stamenflicker said:
What are the odds of these stones being formed by some natural phenomenon?
Certain materials forming regular interlocking structures is inherant in their physical nature; Diamond and graphite are neither random nor consciously designing when forming endless rows of an identical molecular structure... And natural selection is as natural a phenomena as that, because it acts upon all things, including rocks. In differing environments, one shape of carbon lasts longer than another. The graphite in your pencil will not last as long as the diamond on your drill. Natural selection occurs everywhere in the universe, on all things. Life, consciousness and the ability to build Stone Arches is just one particular branch that this particular natural phenomena can lead to. Geology won't put those stones there, but Biology has... it's thrown up the ability to build more than once on Earth in fact. Beavers build dams. Bees build hives. It's rather common on this branch of evolution.
So the chances of a natural phenomena leading to stone arches is actually rather closer to 1 than you assume.
But you prefer to assume the other argument, the argument from incredible odds to lead towards a designer for Evolution... and you are wrong. Evolution requires none; the relevant question is why Evolution seems good at
creating designers.
Maybe a tree once grew between these stones, or a glacier once flowed through these stones
EXACTLY.
Evolution doesn't just add traits, it takes them away too, for the simple mathematical determinism that something which replicates that which is un-needed is inefficient.
When you look at a stone arch, you don't see the soil that was piled up to hold the stones in place. Or the wooden scaffolding which was erected around it. These are things needed to
build a stone arch, but once it's up, the substructure is not need, and so is taken down. So it is with evolution.
But evolution is
slow, because it can only act upon random testing of an essentially unpredicateble population. It doesn't
know people have un-needed building blocks, nor can it select hard against those whose blocks that aren't particularly harmful or wasteful. Mankind still has an appendix, even though it doesn't do anything any more except fall ill, because Evolution is only slowly able to remove it... Eventually though, assuming it doesn't take a more useful path randomly, it'll disappear from our bodies. The vesitigal human tail is further along the path, because we presumably lost a use for it further back in our evolutionary past. Most people aren't even aware that mankind can still occasionally have one. But the code for it is still there, and occasionally it can be randomly activated in a very few individuals.
http://www.aetheronline.com/mario/Eye-Openers/tails_in_humans.htm
Now be honest... do you find those tails sexy? No? And that's why evolution will select further against it. Anyone born thus is unlikely to mate, and the genes with activated tail code (I simplify enormously) will eventually be removed.
But only slowly... because those with the code for tails but which isn't activated will still be mating; and the ability of natural selection to differentiate between the overall energy expenditure of someone passing on that small a difference in needed or un-needed components is extremely small. Small things over billions of years does add up, but you
need those billions of years to so.
Design without intermediate steps is thus not an argument for God/design at all,
because Evolution states itself that intermediatries dissapear. In some cases they haven't yet. In others, it's because they are still useful as either building blocks, or because they carry side benefits as part of larger systems, or useful purely on their own merits. Half an eye is better than no eye at all... or maybe it's not, but Evolution can't just instantly remove, just as it can't just instantly create.
I think as I gaze at the picture, that I really don't know. All I can do is make assumptions.
And that's why you don't understand Evolution. Nor does Behe. You are making assumptions about God, and ignoring the fact that
A.) There is already an answer given for the apparent design of Life within Evolution.
B.) There is already an answer given for where intermediate steps in Life go.
C.) Neither of these answers need God to be valid.
But hey, it sure looks like a cool place to go on a pinic!
Flick [/B]
But it'll be pulled down if more utility is gained from building housing space or a shopping mall. And one day people will refuse to believe that mankind ever could build such arches without the help of modern technology or space aliens. And others will claim that the mythological arches proved people were worshipping the same God as them, even though there are 100,000 odd years of human experience where Jehovah, let alone the Christian God wasn't even known. And then... thousands of years later, no one will think about the arch at all, because not even the vaguest reference to it will exist. But does that mean it never did? Or that people no longer feel the need the memory of such arches anymore?
As I said... natural selection doesn't care. It's created a species which does care, but that's because such a trait is useful for a species to have; You stare at the arch and see God, but you've got the God - Man - Evolution relationship backwards. Evolution has created Man who makes God to give himself reasons to live for; Just like he creates for himself nice areas to have picnics in. But there's no eternal truth involved. You picnic amongst the ruins of the dreams of the dead. You and I both and all. And we all in turn follow them into the past, just as our biological building blocks go. Perhaps for something better, perhaps merely for something different. But we exist
now, and that's true irrespective of how people might later assume for their won convieniance that we did not. And that's what you are doing with regards to previous evolutionary developments... and what Evolution remembers. There were steps here before that now are not.
