Intelligent Design attributed to the digital information found in DNA

Good presentation. Unfortunately, a lot of folks prefer to believe that they are here as a result of some random screw-up in the cosmos. I suppose it alleviates them from any sense of responsibility.

Same way with nature in general. Biochemistry isn't just a series of chance interactions. Every atom, every molecule behaves in standard ways such that when it comes in contact with other atoms and molecules under certain conditions, they always behave in a standard and predictable way. No chance involved. That'd be like saying since nature works on chance that we could never predict what would happen when we dropped a ball from our hand, poured water down a slope or cooled water to below 0 degrees C, heated something up or any number of activities which reinforce that nature has standard ways in which things behave and interact.

If nature behaved on "chance" the way he's using it, then nothing would work. If the interactions of atoms and molecules were really just random chance with no regularity and standardization, then a living cell wouldn't even work no matter how much DNA it contained because when DNA might interact with other atoms and molecules, the "randomness" of how nature worked would preclude any standard outcomes. If it was random, chemical A might bind with chemical B one time, and, under the exact same conditions it might not bind or it might cause damage to or be repulsed by it. THAT is what randomness would cause. But we know nature doesn't work that way.

So, we agree that atoms and molecules don't just interact randomly by chance.  So let's ditch that fallacy.

But I agree, DNA has information. So where does this information come from? It exists inherently in every sub atomic particle in the universe. Each has it's own set of ways it interacts with the world around it....that is information. And as sub atomic particles come together and form atoms, that information comes together and builds. The more atoms of specific kinds that come together, the more the information continues to build.  Molecules form...the information builds concurrently until long-chained molecules like RNA or DNA that came together because they were triggered by precursor long-chained molecules.   So the information he speaks of is the result of a long series of chemical reactions involving millions and trillions of individual particles...all of which come with their built-in information that they then contribute to the reactions and processes that go on when one long-chained molecule comes in contact with other molecules. For the same reason water forms when oxygen and hydrogen come together under the right conditions, other molecules came together and after many interactions in an almost infinite number of ways...all standard and none purely by chance, life could have arose...starting with simple long-chained molecules and eventually extending to longer ones.


Either way, one has what amounts to faith that such and such far-fetched thing is the case. Either life came from the self-organizing properties of nature. Or some superstupenduous intelligence just happens to exist and just happens to have the power and knowledge needed to create matter and energy out of nothing, the will to use that power to create a universe.  It must have the information needed to program each particle/atom/molecule and to create life and the will to create that life the way it did despite the fact that it would turn out looking like...what we see around us. It doesn't seem to have been all that intelligent to have created the world the way it is. I would expect an intelligent designer to have been more...intelligent.

Maybe not.  I'm willing to hear about other options.

Regular natural processes working over a long period of time in an almost infinite number of locations and under a multitude of conditions.  More on the order of being pushed up from beneath as opposed to being pulled up from above or tossed about randomly.  If the natural world behaved randomly, not even living cells would work.

I enjoy a good farce

When you say "chance", do you mean non-determinism? Your entire post looks like that to me.

Non-determinism happens at a quantum level, as far as I know. So in that sense, things do happen by chance.

And even if they didn't: There are so many factors in the world that it's not possible to take them all into account when an event occurs. And maybe trying to calculate the factors influences them.

So IMO things happen by chance. That's a simplification, but it works for me.

He is doing ittle more than rehashing the fiction that evolutionary theory has something to say about the initial source of DNA. Evolution has lots (and is comprehensive) to say about what happened after the origin of DNA to our current plethora of species. 

So evolution is irrelevant to the initial state. That doesn't give intelligent design a boost through the door. The reason science has not produced any comprehensive theory of origins is that there is so little evidence or observation available from 3 billion years ago. 

Abiogenesis provides several hypotheses about the origin of life. However ID isn't one of them. ID requires an old guy sitting on a cloud waving a magic wand (or perhaps a flying spaghetti monster laughing his arse off). 

   That meaning is essentially the same as "complexity" and is not a "new" argument in these debates.  It has long been argued that life is too complex to arise without an intelligent designer.  As much as that really is "common sense," such arguments have continually failed.