Michael J. Behe's Blog, page 168

Sabine Hossenfelder despairs over vacuum energy. Rob Sheldon responds

We bet that our favorite theoretical physicist will pull through but here’s her own account:

If we leave aside gravity, we can’t measure absolute energies. We only ever measure energy differences. You probably remember this from your electronics class, you never measure the electric potential energy, you measure differences in it, which is what makes currents flow. It’s like you have a long list of height comparisons, Peter is 2 inch taller than Mary and Mary is one inch taller than Bob and Bob is 5 inch smaller than Alice. But you don’t know anyone’s absolute height. Energies are like that.

Now, this is generally the case, that you can only measure energy differences – as long as you ignore gravity. Because all kinds of energies have a gravitational pull, and for that gravitational pull it’s the absolute energy that matters, not the relative one.

So it really only becomes relevant to talk about absolute energies in general relativity, Einstein’s theory for gravity. Yes, that guy again. Now, if we want to find out the absolute value of energies, we need to do this only for one case, because we know the energy differences. Think of the height-comparisons. If you know all the relative heights, you only need to measure the absolute height of one person, say Paul, to know all the absolute heights. In General Relativity, we don’t measure Paul, we measure the vacuum …

What’s this all got to do with vacuum fluctuations? Nothing. And that’s where physicists get very confused. You see, we cannot calculate this measureable vacuum energy-density which appears in general relativity. It’s a constant that we infer from observations and that’s that.

Sabine Hossenfelder, “Physicist Despairs over Vacuum Energy” at BackRe(Action)

Experimental physicist Rob Sheldon responds,

Sabine says over and over again that the problem is that physicists confuse metaphysics and physics. Which is true. But that doesn’t mean they can stop doing it. Because Sabine does it too. It’s like complaining that news sources are biassed. Of course they are. But that doesn’t mean they can stop being biassed.

What Sabine needs to do, is pick her metaphysics and be open with it. She’s a materialist, and that’s a problem for physics. And it affects the dark energy calculation. And lots of other calculations. Including her pet “measurement of lambda” issue being a materialist factoid with no metaphysical input.

Here’s Hossenfelder on the measurement of lambda.

With your morning coffee: These specialty controversies are an interesting backdrop to the current war on math. Sabine Hossenfelder and Rob Sheldon would likely agree that 2 + 2 = 4. But survey the vast degreed hordes for whom such a statement is an instance of white supremacy and colonialism and we will see the real problem facing our civilization: Far too many people have degrees (and grievances!) but no insight into what knowledge is.

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Not an animal, plant or fungus — or protist — but still a life form

Fuligo septica is also known by the attractive name of “dog vomit slime mold”:

It’s maybe a “protist,” which could be expert-ese for “we don’t know for sure”:

I’m fairly certain this [photo at site] is Fuligo septica, one of the few of these fascinating organisms to have a well-used common name – dog vomit slime mold. Slime molds are not true molds; true molds are fungi, while slime molds are protists. Wayne Armstrong has an excellent article on slime molds that explains how slime molds are different from other organisms. He also illustrates the common name through a series of Fuligo septica photographs. If you read his account, you’ll learn that this yellowish mass is the spore-bearing stage in this slime mold’s life cycle, known as the aethalium.

Daniel Mosquin, “Fuligo septica” at University of British Columbia (May 31, 2006)

It seems that life comes into existence whether it can be classified or not.

Note: In a recent post, a question was asked: Animal adopts the lifestyle of a fungus. Animals adopt the lifestyles of plants (sea anemone?) and fungi but are there any instances of plants or fungi adopting the lifestyles of animals? If not, why not?

Several kind readers wrote privately to ask, what about carnivorous plants? Good point. Carnivorous plants behave like animals in some ways. So the various kingdoms of life all seem to be copying each other.

Anyone wanting a journey through memory lane should check out Wolf-Ekkehard-Loennig vs. Nick Matzke on these very pages about the improbability of merely Darwinian evolution in the creation of carnivorous plants: In “Remember that Darwin-eating plant? Now threatening to eat Nick Matzke … ” (September 3, 2011), we posted geneticist Wolf-Ekkehard Loennig’s objections to Berkeley evolutionary biologist Nick Matzke’s assurances that Darwin explains carnivorous plants. Indeed, Dr. Loennig betrays a hint of impatience, remarking,

“Matzke still doesn’t seem to have carefully studied my extensive paper yet, but he is still complaining that others know nothing on that topic and keeps on talking some nonsense promoting some half-baked ideas…” Hey, it’s fun, especially when the carnivorous plant suggested resolving the intellectual problem by eating Nick Matzke…

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Rob Sheldon offers some comments on Karsten Pultz’s “Bicycle” ID thesis

Karsten Pultz outlined his approach here: Why randomness depends on order: Comparing to evolution, the randomness produced by the orderly dice, would be the same randomness having produced the dice itself, because that’s how evolution works, slowly building order by random events from the bottom up. Applying the same hypothetical process to bicycles the random event that I get a puncture when riding my bike would be the same type of event which initially created the bike.

