What's the lamest defence of Theism you've ever heard?

[Edwardo Piet]

Hmm. Another extremely sophisticated looking DooM level, AAA---but it does kind of look rather like the last one. Got anything a bit different? I'm looking for a unique WAD to cruise through with Doomguy on ZDooM.

[God of Mr. Hanky]

No, I won't, since you don't bother to answer the most simple questions. You fill your personal knowledge gaps with god. Fine by me and be my guest. What you fail to adress, just to give one example, is the level of peer reviews of apologist papers. How are they received by the scientific community?

You made a bold statement, so come on, lay your cards on the table.

This is the problem with Triple Ass - he thinks the scientific community is out to get those who disagree in favor of ID. It isn't, but one ID argument is exactly like any other argument which has been heard before, and still the design theists press on, presenting no evidence on which they could even begin to build a theoretical model. Therefore there is at best very little reason for qualified scientists to consider anything new which ID theists have to say, which invariably turns out to be not actually new at all. No matter how many of their bad arguments you destroy, the religious apologists who masquerade as scientists will come back again with the same dumb arguments, dusted over to make them smell fresh to the unwary, and begin all over again, because this is what their imagineered god instructed them to do.

The problem is that believers aren't really interested in the truth of reality - they like the ideas which they have, and they're going to call them real no matter what. Therefore they wouldn't care how much you point out their conflicts with reality, but they do care about convincing others to agree with them, and they want to believe they are doing right no matter how much they lie when they attempt to achieve their goal. They do this, doubling down with every hit to their sense of logic, and again it's because they think their god, who they believe is the author of all which is good, moral and just, has instructed them to do so.

Also, the questioning believer who investigates the ideas which he has been taught still wants to believe that there are at least some ideas which are remotely similar to those which he questions, and that finding and believing them would make him right. So he may see the facts as they are, while still unable to let go of theism when there's a failure to point out the injustice and immorality which is relative to atheism. My favorite canard is that atheists are all hedonistic monsters, and it took me awhile to understand why this wasn't so before I could join this club.

We know from observation of history that humans are easily manipulated to do horrible things when their sense of morality can be twisted, and this is why it needs to be questioned. This is why I seriously doubt your emphasis on fighting the Christards with logic alone. Questioning the morality of a belief is key with many believers, and possibly the majority who eventually deconvert. A true-believer can reconcile any hole you show him in his logic to his preferred reality which his sense of morality prescribes, but (if he isn't sociopathic) when you break through the false front of his morality then he won't be able to continue evangelizing what he now sees for the evil which it is.

[God of Mr. Hanky]

Also the universe does give evidence of design. Every single thing that led to us is unlikely. The cosmological constant, and other finely tuned laws  of physics and chemistry. The features of our planet and solar system that allow life to form. It is all exactly the way it needs to be.

The existence of you in a similar, but not unlikely earth is far more unlikely. By all mathematical reasoning, you shouldn't exist, and at this point in your time and place there would be someone (or thing) entirely different. With or without your imagineered god, the unlikely happens, again and again. It's just really awesome what unlikely conditions, materials, and plenty of time can achieve!

[TheRocketSurgeon]

I go away for a few hours, and this happens?

1) Calling the cosmological constant evidence that the universe was "designed for us" is as ridiculous as saying that a puddle which takes the shape of Elvis did so because the pothole it's in was designed to fit an Elvis-shaped puddle at a depth of exactly 3 cm. You're putting the cart before the horse, in other words: we are the way we are because the random variables fell out the way they did, not the other way around. That argument will never hold water unless you can demonstrate that no other variable-sets could sustain life different from us, or that it's impossible for the variables to have fallen into the order they did without outside intervention (I don't even know how you'd begin to demonstrate that one).

2) They have already explained to you why ID/IC does not constitute science. The definition of science (with which you have actively taken issue because it does not suit your expectations) is that a hypothesis must be formulated based upon the data (which ID/IC meets), then the hypothesis must be falsifiable (fail!), it must be tested and the results published for peer review in such a way that others can reproduce the results and criticize the methodology (fail!), and it must make accurate predictions which can build a model of how that thing functions (fail!). As I told you, please read the Kitzmiller v. Dover case decision carefully... a hyper-conservative Christian federal judge listened to the evidence and took careful note of how they forced the ID supporters (including Behe) to admit that their broadened definition--the one you keep urging us to accept--would also include astrology and tarot in its broad sweep.

That makes it NOT SCIENCE. This is in fact medieval theology-based "magical thinking" trying to creep back into how we investigate the world. I would point out that it was EXACTLY that type of anti-materialist theology which destroyed the Muslim scientific community after 300 years of scientific advancement, around the year 1100 C.E.

3) What's the problem with humans and chimps' relative degree of similarity? It's obvious to anyone (including Behe) who looks at our genomes that we're evolved from the same ancestors. So why are you objecting to our similarity to chimps? Could it be your Creationist "man was made in God's image to rule over the animals, not be one" roots are showing?

