The validity of intelligent design

[The Holy Bottom Burp]

Where do you live to have a Skoda? And, where did you find it?

In the UK, Skodas are very common in Europe these days! I don't drive a vintage Skoda, it is pretty much a rebadged VW.

 

[Laughing Coyote]

I'm still trying to figure out why intelligent people think abiogenesis happened. And the one single simple cell somehow turned into the billions of life forms on the planet today. Now if that isn't quite the stretch of the imagination I don't know what is.

You guys sure do have a lot of faith in some rather incomplete *cough stupid* theories.

If you start by saying you can't imagine something, then it will be unlikely that you will imagine it. No? Your question should begin with the question of how can I go about to figure it out?

It does seem to be a mystery to me that billions of people read the various texts in the world and take some pretty fantastic stories literally which probably weren't even taken literally by their original story tellers, such as the planet stopping turning so an army can have daylight to win a war, a whale eating a person and him surviving, so much rain falling that it covers the entire planet (where did the water come from and where did it go?), a dead man who is probably already rotting being revived to life, and so on. The earth being formed in six days and people formed the seventh day. The early atmosphere that existed for billions of years would have killed not just people but any organism living on the surface of the planet for the last billion years, should it have been placed on the planet after six days or even after a billion years from its formation. Where does one get a concept of day when there is no earth? People all over the earth have all kinds of wonderful stories explaining how the earth came to be, and though they impart significant lessons, the chance that they actually occurred has no basis in any observation or experiment or logical thought.

And yet you can't fathom how a theory that was developed through documented observations of hundreds of millions of all its elements, of tens of millions of people thinking about how these elements fit together over the course of several millennia, and over the last several centuries hundreds of millions of experiments, observations and discussion, excavations, explorations, and so on and on, all of which were repeated, tested and retested, thought about, modified and tested again, and again.

Anyways, nobody would say that life started from a cell. It most likely initially started with billions upon billions of amino acid chains that came to fill the ancient oceans beyond count. They would group together into longer chains. Then it took but one, though likely many, which started to start self reproduce, then gradually among hundreds of billions that were created, element after element was added by mutation, incorporating others, and sharing genetic material similar to the way that all bacteria still do. Cells appeared gradually as different elements were added that served the purposes of the nascent forms in an earth that was itself changing by the activity of all this nascent life -- the waste products, the chemical modification of the elements water, air and land, the layers upon layers of the deposits of the dead, the developing abilities to consume and incorporate others, and so on and on.

Decades ago already experiments were devised that demonstrated that amino acids can be generated abiotically in the conditions that would have been found on the early planet. We have found many fossils of such chains of amino acids from as early as 4.3 billion years ago, not more than billion years after the formation of the planet. They could have even hitchhiked on meteorites furthermore, in which such fossils also seem to have bee found. It is more than likely bacteria spores from our own planet will be or already are hitchhiking across the galaxy on our interstellar space probes long on journeys that will continue long after humans are be gone. Probably a characteristic of our universe is of life, given all the energy, formation of elements and plants, and ferment occurring across it

Remember all this also took place over an immense span of time: it took hundreds of millions of years for the first predecessors of bacteria to form, and bacteria existed and developed for more than three billion years before the first multi-cellular organisms appeared. Each bacteria cell divides once an hour or less, making for an inconceivably vast, constantly reproducing population giving rise to billions of simultaneous experiments, mistakes and successful inventions allowing formation of most all the elements required by the cells with nuclei that make up the multi-cellular organisms. Think of formations like the cliffs of Dover which are formed from the shells of microscopic organisms to allow yourself a sense of all the life that was teaming on earth; and the early proto-bacteria and bacteria so much more than that.

Think how quickly today's bacteria become resistant or evolve to be able to metabolize our poisonous wastes in a way that we, with all our intelligence and technology, can't even yet imagine how to do it. Bacteria even had already formed the first nuclear reactor long before humans ever existed. Many of the elements required for more complex cellular life: 56 kinds of metabolism including the six or seven kinds of metabolism used by each of the current kingdoms of life, ability to form calcium structures which make the coral reefs, shells, bones and teeth were developed by bacteria. The early oceans were covered by mats of them and some of the large structures they created can still can be found.

