Intelligent Design

[Lion of Judah]

If God did not give us a soul we would be nothing but hunter gatherers scavaging the Earth thats why in Genesis Adam and Eve ate from the tree of knowledge to create the world we live in today this happened in the age of Leo 8000 years ago.We should be gracious to fallen saints and our ancesetors for passing information now we are in the age of Aquarius which means the Age of Pieces is on us a time where the land of milk and honey(paradise) will be ours no war or death we would than be masters of our circumference

Edited November 21, 2006 by Lion of Judah

[Cadetak]

If God did not give us a soul we would be nothing but hunter gatherers scavaging the Earth thats why in Genesis Adam and Eve ate from the tree of knowledge to create the world we live in today this happened in the age of Leo 8000 years ago.We should be gracious to fallen saints and our ancesetors for passing information now we are in the age of Aquarius which means the Age of Pieces is on us a time where the land of milk and honey(paradise) will be ours no war or death we would than be masters of our circumference

How are hunter gatherers soulless? Are you saying that animals and plants are souless too?

What is a soul anyways?

Perfection is unachievable, life cannot exist without death, and there will always be war to some degree.

"One man's heaven is another man's hell"

I don't even care for honey and milk...wait is it chocolate milk?

[capeo]

Sean,

I know you may end up not reading these articles because they are from a site that is decidedly anti-evolution, but the majority of these articles quote extensively from scientific articles. Although I did not address each of the found "missing links," I think enough questions are raised to make the whole list questionable.

Jumping in a little late on this one, but I've read the thread and I can't resist commenting on the links you provided. They clearly display the kind of bias creationist sites always do when quote mining as Aquatus pointed out much earlier in the thread.

Really look at that site, is there anything scientific in its representation of the science it's trying to disprove? All it actually does is take quotes out of context then put quippy little paragraphs between them essentially saying, "see, see, they don't know!" Which by the way, they don't know for sure and there are absolutely no definites yet in our distant hominid tree. They take quotes from scientists being absolutely honest (and scientific in their uncertainty not presumptuous in their surety like the site is) and isolate these uncertainties as some over-arching proof that evolution is disproved by such uncertainties. They make it seem like one minute portion of one field of science having difficulty placing certain hominids in a family tree is in any way damaging to evolution. It's trickery, it's uniformed and it's false.

Let's read between the lines and actually look at situation they present logically. First, the actual discover of hominid fossils is actually supportative of the predictive power of evolutionary theory (as is the entire fossil record but we'll stick to hominids). Second, genetics predicts (after the earliest finds) that the oldest hominid finds should be in Africa and corrolates wonderfully with the fossil finds. None of this is mentioned. Now look at how they miscast scientists difficulties without even mentioning the cause of those difficulties. Firstly, hominids existed for a minute amount of geological time. They lived in areas completely unfavorable to fossilization (I won't go into depth here, but trust me). They also were not very great in number. All that said, the lack of overtly complete skeletons is absolutely expected. We cannot extract DNA from those fossils we've found, compounding the difficulty in properly placing them in our family tree. None of this shocking. Scientists don't all agree on what species belongs where, but every scientist quoted knows, due to predictive power of evolutionary theory (as opposed to ID) that they are heading in the right direction. There is nothing the site quotes that casts any doubts on evolution. It simply shows how good science works. Scientists haven't yet found substanial enough evidence to say for certainty where each hominid should be where or even which is our direct ancestor.

Now here's the headfake, the site tries to make it seem logical that this should cast doubt on all of evolutionary theory and the many fields it encompasses. In actuality there is nothing there. They don't put forth an alternative that is testable or has any predictive power. They quote mine and they disparage something that science both predicts and accepts and make it sound like this proves something for their case. They don't mention the preponderance of auxillary evidence that supports these fossil finds. They also chose to pick on one of evolutionary theories biggest predictive successes, the fossil record, but fail to mention how supportive it is of evolution. They make it sound like the scientists don't know what they're doing, when in actuallity they are being absolutely scientific. This is their tactic. Isolate, misquote and really not say anything. It's underhanded and it's outright misrepresentation.

[Spoken into Blackness]

i used to be smart when i was you i guess. All you might do is say by your power:

"stop existing" other wise i'll go with the one who said "exist"

You all are going too get me there arnt you?

