Evidence for Intelligent Design-is there any?

Hi Beretta, thanks for posting the thread. This is just a note to let you know that I am still interested in discussing this issue, but I shall wait for you to address AminNosy's request for clarifications before directly replying to your OP.

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Mutate and Survive

OK, since Nosy has laid down the law, I'll respond.I'll just concentrate on the first example. Note that I'm not interested here in whether the example is right or wrong, but rather whether, if correct, it would constitute evidence for ID. If true, this is something that might legitimately cause us to doubt evolution. In other words, it is evidence against evolution. It would certainly require that an explanation were found in answer, but why should that explanation be intelligent design?Why should ID be the automatic default explanation for a limited fossil record? There could be other explanations. The most obvious is punctuated equilibrium. Now I'm not a fan of PE, but it does provide another explanation for the limited fossil record to rival the ID explanation. That's just one example, but it serves to demonstrate that even if the claim about the fossil record is true, it doesn't mean that ID becomes the replacement explanation. There could be others, some reasonable, others outlandish. There is only one true explanation, but a potentially infinite number of wrong explanations. Eliminating one wrong answer doesn't necessarily mean that any specific alternative is the right answer; it could just be another wrong answer.The same can be said of all the examples given. They argue against evolution. What they don't offer is positive evidence of a designer's handiwork in nature. What do I mean by positive evidence?An example of positive evidence for evolution is the well-known fossil Tiktaalik. This is positive evidence because it confirms predictions made by evolutionary theory. The theory suggests that tetrapods descended from fish. It suggests that this happened during a particular time-frame. Thus, seeking to find the truth of this prediction, palaeontologists looked for rocks of the relevant age and duly found the predicted transitional fossil, a tetrapod-like fish.Prediction made, prediction confirmed. That is positive evidence for evolution. IDists have not managed to equal this kind of evidence, concentrating instead on attempting to chip away at evolution.Even if all the claims made by Beretta are true, it still does not constitute evidence for ID. If evolution was declared obsolete tomorrow, that does not mean that ID, special creation or any other explanation becomes true by default.

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Mutate and Survive

You may think so, I disagree. It's not something you should be taking for granted. Are you kidding? ID is the most perfect exemplar of an explanation forced onto the facts! Again, I disagree, but this isn't really the point. You're still concentrating too much on attacking evolution. Prediction? What prediction? Attempting to explain what we already know (or think we know) about the fossil record is not making a prediction. A prediction has to be made about a future observation, otherwise it's not a prediction, now is it...Tell me, what predictions has ID made, on a par with the tiktaalik example I gave above, that have subsequently been confirmed? I'm sorry Beretta, but you're still not getting it. Neither of those arguments is positive evidence for ID. Sudden appearance of biological forms within the fossil record could have any number of explanations; punctuated equilibrium, some sort of hopeful monster theory, imperfect fossilisation (the most likely actual explanation), the devil put the fossils there, God put them there for a laugh, or, maybe, ID.Sorry, but still no cigar.

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Mutate and Survive

Absurdities? What you mean like believing that a big magic man who lives in the sky made everything that exists, in 6 days, despite despite an overwhelming amount of contradictory evidence from a multitude of different scientific disciplines?Trust me, no matter how absurd you find alternative explanations (such as RickJB's robot example), it's no more absurd than I find your Biblical explanation.As it goes though, personal incredulity isn't much of an argument against something. We reject theories like the robot one, not because they sound outrageous, but because they lack evidence. Why do you imagine that creationism ever fell from favour as the pre-eminent explanation for life on Earth? Because it was criticised to the point of collapse, at which point Darwinism took over by default? Of course not! Darwinism took over because it had positive evidence that better explained the facts. It made predictions which have been verified again and again over the last century.That is what ID needs to do if it is ever to be taken seriously.

