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Andy McIntosh - Atheism vs. God - Part 4 (Software / Information)

This is part 4 of a series of commentaries on material presented by Andy McIntosh.  This material was presented at a church that I attend.  It has been presented other places as well.

For reference, related arguments were presented by McIntosh in the following video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iNIwh6-KEe0

Software

At 47:10, McIntosh starts discussing information, and quickly transitions to "software".




He asks the following questions:

Is software real?  The answer has got to be: yes!
Is software material? Ahh.  Software is real, yet it is not material. 


I saw no presented evidence for any non-material software.  McIntosh throws in his answer of "software [...] is not material", but he doesn’t justify it.  Software is in DNA (from McIntosh's point of view), which is material.  Software is on hard drives, in memory in computers, on your memory cards, and in the neurons in my brain.  All of that is material.  Software is always just an arrangement of material things, and it always seems to be arranged by other material things.  Now, maybe there is something immaterial here.  But we haven't seen evidence of that.

McIntosh states, 
“The message is sitting on the code and the code is sitting on the matter.” 
No, the code is the matter.  The message is the matter.  No matter = no message, no code.

McIntosh is not assessing this from a naturalistic perspective.  He is inserting immaterialism, and once that happens, he's saying that materialism doesn't make sense.  This is true only if you first assume immaterialism.

Information

Given previous statements, that information is not matter or energy, McIntosh's use of information is actually immaterial information.

At 51:07, McIntosh states,
“We intuitively know [immaterial] information is present when it is not due to physics and chemistry..!”



Believe maybe.  But when fully considered, this is a tautology.  “[…] when it is not due to physics and chemistry” makes it an assumed conclusion, essentially saying: we know immaterial information is present when immaterial information is present.  What evidence was presented that supports this lava lamp "is not due to physics and chemistry"?  I saw none.  Complicated physics and chemistry, sure.  But to say it is immaterial information is to assume the conclusion again.  This immaterial information is to have come from the mind of the one who created the lamp, but again, that mind has not been shown to be immaterial.

Logical Issues

McIntosh is building a case here for immaterialism, and I think wants to show that since the immaterial exists, that shows materialism wrong.  But his argument, that software is real but not material, assumes his conclusion of immaterialism.  It begs the question: Is software material?  To his credit, he did actually show this question - but his answer seems to be a baseless assertion, which makes the argument unsound.
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