Intelligent Design proponents claim to be able to distinguish design from non-design. Here’s an easier task. Look at the inscription in the photograph. Is there any way to tell how old it is? I can tell you the stone turned up in an excavation in 1996 in the Pyrenees. Is there any way to tell if the marks are meaningful or gibberish?
It looks just like the DNA information found in spirochetes!
Well, I mean, other than the vast differences.
That’s the beauty of human marks, they’re not slavishly dependent upon hereditary constraints like life’s coded information is. Those could be doodles, or independently-invented marks for a known or unknown language, and those marks may never have appeared in that sequence previously, ever.
Find anything truly like that in life, and you may well have the mark of intelligence. Information in wild-type life simply lacks the possibilities that intelligence working with symbols has.
Glen Davidson
Voynich Manuscript: alien document, or illuminated scripture?
It looks just like the DNA information found in spirochetes!
Voynich Manuscript: alien document, or illuminated scripture?
As far as I know, there is no right answer yet.
Sure there is. We just haven’t heard back from the people who are able to detect design without reference to context.
petrushka,
The Voynich manuscript? It’s obvious.
I don’t think one could ever answer the question with any certainty and without even knowing the language spoken by the writers one may say at best the chance is slightly above or below 50/50.
I’ve noticed that 2 of the symbols seem to have been reused and others seem to be related by rotational or mirror-image symmetry. For this reason I’m inclined to say it does say something.
More relevant to the question of ID is whether we think this was produced by a person or by erosion and weathering. Of course its the former
I have posting privileges here but I’ve never used them. I was considering taking the plunge with this topic but I think it better to just add as a comment.
It seems God writes messages to us.: He writes his name in the clouds fairly often. If you don’t recall seeing any of these messages its because he only seems to write his name in Arabic. There are websites ( such as ‘Miracles of Allah”) that contain pictures from all over the world documenting this. I have to admit I don’t see it, but that’s because I can’t read Arabic. Evidently, to a person who can read Arabic, the word “Allah” just jumps out at you!
So my question is; why doesn’t God write his name in any Western languages, only Arabic. An obvious answer is that God is angry at Christians for following the wrong religion but I have another answer. Western letters are based on a circular form- o,b,q,c,R,d etc, while Arabic is linear and flowing. Its MUCH more likely that wind acting on clouds with produce Arabic rather than English words.
RodW,
Rod, thanks for a refreshingly honest look at ID.
Can an IDer please run the numbers and tell us if these markings exhibit CSI? Or FSCO?
Hello?
I think its a series of accidents, that coincidentally exactly matches some words from an ancient, extinct western language. Probably from wind, or from bugs crawling around over the same path for centuries. Some would say that seems improbable, but that is because they don’t understand the concept of long stretches of time, like millions of years.
The fact that these bits of rock erosion resemble another random meaningless accident (language) isn’t really all that surprising when you think of it. One comparison would be the similarity between marsupial and placental wolves. Although they may look similar to uneducated eyes, they are really two completely different accidents.
Definitely not designed. Accident.
phoodoo,
Particularly when a dishonest IDer cooks the evidence.
keiths,
So true keith, so true. The two are not similar at all. Any illusion of similarity at all, is simply a result of the feebleness of the human mind to make distinctions, along with the obvious propensity for most accidents to make creatures with four legs and tooth filled snouts.
Did you even read the link Phoodoo? Of course not. Listen, if you are a deep cover liberal troll acting like a retarded fuckwitt, please stop. We don’t need to lampoon IDIsts to highlight their mental shortcomings.
Thanks but I’m not sure what you mean. I think the above post and comments are good beginning for a discussion on the appearance of pattern, complexity and purpose in nature, but I don’t think it has tremendous relevance for ID.
Thanks for your comment, Rod. I think you are a bit of an optimist. Not that there is anything wrong with that. Context gives clues. The stone was found on Earth and I’ve discounted all other possibilities than human intervention on a block of soft limestone. Maybe I’m a bit of a pessimist but I see several sub-possibilities.
a) The stone was carved all at once some time ago and all the features and glyphs meant something clear and specific to the person who did the carving and to the wider community for whom it was made.
b)The glyphs are later “graffiti” added but still say something as meaningful as “Kilroy was here”.
c) It’s graffiti but meaningless.
d) It’s intentional fraud. Someone intended to create a mystery for later finders or was the finder and later “re-found” it.
e) There may be another explanation and none of the above are correct.
