The Power of the New Intelligent Design...

Your avoidance of my questions and point in Message 267 tells us that you are afraid of those questions and of the truth. Therefore, I must repeat them and insist that you make a good-faith effort to respond to them ... apparently for the first time in your life: Respond when you have returned from your well-deserved suspension.

Emphasis added: Finally you made a true statement. Not the first part, which is obvious quite false, but rather the part which I placed in bold:Your own writing demonstrates that you do not know evolution. Therefore, you have not "falsified evolution", because you cannot something that you do not know, which is exactly what you just said. So the first step in falsifying evolution is for you to learn what it actually is and how it actually works. It is abundantly clear that you have not taken the required first step yet: you clearly do not know what you are talking about.But of course just knowing evolution is not enough. You must also address it in your "falsification." If you knew evolution but instead you write some gross misrepresentation of it, knowing full well that you are writing is utterly false, then you are deliberately lying. And when you then "falsify" those lies about evolution, then your entire "falsification" is nothing but a deliberate lie created for the sole purpose of deceiving others.So either you do know what evolution actually is, which means that your misrepresentation of evolution and your "falsification" are nothing but deliberate lies, or else you are indeed ignorant of evolution, which means that your "falsification" is nothing but bullshit nonsense.You might think that you know what evolution is, but you clearly do not. Rather, you have an "evolution model" bundle of nonsense onto which you have attached the label "evolution" despite the fact that the only resemblance it bears with evolution is that label. When you "falsify" your "evolution model", then all you have done has been to defeat a strawman. It would be like US Army combat training at the very start of WWII when they lacked actual weapons and tanks, so they put a sign on the side of a truck and it was suddenly a "tank", "machine guns" were made of broom sticks, and bombs were sacks of flour. If you dropped a sack of flour onto a truck with a sign, then you "bombed a tank." At least for the sake of the exercise, but if the soldier who scored that hit would then brag to everyone that he had destroyed a tank, then everyone would know him to be a deluded fool.That would be you in your constant bragging of having "falsified evolution" when you have not even come close to addressing evolution. Everyone knows you to be a deluded fool. 
For now I will assume that you are just ignorant of evolution and that you have gotten most of your misconceptions about evolution from creationists. Creationists always misrepresent evolution, but it appears to be because they just don't know what it is nor how it works. Unfortunately, nobody knows just what the creationist misunderstanding of evolution is, because they refuse to tell us what they think it is. Without knowing what those creationists think evolution is, we are unable to figure out what the hell they are talking about.That is why it is important for you to answer those questions, so that we can start to make some kind of sense out of the nonsense that you keep writing. Here they are again (anticipating that you will have ignored them yet again): In considering how evolution works, please also give some thought to how that controls the speed of evolution, including stasis! I couldn't find where you addressed evolution causing statis, so, combined with your silly "evolution is any change" and your considering gradualistic evolution as a separate issue, you obviously are unaware that varying rates of change including stasis are integral parts of evolutionary processes. If you knew evolution, you would know about that or at least have been able to figure it out. 
Of course, there is the major problem that you are a creationist. Creationists are almost universally dishonest, so I know to not hope for any honesty from you. But I could be pleasantly surprised for once.Edited by dwise1, : changed subtitle

