The facts say otherwise. Almost all of their arguments are based on "evidence" against evolution and on trashing scientists, especially Darwin. Much of their opposition has nothing to do with scientific evidence of design; instead, it's directed at materialism and atheism and other views that they see as an integral part of something called "Darwinism."
Let's see how bizarre this can get. Friedrich Nietzsche ("God is dead") is hardly someone who the IDiots respect for his philosophical view. But that doesn't matter as long as he said something bad about Charles Darwin [Nietzsche, possibly the Nazis’ favourite well-known philosopher, criticized Darwinism on aesthetic grounds].
But, wait a minute. If Nietzsche was a favorite of the Nazis then Darwin must have been opposed to Nazism because Nazi Neitsche criticized natural selection. I'm confused. What does this have to do with evidence of design?
47 comments :
Nietzsche opposed Darwinism, and his "Uebermensch" was a creative person, not a higher physical evolutionary form.
The Nazis generally opposed Nietzsche (Dietrich Eckart denounced his anti-Christianity) or gave Nietzsche no thought, until philosopher Alfred Baumler retroactively denoted Nietzsche as an "inspiration" for Nazism-- which was not historically correct-- in order to give Nazism more intellectual credibility. To do this, they had to turn Nietzsche on his head making him pro-German (!), anti-Semitic (!!) and a statist opposed to individualism (!!!)
From the Will to Power, here Nietzsche opposes Darwinism in the baldest terms. The section is actually titled "Anti Darwin".
Nietzsche wrote: "Anti Darwin.- What surprises me most on making a general survey of the great destinies of man, is that I invariably see the reverse of what today Darwin and his school sees or will persist in seeing: selection in favour of the stronger, the better constituted, and the progress of the species. Precisely the reverse of this stares one in the face: the suppression of the lucky cases, the uselessness of the more highly constituted types, the inevitable mastery of the mediocre, and even of those who are below mediocrity. Unless we are shown some reason why man is an exception among living creatures, I incline to the view that Darwin's school is everywhere at fault. That will to power, in which I perceive the ultimate reason and character of all change, explains why it is that selection is never in favour of the exceptions, and of the lucky cases: the strongest and happiest natures are weak when they are confronted with a majority ruled by gregarious instincts and the fear which possesses the weak. My general view of the world of values shows that in the highest values which now sway the destiny of man, the happy cases among men, the select specimens, do not prevail: but rather the decadent specimens- perhaps there is nothing more interesting in the whole world than this unpleasant spectacle.
Strange as it may seem, the strong have always to be upheld against the weak; and the well constituted against the ill constituted, the healthy against the sick and physiologically botched. If we drew our morals from reality, they would read thus: the mediocre are more valuable than the exceptional creatures, and the decadent than the mediocre, the will to nonentity prevails over the will to life, - and the general aim now is, in Christian, Buddhistic, Schopenhauerian phraseology 'It is better not to be than to be'.
I protest against this formulating of reality into a moral: and I loathe Christianity with a deadly loathing because it created sublime words and attitudes in order to deck a revolting truth with all the tawdriness of justice, virtue, and godliness...
I see all philosophers and the whole of science on their knees before a reality which is the reverse of the struggle for life as Darwin and his school understood it- that is to say, wherever I look, I see those prevailing and surviving, who throw doubt and suspicion upon life and the value of life.- The error of the Darwinian school became a problem to me: how can one be so blind as to make this mistake?
[Nietzsche, Will to Power, 684-5]
Compare this reality to the lies told by IDiots like Klinghoffer. Klinghoffer says that Germans like Nietzsche were PRO-Darwin!
Klinghoffer writes: He [James Carroll] acknowledges the influence exercised by the "'Germanizing' of Darwin, especially in Nietzsche, at least as he was caricatured by the Nazis. Hitler's all-encompassing ideology of race was a 'vulgarized version,' in one scholar's phrase, of the social Darwinism that held sway in the imperial age among both intellectuals and the crowd.
"Social Darwinism" is a phrase used to insulate Darwin himself from the consequences of his ideas and his words...
