Methodological Naturalism

Exactly how does that address the point in your favour?"To my mind, the main issue in design is a vision of the completed product." So in artificial selection there is design going on since there is a completed vision, more or less in the case of dogs? However, we see in natural selection that there is nothing moving to any "vision" it is simply what works now.However, it may be useful to distinguish between architecture and design. The vision you speak of is more architecture as is the vision of the completed scupture. However, design is the detailed implementation, within the limits of the available resources, to realize the vision. Thus the distinction between architecture and engineering.In neither the artificial or the natural selection case is any design (implementation to meet a vision) supplied by any intelligence.In one case we see an intelligence supplying a vision to select against in the other we see selection happening through natural processes. The artificial selection "experiment" demonstrates the power of inherited changes to supply potentially acceptable designs. The selection part is seaparate.

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Common sense isn't

Generally, all but your last paragraph explains things, as I understand them, reasonably well. It might be that a strict "uphill" in the adaptive landscape could be contradicted slightly since only some genetic changes are expressed in the phenotype. The possibility of changes accumulating might allow a sort of "leap" over some parts of the landscape.However, in general, the adaptive landscape and ESS ideas make sense to me. And if we examine the nature of living things we see odd forms that are what you might expect under such conditions. Oh, the Bible is an document about evolutionary theory is it? Could you site chapter and verse about the changes in living forms taking place in babysteps?You have evidence for being "carried by the Lord"? You were doing so well, then you went off a some silly spin to try and make the Bible something it is not.

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Common sense isn't

ROFL!!!

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Common sense isn't

LOL - laughing out loud
ROFL - rolling on the floor laughing

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Common sense isn't

A skeptic.

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Common sense isn't

I'm not talking about the religious form of sceptic. (but that is just a subset of what I am)I'd say that it puts me in very good company indeed.Everyone is, to some degree, a sceptic. You aren't going to tell me that the right approach is to believe everything are you?We all have to have some sort of filters and what we believe easily, what takes a bit of evidence and logic and what we will only believe after being dragged to it kicking and screaming.The question is what filters does one use? How well does one use them? How reliable have the results been for that person in the past?

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Common sense isn't

Yes of course they do.That is why we have to be very careful trusting individual humans. That is why the process of science is set up to try to minimize the opportunities for individual bias's and limitations to mess with the results.Eventually the evidence won out. Maybe, in the worst cases, with the death of those unable to change their minds, but eventually this proved to be exactly why the scientific process has been so very powerful and worked so well. Even in the face of damm fools!

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Common sense isn't