Actually, if you allow yourself to learn some of the elements that make it, I think the veil of your mystification will fall away. There are many very accessible and interesting books that discuss nearly every angle of the formation and development of life. Our problem is most of these things are introduced to us as children in school textbooks, which are the most boring and uninteresting forms of literature one can have, extinguishing that wonderful word most nearly all small children have: why, why, why? And make us instead say "I can't understand how ..."

Probably most of all the varied folk stories of the world's peoples and many of stories in the books of the great religions were made up by adults to fend of the exasperating why?, why?, why? of children. This makes them so fantastic and wonderful too, and it explains how such stories enthrall and entrance our children today: spider stories from Africa, coyote stories from the Americas, the crow-and-dog stories of Laos' forest peoples, Jaguar of Amazonian peoples, the stories of storks or explaining that God made herself pregnant (who's going to say that your dad did it, which will lead to all kinds of uncomfortable questions), the corn sisters and sky woman to explain where the corn came from or where the land we live on came from. In Nepal today mothers call their children their little kings or queens, with stories of talking animals, priests, and kings coming to worship them at their birth. For most of history there has been no daycare or primary schools. Adults had to entertain and explain things to their children themselves, and if they had done it like our textbooks now do, they'd lose the child's attention pretty quickly.

 

[DavidFirth]

Sounds like The Old Lady Who Lived in a Shoe to me; a fairy tale pipe dream that couldn't possibly be real.

 

[columbus]

Sounds like The Old Lady Who Lived in a Shoe to me; a fairy tale pipe dream that couldn't possibly be real.

I am often a little stunned by the ability of people to dismiss the mountains of evidence, collected by zillions of people through the decades.
Then they will confidently assert things like Jesus was crucified and Rose from the dead, and He really cares about your sex life. As though that were simple and obvious.

Tom

 

[Guy Threepwood]

I am often a little stunned by the ability of people to dismiss the mountains of evidence, collected by zillions of people through the decades.
Then they will confidently assert things like Jesus was crucified and Rose from the dead, and He really cares about your sex life. As though that were simple and obvious.

Tom

what mountains of evidence? Piltdown man was a fake, the Cambrian explosion is more explosive than ever, the gaps were never filled but have become ever more distinct. birds from dinosaurs, dogs from wolves, men from apes, everything confidently asserted 150 years ago has been thrown into doubt by the scientific evidence

Some of us acknowledge faith in our beliefs!

 

[Skwim]

I am often a little stunned by the ability of people to dismiss the mountains of evidence, collected by zillions of people through the decades.
Then they will confidently assert things like Jesus was crucified and Rose from the dead, and He really cares about your sex life. As though that were simple and obvious.

Tom

Thing is, creationists are obligated to dismiss it. They're in a position of not being able to present a convincing case for the Biblical creation of the various life forms on its own, so they're driven to trying to tear down evolution, as if such an accomplishment would mean creationism wins by default. It's a dull-witted hubris, but it's all they have.

The result is that creationists come up with the most inane objections, to say nothing of outright lies.

.

.

 

[columbus]

what mountains of evidence?

It's all around you. You need to start with basically understanding the scientific method, then elementary biology.
There's a bunch of links here on RF. But you do have to read them.

everything confidently asserted 150 years ago has been thrown into doubt by the scientific evidence

This is flat out false.
Much of what was asserted in the 19th century has been demonstrated to be wrong. That includes the Christian teachings that black people are inherently less than whites because they are under the curse of Ham. That women need to suffer in childbirth because God said so in Genesis. And a lot of other things that many modern Christians don't believe, because they don't believe in the Bible the way that they used to, secular humanist morality is making serious inroads into Christian morality.

Some of us acknowledge faith in our beliefs!

