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Detecting Design is a Matter of Physical Evidence and Logic
- From Michael Behe
By Dr. Michael Behe - Author/Professor
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Behe is ignoring lots of relevant data
Unfortunately Dr. Behe continues his standard modus operandi, which is making bald assertions backed up by incredibly tenditious interpretations of mainstream evolutionary research, and ignoring the counterevidence which has been publicly presented to him again and again.
In this essay Behe makes basically two assertions: (1) observed evolution mostly produces "degradative changes" and (2) mutation & selection cannot produce irreducibly complex systems. Addressing them in turn:
1. Behe, either here or elsewhere, has provided no objective definition of what evolutionary changes are "degradative" and what are "improvements". It's entirely his subjective opinion, which lets him arbitrarily declare anything he feels forced to accept as a natural evolutionary product to be "degradative". But what is degradative? Probably most evolutionary changes that improve e.g. a protein in one aspect "degrade" a protein in some other aspects. Optimization for specific binding to substrate A will often (not always) decrease binding to substrate B. But on this standard, a great number of evolutionary changes that Behe surely would consider "improvements" would actually be "degradative." Ape feet are prehensile, with thumbs and great dexterity. They evolved into human feet, which have pretty miserable dexterity and actually aren't even that good as feet compared to, say, virtually any other large running vertebrate (think of cow hooves or ostrich feet). Bird wings are pretty spiffy at flight, but they're no good at what they used to be (the grasping forelimbs of bipedal carnivorous dinosaurs). Human brains are certainly great evolutionary innovations, but came at the cost of numerous, pretty much ludicrous compromises from the point of view of a tidy-minded designer focused on a general sense of improvement (i.e., someone like Michael Behe): that huge head has to be jammed through the female pelvis (why? why not put the birth canal in just any other part of the female body? You will find the answers in evolution, not intelligent design), resulting in difficult, very painful births compared to other animals, and high rates of mother & infant mortality & injury. To this we can add literally years of painstaking childcare and teaching (compare to the large animals on the African savanna, who can stand and run within hours of being born) to train up the brain and the underdeveloped infant body, and a major energetic cost.
The point is that someone using Behe's loose, arbitrary standards could pretty much argue that any evolutionary change was "degradative." He isn't doing science, he's just name-calling.
If we move to Behe's likely defense position, the situation doesn't improve. Perhaps Behe would argue that "breaking genes" or "decreasing substrate specificity" are objectively degradative. Perhaps, but if that's his standard, then his argument is easily disproven, because we have numerous examples of (a) evolution producing new genes with new functions and (b) evolution producing increases in substrate specificity. Examples are easy to find, Behe likely won't even dispute this point since he knows it is true (unlike most ID advocates, incidentally), but here are references to reviews for those who are interested:
Long, M., E. Betrán, K. Thornton, and W. Wang. 2003. The origin of new genes: glimpses from the young and old. Nature Reviews Genetics 4: 865-875.
http://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=The +origin+of+new+genes%3A+glimpses+from+the+young+and+old&hl=en&lr=&btnG=Search
Nicholas J. Matzke (2007). “The edge of creationism.” Trends In Ecology and Evolution (review of Behe's The Edge of Evolution):
http://www.pandasthumb.org/archives/2007/10/full-text-of-th.html
(to be continued)
- Nick Matzke
September 9, 2008 7:40PM
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Fitness increases
I was wondering where Behe got his data since Lenksi's site showed clearly how fitness had been increasing, so the claim that at best there were a few degenerative mutations shows a lack of familiarity with the actual data or perhaps a sign of forgetfulness.
And people wonder why scientists have come to find ID to be scientifically vacuous...
- PvM
September 9, 2008 9:09PM
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A relevant paper
Nadège Philippe, Estelle Crozat, Richard E. Lenski , Dominique Schneider, Evolution of global regulatory networks during a long-term experiment with Escherichia coli, BioEssays, Volume 29 Issue 9, Pages 846 - 860
Abstract
Evolution has shaped all living organisms on Earth, although many details of this process are shrouded in time. However, it is possible to see, with one's own eyes, evolution as it happens by performing experiments in defined laboratory conditions with microbes that have suitably fast generations. The longest-running microbial evolution experiment was started in 1988, at which time twelve populations were founded by the same strain of Escherichia coli. Since then, the populations have been serially propagated and have evolved for tens of thousands of generations in the same environment. The populations show numerous parallel phenotypic changes, and such parallelism is a hallmark of adaptive evolution. Many genetic targets of natural selection have been identified, revealing a high level of genetic parallelism as well. Beneficial mutations affect all levels of gene regulation in the cells including individual genes and operons all the way to global regulatory networks. Of particular interest, two highly interconnected networks - governing DNA superhelicity and the stringent response - have been demonstrated to be deeply involved in the phenotypic and genetic adaptation of these experimental populations.
