Steven – You are correct that Gould, years after he commented on the paucity of transitional forms, claimed that there are abundant transitional forms in the higher taxa. It should be noted that the latter statement came after he was lambasted by the Darwinian establishment for giving aid and comfort to the “enemy.” That alone should be enough to raise a few skeptical eyebrows. But then there’s Niles Eldredge (Gould’s scientific partner) who maintained the original position, stating: “[m]ost families, orders, classes, and phyla appear rather suddenly in the fossil record, often without anatomically intermediate forms smoothly interlinking evolutionarily derived descendant taxa with their presumed ancestors”; and elsewhere noted, “the higher up the Linnaean hierarchy you look, the fewer transitional forms there seem to be.”

It appears that you were critiquing posts from the archive that had been truncated. For example, the one on the fossil record has been restored and includes a discussion of Gould's punctuated equilbrium. Likewise for the one on NS; it has been restored in its entirety.

When you stated that "scientists found natural mechanisms to form the planets," it was you who introduced cosmogenesis into the discussion, not I. My point about gravity was that we need not, as you say, appeal to the birth of the universe or quantum weirdness to find a place to squeeze God into the machine; he has room aplenty in the current macro-scopic dimensions of reality.

Now, let's look at Regis's self-created "Debunking Darwinism" series.

Debunking Darwinism #1 - Natural Selection: Regis fails to address natural selection at all. He turns immediately to discussion of genes, and fails to complete it. But the fact is, we've seen natural selection in action and we've seen its impact on genetics. One of the more dramatic examples is the Lenski Long Term E. coli experiments, where organisms evolved new capabilities that gave them competitive advantage, and quickly overwhelmed the population without the advantage. Lenski showed the exact genetic changes that led to the advantage. It is an excellent example of natural selection in action.

Debunking Darwinism #2 - Here is a typically dishonest creationist ploy. Regis is arguing against Darwinian "gradualism", that species evolve in smooth, gradual transition over time. Darwin proposed gradualism, but Darwin was wrong. We now know that evolution is marked by periods of rapid change and long periods of stasis, driven by population sizes. Gould called this "punctuated equilibrium". So Regis is arguing against a 150-year-old version of evolutionary theory.

How ridiculous would it be if Regis said modern medicine is false because doctors use bloodletting? Well, that's how ridiculous Regis is being when he argues against the state of evolutionary theory 150 years ago.

And of course, Regis brings out cases where people have faked fossils as proof that the fossil record doesn't demonstrate evolution. Well, Regis - by your logic, I guess all religion is false because Peter Popoff was a fraud. Correct?

Given the poor quality of the first two articles, it would be a waste of time to address the rest.

Regis, you seem very comfortable with using false logic and making false statements to support your ideology. Personally, I'm very uncomfortable with stating something I know is false. But stating falsehoods doesn't seem to bother you. Why not?


For a rational Christian view of evolution, Regis, I suggest you contact one of the 12,000 Christian CLERGY in this list:
http://blue.butler.edu/~mzimmerm/Christian_Clergy/ChrClergyLtr.htm

They all signed a statement saying the following:

"We the undersigned, Christian clergy from many different traditions, believe that the timeless truths of the Bible and the discoveries of modern science may comfortably coexist. We believe that the theory of evolution is a foundational scientific truth, one that has stood up to rigorous scrutiny and upon which much of human knowledge and achievement rests. To reject this truth or to treat it as “one theory among others” is to deliberately embrace scientific ignorance and transmit such ignorance to our children. We believe that among God’s good gifts are human minds capable of critical thought and that the failure to fully employ this gift is a rejection of the will of our Creator. To argue that God’s loving plan of salvation for humanity precludes the full employment of the God-given faculty of reason is to attempt to limit God, an act of hubris. "

I suggest you seek out one of these clergy and discuss how you can learn to curb your hubris and stop trying to deny humanity's growing knowledge of the natural world.

Regis, you skipped right past the fact that Newton was wrong about God being a direct force in the universe, and went immediately to "cosmogenesis". Do you know anything about history? Can't you see what you're doing? You're retreating to the limits of current human knowledge and saying "THAT'S the real question, because that's where God must be."

Gods used to be at the top of a mountain everyone could see. They used to be just above the clouds. They used to be in the rocks and animals. Gods were once directly responsible for tsunamis and hurricanes. Witchcraft was everywhere. Epilepsy and schizophrenia were divine possession. But human knowledge has expanded so far that people like you must appeal to the birth of the universe or to quantum fluctuations to find a gap to squeeze your God.

