Hi SamIam,
Originally posted by Samiam
There's no faith involved in the scientific method, which is driven by demonstrable, repeatable results.
You can't have faith in science. You can observe that something works or behaves in a manner that you predict - demonstrating an understanding of it - or that it does not, demonstrating a lack of understanding.
Actually, many aspects of science rely on unprovable presupositions and inference.
Let me give you one minor example, the SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) program.
Seti uses radio telescopes to receive and then analyze electromagnetic signals to determine if any of them contain information. They assume that if they can find this information embedded in radio waves coming to the earth from space, that this would be evidence of intelligent life in the universe. No one in the scientifc community considers this to be a major leap of faith. However, there are actually hundreds of assumptions, presuppositions, and leaps of faith bound up in this program. I'll only discuss a few, first it presupposes that extraterrestrial life is possible on other planets and that biological life-forms would be similar enough to humans to be capable of communicating with them in an intelligible fashion, and so on. But aside from these presuppositions there is the critical assumption that if we received an information bearing message that the most likely explanation for it would be that it had been created by an intelligent life form.
In other words if we received a message which clearly said "Greetings Earth People" we wouldn't immediately dismiss the possibility that an alien intelligence had created it and set about determining how the radio waves formed themselves into such interesting patterns. In other words, we would begin by assuming that it was the result of Intelligent design unless and until it was proved otherwise.
Now in the case of DNA we have infinitely more information encoded than the simple "Greetings Earth People" we have literally millions of pieces of information stored in specifically arranged sequences of nucleotides. The arangement of these nucleotides into complex specific information bearing structures cannot be explained by an appeal to blind chance - even spread over millions of years - as the probability of that is so close to zero as to be statistically irrelevant.
Additionally, chemistry provides us with no "self-ordering properties" that explain it, especially as there are no chemical bonds between the helix and the genetic instructions in the DNA molecule. Any such self-ordering principle would also produce uniformity, as it does in inorganic chemicals, and such uniformity would be disastrous in the DNA molecule which depends on asymetrical and irregular ordering of (A)denine, (T)hymine, (C)ytosine, and (G)uanine in order to produce the vast number of variations that are found in organic life. To use an analogy, just like the message "Greetings Earth People" depends upon specific, non-random and deliberate, ordering in order to convey information so too the DNA molecule depends upon the same factors in order to convey information, and defies a materialistic explanation for this ordering.
The way evolutionism or materialism as faith affects the search for the origin of life is in its blind insistence that an intelligent pattern cannot be the result of intelligent design, because of its faith in the fact that
there is no creator. It would be rather like digging up a pocketwatch and then being forced to exert all one's energy on creating hypotheses for the creation of the pocket watch, but never being allowed to even consider that it was the product of a watchmaker (because watchmakers are impossible). So even though we cannot posit a materialistic explanation for the existence of highly organized information in DNA strands, we must continue to search for one endlessly since we take it on faith that Intelligent Design is impossible.
The SETI researchers should consider themselves blessed that they don't have to operate under the same rules, or their ability to establish the existence of Extraterrestial Intelligence would be rendered absolutely impossible.
- SEAGOON
