Human cell and DNA clearly point to Intelligent Design

[Smidlee]

And how does one detect design?


You're applying probability to God, an omnipotent being?


What defines "irreducible complexity"? Two of the most common examples (the eye and the bacterial flagellum) have been thoroughly beaten to death by now - are there any others?

Explaining how the eye /flagellum works is not the same thing as how the eye/flagellum could evolve. (We have mutated the poor fruit fly every way possible yet the fruit fly still has the same body plan with the same eyes.)

To be able to detect design requires intelligence. It's the same way with music. Even though I know nothing about music I'm still able to tell when someone can't sing. It's not something you learn it's just something you know.

What specific bird features in platypi are you referring too, that do not make sense due to common ancestry with reptiles?

Don't take my word for it:
"The duck-billed platypus: part bird, part reptile, part mammal — and the genome to prove it."
Of course this proves that this animal didn't case any doubt on evolutionist thinking. It would be the exact same thing if we found a bird breastfeeding their young.

They claim they found a platypus fossil 112 million years old

 

[Anthony Puccetti]

Why is that relevant? Of course God's creation can exceed human technology, regardless of whether God used evolution or poofism (to distinguish from evolutionary creationism) to create. I can give plenty of other examples too - we can't make a sustainable fusion reactor (like the sun), we can't make a gymnist robot, we can't make a mousetrap than a cat, and so on.

The point is that intelligent design is manifest in organisms,and since we can recognize products of man's intelligence,we should also recognize products of God's intelligence.

Worse, that sets up a God of the gaps argument, where every human advance shrinks God, and Christians bemoan our progress, becoming anti-science/technology.

That doesn't follow. It is theistic evolution theory that reduces God,by replacing God's power in nature with self-sufficient natural causes,and reducing God's creative action to gradual natural processes in which God does not create anything individually and yet everything develops naturally.

The god of the gaps idea was made up by a skeptic to ridicule people who attributed natural phenomena to God,his underlying idea being that it is irrational to attribute natural phenomena to God,and only natural causes should be used to explain them.

 

[Lepanto]

What defines "irreducible complexity"? Two of the most common examples (the eye and the bacterial flagellum) have been thoroughly beaten to death by now - are there any others?

Certainly irreducible complexity has not been refuted. Read this: http://www.evolutionnews.org/2011/03/michael_behe_hasnt_been_refute044801.html

I have been only arguing against atheist evolution. There is no point for Christians to ardently defend atheistic evolution, but one or two (maybe only 1 person disguised as several) Christians ardently come to its defense. Some of them show immense hatred for Creationism, even believe that morality was a product of evolution, etc. That makes you wonder whether they are Christians or atheists ... ?

 

[RocksInMyHead]

Explaining how the eye /flagellum works is not the same thing as how the eye/flagellum could evolve. (We have mutated the poor fruit fly every way possible yet the fruit fly still has the same body plan with the same eyes.)

Except that various transitional eye forms have been discovered (ours are hardly the most advanced, by the way), and the evolution of the flagellum has been described in great detail.

Evolution of the eye: Evolution of the eye - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Evolution of the flagellum: Stepwise formation of the bacterial flagellar system, The Flagellum Unspun

To be able to detect design requires intelligence. It's the same way with music. Even though I know nothing about music I'm still able to tell when someone can't sing. It's not something you learn it's just something you know

So, you know it when you see it then? Hardly scientific. And I think that the multitudes of people who don't see any evidence for intelligent design in nature would take issue with you calling them idiots.

