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Fair enough, but you have come to the conclusion that design in this case has been driven by random chance and natural selection. I have come to the conclusion that design came about by an external designer. I suggest that either decision is a rational one and we have just come to different conclusions.
But what is your conclusion based upon? What rationale? What evidence?
If it is not based upon any, or the logic requires any unsupported assumptions, then it is not a rational belief.
For example, what evidence do you have of external design of natural phenomena?
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What is the firm basis of evidence for the naturalist explanation?
Well, how about over 200 years of experimentation and repetition of observations and 200 years of borne out predictions of future events based upon past events?
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Accepting random chance and natural selection that has no metaphysical interference is just as much a gut feeling as is believing that there is metaphysical interference in the evolutionary process.
No, it doesn't.
There is no reason to infer metaphysical interference since there is no evidence of it.
To claim that there is or was supernatural interference is to make a rather enormous unwarranted unsupported assumption that has exactly zero predictive value.
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Science can only determine what has happened. It cannot empirically test why it happened or what precipitated it.
Nonsense. Science is precisely the business of testing predictions.
It is through the repeated testing the implications of theory that we learn anything at all in science.
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What it was that caused those mutations to occur in the manner that they did is a mystery no matter how you look at it.
Actually, we do understand many mechanisms of mutation.
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As I said earlier that I believe that the finely balanced design in the natural world is evidence.
Exactly what kind of design do you consider to be "finely balanced"?
Please be specific with your examples.
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Our consciousness and our code of conduct are evidences.
Why? Why couldn't these things have been selected for without the supernatural?
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The Bible is evidence.
Why couldn't the bible have been written only by men, just as the thousands of other religious books ever to have been written?
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Out of body experiences are evidence.
Out of body experiences are due to oxygen starvation of the brain and have been induced with certain chemicals.
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Self-awareness is evidence.
Several of our primate relatives are self-aware, as are dolphins. It seems that social creatures with large brains have the capacity for self-awareness. Why is this evidence of the supernatural?
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None of this can be tested in a lab but I do believe that there is truth that exists outside of science.
None of it can be tested
at all. It is pure personal, irrational belief.
Which is fine. But it ain't
proof in any way, shape, or form.
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You look at the evidence and come to a completely different conclusion than I do, but it is still evidence.
But not all conclusions are warranted, or correct.
Your conclusions are not based upon evidence, they are based upon faith.
Which is fine, but there's absolutely not explanitory power to "I want to believe this about the evidence because I want to."
If someone concluded that the reason the sun travels across the sky is because Apollo pulls it in his firey chariot, and another person concluded that the sun appears to ravel across the sky because of the Earth's orbit around the sun, would you consider the first person's explanation to be equally valid simply because she said that "The evidence is the same, we've just come to different conclusions."?
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