Summations Only

Don't know how Dawn will answer you but I think it's the difference between a reality and a verbal formulation. That is, apples continue to fall to the ground despite Einstein's theory, if you jump off a building you will probably die, and so on and so forth. That remains a physical reality, a divine law if you will, even if a more precise understanding would put it differently.I think that's the part that's law as Dawn put it, divinely given reality. Falsifiability and parsimony and Newton's Laws are the humanly devised principles formulated to explain the divinely given realities. Those realities never change, but the principles to define them will change with more sophisticated understanding.

Seems to me it does help discussion if it's possible to find a way to make distinctions like that. There is such a thing as a "law of nature" although probably not in scientific circles. How about "divine law" or "natural law" versus "humanly formulated law" or something like that.

I'm for whatever phrasing most clearly gets across the distinction.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

Dawn, I'm not understanding much of what you are saying either though I keep trying. I'd like to believe you are on to something with your distinction between direct and indirect evidence but I don't really know what you mean by those terms. Do you mean something like creationists are asked to prove the existence of a Designer and His designs while evolutionists don't expect to do more than point to the mug on the desk as evidence of (human) design? If there's anything to what you are saying it would need many more examples. Can you provide some?We don't need to point to the stamped information on the mug, we can tell it's the product of design just by looking at it -- or recognizing its function -- and we can tell the same from objects found in an archaeological dig: a pile of bones is easily distinguished from a clay vessel or an arrowhead and we don't need "Made in China" stamped on them to tell the difference.I believe that living things all bear the stamp of design, "irreducible complexity" being a big part of the evidence, and that evolution couldn't possibly explain what we see, but we'll never be able to prove this to them. Genomicus pointed to an example of adaptation by natural selection as supposed evidence that evolution can produce what looks like design, but that's something that occurs when the system is already in place -- it's just microevolution. What shows design is the system itself, or, as I think you are trying to say, the origin of the thing. (ABE: Yes, I see you said this in the post just above this one while I was writing this)Best I can do with your efforts here.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

There are no doubt some objects that are hard to identify as designed or not but they would be the extreme exceptions. Sometimes nature comes up with an interesting fluke. Those we can just lay aside to figure out later. The vast majority of examples are not hard to identify at all. I think the point Dawn is trying to make is that evolutionists don't expect to have to prove "scientifically" that evolution can design as well as a designer: all you have to do is point to microevolution and make that suffice. Like pointing to the mug on the desk. But creationists can't just point to the obvious evidences of design in nature as sufficient to show the existence of a designer, which to my mind is more than sufficient: you don't get design without a designer. But that's not considered "scientific" although pointing to the mug or natural selection is sufficient enough for the evolutionist. I'm not saying this very well, I think I need to sleep on it. Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

Nonsense. Yes we recognize design based on familiarity with designed objects, but we can also extrapolate from the characteristics of those objects to nature. Living things have a coherence that nonliving things don't, they often have an irreducible complexity, they have features without any clear function at all, extravagances of display in birds for instance, incredible expressions of color, beauty etc. This all gets rationalized by evolution -- sexual selection being the usual theory -- but not explained, not proved by evidence to be possible by blind natural processes alone. Again they are the product of an already-existing design, even if in themselves they can be shown to be built into the DNA. It's the fact that the DNA could produce such a thing that clearly shows it's designed. And again, the rejoinders by the evolutionists are also not science in the sense you ask it of creationists. All they can do is point to their own theory and guess at a reason for the appearance of design, they cannot test it, they cannot prove it.Yes, saying that a living thing looks designed is sufficient and is as good science as you're going to get in the arguments against it. No, but it's amazing that it is so often the evidence and the only evidence given in a particular discussion.

I think what you are saying here illustrates what Dawn is claiming about how you require (direct/scientific) evidence from creationists though you don't have any (direct/scientific} evidence yourself.The intricacies themselves are the indirect evidence Dawn is pointing to for the design of the eye. Intricacy is a quality of human design too and can be extrapolated to natural design. Intricacy, irreducible complexity, all that.Whereas on your side all you have is very very indirect evidence, the evidence of homologies that have no genetic relationship to one another. Isn't that how the eye is claimed to have evolved? -- all by a COULDA -- it coulda happened that way because there are so many different kinds of eyes scattered among the creatures, and we can arrange them in a series of functionality and complexity that could be stages of evolution from one to another, even though the stages are also scattered throughout the Linnaean chart in no evolutionary order whatsoever. But just because it seems that all the stages are there somewhere or other, therefore it coulda happened in a direct line of descent too, therefore it DID. Not exactly direct scientific evidence that the eye evolved but you accept it anyway.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

See my previous post 211.He's presented the indirect evidence of the intricacy itself. It IS evidence. And as I say above you don't have any more direct scientific evidence than that. In fact your evidence is SO indirect and wildly constructed it's not even as direct as Dawn's. Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

dupEdited by Faith, : No reason given.

It's not all that clear that you can either though, or even why it matters. It isn't as obvious as you say that these facts prove evolution, it's still just an extrapolation you make, meaning it's INDIRECT evidence as Dawn keeps defining it, and very far from any direct scientific evidence. As long as you have nothing but inference, and this particular one is certainly better than the eye inference, it's just unproved theory and no better than the creationists have. Well, that's not true, Taq. ID points to characteristics of living things that imply a Designer, based on our knowledge of the characteristics of things we KNOW are designed by US. Incredibly coherent functioning systems designed to perform certain tasks, all working together as a unit; the intricacies Dawn keeps mentioning; and I've added the extravagances of beauty we see in some plants and particularly in birds. All these things are evidence of design.All you can do is postulate ways they COULDA come about by evolution, and although that is really all you can do, you have the effrontery to declare it all Fact. I'm not sure what you are saying here.

I for one don't get how nested hierarchies proves anything. And certainly it is NOT direct evidence of anything, it's as indirect as all the other evidences, it's something you have to INFER evolution from, you can't KNOW evolution is the cause of this pattern, you can't prove it directly. And why it shouldn't be a feature of design is not clear at all though you declare it so adamantly. I also suspect that the pattern itself is probably not anywhere near as perfect as you claim, but I'm not in a position to know that one way or another.

Then you have to be observing MICROevolutionary mechanisms, right? Since there is no way to observe anything beyond that. And in that case all you are observing is a design feature built into the reproductive system.No, humans don't DESIGN ice.

I have no idea and no idea why it should prove evolution.

You don't know what a Designer would do so you shouldn't claim to.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

No, that is all microevolution.