Experimental physicist Rob Sheldon responds:

A couple of comments on your excellent post:

a) in computer science, it is very difficult to make a random number generator. Successive runs of the code should not produce the same numbers. But most generators do. Likewise, if the numbers are grouped in triplets, and plotted in a cube, do they fill the cube smoothly, or is it clumpy? Again, most random number generators are clumpy. That’s because a program with information is attempting to act like randomness. There are even companies that use a radioactive material whose decays are turned into numbers to get a random number generator! In this case, attempting to throw away all the information in a computer program.

So I do understand your claim that disorder is only in reference to order. Because our tools are all about order. Nevertheless, there can be randomness without tools, without programs, without persons. Such randomness, however, isn’t recognized. It is only when we apply a tool to it, like the decays of radioisotopes, that we find it is random. Ontologically, neither the randomness or the order is first, but it takes order to recognize disorder.

b) Second, randomness, like the computer that uses a radioisotope to make random numbers, can be a orderly process. There is no reason that disorder cannot be the product of an ordered system. Purpose includes both order and disorder. On the other hand, disorder cannot include order at all. So in one sense, order is the greater of the two, and swallows up, or incorporates randomness. This can be seen, for example, in “intrinsically disordered proteins”, that by design, do not settle down in a specific shape. Clearly, it takes effort to find a protein that is so unstable, and the cell makes use of such proteins.

Likewise, in the dice example, there is a careful preparation of a perfect cube with a centered center-of-gravity. In college I had a shop class, and tried to make a die on the end-mill. I could not get a perfect cube, as I watched my project shrinking to a smaller and smaller piece of metal. It takes skill to make a die random, and disordered end-mill cuts only made things worse. Randomness does not arise by accident.

c) Finally, let me say something about physics. In the 1800’s we described the motion of an object as subject the forces acting on it. The theoretical equations of motion were described by the “Lagrangian”. The solutions to the Lagrangian determined the motion of the particle. So powerful was this paradigm that a philosophical position was called “Lagrangian Determinism”, that we were all made of atoms, and the atoms all behaved as point particles with forces, and therefore given the initial conditions, we could integrate the Lagrangian and determine the future.

Common wisdom is that QM destroyed this possibility, but actually even before the advent of QM, at the turn of the century, Henri Poincare showed that there were numerical solutions to Lagrangians that were “chaotic”, indescribable by any regular function. Russian mathematicians around the time of the Communist revolution, showed that there were entire classes of functions that had no derivative or continuity—that knowing the value of a function at time t, told you nothing about later times t+dt. Determinism was impossible. (These mathematicians were Russian Orthodox, and felt that their math would prove the Communist programme to be a failure.)

No one knew what to do with these discoveries at the time. We invented computers and in the 1960’s rediscovered chaos. It turns out, that if you make a “Poincare plot” by say, plotting the position versus velocity of a pendulum at t, t+dt, t+2dt, t+3dt etc, the points sometimes retrace a figure showing a “closed solution” and sometimes scatter all over the place filling the area densely, “chaotic solution”. So if you compare the area of chaotic orbits to the area of closed, deterministic orbits, you find that chaos is by far the most common behavior. We just had never seen it because we didn’t have computers, and the tools to find it.

What this says is that far from “Lagrangian determinism”, we are far more likely to have “Lagrangian chaos” for physical systems. It takes planning to make a system deterministic, closed orbits.

But does this mean the system is most likely random? By no means. These chaotic orbits have special properties. For one thing, they obey the Lagrangian equations. They have little islands and inclusions that represent closed solutions. And often they present “strange attractors” or basins where all the solutions end up. So just as mathematicians find that true randomness is very hard to produce in a program, so physicists have come to realize that we live on the edge between chaos and order, where the chaos is just order on a higher plane. Chaos is a global solution, not just a local one. The equations or area described by the chaotic orbits is not defined by the current values of x,v_x, but rather by the global properties and boundaries of the system.