Take a look, for instance, at the research team whose work you mentioned earlier (when you said the male-specific Y-chromosome regions were surprisingly different between us and chimpanzees), and how they described it:

"The human Y chromosome began to evolve from an autosome hundreds of millions of years ago, acquiring a sex-determining function and undergoing a series of inversions that suppressed crossing over with the X chromosome. Little is known about the recent evolution of the Y chromosome because only the human Y chromosome has been fully sequenced. Prevailing theories hold that Y chromosomes evolve by gene loss, the pace of which slows over time, eventually leading to a paucity of genes, and stasis. These theories have been buttressed by partial sequence data from newly emergent plant and animal Y chromosomes, but they have not been tested in older, highly evolved Y chromosomes such as that of humans. Here we finished sequencing of the male-specific region of the Y chromosome (MSY) in our closest living relative, the chimpanzee, achieving levels of accuracy and completion previously reached for the human MSY. By comparing the MSYs of the two species we show that they differ radically in sequence structure and gene content, indicating rapid evolution during the past 6 million years. The chimpanzee MSY contains twice as many massive palindromes as the human MSY, yet it has lost large fractions of the MSY protein-coding genes and gene families present in the last common ancestor. We suggest that the extraordinary divergence of the chimpanzee and human MSYs was driven by four synergistic factors: the prominent role of the MSY in sperm production, 'genetic hitchhiking' effects in the absence of meiotic crossing over, frequent ectopic recombination within the MSY, and species differences in mating behaviour. Although genetic decay may be the principal dynamic in the evolution of newly emergent Y chromosomes, wholesale renovation is the paramount theme in the continuing evolution of chimpanzee, human and perhaps other older MSYs."

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20072128

See the part where they mention the God-magic that caused the divergence to happen? Yeah, neither did I.

[Cyberman]

Which is why you have to play the kalam card and shift your designer beyond the reach of falsifiability.

So is your multiverse

Ok, first of all it's not my multiverse. Second, your bizarre tu quoque/red herring hybrid reply makes no sense as a grammatical run-on from my post. Third and more importantly, it may surprise you to know that I am not actually convinced by talk of a multiverse, and I do not in fact think it is necessary ultimately to account for the Universe as we experience it. Of course, I do not claim the expertise in this field to propose MVT as a viable and necessary proposition as you clearly do to be able to dismiss it in four words. On the other hand and by the same token, regarding the design alternative that you propose, I do not need to be an expert to dismiss it as unfalsifiable since you yourself have already described it as such. This is demonstrably the case, as otherwise you would be able to point to this deigner, or at least present a method by which ID might identify it (the predictive capability you mentioned) as I have asked you on at least two occasions.

[Pat Mustard]

"You wouldn't believe the evidence anyway so I'm not going to show it to you."

That's funny, that's what I'm getting from the atheists on this page.

Actually, Junk Status, in order for you to be able to claim that you'd have to show us evidence. But you cannot do that, because you've got none.

Checkmate creatard.

[AAA]

No, I won't, since you don't bother to answer the most simple questions. You fill your personal knowledge gaps with god. Fine by me and be my guest. What you fail to adress, just to give one example, is the level of peer reviews of apologist papers. How are they received by the scientific community?

You made a bold statement, so come on, lay your cards on the table.

It isn't God of the Gaps I don't know why you can't understand that. It is not that I am saying that God is responsible for every cellular interaction. I am saying that we understand how attenuation works. We understand how membrane proteins work. We understand how enhancer sequences work. We know how genes are expressed. It operates in ways that we can only compare with our own technology. Therefore it is based on what we DO know that we conclude it to be designed, not what we don't. And I'm not overly concerned with peer review. But if an ID article is published, you will just say that the publisher is wacko and ignore it. So if we can look at the evidence ourselves, then we do not need to base our conclusions solely on peer review. However, obviously peer review is an important part of science and making sure that experiments don't overlook potential factors that may disrup it, but it isn't everythin.

[AAA]

That's funny, that's what I'm getting from the atheists on this page.

Actually, Junk Status, in order for you to be able to claim that you'd have to show us evidence. But you cannot do that, because you've got none.

Checkmate creatard.

Sequential information in cells and molecular mediums that allow information to be transferred between molecules seem like designed features. It can easily be interpreted as evidence of design, especially when we see intelligently created technologies that resemble it, yet we never see non-living systems mimic it.

[AAA]

I go away for a few hours, and this happens?

1) Calling the cosmological constant evidence that the universe was "designed for us" is as ridiculous as saying that a puddle which takes the shape of Elvis did so because the pothole it's in was designed to fit an Elvis-shaped puddle at a depth of exactly 3 cm. You're putting the cart before the horse, in other words: we are the way we are because the random variables fell out the way they did, not the other way around. That argument will never hold water unless you can demonstrate that no other variable-sets could sustain life different from us, or that it's impossible for the variables to have fallen into the order they did without outside intervention (I don't even know how you'd begin to demonstrate that one).