The difference between us is that you have far more Faith in human sources than I do.
If a human tells me something, asserting that it's true, I expect some solid empirical evidence if it's important. I will not take their unsupported opinion for much of anything meaningful.
God has never told me anything important. Nothing. You telling me to trust you, and your unsupported opinions about which human beings are credible, doesn't demonstrate anything to me except that you consider yourself a spokesperson for God.
I don't have as much Faith in humans as that. I want to see some empirical, peer reviewed, evidence before I will take your opinion as reflective of reality. Or anybody else's.
I simply do not have as much Faith in humans as is required to believe in revealed religion.

Tom

 

[Laughing Coyote]

I don't think that explains why more animals don't have Eagle vision. I don't see the energy cost as being much different and it would certainly help many other creatures to survive.

The question is what are selective pressures at work. Usually there are very many, perhaps countless, pressures working simultaneously on all different elements of an organism, making a population of organisms into constantly changing collection of compromises.

Certainly an eagle eye would be useful to many of us, but does it give selective advantage to an organism such that it would leave more offspring and change the gene pool versus animals without it? This means that it must both give advantage and not add cost by compromising other features that also give selective advantage.

An eagle is looking for small animals from very high altitude, so it is no surprise that an extreme sense of sight would be useful. Smell, hearing and touch, though they could be useful, would not give selective advantage while overdevelopment would require energy that could go to better eyes and other requirements eagles need. In normal fluctuations of the environment these interactions are generally fairly subtle and gross changes tend to work over a long period

In contrast, eagle eyes would not give a wolf selective advantage, but keen sense of smell is extremely useful when you live in woodlands and grasslands and can't see potential prey who are concealed by trees, brush and high grasses or if you are hunting at night. Similarly owl eyes don't have the acuity of eagles, but they are great at night, as well as their hearing, which can locate the location of a mouse. There is a whole discussion about the balance of development of smell and eyesight among different mammals, including the spectrum of light sensed, the range of area visible, and the reasons for it.

At the other extreme, this is why eyesight disappears entirely for fish that live in caves and subterranean mammals, as there is no selective advantage for and a cost for keeping eyesight, whereas other senses such as touch that are advantageous are selected.

Similarly, there was not selective advantage for birds on islands to keep the the highly costly facility of flight, as there were no predators. Even for humans, if we were to develop the network of tubes required for trains that run at greater than speed of sound, fleets of long distance planes would decrease simply because it is more costly energy-wise and thus also monetarily to construct and propel vehicles through the air. You can do away with the weight and cost of wings and not have to put the energy into sustaining the vehicle to fly at great height. The cost that has to be overcome in this case would be the construction of a whole new infrastructure (it might also be much cheaper than maintaining an interstate highway system; however, the human decisions required, in the manner of natural selection in organisms, require compromises too, which in this case are political).

The embryonic development of mammals including humans provides a history of things that had been useful to their ancestors but no longer are useful for their descendants. Human embryos develop and lose fins, and like frogs they develop and lose tails, since these no longer provide selective advantage. A tail might be useful when you want to hang from a tree, walk along a branch, or caress your spouse, but they don't provide selective advantage whereas other things such as further development of hands, specialization of legs and feet designed for striding rather than grasping, and enlargement of the cerebral cortex did have had selective advantage for us humans and thus were developed and elaborated. If in the future we were forced to live in trees again, perhaps those few humans still born with tails would have more offspring and that would gradually change the makeup of the population. Or if our politics continues in the way it has been going, maybe we won't require such large cerebral cortex (joke).

The neck of the giraffe is another good example of compromises which aren't well understood if you try to understand it just in terms of one advantage a feature might seem to give. Intelligent Design advocates say that the sexual differentiation between males and females proves there is not natural selection since it should give the same advantage to females as males, because it allows them to reach higher into trees. Indeed the long necks allow giraffes to graze in trees, but this is not the only selective pressure. Male giraffes fight for females using the long necks as levers and their heads as bludgeons, which gives male offspring with longer necks a selective advantage. Those with longer necks will be more likely to win mates and thereby have more offspring, so there will be more and more of them and less and less of shorter necked males. The disadvantage is that as a result of having long necks, giraffes have the highest blood pressure of any mammal to the extent that it is about as high as technically feasible. Not only do females not need the longer necks for fighting for mates, but there is a certain advantage of lower blood pressure and less stress on their system by having somewhat shorter ones, particularly since they have other stresses such as bearing and nursing the baby giraffes. Thus there is selective advantage for females not to develop as long necks and also to be a bit smaller. Different needs and stresses experienced by the bodies of males and females explain many kinds of sexual dimorphism, or differences in form of the body, in many different species.