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Mutate and Survive

Don't play dumb Beretta. You know perfectly well what kinds of evidence I am talking about. This isn't about evidence for or against evolution, it's about evidence for Intelligent Design, a concept that you seem either incapable of grasping or determined to ignore.I'm not playing this game. Stick to the OP, the one that you wrote; provide positive evidence for ID (or Biblical creationism, since you use the two phrases as synonyms) or explain why your previous efforts count as positive evidence. If you want that day to come you'll have to do better than one-liners like the above. You'll actually need some evidence. Yes, they were shown evidence. You can call it philosophical bias if you like, but you have done nothing to provide any evidence for ID that I could even criticise. No good evidence, no bad evidence, no evidence at all in fact. Whining about other people's supposed biases is, as has been made abundantly clear to you already, not evidence for ID, creationism or anything else. You know, hard as this may be for you to accept, this isn't about atheism. Plenty of people manage to get along just fine believing in God and evolution. You are attempting to create a false dichotomy.Of course, if you think universities are teaching falsehoods, you know what you can do. Pick a lie. Start a thread. Show us all how exactly where we have been brainwashed. Easy eh? *sigh...* This paragraph isn't really worth responding to, since it consists merely of a repetition of your usual whine about wrongly interpreted evidence, a claim that you have never backed up. I'm not playing this silly game. Evidence for ID please, not whining about evolution. Demonstrably false: see here Organised enough for you? Well spotted, but seeing as how the ability to raise the dead isn't actually a prediction of the ToE, it's not something I'm going to loose any sleep over.Bottom line, you have presented nothing that could qualify as positive evidence in favour of ID. This is because you haven't got any. You haven't got any, because there just isn't any. But hey, prove me wrong. Just answer the question that you ignored before; I'm waiting...

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Mutate and Survive

My dear fellow, the title for this thread is "Evidence for Intelligent Designer - Is There Any?", not "Let's All Whine Incoherently About Evolution".If you don't have any evidence for ID, a simple "no" will suffice.Mutate and Survive

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"The Bible is like a person, and if you torture it long enough, you can get it to say almost anything you'd like it to say." -- Rev. Dr. Francis H. Wade

Oh dear. That's not evidence of anything now is it? That's just a bare assertion, only a sentence long.What coded information exactly?Why is it evidence for a designer exactly?Precisely how does it show specified complexity?If you are not going to present answers to these kinds of question, and just make bare assertions, I need do little more than just respond with a bare "No it isn't".The real problem here is that SC is merely another negative argument. It claims to prove that evolution cannot be responsible for complexity, but, even if we accept Dembski's dodgy maths, we have only his word for it that intelligence is the best alternative explanation. Why must SC be the result of intelligence? Why could there not be other explanations? Dembski simply asserts that SC must be the product of intelligence, he never demonstrates that this central tenet of SC is actually true.Further, Dembski's calculations on the bacterial flagellum are entirely dependent on Irreducible Complexity, since they use that as their model. IC is itself a negative argument along the lines of "I can't imagine how this could possibly evolve, therefore it can't have evolved.", a pretty clearly fallacious line of argument. It is merely more evo-bashing, in the hope that God, sorry, the Intelligent Designer, will sneak in as the default explanation. That's not how science works.Specified Complexity is based on bad maths, bad logic and bad theory. It makes no predictions and explains nothing.It's also worth mentioning here that if you are arguing that DNA displays specified complexity, you are essentially arguing against micro-evolution, which I thought you accepted. We can observe micro-organisms evolving specified and complex traits in the lab (here is a recent example concerning citrate metabolising bacteria evolving under lab conditions) and at no point does the hand of God appear and magic the mutations into place. Claiming that an invisible intelligent agent is manipulating such mutations from behind the scenes adds precisely nothing to our understanding of what is happening.Occam's Razor keeps such entities out of the lab and rightly so.

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"The Bible is like a person, and if you torture it long enough, you can get it to say almost anything you'd like it to say." -- Rev. Dr. Francis H. Wade

HI Tony and welcome to EvC Forum! Even by the rather lax standards of ID, this statement makes no sense. The programming can intelligently design? Don't you mean the programmer? DNA doesn't function much like any computer that I would care to own. If you go line by line through the programme that runs your operating system, you won't find much in the way of junk code, i.e. coding that does nothing at all. Your genome on the other hand contains enormous amounts of neutral, non-coding DNA. Why would an intelligent designer include such waste? Why would they include harmful code, such as that which causes genetic disease? The problem here is that you have jumped the gun; you have declared victory for ID without ever providing evidence for the assertions upon which you appear to be basing your conclusions. How do we know that logic is not naturally occurring? You don't say, you just blindly assert this to be the case. Of course, if the evolutionary explanation for your existence is correct, then logic does occur naturally, in your highly evolved ape brain.You need to provide evidence that can differentiate between these differing explanations, evidence that favours ID and no other explanation. Just offering assertions like; is of no value as evidence for anything.Mutate and Survive