I beg to differ. Engineers live and work in reality since what we design must work (or else we must use reality to determine why it doesn't work). Wishful and magical thinking (ie, divorcing one's thinking from reality) has no place in engineering. You boast rather loudly about being some kind of engineering genius (page 32), so your resorting to magical thinking divorced from reality (eg, some kind of external guiding intelligence which can only be supernatural guiding evolution) seems rather odd, especially when you accuse others of not knowing reality -- that appears to be a symptom of you projecting your own deficiencies on others.I am a retired software engineer. My career started with being trained as a digital electronics technician (USAF) which led to earning my computer science degree while on active duty (I also took several EE classes to supplement my technician training and for fun). Almost all of my professional work was in embedded programming in which I worked closely with hardware; at one job, our EE was expert in analog electronics but weak with digital, so I routinely explained digital component datasheets and interfacing to him. In my last job (22 years), I was the resident expert in designing our serial port communications protocols with a variety of external devices (eg, GPS receivers). And before that I had worked 8 years with my father, a master carpenter and general contractor. He called his philosophy "construction thinking", in which you approached all problems (especially construction problems) with plans for practical solutions -- pragmatic, grounded in reality, no room for wishful or magical thinking; solve the actual problem instead of trying the philosopher/theologian/religionist/lawyer trick of making up new terminology and changing definitions to wish the problem away into the cornfield.Please note that throughout my career and even before it, I worked constantly with reality, so we're not strangers.For as far back as I can remember, I have always thought like an engineer. Every device or system I'd see, I wanted to figure out how it worked. That included lots of taking things apart and putting them back together. Like Slartibartfast, I became a big fan of science as I learned how everything worked -- nature, mechanisms, electronics, atoms/molecules, physiology, life, etc. I didn't just blindly accept what I was being taught, but rather I had to test everything, especially if something didn't seem to make sense (eg, Richard Dawkins' WEASEL program in The Blind Watchmaker seemed too good to be true, so I tested it by writing my own version and when that worked way too well I analyzed the math of the probabilities involved, which is how it finally made sense). Conversational Spanish (memorize common sentences) didn't appeal to me, but German class did because I had an old-school teacher whose approach was based on the grammar through which I could see how the language worked; since then I've learned languages both through the grammar (learning how it works) and by thinking in that language.Furthermore, I tend to approach everything with the same basic question: "How is this supposed to work?" That basic question has cut through a helluva lot of Trump's bullshit lies. I have also used that question to approach all aspects of evolutionary theory. In particular, how does evolution agree with how life works? Extremely well. How does evolutionary theory account for varying rates of change as well as for stasis and how does that agree with how life works? Again, extremely well. For that matter, one can take a detailed description of how life works (ie, produce offspring very similar to yet slightly different from the parent, some of that generation of offspring survive to reproduce the next generation, etc) and verify how evolutionary processes are based on how life works. Furthermore, And verify that there is no need to invoke any supernatural intervention in any step of that process -- see my Message 78, though I can reformat that information into a more readable list structure.Since your ID approach calls for supernatural intervention, we should look at how dealing with the supernatural squares up with reality. Please note that if the supernatural were to exist, then it would be part of reality. However, the problem that faces us lies in the very nature of the supernatural. We cannot in any manner observe, sense, or even determine the existence of the supernatural (outside of someone having a "feeling" or other extremely subjective experience).Therefore, your intention to override and replace the objective reality of biological evolution with invocations of supernatural intervention contrary to the reality of how the supernatural can be dealt with is itself your own departure from reality. 
We have a lot to discuss. I sincerely hope that you are capable of engaging in discussion. Sadly, your conduct here so far indicates that you are not. Please surprise me.Edited by dwise1, : sub-title

Yes, I did reply to one of my own messages. No, I'm not talking to myself. If I were talking to myself then this would be in German, nicht wahr, since for nearly half a century that has been my habit and the only opportunity I would have to practice German (and lesser so in other languages ... тоже мало по русский, но очены мало). As I would inform others: "If I say something and it's not in English, then I'm talking to myself, not to you." 
Another way in which I work more closely with reality than most do is when I'm dealing with creationism. When presented with a creationist claim, my first thought is always, "And how is that supposed to work?" I would (and still do) test every creationist claim against what the science really is, how the science is really done, what a "cited" scientific source really did say, how the math actually turns out, etc.IOW, given a creationist claim, I would compare it to reality.. Since I started in 1981, that has been my most successful approach: Reality.A case in point that I keep bringing up is Kent Hovind's Solar Mass Loss Claim:

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All you got to do is step outside and look up. Obviously the Sun is burning. It's losing 5 million tons every second. You can't just keep losing 5 million tons a second, pretty soon you start to lose weight. And so the Sun is losing this mass -- 5 million tons every second -- which means it used to be larger. And it used to be more massive. If you increase the mass of the Sun, going backwards in time for several billion years, you start to create a problem with the gravitational balance between the earth and the Sun. It's going to suck the earth in and destroy everything.