Certainly irreducible complexity has not been refuted, at least not by atheistic evolution. Read this: Michael Behe Hasn't Been Refuted on the Flagellum - Evolution News & Views

How exactly does that article prove that it hasn't been refuted? All it is is a newspaper article saying "Nuh-uh!" I was hoping for at least some sort of content, rather than this:

"Not only is it complex but an expensive system to run, due to its demands on energy, and it must be put together with care as the “untimely expression of flagellum proteins may induce a strong immune response in the host system, something no bacterium wants to do. If the peptides present themselves at the wrong time, macrophages in the bacterium may “smell” an alien and do their job—to ingest foreign objects—to the demise of the bacterium. “The bottom line is that modern Darwinian theory – as classically understood – has come nowhere close to explaining the origin of this remarkably complex and sophisticated motor engine.”"

I have two words for you: natural selection. Any bacterium whose proteins were expressed at the wrong time died. The ones that did it right lived and passed that trait onto their offspring. How is this difficult to understand?

I have been only arguing against atheist evolution. There is no point for Christians to ardently defend atheistic evolution, but one or two (maybe only 1 person disguised as several) persons ardently come to its defense. Some of them show immense hatred for Creationism, even believe that morality was a product of evolution, etc. That makes you wonder whether they are Christians or atheists ... ?

You make it sound as if the only two options are atheistic evolution and "Creationism" (which to me implies YEC/OEC, not intelligent design, let alone theistic evolution and any other position between the two extremes). And what about all other theists? Does "atheist" now mean "anyone who isn't Christian"?

In other words, you're trying to turn a grey-area issue into a black-and-white one. It isn't. True, there are some atheists out there who truly hate Christianity and anything that it stands for, just like there are Christians out there who truly hate anyone who doesn't subscribe to their particular interpretation of scripture. However, the vast majority fall somewhere in between.

 

[Smidlee]

Except that various transitional eye forms have been discovered (ours are hardly the most advanced, by the way), and the evolution of the flagellum has been described in great detail.

Evolution of the eye: Evolution of the eye - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Notice this mostly deals with the different types of "Eyeballs" found in nature and says very little about the very complex parts of the eye itself. You can have two "eyeballs" and still be totally blind.
This is used to fool the average Joe who knows nothing about how complex the eye really is.

 

[RocksInMyHead]

Notice this mostly deals with the different types of "Eyeballs" found in nature and says very little about the very complex parts of the eye itself. You can have two "eyeballs" and still be totally blind.
This is used to fool the average Joe who knows nothing about how complex the eye really is.

I see development of a light sensing mechanism (eyespots are the forerunners of the retina), the lens, the focusing mechanism (iris), color vision, and location. What more do you want?

If you're looking for mechanisms of evolution, it's the same as any other development. Organisms started out with no light sensing devices of any type, so when something developed light-sensing cells, it immediately gained a competitive advantage and passed the trait onto some of it's offspring. Those offspring with photoreceptor cells were more competitive (at least in a lighted environment), so they survived more often than their non-photoreceptive relatives. Over time, the photoreceptive cells coalesced into eyespots because it provided another advantage. and so on - you start for eyespots and gradually add more features over time as natural selection culls the models that don't work.

And don't forget the problems our eyes have: the picture we see is upside down and backwards, so our brains have to do a lot of extra processing work to see the world naturally and we have a blind spot (a lot of animals don't). That doesn't seems like good design to me.

 

[TasManOfGod]

I see development of a light sensing mechanism (eyespots are the forerunners of the retina), the lens, the focusing mechanism (iris), color vision, and location. What more do you want?

If you're looking for mechanisms of evolution, it's the same as any other development. Organisms started out with no light sensing devices of any type, so when something developed light-sensing cells, it immediately gained a competitive advantage and passed the trait onto some of it's offspring. Those offspring with photoreceptor cells were more competitive (at least in a lighted environment), so they survived more often than their non-photoreceptive relatives. Over time, the photoreceptive cells coalesced into eyespots because it provided another advantage. and so on - you start for eyespots and gradually add more features over time as natural selection culls the models that don't work.

And don't forget the problems our eyes have: the picture we see is upside down and backwards, so our brains have to do a lot of extra processing work to see the world naturally and we have a blind spot (a lot of animals don't). That doesn't seems like good design to me.

