Let's get ready to rumble! (Part 4)

The evolutionist:

If you want specific replys to some of the issues raised here, we will need to break it up some. But I will try to address the items below. Intelligent design and creationism are one in the same. The same people are involved in the same organizations. The only difference is that some of them shy away from saying God when they reference an 'intelligent designer'. Find me one of these 'scientists' who would be comfortable with the the 'intelligent designer' being called Allah, and I will believe you. In fact, I think I would be much closer to believing that you believe in 'intelligent design' if we agreed from on use the term Allah whenever we reference the 'intelligent designer'.

I have re-read every e-mail you have sent me, and there was no link to anything, so I don't know what you mean when you say I have not looked into 'the resource' you suggested. Unless you want me to read entire book you mentioned. Which I have not done. As to the two websites. The Discovery Institute and AllAboutGod. And guess what, two of the three links you sent me lead right back there. The third one was PBS. Which was very useful (I read all three). It exactly coincides with what I was saying about punctuated evolution, and how it is perfectly compatible with Darwin's thought, and with current evolutionary thought. Thank you, I hope Peter read it too.

I am confused at your conclusion since this article clearly reinforces my original statement. In fact, it says that speciation can occur in a matter of tens of thousands of years, which thought anyway but didn't want to freak you out with that suggestion. The 1 million years was enough to get you foaming at the mouth. I will get back to you on how fossils are formed. I need to find some good articles on the subject, because my memory of stuff I have read before isn't specific enough to tell you right where to go. Although I think it would be as easy for you to find as me. I am just going to go to some scientific organzation websites and some science journals and see what turns up from a general search.

Imperfect fossil record. Let me get this right, you will only accept evolution when we have a 'perfect' fossil record? That is what you require? Because if you can accept only perfect historical evidence, than we might have all kinds of problems here with the bible. There are many, many transitional forms of fossils. I will find some articles about that too.

Please don't pull up the same Darwin quote that Pete did. That only makes it so obvious that the objections come from the same small self-referencial community. Again, that quote is a rhetorical question that he answers in the book. For confimation, please refer to the same article you just sent me on punctuated evolution.

Me:

Thank you for your response, it was slightly more courteous and I appreciate it. I was almost finished writing my response when I began to read some of your exchanges with the others from this past week. I think I may be repeating some things. Hope you all don't mind. Warning: this one's long:

G. Simpson's phrase "Man is the result of a purposeless and natural process that did not have him in mind" is not merely one man's thought, but the very basis for your naturalist materialistic presupposition. I'm in the middle of writing a comment to your "Viewpoints" response to Pete which should help us get down to the root issue.

The Discovery Institute and AllAboutGod. That's funny, I don't normally use those two websites when I debate. I didn't know about AllaboutGod until I started following this thread. I simply wanted to show you there are scientists who believe in Intelligent Design. But it's understandable that DI pops up: it's because they're the lead organization of this movement. And if you're still not convinced there are credible scientists who believe in ID, here's an official list (and I doubt all are creationist Christians):
http://www.discovery.org/scripts/viewDB/filesDB-download.php?command=download&id=660
Sorry to use DI's website, but just wanted to show you that there is an actual growing list and there are many more scientists being added as we speak. Even from the Muslim world. Here are a couple of Muslim scientists who believe in Intelligent Design:

Dr. Iqbal http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muzaffar_Iqbal - unfortunately, you may see his name on the dissenters list on DI, a site you don't like. But you wanted ID from the Islamic world, so here's one. More will be added soon by the way.
Dr. Torla Hassan http://research.iiu.edu.my/cluster/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=23&Itemid=27 and I'm sure most of the professors at that Islamic school are ID supporters/creationists. As a default, Muslims are creationists.

Intelligent design and creationism are one in the same. The same people are involved in the same organizations.