It's nonsense. Read Spinoza if you want a workable God that won't force you to lie about science and won't force you to deny humanity's discoveries and achievements.

Looks like a few of the links I provided from the archive do not include the full original post.

Regis, I've tried to look up your critiques. Apparently this site has been reorganizing, assigning new URLs to old files and doing ghastly things to some of your articles (e.g. your article on "natural selection" has a new URL attached to what appears to be the introductory paragraph, peppered with random typographic symbols instead of proper punctuation, and no discernable way to access the meat of the article I'm assuming was originally there). There is no result for the old URL, and the rest of your articles seem to be in the same condition.

To take just the fossil record, though, Gould, whom you quote on the paucity of interspecies transitional fossils, insisted repeatedly that transitions between higher taxa were common in the fossil record (he was especially fond of the whale series). As for transitions between species, these have been seen in the lab and strongly inferred in the field in present times: the degrees of evolution (microevolution and speciation within a genus) hardest to find in the fossil record are sorts we can observe directly in the present and that ID proponents generally concede!

I perhaps should have brought up in an earlier post that "random" should always be used to indicate "random with respect to X." Mutations are "random with respect to fitness," for example: not all mutations are equally likely, not all genes are equally mutable, not all imagineable outcomes are possible, etc. But the chances that, e.g. a mutation will make a bacterium more resistant to penicillin seem not to depend at all on whether or not penicillin is present in the bacterium's environment.

And it seems to me that you're right when you say that selective pressures themselves depend on phenomena -- climate, invasion or extinction of other species, etc. -- that are random with respect to any particular "goal" we might wish. This is why I said that evolution doesn't seem capable of having goals. But that's not the same as saying that evolution is random with respect to fitness, and if there are traits that are fit over a wide range of environments (e.g. legs are more useful than fins in rain forest, taiga, or desert; wings are useful for flight regardless of what the flier might be flying over, climate changes don't have radical effects on what traits make for a good eye), shaping such adaptions is not a matter of "random chance" (arguably, which lineages they happen to is random, which is not quite the same thing).

Regis Nicoll offered an argument from consequences: ID, he claims, offers a support for moral choices he approves and undercuts support for moral choices he disapproves. I was arguing, simply, that he was wrong: if we don't know and aren't allowed assumptions about the Designer's methods, motives, and design philosophy, then we have no grounds whatsoever for inferences about how much or under what circumstances the Designer values His creations, or how He expects us to behave (including either "all human life is sacred" or "some human life is not sacred"). Intelligent Designers keep insisting, whenever they are arguing that their ideas are science rather than religious apologetics, that the Designer doesn't need to be the Christian God, or God at all. I'm simply pointing out the implications of that position.

Intelligent design purports to be a scientific argument. The imputation of design is supposed to be a scientific hypothesis, if not an outright scientific conclusion. What possible sense does it make to say that it does not need to be empirical? There can be arguments for theism that are not empirical, but they cannot be design arguments (and conversely, again, a design argument is not necessarily an argument for an omnipotent, omniscient, omnibenevolent God with a plan for our salvation).

I don't think you quite grasp the "God of the gaps" accusation. Edward O. Wilson argued, on strictly naturalistic and evolutionary grounds, that there were probably natural phenomena that humans would never be able to explain. Conceivably, the origin of life could be such a permanently intractable problem. I think it was Isaac Asimov who stated that he was convinced that unidentified flying objects existed; it was their identification as alien space ships that he questioned. By the same token "we don't know how this happened" is not evidence for intelligent causation, much less for any particular sort of intelligent Cause. ID doesn't have even a hint of a mechanism by which "intelligence" creates life (in our experience, so far as it goes, all the intelligence in the world won't put a line on paper, much less build a complete machine from a blueprint, without some sort of material mechanism), so what scientific advantage does it enjoy over "some unknown natural cause presumably did it?"

Since the engine of evolution is genetic mutation which is initiated by random events (cosmic rays, environmental agents, copying errors, etc), evolution is intrinsically random. The fact that natural selection (NS) acts as a filter on the genetic code of a given “mutant” does not make the final result non-random. For one thing, NS does not filter out all but the most fit -- only those examples that fail to get their genes into the next generation. For another, even the NS “filter” is random as it depends on environmental pressures (drought, famine, climate change, etc.) that are governed by chaos processes, such that what is “beneficial” this year, decade, or century, may be “detrimental” the next.