It must have been bedlam at mating time for a few billion years with no eyesight

 

[Smidlee]

I see development of a light sensing mechanism (eyespots are the forerunners of the retina), the lens, the focusing mechanism (iris), color vision, and location. What more do you want?

If you're looking for mechanisms of evolution, it's the same as any other development. Organisms started out with no light sensing devices of any type, so when something developed light-sensing cells, it immediately gained a competitive advantage and passed the trait onto some of it's offspring. Those offspring with photoreceptor cells were more competitive (at least in a lighted environment), so they survived more often than their non-photoreceptive relatives. Over time, the photoreceptive cells coalesced into eyespots because it provided another advantage. and so on - you start for eyespots and gradually add more features over time as natural selection culls the models that don't work.

All you are saying is a light sensing cells just pop into existence then so happen later a lens pop into existence even though proteins are not normally clear.

Anomalocaris – "Very few modern animals, particularly arthropods, have eyes as sophisticated as this,"

And don't forget the problems our eyes have: the picture we see is upside down and backwards, so our brains have to do a lot of extra processing work to see the world naturally and we have a blind spot (a lot of animals don't). That doesn't seems like good design to me.

What good are eyes without the brain? Our eyes are just an extension of our brain. Our brain creates a 3D image of the world around us. Also since our eyes are designed to see objects in 3D which means our eyes are design to work as one (unlike a fish ). In another word we don't "see" with our eyes we "see" with our brain.
By the way this is why it's dangerous to talk on a phone while driving. It's not the holding of the phone that the problem. For some reason you move your eyes less while on the phone which hinders your brain to create a more "up-to-date" 3D image of the world around you.

 

[Papias]

Lepanto wrote:

Papias wrote:

Secondly, the idea that evolution rate will depend on the environment is not some "added hypothesis", but has always been expected, even being predicted by Darwin in the OOS in 1859. The fact that these confirmations of Darwins predictions are touted by creationists only displays how poorly they understand evolution in the first place.

Thirdly, it is correct to state that a hypothesis that cannot be proven wrong is worthless (that is called an "unfalsifiable hypothesis"). However, evolution is extremely falsifiable. All kinds of evidence can be imagined in any area that falsifies evolution. For instance - fossils of modern humans in precambrian rock, or genomes that of species with a recent common ancestor which have wildly different genomes, or clear, Christian information within non-coding DNA (wouldn't it be trivially easy for God to encode, say, the Gospel of John in the non-coding DNA of all vertebrates, or even one of them?), or animals that don't fit a nested hierarchy (such, say, a whale with gills or an eagle with mammary glands), and so on. It would be hard to imagine a more eminently falsifiable hypthesis than common descent.

Fourth, creationism, on the other hand, is truly unfalsifiable (just like Last Thursdayism). Any find can be simply dismissed as "well, that's how God created it". Clear transitional forms? Oh, God just put them there to test us. Common descent proven by Genetic data? "Oh, God just used 'similar designs', including the genetic mistakes.", stupid designs? "Oh, God actually made a good design, and we don't see that it is actually a good design", and so on.

Regardless of whether the slow speed hypothesis was added recently or not recently, it is cunning to add a contingency element so that contradictory findings cannot falsify the theory.

As I've pointed out, there are many clear and plausible pieces of evidence that would be strong evidence against evolution. I'm sorry that by buying a creationist canard, you actually thought that evolutionary stasis was somehow evidence against evolution (even though it is predicted by the theory of evolution), but just because Lepanto is unhappy with evolution is hardly evidence against it.

You seem not to have read the list of just a few of the examples I gave Smidlee. Here it is for your convenience:

OK, I'll broaden them:

Any primate (chimp, monkey, human, lemur, etc.) in Any rock from before the ordovician. How much more broad than that can we get?

Or this: Any land vertebrate, be that lizard, camel, anything, before the ediacarian, a span that covers over 70% of all rock history.