Edited November 22, 2006 by Spoken into Blackness

[IamsSon]

Jumping in a little late on this one, but I've read the thread and I can't resist commenting on the links you provided. They clearly display the kind of bias creationist sites always do when quote mining as Aquatus pointed out much earlier in the thread.

Really look at that site, is there anything scientific in its representation of the science it's trying to disprove? All it actually does is take quotes out of context then put quippy little paragraphs between them essentially saying, "see, see, they don't know!" Which by the way, they don't know for sure and there are absolutely no definites yet in our distant hominid tree. They take quotes from scientists being absolutely honest (and scientific in their uncertainty not presumptuous in their surety like the site is) and isolate these uncertainties as some over-arching proof that evolution is disproved by such uncertainties. They make it seem like one minute portion of one field of science having difficulty placing certain hominids in a family tree is in any way damaging to evolution. It's trickery, it's uniformed and it's false.

Let's read between the lines and actually look at situation they present logically. First, the actual discover of hominid fossils is actually supportative of the predictive power of evolutionary theory (as is the entire fossil record but we'll stick to hominids). Second, genetics predicts (after the earliest finds) that the oldest hominid finds should be in Africa and corrolates wonderfully with the fossil finds. None of this is mentioned. Now look at how they miscast scientists difficulties without even mentioning the cause of those difficulties. Firstly, hominids existed for a minute amount of geological time. They lived in areas completely unfavorable to fossilization (I won't go into depth here, but trust me). They also were not very great in number. All that said, the lack of overtly complete skeletons is absolutely expected. We cannot extract DNA from those fossils we've found, compounding the difficulty in properly placing them in our family tree. None of this shocking. Scientists don't all agree on what species belongs where, but every scientist quoted knows, due to predictive power of evolutionary theory (as opposed to ID) that they are heading in the right direction. There is nothing the site quotes that casts any doubts on evolution. It simply shows how good science works. Scientists haven't yet found substanial enough evidence to say for certainty where each hominid should be where or even which is our direct ancestor.

Now here's the headfake, the site tries to make it seem logical that this should cast doubt on all of evolutionary theory and the many fields it encompasses. In actuality there is nothing there. They don't put forth an alternative that is testable or has any predictive power. They quote mine and they disparage something that science both predicts and accepts and make it sound like this proves something for their case. They don't mention the preponderance of auxillary evidence that supports these fossil finds. They also chose to pick on one of evolutionary theories biggest predictive successes, the fossil record, but fail to mention how supportive it is of evolution. They make it sound like the scientists don't know what they're doing, when in actuallity they are being absolutely scientific. This is their tactic. Isolate, misquote and really not say anything. It's underhanded and it's outright misrepresentation.

So, basically, what you are saying is, let's pretend that it makes absolute sense that we can claim a couple of bones found at certain strata in certain locations at which we would expect to find the skeletons of the precursors of man must be the skeletons of the precursors of man because they are at the strata where we would expect to find them. Uh, that's very good circular thinking there. And of course, anyone who disagrees with this circular thinking must be perpetrating some sort of attack on this great piece of thinking.

If I were to find a couple of nuts, some screws and some rusted pieces of metal and used them to build a model of the automobile I believe they came from because these pieces were found in an area where we would expect to find old rusted Ford Fairlanes, and I built a model which included those nuts, screws, and rusted pieces in the areas where I would expect to find those pieces in a Ford Fairlane, would that prove I had found a Ford Fairlane?

[Rahl]

the thing i wonder , what point in, i guess organic chemistry, is life deemed to be resident in a organism/ molecule etc. i know we are carbon based but we know there is no actual 'life' in carbon or oxygen etc , what exactly .element-wise is the life carrying ..'ingredient ' ? what are the basic minimum constituents in a compound to faciltate the propogation of life , that can be produced from something not already existing as we would refer to as life ?

[capeo]

So, basically, what you are saying is, let's pretend that it makes absolute sense that we can claim a couple of bones found at certain strata in certain locations at which we would expect to find the skeletons of the precursors of man must be the skeletons of the precursors of man because they are at the strata where we would expect to find them. Uh, that's very good circular thinking there. And of course, anyone who disagrees with this circular thinking must be perpetrating some sort of attack on this great piece of thinking.

