A Good Challenge to ID

I've been carrying on a conversation with a commenter by the name of John at a post or two over at Biologos. He began by saying that he couldn't see a coherent ID inference for the start and stop codons in the cell.

[A brief explanation: Messenger RNA makes a copy of a strand of DNA that codes for a protein. The first triplet of nucleotides, or the "start" codon, always codes for the amino acid methionine, whereas the last triplet of the strand, or the "stop" codon (of which there are three possible permutations), never codes for any amino acid.]

After much give and take between us, John finally came up with what I consider to be a good challenge for the ID hypothesis. Proteins achieve their function by folding into their specific shapes. In order to do this, it is important to have many or most of the correct amino acids in the correct positions. Because the stop codons do not code for any amino acids, when the ribosomes produce the protein, there is no problem of the stop codons coding for an unwanted amino acid. However, this is not the case with the start codon. Whether or not the protein calls for methionine at the first postion, methionine will be at the first position. Often this could interfere with the correct folding of the protein. So a second process is needed to remove the methionine before the protein can fold and function. From a design perspective this does indeed seem needlessly inefficient. It would seem that a much better process would be for the start codon not to code for an amino acid, also.

So the challenge is for the ID proponents to figure out why an intelligent designer would have used methionine for the start codon, instead of a codon that does not code for an amino acid. And until an explanation is produced, John's challenge weakens, to some extent, most ID hypotheses.

Of course, there may already be a good explanation that I'm not aware of. Any readers who know more about this should feel free to comment.

A very rough first try of a philosophical argument for...

...I'm not sure what:

1. In a rational world (state of affairs?), the future would resemble the past.

2. However, there is nothing contradictory about a world where the future does not resemble the past.

3. The number of ways that the future would not resemble the past far outnumber the ways that it would resemble the past.

4. Therefore, it is very improbable that the future would resemble the past.

5. Therefore, we should not expect the future to resemble the past, unless it had a rational cause.

6. Therefore, our expectation that the future would resemble the past only makes sense if we believe that it has a rational cause.

Telic Thoughts is Alive and Well

I'm glad to see that I wasn't really needed that much at TelicThoughts. They've had some very interesting posts (such as here and here), which I recommend to my readers.

An exercise

At a friend's insistence, I've begun reading Darin Hufford's The Misunderstood God. He quotes the famous love passage from I Corintians 13:

⁴ Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. ⁵ It does not dishonor others, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. ⁶ Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. ⁷ It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres.⁸ Love never fails.

Then he suggests substituting the word "God" for "love." So we get:

"⁴ God is patient, God is kind. God does not envy, God does not boast, God is not proud. ⁵ God does not dishonor others, God is not self-seeking, God is not easily angered, God keeps no record of wrongs. ⁶ God does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. ⁷ God always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres.⁸ God never fails."

A helpful exercise for those of us with dim views of God.

More from Feser

Ed Feser really doesn't like ID:

Heads ID wins, Tails you Lose.

So taking my role as a "cultural warrior in the combox" seriously, I'm commenting in the combox there, as well. I'm asking honest questions. Let's hope this leads to clarity.

In Praise of Tinkerers

As an armchair philosopher who is all thumbs, I deeply envy tinkerers. I stand in awe of their ability to conceive, design, create and build things. So when critics of ID attack it on the grounds that it makes God a "mere tinkerer," I have difficulty understand their point. To me, they have just bequeathed one of the highest forms of praise on God that I think is possible, yet they do it with their noses turned up, as if they think calling God a tinkerer is an insult of some kind.

Well, God seems to like tinkerers, too. At least, if the Christian story is true, He liked them so much He decided to be incarnated as one. Or must God take on the form that is closest to His own nature?

Ed Feser's New Post against ID

Aristotelian/Thomist philosopher, Ed Feser, has a new post:

Thomism versus the design argument

The crucial part of his argument:

"Similarly, so long as you insist (for whatever reason) on treating natural substances as if they were a kind of artifact, and on predicating attributes of both the world’s “designer” and of human designers in a univocal way, you will never (from an A-T point of view, anyway) get even one inch closer to the God of classical theism, because you will necessarily be describing the “designer” in a way that not merely falls short of, but is positively inconsistent with, classical theism."

A commenter by the name of Maolsheachlann (how the heck do you pronounce that?) made what I thought was a very good point:

"I don't understand how intelligent design in the ID sense would be different from a miracle. A miracle is a kind of bypassing of the usual operations of nature, and yet it it attests to God-- not to some kind of sorcerer or Urizen. You may not be able to reach the God of classical theism from a miraculous cure of Parkinson's disease, and yet God doesn't disdain to act in this way."

So why must God disdain to directly intervene and create life?