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Author Topic: other than complexity
edmund
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Icon 1 posted 07. April 2002 00:32      Profile for edmund   Email edmund   Send New Private Message       Edit/Delete Post 
It seems to me as though ID is trying to tackle a huge hurdle by focusing on complexity. Because it is not clear what sorts of complexity can and can't be generated by non-intelligent mechanisms, ID is forced to show exhaustively that a system couldn't have been generated by such mechanisms before design can be invoked.

However, there are many attributes which a system might have which could have come from design but not from known natural processes. Evolutionists agree that natural selection is strictly limited in the attributes that it can confer on a system-- the attribute has to favor reproduction or be a side effect of it (complexity arguably falls into this category). If ID could show that biological organisms have some attribute clearly falling outside of these categories, NS couldn't have been responsible for it, and there's no need to struggle over questions of complexity.

Is there any evidence out there for such attributes? Without getting into speculation about the nature and motivation of the designer, it's hard to say what these attributes might be, but order would certainly be one. Is there any evidence that genomes are organized more than required by their simple function? Or that groups of extant or extinct organisms fall into orderly patterns inexplicable from an evolutionary perspective?

(Hopefully this thread will be less ramose than my last. Be patient with me, I'm learning...)

--edmund

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