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Wow who would have guessed this from reading Behe's descriptions.
- PvM
September 9, 2008 9:20PM
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Response to Behe, part 2 of 2
2. Behe claims that normal evolutionary processes cannot, or are very unlikely, to produce irreducibly complex systems that make the cell "reek of design." Behe, while he claims Lenski's work shows that evolution doesn't lead to new complexity and new systems, someone manages to avoid mentioning that that Lenski's E. coli bacteria were able to evolve a new biochemical pathway that could eat citrate, a chemical that E. coli in the wild cannot eat (Blount, Z.D., Borland, C.Z., and Lenski, R.E. 2008. Historical contingency and the evolution of a key innovation in an experimental population of Escherichia coli. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U. S. A 105:7899-7906.). Behe was forced to write a laughable response ( http://www.amazon.com/gp/blog/post/PLNK3U696N278Z93O ) that dodged the implications (evolution even in a limited lab population can produce a new beneficial system, i.e. an improvement that was not "degradative"), but, as per his modus operandi, he will dance and redefine his terms rather than admit that his argument against evolution has been falsified.
Unfortunately for Behe, Lenski's work is not isolated. The adaptation of bacteria to eat substrates that are indigestible to the wild-type bacteria -- or even compounds that are toxic -- is an extremely common phenomenon in labs that has been known for decades. And it is known to occur in the wild. There are several cases where bacteria in the wild have developed the ability to break down compounds that purely anthropogenic -- that is, chemicals that did not exist in the environment until humans manufactured them. For this very reason, these chemicals are often good preservatives (for example, wooden telephone polls) and/or highly toxic. They are often considered pollutants in the soil or water, so a fair bit of work has gone into discovering what happens to them. Again and again, the pattern seems to be that after a few decades, some bacterium has assembled a novel pathway -- always by assembling and modifying pre-existing enzymes with other original functions. Well-known examples include nylon, PCP (pentachlorophenol, a preservative of e.g. wood), and 2,4-DNT (dinitrotoluene, a breakdown product of the explosive TNT, or trinitrotoluene, which is often a soil pollutant on military bases). In at least the cases of PCP and 2,4-DNT, the breakdown pathways have multiple required parts, and therefore ought to be considered irreducibly complex (except that Behe will often dodge here also and invoke a "strict" definition of IC which excludes metabolic pathways, a definition which he invokes only when convenient, and which is arbitrary because the IC argument really only relies on the "multiple required features, too improbable to evolve at once" logic; in other situations he and his allies have declared various metabolic pathways to be IC when it seems to help the argument).
One more alternative might be to say that evolution hasn't produced anything "new" in these situations, only re-used old parts. This too would be the ID advocates sawing off the limb they sitting on; for every "irreducibly complex" system the ID guys like to tout as evidence for ID -- the flagellum, the cilium, the immune system, the blood-clotting cascade, etc. -- is basically just a combination of parts known to have other functions in related organisms or systems. The parts have statistically strong sequence similarity, and sequence similarity is explained by copying, and copying of sequence is the result of gene duplication, which (along with subsequent modification) is the main explanation that evolutionary biologists have invoked for the origin of new genes and "new information" for generations. The ID advocates have almost completely ignored this simple, obvious, well-documented, testable, and well-tested explanation for biological "information" and "complexity" for nearly 20 years now. This demonstrates scientific incompetence and carelessness, and lends support to the view (which is undeniable but outside the scope of this post; read the Kitzmiller decision for some of that) that ID is not about good science at all, but really just a branch of conservative religious apologetics.
- Nick Matzke
September 10, 2008 10:06AM
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Welcome Nick
To those unfamiliar with Nick Matzke, he was one of the (many) instrumental contributors to the success of the Kitzmiller v Dover ruling, as part of the plaintiffs' team. Not only has Nick contributed significantly to the unraveling of Behe's 'flagellum must have been designed' argument but he has also shown the evolution of ID from "creationist" via the intermediate fossil "cdesign proponentsist" to "design proponent". In fact, thanks to Nick Matzke and the plaintiffs' team, Behe's testimony during the Kitzmiller trials became useful evidence for the plaintiffs and the judge quoted extensively from Behe's testimony in his final ruling to show not only why the school board was motivated by religion but also that ID fails to be scientifically relevant.