Another example of such sexual dimorphisms, talking of raptors, are the Coopers hawks that use their good eyesight to spot from great distance my chickens wandering in my yard. Observing that the females are larger than the males, you might wonder why a male should be so disadvantaged. Coopers hawks hunt birds, including chickens much to my sorrow. While the females brood and protect the hawklets, or whatever you call baby hawks, the males do the hunting to feed them. Since their bird prey live amidst trees and are highly mobile, it is advantageous to the hawk family that the father be able to fly at higher speeds to catch those birds while dodging all the branches and other obstacles that birds live among, otherwise they'll share the same fate as those storm troopers in the last scenes of the first Star Wars movie. Indeed, many male Coopers hawks do suffer injuries from collisions even so. The loss of speed and maneuverability due to the greater size of the females on the other hand is outweighed by their better ability to brood and protect the youngsters.

There is a wonderful and entertaining book called the "The Beak of the Finch: A Story of Evolution in Our Time," in which the biologist Jonathan Weiner discusses all this in his story of 25 years of documenting the change in in the beaks of finches on the Galopagos Island. He also noted that that because Darwin arrived at the Galopagos in a time of plenty of rain that Darwin was unable to observe the effect of selective pressures at work that he might have seen if he'd come during drought, when there is observable change in length of the beak of the finch populations on the islands due to lack of various kinds of seeds.

 

[Laughing Coyote]

It's all around you. You need to start with basically understanding the scientific method, then elementary biology.
There's a bunch of links here on RF. But you do have to read them.


This is flat out false.
Much of what was asserted in the 19th century has been demonstrated to be wrong. That includes the Christian teachings that black people are inherently less than whites because they are under the curse of Ham. That women need to suffer in childbirth because God said so in Genesis. And a lot of other things that many modern Christians don't believe, because they don't believe in the Bible the way that they used to, secular humanist morality is making serious inroads into Christian morality.


The difference between us is that you have far more Faith in human sources than I do.
If a human tells me something, asserting that it's true, I expect some solid empirical evidence if it's important. I will not take their unsupported opinion for much of anything meaningful.
God has never told me anything important. Nothing. You telling me to trust you, and your unsupported opinions about which human beings are credible, doesn't demonstrate anything to me except that you consider yourself a spokesperson for God.
I don't have as much Faith in humans as that. I want to see some empirical, peer reviewed, evidence before I will take your opinion as reflective of reality. Or anybody else's.
I simply do not have as much Faith in humans as is required to believe in revealed religion.

Tom

Then you are halfway to being a good scientist. Science advances by lack of faith in human sources. The other half is that when you disagree, you devise ways to test it. Everything in scientific knowledge is continually being being considered and test

I was teasing you slightly Grandliseur, but to answer your question I don't put any interpretation on current events. I don't believe in any religion, so I don't believe in "end times" as an event, unless you mean the eventual end of the Earth as it gets burnt up by the Sun in 7 million years or so! Of course I have concerns about the amount of weaponry stockpiled by countries, but it is hardly a new development. For many decades now we have had weaponry that could scorch the earth and make it uninhabitable. When you look at the statistics you see that since WW2, the world population has grown enormously and deaths by armed conflict has shrunk considerably compared to past times. Sure, it could be some nutcase decides to launch nuclear weapons, but we've been through the Cold War when people thought nuclear war was inevitable (for decades) but they were wrong. At the moment I'd say there are fewer reasons to fret about world war than ever before in my lifetime (and I'm no spring chicken!).