I have argued just that, adding only that the influence of Darwinism [on Hitler] is the more concrete, since he used biological language in couching his call for race war
Stop right there-- creationists have used biological language to promote racism and race war for 200 years. Hitler used religious language when he accused the Jews of being atheists and Christ-killers. Hitler's racism was copied from creationists like Louis Agassiz, Cuvier, Arthur Comte de Gobineau, Josiah Nott, Samuel Morton, etc. etc. and the super-anti-Darwinist Houston Stewart Chamberlain. Hitler's "biological" language was either explicitly anti-Darwinian or at most embraced the "microevolution" that creationists all believe in.
Back to Klinghitler:
whereas he [Hitler] did not use the ancient Christian vocabulary that assailed Jews as "Christ killers. [David Klinghitler at ENV]
What a lying putz Klinghitler is! Hitler called the Jews atheists and Christ-killers in Mein Kampf in an oft-quoted passage. Many Nazis did.
Here's creationist Henry Morris, telling us that the anti-Darwinist Nietzsche is "an ardent evolutionist":
Henry Morris wrote: The seeds of evolutionary racism came to fullest fruition in the form of National Socialism in Germany. The philosopher Friedrich Nietsche [sic, Nietzsche], ... an ardent evolutionist, popularized in Germany his concept of the superman, and then the master race. The ultimate outcome was Hitler, who elevated this philosophy to the status of a national policy... [Evolution and Modern Racism, by Henry M. Morris, Ph.D., from Creation - Acts, Facts, Impacts, 1974]
Here's William Jennings Bryan from his closing argument in the Scopes Trial, popularizing the lie before the rise of Hitler, who would later be avidly supported by American creationists:
William Jennings Bryan: Kidd says that Nietzsche gave Germany the doctrine of Darwin's efficient animal in the voice of his superman, and that Bernhardi and the military textbooks in due time gave Germany the doctrine of the superman translated into the national policy of the superstate aiming at world power.
Here is William Bell Riley, who founded fundamentalism as a political movement in the USA, writing in the 1930's. Ironically, Riley the anti-Darwinist, like many American creationists, avidly supported Hitler and Nazi Germany in the 1930's.
Here Riley has promoted the anti-Darwinist Nietzsche not merely into a Darwinist but the greatest exponent of Darwinism of his age.
Riley: Nietzsche, who in the judgment of Prof. Williams of Oxford, was the greatest exponent of evolution known to the age, said “Egoism is the prime characteristic of the noble soul!” ...The superman, prophesied by so-called modern science, is nothing more nor less than a repetition of Satan’s garden triumph; and again the sons of Adam are delighting themselves in the taste of “forbidden fruit”, tempted to it by the lie, “Ye shall be as gods” [William Bell Riley, Anti-Evolution Pamphlets, ed. Ronald Numbers, p.8]
Larry, I think that what Denyse O'Leary was trying to say was that
(1) Nietsche = Nazi
(2) Nietsche criticized Darwin, but
(3) Only on aesthetic grounds, so
(4) Nietsche actually accepted Darwin, and thus
(5) Darwin = Nazi
... or something like that.
Nietsche seems to have been quite fascinating, but not totally consistent.
He also seems to have opposed anti-semiitism, German nationalism, and racism.
But, wait a minute. If Nietzsche was a favorite of the Nazis then Darwin must have been opposed to Nazism because Nazi Neitsche criticized natural selection. I'm confused.
That's not a bug, it's a feature of ID.
Hi Larry,
I agree with you that relying on the practice of attacking either Darwin or his theory is not the way one should argue for ID.
How should one argue for ID?
YEC and ID insist they use the evidence of nature to assert God's fingerprints in nature and to oppose wrong ideas like evolution.
YEC includes Gods word.
It is about evidence and about incompetence in understanding the evidence or lack of it.
Its not just fighting the error of Darwin and company.
Its all about showing complexity in the universe is beyond chance.
Its beyond a roll of the dice.
Byers says: "YEC... is about... incompetence in understanding the evidence"
Byers, you are a genius. You have described YEC better than I ever could. This is why you are welcome here. You're golden.