As to the idea that ID is a threat to the “proper teaching of biology”: Nobody is saying that “micro-evolution”—the process of genetic variation and inheritance that enables species to adapt, within pre-defined limits, to changing environmental conditions – should be modified; rather, that macro-evolution – the speculative and unproven theory that new and increasingly complex organisms gradually emerged from a simple, ancient life form -- should be critiqued in the spirit of Darwin himself who said: "A fair result can be obtained only by fully stating and balancing the facts and arguments on both sides of each question."

If you are tempted to cite the familiar “multiple lines of evidence,” I suggest you first check the critiques done in our counter-celebration of the Darwin bi-centennial lat year. Cheers!

Debunking Darwinism #1: Natural Selection http://thepoint.breakpoint.org/tp-home/blog-archives/blog-archives/entry/4/2490
Debunking Darwinism #2: The Fossil Record http://thepoint.breakpoint.org/tp-home/blog-archives/blog-archives/entry/4/2484
Debunking Darwinism #3: Darwin's finches http://thepoint.breakpoint.org/tp-home/blog-archives/blog-archives/entry/4/2477
Debunking Darwinism #4: Morphological Similarities http://thepoint.breakpoint.org/tp-home/blog-archives/blog-archives/entry/4/2471
Debunking Darwinism #5: Genetic Similarities http://thepoint.breakpoint.org/tp-home/blog-archives/blog-archives/entry/4/2464
Debunking Darwinism #6: Peppered Moths http://thepoint.breakpoint.org/tp-home/blog-archives/blog-archives/entry/4/2456
Debunking Darwinism #7: The Urey-Miller experiment http://thepoint.breakpoint.org/tp-home/blog-archives/blog-archives/entry/4/2455
Debunking Darwinism #8: Random, unguided change http://thepoint.breakpoint.org/tp-home/blog-archives/blog-archives/entry/4/2454
Debunking Darwinism #9: Gradualism vs. IC http://thepoint.breakpoint.org/tp-home/blog-archives/blog-archives/entry/4/2448
Debunking Darwinism #10: Gradualism vs. CSC http://thepoint.breakpoint.org/tp-home/blog-archives/blog-archives/entry/4/2440
Debunking Darwinism #12: Predictive Power and Usefulness http://thepoint.breakpoint.org/tp-home/blog-archives/blog-archives/entry/4/2426

Steven Thompson wrote:

"Third, if, as ID proponents tell us, we are not allowed to make assumptions about the likely motives of the Designer, why should we assume that He regards the infirm or handicapped as anything but botched manufactures that ought to be discarded in favor of exemplars that don't deviate from the intended design?"

Ultimately we are all "discarded" by death. It is unclear what the point of this is. Is this an argument for natural selection, for eugenics or something else?

"Fourth, if Mr. Nichol can be so wrong on the basics of evolutionary theory and biology (and arguably even on what intelligent design holds), why should we assume that he's right that ID is anything but a collection of shabby God-of-the-gaps arguments with no scientific merit, and which poses no threat whatsoever to "Darwinism?"

What rational outlook requires that imputing design to a natural phenomenon must be derived from an empirical process? One can impute design from rational perspectives detailed by IDists like Mike Gene and Stephen Meyer. Mike is no stranger to empirical endeavors but is able to discuss design without mention of the word science. There can be other evaluating criteria as he specified in his book.

But if you insist let us note that empirically based explanations of evolution are predicated on the existence of a cell already equipped with a self-replicating capacity enabled by DNA coding properties. And this is where the ugly side of ID criticism surfaces. There is no empirically grounded explanation for the origin of cells. That is attributed to a lack of knowledge. It's out there, we just don't know yet. Nothing must be inferred to indicate that this big unknown is but a temporary state of affairs. That would invoke a derogatory gap accusation. If you are going to have faith then place it in an empirical approach able to answer all our origin questions. Because that's what is behind the gap charge- secular faith in an empirical methodology.