And of course, Nick has always been at the frontline of defending scientific competence and accuracy.
- PvM
September 10, 2008 10:41AM
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Behe's response?
I understand that Michael Behe is one of the participants on this forum and I am looking forward to his contributions addressing Matzke's observations.
- PvM
September 11, 2008 12:29PM
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Confusing
Behe claims that --They can bring together separate components and place them in relationship to each other, to create an effect that may be extremely unlikely to occur by chance. So we detect design by inferring that some parts appear to have been arranged for a purpose.--
Remember however that this addresses only chance and not regularity. In fact, it is regularity which helps us understand how design inferences work in real science where science deals in concepts such as means, motives and opportunities to narrow down the possibilities not by relying on chance but rather on an interplay of regularity and chance. How do we determine that a person was involved in a crime? Not by stating that 'chance and regularity' cannot explain the data thus designed. Few crimes if any have been solved in this manner, and that should come as no surprise since we would expect to see many innocent people locked up. Without however understanding motive, means and opportunities, one cannot easily make a design conclusion. Gary Hurd presented a good example of how the circumstance of our background knowledge can greatly affect our inference. The case involves an example in which a religious person was bitten by a snake. Initially this seemed to be just another accident, until the police found out that the snake was part of a snake charming ceremony in which the faithful handle snakes. While not as much an accident, it was also not a case of attempted homicide but it could be interpreted as an attempted suicide. After all, what person would willingly handle these poisonous snakes? But then the police found out that the woman was the wife of the preacher and that the preacher had just taken out a large life insurance for his wife. Now suddenly the police became suspicious. But was this evidence of murder or just a coincidence?
ID's hypothesis would be useless in this case. Of course, ID proponents may argue that the design inference is not meant for all circumstances but I would argue that for rarefied design, it is unsuitable in any circumstance. Rarefied design is design which lacks the necessary information to constrain the explanatory power through relevant background data.
In addition, while the concept of purpose is used by Behe, ID provides no way to determine purpose and in fact, due to its teleological nature, natural selection, which selects for function can be easily lead to apparent design. In fact, this returns us to the Paley problem namely that science replace our ignorance with scientific pathways to explain the evolution of life on earth. That subsequent data continued to strengthen these findings has made evolutionary theory such a powerful explanation.
While ID has good reasons to want to return to the pre-Paleyian age, it presents no methods to differentiate between apparent and actual design. In fact, such a differentiation is never truly possible in case of the supernatural because one could always argue that the designer used nature for its design, just like the evidence suggests.
In fact, ID does not infer purpose or a purposeful arrangement, it merely claims that design is that which remains when science has failed (so far) to explain a particular feature or system. However, to call our ignorance 'design' is just equivocating on concepts.
So next time an ID proponent asserts that ID detects design through the purposeful arrangement of parts, let's remember that this is NOT how ID's methods work.
- PvM
September 9, 2008 7:58PM
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Confusing continued
And worse, during the Dover trials, the judge came to conclude that based on the evidence presented
---Judge Jones---
We will now consider the purportedly “positive argument” for design encompassed in the phrase used numerous times by Professors Behe and Minnich throughout their expert testimony, which is the “purposeful arrangement of parts.” Professor Behe summarized the argument as follows: We infer design when we see parts that appear to be arranged for a purpose. The strength of the inference is quantitative; the more parts that are arranged, the more intricately they interact, the stronger is our confidence in design. The appearance of design in aspects of biology is overwhelming. Since nothing other than an intelligent cause has been demonstrated to be able to yield such a strong appearance of design, Darwinian claims notwithstanding, the conclusion that the design seen in life is real design is rationally justified. (18:90-91, 18:109-10 (Behe); 37:50 (Minnich)). As previously indicated, this argument is merely a restatement of the Reverend William Paley’s argument applied at the cell level. Minnich, Behe, and Paley reach the same conclusion, that complex organisms must have been designed using the same reasoning, except that Professors Behe and Minnich refuse to identify the designer, whereas Paley inferred from the presence of design that it was God. (1:6- 7 (Miller); 38:44, 57 (Minnich)). Expert testimony revealed that this inductive argument is not scientific and as admitted by Professor Behe, can never be ruled out. (2:40 (Miller); 22:101 (Behe); 3:99 (Miller)).
