What evidence exists for your arm being the result of sheer chance?

Question

Consider the design components of your arm:
1. Constructed of 31 bones and no less than 50 muscles which all must act in symphony as a functional unit.
2. Capable of limited self-repair, maintenance, and growth.
3. Capable of exerting force in a wide degree of motion, including: push, pull, torque, flexion, extension and such, all from muscle contraction.
4. Able to perform a wide variety of tasks, including playing the piano and weight lifting.
5. The substance that is responsible for this movement (muscle) is self-powered, having no peer in the engineering/design world.
6. This design doesn't deal well with changes to its blueprint, as changes to a single enzyme can destroy the entire system:
http://www.neurology.org/cgi/content/abstract/62/6/994
7. Most mind-boggling of all, 100% of this design is somehow encoded into 4 complex bioacids (DNA).
In light of this evidence, why should I believe that the arm is the result of unintelligent chaos, rather than Intelligent Design?

Scott M:
Funny, you admit that evolution has a nonrandom component? Almost as if all matter and living systems were *ahem* designed to operate in a particular way?

coragryph:
Nothing special about the arm? Point me to one man-made structure that performs its functions better than the arm. Unless you were referring to other living systems, but how could that possibly help your argument?

Funny, when I commented that Atheism was brainless, retarded and unimportant I got 36 answers. Here, I only got 4. Is it possible that Atheism has a hard time grappling with science?

Shedoblyde:
Mutations aren't random? Living systems aren't choosing from randomness to improve themselves? Doesn't a well-ordered system need to be in place FIRST in order to possess the ability to choose from randomness?

Craig:
Fine, life comes only from life, and God is life. Test that one.

DuckPhup:
Maybe you missed the last part of my question:
"In light of this evidence, why should I believe that the arm is the result of unintelligent chaos, rather than Intelligent Design?"

Jim L:
I personally never use probability arguments because I think they are all silly. What is the probability of proteins coming together without enzymes? 0%, that's what! What are the odds of a mutation being bad? Nearly 100%! Test those ideas. Booyah, yeeha, checkmate and such.

Answer 1

Straw man. If you had studied any of the sciences involved at all, you would know that natural selection and adaptation are not "random".

"My body tells a tale of Incompetent Design.
My back still hurts, my sinus runs, my teeth just won't align.
If I had been the designer, I'd certainly resign.
Incompetent Design!

Evo-evo-evo-evolu-tion!
Darwin sparked a revolu-tion.
Creationism spawns confu-sion,
And science shall prevail!"

Answer 2

You know what...you don't have to believe anything. You can disbelieve all you want and you can still be wrong! I'll repeat that and use caps for emphasis: JUST BECAUSE YOU BELIEVE SOMETHING DOESN'T MAKE IT TRUE AND JUST BECAUSE YOU DON'T BELIEVE SOMETHING DOESN'T MAKE IT UNTRUE! And really how intelligent is our design? Why do we have earlobes? Why do we have appendixes? Why do we have tailbones? It may be that there was a "designer", but it didn't do a very good job. And that "designer" could have been a highly-evolved advanced race who came here and seeded our world so life could begin...as in Arthur C. Clarke's 2001...it doesn't have to be a supernatural being. Oh, and it was certainly not the "greatest scientific minds" that believed the earth was flat...that's ridiculous! It was the ordinary people who believed that. Who were these "greatest scientific minds" anyway? Name some if you can...

Answer 3

First, the fact that hundreds and thousands of other designs also exist which do the same thing, to similar degrees. So, there is nothing particularly special about this design compared to others.

Second, you are incorrect about muscles having no equivalent. There are many natural and artificial equivalents that work the same same way.

So, just becuase something exists, you can't use that to prove your belief that it's existence was planned. If you really want to start proving Intelligent Design as a scientific theory, read the links below.

Answer 4

(False logic again.) Ok for fun, I have no evidence to support that the arm is the result of chance. So, your god wins by default, right? Wrong. How do I know that aliens from outer space didn't genetically engineer human beings in their spaceship and populate the earth?
How about my purple hobgoblin from mars? What evidence exists that would give your god the credit for "intelligent design" instead of the MILLIONS OF OTHER POSSIBLITIES?

Haven't you heard of the Flying Spaghetti Monster???? This is the exact argument they used to keep Intelligent design and other NON-SCIENCE out of the classroom!

Answer 5

The foolishness that serves you as a substitute for logic and reason is a logical fallacy (a flaw in thinking) known as the "Argument From Incredulity"... which is a sub-category of the "Argumentum ad Ignorantiam" (Argument From Ignorance). It goes something like this: "I can't conceive of how this might have come to be; therefore, God did it."