Actually end times Apostle Paul referred to at the time concerned the Roman Empire. It did occur but largely due to the over-expansion and destruction of the productive base of the Roman Empire itself, and the simultaneous development of surrounding tribal peoples, including getting better military and industrial capabilities in part from the Romans. Paul was himself a Roman soldier and probably had pretty good idea of the weaknesses of the empire, even though it took another 300 or so years for them to come to complete fruition. Nowadays we have a whole collection of conditions being created by people which observation and rational analysis can predict are going to, in the words of the Oracle of Delphi, bring down a great civilization: building a civilization based on a limited and unrenewable energy source (petroleum), destruction of the planetary life support systems, over-centralization of production, commerce, finance and administration, release of sequestered carbon into the atmosphere, destruction of the fertility of the soil, cutting the forests and plowing up of the grasslands, over-fishing the sea, uprooting of all the world's agricultural communities and destruction of their agricultural systems, and so on. As well as diversion of a major portion of the world's productivity to making war and concentrating power, including nuclear weapons talked about. The end will be a confluence of factors which won't require the intervention of a God, no more so than the Roman empire required one. It will be said we did it to ourselves. Few people heeded Paul in his white robe (if that is what he wore), and few people heed the latter day Pauls in their white lab coats -- that is, those who aren't actively bringing this about with their short-sighted and reductionist-minded use and application of their knowledge, which unfortunately is most of them. If religion and philosophy have a role, it is inter-mediating in human self-destruction of the planet and themselves by making humans attend to the needs of the planet and all life on it, rather than accumulation of wealth and self-grandizement by liquidating life on earth. From what I know of Jesus, I think that he would have been doing just this thing, and people, being as they are, would probably kill him today too, probably with the excuse that he was undermining state security.

 

[It Aint Necessarily So]

No need, Genesis 1 & 2 explains it in enough detail for you. If you read the entire ICR website you would understand.

But you won't.

Why would any skeptic visit a creationist website to learn about how the world works and how it got to be this way? Are you not familiar with how such sites are perceived by skeptics? They are preaching, and they have no ethical restraint regarding what they'll publish.

I saw one recently arguing that humans could not have come from a common ancestral great ape because all other apes have 24 pairs of chromosomes, humans have 23, and the deletion of a chromosome would be lethal. All of those are facts, but not only don't they rule out a common ancestor, once the reasons for that are understood, they constitute smoking gun evidence that we are related to the other great apes. That's the ethics and scholarship that we are accustomed to. It doesn't matter if the author was ignorant or lying, he was generating typical religious apologetics.

From DNA tests prove Darwin Was Wrong - Ape DNA very different from human DNA - Laws of Genetics Contradicts Ape to Human Evolution

• "there is no way to explain how apes, with 24 pairs of chromosomes, could have evolved into humans with 23 pairs of chromosomes. We all know that if we lose a pair of chromosomes, we cannot reproduce ... Darwinians also were determined to hide any evidence that contradicted their beloved evolution theory. That is why atheist scientists simply concocted a lie and told us apes and humans both have 24 pairs of chromosomes."

He's calling the scientists liars while lying himself.

This is what we are accustomed to with Christian apologetics. This is the typical level of scholarship and ethics we see.

If you don't understand the objection, Google human chromosome 2.

 

[Guy Threepwood]

It's all around you. You need to start with basically understanding the scientific method, then elementary biology.
There's a bunch of links here on RF. But you do have to read them.


This is flat out false.
Much of what was asserted in the 19th century has been demonstrated to be wrong. That includes the Christian teachings that black people are inherently less than whites because they are under the curse of Ham. That women need to suffer in childbirth because God said so in Genesis. And a lot of other things that many modern Christians don't believe, because they don't believe in the Bible the way that they used to, secular humanist morality is making serious inroads into Christian morality.


The difference between us is that you have far more Faith in human sources than I do.
If a human tells me something, asserting that it's true, I expect some solid empirical evidence if it's important. I will not take their unsupported opinion for much of anything meaningful.
God has never told me anything important. Nothing. You telling me to trust you, and your unsupported opinions about which human beings are credible, doesn't demonstrate anything to me except that you consider yourself a spokesperson for God.
I don't have as much Faith in humans as that. I want to see some empirical, peer reviewed, evidence before I will take your opinion as reflective of reality. Or anybody else's.
I simply do not have as much Faith in humans as is required to believe in revealed religion.

