Perry Marshall presents himself as an invincible defender of his supposed proof of an Intelligent Designer, standing atop a mountain of vanquished counter-arguments from hordes of atheists.
The plain logical error in the argument is in the second premise, and it's the one logical fallacy I come across more than any other: an argument from ignorance. "There is no natural process known to science that creates coded information." That's not the same as saying there really is no such natural process (which would be a simple unsupported statement rather than a fallacy), but it expects us to assume as much. Is Mr Marshall, or any human alive, familiar with "all codes" in the universe? What qualifies anyone to make such a sweeping statement? This attempted proof by elimination of the origin of DNA must leave room for unknown alternatives to maintain any honesty, and is therefore not a real proof.
I realise that the fact of the logical error is not such a brilliant counter-argument when you're actually trying to convince people. There are plenty more objections, and Marshall has posted and replied to many on his site. He hasn't always done so convincingly, though you can judge that for yourself. I'll just take one approach as an exercise.
As support for the argument that all codes are designed by a mind, Marshall argues that random processes do not produce information. (I've been through this at length.) His primary demonstration is his own text-based random mutation generator which takes a sentence and, through single-letter changes, turns it to nonsense.
Marshall admits that the mutation utility does not simulate natural selection, the non-random element of evolution. Furthermore, he's not interested in adding that functionality to test his own argument. (He says instead that the reader is free to do it for him; if someone has taken him up on this, please let us know. Meanwhile, here's a more complex simulator.)
He argues that natural selection would only create sensible sentences if words only mutated into other meaningful words, but that's not applying natural selection at the letter level. An ideal extension of his program would present several choices of mutation at each step, and allow those letter mutations which destroy the legibility of a word to be manually or automatically ruled out. (The real world equivalent is a serious birth defect, which would keep a creature from breeding or even living long enough to breed.) In Marshall's program, detrimental mutations are allowed to compound until all sense is lost. Of course we won't likely get anything useful out of it.
Forgetting even the mechanism of natural selection, I submit a basic argument for the possibility of chance creating information which I've used before: think of a large grid of squares which can be either black or white, but all start as white. If you randomly pick the colour of every square at once, there is a chance, however small, that the newly black squares will form a simple but clear picture of a rectangle, or the letter G, or Elvis. Without adding any extra material, chance can increase the amount of information the grid provides. The prebiotic chemicals only had to manage a feat like this once, given potentially unlimited opportunities, to come up with DNA or its precursors.
- SmartLX
Comments
Ladies and gentlemen,
Ladies and gentlemen, Richard Dawkins to the rescue. Thirty years ago.
In his early book The Blind Watchmaker, he wrote a simple program in BASIC which simulates mutation and selection to turn gibberish into legible text. In the blog entry I've linked to, that program is recreated in QBASIC and available for download.
Even when saddled with various inhibitors, such as the culling of viable strings, it works wonders.
Here's the Theist's
Here's the Theist's Riddle:
1) Physical matter is not created by conscious minds; there is no conscious process known to science that creates physical matter.
2) Therefore the physical universe was not created by a conscious mind.
If you can provide an empirical example of physical matter being created by a conscious mind, you've toppled my proof. All you need is one.
Nice, but...
Clever flip, but you probably realise that yours isn't a proof either. Since we've never seen physical matter created by anything, we have no authority to declare how it's created, if at all. Though one example of conscious creation would indeed topple your argument, the lack of examples does not confirm it.
You're right, it is not much
You're right, it is not much a proof either. Plus there's the point that the supernatural is not subject to the laws of nature.
Something interesting about The Atheist Riddle is that it implies that conscious minds are not the result of natural processes -- consciousness is supernatural, since no natural process can create codes but minds can (according to its premises).
The word supernatural refers to something that is not found in nature. However, conscious minds are found in the natural world and can be observed as brain activity.
It's not just human minds that can create codes, animals communicate with behavioural and chemical codes (like ants or honey bees). Is Perry Marshall saying that a honey bee's dance language is not wholly the result of natural processes, but requires a supernatural component?
And if conscious minds are supernatural then why is it that they are affected by and dependent upon natural processes.
Marshall
Perry Marshall's initial argument extends to all codes created by living things, because either they're actually the result of conscious minds or they're from DNA. In other words, the supernatural component does extend to all life, and praise God for that, yada yada yada. The whole dualism aspect is another kettle of fish.
A better mutation and natural selection word game
"Marshall admits that the mutation utility does not simulate natural selection, the non-random element of evolution. Furthermore, he's not interested in adding that functionality to test his own argument. (He says instead that the reader is free to do it for him; if someone has taken him up on this, please let us know."
Done. ;)
I give you Mutate, a word mutation generator that utilizes a dictionary look up and user feedback for natural selection. The successful mutations are also stored in a database and can be viewed in a mutation tree.
Nice.
NICE.