Benjamen R. Meyer informed me that biblical theology is very much at odds with evolution. I don't recall arguing otherwise in my post (though Francis Collins and Kenneth Miller have argued otherwise at some length). He tells me this several times, although he is a bit vague on which biblical fundamentals evolution contradicts. Gerardus Bouw would tell me that heliocentrism contradicts biblical fundamentals. He has a point, but quite a few Christians (Mr. Meyer among them, I suspect) disagree strongly. Quite a few Christians disagree strongly that evolution contradicts anything properly fundamental to Christianity.

Of course, intelligent design by itself cannot establish that the Designer must be the God of the Bible, or interested in judging His creation. A distaste for divine judgment by itself would not suffice to make scientists reject creation for evolution (and of course, as noted, not all evolutionists reject the idea of a God Who judges, punishes and saves). As I pointed out, evolutionary theory doesn't posit that we are moving ever upward and onward to perfection, so why would anyone embrace evolutionary theory merely in order to deny our imperfections?

Per the age of the Earth: this is the first time I've ever run across a "gap hypothesis" that posited a gap between Adam's creation and the Fall. Genesis said that he lived 930 years; inserting a gap of unknown years before the birthday count starts seem very arbitrary. When you speak of "billions of years," I have this mental picture of Adam enduring through geological eras, watching entire successions of dinosaurian ecosystems being created and replaced, before the first placental mammal besides himself and Eve is created.

First, Regis, thank you for replying to me.

Second, I'm pretty sure that it does not follow that because something begins with a random event, or incorporates random events, it is "random all the way down." This is, after all, one of the points of Dawkins' "weasel applet:" while it is (as Dawkins explicitly notes) an imperfect model of evolution (in part because it has a goal), it shows that non-random selection applied to random input and variation yields a non-random result. Natural selection is not random. And while greater complexity is a likely outcome of evolution in some lineages, greater complexity is not a synonym for "perfection," or even "superior adaption." If natural selection were random, bacteria in hospitals would be as likely to become more vulnerable to antibiotics as they are to become less vulnerable.

Third, I grant your point about the primary purpose of sex; I think no evolutionary biologist has ever suggested that the "purpose," or selectable function, of sexual relations is anything but reproduction (the purpose of sex, itself -- of having distinct males and females, when it clearly isn't necessary for reproduction or even sexual reproduction -- is the subject of some controversy). Sexual pleasure is just natural selection's trick to get us to perpetuate the species. Of course, an evolutionist may not see much point to submitting to or seeking moral guidance in the "purposes" of something for which the word "purpose" needs scare quotes. And a design theorist must suspect that the Designer values sexual pleasure in and of itself (why else build it in?), perhaps to the point of not caring whether it is always open to reproduction.

Fourth, the point of the "bad design" arguments (did I advance that argument? I was suggesting that a design theorist could hold that in handicapped people, a good design had not been properly instantiated during manufacturing) is not that no competent designer would do this, but that common descent with opportunistic modification explains it (e.g. the plantaris tendon is a vestige of a tendon that is extremely functional in monkeys and apes), and that "intelligent design" merely posits that there could be an explanation for it.

Fifth, intelligent design could pose no threat to the dominance of evolutionary theory in biology, and still pose a threat to the proper teaching of biology (whether by teaching falsehoods about evolution, or simply by diverting classes into bull sessions about design).

RickK— The question is not whether there are alternate conjectures about cosmogenesis; but, rather, which one is true. As to what “scientists [have] found,” scientists don’t even know what gravity is: Is it a twisting of space-time, a motive force between massive objects, or an attractive effect of mediating particles like gravitons. Our ignorance is reflected in the Standard Model of Physics (one of the two most highly successful theories of science, by the way) which excludes gravity in its description of physical reality.

Stephen J.— You are right that evolutionary theory is not teleological. It begins with a random event, so it is random all the way down. Nevertheless, because folks like R. Dawkins gush over the omnipotence and omniscience of Natural Selection there’s more than a passing notion in the Darwinian camp that evolution is not random and that complexity [read: evolutionary progress] is written in the laws of physics. Come to think it, if the materialistic narrative of molecules to man in millennia is true, they’re probably right.

Although asexual life forms exist, it has no bearing on the purpose of sex for heterosexual life forms. Since a planet of all males or all females could not produce offspring, reproduction – not personal pleasure, happiness, etc – is the primary purpose of sex.