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So I did the unthinkable: I did the math! That is so unthinkable a thing to do that in more recent videos (that's almost the only medium that Hovind does anything in) Hovind forbids his followers to ever do the math or to listen to anyone who has done the math. Because doing the math completely destroys his claim. Because when you do the math, you find that the total solar mass lost in 5 billion (5×10⁹) years only amounts to a few hundredths of one percent of the sun's total mass, such that difference between the ancient and present suns' gravity is minute (taking the last line of Hovind's claim, the ancient sun would have "sucked the earth in" by about 60,000 miles). That's reality at work. 
So when MrID proclaims: "... , but you do not know reality.", he is dead wrong yet again. Rather, it is the creationists, such as himself, who do not know reality and who have to expend so much time and energy to oppose reality because their beliefs are contrary to reality and so the only way they can support and defend their faith is to oppose reality.Creationists are on a fool's errand, but their path of opposing reality is the one that they have chosen for themselves. So sad, especially when they fight so desperately against all our attempts to save them from that disastrous self-destructive quest.

I did happen to see him in the "online now" list last night a couple hours before his suspension ended, but nothing since then.And of course he hasn't posted any kind of response either. He's probably creating yet another say-nothing gibberish "article" in order to avoid any discussion in which he would have to support his "position".

I've returned to preparing my questions of that, though my approach is to learn how his "new ID" is supposed to address and correct the problems with the "old ID". Here is the opening section in my draft: I'll follow that with a list in HTML's Definition List format of a few of the many well-known problems with ID including a <DD> discussion section. Those problems include:

• ID's failure to take into account naturally occurring complexity by trying to equate complexity with "design" even though naturally occurring complexity is so much more complex than designed complexity could ever hope to be. That would also include how the most common characteristic of a product of evolutionary processes is high levels of complexity, such that if you find something in nature that is highly complex then that is evidence that it had evolved.
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• ID's fatal confusion of science's practice of methodological materialism ("We are incapable of working with the supernatural, so we do not include it.") with philosophical materialism ("The natural universe is all there is.").
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• ID's political and social agenda to transform science by forcing it to include the supernatural. Their motivation in pushing that travesty comes from the previous point in which they are unable to understand how science works.
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• ID having to always resort to explaining everything away with "God Did It" (AKA "goddidit"). More specifically, they point out how highly complex something is such that they have difficulty explaining it completely, so they jump to their go-to "conclusion" of "goddidit".
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  Of course, that "answer" not only answers nothing at all, but it also blocks any further investigation of that question. As we discussed in my topic, So Just How is ID's Supernatural-based Science Supposed to Work? (SUM. MESSAGES ONLY), "goddidit" effectively kills science.
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• ID's worship of the God of the Gaps. This view argues that finding natural explanations for things works to disprove God, which would mean that our inability to explain something works to prove God. That would lead to an agenda which strives to preserve ignorance and to impede the growth of knowledge. Note that this worship of the God of the Gaps is also quite common among YECs.

So I want to know how MrID's "new ID" is supposed to address those central problems with the "old ID". What he has presented so far is that the only change in his "new ID" is that he replaced the made-up meaningless "magic words" of "old ID" with his own set of made-up meaningless "magic words", such that his "new ID" ends up being just as meaningless as the "old ID", if not more so.In another discussion which I already presented to xongsmith in Message 78 but in which I have tried to engage MrID, as we go through the natural processes of biological evolution, each step of which will take place even without any external intelligence's intervention, where exactly he would claim that that external intelligent intervention would be necessary and why. I see none necessary, but if he sees such a necessity then he needs to explain that. And of course in order to do that then he would need to know how evolution works (hence my repeated questions to him on that matter).Repeating that discussion from Message 78 redone here as a list:

• Populations of organisms produce offspring. No need for an external intelligence there.
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• For any given trait, the more parents possessing it means the more offspring inheriting it. No need for an external intelligence there.
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• Only some of the offspring end up surviving to adulthood. No need for an external intelligence there, but rather it is intuitively obvious even to the most casual creationist observer that the offspring with traits that are more beneficial for survival will be more likely to survive.
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• The offspring that end up being the parents of the next generation will be the ones who survived (whose definition should include being able to make it past sexual selection as well as having fully functional baby-making parts). Yet again, no need for an external intelligence there.
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• Whether given traits are beneficial or not depends on the environment in which the organisms must live and survive. No need for an external intelligence there.
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• Over generations we should expect to see many if not most of the members of a population possess more of those beneficial traits and fewer of the disadvantageous traits. No need for an external intelligence there.
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• As the environment changes (or the population moves into a new environment), which traits are beneficial or disadvantageous or neutral can and will also change. No need for an external intelligence there.
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• Under those changed conditions and over the generations, the newly beneficial traits will come to dominate in the population. No need for an external intelligence there.
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• Genetic mutations happen; it's a simple fact. No need for an external intelligence there.
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• Most genetic mutations are either neutral or deleterious (remember those large percentages of seeds that fail to germinate and fertilized eggs that fail to develop?), but some are beneficial (both in terms of viability and of being advantageous in the environment).
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  Please note that most seeds and zygotes fail to develop so they never become part of the gene pool and we never see them (the figure I've heard for humans is that 50% of conceptions abort spontaneously, many before the zygote would have had any chance of attaching to the uterine lining), which would account for MrID's bizarre "Dislocated Parts" ideas (if we are ever able to understand what the hell he's talking about).
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  No need for an external intelligence there.
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• Those new beneficial traits will spread through the population in accordance with population dynamics. No need for an external intelligence there.

So far, I have not seen any evidence of MrID ever addressing that fundamental question of where and why an external intelligence would be needed in the normal operation of evolution. Instead, we only see quasi-philosphical assertions; eg, he proclaims that word "modification" in "descent with modification" requires by the very definition of the word the intentional actions of an intelligent agent (eg, page 13). Yeah, his arguments do actually get that incredibly stupid.MrID has lots to explain.Edited by dwise1, : added initial qs block for context

It's the old "First Cause" question (AKA "First Principle") and following it to its logical consequences. Basically:

1. Everything that exists has a cause: cause and effect.
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2. Every intermediate cause exists because something else had caused it.
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3. Philosophers have extrapolated that chain of cause and effect back to what they postulated as a "First Cause", which they identify as "God".
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4. Those same philosophers fail to ask the obvious question: "Since everything needs a cause, Who caused God?"

Sadly, I'm not surprised that you didn't know that and that you cannot understand it when you do finally encounter it.

Well, that doesn't change the fact that much of their thinking and many of their arguments are based on the Aristotlean idea of a "First Cause", "Prime Mover", etc, which believers identify as their "God". Over the decades I have encountered many creationists and just plain fundie proselytizers (usually indistinguishable from each other, except that the creationists rely more strongly on false "creation science" arguments while just plain fundies go more purely biblical-ish) who had gone straight for the "First Cause" argument. So speculation about a First Cause is very much in their DNA.The difference is that they fail to take the next inductive step which you presented: so who created God? They say "nobody", but in doing so violate their entire argument of "intelligence cannot create itself, etc". Of course, many others have also taken the same inductive step as you have and theists defending their "First Cause" have weasel-worded their way out of it. I'm just saying that this is nothing new, except maybe to the less educated creationists (which isn't as redundant as it sounds).It's kind of like the old joke of proving that the Pope is a Protestant:

Of course we have to sketch our drawing on the backs of paper napkins. It has become very nearly impossible to find any shirts with a pocket that we can carry a sheet of scratch paper, our writing implements, and our glasses. How is an engineer supposed to function anymore?