Now you're simply being obstinate. It seems you're not very careful with what you read. In your stubborness and haste to defend evolution, you get a little sloppy. Once again, you make it obvious you don't see the differences between ID and Creationism. Please read more about these differences. To start you off, I'll give you a website, not related to DI or AllaboutGod, just to be fair to you:

The definitions are to the middle of the page to the right under the title Who's What? http://www.law.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/conlaw/evolution.htm

Let me make this as simple as possible: just because some websites have links to DI and use each other's information, does not make them the same entity. And also, it seems you haven't read into the biography of at least one of those two ID scientists. Dr. Sternberg is an evolutionist who believes there was an intelligent first cause, and that's it. I didn't check to see if he is a Christian or even a creationist, you can help me with that if you want. But I know he is open to the idea that Nous began all things. As far as I can tell, that's not all too Christian, because there's more to God than just the Great Mind. Dr. Sternberg is a fellow with ISCID and a signatory for DI's dissent from random-chance evolution but is not affiliated with creationists and still considers himself an old Earth biological evolutionist. From your statements, you have programmed yourself to believe ID is a cover for creationism or at least that it's a variant called neo-creationism. It may have been started by a Christian, but it is definitely not Christian. Many people are confused about it because there are so many different ways to go about intelligent design. A Hindu can be an ID supporter as easily as a Christian. Or, agnostics like Darwin and Berlinski. And just because a PA court defined ID as a progeny of creationism, doesn't mean it's true. Just shows state courts aren't the most reliable places to define movements of scientific thought. If you can't make sense of it yet, please accept it for now. As we continue to dialogue, I hope it will click for you. Let's continue with more important points.

Constantly varying speciation is true below the order level, that's observable, a reason why most creationists will say microevolution is science-based theory, since Darwin was mostly talking about his observation of change in species. I can't agree on what he couldn't observe or find in the fossil record of a major phylum shift, which was more of a guess on his part. But then again, the term "species" (and sometimes genus and family) isn't even agreed on among evolutionists. I hate using wikipedia, but this sums it up:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Species_problem

And here's another from the American Scientist:
http://www.americanscientist.org/issues/pub/2005/7/attacks-on-taxonomy

Please make sure to carefully read the links I send because you seem to be missing out on certain details which doesn't help your argument. I'm even willing to place the excerpt in this message if that will help. I just wanted you to read it in context.

It exactly coincides with what I was saying about punctuated evolution, and how it is perfectly compatible with Darwin's thought, and with current evolutionary thought.

Well, yeah, no kidding it's not going to be drastically different from evolution because punc eq is still evolution! I was pointing out the differences of emphasis from Darwin to today, which you didn't catch. Remember, the link I gave you about punc eq was only a short summary, not the complete explanation. Punc Eq is a change or improvement from Darwin's assertion, "of slow and gradual modification, through variation and natural selection. New species have appeared very slowly, one after another, both on the land and in the waters." It's the assertion "slow gradual change" vs. "rapid burst" that you missed. You may have missed this part: "In many cases, scientists have been unable to find most of these intermediate forms. Darwin himself was shaken by their absence. His conclusion was that the fossil record has lacked these transitional stages, because it was so incomplete (aka imperfect, Darwin's term). That is certainly true in many cases, because the chances of each of those critical changing forms having been preserved as fossils are small (this sentence is an assumption and a cop out that Darwin made, although he was hoping for more evidence). But in 1972, evolutionary scientists Stephen Jay Gould and Niles Eldredge proposed another explanation (emphasis mine), which they called "punctuated equilibrium." That is, species are generally stable, changing little for millions of years. This leisurely pace is "punctuated" by a rapid burst of change that results in a new species and that leaves few fossils behind."

And 150 years later, there is still a lack of a fossil record. Unlike most evolutionists, Gould at least questions the theory when it's challenged by the evidence, which is why he and Eldredge presented punc eq. One of the many disadvantages to their theory is that higher percentages of deleterious mutations occur within a smaller population. (For reference please see M. E. Soulé, et al, "No Need to Isolate Genetics," Science, Vol. 282 (1998), p. 1658, who points out the grad/punc difference by saying "No real evolutionist, whether gradualist or punctuationist, uses the fossil record as evidence in favour of the theory of evolution as opposed to special creation." Some of Soule's ideas runs counter to other evolutionists, though, and that's a whole other issue I'm not about to get into.)

