Evidence for Intelligent Design-is there any?

Something along the lines of "Blessed are those who believe but do not see" I guess. Although how this could account for the evident physical absence of any designer other than the Christian God I am not sure.Now I think of it.......
Doesn't the whole "Blessed are those who believe but do not see" mean faith in the absence of evidence is to be rewarded? Is not seeking evidence for ID and creationism directly contradictory to this? Are those who seek evidence for ID and creationism less "blessed" for seeking to "see"?It seems to me that in terms of the Christian outlook the whole idea of seeking evidence for ID/creationism is kinda contrary to the spirit of faith anyway.

A scientific theory is simply an explanation for a given set of facts. The theory must account for all of the facts, and not be contradicted by any of them. And, it must successfully make predictions.The theory of evolution, greatly simplified, explains that line-up of fossils by common descent and change in the genome over time.What would be the ID explanation for that same line-up of fossils? (Remember, your explanation must account for all of the facts, and not be contradicted by any of them. And, it must allow for predictions.) Different fields of science have different forms of evidence. What you can do in a chemistry laboratory is not what you can do as a geologist working with thousands of feet of geological strata.You seem to be following the latest creationist talking point of saying that the theory of evolution is not "real" science because you can't "prove it to a high degree of accuracy." Actually, the theory of evolution is "proved" to a much higher degree of accuracy than the theory of gravitation.But back to the topic: What would be the ID explanation for the facts that are currently explained by the theory of evolution?

What facts can you account for with ID?
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What facts are still unaccounted for?
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AWhat predictions can you make?

That is how you do science. Care to give it a try?

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Religious belief does not constitute scientific evidence, nor does it convey scientific knowledge.

You might have a point. I wonder what some of our experts on Xian theology would think about that. Actually, I think this is part of the reason that some theologians object to I.D.Still, it's not the reason that we're not getting any positive evidence here. That's just because there isn't any. I don't think it's unreasonable to ask for direct evidence of the designers, because they are the mechanism of I.D. The equivalents for evolutionary theory are mutation, selection and drift, all of which can be demonstrated to exist. When you think of the shrill demands for evidence aimed at realists, it's clear that we should be making equal demands of the superstitious faction.

In discussions at uni, at churches, schools, and on here, I have been saying for years that people who waste their time looking for Noah's Ark, The Ark of the Covenant, or external verification of anything in the Bible, have a very weak faith.This is *one* reason why I don't consider Ray or Buz to be Christians, apart from oozing hatred from every pore, they have no faith.,

The dodge is all yours and all the other ToEs at this forum. Science can delve into the the "what" of life forms that existed millions of years in the past, but science can never determine the "how" they came to be. This is what ToEs attempt to do by all the evidence they put forth as evidenciary proof, while discounting any explanation creationists put forth as to why ID is the only reason why any life exists.While maintaining the possibility that "God gaps" could explain the transitional fossils, the rest of your arguments put forth skeptism that you don't want there to be a God and universe like that.

You'll have to be the first example, John. You haven't even attempted to supply any evidence for ID here.You have 12 hours to think about what such evidence might look like or search the web for some.There has been enough discussion about staying on topic. You didn't, you're taking a break.

My dear fellow, the title for this thread is "Evidence for Intelligent Designer - Is There Any?", not "Let's All Whine Incoherently About Evolution".If you don't have any evidence for ID, a simple "no" will suffice.Mutate and Survive

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"The Bible is like a person, and if you torture it long enough, you can get it to say almost anything you'd like it to say." -- Rev. Dr. Francis H. Wade

quote:

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This absence of historical or experimental confirmation is presumably what Gould had in mind when he wrote that "These tales, in the just-so tradition of evolutionary natural history, do not prove anything." So is this science?

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You sure this is Gould? This sounds more like Phillip E. Johnson, since his entire book "Darwin on Trial" centered around this point.Yes, a good deal of evolution involves the crafting of hypothetical situations, especially in the step-by-step construction of transitional forms. And this is exactly what good science does!Remember that much of evolutionary biology is a lot like forensic or historical science... you study phenomena as they are now, then extrapolate backwards to reconstruct what happened before. Forensic scientists, for example, know how blood spatters in different situations and what kind of marks knives leave when they enter and exit a body, and as a result with enough data they can reconstruct a crime scene with stunning accuracy.Evolutionary biologists, on the other hand, study how organs like wings and ears and the like work across many different species, and as a result can construct coherent maps of how organs must've transitioned.Evolutionary biology is therefore based on just as much empirical evidence (if not more, given how many different species they study) as history or forensics... it's much more than a "just-so story" as Johnson likes to claim.