Or this -- any animal, with the less than a 60% agreement in gene order (even with the same genes) from the same genera.

Or this - Any life form, of the millions on earth, with any of the books of the Testament encoded in it's DNA, in any location, among it's hundreds of kilobytes of DNA data.

or are those "too specific"? Perhaps you'd like to tell me the "more specific" predictions made by creationism?


​

It is like saying "Medicine X will cure disease B, will take effect in a week,
but sometimes a month, sometimes a year, sometimes 10 years, sometimes, 20 years, sometimes could take 70 years", and when a patient got worse,
you say "sometimes you can get worse before recovering".

Do you reject plate tectonics because it says that the gap between earthquakes can be "a week, but sometimes a month, sometimes a year, sometimes 10 years, sometimes, 20 years, sometimes could take 70 years"?

To say evolution can be so slow as to explain away 65 million years of stasis, sounds like deception to me. Even if this is a valid hypothesis, 65 million years is still too LONG to be explained away as slow speed evolution.

65 million years is not long, especially if you look at evolutionary stasis (no evolutionary change), not just "slow evolution". I still don't understand why creationists seem to just go for the small potatoes. After all, the earthworm is mostly unchanged for many times that, and many bacteria appear to be the same after 2,000 million years. 65? pfft. Maybe it has to do with understanding the magnitude of deep time?

I still haven't seen and answer to this from Lepanto:

Lepanto, are you seriously proposing that creationism is more falsifiable than common descent and evolution?

Papias

 

[pgp_protector]

Sigh in the Protected subforum
Figures.

 

[Papias]

Smidlee, here is where I think we are on our points. Please correct me where I'm wrong:

#2 - no response.

OK, how about this. If you hypothetically considered a world where evolutionary stasis happened, would you expect living fossils there? I'm trying to see if your difficulty is with the idea of evolutionary stasis (predicted by Darwin) or with understanding how that would give living fossils.

#3- I didn't see a response to my list of very broad possible evidences that show that evolution is quite falsifiable. Here it is again for your convenience:

OK, I'll broaden them:

Any primate (chimp, monkey, human, lemur, etc.) in Any rock from before the ordovician. How much more broad than that can we get?

Or this: Any land vertebrate, be that lizard, camel, anything, before the ediacarian, a span that covers over 70% of all rock history.

Or this -- any animal, with the less than a 60% agreement in gene order (even with the same genes) from the same genera.

Or this - Any life form, of the millions on earth, with any of the books of the Testament encoded in it's DNA, in any location, among it's hundreds of kilobytes of DNA data.

or are those "too specific"? Perhaps you'd like to tell me the "more specific" predictions made by creationism?

​

Smidlee wrote:

Originally Posted by Papias

What specific bird features in platypi are you referring too, that do not make sense due to common ancestry with reptiles?

Don't take my word for it:
"The duck-billed platypus: part bird, part reptile, part mammal — and the genome to prove it."
Of course this proves that this animal didn't case any doubt on evolutionist thinking.

Um, the article doesn't mention anything that doesn't make sense from common ancestry. In fact, the article specifically points out that the findings support common ancestry.

It would be the exact same thing if we found a bird breastfeeding their young.

Why do you think that? A breastfeeding bird would be evidence against the current understanding of bird evolution because breastfeeding developed after birds had split.

They claim they found a platypus fossil 112 million years old

OK, so why is that a surprise? It's predicted by evolution. Here, understand the timeline. The evidence suggests that mammals arose gradually from reptiles during the time from ~250 to ~180 mya, while the earth is 4,600 m years old.
So from 4,600 to ~250 (that's 95% of the geologic time, Smidlee), NO platypus fossils are expected.
From ~250 to ~200 mya, a fossil playpus would require some adjusting by a few percent, of the timeline.
From ~180 to today, fossil platypi are expected to be sometimes found.

So, with that, you inform me that a fossil playpus was found at 112 mya. You just helped confirm evolution.