First off, and I can't believe you don't see this, but YES. Obviously that would be a logical conclusion based on the evidence. That's not circular, that's deductive reasoning. Secondly, the first fossil finds came along long before the DNA evidence that supports finding our oldest ancestors in Africa, but support the evidence it does.

If I were to find a couple of nuts, some screws and some rusted pieces of metal and used them to build a model of the automobile I believe they came from because these pieces were found in an area where we would expect to find old rusted Ford Fairlanes, and I built a model which included those nuts, screws, and rusted pieces in the areas where I would expect to find those pieces in a Ford Fairlane, would that prove I had found a Ford Fairlane?

Nobody is saying they've proving anything, that's your mistake, but you'd be an idiot if you didn't put your money on it being a Fairlane. Hominid evolution is very hotly contested right now. Not, mind you, that it happened, there's more than enough evidence to conclude that. The contention comes in where these fossils fit into the tree, for all the reasons I mentioned above. But do you not see the smokescreen you just put up. Nobody in the quotes on that site are saying they have proved which fossil belongs where, they're seeking further evidence from a sparce source. That's a strawman the site creates and tries to burn down. It is attacking a suppisition that nobody is making.

[antiaging]

I would like to address the subject of intelligent design. In the US the xian right want our children to experience the theory in their classrooms. I'm not a follower of the religious concept but I would like to see how it would play out in mythology classes. I've been on this forum for a while now and I've noticed that we have some pretty astute young people around here. Young people aren't as gullible as they were a few years ago. I'm thinking maybe they might be able to disect it enough to disprove it if put in a classroom setting. Of course I realize that once the religious right get it in the door they will manipulate it into the mainstream ciriculum.

I know it will never play out in the public school system but around here we're open to discuss anything. What do you guys think?

Disect This:!!

The laws of probability will tell you that this universe with all of its ordered complexity, could not have come into being by chance. To have that much order and complexity, the universe had to be designed by an intelligent creator. There is enough coded information in one human chromosome to

fill a small library of books. This had to be designed by an

intelligent creator.

The probability against that happening by chance is very

very high. It's like giving a chimpanzee a typewriter and letting him hit the keys at

random. The probability against his being able to type a small library full of books by hitting keys at random is so high that for all

practical purposes you can consider it impossible.

Because of this, there are some scientists and mathematicians who are forced to

believe in the existence of God by logic alone.

In order for a single cell to live, all of the parts of the cell must be assembled before life starts. This involves 60,000 proteins that are assembled in roughly 100 different combinations. The probability that these complex groupings of proteins could have happened just by chance is extremely small. It is about 1 chance in 10 to the 4,478,296 power. The probability of a living cell being assembled just by chance is so small, that you may as well consider it to be impossible. This means that the probability that the living cell is created by an intelligent creator, that designed it, is extremely large. The probability that God created the living cell is 10 to the 4,478,296 power to 1.

Example: 10 to the 6th power is one million, 10 to the 7th power is 10 million, 10 to the 8th power is 100 million, 10 to the 9th power is a billion; each time the power goes up by one, the number goes up by ten times as much. 10 to the 4,478,296 power, is a tremendously large number.

[The probability of this was calculated by Fred Hoyle, famous astronomer and mathematician.]

The laws conscerning entropy are well established in physics. Entropy is the measure of the randomness or disorder in a system. Entropy is always observed to increase in natural physical processes. Natural processes in science always tend toward more disorder. The idea that the universe could develope the ordered complexity that it has, by natural processes violates the law of entropy, that says disorder must increase in natural processes. Therefore, one must conclude that the complex order that we see in the universe did not come about by chance scientific processes. It was developed on purpose by an intelligent creator. God created it.

The law of entropy exists in thermodynamic systems involving heat, that is true. Entropy also exists as a measure of disorder in a system in statistical mechanics having nothing to do with thermodynamics. S=klnp + c. S = value of measure for a system in a given state. P is the probability of the occurence of that state. K is a fixed constant and c an arbitrary constant. Heat is disordered energy. Entropy is a broader term describing either heat or the amount of disorder in a system. The chemical reactions that you suppose will produce hundreds of thousands of ordered building blocks of amino acids to produce genes cannot occur by chance processes because statistical mechanics says that the reactions will tend toward more disorder. Genes and chromosomes have hundreds of thousands of complexly ordered parts. Accoording to statistical mechanics this much order cannot come from chance scientific processes. It had to come from an intelligent creator.