I hope Byers never goes away. If it were up to me, he'd be the last ID-creationist when everyone else has abandoned ship.
The same way they always do. Badly.
I like Mike Gene's approach, which he discusses in his book, The Design Matrix. Very briefly, he offers four criteria: Analogy (it resembles ojbects we know are designed), Discontinuity (it doesn't appear to be the kind of thing that could come about without design), Rationality (it makes sense to design it this way), and Foresight (it serves some future purpose).
Analogy doesn't seem to work, as things that aren't designed can resemble things that are designed; that is, natural selection is capable of producing such things. Discontinuity, as you explain it, just seems to be the argument from personal incredulity. Rationality doesn't work, as many things that are designed don't make sense and many things that aren't designed do make sense; natural selection again. Foresight seems a good one iff we can identify future purposes. So, one out of four. Is there an example of #4?
Hi John,
Brief replies to your responses:
Analogy: True, but the more it resembles design, the more likely we'll attribute it to design.
Discontinuity: The longer we look for a non-design explanation and not find one, the stronger the discontinuity becomes.
Rationality: The more rational it appears to be, the more likely we'll attribute it to design.
Foresight: Crick and Watson noticed that the double helix of DNA leant itself to future reproduction. Mike Gene favors the hypothesis of what he calls Front-loaded Evolution (first cells were originally designed to make evolution of plants and animals more likely). He offers many examples of Foresight here:
http://designmatrix.wordpress.com/tag/front-loading/
Analogy: you are implicitly assuming that design is the only thing that's expected to produce design-like phenomena. And you can't assume that if there are other proposed mechanisms, e.g. natural selection.
Discontinuity: That's making design the null hypothesis, which is another bit of personal incredulity.
Rationality: This is at best a one-way criterion, incapable of falsifying design; scientifically, that's a flaw. And it has the same problem as analogy above.
Foresight. That isn't foresight. It's current utility. I find front-loading hard to believe. Haven't looked yet, though if the other examples are as poor as the double helix, I won't be impressed.
"Analogy (it resembles ojbects we know are designed),"
If you can find an organism that gets it that way round, we might concede the point. What you mean is that there are some things that are designed that resemble living organisms. Well ... yes. Fake fur looks like fur.
As for 'it makes sense to design it this way' - no, actually. If we're talking about a God with the abilities described in Genesis, he'd have designed things like he did in Genesis - magicked them up, quickly and in their current forms. If God wanted specific results - if he wanted lions and lambs and humans to be exactly like they are currently, then evolution is a silly way to do that. In human terms, obviously - God may be more patient - but human terms are ones your arguments rest on.
I looked at the front-loading arguments you linked to. I don't see any that make sense. If you would care to discuss and defend one specific claim (presumably the one you think is strongest), go to it. But I see nothing there.
Analogy: The vestigial leg bones of whales and the propensity for my lower back muscles to tear themselves to shreds under the least amount of load would indicate by analogy that both whales and humans have quadruped ancestors.
Discontinuity: That you reject perfectly good non design explanations for the diversity of life is good evidence that our brains evolved, with confirmation bias having high survival value among our primate ancestors.
Rationality: At least you have a good sense of humour.
Foresight: As a middle aged male whose prostate is busy trying to strangle my urethra, I marvel at the foresight implied in this "design".
Bilbo:
Can you provide the empirical evidence that shows those four criteria are able to dicriminate between things that are "designed" and things that are not "designed"?
Obviously, there are things that were not "designed" that will fail to meet those criteria. But how do you determine that there are no things that are not "designed" but which nonetheless meet the criteria?
I left a comment demolishing at the ID thread Bilbo suggested, on the ID concept of "front-loading" information.
This "front-loading" is a creationist concept that has no official name: the YECs often call it "mediated design", while the IDers sometimes call it "autogenous variation"; it's similar to William Dembski's assertions about "apparent specified complexity." I call it "occult info shminfo", because it is an occult idea, like ghosts and mediums and ectoplasm.
This "new" idea is nearly identical to an idea embraced by various crackpots in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, then called "orthogenesis" or "bathmism."
