Show me the intelligence ...

Maybe, maybe, TruthDetector. But this is one of many, many, many facts that have to be understood in one grand whole. Current biology handles it very well, physics and geology tie in properly.The maybe, maybe, God did this or that explanation has only one end point: God is deliberate deceiver! Is that where you want to take this? This is one teensy, tiny little piece of the jigsaw puzzle. You have to be able to explain them all. And as you get pressed you end up with "God fools us by making all these things look this way".You've assumed a flood in a young earth with some sort of giant hyper fast evolution but one which has some magic invisible limit built in that no one can find. However, each of these, has at best no evidence at all and mostly is shown to be false by lots of good evidence.Look over all the old threads here. You have to handle at least a reasonable number of them if you want to actually claim to have any kind of reasonable answer. Look where they go. In the majority of cases the young-earth, flooders give up and disappear. Is that your fate? Or will you be able to begin to detect some truth different from what you first thought?

That's the problem -- 'we assume'.If no one can come up with something about
the pocket watch that suggests intelligent
input, what hope to we have for anything else?A snow-flake doesn't reproduce either does that
have an intelligent input? Why/why not?

Actually, no. You answered the question out of context. The question was in reply to TruthDetector's

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Stop using 'flaws' in God's creations as an argument against him when he himself said, it was good.

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So the question was: in the context of God's "good" design, what's good about having external testicles? Sure, given that sperm might need to be kept cool, having them outside might make sense. But it was (allegedly) God himself who designed sperm in the first place! What's good about a system which leads to other problems? Having testes that need to be kept cool is not good design.TTFN, DT

Life in itself is good, there are flaws, which keeps things from being perfect, life is still GOOD. I think MOST people would at least agree with me on that.

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Life in itself is good, there are flaws, which keeps things from being perfect, life is still GOOD. I think MOST people would at least agree with me on that.

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I agree with that. Can you agree that if natural selection were in fact guiding the evolution of species that we would expect designs that were GOOD ENOUGH? In agreeing with the previous statement, you are not agreeing that evolution in fact happens or happened in the past, but rather that designs that are good enough would be the most probable outcome of evolution.I am just trying to point out that if we lower the bar for intelligent design to GOOD instead of PERFECT it may be indistinguishable from evolutionary processes.

It might Mouth but consider this paragraphy from John Maynard Smith in a chapter immediately after Gould's on if there is or is not a new emerging evolution theory with the note that Gould thought Smith vs Goodwin was the same perhaps as Fisher vs Wright AND Paly vs Aggasiz from the book BUT IS IT SCIENCE THE PHILOSOPHICAL QUESTION IN THE CREATION/EVOLUTION CONTROVERSY for I for one am not completely sure how to read the questions for an answer at Smith's title "Did Darwin Get It Right?" onto page 198 said, "The question of stasis and punctuation will be settled by a stastistical analysis of the fossil record. But what of the wider issues? Is mutation plus natural selection within populations sufficient to explain evolution on a large scale, or must new mechanisms be proposed?" I hope this helps. Best Brad.

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. . . I for one am not completely sure how to read the questions for an answer at Smith's title "Did Darwin Get It Right?" onto page 198 said, "The question of stasis and punctuation will be settled by a stastistical analysis of the fossil record. But what of the wider issues? Is mutation plus natural selection within populations sufficient to explain evolution on a large scale, or must new mechanisms be proposed?" I hope this helps. Best Brad.

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Let me see if I can get this across succinctly (I have a hard time even explaining it to myself). Darwin could be right even if mutation does not answer all the questions and other mechanisms are needed. That is, Darwin's main push was that organisms varied within species and the individuals that best fit their environment are better able to pass on those traits. So for Darwinism, you need selection and the passing on of traits. Secondly, you need a way to create the diversity within species, but mutation never is mentioned specifically because the importance of DNA had yet to be discovered. So, there could be a situation where certain traits are passed on (such as memes, possibly?) that are not controlled by DNA and therefore not affected by mutation. It is the Neo-Darwinian view that relies upon changes in the DNA sequence for the mill grist. However, natural selection is needed in both theories.What design puts forth is the possibility that there could be other forces at work without putting forth a mechanism. Some claim that there are sequences that are predestined to mutate in a very precies way in order to express a certain phenotype given the right conditions. I think it is the random nature of mutation that has to be investigated if both theories are going to be tested on even footing. So far, randomness can be seen (although there are exceptions) and to my knowledge there are no genes that have been shown to be pre-destined for precise mutations that would evidence forsight when encountering new environments. In fact, the literature seems to strongly support that random, inserted sequences can randomly mutate, and through selection, confer higher fitness.What it boils down to for me is that the ID inference with respect to random/non-random mutations is interesting, but is not supported at all.

You appear to be saying that there is nothing inherent
in a watch (a known intelligent design) that could lead one
to conclude that an intelligence was involved -- apart
from already knowing that to be the case.Is that a correct understanding of your opinion?

