Why? Extraterrestials would not be supernatural.
True, in that sense. But scientists searching for extraterrestrial life are searching for signs of intelligence in radio waves, (non-random patterns, etc.), yet scientists dismiss, out of hand, the manifest evidence of intelligence or intelligent agency in DNA coding, for example, or irreducibly complex natural mechanism.
And evolutionist speculation, why would that be affected?
Evolutionary theory consists almost entirely of speculation regarding the nature and cause of inherently unobservable past phenomena. Evolutionists supposedly derive cause from effect. To determine such causation, scientists must make metaphysical assumptions (that natural laws have operated uniformly forever, etc.), assumptions which fall outside the domain of empiricism.
The difference between science and ID is that science never says that trying to understand something is too difficult if we just rely on natural forces to explain it, so we’ll just throw up our hands and say it must be supernatural.
No! ID is simply the recognition of intelligent agency when its effects are observed. Suppose, for example, that you were exploring a jungle and came upon a library. Would it be reasonable to believe that this library was constructed by intelligent beings at some time, or that the wind blew the library together at random?
Similarly, it is unreasonable to believe that the library's worth of information contained and encoded in human DNA simply "blew together" by chance or by "natural selection," a term with absolutely no explanatory power in this domain. (This problem is recognized by evolutionists, like Dawkins, who propose that aliens "seeded" human life on this planet. But this "solution" merely pushes the problem back to another planet.)
That sort of thinking would have left science where it was in the Middle Ages.
You have it exactly wrong. Buridan's impetus theory followed directly on the Church's dogmatic teaching of "creation from nothing." Newton built on Buridan's theory. It's no accident that science suffered stillbirth's everywhere except in Christendom.
That library must have self assembled because the ordered structure was “most fit” to selective pressure.
Same with fingerprints at a crime scene.
And, to fit in with Gonzalez’ book, more sarcasm - the earth’s position in the solar system, its relation to the moon, the moon’s size, the existance of our gas giants and asteroid belt, the sun’s location in the galaxy, our type of galaxy - all accidental, of course.
Let’s leave the discussion of the creation of DNA alone for a moment. Scientists say that for the first two billion years after the initial beginnings of life on earth, there were only single celled organisms on the earth. Do you accept that? Do you accept that they had DNA? Do you accept that all the creatures in today’s earth evolved from those single celled organisms?
If not, then do you accept that any of the creatures in today’s earth evolved from organisms that previously inhabited the earth? Or do you not believe in evolution at all?
“Why? Extraterrestials would not be supernatural.
True, in that sense. But scientists searching for extraterrestrial life are searching for signs of intelligence in radio waves, (non-random patterns, etc.), yet scientists dismiss, out of hand, the manifest evidence of intelligence or intelligent agency in DNA coding, for example, or irreducibly complex natural mechanism.”
I don’t know that there is “manifest evidence of intelligence...in DNA coding.” I would agree that it is marvelously complex and serves it purposes well, but there are things about it that are not intelligent as well, such as the huge segments of “junk” DNA coding that contribute nothing useful to the organism. But aside from that, since we are talking about the theory of evolution, and not the intitial creation of life itself (which, as far as I am concerned, may well have been devinely created), the real question is, have organisms evolved since the creation of life on earth (which scientists say consisted originally of single celled organisms), and does Darwin’s theory explain that evolution?