in a way that can't be numerically different from the evidence it provides for any other "big God" sort of theory. They often neglect that this natural theological approach wasn't the work of Christians and the pagans were doing it long before Christianity came along.

The folding of a protein -- the particular confirmation it assumes -- is what corresponds with the function that protein will perform. Just because a particular confirmation changing results in a loss of that particular function doesn't mean that what results has no function at all. This is what I meant by the assumption of specification. What guys like Meyer and Behe are doing is acting as if one sequence S with a function F is what's being specifically sought by the search algorithm. But some other similar (possibly preceding) sequence could have a different (possibly related) function. So for any given protein of 150-aa length and some confirmation, there was probably a different protein with a different (but related) function that preceded it. You see evidence of this in the blood-clotting cascade, which features a ton of different proteins. But many of them are quite similar. The genes for some of the early clotting proteins were probably duplicated with mutations along the way, resulting in different but similar proteins that either (a) helped clotting advance or (b) were detrimental. If they help, they get preserved. If they don't, then they're either detrimental enough to register for negative selection or they're neutral enough to pass through the filter -- at some point all change processes become significant enough to register as beneifical or detrimental.

For any protein to perform a given function, there's some variability that's possible in its sequence, and it will still do what it's supposed to do. So, for any given F, there is a set S of sequences rperesenting proteins that could get the job done. If any given mutation introduces a slight modification to a protein, it's not improbable that this protein could either (i) still perform the same function or (ii) perform a similar function that integrates with the existing process to improve it.

Like I said in response to @The_Reunto , I would agree that there is a good deal about evolutionary processes that we don't know, including higher-order mechanisms that introduced goal-directedness into processes once they've proven they are beneficial. But once we get to an organism as complex as human beings, they've evolved epigenetic systems that exhibit downward causation on the genetic processes themselves, almost "tuning" Darwinian processes to be more efficient.

And in terms of the religious significance, I don't understand the prevalent bias against these materialistic explanations. I prefer to use the term physical because 'materialism' is already a loaded, propagandized term. These physical mechanisms are staggering in their elegance. The idea that we need magic and not mechanism is just something I can't wrap my head around. If some divine intelligence is responsible for the uniform laws of nature that make evolution possible, I can't grasp downplaying that because we have a bias against the physical as being somehow mundane.

Who wants a train with square wheels?

That's what everyone with an ethnic religion does.
The Jews just convinced you that an ethnic White eugenics religion is bad for you because they can't subvert that to enslave you.

Atheism means one thing only : non belief in a deity, that's it, you can't attach anything else too it.

Whos the retard now ?

Because they have already proven how life comes about and can exist, however rare. Why attribute that to an invisible sky daddy tinkering on galactic computer code? Its infantile and reductive.