We are constantly told that all the appearance of design and purpose is illusory
That is an opinion based on ignorance and simply a rebuttal to theist's inference to an intelligence behind Creation itself.
That's not an opinion based on ignorance. The idea that purpose is illusory is extremely complex. If you don't follow it; if you don't understand it, then I can see how you'd say it's based on ignorance. But not the ignorance of those who attempt to explain the mechanism.
I once ran across something strange in the woods where I grew up. It was a series of sticks, arranged in a roman numeral 2. My first(and instant) thought was that someone else placed the sticks. This initial conclusion is a well-documented bias in human psychology. We are biased to conclude that intelligence is the cause of anything and everything which appears to have purpose or contain information, even if those things are random and naturalistic. The examples are legion. Apophenia and Paradoelia are consequences of this bias.
The reason we are biased is because if we weren't, we'd be easier to ambush, easier to deceive, easier to enslave, easier to kill. By concluding that there was intelligence behind the roman numeral two, I was guilty of a false positive(after picking up the sticks, I saw that it was a single branch laying in a way that created an optical illusion). This is where the math kicks in, game theory if you will. A false positive is relatively harmless(increased wariness). We react in a way that's 'better safe than sorry'. A thousand false positives are less dangerous than a single false negative.
This results in an inherent bias in our psychology. Daniel Dennet calls it Agency Detection, and there are many books that show this bias is in fact a bias; we routinely reach false positive conclusions of Agency even when the truth is naturalistic(controlled experiments show this).
The idea that purpose is illusory comes directly from this bias.
ant wrote:How do the laws that govern genetic code organization ultimately achieving conscious systems surpass those that govern nonliving systems?
Which of the several aBiogenesis hypothesis addresses this?
Ant, none of the abiogenesis hypotheses address it. The origin of consciousness is a separate problem. Consciousness arose long after life arose. Hypotheses for the origin of consciousness include models of cultural evolution. Again, I'm more than happy to look through existing literature and discuss it here on Booktalk if you wish. There are models of how consciousness arose.
Flann wrote:The greater the complexity of the code the more likely it came from an intelligent source rather than some confluence of random events and laws.
Most information today is the result of human creation. The elephant in the room is whether or not natural laws can also create information. ID proponents say there is no evidence for spontaneous generation of information. Therefore evolution is false.
The problem is, this rebuttal is circular. A primary argument of ID is that we don't have evidence that information can arise spontaneously, therefore evolution is false. Yet, evolution is, at it's core, a naturalistic explanation for how information is created naturalistically. In order for the ID argument to be valid, you need to believe evolution is false. But the primary argument that evolution is false is that information can't arise spontaneously. This is circular.
The evidence for evolution is stronger than theists want to admit. It truly is. Not only in sheer volume, but in the elegance of the mechanism. Can information arise naturalistically? That's a question that's answered by evolution. Yes, information can and has arisen naturalistically, which we conclude from all available evidence.
Let's shelve the talk of abiogenesis for now. Not ignore it, but shelve it. I think there's another thread on abiogenesis where we can hash it out. Instead, I'll try to give my understanding of evolution and how it leads to the accumulation of information. Since the literature on evolution is so vast, I may misunderstand part of it or portray it incorrectly. So I'll try to keep it simple.
Let's assume that proto-life was naturalistically assembled from the stew of prebiotic ingredients on ancient Earth(we can discuss the "how" in another thread). The first form would have very little "information". It would be an 8-bit form of protolife.
By definition, the conditions of this protolife is that it can replicate, and during the replication process, it's information is changed/subtracted/added in a random fashion. One of the ways the original 8-bit life form may alter during replication is to form a 12-bit life form. (It may also lose information or alter information... mutations are random). Compared to the zettabytes of information in our genetic code, this 4-bit increase would be small. There's no telling what this increase in information may result in.
The consequences are as random as the mutation itself.
This is where the elegance of natural selection kicks in. While the mutations may be random, the environment is not. There are highly specific and numerous parameters in any environment. If the 4-bit increase lead to a type of organism that self-destructs or can't use the surrounding prebiotic molecules or can't replicate any further, then it is a dead end. That information is lost. The majority of mutations during ancient Earth would have originally resulted in dead ends.
But this replication isn't serial, it's parallel. Many proto-life forms, each with many 'offspring'. Think of the possible consequences of this 4-bit increase in information. If only 1 out of 100 of the 'offspring' is able to replicate slightly faster, or use resources a touch more efficiently, or resist destructive molecules a bit more effectively, then that single offspring will spawn countless others with the same traits. A new baseline is create(a new species of proto-life), and from that baseline an entirely new set of possible mutations now exists between parent and offspring.
That incremental increase in information from a mutation is enough to give rise to the zettabytes of information we see today. It happened over billions of years, a slow accumulation of random information that is de-randomized by the parameters of the environment. That is how information spontaneously generates.
A primary argument for an intelligent designer is that information can't come into existence in a naturalistic fashion. Yet that's exactly what all the evidence for evolution says happened. In order to accept any argument against the spontaneous generation of information, you first need to believe evolution didn't happen. Yet most ID proponents don't believe in evolution because they don't believe information can spontaneously generate. Again, it is circular.
EDIT - I said we could hash out abiogenesis on another thread, but this is an abiogenesis thread!!! Subsequent posts in this thread then. For the sake of brevity, this one is to show how evolution produces information.