Nature belongs to ID

And nature also incorporates phenomena such as mutation, recombination, natural selection, sexual selection, lateral gene transfer, etc. These are natural. Supernatural things are not natural. God doing magic is not natural, natural selection is. Hence the name.Now, in the scientific method, when one has a theory based on known mechanisms that explains the phenomena, and the only alternate hypothesis is magical, then you (provisionally) conclude that the theory is correct. When you're reduced to saying: "Either the patient has measles, or invisible fairies are painting spots on his skin with tiny invisible brushes, ahahahaha", this is as much to say --- the patient has measles.Edited by Dr Adequate, : No reason given.

No, nor is it their biggest. The failure of ID is not down to its lack of spin, but to its lack of substance. When I'm reading their worthless arguments, I don't think: "They may have compounded gross factual errors with gormless errors of reasoning, but if only they hadn't described evolutionary biology as Naturalism I'd find their argument perfectly convincing."

I agree with Percy and NoNukes. Vanessa would have to be a whole lot more wrong than she appears to be about what she means when she calls mutations "unguided" before your statement would be less misleading.In normal English, one would not even say that raindrops were "guided" downwards, even though they are obeying the law of gravity. That would imply an intelligent agency.

And yet no-one ever does claim that, which should tell you something. But as that is not what everyone else means by "accident", perhaps you should choose your words more carefully.An accident is only possible when there is an intention and a plan, and events turn out contrary to the intention and the plan. If I fall off a cliff, that's an accident, because I had the intention not to do so. If scree falls off a cliff as a result of mass wasting, that isn't an accident, because there was no intention on the part of the scree, or the cliff, or the force of gravity, that it should stay up.Really, do you say (for example) that raindrops fall down rather than up "by fortuitous accident", just because no-one is guiding them down?Edited by Dr Adequate, : No reason given.

One side does so in terms of natural processes that we can observe, and the other does so in terms of supernatural miraculous processes that we have never seen.You are not going to change the significance of this fact by playing about with the meaning of the word "naturalism" or by playing about with the occasions on which you and your creationist pals wish to apply it.

You seem not to have grasped my point.Obviously, scientists do not claim to have observed the evolution of (for example) a giraffe from some more basal chordate such as (for example) Pikaia.However, they do claim that they have observed the processes by which this evolution occurred: they attribute this evolution to well-known natural processes such as reproduction, mutation, and natural selection --- natural processes that they can see happening.Meanwhile, creationists ascribe the existence of giraffes to a supernatural process that no-one has ever seen.Scientists attribute the diversity of life to natural processes that they have seen. Creationists attribute the diversity of life to a supernatural process that no-one has seen. Scientists are sticking to nature and the observable facts; creationists are appealing to the supernatural and to processes that no-one has witnessed.So if you wanted to use the ambiguous and misleading term "naturalistic" to describe one of these two views, then it would much better describe the scientists than the creationists. A less ambiguous way of putting it would be that the scientists are being scientific and the creationists are not. What exactly are you advocating, then? Front-loaded evolution, perhaps?

But that is absolutely not what the P.E. people are saying.What they claim is that speciation is rapid (mere tens of thousands of years) when compared with the periods of stasis. If you told them that they were talking about "a great leap forwards in complexity and diversity" they would call you a liar and throw rocks at you.I don't know how to say this nicely, so I'll just say it. You're a sucker. Instead of reading what the advocates of P.E. actually think, in their own words, you've swallowed the lies of creationist propagandists about what the P.E. advocates think. And then you've come here to discuss that, instead. Rather than quoting what Stephen Gould says or what Niles Eldredge says, you're talking about what a bunch of creationist liars and halfwits say that they say. Dear Lord, give me the strength to carry on.OK, I'm done praying, I'll go back to sarcasm. You have such an enormous knowledge of the Cambrian Explosion that you can use your immense knowledge of this subject to prove that biologists are all wrong about biology, the subject that they know about and you don't. So please tell us, in your own words, what the C.E. actually was.

You appear to have composed your post by taking an introduction to evolution, cutting it into separate words with scissors, and then drawing them blindfold out of a hat. The consequence is that while the words may sound very science-y, the sentences themselves are meaningless.Edited by Dr Adequate, : No reason given.

Good. I hope you weren't trying to say anything remotely accurate either. Wishful thinking is a wonderful thing, isn't it? What a curious fantasy.

If humility involved agreeing with sentences beginning with the words: "While there are random adapative changes resulting from natural selection ..." it would not be a virtue.But it does not. Myself, I think that humility, amongst other things, involves finding out what you're talking about before you talk about it, and that arrogance is betrayed by the assumption of knowledge which you have not in fact labored to achieve. If you think it's the other way round, then I suppose we are two very different people.

Yes, well, anyone who views evolution as simple process involving (a) the origin of life (b) a few chemicals in a Petri dish clearly needs their head examining, and their dictionary, since that is not what the word "evolution" means.

Current theory (which you fail to properly identify in your post) states that reproduction is the method by which new organisms are produced. Like saying new computer programs are produced by existing programs having sex - like saying my media player will one day give birth to a media player.This comparison shows how silly it is to say that organisms reproduce --- because if the immaculate intellectual structure that is creation science has taught us anything, it's that analogies are always perfect, and that consequently everything is exactly like everything else. That's not an assumption, that's calling it how we see it. And another for the evolution of jazz from ragtime. This will not stand!Different things do have different reasons. Well, no. No they didn't. Your allusion to Galileo I do not understand at all; as for Einstein, he wished to (and failed to) unify various physical fields; but he did not try to unify all things, giving one single explanation for gravity, aardvarks, and spaghetti.

No, you reject it. Refuting it would take actual work. So you know of a better idea, but you won't tell us what it is? Well, it's the only one we know. No it isn't.We have a theory that works perfectly. We don't know of any alternative that works at all. We say so. This is not arrogant, it is merely factual. Now, I would not go so far as to say that it is the only possible explanation, but it is certainly the only extant explanation. (Note that an explanation that exists only in your head which you won't tell anyone about doesn't really count, because no-one else knows what it is.)