Atheism vs. God's Existence

[TheRocketSurgeon]

And yet, you keep saying that "it contains information" (true, in the broadest sense of the term), which you then conflate with some deliberately-encoded message to produce a desire end-result (the "Intelligent" part of your design hypothesis).

What you are leaving out is that life has had four billion years and literally trillions of generations to get this right. It did not start out with the complex modern systems you now say cannot have come about any other way, because, gosh, they're just SO COMPLICATED!!! (!!!)

Once any basic, replicating molecule formed on this planet, by whatever chemical means, that replicating molecule would, like a Polymerase Chain Reaction, continue to replicate itself endlessly, within the physical constraints of the environment which contained it. Some of them would be slightly different--most nonfunctional, but others still working in their new forms--and over time they would increase in complexity (they must, because if the original unit represents the base degree of complexity required for replication, then literally the only directions they can change are "equally complex" and "more complex") until new functions were added. When you leave out the "scaffolding" that led to the complex systems today, and posit that evolution is unfalsifiable, we must start to question whether you are being dishonest or willfully ignorant. I'm sorry that this offends you, when you think you're trying to be serious... but man, if you can't grasp why we can't take you seriously on these points, I don't know what to tell you.

You claim that the mechanisms have not been shown to be adequate for this. Yet, as we have shown you several times, ID proponents like Behe have tried to say they have a "mousetrap", in which any removed part would render the complex, multi-step whole inoperable... which is true, except it leaves out that by modern times, the DNA code is long enough that there are many interacting genes which can be modified, duplicated, and/or co-opted to perform new functions through nothing but chemistry and random alterations. Other scientists (largely graduate students) showed exactly the processes that Behe claimed as irreducibly complex were nothing of the sort... they "filled in the gap" to show why his proposition was wrong, not just unnecessary. What does he do? He moves on to the next one, because hey, he sold a LOT of copies of his "Darwin's Black Box" and follow-up books to the gullible, who will shell out their $$ to protect themselves from the crazy idea that we might have gotten here without the need for outside intervention.

"Humans can change DNA, therefore it is a mechanism for change" is nothing even close to an answer. Humans can wear down rocks into cool shapes, just like erosion, but it doesn't mean that when we find a cool-shaped rock, it's anything other than erosion. What would indicate design (as you put it) would be to find a section that could only come from non-natural processes. We see nothing of the sort in DNA's complexity, nothing that defies the basic laws of chemistry and atomic physics, or of the Theory of Evolution and Natural Selection.

Instead, what we find are lots of leftover errors and scars/marks from past viral infections, chromosomal fusions, and a lot of other natural processes that demonstrate we all inherit our DNA from our ancestors, with modification, and that we share a relationship in our DNA patterns with our cousins (some more distant than others) because we share common ancestry. We have enough information about evolution via genetics, now, that we can actually trace the rise of various genes that added to the complexity and permitted us to have a lineage that contained that gene--such as the ones for a spine, or kidneys, etc.

And while you scoff and deride our counter-examples as too trivial, too simple, to represent the idea you're trying to present, I propose to you that they're really not different, for their time and place. In 1580, it would have been perfectly reasonable to think that the order you describe must have been from an intelligence, instead of the physics of chemistry, because they didn't know enough about the physics of chemistry to make such a call. They didn't really know anything about it. Today, you're making the same sorts of comments as those they would've made about the snowflakes-- even though we have good information on how it happens. Stop it!