Let's look at that with a timeline, where a "-" = 100 million years in which no platypi are expected, a "p" = 100 million years in which finding a platypus is consistent with the rest of the evidence, and a "P" being when smidlee is telling us a platypus was found:

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - p p

and what we found:

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - P P

How, again, Smidlee, is that evidence against evolution, when evolution's very falsifiable prediction is confirmed by the evidence?

Point #4 (creationism is unfalsifiable) Still no response from Smidlee.

Papias

 

[Lepanto]

If you hypothetically considered a world where evolutionary stasis happened, would you expect living fossils there? I'm trying to see if your difficulty is with the idea of evolutionary stasis (predicted by Darwin) or with understanding how that would give living fossils.

Papias

Was stasis predicted by Darwin or added later by evolutionists ?

A theory predicting X and not(X) is ridiculous. I believe that's only evolutionists' way of "buying insurance" in case they found contradictory evidences.

Evolutionists' official excuse for stasis is "some living things are so adapted to the environment that they don't evolve anymore". But isn't all living things well adapted to environment already, according to evolutionists ?

Moreover, that's contradictory to their theory, which says evolution has no purpose at all. According to
TOE, living things should continue to evolve even if they are super adapted to evironment, because
there is NO PURPOSE behind the process and it is driven by chance, not intelligence.


"Biology has taught us that nature resists change much more effectively than it produces change. This is perhaps the most embarrassing biological phenomenon of all for evolutionists. The evidence of biology clear points to stasis not evolution.

Rather than revealing organisms gradually evolving into other forms, the fossil record speaks of "SUDDEN APPEARANCE" and "STASIS"."
(excerpted from "Creation, Evolution, and Modern Science", by Kerby Anderson, Raymond G. Bohlin)

 

[shernren]

Was stasis predicted by Darwin or added later by evolutionists ?

A theory predicting X and not(X) is ridiculous. I believe that's only evolutionists' way of "buying insurance" in case they found contradictory evidences.

Totally. I think science is bollocks too, not just evolution.

I mean, I'm sick of physics predicting one moment that my car should be stationary in my garage and the next that it should be accelerating down the street. A theory predicting X and not(X) is ridiculous. All this talk of "different external circumstances" is just physicists' way of "buying insurance" in case they found contradictory evidences.

 

[Papias]

Hello Lepanto, and thanks for the cordial response.

Lepanto wrote:

Was stasis predicted by Darwin or added later by evolutionists ?

It was predicted by Darwin, in the first edition of the Origin of Species. Here is one of the places where he mentions it:

Species of different genera and classes have not changed at the same rate, or in the same degree. ... (tons of examples - anyone who has read OOS knows that Darwin cites tons of examples for everything)....

These several facts accord well with my theory. I believe in no fixed law of development, causing all the inhabitants of a country to change abruptly, or simultaneously, or to an equal degree. -Origin of Species, pages 313 and 314.
​

A theory predicting X and not(X) is ridiculous. I believe that's only evolutionists' way of "buying insurance" in case they found contradictory evidences.

It does't both predict "X" and "not (X)". There are a lot more than two choices out there, after all. Of the millions of possible things one could predict, evolution states predicts some, and says that many others won't be found.

Evolution predicts all kinds of things that could well be shown to be false, and haven't been. You saw a list of some of them in my previous post. Evolution has made literally hundreds of concrete and specific predictions in many different branches of science, all of which would be unlikely at best if evolution were false, and each of these has been confirmed by the evidence. We can get into some of them if you like. That's about as falsifiable as a theory can get.

Evolutionists' official excuse for stasis is "some living things are so adapted to the environment that they don't evolve anymore".

No, the "official excuse" is nothing like that. The theory of evolution, from the start, has stated that a population of reproducing organisms will undergo change to better fit it's environment. From that, stasis is expected, as is rapid change, depending on the environment. Is the environment mostly similar for a long time after the organisms have evolved for a long time to fit it? Then expect little change.