There’s a saying that if you want to know an artist, study his art. If a body of work establishes an artist as a master, we don’t discredit his skill if a given piece contains techniques or elements that seem ill-conceived (think Picasso); instead, we question whether we sufficiently understand what he is trying to communicate. Likewise, if the natural word is designed, an apparently ill-conceived feature or imperfection may reflect our lack of understanding in how it works for the greater benefit of the whole; and that is a legitimate scientific field of study.

Since ID “poses no threat whatsoever to ‘Darwinism,’" you might want to let Mr. Gaurino in on it, as he has expended a lot of time and energy “exposing” the toothless tiger.

Darwinian evolution is the creation story of atheism. It is the tale of nothing becoming everything through an incremental, unguided process of random change and adaptation.

Yet despite its many logical and technical difficulties—not the least of which is explaining how nothing became a “something” to get the whole process started—the narrative has captured the imaginations of a wide spectrum of individuals, religious and non-religious alike.
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GG - As is so often the case in creationist tracts, you get it wrong from the very beginning. Evolutionary biology has nothing at all to say about the beginning of the universe, or even about the beginning of life on Earth. It deals with the diversification of life from early common ancestors to the variety of species we see today.

That creationists so frequently resort to the "where did it all come from" argument is a testament to the robustness and reasonableness of evolutionary theory. One has to go outside its bounds to find sufficiently "unanswerable" questions. Moreover, if "where did it all come from" is a problem, then it is a problem for all science, but I don't see you taking chemists to task for not knowing where Hydrogen comes from.
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Today nearly any article or television program, covering any aspect of the natural world, from the eating habits of chimpanzees to the dreams of humans, is sure to make mention of “our evolutionary heritage.”
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GG - Evolution is central to modern biology, and is thus a natural fit for programs about life on Earth.
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What’s more, phenomena as counterproductive to Darwinian fitness as homosexuality and altruism are increasingly being traced to some evolutionary advantage.
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GG - Replace the word "altruism" with "cooperation" and it's easy to see how groups of social animals could leave more of their "cooperative" genes in the next generation than the more selfish pack across the stream. As for homosexuality, there's too much to discuss in a short post, but suffice it to say that your assumption that it is necessarily counter to "fitness" is overly simplistic.
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It is as if to be taken seriously as a researcher, writer or thinker, one must pay homage to Darwin, no matter how tenuous the connection to the subject matter, or fatuous.
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GG - I doubt that many researchers, writers or thinkers give much thought (much less "homage") to Darwin at all. They do indeed use evolutionary concepts, some first articulated by Darwin, others added on and improved by countless biologists over the past 150 years.
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The charm of the tale comes not only in what it has to say about history, but in what it has to say about the future—the eternal struggle for survival will lead to change; change will lead to progress, and progress to perfection.
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GG - No evolutionary biologist would say such a silly thing. When you set out to criticize an idea, please take the trouble to understand it first. Evolution does predict adaptive change, but has nothing to say about a human concept like "progress" and certainly nothing about "perfection".
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As the story gained currency, faith in a caring Superintendent began to be displaced by hope in an indifferent, impersonal mechanism of change—“Change we can believe in,” change we must believe in, if we reject the antediluvian myth and its Author.
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GG - There are any number of things we might believe in place of what you call the "antidiluvian myth". But the Theory of Evolution fits the known evidence.
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It is no wonder that few phrases in recent memory have provoked as much comment, criticism and derision as “intelligent design.”

The fear

Since its introduction into modern lexicons, intelligent design (ID) has been called everything from “creationism in a cheap tuxedo” to a “Trojan horse” to a “sham.” And those are some of the kinder put-downs.

And ID opprobrium has not been restricted to the fever swamps of atheism. Educators, judges, politicians, scientists, journalists, and even Christians have logged withering comments about the science of design. But why the invectives over a non-sectarian enterprise that makes no claims about the identity of the Designer?
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GG - That's the "sham" part. They make no such overt claims to avoid running afoul of current law, not because they actually have no position on the matter.
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Although the proposition of intelligent design is modest—that certain features of the universe are best explained as the products of intelligence.
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The proposition is hardly so modest or limited. It is an attempt to prevent well-supported biology from being taught in schoos, on religious grounds.
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—there is fear that ID and science are mortally locked into a zero-sum game: For ID to win, science must fail. The fear is not unfounded.

