Argument from complexity

by goddidit 15 Replies latest watchtower beliefs

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  goddidit

  Any doctrines you recommend?
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  Black Sheep

  Only one.

  The primary doctrine.

  They are taught that Jesus selected them in 1919 to be God's sole channel of communication to mankind in our day.

  Don't remind them of that. Ask questions that get them to tell you every part of that.

  How do you know ...??? When ...??? How do you work that out....??? etc..

  As long as they believe that doctrine, they are trapped.

  If you tell them that doctrine is BS, you are pushing them in. When they tell you that doctrine BS, they are on their way out.
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  bohm

  Whew. Okay. First you got to spend a lot of time to understand what the other persons position is, i mean really make him explain it. If he end up with something like: "Evolution cannot create complexity", i would say something like:

  I think in many ways that is the question with respect to evolution. One of the difficulties i have had with the question is what exactly complexity is. Personally i think about complexity like a new think the organism can do or a new part of the DNA that does something usefull for the organism. (instead of just a new random chunk), what do you think?

  There is clearly a difficulty in terms of evidence no matter if evolution is true or not. For example, if we look at two microraptors, one has muscles and limbs that indicate it could fly, the other has muscles and limbs that indicate it could not fly but rather run faster. We can perhaps agree that the flying microraptor seem more complex than the other, but then the question become: "Did one descend from the other" and we are really asking "Evolution cannot cause this microraptor to evolve from this" -- not much have been gained.

  I think it is for this reason most work on the complexity question amongst scientists who does not believe in evolution is being discussed in the context of microbiology, for example the bacterial flagellum. Complexity in this context seem to me to be something like weater a new proteine that does something new can arise, or if a cell can evolve to do something it could not do previously and which has some utillity. The good thing is that evolution predict that since cells should divide so quickly we should see things happening right before our eyes, and if we dont see anything happening, its like believing in plate tectonics without seeing the plates moving.

  I am very interested in how you view these things, but i think there are many things which indicate something do happend. For example E-coli which has evolved to digest its own growth medium http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E._coli_long-term_evolution_experiment, the evolution of the nylon-eating bacteria, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nylon-eating_bacteria etc. These things are clearly beneficial for the organisms and involve the creation of new enzymes. It seem that as a general statement "evolution cannot create complexity" is wrong.

  Personally i see the problem as what kind of structures evolution can create and which it cannot though the slow accumulation of the complexity which we know can arise over millions of years. I wonder how you view this?
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  streets76

  Ever wondered if Jehovah, the epitome of complexity, ever sits around and wonders, "Where the hell did I come from?"
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  sir82

  I've always liked the "potato chip" analogy for those who say that order and design can't come about without intervention:

  When you open a bag of potato chips, are the bigger chips at the top or the bottom? By the time you get to the bottom of the bag, are they big or small?

  The chips "arranged themselves" from large to small, from top to bottom, without a designer physically moving them around.

  Not everything, left to itself, inevitably becomes simpler or more disorganized. Order and (apparent) design can arise naturally.
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  BurnTheShips

  There is no irreducible complexity. And another thing, complexity will only continue to increase for the foreseeable future.

  The Phenomenon of Man (Le Phénomène Humain, 1955) is a non-fiction book written by French philosopher, paleontologist and Jesuit priest Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. In this work, Teilhard describes evolution as a process that leads to increasing complexity, culminating in the unification of consciousness.

  You can read the book here:

  http://arthursbookshelf.com/other-stuff/phenom10.html

  BTS