Let me just repeat what you said. DESIGN IS NOT ALWAYS OBVIOUS. This statement does just as much to refute evolutionary dogmatism as to support it. If design is not always obvious, then we cannot dogmatically insist, Based on the empirical evidence, speciation is obviously not a work of design. I for one dont PRESUME either creation or evolution. I have formed an opinion, but I am not excessively dogmatic in that opinion, for it would be intellectually dishonest for me to presume to know the truth of origins in light of the evidence available to both sides of the debate.
Ahh, but I did not say "speciation is not a work of design". I said "speciation can be explained through an evolutionary framework". There is a difference there. Suppose I take your hypothesis that "all life is designed". What can I do with it? What characteristics of life can I predict from it? Can I predict, say, that 1,200 species of fish should be presumed poisonous instead of 200, because fish are "designed"? Can I predict, say, that a person who doesn't finish a course of antibiotics runs the risk of breeding antibiotic-resistant bacteria, because bacteria are "designed"? Can I predict, say, that the gene responsible for completing Vitamin C will be broken in a particular way in humans since it is broken in the same way in chimps, because humans and chimps are "designed"?
Clearly not. Suppose, to take your solipsist arguments
ad absurdio, that God has poofed the entire universe into existence 5 minutes ago, and completely faked every piece of evidence that says it's anything older than that. Would the "fact" that the universe is 5 minutes old be scientifically useful? No: by definition of the problem, God has eradicated any evidence that it isn't 5 minutes old, meaning that the "fact" that it is 5 minutes old has no physical evidence and thus
has no physical effect on the universe. In the same way, if your design hypothesis has no physical effect on the universe, it can be as true as anybody wishes it to be - and still not scientific.
And if it's not scientific, why should it be in a science textbook? On the other hand, if it
is scientific, it must make testable predictions. Evolutionary theory makes testable predictions; empirical biology finds those predictions to be accurate and true. Hence it is science, whether or not anything in the universe is real.
If you find yourself vehemently protesting this, pause and think: since when did being "scientific" become so important anyway?
Again, if I traveled to some distant planet and found some device evidently not of human origin, I would postulate the potter (alien intelligent life) as a high probability, REGARDLESS of whether I had actually SEEN the alien, or seen HOW the alien designed it.
Note again your evident bias. You know that humans create "devices". As it is, I can't think of a single life-form that I would call a "device". Can you?
What I want to see in the textbooks is intellectual honesty. When a textbook, for example, posits gravity in a dogmatic fashion even when the very inventor of the theory, Isaac Newton, admitted it to be absurd - this is intellectual dishonesty. In the same way, when the authors pretend to KNOW that the only factor in natural origins is evolution (and thereby the exclude the possibility of intelligent design) this is intellectual dishonesty.
Indeed! I want science textbooks to acknowledge that people used to believe that the sun was driven by chariots, eclipses were caused by giant heavenly dogs eating the luminaries, and that epilepsy was caused by demons - furthermore, I want them to acknowledge that we can never prove that invisible sun-drawing horses, giant interstellar star-eating canines, and epilepsy demons don't exist!
On a more serious note, I do agree that science simply isn't taught right these days. Science needs to go back to the authority, not of the scientist, but of physical reality. We are merely discovering what has been there all along - within a theistic framework, what God has created since the beginning of the universe. Theories are only useful insofar as they explain and predict evidence; theories are motivated by evidence and are pointless without it. I want to see people stop teaching science as an authority in and of itself - as if it is some kind of abstraction that can be independent of reality. Instead, I want to see science taught from evidence up, not from theory down.
Because when science is taught theory down, people learn and think that science is arbitrary, that you can pick and choose between theories for a comfortable fit - that we learned atom theory and gravity and evolution in school from the teachers because that's what scientists think, and who do scientists think they are to dictate what I think according to what they think? But if science is taught evidence up, the challenge is both simple and elegant: scientists are simply serving evidence, and the fact that creationists have not been able to change scientists' minds is simply because the created physical world happens to disagree with them.
Fact is, the watchmaker argument is plausible because the human body has much in common with modern machines. It has a very complex cooling system, fuel intake system, a fuel combustion system, a water pump, an air-intake system all of which are EXCEEDINGLY more complex than an automobile or a watch. To reply (as Mallory did), But there are differences between pots and biological life, because biological life reproduces only ADDS to the complexity of that machinery. I would be very impressed by a computer which builds other computers , for example, and thus would be even MORE inclined to postulate a designer. Is such a watchmaker argument fully probative? I dont believe so, but its pretty damn plausible deny it all you want if it makes you feel better.
Does that include the broken GLO gene, the inability to metabolically produce essential amino acids, the >90% sequence correspondence with chimpanzees, and the dubious honor of having an immune system so easily hijacked by a retrovirus? Do you really want to start playing "Look how well-designed the human body is"?