Yeah, Jeremy, I'd want them dead. But unfortunately there's no way to enforce that standard without also killing wrongly accused victoms. We know this as fact. How you can ignore that fact is beyond me. If you went to jail because a couple of phony eye witnesses accused you of murder you'd sing a different tune.

Ah - irreducible complexity. That's the term I've been searching for.

First, take a look at the about us page from both of mixandburn's links.

They are not a scientific organization--they are a religious conversion tool.

Second, their claims have already been addressed by my links throughout this thread. They also pull the dirty trick of quoting scientists, including Darwin, out of context in order to make them appear to be doubting their own work. One good example is the quote on the eye, about which I posted an entire quotation of Darwin's earlier. They do exactly what the link I posted accused of.

Third, that article has no author listed, and is written in a style so cleverly contrived as to give the appearance of objectivity. It is absolutely not objective, but attempts to use the Bible as scientific evidence disproving Big Bang theory as well as Evolution.

Here's an example of their scientific rigor:

The notion of Irreducible Complexity is a study in the misapplication of logic. A typical claim goes: Such and such mechanism is a perfect working machine. For it to function, all its parts must have been generated at once, already functioning, or else the machine wouldn't work at all. Take a car's engine for example--without spark plugs, it wouldn't do anything, so it couldn't have evolved from separate parts.

This completely ignores the fact that simpler systems exist, and have been documented. In the case of the eye, simple light detecting cells gave way to mucous-covered motion detecting cells. Then the mucous led to a fixed lens, and after millions of years we got the magnificent mechanism of moden human vision. Creationists would have you believe that evolution says some creature existed with a lens, occular musculature, and a retina but no iris, then suddenly--bam, an iris "mutated" out of nothing and here we are.

Creationists prey on the uneducated and attempt to supplant the desire for knowledge with a faith in Jesus Christ.

This does not mean that belief in Christ is erroneous. It's just that belief in his teachings cannot replace empirical, repeatable, testable evidence.

I'm still waiting for the evidence of so-called Intelligent Design. So far all I've seen is evidence of the need for further research in evolution--which I don't deny, and in fact encourage.

Intelligent design was created as a front for Christian fundamentalist creationism, and I'm glad mixandburn is proving this through his links.

Maybe someone's moniker should be changed to "mixandburninhell" for all the non-believers. Now wouldn't that be a lovely holiday greeting for all? Happy Festivus!

I would argue that light detecting cells aren't so simple, and each step from there (many of them) toward the camera eye would not be very simple as well. Of course, this linear path toward a more complex and more useful development could have gone another direction, maybe one even more amazing. But then it would've been all the more miraculous.

The use of biased internet sources goes two ways. Being biased, however does not necessarily mean that they only spew crap. It just means you have to be more careful and skeptical.

Is there anyone that argues against ID being some form of creationism? I thought that was a given.

Thanks for the reply AO.

First off, just because scientific information does not come directly from some scientific website, whatever that might be, does not necessarily or automatically negate that informations validity or credibility. Also, what scientific website would list this information anyway? That would certainly seem to undermine the years of hard work and research being at stake if any information would come to light that may contradict the long standing ( 150-200 yrs.) of evolutionary thought. I can imagine just like in Christianity, ones whole belief system could be tied up in this issue. Far be it there could be a chance of that crumbling down based on opposing relevent information.Darwinism has some very interesting challenges to its doctrine whether they will be acknowledged here on this forum or not. In the spirit of an open mind would it be fair to say technology has come a long way since his ideas first came to light? Is it possible some of Darwins conclusions may have been incorrect because of a lack of that technology? Did you not say something like science is always changing based on new information. Are not some, if not most of the changes in scientific thought due to ever improving technology that reveals flaws in an older system of thought? You claim the information I linked to is invalid because it happens to come off a website that has a Christian perspective? I think it brings up interesting thought provoking logical alternatives to a possibly outdated incomplete theory.
Further, your introduction of the last post you made sure smaks of a good old political smear campain tactic. Would you agree?
I could just as easily discredit your own sources a few posts up.
http://www.straightdope.com/faq/officialfaq.html
http://www.bidstrup.com/Resume.doc

You surprise me AO, especially since you chastised Dorkus for apparently not knowing his sources. Are these the kind of places you regularly resource information from? Really,what credentials does Scott Bidstrup have in regard to his preported vast knowledge of Christianity and the bible?