The artifact has received little attention and no interest from professional archaeologists. One local amateur has claimed the glyphs are (or resemble) Aramaic.
I absolutely agree that this is a human-created artifact. I do wonder why you think it is relevant to Intelligent Design. ID proponents often make the point that detecting design is all and the who, what when and how are not up for consideration.
I wonder why God has to be so cryptic. Why doesn’t he just come right out of the closet and sort mankind (and womankind – though obviously they need much less sorting) out?
Alan, do you know anything more specific about that stone? You say:
So who was it discovered by? Where in the Pyrenees? What was the archaeological context? There are so few Palaeohispanic inscriptions that historical linguists treasure every one of them, especially if it happens to contain a rare or previously unknown script. If they are not interested in this one, there must be a reason for that.
It isn’t Aramaic or Punic, that’s for sure. Some of the “characters” resemble the Western Celtiberian script, but their phonetic values don’t add up to anything that could be interpreted as Celtic, and others don’t match any recognisable writing system of the area. It’s possibly a hoax by somebody vaguely familiar with Celtiberian inscriptions. Specialists could probably tell if the carving was done recently or, say, in Roman times.
Well, I first heard about it (and saw it) this Easter. There’s a sort of bifurcation here. I’m interested in developing the general idea of design identification but I’m also intrigued by the archaeology. I’d be happy to put you try and in touch with the custodian if you’d like. If you click on “messages” in the banner, I could go into more detail.
Reading a short message even in a known script and a known language can be tricky if we don’t know the author’s identity and intentions. Take the Undley Common bracteate, for example (Suffolk, late 5th c.):
British Museum
The inscription on it is in the Anglo-Frisian version of the Elder Runic alphabet, and the letters are completely legible, so it can be read without the slightest difficulty. The language should be some kind of “Proto-English” or the MRCA of English and Frisian — something that we should be able to understand easily. But the letters read:
gægogæ mægæ medu
which sounds like gibberish. Perhaps the goldsmith who made the bracteate only imitated a real inscription, or used a system of abbreviations unknown to us — there’s no fully convincing reading anyway, just tentative guesses.
Indeed. We speak in shorthand to friends and workmates who understand the context. Abbreviation seems to be the norm with coins..
Interestingly, the image is much clearer. A head in a Roman-style helmet, and a wolf suckling a pair of twins — immediately interpretable in the cultural context of post-Roman Europe. The medallion imitates a Roman coin, so who knows, the inscription might be some kind of fake Latin — but why in Runic letters? mægæ medu can actually be read in archaic Old English as ‘mead for the kinsman’, but this neither clarifies the gægogæ part nor makes sense in the context of an “emperor”‘s portrait and the Romulus & Remus scene.
I’d like to note that it is exactly on our “pathetic level of detail” that such human-made (apparent) symbolism is properly concluded to be intelligently manufactured.
And that’s still without knowing the purpose or meaning of the markings.
Basically, you have a good match-up of cause and effect with those markings. Empiricism leads us to understand them as human-made, as we know the cause of similar markings.
The differences between this and ID’s supposed identification of intelligence behind life are enormous, and would be even if we didn’t have a good match-up between life’s derivative nature and the fact that unintelligent evolution necessarily would be about as derivative as what we see in life (atypical, to say the least, of design).
Glen Davidson
Why are you all so sure that it wasn’t just ants crawling over the same areas for millions of years? What rules out your accident theory?
phoodoo:
We thought about it, and we’re better at thinking than you are.
We don’t think it was an accident, phoodoo.
keiths,
But WHY don’t you think it was an accident?
phoodoo,
“your accident theory”? Who do you (Phoodoo) think the “your” is, whose “accident theory” you (Phoodoo) are inquiring about?
phoodoo,
Because I’ve thought about it, and the obvious explanation — that the inscription was carved by the humans who were around at the time — is far more plausible than any hypothesis involving ants or other “accidental” causes.
