brotherdan:
When someone tell you: "Information cannot come from non-information, therefore evolution is false", you should expect them to be able to flesh out the argument in some detail. this never happends. Its simply amazing that people like Dembski, Gish and Ham will claim such a thing again and again knowing its a lie. I will give 3 reasons.
the statement is wrong for theoretical reasons.
This is the most easiest. anyone who read a rigerous definitions of information as they are presented in information theory (which has nothing to do with evolution, its a branch of mathematics) will realize the statement are trivially wrong.
It hardly even require an argument, just look up "information" on wikipedia and check out stuff like "shannon information" and "kolmogorov complexity". As soon as you understand what they are saying, you will realize that the statement is absolutely hopelessly false. Thats why it bug me: These people know they are wrong and are lying to the unsuspecting; or rather, they formulate themselves in a way people think they are saying one thing, when they are really choosing their words very carefully to avoid obvious lies. yah it do remind me of some other organization...
But i might be wrong. There might be a really cool definition of information we have not discovered (like Dembski might manage to turn "complex specified information" into an actual theory, which he has not done so far). But i dont think so because:
Evolution work as an optimization method
I use a mathematical enviroment called matlab every day. It has a build-in state-of-the-art genetic algorithm optimization package; its not because its build by crazy evolutionists, its because the methods behind evolution are extremely useful at solving certain problems.
its hard for me to understand how someone can say evolution cannot create information, when engineers use 'evolution' to solve problems that are to hard to solve otherwise.
If you read dembski he will give the following response: "No, evolution didnt create information, because by somehow asking the question, the scientist was allready giving the information contained in the solution". Thats a lot of fine words for the following: Because the question was asked, there is no new knowledge learned in answering it. I hope this dont sound convincing.
Evolution work in the laboratory.
You might dismiss the above by saying: "well, so there is no reason information could not be created, and no reason why it could not work in principle -- but it might still not work because nature is somehow to complicated"
The problem is that there is plenty of examples where evolution has created new strings of DNA which did stuff that was usefull for the organism. if thats not "information" in any sence of the word, i dont know what is.