<chuckle>
Sharp eye! I hadn't even noticed that...

I wonder how Lonest@r feels about astrology...

Been busy, Derby week.... plan to respond when I get some time, just letting you know I haven't ran away or forgotten about you guys...

This is a good example; feathers on a mammal would be pretty odd, as their most recent common ancestor with birds easily predates the evolution of feathers. So, if we found such a case it would be good evidence that either evolution is wrong or we’ve seriously misread the fossil record. The lack of such anomalies is good support for evolution.

Actually though, you can occasionally find cases similar to this in nature, like tails on humans and teeth in birds. This is evidence for common descent, as clearly the genes for traits in the ancestor are still around in the modern animal and can be reactivated by mutations. On the other hand, ID has a hard time explaining this kind of thing without invoking demons.

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Do try not to take me too seriously.

Although I understand what you're saying, you have to be careful not to sound like you're making a circular argument: lack of feathers in mammals is evidence of evolution -- their presence would support common descent, which is also taken as proof of evolution!

Perhaps you should make a clearer distinction between sporadic cases of feathers in mammals, which would be expainable by common descent + random mutation, and a systematic presence of feathers in most individuals of some species of mammals, which, combined with its equally systematic absence in other species of mammals, would indeed constitute a big challenge to the theory of evolution.

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"All your bias are belong to us." Ara Pacis
"A witty saying proves nothing." Voltaire

It isn't circular if you look at what he actually said. Not only are there no feathers in mammals, there should not be any sporadic cases of feathers in mammals, as we split off of the birds' evolutionary branch before feathers developed. However, items that were developed before we split off, like tails, but later vanished can still show up occasionally. The same applies to birds and teeth.

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You misunderstand me. I wasn't claiming that Demigrog's argument was circular; only that it might seem so.

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"All your bias are belong to us." Ara Pacis
"A witty saying proves nothing." Voltaire

'tis ok. I originally had a much longer post that probably explained my thoughts better, but decided nobody likes to read long posts (especially in an ID/evolution thread) and trimmed it down. Perhaps too much.

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Do try not to take me too seriously.

Hi all, this is my first post here, but this forums seemed to have a lot of interesting conversations so I thought I'd join the fun . Also please forgive me if some of my questions/statements have already been addressed, 14 pages of comments is a lot to sift through, and I may have missed something.

First of all, Lonest@r, I commend your attempt at being objective with this subject. Most of the time the topic of creation and related subject come up, logic and reason go out the window and you have tried very hard to at least be open to rational arguments.

On to my thoughts.

At some point early in the thread, it was said that ID doesn't necessarily refer to a god, but could also be aliens or some other form of intelligence. Unfortunately, this doesn't hold water. If we suppose for a moment that aliens are the IDers, well, then who created THEM? You may be inclined to say other aliens... but you can follow this logic recursively until you get to a single conclusion, if there is an IDer, it has to be a god (or god like presence), which is eternal and has always existed. The ID stance simply doesn't work otherwise.

Given that, since ID requires a god to exist, why is it any more likely that this god created aliens which created us than us being created directly. Based on this, the conclusion must be made that if ID is true, some god like presence is the designer.

On to the evolution arguments . If it has been agreed that evolution occurs even on the smallest levels, then why is their any reason to doubt that given enough time, eventually, enough of these relatively small mutations will add up to a new species? We see mutations all the time. And I think that it is trivially true that some species tend to do better than others at surviving. Why is it so unlikely that every once in a while, a mutation occurs that improves a species survival rate?

Antibiotic strains of bacteria are a perfect example of the principles of evolution. You have mutations, and you have selection (the antibiotics kill the ones without the resistance mutation).

All in all, to say the least, there is evidence that evolution is correct. While religion as a whole provides zero proof. If it did have proof, religions wouldn't be "faiths", their would be no argument, it would just be known to be true. Unfortunately, things like the bible/torah/etc don't count as proof since there is no actual falsifiable evidence that those books are more than just stories.

Also, there are MANY creation "myths" (I don't use myth to try to put them down, but it's the best word to describe them). All of which have no proof. Heck, I've heard of at least one Native American culture that believed that the earth was created from the shell of a giant turtle like creature. Since NONE of these have any proof, why are any considered more likely than others? The choice is pretty arbitrary, and it's likely that most people believe whatever there parent's/religion school taught/told them.

However, the science behind evolution has real hard evidence. To me, the choice seems clear which is more likely to be correct. I choose the one which has ANY evidence.

The fact of the matter is that the only time I see IDers try to "prove" anything is when they try to prove that evolution is wrong, never can they show any evidence that they are correct. The closest I've seen is the "everything which was created has a creator" argument. Well, if you are going to make an exception for god (exists but wasn't created). Why not have the same exception for the universe itself, or to that matter anything in it?

Finally, the question came up "why not teach ID as at least a secondary school of thought in classrooms." This seems to be a bad idea. If we go this route, why not teach every single creation myth? All that would accomplish is causing confusion on the subject. If some teacher were to tell my kids that some people think the giant spaghetti monster in the sky made the earth out of meatballs, I would be furious. Now, what if he really believed this? Couldn't he argue that it's just another school of thought?

The proper time and place for these other theories (if they aren't science based) is religious school. Theories of creation fall into 2 categories that I can think of. Science based (which currently believes evolution to be true), and religion based (not based on science, but instead believe systems). If there is a 3rd category, I'd love to hear about it. But the fact remains that if it is based on a religious belief system, then it belongs in religious school.

Now, to be fair, if science comes up with a new theory to explain how life began and changed over time...I would love to hear about it, and if it has scientific merit, maybe it is worth teaching as an alternative school of thought. But this hasn't happened yet.

Now that I am done with my long rant, I look forward to your responses .

proxy

Hi Proxy and welcome to the forum! this subject seems to be hotly debated and i think you summed it up very well with your comments. I think a possible solution would be to combine the two arguments. Everything before 10^43seconds was ID from then on its down to evolution! (sound familiar?)

Yes and everything after 10^-43 seconds could be ID too if it was allowed to evolve

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"Nature is obliged to let reality determine its laws, whereas mathematics is under no such constraint."

Exactly! but asking questions about or trying to find evidence to support this form of ID is pointless.

"You cannot know the mind of god"

Evolution is the only line of scientific understanding we can hope to learn from.