The idea is that living organisms have in them a vast, perhaps infinite, sea of invisible "information" which explains why evolutionists keep racking up observations of gains in complexity in evolving species-- any gain in complexity is just an illusion; according to creationists, those observations really show REDUCTIONS in a certain kind of information-- a special kind of "information"-- the invisible kind, see.
But "information" in general is something the IDiots refuse to define and can't compute. Even if creationists could locate just where it is in the cell, which they can't, it would still be undefinable, un-measurable and uncomputable. Even if, hypothetically, this sea of occult information that's allegedly in every living cell were visible, which it's not, they still wouldn't be able to define what this "information" is anyway, or measure how much precisely there is now, or how much there was before the scientists started the experiment.
Before any novel complexity is observed when scientists do experiments on evolution, the alleged "front-loaded" information which was supposedly there all along can't be detected or measured by any creationist by any mere method like say, genomic analysis or reading off the sequences of genes.
NO. Only after real scientists do experiments on evolution and observe novel complexity, only then, after the fact, can ID creationists detect that the "information" was really there all along, and of the right kind, that is, invisible.
But creationist occult info shminfo, since it is invisible, may be infinite, that means that the ID creationist allows for all possible changes in species. Any change in a species-- anatomical or genetic-- becomes possible, which is an important "escape hatch" for the creationist, because real scientists are detected more and more gains in complexity in living species all the time.
The fact that ID creationism permits any possible change in species, including gains in complexity and information, means that creationism can accommodate all observations, thus predicting none.
So there are two kinds of creationist "information":
1. The normal kind: undefinable, incomputable, unquantifiable.
2. The front-loaded kind: undefinable, incomputable, unquantifiable, but also invisible, and can only be detected by creationists after real scientists observe evolution producing gains in complexity.
My comment demolishing "front-loading" at the creationist website is now in moderation; if it appears later it should be at: http://designmatrix.wordpress.com/2013/04/03/amoeba-now-support-front-loading-evolution/#comment-3388.
RE: analogy, discontinuity, etc.
As I must continue to assert, the main problems with the hypothesis of "Intelligent Design" is that it lacks an understanding of both intelligence and design. Here is my hypothesis of how both intelligence and design work, based on my experience as a mechanical design engineer:
There is no magic involved. These basic steps are used:
1. Trial and error of random ideas, usually in the form of incremental improvements to existing ideas.
2. Some selection criteria which can be used to distinguish successful ideas from unsuccessful ones. In the case of design, the chief criterion is survival in the marketplace.
3. Some form of memory that records what has previously worked. In the case of natural evolution, this is DNA.
So from my point of view, all your points simply compare one form of evolution (design evolution - you've seen cars and computers and phones follow this process over your lifetime) to another. Yes, there are many things we still don't understand about thought evolution, design evolution, and natural evolution, (just as once we didn't understand rain or lightning, and attributed them to magic), but nothing magical has been found. Until you can point to something magical - perfect designs poofing into existence - you have nothing to compare to which is not itself a form of evolution.
"If God wanted specific results - if he wanted lions and lambs and humans to be exactly like they are currently, then evolution is a silly way to do that. In human terms, obviously - God may be more patient - but human terms are ones your arguments rest on."
Ahh, the non-anthropomorphic designer. The closer we look at his designs, the less they look like the only kind of design we actually know about, human designs. So in response, the IDists re-ad-hoc rationalize that this is because "it isn't a human designer". One is left wondering why they then think it was designed in the first place, now that it stopped looking like it was designed.
The more incomprehensible and non-anthropomorphic the designer, the more indistinguishable his designs become from the results of an evolutionary mechanism.
To some specific "theistic evolutionists" they took this argument all the way, and simply insist that god made the universe with foresight, but let evolution and natural laws do the job.
So god has become so alien and ineffable a designer he now looks indistinguishable from nature. What evidence is there, then, of "design"?
The front-loading argument is particularly ridiculous, since any and all observations can be rationalized to be the result from some kind of all-knowing planning and foresight.
