What exactly is ID?

False. How much time did they spend looking for a supernatural cause for the murder? Did they investigate to see if the devil stabbed the victim? Did they check with Odin the Allfather to make sure he didn't justly smite the unbeliever? or did they confine their search to natural causes/suspects?Edited by DrJones*, : No reason given.

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It's not enough to bash in heads, you've got to bash in minds
soon I discovered that this rock thing was true
Jerry Lee Lewis was the devil
Jesus was an architect previous to his career as a prophet
All of a sudden i found myself in love with the world
And so there was only one thing I could do
Was ding a ding dang my dang along ling long - Jesus Built my Hotrod Ministry
Live every week like it's Shark Week! - Tracey Jordan
Just a monkey in a long line of kings. - Matthew Good
If "elitist" just means "not the dumbest motherfucker in the room", I'll be an elitist! - Get Your War On
*not an actual doctor

Well you can call it a mistake if you like, but I should tell you that I am well versed in the scientific definition, and my use of it is completely intentional. You see I have found that while scientists (which only make up a minute portion of the entire population) love to cling to there little narrow definition, the rest of the working world have adapted the term to mean much more. So I always like to clarify what meaning you pour into the term. If by evolution you only mean observed change in a population over time, then yes evolution is an absolute fact. But if you pour into the term the concepts of abiogenesis and universal common decent then no it is at best only a really neat'o back drop for cool sci-fi movies.Those changes you refer to in the genome are not changes that take place as a result of added information to the chromosomal DNA as a result of random mutations. The changes are the result of natural selection "selecting" already existing alleles within the gene pool of a population. The fact that any given species can have well into the trillions of different varieties of offspring from already existing genes in the gene pool selection, actually can be interpreted as evidence for a designer rather than evolution. At the very most, this type of adaptation process only explains the survival of the population and not the existence of the population.

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I would rather inspire one, than impress a thousand.

I spent six years in graduate school, much of that time studying evolution.I don't need fundamentalists to explain the data or theory to me. Try someone who doesn't know any better.

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Religious belief does not constitute scientific evidence, nor does it convey scientific knowledge.

Yes, scientists do like to use the correct definition for scientific terms.The fact that scientific illiterates sometimes misuse these terms is no excuse for imitating them. Scientific illiterates make a lot of mistakes about science. This is a consequence of their scientific illiteracy. This is of course, not in general true. Once more you seem to be substituting the baseless beliefs of scientific illiterates for the observations made by scientists.

I'm terribly sorry Iblis, if you thought I was wining. I was just trying to answer the question raised about 99% of scientists accepting evolution(universal common decent). I was pointing out that when you exclude one possibility from the start (without good cause), you are left with only trying to find answers that work with what is left. But what if the exclusion turned out to be the answer Iblis? Aren't you shooting yourself in the foot? I think so.BTW, ID people actually are doing "that"

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I would rather inspire one, than impress a thousand.

Great comeback Coyote. If you didn't want my comments then why bother engaging me?

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I would rather inspire one, than impress a thousand.

Well, I'm not so sure of that. European scientists started off with supernatural assumptions about creation that excluded naturalistic concepts. But when they discovered that they were wrong, they changed their minds. Their supernaturalist presuppositions may have delayed them from grasping the truth, but it did not prevent them from doing so.

So when I asked you to produce one example you have failed to do so?Or am I wrong? You are conflating the Gravitational Theory with gravity. When you drop a book and it fall it is 'gravity' that accelerates it; not the theory of gravity.Gravitational Theory makes predictions that be either born out or regected because they don't concur with reality.Nothing in nature has been shown to require a designer. I have: a snow flake. And I would agree; however your premise that is flawed you can be as logical as you like and still be wrong.

Ooh, but Dembski is one step ahead of you.A snowflake, he explains, is not an example of CSI being formed by natural processes.Why not? Because, he explains, contrary to appearances, it has no CSI.And how did he determine that? Well, it can have no CSI --- because it was formed by natural processes. As he explains: "such shapes form as a matter of necessity simply in virtue of the properties of water".What a genius that man is, to be sure.I follows that, in general, to find out whether an object has CSI we must first know whether it was designed or produced by natural processes ...

I wish this came as a surprise, I really do.Wouldn't it be great if IDers finally did some real science?

But....how can we know it is designed without first knowing it has CSI? Isn't this CSI the key for it to being designed? Am I just too ignorant for thinking this is pretty circular?

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Who are we? We find that we live on an insignificant planet of a humdrum star lost in a galaxy tucked away in some forgotten corner of a universe in which there are far more galaxies than people
-Carl SaganFor me, it is far better to grasp the Universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring.
-Carl Sagan

Actually I think that would be a crystal, which is classified as a natural pattern. As beautiful as a pattern may be to look at, it still is not specific, nor is it information necessary to perform a task. I said that no one has ever observed complex specified information form by random processes.

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I would rather inspire one, than impress a thousand.

quote:

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Actually I think that would be a crystal, which is classified as a natural pattern. As beautiful as a pattern may be to look at, it still is not specific, nor is it information necessary to perform a task. I said that no one has ever observed complex specified information form by random processes.

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And in saying that much you confirm that you are using Dembski's version of CSI.So you DON'T have any observed instances of CSI in life to use as evidence, because nobody had worked out how to properly apply Dembski's method to living things.And if you had followed this thread instead of just jumping into the middle of it, you'd know that.

No one ever said you could, did they?Still no example from you, sir. So you do agree with Dembski's version of CSI?Round in circles, much?

Unless, of course, someone made it in a laboratory, which they can.Two of these are natural, and two are a product of design. See if you can tell which is which. Just to clarify, how do these criteria apply to:(a) The Mona Lisa
(b) The Mandelbrot set
(c) An elephant
(d) Cancer
(e) An industrially useful design produced by a genetic algorithm
(f) The artificial organisms that evolve in TIERRA
(g) RNA species produced by mixing Q-β replicase with ribonucleotides
(h) The same species after they've evolved
(i) The lac operonEdited by Dr Adequate, : No reason given.