Christianity is a religion. I generally don't argue against it because I see little point and have no interest in whether or not people are Christian so long as their beliefs don't harm others or impact public policy making in a negative manner.
Christianity is an evidence based faith, you seem to ignore this point in everything you say.
I find it cute that you assume to warn us against our beliefs harming others.
Just what where does your standard for 'harm' come from? Is that a subjective harm? Because it if is, then why should your opinion matter more than someone else subjective opinion?
if its objective then you will have to demonstrate how it is objective.
As for ID, it's not so much that I need to argue against it but rather that ID proponents have yet to put forth anything overly compelling. I've read and am familiar with a lot of ID proponent literature (Behe, Dembski, Denton, etc).
You are shifting ground here. The only way you are going to convince anyone that you have a rational standpoint is to argue for it.
And, I'm starting to see signs of high levels of skepticism in you. Maybe you should doubt your doubts?
The big issue I have with ID literature is they are completely all over the map. You have people like Behe appear to accept common descent, but make other arguments from a molecular biology perspective. On the other hand, I've read ID literature arguing for design with respect to higher order taxa including birds which didn't begin appear until the Jurassic.
I suspect that a lot of different views of ID are also shaped by individual religious beliefs. If one's belief leads them to believe a designer was hand-crafting various species on the planet, that is going to result in a dramatically different perspective than someone who believes the designer kick-started the first life on Earth but left it alone after that.
The fact that religious politics have been mixed up with ID doesn't help matters.
I have no idea how you took that from what I wrote. I was pointing out the exact opposite: that we shouldn't have blind faith in science because scientific knowledge is incomplete.
Again, I'm not following your responses here. You claimed that "Evolutionists just seem to take it by blind faith that the thesis of common ancestry has been demonstrated by the data, when in fact for those who know the data know that's really not true."
I simply pointed out that those most familiar with the data are biologists and that biologists generally agree with common descent.
I would like to see you engage with the inference of ID theory in a more formal manner, while comparing it to the ToE (read 2nd thesis of random mutation and natural selection).
Treat them as competing hypotheses and subject both of them (devoid of emotion of course) to the following criteria and then reach a rational conclusion:
1. The best explanation will have greater explanatory scope than other explanations.
2. The best explanation will have greater explanatory power than other explanations.
3. The best explanation will be more plausible than other explanations.
4. The best explanation will be less contrived than other explanations.
5. The best explanation will be disconfirmed by fewer accepted beliefs than other explanations.
6. The best explanation will meet the above conditions much better than any other explanation.
This framework can give you a basis from which to accept or refuse hypotheses.
You should be careful not to equivocate when it comes to evolution. Yes some scientists agree with evolution, but that is more the thesis of descent with modification. You don't get the mechanism for free. Im a scientist and agree with this thesis. It is the mechanism that drives this thesis that a lot of us and others are worried about (random mutation and natural selection). That is why many mainstream evolutionary biologists are now abandoning neo-Darwinism and looking for other evolutionary mechanisms to account for fundamental innovations in the history of life.
If you want you can watch a video on youtube called Information Enigma: where did information come from? By Stephen Meyer and Doug Axe to see exactly why evolutionary biologists are seeking elsewhere for answers.
If you are looking for more to read on this, you can check out why prominent atheist professor of philosophy Thomas Nagel doubts the 2nd thesis in his book
Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature is Almost Certainly False.
I don't care. I still think he's a hack.
Why would he be a hack? demonstrate to us the hack?
Depends on what specific material of his you are talking about. But there are umpteen rebuttals to his work on the Internet; you can easily search for such.
For example:
Meyer's Hopeless Monster
Meyer's Hopeless Monster, Part II
Meyer's Hopeless Monster, Part III
Quintessence of Dust: Signature in the Cell
And so on...
Rebuttals don't do anything to dismiss the mathematical problem of the mechanism that is supposedly random mutation and random selection. Unless they are mathematical rebuttals, which i haven't seen.
