Lack of Defining Features of Intelligent Design

A mystery? Meaning we can't figure out the physical laws governing the phenomenon? Or meaning there are some details of the phenomenon we haven't figured out? Whichever the case, sure, there are plenty of scientific mysteries. Since we're never going to know everything, there will always be things we do not know, and if you want to call them mysteries then be my guest.But it also sounds as if you're saying that any phenomenon science cannot duplicate is a mystery, and that's clearly not true. There are many natural phenomena we can't duplicate that are nonetheless well understood, controlled fusion being one. But biology doesn't stop at the explanation that "the genome does it." Open any biology textbook and you can read about messenger RNA and amino acid encoding and protein construction and so forth. We understand a good deal of the process to a very fine level of detail, and we learn more all the time, as reflected in the wealth of new technical literature published every month. When science looks at growth and development it only finds extremely complex chemistry. Where, specifically, do you see intelligence and purpose during this process? Typically when an intelligence, such as ourselves, carries out some action, anyone watching can see us do it. If there is some intelligence acting during cell division or growth it isn't visible under any microscope. Creativity? When someone gets a cut or fights off a cold, their body does it the exact same way the bodies of their long-ago ancestors did it. There's no evidence that their body is creatively exploring new solutions to either cuts or colds. You mean like lizards growing a new tail? That's replacing a body part, not growing a new body part that didn't exist before.You're describing normal everyday things as if they were evidence of an intelligence and purpose, but when we examine it it just looks like complex chemistry, and at a lower level of detail it's just physics. If there's some intelligence at work then it's indistinguishable from natural physical processes. This is incorrect. Its difficult to tell precisely what your epigenetic claim is, but adaptations acquired during an organism's lifetime never become incorporated into the genome and passed on to offspring. It hasn't been detected in living systems, either. You seem to be making some kind of Lamarckian claim, something which was known to be wrong long ago, even before Darwin. Unlike your own claims, there are mountains of evidence for the role natural selection plays in evolution. I not only don't find the evidence compelling, I don't even see any evidence. Sounds like Jesus preaching for science: all you need is love and tolerance and you can be a "perfectly competent biologist." But science is actually a journey of discovery of the nature of the real world through a process of experiment, observation, analysis, replication and theorizing. If you have evidence from the real world for your views then you can go ahead and make the scientific case, but without evidence, which seems to be your situation, scientifically you're lost.--Percy

Hi Elhardt,About accusations of hypocrisy, you can cast ad hominem at people with different views from your own, but this tends to cause discussion to deteriorate into name calling, and so we discourage such practices here. You might want to give the Forum Guidelines a look, particularly the last one intended to promote civil exchanges. When a paleontologist digs through the dirt and finds a rock flake, he calls an anthropologist. Anthropologists do not seek signs of intelligent design but of human activity, because we know humans craft stones into tools. And zoologists know birds build nests. SETI is looking for narrow bandwidth radio signals, because our understanding of natural processes indicates that nature can only create wide bandwidth signals, and so a narrow bandwidth signal would be an indication of intelligent intervention.The problem for ID, if we're talking about ID a la Behe, is that all his claimed intelligently designed microbiological structures, from the bacterial flagellum to blood coagulation, can be created through natural processes.So even though your above analogies to anthropologists, zoologists and SETI were flawed, it is nonetheless instructive to note that the anthropologist knows of no natural processes that could create an arrow head, the zoologist knows of no natural processes that could create a bird's nest, and SETI knows of no natural processes that could create a narrow band radio signal, but we do know of natural processes that can create bacterial flagellums and blood coagulation.--Percy