The Power of the New Intelligent Design...

Just because you can't find meaning in a finite life does not prevent others from finding meaning in a finite life. Given the ignorance you have spread on this forum, I doubt your opinion on these matters would sway anyone.

It's rather sad that you have to have to believe in an afterlife in order to have meaning. The journey is the meaning, not the destination.

It's the journey in between that has meaning.You seem like the worst kind of person to travel with. All you would want to do is get to the hotel at the end of the drive, missing all of the wonderful scenery and comradery along the way. Absolutely. Don't your loved ones mean something to you? Doesn't the experience of walking through nature and seeing beautiful sights mean anything to you? Doesn't time spent with friends enjoying each others' company mean anything to you? Does learning new things mean anything to you?What a horrible life you must live.

Projection once again. In order to try and discredit atheists you try to make them look more like you. That says a lot.

You try and discredit atheists by claiming they are worshipping a god, all the while you are worshipping a god yourself. You try to take the weakness you see in yourself and project it onto others as a way of dealing with your own weakness. This is called psychological projection.

Then why do you try and claim that atheists are worshipping a god? What's the point of making that argument? Aren't you trying to discredit atheists with that argument?

We don't struggle with the concept. We recognize it for what it is, a subjective opinion.More to the point, ID can't explain the most basic observations in biology, such as the nested hierarchy and the patterns of sequence divergence in genomes.

God is also perfectly capable of creating patterns other than a nested hierarchy. There is absolutely no reason why we would expect to see a nested hierarchy if species were created separately. The only reason we would expect to see a nested hierarchy is if species evolved from a common ancestor.

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For, be it observed, the exception in limine to the evidence which we are about to consider, does not question that natural selection may not be able to do all that Mr. Darwin ascribes to it: it merely objects to his interpretation of the facts, because it maintains that these facts might equally well be ascribed to intelligent design. And so undoubtedly they might, if we were all childish enough to rush into a supernatural explanation whenever a natural explanation is found sufficient to account for the facts. Once admit the glaringly illogical principle that we may assume the operation of higher causes where the operation of lower ones is sufficient to explain the observed phenomena, and all our science and all our philosophy are scattered to the winds. For the law of logic which Sir William Hamilton called the law of parsimony—or the law which forbids us to assume the operation of higher causes when lower ones are found sufficient to explain the observed effects—this law constitutes the only logical barrier between science and superstition. For it is manifest that it is always possible to give a hypothetical explanation of any phenomenon whatever, by referring it immediately to the intelligence of some supernatural agent; so that the only difference between the logic of science and the logic of superstition consists in science recognising a validity in the law of parsimony which superstition disregards.

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Now, since the days of Linnæus this principle has been carefully followed, and it is by its aid that the tree-like system of classification has been established. No one, even long before Darwin's days, ever dreamed of doubting that this system is in reality, what it always has been in name, a natural system. What, then, is the inference we are to draw from it? An evolutionist answers, that it is just such a system as his theory of descent would lead him to expect as a natural system. For this tree-like system is as clear an expression as anything could be of the fact that all species are bound together by the ties of genetic relationship. If all species were separately created, it is almost incredible that we should everywhere observe this progressive shading off of characters common to larger groups, into more and more specialized characters distinctive only of smaller and smaller groups. At any rate, to say the least, the law of parsimony forbids us to ascribe such effects to a supernatural cause, acting in so whimsical a manner, when the effects are precisely what we should expect to follow from the action of a highly probable natural cause.
--George Romanes, "Scientific Evidences of Organic Evolution", 1882
The Project Gutenberg eBook of The Scientific Evidences of Organic Evolution, by George J. Romanes, M.A., LL.D., F.R.S.

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A nested hierarchy is just one of billions or trillions of possible patterns of shared and derived features that God could produce. So why do we see the one pattern of trillions that just so happens to be the one pattern that common descent and evolution would produce? Why would God limit himself to a nested hierarchy when it is entirely unnecessary?

In a nested hierarchy there are billions of different gene and feature combinations that can not exist. For example, you can not have a species that has a mixture of mammal and bird features. You can't have a creature with jellyfish and mouse genes.A nested hierarchy severely limits what you can do which is why humans don't force their designs into a nested hierarchy, and that includes organisms that humans design. You don't need a nested hierarchy in order to get functional designs.

We would expect a non-nested hierarchy because that is what human designs fall into. There is absolutely no reason why separately created species/kinds should fall into a nested hierarchy. For example, a separately created kind could have feathers, tidal lungs, teats, and three middle ear bones. There is no reason why a separately created species would have feathers simply because it did not have three middle ear bones like mammals do. There is no reason why a species could not have flow through lungs and hair. There is no reason why a species could not have a forward facing retina and a spinal column.The only reason we would not expect to find these mixture of features is if species evolved from common ancestors with vertical inheritance.

But those sequences will have a very low phylogenetic signal. This isn't the case with the genomes of species. Instead, there is a very strong phylogenetic signal. In fact, the measure of tree-like structure in DNA sequences from species is compared to random sequences as a negative control.On top of that, there are two nested hierarchies: morphology and DNA sequence. There is absolutely no reason why these two nested hierarchies should match, but they do.

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The degree to which a given phylogeny displays a unique, well-supported, objective nested hierarchy can be rigorously quantified. Several different statistical tests have been developed for determining whether a phylogeny has a subjective or objective nested hierarchy, or whether a given nested hierarchy could have been generated by a chance process instead of a genealogical process (Swofford 1996, p. 504). These tests measure the degree of "cladistic hierarchical structure" (also known as the "phylogenetic signal") in a phylogeny, and phylogenies based upon true genealogical processes give high values of hierarchical structure, whereas subjective phylogenies that have only apparent hierarchical structure (like a phylogeny of cars, for example) give low values (Archie 1989; Faith and Cranston 1991; Farris 1989; Felsenstein 1985; Hillis 1991; Hillis and Huelsenbeck 1992; Huelsenbeck et al. 2001; Klassen et al. 1991).
29+ Evidences for Macroevolution: Part 1

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There is only one ticket out of that million that evolution would produce, and that is a nested hierarchy. We can observe populations producing that same phylogenetic signal in real time, and it is due to common ancestry, evolution, and vertical inheritance.

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Inbred mouse strains have been maintained for more than 100 years, and they are thought to be a mixture of four different mouse subspecies. Although genealogies have been established, female inbred mouse phylogenies remain unexplored. By a phylogenetic analysis of newly generated complete mitochondrial DNA sequence data in 16 strains, we show here that all common inbred strains descend from the same Mus musculus domesticus female wild ancestor, and suggest that they present a different mitochondrial evolutionary process than their wild relatives with a faster accumulation of replacement substitutions. Our data complement forthcoming results on resequencing of a group of priority strains, and they follow recent efforts of the Mouse Phenome Project to collect and make publicly available information on various strains.
mtDNA phylogeny and evolution of laboratory mouse strains - PMC

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Because we don't find numerous and obvious violations of the pattern we would expect from evolution, we take that as strong evidence for evolution. When the observations match what the theory predicts that is evidence for the theory. That's how science works. Why?

Yes, I do understand that. Do you?There are 999,999 tickets that don't match evolution. There is only 1 ticket that does. What ticket do we see? The one that matches evolution.