Tom

Darwinism was obviously a big inspiration for Hitler & eugenics in general- but that's another thread, I do not think you are a racist and I am sure you were not trying to imply that about me either- mud slinging has nothing to do with the actual science here i hope we can agree.

I trust people more than institutionalized academic consensus, and I don't need to tell you where most stand on this- Belief in Darwinism is about 19% in U.S.
But the whole point of science is not having to trust anyone,

Beyond that, Eugenics, canals on mars, classical physics, piltdown man, steady state, Big Crunch, were all declared 'scientific'. And skeptics were 'deniers of science'
While the Big Bang was a pejorative term for what was once considered 'religious pseudoscience'

So I am less interested in whether something is considered 'scientific' and more interested in whether or not it is actually true.

The best evidence tells me evolution is not true, any chance we get back to substance here? It can be much more interesting, honestly!

 

[DavidFirth]

Why would any skeptic visit a creationist website to learn about how the world works and how it got to be this way? Are you not familiar with how such sites are perceived by skeptics? They are preaching, and they have no ethical restraint regarding what they'll publish.

I saw one recently arguing that humans could not have come from a common ancestral great ape because all other apes have 24 pairs of chromosomes, humans have 23, and the deletion of a chromosome would be lethal. All of those are facts, but not only don't they rule out a common ancestor, once the reasons for that are understood, they constitute smoking gun evidence that we are related to the other great apes. That's the ethics and scholarship that we are accustomed to. It doesn't matter if the author was ignorant or lying, he was generating typical religious apologetics.

From DNA tests prove Darwin Was Wrong - Ape DNA very different from human DNA - Laws of Genetics Contradicts Ape to Human Evolution

• "there is no way to explain how apes, with 24 pairs of chromosomes, could have evolved into humans with 23 pairs of chromosomes. We all know that if we lose a pair of chromosomes, we cannot reproduce ... Darwinians also were determined to hide any evidence that contradicted their beloved evolution theory. That is why atheist scientists simply concocted a lie and told us apes and humans both have 24 pairs of chromosomes."

He's calling the scientists liars while lying himself.

This is what we are accustomed to with Christian apologetics. This is the typical level of scholarship and ethics we see.

If you don't understand the objection, Google human chromosome 2.

Why should I then visit your websites? You justify not hearing other interpretations of the evidence by being a skeptic?

The reason why creationists rule out coming from apes is because the assumption is ridiculous. There is no other real reason. If you can't prove it, and you should be able to prove it, everything you need is here, then how about you shut up about it?

 

[The Holy Bottom Burp]

Actually end times Apostle Paul referred to at the time concerned the Roman Empire. It did occur but largely due to the over-expansion and destruction of the productive base of the Roman Empire itself, and the simultaneous development of surrounding tribal peoples, including getting better military and industrial capabilities in part from the Romans. Paul was himself a Roman soldier and probably had pretty good idea of the weaknesses of the empire, even though it took another 300 or so years for them to come to complete fruition. Nowadays we have a whole collection of conditions being created by people which observation and rational analysis can predict are going to, in the words of the Oracle of Delphi, bring down a great civilization: building a civilization based on a limited and unrenewable energy source (petroleum), destruction of the planetary life support systems, over-centralization of production, commerce, finance and administration, release of sequestered carbon into the atmosphere, destruction of the fertility of the soil, cutting the forests and plowing up of the grasslands, over-fishing the sea, uprooting of all the world's agricultural communities and destruction of their agricultural systems, and so on. As well as diversion of a major portion of the world's productivity to making war and concentrating power, including nuclear weapons talked about. The end will be a confluence of factors which won't require the intervention of a God, no more so than the Roman empire required one. It will be said we did it to ourselves. Few people heeded Paul in his white robe (if that is what he wore), and few people heed the latter day Pauls in their white lab coats -- that is, those who aren't actively bringing this about with their short-sighted and reductionist-minded use and application of their knowledge, which unfortunately is most of them. If religion and philosophy have a role, it is inter-mediating in human self-destruction of the planet and themselves by making humans attend to the needs of the planet and all life on it, rather than accumulation of wealth and self-grandizement by liquidating life on earth. From what I know of Jesus, I think that he would have been doing just this thing, and people, being as they are, would probably kill him today too, probably with the excuse that he was undermining state security.