Obviously, this mountainrange was made for the explicit purpose of collecting snow on top in this exact patter so that when it melts it forms this particular and specific river, in which this particular and specific species of fish live, one particular and specific of which I would one day catch, setting another specific and particular chain of events in motion so that I one day meet some specific and particular girl etc. etc.
Therefore, that mountain was placed there with me in mind. It's too improbable to have happened by chance, after all.
Clearly a ridiculous proposition to any rational thinking person, but it demonstrates how anything can be re-thinked in this kind of ad-hoc rationalization manner to be the result of "planning", "foresight", "front-loading" etc. etc.
Unfalsifiable statements have no explanatory value. They don't predict anything in particular, they're just infinitely compatible with all possible observations. Since designers can design almost anything, and supernatural, omnipotent designer CAN design literally anything, no concievable observation could be made that would falsify the proposition.
Even in a chaotic, completely random universe with laws that fluctuate between extremes and sometimes disappear entirely, could have been what the "non-anthropomorphic" designer wanted. Who can know his non-human ways of thinking? Who can know his non-human desires? What do gods find beautiful? Mere men can't know...
Wow, too many comments to respond to here. I suggest reading Mike Gene's book, The Design Matrix to get a better understanding of his criteria. Or take it up with Mike at his blog.
Bilbo, perhaps if it's understanding you're after, it would have been better if you hadn't read it.
The arguments are you present them are bog standard, very silly creationist ones. We've heard them before. Perhaps the book's a good one ... but I don't read books about homeopathy or astrology, either. There's open-minded and empty-headed, and you're not really selling it to me.
"The more incomprehensible and non-anthropomorphic the designer, the more indistinguishable his designs become from the results of an evolutionary mechanism."
William Lane Craig is fond of that bait and switch which runs something like 'doesn't this look more like the work of a person, not random chance? [snip] and so God is this omnipotent, omniscient, impersonal essence that is being'
Er ... so not a 'person', then. Theists need to pick one: you can know God by looking at his handiwork or you can't.
Evolution is pretty much the only way we can get to biosphere we observe *without* some form of designer. So the first question creationists should be made to answer is why God is such a doofus that he managed to design a universe that looks like the the only possible *non* designed one. Bonus points if they can explain why the first 1820ish years of Christian teaching was that design *was* evident.
Bilbo, if you aren't willing to defend Mike Gene's ideas, perhaps you don't understand them well enough to recommend them. "Go read the book" is a weasel's way out. I read his web site, as you suggested, but found nothing there that would convince anyone other than a true believer. Why should I expect anything different from the book?
It seems to me - correct me if I'm wrong - that the book you refer to is based on the a priori assumption that design work done by "intelligent" humans is somehow magical and not possible for natural biological evolution to do. I don't agree with that assumption, so reading the book would not be worth doing.
Biology, human thought, human design work (such as Edison testing about 10,000 lightbulb filament materials before finding one that worked): as Elaine (from "Seinfeld") would say, evolution, evolution, evolution.
In other words, biological evolution has produced brains which think using the methods of evolution, which are then used to design things using the methods of evolution. That seems both internally consistent, and consistent with my observations from hundreds of design meetings. I suspect those who consider design a mysterious and awesome process have never spent years as a design engineer. I know how humans do it, and it is not all that pretty. I have never seen a god demonstrate a more perfect method. It seems to me that proving there is some non-algorithmic, non-mechanical process that can produce perfect designs without iterations ought to be the first step in the ID research agenda. (Bear in mind that algorithmic/mechanical computers can beat the best humans at chess and Jeopardy.)
Bilbo, thanks for validating my prediction, not that it was a particularly prescient one on my part.
Can you recommend any other books I shouldn't read ?
I'm torn between attributing malevolence or incompetence as motives for your actions, can you provide some insight ?
Byers says "YEC and ID insist they use the evidence of nature to assert God's fingerprints in nature".
Good. I take his word that God is repsonsible for all that is good as well as that which is bad in genetics. Bad design as well as good design. Love your hernias, hemorrhoids, ingrown toenails, even hiccups - they are a gift from God. Not a trade-off between our fish ancestry and our mammal present. Byers is an authority, he’s read zillions of books on evolution. I’ve only read maybe a hundred.