Whether the 'designs' are 'good' or not has no bearing on
my original question.There are plenty of human designs that are flawed, some
fatally so -- if that were not the case there would not be
increasing interest in various forms of safety analysis,
and structured design approaches.Many human designs are 'poor', but there is still an intelligent
input.The perceived quality of the object/system in question is
in no way connected to the intelligent input to the 'design'.If natural selection does indeed drive evolution (along with
isoaltion etc. etc.) then one can have designs that had no
intelligent input -- how do we determine the intelligent input?

As I said in message 10 our knowledge of manufactured artifacts would be sufficient to quickly recognise a watch as having been manufacured and therefore designed.What I said in message 12 is that any intelligence that lacked the knowledge necessary to follow that line of thinking is sufficiently alien that I cannot say what it would conclude about a watch or on what basis.

I'll even GIVE you THE (a) mechanism!! It's constuction will depend (if it can be done) on NOT getting over creationism as one may or would like to get over Lamarkianism... I have a paragraph but it will probably confuse as so instead I will just ASSUME MY athority. The opposition would be Wolfram Science which asserts that there is not physics here. I will hang my shingle that there IS. At worst I will have to explain why I DONT think like the web experience design expert Jackob Neilsen when he described "creation vs evolution" design but this is as much then a matter of presentation and not architecture and we have here people who have gotten past this issue SO I will assume and any frog should and can challenge me if they like...I was so suprised to find this answer. Faraday illustrates a device in his sixteeth series "On the Source of Power in the Voltaic Pile" in Figure 2 PLATE XII which I will interpret to OPEN up some debate about intelligent design where Daniel Dennet accuses in revealing Chomsky's cell the bald calim that Edleman did not know what a computer was. The striking thing that I recovered was that it is not necessary historically to need to be concerened with the comparison of the frog leg motion and the Leyden jar gold foil electric charge dynamics and I will use this lack not the idea of GOD to motivate the claim which can only get more involved as we know or learn to know more nanotechnology. I'll go thru the names if you like but for personal reasons you can know that I was influenced by Penrose early on but the Faraday equipment I will interpret changes that and hence enables me to comment. The ONLY thing I add is Wey's notion of two different kinds of 1-D symmetry. The assertion of design will be that this device as used by Faraday to argue against VOLTA IS an image (not a mere analogy between a frog leg and a condensor or leyden jar as it was)of a MECHANISM that Gould DID NOT find punc eq to detail.The design mechanics are ON a theory about all forms of rapidity on any scale or level in biology and the kinematics form form ahead of function which is a newer way to think than has been historically the case so far in this subject of the value of any creationism. Creationism in its current form may loose and some may be vindicated but it will no longer be possible to assert that it can not help benefit all of science. I can be wrong only if Ameisen's biological "
weapon" concept is correct as well as his notion of a coupled evolutionary arms race and orginal sin which I will attempt to use this stucuture of form ahead of structure to show that these are merely wrongful comparisions of Lamarkianism willed creationism.The device has the space between fluids in my current understanding as either the baramin seperation or evolutionary topobiology but that selfish notion can be divided by the gene will be available. I know I am rushing thru all of this. More details later. The interpretation merely requires that one consider Faraday's a,b and x as locations of DNA, RNA and protein and the effected of signed 1-D symmetry appearing at these places in the organic equivalent.Faraday found that with only a small change in temperature a current would flow and it will be my carrer to show that Tetrahymena macronuclear digestion with survival of the cell though today spelling a "trait" of an 'excutioner' is a recycled genetic information instead. At least I will be able to support Newton's absolute space time and force here and so get ID ALSO as the relgious part.The error in thought will be that one tries to THINK of biology and phsyics as both different and the same. Wrong. Just consider the device and the mecanics will be the difference of apotosis between plants and animals if I am correct to the letter, give or take a word.Ok I know this is incomprehensible but I know how I see. I will describe it better later.

So that's a 'Yes' then.We cannot determine that an intelligence was involved,
we can only know that to be the case.So we cannot know (one way or the other) whether intelligence
was involved in biological system design.Doesn't that leave ID high and dry unless that question is
satisfactorily answered?Evolutionary theory proposes mechanisms that would not require
intelligent input, and supports those with evidence.ID theory proposes intelligent intervention, but can have no
evidence to support that contention.

Well strictly speaking it's a "no" - since I do not require the direct knowledge that the watch is designed.But in general you are right - we do not have a general design detection mechanism. All Dembski could manage was the exclusion of all other possibilities.ID either has to produce a workable method or start producing specific design hypotheses which deal with the nature and purpose of the alleged designer (which they won't do for political reasons).

Not considering design at all at the moment, only
the identification of an intelligent input into the
design.

Well that's the problem isn't it - so far the best ID has come up with is eliminating alternative explanations.Now if we have some idea of the capabilities and intentions of a possible designer we can use those to make predictions as to what we expect to see - the current SETI effort made assumptions about possible designers to decide what to look for. The ID movement likes to compare itself to SETI but they won't do that.