More from other scientists: Todd's article "Evolution of the Lung and the Origin of Bony Fishes: A Casual Relationship," American Zoologist, vol. 26, no. 4, 1980, p. 757

"All three subdivisions of bony fishes first appear in the fossil record at approximately the same time. They are already widely divergent morphologically, and are heavily armored. How did they originate? What allowed them to diverge so widely? How did they all come to have heavy armor? And why is there no trace of earlier, intermediate forms?"

From Wesson's Beyond Natural Selection (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991) p. 45.

"The gaps in the fossil record are real, however. The absence of a record of any important branching is quite phenomenal. Species are usually static, or nearly so, for long periods, species seldom and genera never show evolution into new species or genera but replacement of one by another, and change is more or less abrupt."

I'm sorry to disappoint you on the Darwin quote, it was from a chapter in OotS. I must have missed Pete's email on that. I'll give you another one if you'd like:

"If then, there be some degree of truth in these remarks, we have no right to expect to find in our geological formations, an infinite number of those fine transitional forms, which on my theory assuredly have connected all the past and present species of the same group into one long and branching chain of life. We ought only to look for a few links, some more closely, some more distantly related to each other; and these links, let them be ever so close, if found in different stages of the same formation, would, by most palaeontologists, be ranked as distinct species. But I do not pretend that I should ever have suspected how poor a record of the mutations of life, the best preserved geological section presented, had not the difficulty of our not discovering innumerable transitional links between the species which appeared at the commencement and close of each formation, pressed so hardly on my theory." (emphases mine)

Your comment about his statement being a rhetorical question is not accurate. In OotS, you will see that Darwin was being open about the possibility of a lack of evidence to alter his theory, what a good scientist should do. Of course, Darwin tried his best to reason away this lack in the two or so chapters after, and does something very unscientific: because the evidence doesn't clearly support his theory, he says the evidence must not be correct or is imperfect. He makes the mistake that evolutionists today tend to do - they place theory above observation (or wait indefinitely for the right evidence to come along, which may not. "But evolution must be true" and the circular reasoning goes round and round). As G. Simpson said, "It is inherent in any definition of science that statements that cannot be checked by observation are not really about anything...or at the very least, they are not science." And that's one of many reasons why I don't believe in evolution - it is not science but a worldview.

Here is an even better quote. I made sure not to look at DI, AllaboutGod and my sources for this one, but from the book itself: "There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed by the Creator into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone circling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being evolved." These days, Darwin, who was an agnostic, could be technically labeled as an ID theorist, and some of them are agnostics and atheists.

And I gave you five links last time, not just three. The two links on fossilization are not connected to those dreaded "two websites." You may look for others if you'd like, but you will most likely find similar results. Don't worry, I don't freak out at suggestions, I merely respond with good reasoning.

I have re-read every e-mail you have sent me, and there was no link to anything, so I don't know what you mean when you say I have not looked into 'the resource' you suggested. Unless you want me to read entire book you mentioned. Which I have not done.

I wasn't talking about a link, I was talking about the Journal of Paleontology, which I mentioned in a previous email, but didn't specifically point out which issue. But thank you for being honest about not reading Darwin's book, if that was what you were referring to.

In fact, I think I would be much closer to believing that you believe in 'intelligent design' if we agreed from on use the term Allah whenever we reference the 'intelligent designer'.

Harty har! Cute phrase. But if you're serious, then you assume too much. I'm a creationist. ID is a different entity. No, the term God will suffice. If you knew the differences, the nuances, and the connotations, you'll understand.

In summary:
1) ID is different from Creationism.
2) There are legitimate and credentialed scientists in all three camps with their own journals.
3) Darwinism is still without good transition forms between phyla.