Not only has Byers read more books on evolution than anyone I know, this creotard renaissance man has published as well:
Post-flood Marsupial Migration Explained
http://www.nwcreation.net/articles/marsupial_migration.html
Not only has Byers read more books on evolution than anyone I know, this creotard renaissance man has published as well:
Post-flood Marsupial Migration Explained
http://www.nwcreation.net/articles/marsupial_migration.html
Well that about melted my brain.
Byers argues that creationists can explain why there are so many marsupials and nearly no placental animals in Australia.
Here is an example of his lines of reasoning: A pair of moles step off the Ark. Some migrate to Eurasia and become placental. Others migrate to Australia. The Australian environment causes evolution (don't call it evolution!!) on a hyper-fast time scale that causes the placental moles to turn into marsupial moles.
Likewise: A pair of cats step off the Ark. Some migrate to Eurasia or the Americas and become placental tigers, lions. Others migrate to Australia. The Australian environment causes evolution (don't call it evolution!!) on a hyper-fast time scale that causes the placental cats to turn into marsupial cats, hence the thylacine.
In fact, Byers is insistent that ONLY HE knows the true ancestry of the thylacine-- but even he doesn't.
You see, the thylacine has been called both a "marupial wolf" and a "marsupial lion." Byers appears to think "marupial wolf" and a "marsupial lion" are two different animals, but they're just one.
Thus, Byers ALSO implies that the "marsupial wolf" (really the same animal as the marsupial lion) is descended from DOGS that stepped off the Ark and went to Australia and got turned into a marsupial wolf.
So for one species he's got two sets of ancestry.
Now I've got a question for Mr. Byers.
Why is that aboriginal HUMANS have existed on Australia for 40,000 years but never turned marsupial?
But the mysterious radiation causing the "marsupial mutation" is not restricted to Australia. Some of the rats descended from the pair saved by Noah travelled to North America and became opossums, evidently by absorbing marsupial miasma from some local source. In Scotland, men and their pipes were likewise affected, the former turning into marsupial Scotsmen (curiously, in this case the mutation targeted the males of the species), and the latter into bagpipes.
Hi guys,
Though I'm an ID proponent, I've been spending most of my online time on other things, such as Edward Snowden's revelations. It's not that I don't want to engage you guys in debate. It's that other things pre-occupy my time. That's why I recommend bringing up your challenges to Mike Gene, if you really want a debate. If not, that's okay with me. Just don't pretend that you really want a debate.
Well, that managed to get this middleaged lifelong atheist to shout out 'Jesus Christ', so presumably that counts as a win.
I feel, at times, that some of us should defect to creationism. Just to make a fight out of it.
In that spirit, I've got another - even more compelling - example: if you hang around cold climates for fifty or sixty years, your hair will turn white. Like a polar bear's or arctic fox's.
If I may be so bold, Professor Moran is living proof of this. Canadian + White Hair = Noah's Ark.
I read a couple posts at Mike Gene's The Design Matrix, and they were quite terrible. I left two comments at a couple of his posts on "Front Loading", and after two days my comments are still in moderation, so I don't expect we can or will "engage" with Mike Gene.
The idea of "Front Loading" as Gene describes it is simply, if any structure is very old, and used to have a different function, then it must have been "front loaded", that is, designed by God hundreds of millions of years before its present function appeared. That is Gene's one point, endlessly repeated.
BUT how is this different from the predictions of evolution? Evolutionary theory expects that structures start with one function and get co-opted for another function, then another... And complex structures, like protein signalling mechanisms, would have evolved hundreds of millions of years ago, when our ancestors were one-celled organisms and our population sizes were vastly larger, allowing for much mutations and experimentation.
If front loading were to have any real meaning, surely it should make predictions different from evolutionary theory. Surely it should mean God designed a structure, say, 500 million years ago, when it had NO function; and it was somehow or other protected from degeneration by deleterious mutations that would have erased it for 500 million years, WITHOUT invoking natural selection, because it's functionless; then all of a sudden it gets a function.