Science, properly understood, is a systematic method of empirical investigation, philosophically open, for the acquisition of knowledge. It is the science, modern science, mid-wifed by individuals—Bacon, Ockham, Galileo, Kepler, and Newton—whose openness to an external Source of order, beauty and harmony made possible the game-changing discoveries that led to the scientific revolution.
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GG - Those scientists may have believed they were teasing out the laws of God's universe, but the "external Source" had no place in their actual calculations. We accept Newton's descriptions of planetary motion because they agree with the observed world.
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Science, as it has become today, is an investigative enterprise ideologically confined to naturalism, which holds that the material world is a brute fact fully explicable in terms of matter and motion, without appeal to external causes.
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GG - All science depends on methodological naturalism, which is another way of saying that we can only study observable phenomena.
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For that science, ID is bad news.
Bad news for science

Like the pioneers of modern science, the ID investigator is not committed to rules of play and conventions of “good form” aimed at protecting the consensus view. He is free to follow the phenomena wherever they point, whether to chance, law, or intelligence, whether of the material world or beyond it.

Unfettered by the groupthink of the scientific establishment, he represents a threat to those for whom Oxford cardiovascular physiologist Denis Noble writes, “[Materialistic science] functions as a security blanket.” The security of their paradigm, Noble continues, is that “It avoids the need to ask too many questions, to stare into the abyss of fundamental uncertainty.” Yet sooner or later, that abyss will be encountered.

Over the last several decades, discoveries of the functional elegance and integrated complexity of the universe have made the materialistic underpinning of science increasingly untenable, leaving those so-committed to cede it all to luck or to some yet to be discovered final Law which, if found, would itself beg an explanation.
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GG - Merely calling the "final law" God does nothing to make it more comprehensible. God had to come from somewhere as much as the universe did.
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For instance, should an ultimate law be unearthed down that ever-receding shaft of exploration, it would not account for immaterial phenomena like thought, free will, creativity, and aspirations, except as illusions created by the chemical firings of neurons.
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GG - That such phenomena are "immaterial" is your assumption, an assumption that neurological science does not seem to support.
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Likewise, a meta-Law of the universe would neither provide, nor explain, the moral “oughtness” pressing upon the conscience of man.
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GG - Nor does it need to.
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If it could, humans could no more choose to violate it than they could choose to change their height or blood type. Yet not only do we violate it, we have feelings of guilt when we do, suggesting something behind Law, a teleology, a concern about humans and their social dealings—an intelligence.
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GG - There's a logical leap there that I don't follow. But it sounds like you're saying that if we "feel" morality, then morality must come from without. Why? Could morality not be the instinctual "glue" necessary for the success of a social creature like humans, and thus be selected for ?
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Design suggests that the “machine” is not infinitely malleable as Darwinian theories would have it, but fixed with an in-built limit of “flex.” And that is bad news for social engineers who view humanity as an intermediary life form in the march to our utopian, transhuman future.
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GG - That's just nonsense. No one thinks the "machine" is infinitely malleable, even if the "machine" is all the life on Earth. And your use of the word "Utopian" is more evidence that you really don't understand the basic concepts of evolution.
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Yet many folks who would never think of discarding an irreparably damaged Monet, have few qualms “discarding” a person who is unborn and unwanted or who has been irreparably damaged through injury or impaired through the onset of age.
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GG - "Many folks?" Who are these "many" you speak of? The permissibility of aborting a fetus too young yet to "think" is a common enough view. But who are these people who would euthanize the aged and "injured" against their will?
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The design inference suggests that all persons—even the least-developed and most-infirmed among us—have intrinsic value, worthy of vigorous protections against forces that would threaten their lives and welfare. And that is bad news for the culture of death.
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GG - First present some evidence that atheists, and for that matter religious people who accept evolution, have less concern for their fellow man than Creationists. It seems to me that plenty of avowed Creationists through history have been perfectly happy to kill their fellow man, sometimes for the crime of perceiving God in a slightly different fashion.
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For those who have built careers, labs, and reputations on the shoulders of Darwin;
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GG - Science marches on. All scientists build on the work of those before, Darwin is one very old link in a continuous chain. The work of thousands of biologists since Darwin have served to confirm the importance of his most basic concept, Natural Selection, and has modified and/or discarded many of his other ideas. Darwin is not revered as an authority.
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for those whose investigative quest is driven by an ideological commitment; for those who want to make peace with “science” and appear reasonable to their peers; for those who are more concerned about protecting orthodoxy than in the pursuit of truth;
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GG - This sounds like the Discovery Institute.
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for those whose hopes for the planet lie in evolution’s inexorable march of progress; for those who would litter the road to Utopia with carcasses of the unwanted, the disabled, the aged, and infirmed; and for those who seek escape from the deeper implications of human existence—intelligent design is bad news. It is very bad news.
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We come to the end of your screed without encountering a single word about actual biology, but a great deal of verbiage devoted to fearmongering, straw men and mischaracterizations. An Evolutionary Utopia? Try listening to real biologists for a change. See if they are as morally crippled as you would prefer to believe.

