Your response is wholly lacking in common sense and universal life experience of nearly everyone....
Actually, the moment a child understands what the concept of design is, which he learns by observing man made things (including his own creations), and is given to understanding words like design, or created, and of course hears his mother says of his silly finger painting....what a wonderful design and how much creativity you show....without any training atheist or theistic at all, observation of nature will yield simply by that it appears designed as well.
Even most rational hard core atheists have to admit things appear designed, but they reject the appearance of design to be a truth on the basis of a claim of no proof of a designer....which is of course the fallacy of argument from ignorance...
It is the mental filtering and condition of non design theory that supplants the normal human understanding of empirical observation of life as by design...
Still no answer from any of the resident non design proponents why all life has the following qualities:
1. A birth, a period of life which is finite, then death.
2. Living being try to survive and adapt, they don't naturally seek out ending their life.
3. Life emerges comes from another living being, not from dead inanimate matter.
So the very first form of life came from what the child asks the atheist non design theorist, from non life? Why don't we see that happening all the time then?
This is where we hear the crickets chirping...
Quote from ddunbar:
Zx10, my friend.
The flaw in your thinking is thus:
Most of the world believes there's a designer as most of the world is theist. So naturally things will look designed to them. As it does to me. Or perhaps you. And certainly T.
But, a truly rational person will ask, "well, it looks designed perhaps, but where is the designer or does one even exist?" If you can't prove a designer, you can't posit design with any stringency. You can believe it or have a hunch, sure. But beliefs and hunches aren't science. (science just observes the development of life on Earth and isn't quite seeing the point where a designer came in - given the clasical understanding of the method of the "designer" - wink wink nudge nudge.)
For what we know to be designed, we know for a fact that there's a designer. If we didn't, we wouldn't assume it.
So T's basis for this thread is nonsensical. An observation of design (what T calls empirical data) is directly proportional to one's belief in a designer. There's no two ways about it. So while ID might not be wholly 6 literal day creationism, it's creationism nonetheless. Regardless of Dembski's smoke screen which laughably attempts to include ET as the possible ID. Given his theism and affliations to theist groups, we all know what he truly means. Which of course squarely puts ID in the realm of creationism.
Oh and let's pretend for a moment that Dembski was sincere about an ET as possibly being the ID - the question remains, who designed the ET who's the ID for Earth? And so on and so forth. Until of course you reach an ultimate ID - a polite euphemism for GOD.
I'm going to have to bookmark this post as my boilerplate response to this thread if it somehow continues to live on. This thread's longevity is almost mystical.
