Evolution presents modern man as an improving animal.

Actually, no. No improvement at all. Just an animal. Just different, is all. Can’t let man get too different. Numerous differences, to be sure. But not so different as to be all that different from an animal. If that makes any sense.

The idea that God direct evolution (theistic evolution) in order to produce man is also incompatible with what the Bible states about God’s personality and qualities. If God guided the process of evolution, it would mean that He guided man into its present diseased and distressed state. However, the Bible describes God as being perfectly just (Deut. 32:4,5). Mankind’s present suffering is not the result of God-directed evolution.

One of the basic teachings of Christianity is that Christ died for our sins (1 Cor. 15:3). The Bible clearly states that Christ paid the price for Adamic sin (Rom. 6:23). If we doubt the biblical statement that “in Adam all are dying” then how can we hope that “in the Christ all will be made alive”?

- I am not sure what this ‘trail’ is that you would expect from natural evolution. There are two very important trails that show that life on this planet evolved over time, the fossil record and the molecular phylogenies.

How gradual the gradual buildup of information would have to be is an open question. Exactly how fast the observed changes happened has not been determined, I think. What is certain is that the fossil record is a very coarse sampling of the long sequence of generations that have lived on earth. Even ‘abrupt’ appearance of new species was not necessarily abrupt at all in biological time, and may well have taken place over many, many generations of organisms.

We know that most of the differences between ‘less complex’ and ‘more complex’ biological organisms are caused by differences in their genome. There are many known natural mechanisms that modify genomes, and if some of these modifications result in changes that have benefits in real life, it is not hard to see why such changes become fixed in the population.

How does you saying that no observation of increased information has been observed match with Cornelius Hunter’s post, some pages down, describing the appearance of de-novo genes? Why wouldn’t that count as increased information?

fg

You still do not understand the debate. When I say that quantum events would be consistent with ID, I am not saying that is how it happened. I am just saying that if an intelligence did decide to do it that way, then ID would have no problem. And in fact that could have been the way it happened.

What ID says is that there no evidence that it could happen naturally. That is a huge difference. If it happened naturally then it would leave a trail and no such trail exists. Quantum events directed by an intelligence would not leave a trail. Quantum events not directed by an intelligence would leave a trail. Naturalistic non quantum processes would leave a trail.

The issue is that there is no trail. Just what you would expect from an intelligence working on evolution. It all happens suddenly through no known natural process. Just as you type at the keyboard. All naturalistic processes, quantum or otherwise would leave a trail. That is why ID and a lot of science are different. A lot of science, not all, is based on trails and repeatable events. An intelligence is neither. just as your comments are all unique and will generally not be repeated or if they are repeated they will not be repeated in any specific pattern that is on going as would be by natural laws. Intelligence over rides natural laws and that is what we observe in macro evolution. In micro evolution natural laws operate but they operate on an intelligent system built to take advantage of natural laws.

Think of it as like a garden with a gardener. The gardener, plants, weeds, fertilizes but in general lets natural laws do most of the work under his initial and boundary conditions and his occasional intervention. The initial conditions are the seeds, the ground, etc. The boundary conditions are the extent of the fertile area, the normal amount of rain fall and sunlight, a fence and scarecrow to keep predators away, etc. But nothing productive would happen if the intelligence did not design the garden and intervene at various times. That is what we find when we look at life.

ID says there are no trails. When there are no trails, the most likely explanation is an intelligence. The main trail that is missing is the gradual build up of information over time to explain the increased complexity witnessed over time. No natural process has been discovered that builds up information over time. And no observation of increased information has been observed. It was all sudden and in the past.

I hope this helps you.

Because appearance can be deceiving and because ID proponents aren’t satisfied with giving up on science and invoking “chance of the gaps.” It has a lot to do with the end product. Is the end product characterized by either law (mathematical description of a regularity or pattern defined by the physical properties of the units utilized to create the pattern) or chance (referring to unguided processes which produce satistically random patterns); or is it best characterized by foresight (modelling the future, generating a future target not yet in existence and then engineering/fine tuning law and chance in the present to produce that end goal in the future)?

We invoke ID for the same reason that “Me thinks it is like a weasel” can appear to generate itself from a random selection of randomly mutating letters. Yet upon closer inspection and from what we understand about cause and effect, the flow and transformation of complex and specified probabilities, and how both chance and intelligence operate, we can arrive at the tentative conclusion that until someone provides evidence otherwise the phrase most likely had its origin in intelligence, working alongside chance and law.

In fact, an evolutionary process is itself some of the best evidence of previous intelligent fine tuning. Evolution is indeed the perfect example of the co-operation between intellingece, law, and chance — intelligence harnessing law and chance to produce end targets which wouldn’t exist through the workings of chance and law absent previous intelligence.

fG

Exactly right.

—”Before people start asserting what they know about TE’s they should read some of the ASA comments over time about the term. They have had long discussions about it. And if people here are frustrated with how ID is interpreted then they are often as equally guilty of misinterpreting TE’s.”

For my part, I am less concerned about their differences and more concerned about what they have in common. Not all TEs are created equal, sure enough. However, they key point for me is their insistence that God’s handiwork cannot be detected in biology–that we must “believe” in God’s design because we cannot “perceive” it. That’s big, and it flat out contradicts Romans 1:20, one of the most important verses in the Bible.

Atheists are “without excuse, so the Bible tells us, “because they refuse to acknowledge the beauty of God’s creation. One does not simply believe that something is beautiful—beauty is understood, perceived, and apprehended by the senses; it is not assumed or believed by faith, as the TE’s would have it. [That, by the way, is why it is so ridiculous for PZ Myers and Abbie Smith to purr on about the "beauty" of Darwinistic evolution.]

For most TEs that I know, God revealed himself in cosmology, where his handiwork can be perceived, and then hid himself in biology, where we must then take the TE’s word for it that design is “inherent in the evolutionary process,” as Stephen Barr puts it. It makes no sense to me, and for my money, Bsrr is the most formidable TE in the mix. On the contrary, the Bible does not say that we must believe in TEs, or even in God himself, to apprehend design. All we need to do is just look around. As Thomas Dubay puts it, beauty has “evidential power.”

They do tend to think that design cannot be detected scientifically. And I consider many of them to be at least a little naive (thinking that “unguided evolution” is regarded as going beyond what science can say, in the eyes of most scientists. In reality, I think the treatment is vastly more hypocritical and political.)

God guided Darwinism is just an oxymoron.

But surely, God guided Darwin into atheism.