Mate, that seemed a long way of saying the world is overpopulated, is burning too many fossil fuels, and is probably going to pay a heavy price for it sometime further down the road. Sure, that has been recognised by many scientists (even the reductionist minded ones) for a few decades now. You don't need religious people or philosophers to point that out, when there is scientific evidence to suggest future generations might be in trouble.

Not sure what your point was about Paul, but predicting the end of an empire and then seeing it happen three hundred years later is not impressive! Made me laugh though! Pretty sure they'll be a few more empires ended three hundred years from now....

 

[It Aint Necessarily So]

Science is happy with anything but God, so we know they've the got the blinders on, count them as an unreliable opinion.

"You stare into your high definition plasma screen monitor, type into your cordless keyboard then hit enter, which causes your computer to convert all that visual data into a binary signal that's processed by millions of precise circuits.

"This is then converted to a frequency modulated signal to reach your wireless router where it is then converted to light waves and sent along a large fiber optics cable to be processed by a super computer on a mass server.

"This sends that bit you typed to a satellite orbiting the earth that was put there through the greatest feats of engineering and science, all so it could go back through a similar pathway to make it all the way here to my computer monitor 15,000 miles away from you just so you could say, "Science is all a bunch of man made hogwash."- anon.

 

[It Aint Necessarily So]

The reason why creationists rule out coming from apes is because the assumption is ridiculous. There is no other real reason.

Great argument.

 

[Kemosloby]

"You stare into your high definition plasma screen monitor, type into your cordless keyboard then hit enter, which causes your computer to convert all that visual data into a binary signal that's processed by millions of precise circuits.

"This is then converted to a frequency modulated signal to reach your wireless router where it is then converted to light waves and sent along a large fiber optics cable to be processed by a super computer on a mass server.

"This sends that bit you typed to a satellite orbiting the earth that was put there through the greatest feats of engineering and science, all so it could go back through a similar pathway to make it all the way here to my computer monitor 15,000 miles away from you just so you could say, "Science is all a bunch of man made hogwash."- anon.

God does everything without satellites, which is nice. Helps keep costs down.

 

[Esoqq]

Umm, I would like to know exactly where Darwin himself did imply this? ID likes to take things such as Darwin's introduction to his discussion of the the structure of the eye, for example, in which he says the eye is so complex that you would think that only some creator could have designed it. But ID then excludes all the many pages that follow in which Darwin shows how all the elements of the eye developed step by step, just opposite of what one would think. Darwin again and again uses rhetorical forms such as this to bring his argument to a hostile world, including that of science at that time.

Nature has been extremely generous in leaving a record of all these steps in both the fossil record and within the various rungs of existing life, and more recently accessible in the minute detail in the mapping of the chromosome, allowing very good understanding of how complex structures developed. This is particularly the case with the eye, in which every single step can be found in living forms allowing one to see how the next one followed the previous one. Furthermore, because things such as the eye developed step by step, they are not designed in the manner of something that had a pre-existing plan. They are stuck with elements and arrangements determined by forms that preceded them rather than more efficient arrangements that a designer with a preconceived idea of what he wants might design.

To present a portion of a person's argument that appears to support one's own argument, which is a subject separated from its object, but hiding what follows which totally contradicts it is dishonesty. I've read much of the ID literature, and basically it consists of creating straw men that are set up falsely as being the position taken by the theory of natural selection and then knocking them down and saying that evolution has been disproved. It in fact has no evidence-based "theory," as such, of its own to offer as alternative.

