inkorrekt writes:
For those who believe in random chance:
Good to know that you're not addressing anyone here, at least regarding the way randomness applies to evolution. Evolution is not a random process. It is composed of two major parts: mutation and natural selection. While mutation is random, natural selection is not, so evolution as a whole is a process that acts nonrandomly upon something that is random.
Let me clarify that with an example. Imagine if you had 100 dice. If you encountered a bunch of dice, all with the 6 side facing up, you would think that someone had simply set them all up like that. The reason you would think that is probably because if you dumped them all on the floor, it would be very unlikely that you would get all sixes. In fact, the odds of this occuring are about one chance in 6.53x10^77.
But if you rolled the dice, and left all the dice with sixes on them on the floor, and picked up all the rest, then threw those back on the floor, you would have more sixes the second time around than you had the first. If you kept removing everything that wasn't a six and rethrowing it, it would probably take only a few dozen throws to get all sixes.
Life works in a somewhat similar way. You start with something that is somewhat likely to come about suddenly, and then it is altered over many generations until it is very different from how it began. The end product is extremely unlikely to come about on its own, giving the illusion of design.
Computers aren't the best analogy to describe either evolution or intelligent design, in my opinion. While they were certainly designed by intelligent humans, and though they changed over time as new designs were invented, they differ from living things in that computers do not reproduce the way life does. Living organisms carry genetic information in their DNA, and this is passed on to their offspring with a high, but imperfect, degree of accuracy. Computers do not do this. Entirely new components can be added or changed in ways that would be impossible for living things. If information is moved from one computer to another, changes during that transition are to be avoided as much as possible.
Someone else touched on this point earlier in the thread, but there have been computer programs that use evolutionary algorithms to solve problems and design new software. These programs seem to evolve in a way much more similar to that of living things than does the entire computer, as natural selection and mutation is used to generate some new, complex program.
inkorrekt writes:
He could be an alien from Mars even.
Creationists often say things like this, but I don't understand why. It is as though you expect all the biologists to stand up and say "Well that sounds reasonable, someone from Mars created everything!" We aren't so opposed to the idea of a god that we would rather have faith in aliens, we just want our beliefs to be supported by evidence. If we had some evidence that life originated on Mars, we would want to investigate that and figure out how it happened there, just as scientists are trying to figure out how life originated on Earth, according to our present understanding. Scientists would not stop asking questions just because someone gave an explanation that doesn't invoke a diety.