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And I’m not sure Nature is a peer-reviewed journal? I don’t read it, but is it similar to something like the Journal of the American Medical Association? I’m assuming that we have the same definition of a peer-reviewed journal.

Secondly, my whole point was that the whole issue has been clouded by an unwillingness to admit to mistakes, frauds, and poor evidence. There is so much dogmatic ideology running rampant, that neither side is willing or able to hear what the other side is saying.

Finally (and I suppose this is where you and I go in opposite directions), I can’t see how you get solar systems and people and animals and oceand and literature and air and physics and atoms etc., etc., without some sort of Original Cause, which must be intelligent (otherwise where do order and intelligence come from? Nothing plus nothing times nothing equals…. nothing) and therefore must also….

No. I’ll stop there. I’m not going to dive into the endless circle and insult my friend and his courtesy in permitting me to comment here.

So. We’ll have to agree to disagree, and remain friends, and perhaps help each other sharpen up our respective arguments LOL

And I would never dream of sharpening my claws in your house. That would be rude. Unless, of course, there are some moonbat trolls hanging around…? [peering into the corners....]

From a link on the page I linked to originally:

– M.J. Denton & J.C. Marshall, “The Laws of Form Revisited,” Nature, 410 (22 March
2001): 417; M.J. Denton, J.C. Marshall & M. Legge, (2002) “The Protein Folds as
Platonic Forms: New Support for the pre-Darwinian Conception of Evolution by Natural
Law,” Journal of Theoretical Biology 219 (2002): 325–342.
This research is thoroughly non-Darwinian and looks to laws of form embedded in nature to
bring about biological structures. The intelligent design research program is broad, and design
like this that’s programmed into nature falls within its ambit.

Like I said earlier, about 60 seconds of Googling. I’m sure better stuff could be found if one spent more time on it.

Here’s a nice little FAQ entry from an ID advocacy website that hits on most of the arguments you’ve used against ID. Once again, a click from the first page of a Google search.

Please don’t let prejudices get in the way of learning. Things like a heliocentric solar system and a cure for common stomach ulcers go undiscovered if we allow that to happen.

Measuring the statistical improbability of a suggestion is the right way to go about assessing its believability.

That’s what I get for typing stuff from memory.

And I’m afraid your argument that ID doesn’t necessarily mention God so it’s not faith but scientific inquiry doesn’t fly very far. Who or what is the “I” in Intelligent Design but a Supreme Being? Simply not mentioning God isn’t good enough.

Why does there need to be a “who”? It’s possible that we simply do not fully understand the true nature of what we call intelligence.

There are many instances of “organic” systems, such as lassiez-faire capitalism, that are formed from intelligent component entities working together in an uncentralized, undirected fashion, but with simple rules that were in and of themselves designed to benefit the system as a whole.

Even entities at the sub-atomic level seem to “decide” things.

So there’s not necessarily a big bearded guy in the sky who does everything. Like Spinoza thought, it may be that the sky itself is smart and does it all.

Thanks for your thoughtful comment.

As for peer reviewed ID theories, well…if you can show me an article in
“Nature” or some other recognized journal and not whatever standards used by Cambridge Press to publish the book you linked to, I’ll gladly change that statement.

And I’m afraid your argument that ID doesn’t necessarily mention God so it’s not faith but scientific inquiry doesn’t fly very far. Who or what is the “I” in Intelligent Design but a Supreme Being? Simply not mentioning God isn’t good enough.

Now your Gould quote is interesting and provacative…but I think Stephen was trying to say there’s just so much we don’t know about origins yet that anything is possible.

I might add that a similar debate occurred Rutherford first began to unlock the secrets of atomic structure. At that time, we didn’t know about the existence of neutrons so it was difficult to extend the atomic model beyond hydrogen and helium. Once our knowledge increased, the theory was proven all over again.

That’s part of the attraction of evolution as a theory. So much of what we learn lines up and verifies that theory that the bits and pieces we can’t yet give a home within the theory are open to differing interpretations, one of which are evolutionary processes currently unknown to us.

My own belief is that we should look to the micro-biologists for the next breakthroughs in evolutionary science. Only by examining the very small will we be able to decipher the very big changes that happen to species.

There’s no way to evaluate a theory that posits the notion that ID and ID ONLY is responsible for evolutionary changes. There’s just no way to evaluate evidence based on faith.

In a few seconds of Googling, I found this about ID peer review.

Also, if I understand it correctly, ID doesn’t definitively state that there is a supreme being, so your statement about “evidence based on faith” is incorrect. Among other things, ID posits that the probabilities of morphological changes exceed the observed time frame of their appearance. The evidence is the study of these probabilities; mathematics is not faith.

Stephen Jay Gould said himself that this was a proper way to evaluate neo-Darwinism, though he was too weak in mathematics to defend it well.

When the probabilities for an event exceed the limits of random occurrence, the only other force we have observed as causing such an event is an entity with intelligence.

There may be a third sort of force or agent, but we have not observed it.

As a Christian and a geologist (BS, MS) (I consider myself to be an Old Earth Creationist), I will cast my lot with the biologists you cited. There is ample evidence of evolution in the fossil record, but evolution by itself seems to be unable to answer the question “How did it start?” (or at least in my mind).

Whatever was first, whether it be single-celled plants, photosynthetic cyanobacteria or something else, where did the energy come from to drive respiration/photosynthesis? How did the ability to convert inorganic molecules into living, growing biomass happen by accident?

When you consider that, among “higher” creatures and plants, one half of the genetic material comes from the male and one half from the female, for the purpose of “stirring the gene pool”, how did that happen by accident?

Please don’t lump me with the “Young Earth” Creationists.

As for the supporters of evolution, they shouldn’t have boycotted the hearings. Regardless of what you believe, if you believe strongly enough, you should be able to withstand a few questions or challenges. Just because some want to raise some questions about evolution, that doesn’t mean that the theory of evolution is ready to be tossed, or at least it won’t be tossed if some sensible people are involved.

I blogged on the subject of the “three sides to this argument” on April 12, 2005.

We are not going back to the days of the Scopes Monkey Trial. It doesn’t have to be all or nothing of either side.

Second, I have to take issue with a few of your points.

1. There has been no serious peer review of any article or theory published by an ID scientist. Not one article in any recognized, respected scientific journal. The reason is simple:

There’s no way to evaluate a theory that posits the notion that ID and ID ONLY is responsible for evolutionary changes. There’s just no way to evaluate evidence based on faith.

Having said that, a survey I saw showed that something like 75% of biologists who support evolutionary theory believe in God. They may believe in ID as a matter of FAITH…but evolution as a matter of science.

There’s no need to teach ID in schools any more than it’s necessary to teach that the Steady State theory instead of the Big Bang is responsible for the birth of the Cosmos.

I’ve had this argument with Cao and her dad and have stopped trying to explain because there’s just no way you can “prove” that a supreme being is behind anything…the reason is there are alternative explanations for everything the Id’ers believe. And theories with alternative explanations based on faith are as useless as the Hindu belief that the world is flat and rests on the backs of elephants.

(Also shutting up before ‘cat’s claws make an appearance!)