I worked at my last job for 22 years before retiring (so I count myself very fortunate for that steady work). Towards the end the company would give us a new company polo shirt every few years or so. No pocket. Our senior-most engineer would always remark, "Well, there's another shirt I won't be able to wear."Due to my Scouting and military training, I have always kept at least one sheet of scratch paper folded up in my shirt pocket for notes, etc. Right now that sheet of paper has printed on one side a table of Morse code for study purposes and a Vigenère Square in case the discussion ever returns to cryptography (with my Secret Jewish Space Laser Corps decoder wheel in my pocket as back-up).

Decades ago on PBS, I think it was in James Burke's series, The Day the Universe Changed that they recreated the first time that a Moor told a Spaniard about zero (with no subtitles, BTW):

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Spaniard: ¿Qué es eso?
Moor: Eso es un cero.
Spaniard: ¿Qué es un cero?
Moor: Nada.
Spaniard: ¿Qué?

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One of the key characteristics of a product of evolution is a high degree of complexity.An intelligent designer produces a well structured product. Evolution uses whatever there is to work with to perform new functions no matter what it takes just so long as it works. As a result, evolution give us Rube Goldberg machine, perhaps the furthest thing from an "intelligent design".

I'm a retired software engineer, so I have had some practical experience in designing.I would describe our design process as largely evolutionary. Yes, we would approach a new project in the traditional way: analyze the problem, devise a top-down or object-oriented structure, try to organize the data structures, etc. IOW, intelligently, which includes modularity and parsimony (KISS).That worked fine for the first design of an all new project, but that was rarely the case. Instead, our assignment would be something like "Make it just like this other project only completely different in these several ways." So we would take an existing product and copy and modify it. And in many cases of a "new" project, we would still reuse components from other projects and modify them as needed. But then we would go even further and added new features to existing products by copying procedures (ie, functions or objects) and modifying them to serve their new functionality. I would routinely refer to such copy-and-modify techniques as "evolutionary programming."An example of that is in "Hunt for Red October" in which the sonar software on the USS Dallas interpreted the sound of the caterpillar drive as a "seismic anomaly" because that software was a modified version of earthquake analysis software.I would also point out that object-oriented programming (OOP) design involves defining a data-and-code structure called a class which act as a data type in its own right and which you then instantiate into objects which actually use that code and data. The only way the main program (or other objects) can use that code and data is through the class' interface. The alternative classic approach is to keep all the data and code as global and accessible from anywhere in the program, which thus would open the door to code in one part of the program diddling the data of the code in a completely unrelated part of the program, thus creating bugs that can be extremely difficult to find. Using OOP, you can compartmentalize the data and thus each object could protect its data from the rest of the program. Now that's intelligent designing.Another intelligent design aspect of OOP is the ability to replace objects with entirely new object that have the same interface -- in hardware design, that would be a pin-compatible module. Internally, the new class could work entirely differently than the old one (eg, old one had a fixed set of dummy data points used for design testing whereas the new one would actually generate live data) and the program would not know the difference since they both look and behave the same (ie, they both have the same interface which is the program's only access to them). That is how you can replace an automotive component that used electro-mechanical relays with one that used transistors and then that with one that used integrated circuits and the car wouldn't know any different. You could even replace an American car engine with a Japanese engine and the car wouldn't know any different. Now that's intelligent design.We can also go into an existing program and completely rewrite portions of it from scratch (believe me we were so tempted to do that so many times). That would also be the hallmark of intelligent design, the sudden appearance of entirely new and novel features. Unlike the modifications of preexisting features that evolution would give us.So what do we see in nature? The plug-and-play pin-compatible interchangeable modules of intelligent design? No. Novel new features suddenly appearing out of nowhere? No. The copying and modification of existing features to perform new functions as we would expect from evolution? Yes. 
Another aspect of evolutionary programming methods is increasing complexity. Every self-respecting programmer strives for elegant code, code which is precise and efficient and effective while still being kept to its minimal form -- a programming joke is of a game like "Name that Tune" in which competitors say "I can write that code in 8 lines!", "I can write it in 5 lines!", "Write that code!" But in the real world, code loses elegance as you have to add ever new cases to take into account and ever more testing, etc, until your code becomes a complex mass of kludges for special cases.So, the hallmark of an intelligent design would be elegance, whereas the hallmark of evolved design would be ever increasing levels of complexity.Which do we find in life? The elegance and parsimony indicating intelligent design? Or the incredible complexity indicating evolution?