Why is this significant? Because in the 1800’s physics believed that diffusion, heat, transport were local, random, processes defined by a Maxwell-Boltzmann distribution. That randomness was inherent in Nature, and that global order was a difficult, information-rich process that rapidly degenerated (entropized) on its own. Darwinism was a direct result of applying that local physics to biology. Now the very same systems are seen to be part of a global chaotic system with its own set of rules. Diffusion is no longer random, but a process by which the global system approaches its lowest energy state. When magnet domains are involved, that minimum energy state can be “frustrated”, leading to many “non-equilibrium” long-lasting states. In other words, we have learned to make global “smart materials” that do not behave like the 19th century “dumb” materials subject to local diffusion and entropy.

It is not that our materials are different, it is because physics is no longer assuming that “randomness” is a natural or inevitable state of matter, or that all forces are local. Locality and randomness isn’t as basic as we thought. It is actually a subset of all states that are available, being unable to account for global states. Darwin is just so 19th century, but we are now in the 21st.

I hope this gives a flavor of what I enjoyed about your post. – Rob

Note: Karsten Pultz’s is the author of Exit Evolution. Rob Sheldon is the author of Genesis: The Long Ascent and The Long Ascent, Volume II .

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At Mind Matters News: Science’s Limitations According to a Futurist

Caitlin Bassett notes that Canadian futurist Nikola Danaylov rightly warns against a blind embrace of science

Danaylov spends the first several chapters of his online series discussing the power and importance of story. He argues that storytelling is our greatest technology, dating back tens of thousands of years in the early days of the Homo Sapiens species.

According to Danaylov, we have reached a point in history in which the story needs to change – much like it has changed through time:

“The human story has been written and rewritten several times already. The last time was somewhere between the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution when we dethroned God as the central authority in the Universe and took his place instead. Since then our story has spread the myth of the supremacy and centrality of the human being… – Nikola Danaylov, “Chapter 6: the Biology of Story” at Singularity Weblog”

This story is beginning to crumble, says Danaylov, and a rewriting is necessary. But that comes with a warning:

“…we ought to be very careful in rewriting our story. Because if we end up destroying it without offering a better alternative we can end up destroying our civilization.”

Caitlin Bassett, “Science’s Limitations According to a Futurist” at Mind Matters News

Takehome: Science is not supreme. That’s an excellent point made. The problem here is that Danaylov fails to tell us what IS supreme.

You may also wish to read: What’s wrong with a popular theory of the evolution of religion. Generally, monotheism is favorable to a high level of organization, including complex theologies that don’t just morph a lot but are only changed with much deliberation or controversy. But did that state of affairs evolve so as to foster “cohesive unity,” as Harari suggests? Hard to say. Religion — especially propositional religion, like the monotheisms — can foster either unity or disunity. Monotheism has not been a force for unity in Northern Ireland or the Middle East.

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William Lane Craig and atheist actor Scott Clifton on the Kalam Cosmological Constant

The Kalam Cosmological Constant “uses a general pattern of argumentation (logos) that makes an inference from particular alleged facts about the universe (cosmos) to the existence of a unique being, generally identified with or referred to as God.” – Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

In this livestream, Dr. William Lane Craig and Scott Clifton have an informal discussion about the merits the Kalam Cosmological Argument.

Christian philosopher William Lane Craig is known to many readers. Scott Clifton is a well-known actor who is an atheist.

See also: William Lane Craig and Alvin Planting rank in Top Ten of world philosophers. Craig: What is especially significant is that these rankings are not just someone’s subjective opinion but are computed according to an algorithm that takes into account such objective data as number of citations of one’s work.

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At ScienceNews: Statistical significance as a strange idea

Bruce Bower thinks that social sciences researchers wanted to seem as impressive as hard science researchers, in terms of results, so they developed the p-value (p < .05) in the mid-20th century. He doesn’t think it was a good idea.

Psychologists in particular wanted a statistical skeleton key to unlock true experimental insights. It was an unrealistic burden to place on statistics, but the longing for a mathematical seal of approval burned hot. So psychology textbook writers and publishers created one, and called it statistical significance.

By calculating just one number from their experimental results, called a P value, researchers could now deem those results “statistically significant.” That was all it took to claim — even if mistakenly — that an interesting and powerful effect had been demonstrated. The idea took off, and soon legions of researchers were reporting statistically significant results.