Given that thought is a severely limited option for you, how did you reach the conclusion that it wasn’t an accident?
keiths,
So the way you detect design is by using your mind to think about it and come up with the obvious explanation?
Why is using one’s mind such an alien concept to you, phoodoo?
Are you unaware? Some materialists have a theory (ok all materialists) that accidents can add up to meaningful, organized, intelligent structures.
I know, it sounds bizarre, but…that’s what some people believe.
keiths,
I just wanted to understand how materialists detect design.
keiths,
I think you could have saved a lot of time over at UD if you would have just admitted long ago that they way to detect design is to use one’s mind to think about it and come up with the obvious answer.
Here’s one for Phoodoo: How old is the Universe | Earth | Life ?
Poor phoodoo. Flaming out again (on two threads!).
Now watch him get stuck following the links back and forth.
I don’t think phoodoo has been flaming out on this thread. He is probably puzzled. He sees folk thinking that this is a case of intelligent design, and is wondering why opponents of ID would say that.
ID proponents describe us as blindly dogmatic and ignoring evidence. He is trying to see if he can get us to exhibit that kind of behavior. It hasn’t been working out for him.
It has been interesting to observe.
Neil,
Exactly, which is why I described him as flaming out.
Humans tend to be pretty good at detecting human-specified activity.
Yet: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accident
Evolution has no foresight or intention. Therefore it cannot have accidents. Evolution explores nearby spaces. Sometimes those spaces are hostile to continued life, sometimes not. Calling one particular type of outcome an “accident” is foolish.
Speaking of foolish, gordo (kairosfocus) is accusing Joe Felsenstein of “making yet another strawmamn argument”. See comment number 9 in the
‘Signal to Noise: A Critical Analysis of Active Information’ thread at UD.
Hey phoodoo and other IDiot-creationists, why don’t you press your fellow traveler gordo mullings to step out of the UD sanctuary and come here to defend his claims and accusations?
Creodont2,
Haha, even Lizzie can’t stand it here, why would you think he would want to.
I only post here to expose the hypocrisy and idiocy of your side. keiths has been very helpful in that effort. Every time he can’t answer a question logically, all he can say is “flameout.” Its there for all to see.
So we have learned a few things from him and his type. Its moral to exterminate an entire race of people if that is what one chooses, and the way to detect design is to simply look at it, and see what you think.
phoodoo,
Ah, so you’re terrified that gordo will rain fire and brimstone upon you if you press him to come here. That’s what I figured.
You IDiot-creationists will enable and encourage anything, no matter how wrong, dishonest, stupid, cowardly, falsely accusatory, and despicable it is, as long as whoever is doing it is an IDiot-creationist. So much for your alleged ‘objective morality’.
Creodont2,
Do you also agree that gassing an entire race of people because you don’t like them is moral, as long as you believe its moral? Keiths flamed out, so now we can only see who else agrees with his weird morality.
You have honesty issues, Phoodoo.
Do you believe sacrificing your child is moral, if your deity told you to do it?
OMagain,
I don’t believe deities tell us what to do. I believe we were given a conscience.
Your holy book says otherwise.
And that conscience did not stop Abraham did it?
Yeah.
Either phoodoo is so stupid that xe actually believes what xe said .. or xe is so twisted that xe thinks it’s appropriate to slime Lizzy and her site with repeated dishonest slurs.
Either way, xe creeps me out.
I suggest that is typical of an “Intelligent Design” analysis. Jump immediately to the assumed conclusion.
Creodont2,
Aurelio’s OP was great, but Gordo immediately barged in with his fishing reels and sea-cucumber behaviour. Which is a pity, since I intended to comment there.
I’ve noticed that some people believe that the kind of organization that is found in life–the relationships that appear to have come lawfully via descent with modification–in fact is nothing other than the whim of some deity, or, wink wink, a super-alien.
Organization isn’t caused by lawful inheritance and change, according to this view, but is entirely coincidental–at least from the human perspective. I wonder why we’re supposed to abandon the lawful workings of heredity as an explanation, when life exhibits the organization arising from the limits of hereditary limitation acting through time, in order to say that such organization is nothing more than coincidence.
I contend that coincidence is an entirely implausible “explanation” for life’s patterns.
Glen Davidson