Why complex form requires an Intelligent Designer

Your argument assumes two things for which there is no foundation.First, that there are an infinite number of possible genetic combinations and that these possible combinations could produce an infinite number of possible bone shapes.Second, that the genetic combination that produces a bone shape for a given organism is simply plucked at random from among the infinite number of possible combinations.Unless and until you can support both of these assumptions, your observation is about as interesting as noting that everyone's legs are just long enough to reach the ground.

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Those who would sacrifice an essential liberty for a temporary security will lose both, and deserve neither. -- Benjamin Franklin

No, a strawman argument misstates a particular position and then shows that the misstatement is false.BTW, your posts would be much easier to follow if you would use quote boxes, rather than quoting the way you do. Several people in this thread have shown you how to do that.

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Those who would sacrifice an essential liberty for a temporary security will lose both, and deserve neither. -- Benjamin Franklin

No. The shape of an organism's femur, to take your example, can only come from a combination of the genetic information it receives from its parents at the time it is created, together with the different shapes that may result from one or more mutations of that information. It is your assertion that such combinations can create any of an infinite number of shapes. It is therefore incumbent upon you to provide proof of this assertion.I do not take at face value your claim that such is the case, and you have provided no reason for us to believe so, beyond your naming of some various shapes. The mere fact that a shape can be named or described is no evidence whatsoever that such a shape can actually ever be produced by the combination of genetic information from two individuals and the mutations that might possibly occur is such information.

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Those who would sacrifice an essential liberty for a temporary security will lose both, and deserve neither. -- Benjamin Franklin

And, to take this point a step further, why do all mammals have the same basic femur shape? It's not reasonable to assume that the optimal femur structure for a shrew and a mammoth would be the same basic design given the infinite variety of shapes available to chose from. If an intelligent designer were behind it all, we'd seen much more intelligent designs. Instead what we actually see in virtually every organism is a sort of patchwork, doing the best they can with what was left for them from previous generations. Humans suffer from a myriad of physiological ailments because our bodies were not designed to stand upright. We evolved from prior forms there were much better suited to a quadriped existence.If there was intelligence behind it all, it was a piss poor one.

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Those who would sacrifice an essential liberty for a temporary security will lose both, and deserve neither. -- Benjamin Franklin

All well and good, except that you are ignoring that the "Intelligent Designer" that creos are talking about is the lord god almighty. I dare say he would have considerably more expertise than whomever built your house, if he actually existed, that is. In any event, I would submit that any intelligence capable of creating all life on earth would know better than to have only one opening to be used for the intake of both nourishment and oxygen, with the resulting danger of choking and subsequent death.Now, of course the objection following this is that nobody in this thread has talked about who the designer is. But I don't come here and put my common sense aside and ignore reality. There are no atheists or agnostics arguing for creation. In fact, almost all creos are christian fundy types. And we know they aren't arguing for creationism out of a love for the purity of scientific inquiry.As for my nose, it's not flat, and I got it from my maternal grandfather. So there.

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Those who would sacrifice an essential liberty for a temporary security will lose both, and deserve neither. -- Benjamin Franklin

Not really, you know. ID is nothing more than Paley's watchmaker fallacy dressed up. And IDers are IDers only because it's their way to get their god back into the classrooms. Ever heard of the Wedge Strategy? Certainly anything is possible to those who think creationism/ID has any scientific merit. But I don't honestly think this proposal needs any further consideration until someone opens up a church dedicated to the worship of Rube Goldberg. Sure they do. They just don't say so while they're advocating for ID in schools because they know that letting the cat out of the bag would queer the deal. And now who's falling into the "no true Scotsman" trap, eh?

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Those who would sacrifice an essential liberty for a temporary security will lose both, and deserve neither. -- Benjamin Franklin

But you're forgetting, my good Archer, that those people aren't the "true" IDers.

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Those who would sacrifice an essential liberty for a temporary security will lose both, and deserve neither. -- Benjamin Franklin

It's not that "our" side isn't willing to consider that there could be an intelligence behind it all that isn't god. It's that there's no real reason to suppose that anything is happening other than natural processes that we (more or less) see in operation today. If natural processes can explain it, there's no reason to hypothesize that anything else is at work.Now, given the scenario that you described from the book, were we to find evidence of that nature, it would be beyond belief that such coincidences would occur and the only reasonable explanation in that event would be that something else is at work.

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Those who would sacrifice an essential liberty for a temporary security will lose both, and deserve neither. -- Benjamin Franklin

This of course raises the following further questions:Why is our central control device, the brain, so isolated from the other mechanisms that provide it sustenance?Why is our central control device not better protected by being inside our body?Wouldn't an intelligent designer provide a backup system for providing oxygen to the system, such as if everyone were born with a tracheotomy?

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Those who would sacrifice an essential liberty for a temporary security will lose both, and deserve neither. -- Benjamin Franklin

I think different terminology would make the point clearer.A diest who believes that god works thourgh natural processes might well be motivated in his natural investigation by his desire to know more about his vision of god. However, so long as he uses the scientific method in his approach, none of us would cricitize him. What's more, if a creo were trying to prove creationism or the variant commonly referred to as ID, and was motivated by a desire to prove the word of god was true, but used the scientific method, again, we would not object.The problem is not the motivation of creos, but their method. They begin by assuming that evolution cannot be the way life was created and go from there. Various statements that they have made reveal that their method begins by denying evolution and attempting to bolster creationism. Thus, the significance of those statements is not what they reveal about the creos' motives, but what they reveal about their method.

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Those who would sacrifice an essential liberty for a temporary security will lose both, and deserve neither. -- Benjamin Franklin

I wasn't saying in that post that you were doing so. I was simply pointing out that you obviously didn't understand that rather elementary term.

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Those who would sacrifice an essential liberty for a temporary security will lose both, and deserve neither. -- Benjamin Franklin