Since, Bob, this is also not on topic I'm going to have to suspend you too. You're newer and haven't had this harped on so much. 6 hours for you.

Good one -soon I'll let you know unless you'd like to start it?

Yes it was Gould.He doubted a lot of his colleagues' imaginative stories -but somehow, inexplicably he didn't give up on evolution despite this and his comments on things like sudden appearance and stasis in the fossil record. The problem with this is that if you're going to craft a hypothetical situation and you have no alternatives to consider, your crafting wins in the absence of competition. It's like deciding between three different suspects in a murder case. You have to have something to check your theories against. Could it have been this one or does he have an alibi; maybe the next one, any reason why not? -but not with evolution, its just a matter of which just-so evolutionary tale do we accept?There is no other option that they are willing to consider -so as far as forensics goes, it's pretty easy for evolution to win every time. The problem with this is that there is the initial philisophical assumption that these things are related via a common ancestor that clouds any clarity of vision on the topic.
Homology is supposed to explain the formation of the gut in vertebrates but if it were true, the gut should form pretty much the same way embryonically but they so often don't -instead they often form from totally different genes in different parts of the embryo defying the logic of relatedness.
So there, how about that for evidence of ID -homologous features in apparently evolutionarily related creatures have no embryological developmental connection whatsoever, so ID is a better explanation. You may say that is evidence against evolution but it certainly is evidence for separate creation of different kinds of biological creatures. There we go -constructing just-so stories on the assumption that organs have transitioned -philisophical bias there.Has not been proven -no mechanism for it. Dead bones -no date attached, no-one was there -can't prove that any one of those fossils is related to any other(unless you can catch them fossilized while giving birth.)Forensics is just not quite the same as things like gravity.

The coded information in DNA is evidence for an intelligent designer
-specified complexity.Now you tell me why it is better as evidence for evolution or why an intelligent designer is not allowed as an alternative explanation.

Oh dear. That's not evidence of anything now is it? That's just a bare assertion, only a sentence long.What coded information exactly?Why is it evidence for a designer exactly?Precisely how does it show specified complexity?If you are not going to present answers to these kinds of question, and just make bare assertions, I need do little more than just respond with a bare "No it isn't".The real problem here is that SC is merely another negative argument. It claims to prove that evolution cannot be responsible for complexity, but, even if we accept Dembski's dodgy maths, we have only his word for it that intelligence is the best alternative explanation. Why must SC be the result of intelligence? Why could there not be other explanations? Dembski simply asserts that SC must be the product of intelligence, he never demonstrates that this central tenet of SC is actually true.Further, Dembski's calculations on the bacterial flagellum are entirely dependent on Irreducible Complexity, since they use that as their model. IC is itself a negative argument along the lines of "I can't imagine how this could possibly evolve, therefore it can't have evolved.", a pretty clearly fallacious line of argument. It is merely more evo-bashing, in the hope that God, sorry, the Intelligent Designer, will sneak in as the default explanation. That's not how science works.Specified Complexity is based on bad maths, bad logic and bad theory. It makes no predictions and explains nothing.It's also worth mentioning here that if you are arguing that DNA displays specified complexity, you are essentially arguing against micro-evolution, which I thought you accepted. We can observe micro-organisms evolving specified and complex traits in the lab (here is a recent example concerning citrate metabolising bacteria evolving under lab conditions) and at no point does the hand of God appear and magic the mutations into place. Claiming that an invisible intelligent agent is manipulating such mutations from behind the scenes adds precisely nothing to our understanding of what is happening.Occam's Razor keeps such entities out of the lab and rightly so.

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"The Bible is like a person, and if you torture it long enough, you can get it to say almost anything you'd like it to say." -- Rev. Dr. Francis H. Wade

Beretta Intelligent Design theory has never led to a single discovery. Ever.Why is this in your opinion?

Well at least this is honest. Finally we have somebody who is prepared to admit that ID exists solely to prop up a deep emotional need.