There are no existing physical rules, that have been observed by science, that indicate that ordered complexity can evolve by random chance occurences. In Science there is an observed law of entropy. In all natural occurences in science, the amount of disorder increases. In other words, the physical laws that are observed in nature lead to more disorder; they do not lead to ordered complexity.

The only thing observed to cause more complexity is an intelligence, of some sort deliberately assembling something together.

Example: A pile of building materials stacked in a pile is hit by a tornado. When the pieces come down, they do not assemble themselves into a house. They just fall into a more disordered pile of building materials. An intelligence must deliberately assemble the materials into a house to get ordered complexity.

God created the ordered complexity in the universe. There are no observed scientific processes that can account for it happening by itself.

Natural selection will weed out inferior members of a species according to environmental requirements. But, this only leads to a species changing to another variety of the same species known as a subspecies; that is all that is observed in nature. [Crickets in dark caves become white with no eyes; also fish in caves.] But natural selection has not been observed to cause one species to change into another new species. Fish do not change into amphibians; amphibians do not change into reptiles; reptiles do not change into mammals. Natural selection cannot account for the origin of the different species. There are a million missing links in the fossil record as it has been found. The intermediate stages that would be necessary for fish to become amphibians, and reptiles to become mammals, have not been found in the fossils. The fossils show evidence that all of the species were originally created by God and they did not evolve into one another.

"Biochemical systems are exceedingly complex, so much so that the chance

of their being formed through random shufflings of simple organic

molecules is exceedingly minute, to a point indeed where it is

insensibly different from zero"

- Hoyle and Wickramasinghe, p.3

"No matter how large the environment one considers, lfe cannot have had

a random beginning. Troops of monkeys thundering away at random on

typewriters could not produce the works of Shakespeare, for the

practical reason that the whole observable universe is not large enough

to contain the necessary monkey hordes, the necessary typewriters, and

certainly the waste paper baskets required for the deposition of wrong

attempts. The same is true for living material"

Ibid., p.148

"The trouble is that there are about two thousand enzymes, and the

chance of obtaining them all in a random trial is one one part in

(10^20)^2000 = 10^40000, an outrageously small probability that could

not be faced even if the whole universe consisted of organic soup. If

one is not prejudiced either by social beliefs or by a scientific

training into the conviction that life originated on the Earth [by

chance or natural processes], this simple calculation wipes the idea

entirely out of court"

Ibid., p.24

"Any theory with a probability of being correct that is larger than one

part in 10^40000 must be judged superior to random shuffling. The

theory that life was assembled by an intelligence has, we believe, a

probability vastly higher than one part in 10^40000 of being the correct

explaination of the many curious facts discussed in previous chapters.

Indeed, such a theory is so obvious that one wonders why it is not

widely accepted as being self-evident. The reasons are psychological

rather than scientific."

Ibid., p.130

"All point mutations that have been studied on the molecular level turn

out to reduce the genetic information and not to increase it."

- Lee Spetner, "Not by Chance"(Brooklyn, New York: The Judaica

Press,Inc.) p.138

"It appears that the neo-darwinism hypothesis is insufficient to explain

some of the observations that were not available at the time the

paradigm took shape. ...One might ask why the neo-darwinian paradigm

does not weaken or disappear if it is at odds with critical factual

information. The reasons are not necessarily scientific ones but rather

may be rooted in human nature"