To accept such arguments without reading even very good popular discussions, much less Darwin's Origin of Species with all its limitations as you pointed out, which itself was written for a wide audience, and even less everything that followed, is just intellectual laziness in my mind. There is a difference between lack of conclusive proof, or as a scientist might put it, compelling evidence, and having not looked at or considered that evidence -- many millions of publications of results of different studies, and more books that explain and synthesize it then you could get through in a lifetime. If evidence for intelligent design were like the precariously piled sand of an anthill at the base of Mt. Everest, because you don't want to turn from the anthill to face Everest doesn't mean that Everest, or Sagaramatha -- the mother of the seas -- as locals call it, doesn't exist and shouldn't be climbed.

And generally work on the theory of evolution is simply much more interesting reading than Intelligent Design. It is the difference of staying moored at a dock and calling it a voyage versus throwing off the moorings and setting off on a journey across the world. Darwin wrote another wonderful book about that too, called The Voyage of the Beagle, in which you can see him making his observations and developing his thinking. It is one of the classic travel narratives. Unlike religion, nobody beforehand or afterward tells you to abandon one God for another, nor need you give up belief in God in general. You will find your belief much deeper and richer for it. As he put it in a sentence on the next to last page and the very last sentence of the Origin of Species:

"To my mind it accords better with what we know of the laws impressed on matter by the Creator, that the production and extinction of the past and present inhabitants of the world should have been due to secondary causes, like those determining the birth and death of the individual. ... There is a grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved."

I have to admit, I don't remember where I encountered the Darwin quote I mentioned, I do know it was half a century ago and I haven't encountered it since so it might well be the quote you mentioned. Over the decades I have been exposed to much that causes me to question the idea that chance and only chance is the motivating force behind evolution, and what has been posted here only adds to that.
I.D. in my mind also has to include the creation and existence of the universe itself since these events are every bit as near impossible as the formation and evolution of life itself.
One final note, just as mainstream science claims that evolution and climate change as well is pretty much settled science, that is far from true. Here is a link I found a few minutes ago to a petition signed by more scientists than I can count in the few moments I was on the site, but it's probably in the thousands. I've also encountered a similar petition with 30000 scientists questioning climate change and another one signed by 50 NASA scientists and Astronauts.
One thing I hope we can agree upon is that science needs to be divorced from politics since politics tend to corrupt what ever it gets involved in.

 

[Esoqq]

Great argument.

I think that is true primarily for those who believe that Holy Scripture should be taken literally. I don't. I believe in a God mainly because I believe I am more than my body. This is due to an NDE which happened to me in 1967. I've been studying NDE's and related, (and some not so related) subjects ever since, including various branches of science.
After 50 years I've come to this conclusion.
1 Our universe had Creator and this Creator planned carefully the creation and continuation of our universe. On this topic that's all I'm certain of.
2 Within our universe are automated maintenance procedures (natural laws) to ensure that God's plan is carried out.
3 We, and by that I'm not just speaking of humans, but all life, originates and probably exists, (if that's the right word) in another realm.
4 We either have lived multiple lives before or we're able to tap into the memories of others who have recently died.
5 Our brains are not either our memories or the seat of our consciousness. We have a mind that is separate from the brain and is connected to and interacts with every cell in our body.
6 Good and evil are human concepts and have little to do with God. God does have a specific purpose for humanity and at specific times uses specific people to assist us in keeping with God's plan. Since cooperation and harmony are generally beneficial to us, and chaos, violence and destruction are generally harmful to us, we use these as our criteria for good and bad/evil and attribute this knowledge to God.
7 Our existence in the other realm is beyond anything it is possible for me to describe. There simply isn't anything in this reality that can serve as a frame of reference. I can definitely understand the vagueness in most descriptions of Heaven

 

[Milton Platt]

No matter how you dress it up it comes down to either God did it or it just happened. I tend to believe it didn't just happen randomly.

Yes, but if things don't just happen, then how did god happen.....

 

[Kemosloby]

Yes, but if things don't just happen, then how did god happen.....

God has always been, but things have a beginning and an end.