Sorry for the delay. You posted your Message 312 in the middle of my stint in the hospital. I had had a polyp removed from my stomach, but then a few days later that surgery had turned into a bleeding ulcer which landed me in the hospital. Four months later I'm still working my way through that particular medical evolution.Also, it didn't help that you had asked MrID about what I had written. If you had questions about what I had written, then why didn't you just ask me? Here is what I had written in my Message 290; restoring the formatting makes it somewhat easier to read. BTW, I added bolding to the list in question to make it easier for the reader to pick out: The second half of my Message 290 goes through a list of the natural processes that form the basis of evolution (AKA "how life does what life naturally does"), each item of which has no need for any kind of external intelligence (MrID's arguments require external intelligence acting every step of the way, as far as we're able to figure out what he's trying to say). Go back to that message (Message 290) to read more -- it's interesting, but not part of your question and hence not pertinent here.  I wrote about what I know and have observed about ID, though that includes how YEC has incorporated ID ideas in order to play their new game of "Hide the Creationism". Contains no straw to my knowledge. I'll go through each of those items: A distinguishing characteristic of ID arguments is to equate complexity with the need for an "unnamed, unidentified intelligent designer" (please note "creation science's" game of "Hide the Bible" included "postulating" "some unnamed unidentified Creator" ). This does indeed fail to take into account naturally occurring complexity which is indicative of evolution and the opposite of what we would expect of an intelligent design. BTW, I am an intelligent designer, AKA "engineer". I discussed engineering work in Message 283, Message 467 and Message 469.Actual intelligent design strives towards elegance, a clean, minimal solution to a problem which works. Evolutionary processes and approaches, like life itself, are messy and results in very complex products -- a Rube Goldberg machine, the furthest thing from an intelligent design, is what we do find in nature. Hence, when we see something in nature that is highly complex, then that is evidence of evolution, not of any "intelligent designer". This is one of the earliest criticisms of ID that I heard. In reading the Discovery Institute's Wedge Document I saw them repeatedly rant against materialism.However, they rant against philosophical materialism, which is entirely different from methodological materialism, a very simple statement of fact concerning the limits of science.For example, I could design a system to read barcodes on products being processed. My design can only read barcodes and not the printed words on the packages. My design does not assume a philosophical position that the printed word does not exist, but rather acknowledges that the tech that my design is based on cannot deal with the printed word, but rather only with barcodes.Science can only deal with the physical universe (AKA "material universe") and cannot deal with the supernatural. Therefore, the methodology of science can only include the natural universe and cannot include the supernatural. That is not a statement about whether the supernatural exists or not (HINT: cannot be determined scientifically), but rather that science cannot deal with the supernatural and hence will not even try. Says nothing about the supernatural but rather everything about science.ID cannot seem to understand such simple concepts. Again, that was laid out in the Discovery Institute's Wedge Document which I did take the time to read. For example (text transcribed at The Wedge Document | National Center for Science Education ):

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FIVE YEAR STRATEGIC PLAN SUMMARY
The social consequences of materialism have been devastating. As symptoms, those consequences are certainly worth treating. However, we are convinced that in order to defeat materialism, we must cut it off at its source. That source is scientific materialism. This is precisely our strategy. If we view the predominant materialistic science as a giant tree, our strategy is intended to function as a "wedge" that, while relatively small, can split the trunk when applied at its weakest points. The very beginning of this strategy, the "thin edge of the wedge," was Phillip Johnson's critique of Darwinism begun in 1991 in Darwinism on Trial, and continued in Reason in the Balance and Defeating Darwinism by Opening Minds. Michael Behe's highly successful Darwin's Black Box followed Johnson's work. We are building on this momentum, broadening the wedge with a positive scientific alternative to materialistic scientific theories, which has come to be called the theory of intelligent design (ID). Design theory promises to reverse the stifling dominance of the materialist worldview, and to replace it with a science consonant with Christian and theistic convictions.

