Is Biological Life the Product of Intelligent Design?

[MidGe]

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My beef with Dawkinism and others like that is simply their assumption, often unstated, that the universe is undesigned, operates independently of God and their assertion that this is a scientific position. It isn't.

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You are wrong NotReady, only theists have an assumption. That is the assumption of a god, or a phantasm, for which there is no evidence. Science has no position on it, and, frankly, doesn't and should not care.

[vhawk01]

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Maybe I should have been more specific, because I am leery of traps.


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Well I certainly don't want to trap you so I'll lay it out up front. I mentioned in another post that science can't even say that gravity exists without a designer. The overall simple idea is that unless you can explain everything you haven't fully explained anything. Whatever Dawkins showed about his arbitrary lifeform can't exclude the necessity for a designer. If he says it does he has departed science. When you flip a coin you can't say with scientific certainty that God wasn't involved in the result. My beef with Dawkinism and others like that is simply their assumption, often unstated, that the universe is undesigned, operates independently of God and their assertion that this is a scientific position. It isn't.

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You are making the leap from "a designer is unnecessary" to "there was no designer." The first is justified, the second isn't, at least not scientifically. I don't see how you can claim that the first one isn't, though.

[NotReady]

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You are making the leap from "a designer is unnecessary"


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You can't show empirically that a designer is unnecessary. You can't show empirically that gravity works apart from God or that the result of a coin flip occurs without God's involvement.

[MidGe]

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You are making the leap from "a designer is unnecessary"


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You can't show empirically that a designer is unnecessary. You can't show empirically that gravity works apart from God or that the result of a coin flip occurs without God's involvement.

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Of course you can show that that god is not involved in a coin toss. You simply need a sufficiently large number of coin tosses. In that very same way, it is possible to prove that no designer is needed to explain evolution. The fact that you are too stubborn or narrow-minded to understand it doesn't make it any way less correct and it has nothing to do with your beliefs in the real existence of your phantasms.

[Mickey Brausch]

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As long as Darwinians insist on pushing the idea of no God, random chance, no designer, however you want to express it, they have departed from scientific enquiry by definition...

[/ QUOTE ]And why is that, please?

Why is the idea of randomness "anti-scientific" ?

You are most patently wrong, if this is what you are claiming. Randomness exists.

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... and will always meet resistance from people who notice their attempt to sneak atheism in by the back door.

[/ QUOTE ] We cannot sneak an elephant into the class room unnoticed. We'd be fools if we tried to.

But you wanna call that elephant a mouse -- go ahead. Won't go away.

Mickey Brausch

[chezlaw]

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You are most patently wrong, if this is what you are claiming. Randomness exists.

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or it doesn't. You couldn't possibly tell, i'll even explain why if you like.

Though none of this has anything to do with god.

chez

[Ben K]

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In other words, we'd still be witnessing the effects with mutations on some macro degree, but we're not. Species are becoming extinct, not becoming more abundant. In fact for higher species, it appears evident that Darwinian evolution is over. Why?

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Evolution isn't over. Bird flu is a mutation that allows the organism to thrive by increasing the number of other organisms it is able to infect. Or to bring this closer to home, humans are still evolving. Compare average height over the last couple hundred years and the fact is that average height is increasing. Ask 10,000 women if they prefer their men to be taller and you'll find the source of the increased height. Women prefer on average taller men, the genes for height get spread more easily because they're more likely in taller men who get laid more. This also produces taller women though so the next generation continues to grow the overall average because the blokes have to be yet taller. When will it end? Prolly when we hit the point of too tall and our skeletal structure or lung capacity doesn't develop at the same rate causing flaws which hinder the ability of the too tall to get laid. I know better healthcare and nutrition has helped growth so producing taller people which maybe reduces the effectiveness of this example, I haven't looked it up.

One documented example of evolution is the black moth in the UK. Macro evolution is still going and we're seeing it even though the process is very very slow.

[Ben K]

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You are making the leap from "a designer is unnecessary"


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You can't show empirically that a designer is unnecessary. You can't show empirically that gravity works apart from God or that the result of a coin flip occurs without God's involvement.

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I agree you NotReady but I think it may be testable. All you'd need is to give god a definition, to create an hypothesis about how god interacts with a coin flip or gravity. Then decide on what you would see if god wasn't interacting at that level and go flip some coins or drop stuff. It seems that the experiments done to date have failed to consider the interaction of god in their hypotheses.

However, the fact that the developed theories on these topics have managed to explain what we see without requiring god's involvement in any way at all should suggest that they occur without god's involvement. Of course, I'm saying that he's not involved a the point of the flip, not that he's not responsible for maintaining the universe in such a way that these rules continue to work. E.g. my car would not run indefinately without my involvement. However, the process for making cars and running them works without my involvement. So we can understand the universe in ways that do not require god's involvement at every stage and one day we may understand how the universe could be created inthe same way but we'd always be left with why this universe.

Personally, I don't like the idea of saying, it's this one because god says so and therefore I'm gonna go kill some gays. Seems daft to go from a thinking understanding of the universe and concluding there's a supernatural element to religous behaviour especially seeing as the sources of a lot of that behaviour were written by people without the same understanding.

[MidGe]

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Compare average height over the last couple hundred years and the fact is that average height is increasing.

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Sorry Ben,

Go back to evolution 101.

Two hundred years of average human height increasing is unlikely to have anything to do with evolution.

[NotReady]

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You are most patently wrong, if this is what you are claiming. Randomness exists.


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Randomness in nature exists for us in the sense that we don't know in advance what will be the outcome. It can't exist for God if He's omniscient. And humans can never prove that it does exist in the second sense.