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Once upon a time, humans could not explain thunder, lightning and other natural phenomenons, and so humans invented 'gods' to explain them.

Science has explained so many of these phenomenons, and now people look at cultures that still use 'gods' to explain them as 'inferior' or 'primitive'.

Yet, now those 'superior' cultures invoke the same principle when they cannot explain the formation of eyes or mitochondria. Only, instead of 'gods', the word is 'intelligent design'.

How fascinating.

>>Yet, now those 'superior' cultures invoke the same principle when they cannot explain the formation of eyes or mitochondria. Only, instead of 'gods', the word is 'intelligent design'.

What an asenine statement. The formation of eyes is not the issue, nor is mitochondria, nor RNA, ATP or any other cellular entity...

ID tries to deal with why eyes are even formed in the first place, why there are things like mitochondria, and why there is even reproduction, and how reproduction works.

I predict that someday you will make evolution bullet proof.

I'll keep an eye out for the big news.

Once upon a time, humans could not explain thunder, lightning and other natural phenomenons, and so humans invented 'gods' to explain them.

Science has explained so many of these phenomenons, and now people look at cultures that still use 'gods' to explain them as 'inferior' or 'primitive'.

Yet, now those 'superior' cultures invoke the same principle when they cannot explain the formation of eyes or mitochondria. Only, instead of 'gods', the word is 'intelligent design'.

How fascinating.

People were ignorant of the things you listed. Now that we can see more clearly how life is programmed to create machines so sophisticated; the blinders are off.

The Theory of Evolution is like attributing the production of a sandcastle to the ocean because you observed the water creating the mote. Saying that the evidence only leads to the conclusion of Darwinian Evolution is like explaining the creation of a sandcastle by limiting oneself to natural phenomenon.

Two men become stranded on a remote island. As they explore the island they come upon a sandcastle with towers, buttresses and a drawbridge. The design of the castle is amazingly intricate.

One man comments, "It is amazing what time and the ocean can create. The small rocks and seashells on the shore must have got caught in eddies and swirled around and chiseled out that castle. There were a few palm leaves floating by that scribed out the little lines that look like bricks. We are alone here and there is no need to consider anything else."

The other man looked at him incredulously and said, "No, obviously that castle was created by another intelligent being with a clear intent of design, we are not alone. The engineering required to create the castle is far to sophisticated to have originated by natural means."

And life is many levels of complexity beyond a sandcastle. Self-correcting, self-healing, -- multiple inter-working systems like respiration, circulatory, musculature, waste management, fuel storage and retrieval, a veritable chemistry lab for dealing with unlocking energy from food, management of enzymes for unlocking the cell walls to allow passage of energy for use by the factories we call cells -- growth and the limits which keep replacement of dieing tissue from destroying the life form...

An attempt at denying God is making fools of our scientists. Science is entertaining and occasionally helpful.

Curiously, there is a good scientific explanation for the formation of mitochondria. It turns out mitochondria closely resemble one family of bacteria, the cyanobacteria. They look like bacterial cells (prokaryotic) and they have their own DNA, structured in 'plasmid' loops just like bacterial DNA. The realization is that the eukaryotic cell (the kind of cell higher animals and plants have, with nuclei) originated as symbiotic relationships between different bacterial species. This is described in the Lynn Margulis book Microcosmos. She's the biologist who did much of the work showing mitochondria resemble cyanobacteria.

This evidence of contingency in the development of early life makes me doubt ID. But I'm the sort that believes that God created a universe where life would appear; he used evolution to do the work. (If I may hazard a philosophical musing: Perhaps God did it this way because it was pleasing to him to watch it unfold in the unpredictable but beautiful way that it has unfolded.)

Your handle is named after the most elegant postulate in the history of philosophy: Occam's Razor, better known as the Law Of Parsimony. In essence, if there are two explanations for some thing, the simpler explanation is most likely to be the correct one. Darwin's theory succeeds because it leaves out unnecessary "attractive" features. The simplicity of the explanation is what gives it staying power. We can understand the history of life on earth, not by reference to a deus ex machina as in Intelligent Design; we can deduce the processes that operate in the natural world directly from the study of Nature itself.

(Denny Crane: "I Don't Want To Socialize With A Pinko Liberal Democrat Commie.Say What You Like About Republicans. We Stick To Our Convictions. Even When We Know We're Dead Wrong.")

You are taking issue with Pythagoras and Plato, who demythologized the gods but saw geometry in nature. ID is basically a return to that basis. There is design in nature. If we look at matter, we have two choices. Is matter aware of itself or not? Since we exist, then why claim that no intelligence exists in matter?