Greg Guarino

@Stephen - Biblical theology is very much at odds with Evolution. Like it or not, Evolutionary Science is not compatible with the Bible; a number of fundamentals behind evolution flatly break down against Biblical truth. However, there are a lot of "Christian" scientists that tend to ignore the Bible in favor of their science, partially b/c it is the only way for them to get recognition in the scientific world right now - it's very much the case that if you admit you are a Christian Scientist that does not hold to Evolution in any form that you will be disregarded, and you will not be able to get any where. Sad, but true.

FYI - this is very much by design. Evolution is designed to deny that God (or any god) exists. Many dispute that, but that is at its heart - there must not be a god. Why? B/c if there is then they are answerable to someone; and they don't want to be answerable to anyone. They don't want to admit that humans are flawed in nature, at their core; that the world isn't getting to be a better place; it's not moving towards perfection but atrophying away from it.

@All,

Per the age of the earth we must remember that there is a time gap Biblically - we are not told how long of a time there is between Genesis 2 and Genesis 3. It could be a day, it could be a billion years. And no, the Genealogies do not hold the "key" to solving that time gap; the best interpretation of the time is to say that Adam's age is from the fall; it may be from his creation but we simply do not know.

First, evolutionary theory does not posit that change will lead to progress; indeed, among its offensive features are the insistence that what is fitter in one environment or niche is less fit in another, and irrelevant in a third, and that there is no global or ultimate standard of biological perfection. In His Icons of Evolution, Jonathan Wells complains about the insistence of evolutionists that evolution is not the sort of thing capable of having goals, and seems, in some passages, to be trying to reintroduce Lamarckian teleology to descent with modification.

Second, there are a number of species that can reproduce asexually or parthenogenetically: the former are mostly single-celled organisms but the latter include a number of more complex species, such as aphids or some whiptail lizards. Quite a few species that have sexual reproduction despite having only one type of sex cell: sponges and yeast come to mind. Quite a few other species have male and female gametes, but not separate sexes: all normal individuals are hermaphrodites. Snails and earthworms are well-known examples.

Third, if, as ID proponents tell us, we are not allowed to make assumptions about the likely motives of the Designer, why should we assume that He regards the infirm or handicapped as anything but botched manufactures that ought to be discarded in favor of exemplars that don't deviate from the intended design?

Fourth, if Mr. Nichol can be so wrong on the basics of evolutionary theory and biology (and arguably even on what intelligent design holds), why should we assume that he's right that ID is anything but a collection of shabby God-of-the-gaps arguments with no scientific merit, and which poses no threat whatsoever to "Darwinism?"

Stephen, which version of the Bible do you think science "proves," the heliocentric young Earth one, the old-Earth-young-life one, the old-Earth-old-life one, etc.?

Regis, how about you? Do you think that science "proves" one of the mutually contradictory "literal" interpretations of Genesis, or is your conclusion closer to that of chief ID proponent Michael Behe, who accepts a non-literal old-life-plus-common-descent version?

I think you have it backwards, the better science gets the more it proves the truth of the Bible. The older I get and the more developed my Biblical worldview has become the healthier both psychologically and physically I've become.
It took some time and real study of Gods Word but after much work I've gotten rid of all the false teachings learned in both high school and in college (the Bible calls those things strongholds).
You would be blessed by taking a good Bible studies class.

Regis, you refer to past scientists as being open to an external Source of order. Let's look at the Newton example. He could not think of how the planets could be set in motion naturally, so he concluded God set them in motion. But, he was wrong. Later scientists found natural mechanisms to form the planets and set them spinning. Well, the Intelligent Design "scientists" are making exactly the same mistake Newton made - a mistake repeated throughout history. Karen Armstrong makes this point very well in "The Case for God" - how using gaps in our understanding of nature to prove God's existence is a fool's game. It's been a losing game throughout history - "ID" is simply this generation's failure.