Beautiful.

i love science. i have my own theories of course. like the place to view Venus' transit between the Sun and the Earth is the space station because Venusians are going to cast hand shadows on the Earth. 

Your obsolete positivism is underwhelming.  It has less meaning than a robin chirping.  Tweet.

Although your post has some characteristics in common with the Silmarillion, it is less entertaining. ;)  Bye

Btw, Blood on the Tracks is a great album. ;)

I am a Christian and believe in Creation; however,
I laughed when I saw the pic/name or Kirk Cameron in the background 

@UTRow1 - Sorry, the other chimps in your cage were grunting too loud for me to hear your comment.

@soccerdadforlife - you are confusing "hearing" with "reading." An understandable problem for an insane person. 

@soccerdadforlife - You used to side with Curtis, so I'm calling foul on you using that particular insult.

@soccerdadforlife - I also let you troll here.

@nerdyveggiegirl - I'm so glad you're around to point out the important things from my post.

:D

@Jenny_Wren - Right, but I am taking issue with this line of reasoning in general. Just expounding on what GL wrote. 

Not to knit-pick, but ID is not a scientific theory. A scientific theory is“a well-substantiated explanation of some aspect of the natural world, based on a body of facts that have been repeatedly confirmed through observation and experiment.” Scientific theories are more than theories relating to science, or even theories relating to science with some support. Prominent ID proponents like Behe admit ID is a fledgling theory, not a scientific theory (though they don't use those terms). 

I can understand a non-expert believing that, one day, ID may become a scientific theory, but as a matter of fact (not opinion), ID is not currently a scientific theory. It lacks the two primary characteristics of a scientific theory: (1) experimental support over a significant period of time and (2) a scientific consensus among the relevant experts. Conversely, every major aspect of evolutionary theory has been verified, either directly or circumstantially (i.e., we don't know the mechanisms, but we see the results). Evolution is a scientific theory, as evidenced by the overwhelming scientific consensus among life scientists (upwards of 99.9% of published biologists, chemists, biochemists accept evolution, and all the most accomplished modern scientists accept, at least, theistic evolution and reject alternatives). This is only logical, as evolution was proposed over a hundred years ago and literally millions of experiments have been conducted to test its various nuances. ID, as promoted by Behe and the modern ID movement, is about 20 years old, and very few experiments have been done to test it's unique, falsifiable aspects. This has largely been because the theory has patently false and/or unfalsifiable component theories, so research institutions and companies won't fund its research (unlike evolution, which has many commercially beneficial applications like vaccines, drug development, veterinary health, etc.)  

Not to be didactic, but as a former biochemist and evolutionary biology TA, technical terminology is important. ID hasn't earned the title of "scientific theory" yet. ID proponents have to meet a very high burden of proof before they can rightfully call their theory a scientific theory. They have not met this burden yet, and few respected ID scientists would argue otherwise. 

@UTRow1 - Sorry for misusing the term. But I don't think that makes ID unlikely, or more unlikely than the Darwinian evolutionist's explanation for how and why our universe exists. And really, that is the sticking point for me. I am fine with evolution being proven--I think that evolution likely was a big part of how our world came to be. But I don't believe information can "happen" randomly, especially information sufficient for blue-printing life, however basic. I believe God is necessary to explain that.

A lot of people demonize Intelligent Design theory for not taking into account probability, but there is a lot of material that would explain otherwise. 

I was able to sit under a certain Dr. William Dembski, a leading researcher in the Intelligent Design movement.

All ID claims  is that there are aspects of the world, both biological and cosmological, that are too fine-tuned to be merely coincidental. Considering the many examples the ID crowd puts forth, as well as the criteria for design that they measure it all to, I would say it is a legitimate example of inferential science, as much as you would see in forensics, theoretical physics, geology, or archeology. Though different from experimental science, inferential science can be just as useful for interpreting evidence of a past event or the effects of a past event. 

This sort of reasoning can also be labeled as abductive reasoning—reasoning that gathers information from the present to decide what could and could not have caused it in (obviously), the past. However, problems can arise with this sort of reasoning when there are multiple possibilities for a cause. This is where inference to the best explanation (or IBE) comes in, in which only the most likely cause is reasoned to be the answer through more detailed investigation –through comparing each possibility’s explanatory power.

The criteria for intelligent design was developed through mathematical processes by Dr. Dembski, though here I will explain it briefly: events systems or sequences can be described as “intelligent” when it contains high improbability, accompanied with specification. To borrow from Stephen Meyer’s Signature in the Cell: “complex events or sequences of events are extremely improbable and exhibit an irregular arrangement that defies description by a simple rule, law, or algorithim. A specification is a match or correspondence between an observed event and a pattern or set of functional requirements that we know independently.” 

For example, suppose we are observing Mount Rushmore. There is information, complexity to be seen by the shapes on the mountain—shapes we could compare to any natural mountain formation, any rock face. However, there is also detectable pattern that we can read to be communicating something specific—there are the specific shapes of former presidents of the United States. Because complex information, accompanied by specified order to communicate this information was available, we can deduce that this was designed by an intelligent agent aware of the specific information to communicate. In other words—we know that such specific shapes do not occur by accident because of such low probability of such an event, mixed with the specified information being communicated.

That is the important thing to distinguish—it is not the mere existence of information, but the specified order (or pattern, etc) of the information, that causes it to communicate something beyond itself.

This can easily be applied to biological life—especially examples such as the DNA and the cell.

One of the greater questions when it comes to trying to explain the DNA is where exactly did the information come from? Not only where did the information come from—but how did such specified, meaningful, even purposeful information come about from absolutely nothing? The very nature of the information in DNA is information for the future—a “design”, a blueprint, that has yet to come about. How did such anticipatory information come about from randomness? How did the information appear, first of all—and secondly, how does it all arrange itself to be meaningful, specified?

Concerning the cell, the process of DNA replication is astounding in itself—what directs the process within a cell? What formed and put in order the assembly line of “workers”—can this responsibility, the anticipatory information, be logically passed off to blind chance?

These are only examples of specified complexity found in the biological world. One could also point to the cosmological world and find many examples therein. In the end, materialistic causes cannot explain the springing up of specified information out of nothing—to conclude as such would not be using good reasoning, or good inference (which is necessary to use in explaining past historical causes).

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