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The Wedge strategy can be divided into three distinct but interdependent phases, which are roughly but not strictly chronological. We believe that, with adequate support, we can accomplish many of the objectives of Phases I and II in the next five years (1999-2003), and begin Phase III (See "Goals/ Five Year Objectives/Activities").

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...

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GOALS

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Governing Goals

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To defeat scientific materialism and its destructive moral, cultural and political legacies.

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To replace materialistic explanations with the theistic understanding that nature and human beings are created by God.

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Five Year Goals

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To see intelligent design theory as an accepted alternative in the sciences and scientific research being done from the perspective of design theory.

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To see the beginning of the influence of design theory in spheres other than natural science.

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To see major new debates in education, life issues, legal and personal responsibility pushed to the front of the national agenda.

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Twenty Year Goals

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To see intelligent design theory as the dominant perspective in science.

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To see design theory application in specific fields, including molecular biology, biochemistry, paleontology, physics and cosmology in the natural sciences, psychology, ethics, politics, theology and philosophy in the humanities; to see its influence in the fine arts.

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To see design theory permeate our religious, cultural, moral and political life.

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And for the consequences of forcing science to include the supernatural, I will refer you yet again to my topic, So Just How is ID's Supernatural-based Science Supposed to Work? (SUM. MESSAGES ONLY). OK, so one ID claim/"explanation" after another always ends with a "gee, this is all so complex that we cannot figure it out, so it must have been intelligently designed." Please explain to me why that is not "goddidit!"This one is so painfully obvious, dude. How could you argue over this point? True, you IDiots undoubtedly don't talk about the God of the Gaps, especially given that any kind self-reflection or self-examination is unknown to creationists. But I see so much false God of the Gaps theology operating constantly in ID as well as in other creationist endeavors.Basically, God of the Gaps teaches that knowledge dispells God, so God can only continue to exist within the gaps of our knowledge. God of the Gaps is closely tied to "goddidit" in that if we have no explanation for something, then "goddidit" and that is proof of the God of the Gaps. {ABE:
}Interestingly, almost all ID and YEC arguments seem to reduce down to "We don't know, therefore God." That is God of the Gaps, pure and simple. 
So, how was any of that any kind of strawman?

Edited by dwise1, : ABE: For last item, added consequences of resorting to GotG

Edited by dwise1, : changed subtitle

Edited by dwise1, : slightly clearer wording in the beginning

ID is wrong for ID cannot explain if the change is really supernatural or not...If you want to replace science with the supernatural, then you must first demonstrate that the supernatural even exists. That means that you must determine methodologies for detecting and observing the supernatural, as well as ways to test whether something happens through natural or supernatural processes.Then through your methodology for detecting and observing the supernatural you must explain how the supernatural works.But you cannot do any of that, can you? You cannot even begin to think about devising a plan for doing the simplest of those things (ie, detecting the supernatural).You clearly cannot even determine whether the supernatural exists let alone observe how it works. On the other hand, we know conclusively and without the shadow of a doubt that the natural universe exists. And because we can readily observe the natural universe we also know how the natural universe works.We also know that evolution exists and how it works because we can observe it.We cannot say the same for ghosties and ghoulies and things that go bump in the night.Therefore, when we observe something happening in the natural universe then the safest and surest bet would be that it happens through natural processes.
Assuming that it must have happened through the supernatural is the stupidest approach to take, especially since you will end up having learned nothing about that phenomenon.