Allow me to translate - "I don't know enough about the subject to speak to it. I am too lazy and sloppy to learn enough to do so."
I am an honors student in Biology, I recognize fully the poor attempt to disguise pseudo-science as a supportable theory.
Says who? And frankly, I don't care. I've heard enough wild speculation from many otherwise intelligent people that it doesn't matter who says it. The short of it is this. Because of the blind faith of many biologists in their own cosmology, those same biologists show themselves completely blind to gaping flaws in their own hypotheses.
Says the scientific community, the people who have modeled the probable conditions on the young Earth, biologists, geologists, etc.
And as far as I'm aware, no blind faith is needed to make hypotheses and then test them in controlled environments, and then base assumptions about the natural world upon those tests.
If you are one of them, you are clearly doing it too. If you are not, you are blindly putting your own faith in their logical leaps.
In any case where I'm not individually educated about a subject, you could indeed say I put "faith" in the opinions of the community of people who are highly educated about that subject.
So, if one scientist has an opinion completely contradictory to the rest of the scientific community, and I am not particularly educated on the subject, I'll take the lone scientist's opinion with a grain of salt (though I will analyze both sides of the debate).
You should too. PLEASE do. And make sure you have your brain turned on so you really understand the assumptions they are making but not testing. And then take the time to look into the plausibility of those assumptions.
I assure you, their assumptions are far more based in reason, and testable, than an all-powerful invisible creator. For one I'll refer to the Miller Urey experiment above, though for some reason you seem to "not care" about an experiment so directly contradictory to your argument.
That, my friend is philoso-babel.
Care to respond to the actual point?
I see you've spent some time reading the ad hominem and straw man responses to Dembski. Good for you. I am impressed that you've actually read something on the subject. Up to this point, the content of your posts convinced me otherwise.
There was no ad-hominem attack on Dembski made whatsoever. His so-called "theory" was the only thing criticized. As for whether or not it's a straw-man... his argument has been so utterly devastated by the scientific and mathematical community that no straw-man is even necessary.
Like I've said earlier, I respect your right to hold to that position. I challenge you to open your eyes to your own bias when looking at things from that perspective.
And I challenge you to consider that my viewpoint is based on observations gained through experimentation and the scientific method, whereas yours is not based on any evidence and is not even testable.
One of the primary points I made in my last post, which you seem to have conveniently omitted from your rebuttal, is that finding "holes" in evolutionary or abiogenesis theory does not constitute positive evidence for design. Even if all current scientific knowledge were somehow proven wrong, your viewpoint is not the only alternative.
Currently, you're attempting to say "evolution is wrong therefore Intelligent Design is correct," and there are two problems with it. The first is that evolutionary theory is supported by all current data. The second is that even if evolution were proven wrong, that would not automatically mean that ID is correct.
In the same way, I find the explanation that the world and the life that we observe within it came about by billions of incremental steps that include leaps like:
- "raw organic materials" transforming into amino acids
- amino acids somehow "becoming" more complex chains of RNA
- RNA then somehow "becoming" able to replicate
- replicating RNA then somehow "becoming" DNA that constitutes some form of life
- DNA then, by leaps and bounds, extending to new larger AND usable forms that interact with the existing usable segments to reproduce more complex forms of life.
(are we still claiming random mutations and natural selection as the driver here, or have we come up with a different driving force?)
....continue with a multitude of steps like these, every step more complicated and more complex than the most complex engineering and designs ever devised by man....
eventually resulting in a state of life where you and I are contemplating the subject on an internet thread.
That I find unconvincing.
So I guess we both remain unconvinced.
Well, seeing as how we both remain superficially unconvinced, I suppose now we should both examine the data. You can flip through the Biology textbooks and journals of the National Academy of Sciences while I grab a Bible.