Or, has the environment suddenly changed, so now different selective pressures are acting on the gene pool? If so, then expect more rapid evolution. This is seen over and over for both cases in the fossil record.

But isn't all living things well adapted to environment already, according to evolutionists ?

Again, no. That is a false and misleading charicature of evolution. If something has been in the same environment for a long time, it is more likely to be better adapted to it. Conversely, if an environment has changed a lot recently, then the inhabitants are expected to be poorly adapted to it.

For instance, in New Zealand, the environment for millions of years lacked any ground-based omnivore like a rat. Tuataras (which look like lizards) adapted to this environment, including long egg incubation times on ground nests. Within the last century or two, rats became present in the environment, and the tuataras are quickly dying off because they no longer fit their environment very well.

There are dozens of other examples like that, where a change in the environment means that organisms are no longer very well adapted to that environment, and will either evolve quickly enough to survive, or will die out. This is why commercial fishing is causing fish to evolve to be smaller, and many other observed instances worldwide.

Moreover, that's contradictory to their theory, which says evolution has no purpose at all.

"Purpose"? What? The TOE, like any other scientific theory, says nothing about purpose. Purpose is the realm of religion. We decide if we want to attach a "purpose" to any theory. Does the theory of gravity say that gravity has no "purpose"? No - we decide that ourselves.

According to
TOE, living things should continue to evolve even if they are super adapted to evironment, because
there is NO PURPOSE behind the process and it is driven by chance, not intelligence.

I'm not sure where you got that, but it's completely wrong. Please cite a source, or better yet, if you know the source, then remember that the source that gave you that garbage is likely to give you more gargabe, and ignore them.

"Biology has taught us that nature resists change much more effectively than it produces change. This is perhaps the most embarrassing biological phenomenon of all for evolutionists. The evidence of biology clear points to stasis not evolution.

This is another item that is terribly wrong. If that wer true, then the fossil record would not show that 99.9% of all species that have ever lived are now extinct. Stasis suggest that the world the past is like the world of today, and nothing could be further from the truth. Just compare the world's biodiversity at different points in earth's history and you'll see that they are more different than similar, though they do contain the slow evolution of a few of the animals to the forms in the next time period (though most forms go extinct).

Rather than revealing organisms gradually evolving into other forms, the fossil record speaks of "SUDDEN APPEARANCE" and "STASIS"."

There are literally hundreds of cases where the evolution of one form into another is obvious. Often, a creature evolves quickly but gradually, then stays mostly the same for millions of years, then either evolves again or goes extinct. That's why practically all geologists and paleontologists, including millions of Christians, agree that the TOE is correct.

(excerpted from "Creation, Evolution, and Modern Science", by Kerby Anderson, Raymond G. Bohlin)

Oh, that explains a lot. Remember when "creationism" was kicked out of schools by the courts? Well, creationists changed their term, repackaging creationism as "creation science". Then, their tactic was discovered and so "creation science" was kicked out of schools by the courts. Well, creationists changed their term again repackaging creationism as "Intelligent design", and then, their tactic was discovered and so "intelligent design" was kicked out of schools by the courts.

Based on web chatter, it became clear by 2008 that the next term they'd use was "sudden appearance" (which had already appeared in their books). So I guess it's no surprise that you can find anti-evolution falsehoods in a creationist book.

Learning about evolution is not hard - simply taking a biology course at a community college is a good start, and there are courses online too.

Papias

 

[Smidlee]

Smidlee, here is where I think we are on our points. Please correct me where I'm wrong:

#2 - no response.

OK, how about this. If you hypothetically considered a world where evolutionary stasis happened, would you expect living fossils there? I'm trying to see if your difficulty is with the idea of evolutionary stasis (predicted by Darwin) or with understanding how that would give living fossils.

