A Designer Consistent with the Physical Evidence

It's even more insane than that. To explain the nested hierarchies, the designers must have been working in committees or with subcontractors.The vertebrate committee designed the basic vertebrate design, then broke up into the fish subcommittee, the reptile subcommittee, and the mammal subcommittee.The mammal subcommittee designed the basic mammal plan, then subcontracted out whales to one group, bats to another, primates to still another, and so on.The bat guys were intrigued by one of the reptile group's bird designs and so tried to make their own, but were constrained by the overall mammal design that they had to work with.I do agree, though, that common features do not imply a common designer -- the pattern of similarities seems to imply a nested hierarchy of committees of designers.Maybe that's what Genesis meant when God said, "let us make humans in our image?"

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Speaking personally, I find few things more awesome than contemplating this vast and majestic process of evolution, the ebb and flow of successive biotas through geological time. Creationists and others who cannot for ideological or religious reasons accept the fact of evolution miss out a great deal, and are left with a claustrophobic little universe in which nothing happens and nothing changes.
-- M. Alan Kazlev

Heh. That is another problem with the "common design indicates a common designer" that IDistas try to pass off as a cogent argument.In explaining why a common designer would resuse common designs over and over again, they almost always make a comparison with human engineers. Well, the reason that human engineers reuse designs is because they have limitations on budget and on their ability to think of new designs. So, in essence, the "common design indicates a common designer" folks are admitting that their creator is neither omnipotent nor omniscient.

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To count as an atheist, one needn't claim to have proof that there are no gods. One only needs to believe that the evidence on the god question is in a similar state to the evidence on the werewolf question. -- John McCarthy