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| from The Emperor's New Mind by Roger Penrose |
Perry Marshall dismisses ID as Old Earth Creationism because he seemingly is against any inference to the interference of an Intelligence that might turn out to be an Entity that resists scientific inquiry--or at least admitting any such inferences into science... But in this broad characterization of what constitutes "Old Earth Creationism," how does Marshall's view differ?
Marshall seems to be claiming at times that something has been introduced into the universe long after its beginning (which he accepts, I think, to be the consensus time of about 14 billion years ago). Stardust somehow finds itself getting into interesting configurations over the course of 10 billion years and then, poof, God introduces information somehow,
before there are cells intelligently manipulating their own genetic information, in a way that is a total game-changer. Marshall
asserts:
- In the history of the universe we also see the introduction of information, some 3.8 billion years ago. It came in the form of the Genetic code, which is symbolic and immaterial.
- The information had to come from the outside, since information is not known to be an inherent property of matter, energy, space or time. [bold emphasis in original; red highlighting is mine]
So ... at some point around 3
.8 billion years ago, configurations in matter arise that aren't explicable in terms of the configurations that were there 3
.9 billion years ago. Why? Because information is
introduced from
outside the space-time continuum that serves as the substrate for matter and energy, otherwise the information cannot be inferred to have been introduced without some qualitative difference that would invoke an abductive inference to ...
design. I can't help but wonder how this fails to meet Marshall's own broad criteria for God-of-the-gaps.