Who is Cecil Adams? Apparently the smartest man on earth according to that web page. Not very convincing.

Hows a bought leaving the smear campain tactics out and see what we come up with?
I wouldn't pretend to know as much about science as you seem to know, but I'm not a complete idiot either.

It's not the least bit outdated! And if it were complete, there would be no need for the entire field of Evolutionary Biology! The reason you don't see any logical alternatives is that there simply aren't any. If you want to say that God created evolution, then good on yer, mate. But to deny that Darwin got it 100% right is simply ignorant or stubborn. Sorry if that sounds "closed-minded," but if you think about what he said, there's simply no other conclusion (other than "Duh, God created it and that's the end of the story.").

Do you even know what Darwin says? Think about a strawberry, which needs birds to eat its fruit and poop out its seeds to spread them around so it survives. But it doesn't want them to do that before they're ready, so it starts off green and bitter to discourage the birds. Then when it's ripe, it attracts them by being bright red and succulent.

Before Darwin, people would look at the strawberry and say God created it (a.k.a. intelligently designed it). But Darwin showed that the stawberries that were red and/or tasty too early or green and/or bitter too late weren't the ones that survived. And that's how natural selection works. Stawberries don't know they're doing what they're doing, of course, but there are no other theories to indicate that anything else is what's going on because Darwin's theory is absolutely corrrect.

If you apply the same concept to animals, then you see that Darwin's ideas are just the same. Animals are more complicated, but then the time scales are way, way longer. (Great apes were 6 or 7 million years ago, modern humans have been around for about 50,000 years.)

That's why Europeans who have been taught about how evolution works are in disbelief that so many Americans can be so dumb! And that's why anyone who says evolution isn't real is just way, way out there.

We know much more than we knew in Darwin's time, but everything we've learned since - genetics, mainly - has only lent more proof to what he said. It certainly hasn't made it outdated.

Do you even know what Darwin says? Think about a strawberry, which needs birds to eat its fruit and poop out its seeds to spread them around so it survives. But it doesn't want them to do that before they're ready, so it starts off green and bitter to discourage the birds. Then when it's ripe, it attracts them by being bright red and succulent.

Before Darwin, people would look at the strawberry and say God created it (a.k.a. intelligently designed it). But Darwin showed that the stawberries that were red and/or tasty too early or green and/or bitter too late weren't the ones that survived. And that's how natural selection works. Stawberries don't know they're doing what they're doing, of course, but there are no other theories to indicate that anything else is what's going on because Darwin's theory is absolutely corrrect.

I see. So, the strawberry then, depends on birds eating it at just the right time who then spread seeds over the countryside via fecal matter. I understand and believe this. IMO where the logic of this breaks down is found in the thousands of years of evolution and natural selection. At what point did strawberries start turning red at all if the primary purpose of the red color is to attract birds who aid in the advancment of their species. Strawberries only come on the vine once a year. If they did not grow up and turn red, be sweet and juicy from the git go, birds never would have eaten them and the word strawberry would not be in our vocabulary because they wouldn't exist following that line of reasoning. Strawberries couldn't have evolved in that way. They were created that way from the start. I will agree we can have many varieties based on breeding different varieties but a strawberry was always a strawberry. Just like an ape was always an ape and a human was always a human. As Ao pointed out earlier and I agree with, different environmental impacts on a species can produce physical changes or adaptive changes over time if you will, my belief however, is that still the baseline species remains the same. An example would be me. I used to be lean, muscular and vibrant. Now I'm overweight,lethargic and basically feeling worn out. Why? Time and environmental impacts has affected the size and shape of my body but deep inside I'm still that same guy.

By the way;

How do you do that quote thing all you guys do? I could use a little direction on this as evidently I havn't evolved far enough to have figured this out yet on my own. :p

Quote thing?