Posted by Coach on May 14, 1998 at 13:34:10:
In Reply to: What is the evidence of design? posted by rpcman on May 14, 1998 at 10:49:30:
: I believe that evidences can be found that point to a designer.
: What are these evidences?
: Last night I was reading about an item contained in the bodies of nearly all animals and fishes. Unfortunately, I don't remember what it was called, but I can look it up at home if you wish. Anyway, this device is very efficient in fish (where it first evolved). In most animals it has not been eliminated via natural selection because it is necessary, but because of other changes in the bodies it has become increasingly inefficient. In humans it wraps around a bone before returning to where it really goes. In giraffes it travels all the way down and then all the way back up the neck for no other reason other than natural selection works in small steps rather than from a pre-drawn, well-formulated plan. No intelligent designer would have designed a creature with such a feature. Evolution by natural selection frequently exhibits these kinds of 'design flaws'.
Hmmm... That is interesting. Your thingy would certainly seem to point to a poor design for the animals it is in that do not use it. I will attempt to address the thingy(allthough I have no clue what it is). The first thing I would ask is who determined that the thingy in the Giraffe is the same thingy as the one in the fish? If one works and the other doesn't, my first conclusion would be that they are unrelated thingies. My second would be who determined that the thingy in the Giraffe( and human) has no function. It is extremely difficult (some would say it is impossible) to prove a negative. It is even more difficult to prove a negative in Biology, where living systems may make use of something that appears useless when we get it from a dead organism during a dissection. So I would need more evidence about the thingy to draw conclusions. However, even if the thingy is exactly what the book says, it is not a problem for me. I said that I believed that there is evidence of a designer. I did not say (and would not ever say) that all the evidence points to a designer. If all the evidence pointed one way or another, there would hardly be a debate. Finally, My personal opinion (not that it Is the correct one, but of course, like all personal opinions I think it is hehe) tends to be slanted more towards a Theistic evolution point of view. I don't have a big problem with proposed evolutionary methods per say, I have a problem with the statistical likelyhood of it occurring in 3 or so billion years.
Some evidences that I feel are compelling are Sexual Reproduction; Lack of Cl in lipids, carbohydrates, and most proteins; Extremely specialized sybiotic relationships; use of Oxygen instead of Nitrogen;use of CO2 instead of Nitrogen; no Silicon based life discovered yet, Statistical likelyhood of several beneficial mutations happening at once, etc. Any of these is a long drawn out topic and there isn't any way that we could discuss them here. Suffice it to say that my conclusion is that the preponderance fo the evidence suggests intelligence and design - either at the beginning of the process or ongoing throughout. I realize that most of the technical evidences for a Naturalistic view are to involved to be discussed in this forum too.
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