To make matters worse, psychology journals began to publish papers only if they reported statistically significant findings, prompting a surprisingly large number of investigators to massage their data — either by gaming the system or cheating — to get below the P value of 0.05 that granted that status. Inevitably, bogus findings and chance associations began to proliferate.

Bruce Bower, “How the strange idea of ‘statistical significance’ was born” at ScienceNews (August 12, 2021)

We know. It hasn’t helped the profession’s reputation. Some want to just dump “the null ritual”:

It’s well past time to dump the null ritual, says psychologist and applied statistician Richard Morey of Cardiff University, Wales. Researchers need to focus on developing theories of mind and behavior that lead to testable predictions. In that brave new scientific world, investigators will choose which of many statistical tools best suits their needs. “Statistics offer ways to figure out how to doubt what you’re seeing,” Morey says.

Bruce Bower, “How the strange idea of ‘statistical significance’ was born” at ScienceNews (August 12, 2021)

Bower provides an interesting account of an attempt tp use p-values to assess whether people lost their religious beliefs while contemplating Rodin’s “Thinker” statue. We can all think of more useful enterprises for social sciences than that.

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Researchers find Philippine group to have highest known Denisovan ancestry

An Indigenous Filipino group has surprised researchers by having the highest known amount of Denisovan ancestry. The Denisovans were an ancient group that, like the Neanderthals, no longer exist as a separate group of humans, likely due to intermarriage. The researchers had expected to find the group with the highest genetic markers for the Denisovans in Australia or Papua–New Guinea:

Denisovans were a group of archaic humans first identified from a single pinkie bone in a Siberian cave. They coexisted with modern humans and other archaic human species, such as Neanderthals, for hundreds of thousands of years, until they went extinct an estimated 30,000 to 50,000 years ago. According to Gizmodo, only Pacific Islanders and Southeast Asians have substantial Denisovan ancestry. By comparison, most people in other parts of mainland Asia have less than 0.05 percent Denisovan ancestry, and people of African and European descent don’t have any.

“[The Ayta Magbukon] possess more Denisovan ancestry than anybody else on the planet today,” Uppsala University biologist and study coauthor Mattias Jakobsson tells Inverse. “So that was a surprise to us.” …

Annie Melchor, “Indigenous Filipino Group Has Highest Known Denisovan Ancestry” at The Scientist (August 13, 2021)

The paper is open access.

Don’t you just love the way the writer refers to the Denisovans as a “species” that went “extinct” (like Tyrannosaurus?) As Darwinism dies out, its usages begin to sound more and more, well, quaint.

You may also wish to read: A physicist looks at biology’s problem of “speciation” in humans

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Sabine Hossenfelder asks, “Is dark matter real?”

Here:

This is part of a physics seminar series called “Golden Webinars” for which we can’t seem to find transcripts. Sorry about that.

You may also wish to read:

Discover: Even the best dark matter theories are crumbling

Researcher: The search for dark matter has become a “quagmire of confirmation bias” So many research areas in science today are hitting hard barriers that it is reasonable to think that we are missing something.

Physicists devise test to find out if dark matter really exists

Largest particle detector draws a blank on dark matter

What if dark matter just doesn’t stick to the rules?

A proposed dark matter solution makes gravity an illusion

and

Proposed dark matter solution: “Gravity is not a fundamental governance of our universe, but a reaction to the makeup of a given environment.”

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Geostrategic developments, fall of Kabul

The weekend marked a shock-wave event, the rapid fall of Kabul that was not supposed to happen.

Twenty years of nation-building attempt failures, a poorly managed withdrawal, abandonment of 14 – 86,000 supportive allies, logistically crippled government forces and likely bribing local commanders led to a one-week collapse. This primarily speaks to strategic and operational incompetence of the US decision-makers as a class as a better managed withdrawal was clearly feasible and a soft landing end state was arguably possible. Trillions wasted, with blood also on the line.

Predictably, mass murders, return to utter unbridled barbarism, hosting of terrorism and likely a surge in opium-based drugs esp. Heroin. More subtly, Afghanistan counts as in the direction of Khorasan in Islamist readings of apocalyptic hadiths so we can expect a mahdist push; only utter shocking defeat will stop that, a horrific shock comparable to that of August 1945. Meanwhile, China next door likely is trying to use money to influence the situation.