#3- I didn't see a response to my list of very broad possible evidences that show that evolution is quite falsifiable. Here it is again for your convenience:

OK, I'll broaden them:

Any primate (chimp, monkey, human, lemur, etc.) in Any rock from before the ordovician. How much more broad than that can we get?

Or this: Any land vertebrate, be that lizard, camel, anything, before the ediacarian, a span that covers over 70% of all rock history.

Or this -- any animal, with the less than a 60% agreement in gene order (even with the same genes) from the same genera.

Or this - Any life form, of the millions on earth, with any of the books of the Testament encoded in it's DNA, in any location, among it's hundreds of kilobytes of DNA data.

or are those "too specific"? Perhaps you'd like to tell me the "more specific" predictions made by creationism?​

Noticed all these predictions are made after the pattern of the fossil record had been uncovered(before Darwin). Even Darwin admitted the fossil record didn't support his theory yet you still pretend the fossil record does.



​

Point #4 (creationism is unfalsifiable) Still no response from Smidlee.

Papias

The one thing that would falsify evolution would be creation. So you made the rules so creationism can not enter the realm of science thus making evolution a dogma and unfalsifiable as well. Either a creature evolved or it was created. If one side is always "out of bounds" then obviously the other side automatically wins.

Was stasis predicted by Darwin or added later by evolutionists ?

A theory predicting X and not(X) is ridiculous. I believe that's only evolutionists' way of "buying insurance" in case they found contradictory evidences.

This is exactly what Darwin did. Darwin wrote in order to falsify his theory you had to show it's not possible for something to have evolved. In another words he place the burden of proof on the doubters of evolution.
So you have to prove it's impossible for the eye to evolve to falsify it didn't evolve. So the "unknown" is always put in evolution favor.

 

[Smidlee]

Totally. I think science is bollocks too, not just evolution.

I mean, I'm sick of physics predicting one moment that my car should be stationary in my garage and the next that it should be accelerating down the street. A theory predicting X and not(X) is ridiculous. All this talk of "different external circumstances" is just physicists' way of "buying insurance" in case they found contradictory evidences.

If I saw my car going down the street I wouldn't blame physics. I would call the law as someone just stole my car.

 

[Kirkwhisper]

Lepanto:

He said, "There are literally hundreds of cases where the evolution of one form into another is obvious."

He isn't telling the truth. There aren't any including the so-called 'evolution of the horse' & the 'evolution of the whale' which creationists have shot down repeatedly over the last few decades.

But the admission of top evolutionists like Gould, Eldredge, Patterson, etc. over the years establishes our case even firmer.

 

[Anthony Puccetti]

And how does one detect design?

By recognizing purposeful form and arrangement and order. An organism has purposeful order,which sustains the life of the organism.

You're applying probability to God, an omnipotent being?

No,he is applying probability to nature causes - what they can and cannot do - and to the question of what happened in the history of species.

What defines "irreducible complexity"? Two of the most common examples (the eye and the bacterial flagellum) have been thoroughly beaten to death by now - are there any others?

Irreducible complexity is really irreducible purposeful arrangement. The arrangement seen in organisms cannot be rightly explained as being the result of natural "mechanisms" or processes,because they do not have the power to create it. There is no correspondence between natural selection and the creation of functional arrangement seen in organisms.

 

[Anthony Puccetti]

Lepanto wrote:

i) The design of the information processing system inside the human cell is so sophisticated that it is far ahead of human technology;
​

Why is that relevant? Of course God's creation can exceed human technology, regardless of whether God used evolution or poofism (to distinguish from evolutionary creationism) to create. I can give plenty of other examples too - we can't make a sustainable fusion reactor (like the sun), we can't make a gymnist robot, we can't make a mousetrap than a cat, and so on.

The point is that intelligent design is manifest in organisms,and since we can recognize products of man's intelligence,we should also recognize products of God's intelligence.

What you deride as poofism is immediate creation,which is how God creates living creatures. Conception and reproduction is immediate creation.

