intelligent design

So organisms are employing their free will to decide what mutations to exhibit???

 

That one word makes that entire statement ridiculous.

 

I said logical extension - not the exact same thing.

You are smarter than that.

God does not need to control every single thing. He could - but he does not need to. His gift to all is an ability to adapt & survive as conditions change.

And no one has proven that adapt & survive means becoming a new species.

 

Perhaps it does. But you can't even describe a process that would get you there. Neither can evolution or natural selection.

 

Gotcha. Understand how you are using the term in an ID context.

 

That hasn't happened with gravity. The edges of the universe are still speeding up, which would be impossible based on the way we understand gravity. But no one is invalidating that theory.

 

Well which is it then vp? Does the mammal evolve legs to reach food sources further inland because god wills it and designs it or does it happen by chance?

How does God decide which species to extinct? Before you say that it's random, go back to all of Sly's diatribes about how everything had to happen a certain way to produce us. It cannot be that random and still be intentional.

You seem to be arguing both random and controlled at the same time, and that's logically inconsistent.

 

I think that I have been extremely clear about this. What I believe is that God created the different species types and then stepped back and allowed them to evolve. I believe that the Earth has been around for billions of years and when it was right to take the next step, God took it.

I don't think that God decides that. I think that he lets the systems run their courses at that stage. His end goal was always to have man, but that does not mean that dinosaurs or their era did not serve an crucial purpose. What would we be using to fuel our cars for instance if that era had not been?

No it's not. I set limits under which my child can experiment, but he has to try, fail, get hurt, exeperience joy, & learn on his own. Also, all of his previous stages are crucial to their successors. I see no reason not to look at this the exact same way.

 

I completely understand your closed system with chaos inside it model, but that's not at all what ID says, nor, specifically, what Sly is saying when he describes his irreducibly complex systems that had to be designed.

And at the crux of your argument is that statement above. A system cannot be random with an intentional end product. That would be like saying that I intend to build a [insert specific Dell Model] computer, but will accomplish that by dumping a whole bunch of PC parts on the floor and hoping they randomly assemble into a functional PC.

In fact, that's Sly's criticism of evolution. So, your position is contradicting him... at least in my mind.