- Christian Schwabe "On the Validity of Molecular Evolution", Trends in

Biochemical Sciences, July 1986, p.282

"The really significant finding that comes to light from comparing the

proteins' amino acid sequences is that it is impossible to arrange them

in any sort of evolutionary series" - Ibid. p.289

"Thousands of different sequences, protein, and nucleic acid, have now

been compared in hundreds of different species but never has any

sequnces been found to be in any sense the lineal descendant or ancestor

of any other sequence." - Ibid. pp. 289-290

"Each class at a molecular level is unique, isolated and unlinked by

intermediates. Thus molecules, like fossils, have failed to provide the

elusive intermediates so long sought by evolutionary biology." - Ibid

p.290

"There is little doubt that if this molecular evidence had been

available one century ago it would have been seized upon with

devastating effect by the opponents of evolution theory like Agassiz and

Owen, and the idea of organic evolution might never have been

accepted." - Ibid pp.290-291

"In terms of their biochemistry, none of the species deemed

'intermediate', 'ancestral' or 'primitive' by generations of

evolutionary biologists, and alluded to as evidence of sequence in

nature, show any sign of their supposed intermediate status" - Ibid

p.293

Duane T. Gish, The Origin of Mammals : If this view of evolution is true, the fossil record should produce an enormous number of transitional forms. Natural history museums should be overflowing with undoubted intermediate forms. About 250,000 fossil species have been collected and classified?Applying evolution theory and the laws of probability, most of these 250,000 species should represent transitional forms.

Dr. Walt Brown, In the Beginning: Compelling Evidence for Creation and the Flood, page 10: Fossil links are missing between numerous plants, between single-celled forms of life and invertebrates, between invertebrates and vertebrates, between fish and amphibians, between amphibians and reptiles, between reptiles and mammals, between reptiles and birds, between primates and other mammals, and between apes and other primates. The fossil record has been studied so thoroughly that it is safe to conclude that these gaps are real; they will never be filled. ---

Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species:

the number of intermediate varieties, which have formerly existed [must] truly be enormous. Why then is not every geological formation and every stratum full of such intermediate links? Geology assuredly does not reveal any such finely-graduated organic chain; and this, perhaps, is the most obvious and serious objection which can be urged against the theory [of evolution].

Dr. Niles Eldredge, paleontologist at the American Museum of Natural History, "Missing, Believed Nonexistent", Manchester Guardian, 26 November 1978:?

"The search for 'missing links' between various living creatures, like humans and apes, is probably fruitless?because they probably never existed as distinct transitional types...But no one has yet found any evidence of such transitional creatures?If it is not the fossil record which is incomplete then it must be the theory."

Lyall Watson, "The Water People", Science Digest, May 1982:

"Modern apes, for instance, seem to have sprung out of nowhere. They have no yesterday, no fossil record. And the true origin of modern humans?of upright, naked, toolmaking, big-brained beings?is, if we are to be honest with ourselves, an equally mysterious matter."

Dr. Collin Patterson, a paleontologist at the Natural History Museum in Britain, when asked why he hadn't included any illustrations of transitional forms in his book, Evolution, he replied in a letter: "I fully agree with your comments on the lack of direct illustration of evolutionary transitions in my book. If I knew of any, fossil or living, I would certainly have included them?I will lay it on the line?there is not one such fossil for which one could make a watertight argument."

"The absence of fossil evidence for intermediary stages between major transitions in the organic design, indeed our inability, even in our imagination, to construct functional intermediates in many cases, has been a persistent and nagging problem for gradualistic accounts of evolution." S.J.Gould. "Evolution Now: A Century After Darwin", 1982, p. 140

Prigogine, a Nobel Prize winning thermodynamicist:

"The probability that at ordinary temperatures a macroscopic number of molecules is assembled to rise to the highly ordered structures and to the coordinated functions characterizing living organisms is vanishingly small. The idea of spontaneous genesis of life in its present form is therefore highly improbable even on the scale of the billions of years during which prebiotic evolution is speculated to have occured."

Ilya Prigogine, et al, Nov 1972, Physics Today p. 23-31

They’ve also found human and dinosaur footprints in the same rock strata, in places like Turkmenia, in Nicaragua and near the palaxi river in the US.

Disorder always increases overall, in any observed scientific processes. It is an established law of entropy in physics. Small areas of order can happen that is not very complex in small parts of any system, but the overall disorder of the system must increase.

Heat is disordered energy.

Something as simple as a refrigerator, which produces more order in the cooling sections, must be designed to function that way, and will not happen by chance. And a refrigerator is no where near as complex as a living cell.

Overall disorder in the refrigerator function still increases.

[Cadetak]

^^^

Scientist may think that now but in 100 years they may laugh at that and be proving just the opposite.

[capeo]

antiaging,

Why didn't you just put the link to the creationist website you got all that quote mining from and save yourself the trouble of all that cutting and pasting?