"Bruce Barnett" wrote in message
...


ID has predicted nothing, and there is no way to measure its accuracy.

As I understand it, It tries to explain a LACK of knowledge. It tries
to say that between fossil A and C, there was no intermediate fossil.
So the theory can only be disproved one example at a time, and never
ever proved.


Argh! One of the worst debates known to man and here I am entering into
it... I think mine will be a short lived involvement, but I do want to
comment on your statements above Bruce.

Intelligent Design is hard to nail down because it is so loosely defined.
There are almost as many degrees of it as there are people who believe in
it. There is however a very large contingent of folks who believe in
intelligent design that also believe in evolution to a point. The
differentiator tends to be whether things as we know them came into being
out of chaos or whether they came into being by creation. For these folks,
evolution does have a place. It's observable so it can't be denied. ID
does not attempt to deny something between fossil A and C necessarily, but
it does reject the idea of everything originating in some primeval pool of
goo. For many, a big bang type of theory and an expanding universe can
easily sit side by side with a creation notion. ID does put some of the
more radical evolution theories to the test, and that's as it should be.
There are radicals on both sides of the issues, as is the case in
everything. In the evolution camp there are those who are quick to jump to
conclusions not backed by science, simply because it's easy to throw the
cloak of evolution over things.

You are right - science today is shedding light on more and more things that
were themselves, cloaked in mystery for the entire time man has been on
earth. It takes time to overcome beliefs, traditions and long standing
"truths", even when armed with what has every appearance of being factual
evidence. However, science is not shedding a dismissing light on every
aspect of intelligent design. The very rules of science which make it
predictable and measurable imply an order within the universe that is
contrary to the absolute belief in evolution - or better said, to a denial
of intelligent design. As has been proposed many times by minds far greater
than mine, order does not come out of chaos, rather, order tends to decay
into chaos. As yet, I've never heard anyone put forward a theory for how
order in the universe evolved from chaos and somehow found a way to
stabilize at the level of order that we now base all of our science on.

I can't enter into a tit-for-tat type of argument to defend my position
because to be frank, this just has never been an important enough matter for
me to invest any significant amount of energy in. That makes me ill
equipped to argue point by point. My thoughts on the matter really
represent nothing more than a very casual interest in an argument which I
can observe taking place around me.

--

-Mike-