There are many artifacts for which we do not know who the designers were. One of them is Stonehenge. Do you think Stonehenge was designed or was it the result of a nature process? If you think it was designed, do you know who the designers were? These are the facts: 1. No one knows who designed Stonehenge. 2. Archaeologists unanimously agree that it must be designed. These 2 simple facts are more than enough to completely dispute the claim that you must know the designers in order to infer something is designed.
Whaaaaaaat? C'mon, Z. The evidence we cite that Stonehenge was the product of design doesn't have anything to do with the 'evidence' used by creationists to suggest that life on earth was created by an intelligent designer!! This is a useless analogy. Stating that "It is clear that someone designed Stonehenge" does not make it true that "someone designed life on Earth". One is a statement of fact. The other is a statement of faith. There is evidence that someone must have designed Stonehenge, since huge masses of rock don't move themselves around and take on anthropic shapes. Haven't they identified the quarries from which the megaliths were taken? There is zero evidence that life on earth was designed by some intelligent entity (God). The only 'evidence' for that is seen by the faithful, through the lens of faith, which apparently also allows that one day the heavens will open up and a bunch of goats with several eyes will come down and the sinners (like me) will be cast into a lake of hellfire (or something like that, I'm not up on my Christian mythology). Sub-atomic physics has shown us that at the level of the very small, the rules of causality break down (rather spectacularly, in fact) and that our rules up here on the macro level don't apply. The hope on the part of ID/Creationists that life can't assemble itself is simply that - a hope. It is based in faith. The wonders of the universe (the real wonders, not the ones tied to this or that religious fantasy) will be uncovered by science and the process will probably never end.
TraderNik wrote: I never said or implied that because it is clear that someone designed Stonehenge that that means someone designed life on Earth. My point was that one doesn't need to know who designed something in order to infer it's the product of intelligent design. TraderNik wrote: I agree that Stonehenge was designed. And archaeologists have been able to determine this without knowing who designed it. TraderNik wrote: Depends on what you consider to be evidence. Why don't you tell me what it would take to cause you to merely suspect that something in nature was the product of intelligent design. TraderNik wrote: I have no such hope. And my ID inference isn't dependent on proving abiogenesis impossible.
Unfortunately, in the case of Stonehenge, we do know who designed it. Humans. Which humans is irrelevant for the purposes of this discussion. ID is not a scientific theory (since it is not disprovable); thus, there is logically no such evidence. Nothing that constitutes evidence of ID would be scientifically testable. If you admit that abiogenesis is possible while maintaining that life on earth is the product of ID, you are confirming that your beliefs are faith-based. That is my only claim here. Also, your use of the term 'abiogenesis' involves some assumptions about non-ID theories of the origin of life. I do not believe that the term 'non-living' can be applied to the constituents of living organisms. Living organisms are not constituted from a bunch of non-living matter. That is a particularly Cartesian, atomist view which has been pretty thoroughly disproved. It is an irony of these Christian Science beliefs that they are often underpinned by outdated assumptions which used to be a part of the Western Scientific mainstream of thought. This is understandable; it is the same thing that happened when I went to University to study music. The Liberal Arts types felt that they had to have some cred with the chemists and the other hard sciences, so they tried to codify John Coltrane's passages and explain them theoretically. This was of course a futile effort. John was just playing. But the music department eggheads felt that if they couldn't show that music is a science in some way, or scientifically understandable, that the degrees they handed out wouldn't carry the same weight as a Chem degree. Music and musical phenomenon are of course amenable to scientific analysis in some respects, but trying to explain Charlie Parker in terms of scale theory misses the mark in some very important ways.
cool, u guys just go ahead and 'investigate' then... free country... now as far as Science, as i mentioned earlier to z there already is a wide body of proper & fairly advanced scientific research looking at filling the gaps of evolution theory fyi...
So I mention your ostrich position, then you respond so cleverly with "ostrich" comeback... Genius... Ain't these science followers bright? LOL...