The Biotic message: a review of the book by Walter Remine, by Donald Batten

Quotes and comments;

1. "ReMine’s treatment of the origin of life is good. I particularly liked the way he dealt with some of the bluffs of evolutionists who try to dilute the improbability argument with irrelevant analogies. For example, the exact arrangement of the cards in a deck just after it is shuffled is highly improbable, but nevertheless an improbable arrangement happens every time. This confuses the point entirely."
- only someone who totally fails to understand the situation, or someone who is being deliberately deceptive, would imagine this card trick analogy addresses the problem. We're not looking for an 'improbable' result, we're looking for a highly specific result; not just any improbablitity. The point is ths; it is highly unlikely (improbable) we will find a naturalistic explanation. We're not looking for the improbable. We're looking for life; not for improbabilities. We're looking for the concrete, not the abstract. We're looking for the meaningful, not the meaningless.
- if David Hume were here he'd no doubt call this a faulty analogy. Cards are human artifacts; that being the case it would appear to be misleading for a natualist to use them for an analogy to biology.
- cards aren't codes; their arrangements are meaningless; they don't carry information. (Apparently this is all too complicated for richard dawkins to understand.)
- we might (for the sake of humor) say that finding a naturalistic explanation for the origin of life is as likely as producing one of Shakespeare's plays by shuffling a deck of cards :=)