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Joined: Jan. 2006

(Permalink) Posted: Jan. 24 2006,13:46   

Someone: "So, you are basically arguing from incredulity then.  Also known as the Argument from ignorance or what Betrand Russell called "poverty of the imagination"."

Zardoz: I prefer to call it rational conclusion following occam's razor.

djmullen: Occam's razor says to choose the simpler of two explanations that cover the observations equally well.  The problem here is that ANY Intelligent Designer, even a lowly human designer, must have a mind and even a lowly human mind is incredibly complex and requires trillions of bits of information to function.

For instance, an Intelligent Designer would have to understand how even something as simple as a one celled organism works before he could design or build one and that would require millions of bits of information or more.  (For instance, it would require approximately as much information as is found in the organisms genome.)

Evolution, on the other hand, is dumb as dirt: get a population of genetically self-reproducing critters.  Mistakes  will inevitably be made copying the genome, which means that some of the offspring will not be exactly like their parent(s).  If one of those offspring is better at making a living than their parent(s), they will tend to increase in numbers at the expense of their parent(s).

Total information required for evolution - a few bits at a time, which are generated through errors in copying the genome.

Total information required for any kind of remotely Intelligent Designer: Trillions.

Which method passes the Occam's razor test?  Evolution!   And the final score is billions to a few against Intelligent Design.

P.S. If anybody doubts that a God or Intelligent Designer's mind requires huge amounts of information to exist and function, ask yourself these questions:

1) Does God know your phone number?  If He does, then his mind contains at least enough information to incode your phone number, area code and country code.  That's about 13 decimal digits or roughly 40+ bits of information, so God (or any Intelligent Designer) has to have at least 40 bits of information in His mind to know your phone number.

2) Does God know EVERYBODY'S cell phone number?  (Never mind all phone numbers.)  About 650 million cell phones were sold last year.  At 40 bits per phone number, that means that God (or the Intelligent Designer) must have at least 40*650 million or 26 GIGABITS of information in His mind just to know the numbers of the new cell phones that were sold last year.  The figures will be much worse for ALL phone numbers, land line and cell.

3) What is Dembski's Upper Probability Bound?  That is how much information can something contain before it's effectively impossible to achieve without a process like evolution?  About 150 bits!

Therefore, by Dembski's own criteria, Gods and Intelligent Designers of any stripe are impossible unless they somehow evolved.  And if you're not a Mormon, you don't believe that Gods or Inteligent Designers evolve.  QED



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