xero said:
You're invoking a fallacy called "false equivalence". Not all "design arguments" are equivalent. We're raised in a culture where people produce all manner of artifacts. We recognize them as artifacts because we've seen people make them, and we buy them from sellers of artifacts. William Paley's "watchmaker design argument" is entirely based on such recognition. Paley argued that the Christian God is the Great Watchmaker, but his argument fails because no one has seen this God produce any life forms.
Because we have never seen anyone construct a life form, we cannot logically regard life forms as artifacts. We have barely a clue how it might be done. However, as biologist Richard Lewontin wrote (Scientific American, "Adaptation", September 1978, p. 213):
<< The manifest fit between organisms and their environment is a major outcome of evolution. >>
In other words, what Paley regarded as "the design of life" is explained by the various mechanisms of evolution as the natural outcome of millions of years of adaptation -- blind adaptation driven by the vagaries of natural selection rather than conscious design.
The blindness of this adaptation is ubiquitous in life forms, as shown by the often goofy or even bad 'design' seen in many organisms. All life forms contain ERVs (endogenous retroviruses) -- fragments of once-complete viruses that at some point in the distant past infected the reproductive cells of a parent and were passed on to offspring and eventually incorporated into entire populations. Today they are literally "junk DNA", being mere fragments of a virus. Something like 5%-8% of human DNA is comprised of such (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endogenous_retrovirus#:~:text=Endogenous%20retroviruses%20(ERVs)%20are%20endogenous,lower%20estimates%20of%20~1%25).) . These ERVs can often be traced back through genes to some original ancestor, and thence to various descendents, thus proving genetic ancestry.
Now, it might be possible that a Creator used ERVs to help organisms to evolve, but that's pushing the limits of believability. Any computer scientist would regard sticking junk into a DNA sequence as just plain stupid, and bad design. But random mutations followed by natural selection explain it perfectly. And of course, whether some Creator or Evolution inserted ERVs into the DNA, they're irrefutable evidence for Evolution, whether guided by God or as the result of normal evolutionary mechanisms: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T7HBMWfRqSA
Wrong.
False and misleading on several counts.
First, almost no atheists claim that the Bible God, or any gods, don't exist. Rather, they argue that there is insufficient evidence to conclude that such exist.
Second, science has no need to invoke gods to explain how the universe works. Chemists do not invoke gods to explain why hydrogen and oxygen combine to form water. Astronomers do not invoke gods to explain why the moon orbits the earth. And biologists have no need to invoke gods to explain the evolution of life.
Third, as I have carefully explained many times, and you JW apologists invariably ignore, the Theory of Evolution does not include Abiogeneis -- the Origin of Life. It explains what happened AFTER that unknown origin.
Fourth, Bible-God believers have a similar problem: they cannot explain the origin of their God. It's grossly hypocritical to criticize someone else for one's own faults.
Finally, the notion of a Bible God contradicts reality and common sense. As I've said many times, the New Testament says that "God is love" and that He knows when even a sparrow falls to the earth. Yet He created a world where, for more than half a billion years predation and the resulting mayhem and suffering have reigned supreme. Can you spell "logical contradiction"?
Furthermore, the Old Testament itself testifies that its God is quite the opposite of love. As Richard Dawkins wrote in The God Delusion:
<< The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully. >>
You know quite well that anyone who knows the Bible can cite passages that illustrate each of Dawkins' characterizations. Since the Bible contradicts itself on the supposedly loving nature of its God, at most only one statement is true: God is love, or God is a monster. But the paleontological record indicates the latter.
This is incoherent.
Nor do most biologists. They're just different amounts of the same thing.
These terms were actually invented by Young-Earth Creationists. A few real scientists use them simply because "creation-science" is more or less known by many non-scientists.
Sure, and nothing more happened there than happens with breeding dogs and cats. The point of what happened is that natural variations -- which on that time scale were NOT mutations -- were naturally selected to produce different body structures.
But over much longer periods of time, mutations accumulate and populations change. There is no evidence -- and you cannot cite any -- that "micro" has limits which cannot be crossed over to "macro".
Nonsense. Today the fossil record is convincing that all manner of life forms have evolved. You obviously have read only Creationist sources about this. Try reading some proper sources for a change, such as:
Evolution: What the Fossils Say and Why It Matters, Donald Prothero, 2017
Your Inner Fish: A Journey into the 3.5-Billion-Year History of the Human Body, Neil Shubin, 2009
The Cambrian Explosion: The Construction of Animal Biodiversity, Douglas Erwin and James Valentine, 2013
It's now known that many dinosaurs had feathers, and some apparently could glide well, if not actually fly. The earliest birds were almost indistinguishable from certain small theropod dinosaurs. And on and on.
Another imaginary problem manufactured by one who knows nothing of science.
LOL! You've been reading the Young-Earth Creationist nonsense put out by Jonathan Wells, one of the Reverend Sun Myung Moon's starry-eyed cultists, in his thoroughly dishonest book Icons of Evolution. See https://ncse.ngo/icon-4-haeckels-embryos for a debunking.
More obsolete criticisms. Science moved on long ago. Try reading newer material.
Ah, now you're getting into nonsense from Watchtower publications. Artists' renderings are relevant only to non-scientific audiences.
The posters Arauna and True Tom Harley have said somewhat the same thing. Yet when I challenged them to produce either calculations or links to calculations, they could not.
Perhaps you can produce such calculations. But I think not.
[ Video deleted ]
I won't try to debunk all the nonsense in this video, since it will fall on deaf ears. However, a bit on David Berlinski (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Berlinski):
<< He is a senior fellow of the Discovery Institute's Center for Science and Culture, a center dedicated to promulgating the pseudoscience of intelligent design.
Berlinski shares the movement's rejection of the evidence for evolution, but does not openly avow intelligent design and describes his relationship with the idea as: "warm but distant. It's the same attitude that I display in public toward my ex-wives."[1] Berlinski is a critic of evolution, yet, "Unlike his colleagues at the Discovery Institute,...[he] refuses to theorize about the origin of life."
Berlinski is a secular Jew and agnostic about the God of the Bible. He presents no ideas on the origin of life. >>
'Nuff said.
