kjkent1 wrote: The only one's that are going to investigate the possibility that life is designed are those that think life looks designed. All investgations begin with suspicions. Your perspective would insure that any investigation into design would never get off the ground. kjkent1 wrote: Do you know what evidence supporting the design of life would look like? If not, then your conclusion that life is not designed is baseless.
I disagree. The fossils do more than merely "look" like they descend from common ancestors. The fossils, are radioactively dated to progressively earlier eras, and they are found in progressively deeper soil and rock deposits. The deeper soil/rock deposits do not have other artifacts indicating the preexistence of some other designer -- there are no 5 million year old computer semiconductors fossilized into the rock, nor any fossilized systematic compilations of communication (i.e., no books, tapes, CDs, DVDs, etc.). The fossils are statistically predictable and match up with an evolutionary progression. Could this entire progression have been front loaded? Yes. Could God have engineered each intervening step? Yes. Is there any actual scientific evidence of either of these occurrences? No. If you have a room with a dead body and no evidence whatsoever of any other person or mechanism for the cause of death other than natural causes, do you conclude murder? No. Could it still have been murder? Yes. But, until Sherlock Holmes shows up and finds some previously undiscovered evidence to support a finding of murder, the medical examiner will certify death by natural causes -- because that's all that the evidence shows.
Your first paragraph is false, because if a scientist were to accidently stumble upon a physical message obviously intended for an extrinsic audience etched into biological organisms, then that would lead to a search for design, even though no one was previously looking for design. Your second paragraph attempts to force a conclusion which is not supported by the evidence. Darwin stated the simple method by which evolution can be falsified: find a creature which could not have been the result of small, incremental changes -- i.e., a creature with no fossil record, whose constituent parts are, as Michael Behe calls it "irreducibly complex." All of Behe's propositions have been soundly rejected, and no creature has ever been found that is not systematically traceable to some ancestor via the fossil record. If design were obvious, then there would be clear evidence of extremely complex life appearing without any descent path, and it would be happening all the time, because we are always finding new species. However, none of these new species are completely unique. They all are slightly different from existing or fossil ancestors. So, just find a modern, unique species with no fossil trail, or find a creature whose parts are actually "irreducibly complex," and you'll have your evidence of design. You're making your proof unreasonably difficult to come by. Stop inferring design, actually do the science, and produce the results for peer review -- your Nobel Prize awaits.
What exactly are you disagreeing with? It still boils down to subjective analysis or "what it looks like." Just comparing old bones to even older ones. There's nothing much else to go on except observation. The things we would need for definitive analysis just aren't available. If you don't think it's subjective, then just ask a paleologist. They'll tell you it is. In many, many words of course. What is more, paleologist often revise their educated "guesses" as far as which fossil belong to which branch or which is the root fossil of this or that branch. And time is the enemy for such research. As more years go by and fossils yet to be found deteriorate, there will be even less to base our educated guesses on.
kjkent1 wrote: If nothing in the fossil record looked like common descent then no one would be investigating it. All investigations begin with a suspicion based on what something looks like. All hypotheses begin with observation.
Irrelevant. What matters is what the evidence actually shows, not the reason why you begin your research. If you had some evidence of design, you would not complain that an inference is required to find such evidence. You would, instead, simply produce the evidence. But, you have no evidence, so you're stuck with the inference. I'm not saying no evidence will ever exist -- I'm just saying that none currently does, because if it did, it would be front-page news.
Ultimately, everything is subjective, because observation depends upon the objective accuracy of the observer's measuring instruments. However, if you fall back on everything "boils down" to this, then you may as well pack up your equipment and go to church, because there's no longer any point in doing science. If a dead body has a gun lying next to it with one cartridge expended and the slug in the brain of the corpse, with ballistic marks matching the barrel of the gun, is it subjective or objective that the victim was killed by that gun? There comes a moment when the coincidence of many subjective circumstantial facts lead to an inescapable result. Is there always some minutia that permits an alternative conclusion? Yes. In the case above, a barrel of a second gun could have been etched in advance to produce the ballistic pattern identical to the first gun. Occam's razor cuts against this sort of analysis. I prefer to accept the answers which flow from the evidence, and not the answers which might be true, but which have little evidence in support of them. So if you want to conclude that the fossil evidence of evolution is too weak to be anything more than speculation, that's your prerogative. But, most reasonable scientists will disagree with you.
Actually, the history of paleoanthropology started with the idea that there were observed similarities between great apes and humans. That observation started the inquiry into whether or not there was any viability in the idea. Think about Huxley. There were no fossils found yet. Or at least not understood at the time what the relation of the fossil found (neanderthal) with human evolution was. There was scant and highly contested evidence of evolution as far as humans were concerned. It's not that evidence was found first which started a hypothesis. It was the other way around. That's why to dismiss ID out of hand is unscientific. There appears to be an unchanging order to the universe. How that came about or why it exists in this particular order is truly unknown. What literally started the theorethical process of abiogenesis is not completely known, nor has it actually been observed other than the creation of macro molecules in a controlled lab environment. Perhaps, that too is "evidence" for an ID. We know so little in the grand scope of things. But nothing we know or yet have found precludes the possibility of an ID. Only the ability to perhaps detect one is out of our grasp at the moment.