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"The Bible is like a person, and if you torture it long enough, you can get it to say almost anything you'd like it to say." -- Rev. Dr. Francis H. Wade

Yup. No argument here. I hope that forum member Dr. Adequate will forgive me for appropriating his argument here, but is this really the worst thing you can think of to compare evolution to; religion? It is bizarre that theists hurl accusations of religiosity at evolution, as though this were the worst insult imaginable. Does that not strike you as somewhat ironic? Abiogenesis is not the topic, nor is it necessary for evolution. Life could have originated in pretty much any way you care to name, including being kick-started by your god of choice, it would still evolve. Evolution is something that comes after the first origin of life. You could falsify all non-supernatural theories of abiogenesis tomorrow and it wouldn't mean a damn thing to the theory of evolution.It's also worth briefly mentioning that your description how evolution and abiogenesis work is a complete travesty, a mangled and mistaken mish-mash of error and creationist propaganda. I absolutely agree. that is why scientists demand EVIDENCE. Do you have any or are you just going to post repetitive and clichéd polemics? There are plenty of abiogenesis threads open. Take it there. When you do, you might like to back up your absurd claim about wise evolutionists and abiogenesis.Bottom line, this thread is for evidence for ID (which you seem to have conflated with Biblical creationism). Time to put up or shut up. Provide evidence or stop posting here.Mutate and Survive

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"The Bible is like a person, and if you torture it long enough, you can get it to say almost anything you'd like it to say." -- Rev. Dr. Francis H. Wade

Tony,1) Who are you talking too? You have made this post in reply to yourself. When hitting the reply button, make sure you hit the button in the post you wish to reply to. As well as making the thread a lot easier to follow, it means that those members who are set up to receive e-mail notification of replies, will get a message telling them that a reply has arrived.If you are not replying to anyone in particular, you can use the "Gen Reply" button, which can be found at the bottom of each thread.2) We do not debate bare links at this forum. You need to put your argument in your own words and then use links as citations. If you are unsure of the forum rules, you can familiarise yourself with them here. Your post is in pretty clear breach of rule 5.3) The "Law of Biogenesis" has bugger all to do with abiogenesis or evolution and still less to do with the topic here, which is "Evidence for Intelligent Design - Is There Any?". If your performance to date is anything to go by, I'm taking it as a "no".Mutate and Survive

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"The Bible is like a person, and if you torture it long enough, you can get it to say almost anything you'd like it to say." -- Rev. Dr. Francis H. Wade

Hi B-MTony, That strikes me as being true. That strikes me as being nothing but a repetition of the last point, just applied to organelles instead of DNA.There are two basic problems with this as an argument for design.Firstly, if we suppose that DNA is the result of incredibly complex, yet mindless physical/chemical processes, it would still take humanity many years to perfectly understand it.Also, we already know that DNA and cells are very complex. It has taken decades for biology to advance this far and it will take many more before our collective understanding of the subject can be perfected, if that is even possible. We know this. It's not exactly a prediction. That's just very shoddy logic.Imagine that you designed a machine, a machine so complex and so different from what had gone before, that no-one on Earth could understand it. Imagine that attempts to understand the workings of your machine took many years.Would that make you a god?Of course not. It would certainly prove that you were amazingly smart, but it would have nothing to do with divinity. Indeed, that is the whole point of Intelligent Design type arguments. You're meant to be playing Hide the Bible...Mutate and SurviveEdited by Granny Magda, : A little re-phrasing.

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"The Bible is like a person, and if you torture it long enough, you can get it to say almost anything you'd like it to say." -- Rev. Dr. Francis H. Wade

Yeah, I'm learning that you don't know what a metaphor is. What are you going to do for your next trick? I look forward to your evidence that life is just a bowl of cherries...Mutate and Survive

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"The Bible is like a person, and if you torture it long enough, you can get it to say almost anything you'd like it to say." -- Rev. Dr. Francis H. Wade