I find this commentary by a veteran useful:

I offer this main point: the government of Afghanistan lost the “Mandate of Heaven.” The people of Afghanistan had twenty years to experience Afghan government and decide that it was not worth fighting for. The stories are legion: the first president, Karzai, constantly releasing captured terrorist leaders as he dealt directly with the Taliban. President Karzai’s brother being the top gangster of Kandahar. The Afghan Air Force heroin-smuggling ring. The Thursday Man Love sessions for all the pedophiles of the Afghan police and military. The “ghost” soldiers and ever-stolen supplies of the Afghan Army. The massive vote fraud of the Afghan presidential elections. The Afghan judges who gave no justice without a bribe. In sum, the Afghan government had the façade of a constitutional system — but inside its halls, it was a collection of thieves and robbers getting as much as could be gotten while the money was flowing.

There has apparently never been a cohesive, lawful Afghanistan, and that creates a culture of lawless oligarchy, even when trappings of democracy are imposed. I note, though that we need to account for differential performance, as the Pushtun behind the Taliban are not an outright majority. The operational answer points to logistical starvation [no beans and bullets to fight with, after taking 60,000 dead in trying to defend a failing state], a lockdown on technical support that grounded the air force. All of which had to be known to the US decision makers. Their failure to do right by 86,000 people as listed who put their life on the line shows the fundamental untrustworthiness and want of honour of the American decision makers. And this is the second time within fifty years.

I don’t buy the oh this was not expected. Contrast the open borders policy with this breach of honour betrayal of people who put their lives on the line in a now failed attempt to build a better future.

A bruised reed indeed.

The vet continues:

[G]roups, communities, and nations usually get the government they deserve.  A virtuous people is usually ruled fairly well — an anarchic people either collapses into anarchy or is ruled strictly.  I think this was President Bush’s major conceptual strategic mistake in the post-9-11 wars.  He believed that every nation longed for freedom and was capable of democratic self-government.  As we have learned the hard way, our American constitutional government was not just ordered into existence by the Founders; it is the heritage of untold generations of Germanic tribal self-government, the monastic stewarding of the Roman legacy of education, the Anglo-Saxon traditions of consultative government, the compromise of the Magna Carta, the residue of the English Civil Wars and Bill of Rights, and the self-governing experience of the Pilgrims and the colonial founders in the New World interacting with the French and Scottish Enlightenment.

This was not Afghanistan’s experience — the many peoples of Afghanistan lacked the human capital to democratically govern themselves.  The vast majority of Afghans could not read, write, or numerate — parts of Afghan Army basic training were simply teaching soldiers to recognize numbers.  The few Afghan elites were ethnically divided and mutually suspicious.  Often there was no tradition of peaceful self-governance — of the clans living in a valley, often there would be a low-level war among them over resources.  Simply put, the Afghans were not truly capable of self-governing democracy in the Jeffersonian sense.  Therefore, they could not create a government worth dying for.

Sadly, we Americans ourselves also lacked the moral clarity and realism to even try to make the conditions to help build a moral government.  All too often the phrase “it’s an Afghan matter” was used as a rationale to excuse some immoral action of our Afghan government partners.  We saw the evil actions of the Afghan government officials but did nothing about it — in great contrast to the colonial heyday, when British officials would say, “It may be your tradition to burn widows alive, but it is my tradition to hang those who do so.”  We simply shrugged our shoulders and said, “It’s the culture” as we tolerated the evil that destroyed the legitimacy of the Afghan government.

This of course speaks to the cultural buttresses I have often highlighted in discussing an alternative political spectrum:

This leads to explaining what we see as a slide to lawless oligarchy and a coup:

The lessons for the threatening disintegration of cultural buttresses in the US and elsewhere are obvious.

Let’s look at the geostrategic picture:

Afghanistan is an obvious move for China’s Silk Road push to the oil-rich ME and a land bridge to Pakistan, but brings up a contest with Iran and further alienation of India and the belt of states on China’s near-coastal rim from Singapore to Japan and South Korea.

The American geostrategic defeat, retreat and humiliation, combined with a largely continental mindset, points to the post Vietnam malaise as a direct parallel. This also further alienates the dissatisfied hinterland people from the patently incompetent establishment/deep state apostates.

The 4th generation conflict in the US ratcheted up and its inner cohesiveness just got another crack. I still believe the cultural marxists, their red guard cannon fodder and media promoters will lose, but the geostrategic butcher’s bill is going to be high. END

PS: What might a soft landing have looked like? If the Jordanian model of a stabilising adequately backed military had been followed and perhaps a lawful monarchy with a core western presence present to take the two generations to build capacity, something might have been possible. However the depth of corruption may have undermined even that.