But the examples of "front loading" cited by Gene are all of structures that were functional when they first appeared!
Dildo, I'm still on the fence between malevolence or incompetence.
Did you clear this whole proxy debate thing with Mike Gene (is that actually his real name ?) ahead of time or will this come as a complete surprise for him ?
You do realize that you come across as a bit of a dickhead for pretending to want a debate and then cutting and running like the cowardly sack of shit that you are.
Just saying.
Diogenes, Let me congratulate you on that last post. You have neatly and succinctly (not always the case with you -- friendly word of advice) skewered the main problem with Gene's "front-loading" claims. All his examples are of features that are perfectly useful when they first evolve, where front-loading requires features that evolve *before* they're useful. I predict both Gene and Bilbo will ignore you.
It seems to me that just like IDiots shy away from using the word "god" and instead dishonestly use the term "designer", so it is with "front loading" - the perfectly good word "teleological" has been contaminated with religious overtones so it has been replaced with a sciencey sounding term that they can use while playing Mr. Dressup wearing white lab coats while standing in front of a blue screen.
A lot of controversy over ID is due to the lack of accurate understanding what ID, such as Discovery Institute stands for, and other organizations, mainly religious, that believe that universe and life were designed by a superior intelligence-God(s).
That's, however, not the main controversy, as even the most devout evolutionists admit, that complicated biological systems give an appearance of having been designed for a purpose. The real issue is who, or what "designed" them or gave the appearance of having been designed.
I believe that even if there were no actual evidence in favor of Creationist theory, we should still be justified in preferring it over all rival theories.
Well, yes. This is the key weakness in your position, not the core strength you seem to think.
I've answered that (design) question to my personal satisfaction previously in this comment thread. To be uncharacteristically brief, I'll just say I have an answer that is consistent with as much scientific knowledge as I am aware of, as well as all of my life experience, so I don't see how I could do better.
As for what the DI and religions stand for, I tend to take them at their words, that they believe in and are doing their best to promulgate a set of Bronze Age myths. I can think of more devious motivations, including personal gain for some, but until technology invents a reliable lie-detector I can't be sure of that. Ultimately, I think all human beings are a mixture of good and bad qualities, as evolution made us. And if there is one thing I've learned for sure about humans, it is that they are capable of believing just about anything (see astrology, homeopathy, David Koresh, Rev. Moon, etc., etc.).
"I've learned for sure about humans, it is that they are capable of believing just about anything (see astrology, homeopathy, David Koresh, Rev. Moon, etc., etc.)."
Does that include any of the atheistic concepts without any proof?
"Does that include any of the atheistic concepts without any proof?"
Yes.
There are necessary limits to knowledge. We concede that. If you do, you've conceded the omniscience of your G- ... designer.
That doesn't mean we're flapping around unable to assert anything. 'There is no meaningful way in which the Genesis account is historical and its account is so wrong it's incoherent even as symbolically true', say, is a verifiable statement.
I'm not sure what an "atheist concept without proof" is.
An atheist lacks belief in your god, as well as in Thor, Ra, Mithra, Vishnu. This isn't believing in something, it is (to repeat) not believing in something (due to a lack of evidence). As for my beliefs, most of them are not based on proof, but are based on what I think is the preponderance of the evidence. I'm sure some of them are wrong, and hope I eventually see evidence to convince me which ones are.
I have tried to be specific when giving my reasons (e.g., when I described why biological evolution and human design evolution must necessarily have resemblances early in this thread). I am having great difficulty in understanding the reasons for your comments and request that you make them more concrete, with examples. Such as what concepts you object to, on what evidence you object to them, and what makes them atheistic. (There are many non-atheists who accept the Theory of Evolution, so I hope that isn't what you were thinking of.)
Mike has replied to Diogenes here:
http://designmatrix.wordpress.com/2013/04/03/amoeba-now-support-front-loading-evolution/
Ah, the rare bird: an honest creationist who admits evidence doesn't matter to him.
Tell us, Jersey boy, why the belief that dirt turned into the human genome by sorcery should be accorded insurmountable privileges in science.
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