The Human Question

That is, a version of ID that places all of the intervention at the point of the creation of the first cell. Noteworthy: that it is consistent with neo-Darwinism simply for the reason that the latter is a theory of biodiversity rather than biogenesis.

The difference is, according to Dembski, that Miller denies that you can be scientific about that.

At one point in his Design Revolution he indicates that the design component could have been placed in matter with the big bang at the beginning of the universe (my comment: in this case ID would fall under the anthropic principle). At another point (chapter 19) he suggests that information enters ex nihilo (with a little help from quantum indeterminacy)--not at the beginning of the universe, but--after the creation of the universe. I suppose both could be affirmed as partial explanations, so it is not a case of a clear-cut inconsistency. But why isn't he clear on this? Maybe he is treating this issue an an empirical one and is exploring two possible options that would both be consistent with the very general thesis that some type of ID at some time helped originate the present species. Also, maybe the talk of ex nihilo another way of saying that design is not something that you can quantify. It's a kind of qualia , as in the qualia that escape description of sensation ...

The following discussion assumes that there is such a thing as an evolutionary dead-end. Or better, a cuddle-de-sac (the two words are synonymous in their literal meaning, but "dead end" seems to suggest that you must stop, whereas "cuddle-de-sac" suggests that you can turn around). That is, some life forms are much less likely to form a more complex, higher life forms than others. The discussion also assumes that we can imagine many different ways in which different kinds of primal life forms could have arisen. Only one of these ways would be dna as we know it now. It assumes that given the laws of chemistry and the conditions, there are many ways biogenesis could have occurred... many ways of duplicating a dna like code as well as read it to form proteins. Here is question #1 (I can only ask, not answer this question, so it ain't much of a discussion): Are there many ways that the first cell could have structured? Would all of those ways have led ...