(musing to self...what a curiously Z-like question. Perhaps he's not gone after all.) Since you apparently believe this is an important point, why don't you tell me what your standard is, and why it should be applied here, and maybe I'll adopt it.
Since you're the party introducing the term 'evidence' the onus is on you, if requested to do so, to provide a clarification of your understanding of the word as used in context. I am not this Z person, but I assume that he was brilliant.
If brilliance is measured by one's ability to avoid substantive conversation while insulting others, then Z was indeed brilliant. And, if I may say so, you are already doing an admirable job of following in his footsteps. Will you be discussing the substantive issue anytime soon, or should I just retire from this venue again?
Where, pray tell, have I been insulting? What it is that constitutes evidence is at the heart of the issue, especially considering the abstruse nature of the matter at hand. KJK: Show me evidence. HH: What might you accept as evidence?
A verifiable test supporting the hypothesis that the original cause of living organisms on Earth is an intelligent designer. So, I'll ask again -- is there any verifiable evidence to support intelligent design?
Hm. OK. I'm not big on supporting Intelligent Design as an argument against evolution; I prefer the Cosmological argument for Intelligent Design of Everything, including evolution. It will take a little time for me to formulate an efficient response and it's way past bedtime. Get back to you later. Hans
First of all, there is no such thing as a "Darwinist" - or did you mean "Biologist?" You are wrong- no "darwinist" would state that these are literal machines. Literal machines have literal designers, and there is simply no evidence or testability behind that notion. All you have shown here are metaphors to machines. All the papers you cite are clearly using "machine" as a metaphor for the purposes of instruction. Your insistance that this is not the case is amusing. Molecular "machines" are not the product of "sheer dumb luck" but of thousands to millions of generations of evolution. While mutations may be random, evolution certainly isnt. The traits that surface this way are those that statistically enable the population to better survive their environment- and as such they will by definition seem purposeful. Intelligent Design is not an explanation- its a cop out. Until it has some research behind it, it cant even be considered a "theory".
Thank you Stu, for so elegantly summing up the problem with this line of reasoning. I assert that almost any Creationist/IDiot argument can be reduced to a logical fallacy. This one is commonly known as the "fallacy of weak analogy".
kjkent1 wrote: What do you mean by "test", precisely? You can't really test a historical proposition in the same way that you test things in the experimental sciences. That is, you can't test to see if something did happen in the same way that you can test to see if something will happen under a given circumstance. If by "test", however, you simply mean finding data that renders the inference to a given conclusion more or less rational than it was before, that's possible now. And if a proposition is not testable in that sense (meaning, you can have no reason to rationally accept or reject it) then neither is it's negation. ID doesn't have to be proven or needed, just capable of guiding research. Isn't that all that's expected from the non-teleological approach? Are the non-teleologists searching for a test to verify non-design? By applying what we do know about design to that which has the appearance of design we can make a reasonable design inference. Additional research can strengthen the design inference and generate testable hypotheses that help us better understand biotic reality. That's all I expect of ID.
Hansel H wrote: Neither am I. ID is not anti-evolution. Things can be designed to evolve. Evolution can be designed. Evolution can be used by design.