Somebody (Dennis Prager?) said that when he hears someone sprouting a blatantly ridiculous claim as fact, he asks them where they got their Ph.D.

I imagine some other argument where the entrenched mindset tries to argue that a massive object may not actually have gravity, but just exhibit what appears to us to be the effects of gravity, and that there’s no way to determine if distant objects are behaving because of gravity because gravity itself cannot be seen or known to exist.

When you can’t even admit intelligence exist and humans use design detection in all sorts of endeavors, and you cannot even admit that SETI is the Search for Extra-Terrestrial INTELLIGENCE, there’s simply no hope for a reasoned discussion.

I’m seeing more and more that the materialists have abandoned reason.

Is there? And this “engineering” takes place without intelligent intervention? Where exactly can I find this non-intelligent engineering of current life forms?

And, how can I make the suggestion that you propose be made? On what grounds? How exactly can I propose that intelligent intervention of current life forms equates with random processes in the distant past? Exactly how does that work?

Yet, if I do make such a claim, am I not supporting intelligent intervention given that it is, without question, the ultimate basis of the analogy you propose?

No, when someone, especially someone who claims to have advanced training in science, spouts gibberish like that on display in [63] and [64], things have gone terribly awry. You apparently do not have enough sense to be embarrassed to write such flapdoodle, so the rest of us will be embarrassed for you.

I’d written this and my previous comment as one before seeing your instruction to post no more in this thread. (I broke the long comment for readability.) Please let the two through in fairness, and I’ll post no more to the thread.

“We have a proven mechanism.”

Proven? It’s proven that intelligence causes people to emit intelligent behaviors? And that thirst causes people to emit thirst stuff? And that hunger causes people to emit hunger behaviors? And that life causes organisms to engage in living? Perhaps you’re not engaged in vitalism, but you seem to be treading perilously close.

“We don’t have a photograph of the mechanism acting millions or billions of years ago but they don’t either so we’re equally impaired on that point.”

Evolutionary biologists say that the “mechanisms” of the past are operating in the present, though under different conditions. Their science is not purely historical, and it does not appeal to analogy. There is in fact engineering of life forms in the present, but you can at best suggest that analogous, not identical, engineering processes occurred in the past, and you can in no case provide empirical observations of intelligence itself.

The “design inference” of intelligent causation would not be an inference if the intelligence could be directly observed. The present “ground rules” of science permit inference of relations on empirically observable phenomena only, not inference to an unobserved cause. Have you not understood the design inference as a proposed extension of inference in science?

Calling an agent intelligent because of its empirically observed behaviors and saying that intelligence is a cause of its behaviors are two very different things. I have said that intelligence-as-cause, not behavior distinguished as intelligent, is unobservable.

By the way, even SETI scientist do not suggest that anomalous signals might be caused by intelligence, but that they might come from material entities behaving in a manner we consider intelligent.

We all make similar verbal reports of the experience of thirst. We know that certain of our behaviors are associated with the experience of thirst. We can guess from certain nonverbal behaviors that a person will report thirst if asked about it. We believe that we detect thirst in the behavior of our pets. But who ever observed thirst empirically? No doubt, there are empirically observable physiological states associated with certain empirically observable behaviors, but you can’t cut a person open and find thirst. My point is that we have many constructs derived from apparently shared subjective experience, but that many of these constructs do not, and will never, correspond to empirical observations.

“And who says the observation that intelligent agents can tinker around with heritable information in living things for their own purposes is not an empirical observation?”

Again, what is empirically observable is the behavior of the agents. It appears that you assume that your introspection of your own tinkering supplies empirical data.

“I’d say we have the better hand when it comes to empirical data.”

And this means that you and I are not in a particularly meaningful conversation. When you, with experience in engineering, and I with advanced training in science, cannot agree on what constitutes empirical data, things have gone terribly awry.

Given you’re referring to Dembski’s rigorous treatement of specified complexity then the only attempt to apply it to a biological structure that I know of is by Dembski himself in the book “No Free Lunch”.

Personally I prefer Leslie Orgel’s definition of specified complexity in “The Origins of Life”.

I don’t believe it’s possible to mathematically demonstrate Dembski’s specified complexity in living things because there can be never be a completely exhausted search of probabilistic resources. There might always exist some “natural” mechanism (read resource) that we simply don’t know about because it hasn’t yet been discovered or was overlooked or is intractible.

So I prefer to use Orgel’s looser definition and then argue using empirical evidence (which is science instead of math) that it has been demonstrated by experiment that intelligent agents (ourselves) can create biological specified complexity de novo while it has not been demonstrated by experiment or observation that any other mechanism has that same capacity. Thus intelligent design is the best (and currently only) demonstrated means of generating biological specified complexity.

To exclude the only demonstrated means of acheiving specified complexity from any educational material talking about the origin of novel biological structures, while teaching an unproven mechanism as a proven fact, is simply not an acceptable situation.

It doesn’t appear you want any constructive dialog but rather just came here to disrupt this thread with your preconceived beliefs. You’ve had your say and I want other people to get a chance to have theirs. Zip it in this one.

Uh huh. Who died and made their insistence an obligatory command that everyone must follow?

That would be Jesus, who said, in John 14:6 “No one approaches the Father, but through me.”