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Karsten Pultz on why randomness depends on order

Our Danish correspondent Karsten Pultz, author of Exit Evolution, offers some thoughts on the meaning of randomness, a concept especially prized in Darwinian theory, formed while riding a bike:

Random mutation is a phenomenon that only can be observed because we have the order and precise meaningful arrangement of the genome, which constitutes the background on which the randomness can be observed.

Random events can be observed only in relation to or more precisely in contrast to existing order.

This would indicate that randomness cannot exist without order and that order therefore precedes randomness. If this is true random mutation and all other random events can’t produce order hence ruling out Neo-Darwinian evolution as plausible explanation for life.

Could it be argued that randomness is a mere property of order?

The random outcome of a coin toss is only possible because of the inherent order of the coin. The same goes for the random outcome of throwing a dice. A dice contains a high degree of order that forms the well defined background on which the random outcomes are produced when the dice is rolled. No order no randomness because order forms the background on which we can detect randomness.

The constructed order of a dice is much bigger than the randomness it can produce, and the construction of the dice of course precedes the randomness. Neo-Darwinists and materialists have put the cart before the horse, not realizing that if there were no horse (order) there could be no cart (randomness).

Comparing to evolution, the randomness produced by the orderly dice, would be the same randomness having produced the dice itself, because that’s how evolution works, slowly building order by random events from the bottom up. Applying the same hypothetical process to bicycles the random event that I get a puncture when riding my bike would be the same type of event which initially created the bike.

I think this makes very little sense. But what makes sense though is if randomness is a mere property of order. When the constructed order we call a bicycle is brought into existence, the possibility of the random flat tyre or broken chain is also brought into existence. When a dice is made the randomness it can produce is also brought into existence. If this is a general rule random events like mutations cannot produce order because order must precede randomness.

Looking at random mutations and assume randomness produced the whole shebang in the first place, is like looking at a flat bike tyre and assuming that the same odd random event of a puncture is the same kind of event that initially brought the bike into existence.

In evolutionary theory this is exactly what is claimed; it just requires a lot of time to work. But obviously the random event of a punctured tyre could not exist without the order of the constructed bike, so why assume that random events like mutations can exist without the meticulous order of (in this case) the genome existing prior to the random mutations?

The Neo-Darwinists are narrowing their reductionist focus down to the small exceptions, namely the random mutations, and have completely lost sight of the surrounding unfathomable order constituted by the whole organism. Not being able to see the forest for the trees seems to be the problem. The order of the genome can be equated with meaningfulness because it has purpose. In contrast to this stands random mutations which represents meaninglessness because they obviously have no purpose, – that’s in fact how we detect randomness, by observing the fly in the ointment. Neo-Darwinian evolution and the whole materialistic paradigm which spawned it are based on the assumption that out of meaninglessness grows meaning (order out of chaos).

Looking at coin tosses, dice rolling and flat tyres though, it seems like order necessarily must exist before any randomness emerges. I assume the universe is a massive phenomenon of order with a bit of randomness distributed all over, like sprinkling on a cake — after all, we observe order everywhere we look. Any randomness we see is actually only the sprinkling, not the cake itself.

It might be that the second law of thermodynamics is true for a closed system, but if, considering quantum entanglement, everything is connected to everything else, an
actual closed system doesn’t exist. A pocket of randomness will eventually be overtaken by order like the decaying city of Chernobyl is slowly being taken over by the order of living nature.

Randomness, I suggest, is there to prove that order exists, serving as the exception that confirms the rule.

Also, I will argue that order precedes randomness. The random mutations are only there because of the intelligently designed order of the genome which creates the foundation for any randomness to exist and be observed at all.

The inherent order of the universe is treated by Neo-Darwinians as a free lunch whereby, because there’s something rather than nothing, they can spend their fruitless time pondering on how the something came from the nothing.

Evolution is an error driven process. Errors are precisely the meaningless exceptions we find in organized meaningful systems. Evolution is thus a self refuting theory because by being error driven it depends on preexisting, highly ordered, meaningful systems in which errors can occur.

Obviously we can’t have errors before we have an orderly system that defines what an error is. Being an error driven process, evolution points to the necessity of pre existing orderly systems, which we must assume only can have been brought into existence by the same sort of causal agency that makes bicycles.

The assumption that order precedes randomness and chaos is the foundation of Christianity. John 1:1 states: “In the beginning was the Logos.” Logos was the Greek term for order and knowledge introduced by Heraclitus (c. 535–c. 475 BC).

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Why a mechanic infers design — Karsten Pultz explains.

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