Worse, that sets up a God of the gaps argument, where every human advance shrinks God, and Christians bemoan our progress, becoming anti-science/technology.

That doesn't follow. It is theistic evolution that reduces God,by replacing God's power in nature with self-sufficient natural causes,and reducing God's creative action to gradual natural processes in which God does not create anything individually and yet everything develops naturally.

The god of the gaps was proposed by a skeptic to ridicule people who attributed natural phenomena to God,his underlying assumption being that the belief in God's involvement with nature is based upon ignorance of natural causes,and that bringing in God is irrational because natural causes are always sufficient to explain phenomena. So it is a naturalistic claim.

 

[RocksInMyHead]

All you are saying is a light sensing cells just pop into existence then so happen later a lens pop into existence even though proteins are not normally clear.

No, I'm saying that, with successive mutations, a cell may develop the capability to detect light. It doesn't "poof into existence". Then, sometimes, other cells and proteins may overgrow the light-sensitive cells. In most cases, this would be a harmful mutation, so those die. However, if one of those animals also had a mutation to make those particular cells and proteins clear, then you get the devlopment of the first primitive lens. That animal is more successful and passes its genes onto future offspring, some of which have the lenses. Eventually, these lens-eyed animals out-compete those without lenses and become the dominant species. Simple natural selection.

Anomalocaris

– "Very few modern animals, particularly arthropods, have eyes as sophisticated as this,"

So riddle me this: if it's so great, why didn't God give the Anomalocaris eye to all the modern animals with worse eyes? The evolutionary explanation is that Anomalocaris (and whichever ancestors kept those eyes) weren't well-enough adapted to survive into the modern world. Considering that the Earth has undergone several mass extinctions, in which all but a few orders were wiped out each time, it's not surprising that they didn't make it.

What good are eyes without the brain? Our eyes are just an extension of our brain. Our brain creates a 3D image of the world around us. Also since our eyes are designed to see objects in 3D which means our eyes are design to work as one (unlike a fish ). In another word we don't "see" with our eyes we "see" with our brain.

I don't know what bearing this has on the discussion. My point was that the brain has to do extra processing work to turn the image projected by the eye into the image that we see, and other animals have proven that it's perfectly possible to not have a reversed image projection. If we were designed by an ominpotent designer, features like this shouldn't exist.

I could also point out the appendix, which does absolutely nothing in the human body apart from getting infected on occasion and nearly killing us. Why would God put it there?

By the way this is why it's dangerous to talk on a phone while driving. It's not the holding of the phone that the problem. For some reason you move your eyes less while on the phone which hinders your brain to create a more "up-to-date" 3D image of the world around you.

I don't know about the moving your eyes part - the simple fact is that our brains don't multitask well. Simply holding something takes very little thought, but talking and driving both require large amounts of processing power, and your brain has to choose which to prioritize. Again, this doesn't have a bearing on the discussion.

By recognizing purposeful form and arrangement and order. An organism has purposeful order,which sustains the life of the organism.

Purely subjective. One man's order is another's chaos. How do you decide that something has a "purposeful order"? By your definition, an animal like a Liger would be designed by God, but it clearly isn't. It's the unnatural product of breeding a Lion and a Tiger. Sure, it's sterile, but it is alive, right?

No,he is applying probability to nature causes - what they can and cannot do - and to the question of what happened in the history of species.

I'm aware. My point was that the probability of things poofing into existence is far lower than the probability of evolution. So if God has the power to poof, why can't He have to power to work through evolution?

Irreducible complexity is really irreducible purposeful arrangement. The arrangement seen in organisms cannot be rightly explained as being the result of natural "mechanisms" or processes,because they do not have the power to create it. There is no correspondence between natural selection and the creation of functional arrangement seen in organisms.

You got sources for any of this? I've already given/linked explanations on how two supposedly "irreducibly complex" components could have evolved.