Tuesday, July 30, 2019

FFS, What Part Of "That is a long way from "proving" that God's intentionality is behind the relatively small set of evolutionary consequences . . . " Did You Miss?

I understood the consequences of what Afinsens said about chains of amino acids being folded by even more complex cellular action to produce working proteins out of the amino-acid chains produced, not BY DNA but which DNA plays a major role in, makes what happens within cells far, far more complex and adding to the burden placed on probability and random chance that would have been required to produce not only a result BUT THE RIGHT RESULT and that what was already vastly improbable - especially in the limited time it has to happen - improbable to an even greater degree.  Cellular chemistry doesn't produce only one kind of protein based on the same DNA code, it produces many different ones, which seem to find their way to just the right place most of the time to function within cells and which function within organisms.  The burden on "probability" and "random chance" is unsustainable.

The atheist-materialist-scientistic resort to saying "DNA"  something that has made quite a number of careers in a number of sciences and in pop-science (Dawkins) is a sign of rather stupendous ignorance, not erudition.  And that's a far less inadequate resort than the less defined and more general God replacements of "probability" and "random chance".   Those explain nothing, they are materialist smoke and mirrors and slight of hand.  None of this "proves God" but it certainly debunks the atheist gods that they set up to impress the naive. 

Update:  " blah, blah . . . you're claiming that probability is invalid . . . blah, blah". 

Not at all, they're quite often valid and useful tools to do a number of things, they just can't be atheist gods in the gaps in these matters.   And that's exactly what they are in that ideological use, gods in the gaps, materialist gods which, in their most extravagant use in multi-universe cosmology are given powers of creation, lavishing powers on them to create universes out of nothing, in direct contradiction to the arguments the atheists make against the reality of God and, furthermore, insisting that their ideological idols be inserted directly into science as scientific holdings.  

Probability can be very useful, though you have to use it in an honest and rational manner in line with the rules of logic, things this ideological use of them don't even start with.   Atheists do the same thing with "natural selection" and "genes" and "DNA," the first of which I believe doesn't exist and, on close inspection, as a number of people have pointed out,  has many logical problems.  But, since natural selection benefits powerful, privileged elites, it is enforced as one of the foremost matters of scientific faith.  Genes and DNA are real - at least if you maintain a more modest and realistic definition of "genes"and what they both do than is commonly done -  but they're as ill suited as scientistic creator gods as probability.  

For me, thinking about the uses of these things, real and unreal, it is striking how desperately ready ideological atheists are to try to stuff anything they can into the gaps in exactly the way that some naive religious believers are.   If you want a really fine example of how difficult talking about these questions without doing that is,  read Hans Kung, I've read atheists trying to use his writing to their ends when an accurate reading of him shows they don't get him at all.  For example, in his study I quoted from the other day,  Eternal Life?  he doesn't say that things reported as human experience indicating life after death is to be rejected out of hand, in the manner of pseudo-skepticism, he says that since he chooses to argue on the grounds that modernism insists on, he sets those aside.  Then he makes a very convincing argument that would not please the modern atheist or even many modernistic religious writers, doing so on the turf they say is the only valid field of battle.  

I am also finding in reading Kung this year that my respect for the German intellectual tradition of scholarship as opposed to most English language scholarship has grown enormously.   Though much English language theological writing is of the same kind,  Brueggemann's massive Old Testament Theology, comes to mind.  Perhaps growing up in a church where services were still held in German - his father had to convince the older members of his congregation that it was time to move to English - and having to read so much German language scholarship on the subject, it's natural that he would practice that same kind of scholarship.

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