Indeed, the assertion that design of biological systems can be inferred from the “purposeful arrangement of parts” is based upon an analogy to human design. Because we are able to recognize design of artifacts and objects, according to Professor Behe, that same reasoning can be employed to determine biological design. (18:116-17, 23:50 (Behe)). Professor Behe testified that the strength of the analogy depends upon the degree of similarity entailed in the two propositions; however, if this is the test, ID completely fails. Unlike biological systems, human artifacts do not live and reproduce over time. They are non-replicable, they do not undergo genetic recombination, and they are not driven by natural selection. (1:131-33 (Miller); 23:57-59 (Behe)). For human artifacts, we know the designer’s identity, human, and the mechanism of design, as we have experience based upon empirical evidence that humans can make such things, as well as many other attributes including the designer’s abilities, needs, and desires. (D-251 at 176; 1:131-33 (Miller); 23:63 (Behe); 5:55- 58 (Pennock)). With ID, proponents assert that they refuse to propose hypotheses on the designer’s identity, do not propose a mechanism, and the designer, he/she/it/they, has never been seen. In that vein, defense expert Professor Minnich agreed that in the case of human artifacts and objects, we know the identity and capacities of the human designer, but we do not know any of those attributes for the designer of biological life. (38:44-47 (Minnich)). In addition, Professor Behe agreed that for the design of human artifacts, we know the designer and its attributes and we have a baseline for human design that does not exist for design of biological systems. (23:61-73 (Behe)). Professor Behe’s only response to these seemingly insurmountable points of disanalogy was that the inference still works in science fiction movies. (23:73 (Behe)).
It is readily apparent to the Court that the only attribute of design that biological systems appear to share with human artifacts is their complex appearance, i.e. if it looks complex or designed, it must have been designed. (23:73 (Behe)). This inference to design based upon the appearance of a “purposeful arrangement of parts” is a completely subjective proposition, determined in the eye of each beholder and his/her viewpoint concerning the complexity of a system. Although both Professors Behe and Minnich assert that there is a quantitative aspect to the inference, on cross-examination they admitted that there is no quantitative criteria for determining the degree of complexity or number of parts that bespeak design, rather than a natural process. (23:50 (Behe); 38:59 (Minnich)). As Plaintiffs aptly submit to the Court, throughout the entire trial only one piece of evidence generated by Defendants addressed the strength of the ID inference: the argument is less plausible to those for whom God’s existence is in question, and is much less plausible for those who deny God’s existence. (P- 718 at 705).
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- PvM
September 9, 2008 7:59PM
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Poor analogy
Yes, when one sees a flower garden or Mount Rushmore for the first time, one assumes the object was created by an intelligent being. However, this is not at all like looking at a biological mechanism and coming to a similar conclusion. We are familiar with the capabilities of humans and know, when we see the flower garden or Mount Rushmore, that humans are all over the place in this world and completely capable of creating such things. So it is not an unreasonable assumption that people made those things: we know they are capable and have created many similar things.
However, people do not do such things as design eyes or flagelli.
A much better analogy would be if we saw an object that clearly looked designed (say, a carving of a human face) on another planet, where we know with great certainty that humans could not have created the object. That some intelligent being created the object is one theory, but how would we go about vetting that theory? We would look for evidence of that being or others like it. If none could be found whatsoever, and plausible alternate explanations for how the shape, or similar shapes, can arise naturally are developed, the natural conclusion would be that while there was an *appearance* of design, there is no evidence to support the theory.
This is the case for biological mechanisms. No evidence of a designer has been given beyond that the mechanisms seem to be designed. And evolution is very well established and explains well a great many biological mechanisms, including many that may look designed at first. So we have our plausible alternative, and we have no evidence of the designer.
The way in which Intelligent Design shows its religious underpinnings so clearly is in the way it doesn't even attempt to discuss the designer, as if the designer is unknowable and unprovable from the start.
- mj75
September 10, 2008 9:09PM
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You got it
--MJ75--
However, people do not do such things as design eyes or flagelli.
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Exactly and the evidence supports a much better explanation as Nick Matzke has shown. However, ID seems to have mostly ignored these inconvenient facts.