That does not point to a limitation of nature... rather, it exemplifies a limitation of knowledge or intellect. Also, it is intellectually dishonest, since it does not ACKNOWLEDGE the limitation of knowledge or intellect... it merely invokes the fanciful idea of a supernatural creator-entity to manifest the ILLUSION that cognitive dissonance has been resolved. It substitutes 'faith' for fact, and 'belief' for knowledge... but neither faith nor belief are sufficient to sustain reason... they are only sufficient to sustain willful ignorance.

That is the epitome of self-delusion.

"When one person suffers from a delusion, it is called insanity. When many people suffer from a delusion it is called Religion." ~ Robert M. Pirsig

Your question starts off with a false premise... "... your arm being the result of sheer chance"... and contains another false premise... "... result of unintelligent chaos". Essentially, your whole construct is another fallacy... a 'strawman argument'.

I like it better when Straw Men are set up more skillfully... this is so lame as to be laughable.

Lookee here, Buckwheat... evolution does not give a rats a$$ about God... neither does science, overall. All they seek to do is create a consistent explanatory frameworks for observed natural phenomena. An explanatory framework is called a 'theory', provided it has been shown to be consistent with evidence, makes predictions that have been verifiable through experiment and/or observation, and has survived the requisite peer scrutiny and debate... and has not been 'falsified'.

The Theory of Evolution is all of that... and has been for around 150 years. It IS falsifiable... but it has NEVER been falsified. All of the body of work in biology, genetics, and paleontology CONTINUE to conform with the theory, confirm it, bolster it and solidify it. There IS NO controversy regarding evolution within the scientific community. The only controversy is the phony PSEUDO-controversy that has been orchestrated by creationists to undermine science, which they see as the 'enemy' of religion.

Scientific theories are not just 'ideas', as the scientifically illiterate seem to regard them. Scientific theories provide an explanatory framework for observed facts. The theory of Evolution provides an explanatory framework for the OBSERVED FACT of changes to the genetic makeup of populations of organisms, over time. The mechanisms that has been identified... AND OBSERVED... to account for those changes are 'genetic drift' (statistical variations in allele frequency), and genetic mutations (random), operated on by 'natural selection' (NOT random). In other words, the non-random survival of randomly varying replicators. This has absolutely NOTHING to do with chaos, and nothing to do with 'sheer chance'. It has to do with well understand natural processes occurring in accordance with simple natural 'rules'. Complexity arises from simplicity.

So, evolution EXPLAINS facts... it does not INVENT facts... and its 'explanatory power' is unprecedented, so far as theories go.

Your mind is being turned to mush by professional liars who are trying to protect their business interests. They don't want you to KNOW anything... they don't want you to THINK... or even know HOW to think. This was well understood by important figures in religious history. This is why the early church destroyed all the 'tainted' (non-canonical) writings, which were in conflict with dogma... Greek philosophy, medicine, mathematics, astronomy, engineering... all the good stuff. By this means, Christianity dragged humanity directly into the Dark Ages. It seems that you seek to drag us back there, again.

Answer 6

You're right, it would be stupid to believe the arm came from chaos and not design. It is equally stupid to say "it was magic" when a natural process can be found which explains it more thoroughly. Intelligent Design is less than a hypothesis, you won't be taken seriously by scientists until you have a testable mechanism.

Answer 7

Thanks for this well constructed question........ Genesis begins..... "In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth......" In chapter 3, the serpent questions, ."..hath God said.......? This questioning of God is the foundation of evolutionary belief.... So do we believe God or do we question God.....God gives us a free will to chose to believe... I choose to believe God....

Some thoughts for Skeptics......

On paper the greatest scientific minds can mathematically prove that it is not possible for a humming bird to fly???...... But God created the humming bird to fly...

The greatest scientific minds once thought the earth was flat...... The bible in the old testament has references that the world is a sphere.... The greatest evolutionary scientists believe man evolved and was not created by God....They join the ranks of the flat earth scientists...

The whole foundation of excepting the theory of evolution allows atheists in their own minds to escape accountability from God.....

One last thought..... In the final analysis we all have certain opinions and thoughts of every subject imaginable...Ultimately, the only opinion that counts will be God the father, God the Son and God the Holly Spirit...

Reading the bible, praying to God and fellowship with other Christian believers is the way to find God's opinion....

Thank you for your question....Gods intelligent design is what I believe.....

Answer 8

You are yet another person who is trying to use probability and logic to prove your faith, yet your understanding of probability and logic is horribly flawed, and your faith is preventing you from seeing just how flawed it is.

Here is one short article that you should read. If you disagree with it, or don't understand it, then there is no point whatsoever in trying to argue with you.

Answer 9

I agree, evolution is amazing and a lot more interesting than the mythology found in religions!

Answer 10

Scott M has it right. Random chance has nothing to do with it - evolution means survival of the fittest, not random mutation.