2) They have already explained to you why ID/IC does not constitute science. The definition of science (with which you have actively taken issue because it does not suit your expectations) is that a hypothesis must be formulated based upon the data (which ID/IC meets), then the hypothesis must be falsifiable (fail!), it must be tested and the results published for peer review in such a way that others can reproduce the results and criticize the methodology (fail!), and it must make accurate predictions which can build a model of how that thing functions (fail!). As I told you, please read the Kitzmiller v. Dover case decision carefully... a hyper-conservative Christian federal judge listened to the evidence and took careful note of how they forced the ID supporters (including Behe) to admit that their broadened definition--the one you keep urging us to accept--would also include astrology and tarot in its broad sweep.

That makes it NOT SCIENCE. This is in fact medieval theology-based "magical thinking" trying to creep back into how we investigate the world. I would point out that it was EXACTLY that type of anti-materialist theology which destroyed the Muslim scientific community after 300 years of scientific advancement, around the year 1100 C.E.

3) What's the problem with humans and chimps' relative degree of similarity? It's obvious to anyone (including Behe) who looks at our genomes that we're evolved from the same ancestors. So why are you objecting to our similarity to chimps? Could it be your Creationist "man was made in God's image to rule over the animals, not be one" roots are showing?

Take a look, for instance, at the research team whose work you mentioned earlier (when you said the male-specific Y-chromosome regions were surprisingly different between us and chimpanzees), and how they described it:

"The human Y chromosome began to evolve from an autosome hundreds of millions of years ago, acquiring a sex-determining function and undergoing a series of inversions that suppressed crossing over with the X chromosome. Little is known about the recent evolution of the Y chromosome because only the human Y chromosome has been fully sequenced. Prevailing theories hold that Y chromosomes evolve by gene loss, the pace of which slows over time, eventually leading to a paucity of genes, and stasis. These theories have been buttressed by partial sequence data from newly emergent plant and animal Y chromosomes, but they have not been tested in older, highly evolved Y chromosomes such as that of humans. Here we finished sequencing of the male-specific region of the Y chromosome (MSY) in our closest living relative, the chimpanzee, achieving levels of accuracy and completion previously reached for the human MSY. By comparing the MSYs of the two species we show that they differ radically in sequence structure and gene content, indicating rapid evolution during the past 6 million years. The chimpanzee MSY contains twice as many massive palindromes as the human MSY, yet it has lost large fractions of the MSY protein-coding genes and gene families present in the last common ancestor. We suggest that the extraordinary divergence of the chimpanzee and human MSYs was driven by four synergistic factors: the prominent role of the MSY in sperm production, 'genetic hitchhiking' effects in the absence of meiotic crossing over, frequent ectopic recombination within the MSY, and species differences in mating behaviour. Although genetic decay may be the principal dynamic in the evolution of newly emergent Y chromosomes, wholesale renovation is the paramount theme in the continuing evolution of chimpanzee, human and perhaps other older MSYs."

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20072128

See the part where they mention the God-magic that caused the divergence to happen? Yeah, neither did I.

1. It's not like life can just form under any conditions as the puddle analogy. You know that, and I'm disappointed that a person who knows biology can make that statement. 
2. ID is based on the evidence of biology. Also how is evolution falsifiable? And no, you again are describing experimental science, which will never be able to describe the past. You should look up about how scientists compare competing hypothesis about the remote past where experiments cannot reach. Not all science is empirical as you would like to believe, but you know that. The tough thing is to make sure that you do not mix the unempirical areas with the empirical. 
3. And yes the similar genome could be interpreted as common ancestry, or it could be interpreted as a designer using a similar framework to make multiple different designs. All computer codes use binary code. Similar programs have more similar codes. They were still designed.

[AAA]

Also the universe does give evidence of design. Every single thing that led to us is unlikely. The cosmological constant, and other finely tuned laws  of physics and chemistry. The features of our planet and solar system that allow life to form. It is all exactly the way it needs to be.

The existence of you in a similar, but not unlikely earth is far more unlikely. By all mathematical reasoning, you shouldn't exist, and at this point in your time and place there would be someone (or thing) entirely different. With or without your imagineered god, the unlikely happens, again and again. It's just really awesome what unlikely conditions, materials, and plenty of time can achieve!

It's not the same thing. Improbable events happen all the time, but the question is, if only one or few of these improbable events lead to the desired affect, then how likely is it that the affect in question will spontaneously be achieved? For example. What if you were the only viable version of a human. You could have infinite tries to try to get a human like you, but the fact is that it won't happen again because there aren't enough probabalistic resources.