Don't think I agree with that. What about information written in a computer program for example? You would surely grant that the code is information, but it is definetely not about communication.

Can you please give me a specific example of what you mean by "information written in a computer program"? Can you please be as specific as possible?

Let's talk about the Windows operating system, for example. Can you give me a specific example of what in Windows counts as "information written in a computer program"?

The point I'm stressing here has nothing to do with rocks but what does the arrangement of the rocks mean.

And you seem to have missed my point, which is that rocks arranged in a certain way only mean something if we have some basis to conclude that whatever arrangement of rocks we've discovered cannot have occurred naturally. Rocks can, given enough trials over enough time, naturally arrange themselves as you've described. Therefore, if faced with such an arrangement of rocks, we would not be able to conclude that the rocks necessarily mean anything, even though we'd subjectively impose meaning on the arrangement.

Willing to agree with that but in one and only one case: infinite rocks.

Why would you need infinite rocks in order to ensure this arrangement? What mathematical support do you have for that assertion? What I'm asking for here is a mathematical proof showing that the probability of rocks being randomly arranged as you've described is zero unless you have an infinite number of rocks. If you cannot provide that, then you have no basis to make this claim and we can readily reject this claim.

But surely there are no infinite rocks, and surely there are no infinite chunks of DNA everywhere. I think you're focusing more on the analogy rather than the issue at hand here.

The issue isn't whether there are infinite chunks of DNA everywhere. The issue is whether it's possible--even if it's unlikely--for proteins to naturally arrange themselves into DNA. Given that there are a huge number of stars with a huge number of planets in the universe right now, I don't see any reason why even something extremely unlikely would happen. And there's more to it than that. The universe is something like 14 billion years old, so the number of potential planets on which DNA could come about increases substantially when you consider all the planets that used to exist but no longer do. And then there's the future: once again, the number of potential planets increases to a mind-numbing degree. In other words, the universe ran a functionally infinite number of trials and in exactly one instance that we know of, DNA came about. That's not surprising.

There's another problem with your reasoning: you're unreasonably constricting the number of outcomes that would count as a "win," defined here as planets where DNA would come about naturally. What are the chances that humans as they exist on Earth would come about somewhere in the universe? Tiny. But what are the chances that somewhere, at some time, proteins would coalesce into DNA? Almost certainly, that number is substantially higher.

Also, you're fundamentally misunderstanding how probabilities work. Improbable things are just that--improbable. By which I mean that they're possible. Saying that it's impossible for DNA to have come about naturally merely because it's unlikely is like telling a lottery winner that they didn't win the lottery because the odds of winning the lottery are so low. That's obviously nonsense. Unlikely things happen. That's just the truth.

Well, since you understand the argument already, why are you not convinced by it? From what I understand, you don't think there's a flaw in the argument, but you're saying that you're still denying the conclusion? Why?

I never said the argument isn't flawed. It's fatally flawed in a number of ways.

Aquinas says nothing can move itself. Fine. So then what moved god? If god moved himself, then the argument is patently self-contradictory. If something other than god moved god, then we haven't escaped the infinite regress.

Even if we assume that the unmoved mover must exist, that doesn't mean the unmoved mover has to be god, and certainly not that it has to be a personal god, and absolutely not that it's the god that supposedly came to earth as a man and died on a cross.

What could you possibly find compelling about this argument?