- PvM
September 10, 2008 9:47PM
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Detecting Design and Dissenting from Actual Science
It is also possible to "detect design" by reading what other experts say about so-called "experts." For instance, while it is true to say that Michael Behe is a professor in the Biology Department at Lehigh University, it is also true that:
"The (Lehigh University Biology) department faculty, then, are unequivocal in their support of evolutionary theory, which has its roots in the seminal work of Charles Darwin and has been supported by findings accumulated over 140 years. The sole dissenter from this position, Prof. Michael Behe, is a well-known proponent of "intelligent design." - http://www.lehigh.edu/bio/news/evolution.htm
Lehigh's entire Biology Department (with one exception) agrees with the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the National Academy of Science, and essentially every other actual science organization in the country that intelligent design creationism is not science.
Intelligent design creationism's claim to be "science" remains unsupported in the world of actual science. Intelligent design creationism's continued visible support from fundamentalist Christians provides an illustration of what its actual design really is.
- Paul Burnett
September 13, 2008 9:54AM
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Behe's 'edge of evolution'
Michael Behe may be best known for his book "Darwin's Black Box" and to a lesser extent its sequel "The Edge of evolution". Both books attempt to show that there limits (edges) to evolutionary theory which cannot be crossed.
Let's first point out that much of Behe's argument is not with evolutionary theory itself but a component of said theory, namely natural selection. For instance, his Irreducible Complexity argument relies on the (erroneous) claim that processes of variation and selection (aka Darwinian processes) are unable to explain systems which are 'irreducibly complex (IC)".
In order to understand why Behe is wrong, one need not look further than
http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/behe.html
First of all the problem of IC systems and its solution was pointed out by a Nobel Prize winner and evolutionary scientist almost a century ago ( http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/comdesc/ICsilly.html )
Muller, H. J. (1918) "Genetic variability, twin hybrids and constant hybrids, in a case of balanced lethal factors." Genetics 3:422-499.
Muller, H. J. (1939) "Reversibility in evolution considered from the standpoint of genetics." Biological Reviews of the Cambridge Philosophical Society 14:261-280.
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"... thus a complicated machine was gradually built up whose effective working was dependent upon the interlocking action of very numerous different elementary parts or factors, and many of the characters and factors which, when new, were originally merely an asset finally became necessary because other necessary characters and factors had subsequently become changed so as to be dependent on the former. It must result, in consequence, that a dropping out of, or even a slight change in any one of these parts is very likely to disturb fatally the whole machinery; for this reason we should expect very many, if not most, mutations to result in lethal factors ..."
Muller 1918 pp. 463-464. (emphasis in the original)
"... an embryological or physiological process or structure newly arisen by gene mutation, after becoming once established (with or without the aid of selection), later takes more and more part in the whole complex interplay of vital processes. For still further mutations that arise are now allowed to stay if only they work in harmony with all genes that are already present, and, of these further mutations, some will naturally depend, for their proper working, on the new process or structure under consideration. Being thus finally woven, as it were, into the most intimate fabric of the organism, the once novel character can no longer be withdrawn with impunity, and may have become vitally necessary."
Muller 1939 pp. 271-272.
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However, Keith Robison described a very similar example where simple evolutionary processes lead to a system which is IC ( http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/behe/review.html )
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So, duplication plus a loss of function, plus one of two different loss-of-function mutations can convert a single step pathway into a two step cascade. The initial steps are neutral, neither advantageous nor disadvantageous. Such neutral mutations occur regularly. The final step locks in the cascade.
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ID's objections to the above scenario are that it involves neutral steps and are thus not 'Darwinian' in nature, but like Darwin, evolutionary science accepts that selection is but one of various processes and the importance of neutrality on evolution has been historically underestimated.
Dembski, understanding one of Behe's flaws redefined IC to read
--
A system performing a given basic function is irreducibly complex if it includes a set of well-matched, mutually interacting, nonarbitrarily individuated parts such that each part in the set is indispensable to maintaining the system's basic, and therefore original, function. The set of these indispensable parts is known as the irreducible core of the system. (No Free Lunch, 285)
--
Note the addition of 'original function', this prevents the most common pathways in evolution to be irrelevant to explaining IC systems, but now Dembski has to show that indeed, original function was maintained in any particular system. While this may have temporarily saved Behe's original fomulation, it has merely defined IC systems to be something which is much harder to establish as it involves a historical component of 'original function'.
