Wild guess here. ZTroll will respond as if no debating point ever made against him has ever had any validity. btw, dd, nice summation of the fundamental flaws in his thinking. What we must remember is this - ZTroll is fully aware of the difficulties involved in defending a faith-based belief system scientifically. This thread and his participation in it are simply a part of his trolling efforts. It is nevertheless entertaining to bat him around like a cat playing with a mouse and watch him stagger from one comical assertion to the next.
Your response is wholly lacking in common sense and universal life experience of nearly everyone.... Actually, the moment a child understands what the concept of design is, which he learns by observing man made things (including his own creations), and is given to understanding words like design, or created, and of course hears his mother says of his silly finger painting....what a wonderful design and how much creativity you show....without any training atheist or theistic at all, observation of nature will yield simply by that it appears designed as well. Even most rational hard core atheists have to admit things appear designed, but they reject the appearance of design to be a truth on the basis of a claim of no proof of a designer....which is of course the fallacy of argument from ignorance... It is the mental filtering and condition of non design theory that supplants the normal human understanding of empirical observation of life as by design... Still no answer from any of the resident non design proponents why all life has the following qualities: 1. A birth, a period of life which is finite, then death. 2. Living being try to survive and adapt, they don't naturally seek out ending their life. 3. Life emerges comes from another living being, not from dead inanimate matter. So the very first form of life came from what the child asks the atheist non design theorist, from non life? Why don't we see that happening all the time then? This is where we hear the crickets chirping...
Shoot me. Oh wait, I think I owe TraderNik bet money. It's in my night table's drawer. Take it all. Ok, now shoot me.
It just leaves your mouth hanging open sometimes, doesn't it? Just a completely self-contained little world where reality never intrudes. When the planes hit the WTC towers and people were saying 'Oh my God, they must have been crazy, these terrorists', I would say 'Actually, no... that is giving them an easy out. I don't think they're crazy at all. They are fanatics.' Exasperating doesn't even come close to describing the feeling one gets when talking to these robots. But I guess if you fully realize that that's what they are, it would be easier and we wouldn't have to shoot you to stop the madness.
ddunbar: Are you saying the only reason you think life looks designed is because the Bible tells you so? One doesn't need to be a theist or believe in an intelligent designer for things in nature to look designed to them. Richard Dawkins is an atheist, yet he says: ddunbar: You might need to prove a designer in order to prove design but who is trying to prove design? Not me or any of the design theorists I know. The point is in coming up with a teleological approach to explore the biotic world, in the quest of generating insight and fruit. ddunbar: Scientific investigations begin with hunches. ddunbar:: Pure bunk. Their is no smoke screen. Dembski's theological beliefs are irrelevant unless he incorporates them into his hypotheses. Show me where he does this. The two tenets of ID are that intelligent causes exist, and intelligent causes can be detected empirically. That's it. Thus ID is not creationism as you previously defined it: ID has no doctrine of supernatural creation. ddunbar: This is nuts. Dembski doesn't have to believe that ET were behind the origin of life on earth to point out that it is a live possibility within the ID paradigm. ddunbar: More nonsense. It is not unreasonable to suppose that within a 1000 years, humans will have the ability to design life forms and use them to seed distant planets, say planet X. According to your reasoning if we wanted to explain how life got on planet X, we could not appeal to human design, as that would not answer the question about where humans came from. Therefore, to avoid this conundrum, we would have to postulate that life on planet X was spawned from the geochemistry of planet X even though it would not be true.
He just ignores all the discussion in the past 100 pages, and keeps repeating same old arguments. He . just . refuses. to . learn . If there were a school, he would've been placed in the spec. ed. class already...
As long as you ID critics keep repeating the same old arguments I'm going to respond with the same old arguments. Count on it.
Congratulations! You have discovered the design of this world. Identify the designer and you are half-way home. Jesus
Very interesting thread. I studied evolutionary theory extensively in college in relation to biological anthropology. I always accepted neo-Darwinian natural selection to explain what can be termed micro-evolution, or intra-species changes. But I was always a critic of using it to explain macro-evolution. I accept ID in the sense that the universe, or at least our part of it, appears designed for life. And I do not think it is just survivorship bias, as another poster mentioned. You can flip a coin all day and get heads or tails -- you'll never get anything different. Nothing will ever "improve" from that mechanism. The problem with ID is that it can't really tell us anything else other than "Look, the universe looks designed." But evolution is exactly the same. An evolutionist who tells me, "Look, this creature evolved from this creature. Here are a few bones that may have belonged to a few intermediaries" also tells me nothing. To be convinced, I would like to see a computer model detailing each and every step along the way. And so far, no one has created such a program, and no one ever will. Evolutionary theory is the lazy man's way of explaining nature. That is why evolutionary biology has basically been a dead science since the hey-day of neo-darwinism. ID at least posits that there may be other mechanisms out there to be discovered that create evolution. Evolutionary theory is still stuck in the Newtonian phase of its existence. I'm hoping an "Einstein" will someday appear that will uncover a novel, testable, macro-evolutionary mechanism.