Life is most likely intelligently designed

I. Dichotomy Recall from my first round, the valid first premise by the law of the excluded middle is: P1*) Life was either designed intelligently, or not designed intelligently Therefore, in order for Pro's argument to work, he needs to demonstrate that "not designed intelligently" is equivalent to 'naturally randomly'. Pro has done nothing but baldly assert this is the case, the BoP is on him, so he needs to demonstrate it to be the case. My arguments from the last round regarding order arising from aparent chaos and randomness stand, Pro simply has not contested this outside of demanding 'what is the 3rd option?'. The obvious answer is 'naturally non-randomly'. That is not to say that there wasn't an element of chance involved, but it is to say that processes exist which would naturally bias the formation of life, and the most notable process, and driver is the second law of thermodynamics. A nice way illustrate this point, is in the linked picture below: http://www-personal.umich.edu... Here we have one water barrel which is filled with more water than the other. Obviously one has a greater gravitational potential, and without the siphon in the two barrels we can imagine that this system is under 'thermodynamic stress'. The system WANTS to reach equilibrium, with an evenly distributed water load and an output of the gravitational potential energy as diffuse heat/sound. That's the driving force. Similarly with early life, the Earth would have been under substantial thermodynamic stress, with high energy molecules, UV Rays etc under 'stress' to become lower, more diffuse energy entities. This is the thermodynamic drive. What life provides, is effectively the 'siphon' as shown in the example with the water buckets. With the introduction of a siphon, the system reaches equilibrium much more easily, and it greatly favoured by thermodynamics, as it allows the system to reach equilibrium much more rapidly. Equally with life, life is a catalyst for many, many processes, and as such it's development is massively favoured by the laws of nature, essentially if life could develop, then life WILL develop. Thermodynamically 'stresses' systems such as volcanoes, the water cycle, stars, etc all provide a self-reinforcing pathway for this increase in overall entropy. Each and every physical process in life is driven by this, and as such, debunks Pro's false random/intelligent dichotomy. I will drop my air molecules example, it's a bad visual example, what I have stated so far should be adequate to hammer this point home. II. Entropy & Non-intelligent OOL: Pro attacks my application of increasing entropy to life with his pyramids example. Let me ask Pro, how did the great pyramids get to their current state? I will answer that question for him, they were built, by thousands of workers, over decades. Decades of blood sweat and tears, and quite obviously, a MASSIVE increase in overall entropy. While the pyramids are themselves examples of lower-than-usual entropy systems, the overall entropy which lead to their formation increased, since we need to account for the system as a whole. The exact same process is at work for the formation of life. While life is relatively ordered, the overall thermodynamic output it gives more than overcomes the higher local entropy the ordered system is in, especially when we account for life being an adaptive autocatalytic process. Remember the autocatalytic chemical reaction I described in my opening round: [A] + [B] + [Catalyst] ---> [Catalyst] + [Catalyst] + released heat (increase in entropy) Now compare this to a (grossly oversimplified) schematic of life, with a cell as the 'catalyst'. [Food] + [Other stuff] + [Cell] ---> [Cell] + [Cell] + released heat (increase in entropy) + waste (increase in entropy) Summarise the processes of life enough and you will find that it really is this simple, life is an autocatalytic process which produces more copies of itself and is driven and favoured principally by thermodynamics. The 'food' and 'other stuff' (oxygen, nutrients) are high energy dense molecules which want to become more diffuse, lower energy molecules. And life indeed is the siphon in the buckets that makes this happen. III. How this relates to Pro's argument: Remember, Pro's (modified) dichotimy states that life could not have arisen by non-intelligent processes, and I have thoroughly demonstrated that this is just false. We have at least two processes which life arises by non-intelligent processes, abiotically as discussed, and from reproduction from existing life. I have also shown that life adapts and changes, and dies over time, and thus it's very conceivable that the type of life I have demonstrated would lead to something like the life we have today, which is of course, biological evolution. Remember the burden of proof is on Con for this debate, so he needs to actually demonstrate the positive (non-zero) possibility of intelligent design for it to be considered, and he also needs to demonstrate the very low or zero possibility of life arising non-intelligently. To illustrate this let's revisit Pro's argument in inductive form: 1. Either it was intelligently designed, or not designed intelligently (naturally) 2. Probably not not designed intelligently (naturally) C. Probably intelligently designed This is perfectly valid reasoning, and I have provided a schematic on how life could have come about naturally. Pro may contend that such a scenario is very unlikely, and thus it occurring intelligently is more likely. ... But that's the crucial problem, we have no idea how intrinsically likely it is for life to have occurred intelligently, which is the likelihood we need to compare with it occurring naturally. For an analogy, let's say we have a person who is a 'winner' at a game, and there are two possible games. One is the national lottery, and the other is a game of Russian roulette with all six chambers filled. Clearly, the person must have played the national lottery to stand as a winner, and not played Russian roulette, since the latter is a guaranteed 0% win rate, even though the former is also a very low-probability game. It's the comparable probabilities that matters. In the case of intelligent design, we have been given no reason to believe that this is anything other than zero, sure it might be an epistemological possibility ("for all I know it might be designed"), but it needs to be demonstrated it is a physical possibility for the argument to work. Pro has not done that, and hence has not upheld his burden on his dilemma argument. IV. Other objections: Tumours are excellent examples of life's emergence contrary to Pro's attempt to appeal to absurdity. Clearly once the 'barriers' that stop the system from becoming runaway autocatalytic are released, then we have a rapidly multiplying, highly adaptive growing entity. Which is why cancer is so deadly. Life on the grand scale of things is very much skin to the tumour it grows and multiplies and adapts, and is overall more persistent and self-sustaining than a tumour. V. Computer Argument: So this is literally Pro's only standing positive argument for intelligent design. I will let Pro state his own case here: Round 1: "Yo, we're freaking walking computers running our genetic code. We are obviously programmed by an intelligent designer; you don't see computers randomly arising from inert matter anywhere in nature" Round 2: "Con said our cells don't compute but that's not what I said. I said WE are computers and this is self-evident; we compute stuff all the time. I'm sure you computed mathematical formulas in high school.." Con's argument that individual cells don't compute is a red herring." Pro seems to fluff what he means by 'we', since if Pro was originally referring to our brains computing math etc, then his 'running our genetic code' is an absolutely bizarre statement. Since the 'genetic code' is in no way used in the 'data processing pathways' in our brain as far as I can tell. I ask Pro to support this assertion lest Hitchen's Razor be applied to it. Pro's argument appears to be as follows: P1) All things that are computers are intelligently designed P2) Humans are computers C) Humans are intelligently designed The first, obvious problem is that it does not demonstrate the truth of the resolution, which is 'Life is most likely intelligently designed', and only applies to Humans even IF the conclusion is true, hence his argument already falls short. Second, there is no reason to accept either the first or second premise. First I would like to attack the second premise, which is quite clearly applying euphemisms to the concept of humans being capable of calculating things to entail that humans are a 'computer'. However Humans are quite clearly nothing like computers in any other sense, and violates Leibniz' law.[1] If the human brain was a computer, then the human brain would same properties as a computer. This includes both physical and non-physical properties. Humans/Computer XYZ qualities XYZ qualities What we quickly see is while humans and computers VERY superficially share some calculating similarities, they vary enormously from their chemical composition, shape, size, morphology, and even their fundamental methods of processing. A computer processes to give largely discrete and quantifiable and quantitative answers (e.g. the 51st integral), and the human brain gives largely qualitative answers (e.g. who what where why). They are about as different as 'computing' entities can possibly be! Moreover the physical architecture is absurdly different, one is silicon and transistors, and the other is water and carbon. Jonathan Schaeffer illustrates this in the attached video (13.30-16.00). http://www.youtube.com... VI. Conclusion: Pro has still failed to meet his BoP... VII. References: 1. http://tinyurl.com...