- PvM
September 14, 2008 10:38AM
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Behe's 'edge of evolution' part II
In his latest book "Edge of Evolution" Behe attempts to define this edge by pointing to malaria as an example of a designed system in which, according to Behe, two simultaneous mutations are required, and given the estimated probabilities of 1 in 10^20, this may be quite unlikely.
First of all, Behe's estimate of probabilities come from a side comment in a paper which at best ventures to guess at probabilities :
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The estimates for chloroquine and artemisinin are speculative. In the former case, this assumes two events in 10 years of use with exposure of 10% of the world’s falciparum malaria (Burgess &Young 1959; Martin&Arnold1968; Looareesuwan et al. 1996; Su et al. 1997
--
and ignores the relevant research that shows the gradual evolution of resistance to malaria as document in various research papers:
Pooja Mittra, Sumiti Vinayak, Hina Chandawat, Manoj K. Das, Neeru Singh, Sukla Biswas, Vas Dev, Ashwani Kumar, Musharraf A. Ansari, and Yagya D. Sharma, Progressive Increase in Point Mutations Associated with Chloroquine Resistance in Plasmodium falciparum Isolates from India
Volume 193(2006), pages 1304 - 1312
For more details, see Nick Matzke's contribution
http://www.pandasthumb.org/archives/2007/10/full-text-of-th.html
- PvM
September 14, 2008 10:39AM
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Evidence
The following is a quote from your points: Quote "The more parts that appear to be arranged for a purpose, and the more precisely they fit each other to achieve that purpose, the more and more confident we can be in our conclusion of design. For example, if you came across a broken stick on the ground in the woods that pointed toward a campsite, it may be a signal to campers, or it may just be a stick that happened to fall that way. If there were four broken sticks, arranged into an arrow shape pointing at the camp, you’d be fairly confident that that was no accident." end Quote
Sticks to the campsite:
1. The current Calendar that makind has been using for 2008 years is based from the time of Christ's death, known as A.D. (After Death).
2. The timeline used prior to Christ's death is B.C. (Before Christ).
3. The Holy Bible is the most read text in the world and reprinted millions of times. There were plenty of scholars of the time that could have refuted and stopped this text from spreading. So you ask yourself why would such a text continue to this day? Is all that read it delusioned? Are the over a billion people on this planet mistaken about the existence of Intelligent Design?
4. Why do most people want to close their ears and even become defensive on the words printed in this text (Holy Bible)? When they don't even know what is in it. Why is mankind quick to embrace a different approach, but not the Bible which is an instruction manual from the chief I.D.?
These are signs left behind for those who continue to question ID.
- dadunique
October 13, 2008 10:33AM
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Planning ahead?
Behe says: "Intelligent agents can plan ahead, and act on their plans."
If this is true, then there should always be a conscious effort to prevent lines of organisms from evolving into specialized forms that later become prone to extinction when a sudden change occurs in the environment. What happens instead, according to the fossil record, is that many spectacular but highly specialized animals arise which then suffer from mass extinctions, followed by new and different animals that end up occupying the same ecological niches the extinct ones did. If Intelligent Design made life on Earth, we would expect the designer to make all animals generalized in form and they would almost never go extinct. Evolution by natural selection is a blind process, taking no possible future events into account, that causes most lines of organisms to become more specialized over time. It does this so a species can occupy one ecological niche and keep other species out. When several species occupy the same ecological niche, competition between them eventually cause more specialization and/or causes most of the species to become extinct. Then a sudden change in the environment causes the remaining specialists to die out. That doesn't sound at all like an intelligent agent planning ahead.
- Dale Husband
October 16, 2008 2:56PM
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purposefulness and intentionality
"So we detect design by inferring that some parts appear to have been arranged for a purpose."
Other inconvenient observations which bear inspection : purposefulness and intentionality.
Here is that impermissible notion to the effect: "personality is void of material and therefore personality is not worthy of notable consideration by science "
Following that is dismissal and denial of personal expressions and very often ad hominem character-assassination.
We are forced to confront these challenges which in a more spiritual world might appear trivial or pathetic.
Be prepared which might advise be patient and have pity.
- TruthBeautyGoodness
September 6, 2009 4:25AM
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Self-awareness?
In order to have purposefulness and intentionality you need self-awareness. We are self-aware but where does that come from?
- mike1948
September 6, 2009 9:46PM
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