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Originally Posted by rsl12
You mentioned you were a bit confused by my post, so I hope you won't be offended when I return the emotion: this confuses me. An intellegent designer and a process of improved functionality due to natural selection both exist for any particular biological structure? I still don't see how one can hold the concepts of intelligent design (the designer is responsible for the intricate parts of the machinery) and evolution (natural selection is responsible for the intricate parts of the machinery) to be both valid.
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If an intelligent designer created the world, including all the natural laws and conditions, then that intelligent designer is as responsible for anything in that world as those natural laws and conditions are. So e.g. the vertebrate eye evolved by natural selection because the intelligent designer created the necessary preconditions for the vertebrate eye to evolve by NS. It would never have evolved without those preconditions, so the ID was responsible for it. The intelligent design idea extends far beyond biology; proponents are using ID to explain all sorts of physical phenomena, such as the geometry of the earth/moon/sun system, the magnitudes of universal physical constants, the beautiful symmetry of mathematical physics. Simply showing that complex biological structures could in theory have evolved by NS (as has been done countless times already) is not sufficient to refute ID.
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Originally Posted by rsl12
I never said ID was proven--only that, contrary to what you were saying, there could theoretically exist enough evidence to prove to rational folks that there is an intelligent designer responsible for the complexity/functionality of life.
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I understand that; my response is that the evidence outlined in your previous post would seem to be impossible in theory to collect: you would need to have complete, 100% understanding of every natural agency, and every combination of natural agencies, and every combination of initial conditions that ever existed anywhere on earth at any time, in order to "prove" that no natural agency could have been responsible for a structure.
Do you agree that such a proof is impossible? If so, then what other kind of proof would be possible to convince rational folks that an intelligent being designed all forms of life on this planet?
On the supernatural question: clearly any "being" that has control over universal physical constants is outside their realm.