[Physicist]

Predictability works very well when one is dealing with a universe chock-full of design at every turn. If everything has been derived from, and continues to be derived from, a mass of undirected energy, then one must throw predicatability, and even science itself, out the window.

I'm not sure what you're saying, here, but I read it as, "the fact that nature operates according to inviolable principles is proof of design."

It seems that the creationists want to eat their cake and have it, too. It used to be that everything required the active hand of God: even the planets were moved in their courses by teams of angels pushing them by hand. Then the Enlightenment came, which allowed men to see that much of nature was "a machine that would go of itself", and the faithful had to content themselves with a "God of the gaps". Now that the most cherished gaps are closing, all they will ultimately have left to say is, "See? I told you: the lack of gaps is proof of God."

That suits me just fine. That was my starting point, as a Deist. The universe--creation, if you will--is seamless. God or no God, the universe will admit of a self-consistent, self-sufficient, self-contained, natural, materialistic, and simple explanation right down to its very core. It could not have been otherwise: if it hadn't "simply existed" that way, a truly omnipotent God would necessarily have done it that way. Anything less would have been an imperfect failure.

[usastandsunited]

That was my starting point, as a Deist.

Well knock me over with a feather. I would have thought you to be agnostic.

[Fester Chugabrew]

"It seems that the creationists want to eat their cake and have it, too.

Ha! That description applies much better to evolutionists, for while they ascribe predictability to "true science," they offer only an unpredictable, undirected mass of atoms with which to operate.