As far as Pascal's wager goes, it is intuitive, just as one can intuit that intelligent cause is more plausible than undirected process. The fact that Pascal said it long before I did actually makes it seem more plausible.
I'm no scientist, and to be honest the whole debate doesn't mean enough to me to get me to seriously think about it, but you vitriolic eggheads caused me to look around at who was on what side, and I kind of liked this from The Real Skeptic:
There are some things we will never know for sure. All we can do is obtain as consistent a picture of their operation as possible so that we can test those pictures against reality. If we decide that the pictures are not pictures of operation, but are merely pictures of a name, then we have nothing to test. If we lock the pictures away from development by the discovery of subsequent facts, as we do when we label them names and embody them in meaningless laws, we have created a reality we use to test reality that doesn't exist in reality and our technology will be distorted by the inaccuracy of the picture we have created.
The evolution expert, after defining the term theory to mean something more or less verified, goes on in true empirical fashion to claim empirical theories have been verified to the point that they can never be questioned. Theories are the end product of science, he states, not a stage on the way to truth and as such are very unlikely to change. He claims that our unscientific theories are actually hypotheses and that in science hypotheses are hunches or conjectures. He then states that Copernicus' picture of the planets circling the sun was a hunch rather than a theory and only became a theory after centuries of observation and thinking determined it was compatible with everything we knew about the solar system.
In fact, the Copernican picture was a theory, and it didn't become fact until we started shooting rockets into space on the basis of the picture. The rockets missed more than hit their targets and when they hit their targets, they had a tendency to crash because we have an inaccurate picture of gravity, but they were the measuring rod that turned Copernican theory into fact.
Then he addresses the concept of fact, or should we say the empirical hypothesis of the nature of fact. The writer claims that fact is a word that makes scientists uncomfortable because it implies that accuracy can be tested.
Well, golly gee, isn't that something we all try to avoid. Testing reality for accuracy might show reality to be accurate and empirical facts to be the hokum they are.
He then goes on to state that the basic characteristic of a scientific statement is that its accuracy can be tested by comparing it to observation in the natural world, that it must be falsifiable. Under these conditions, measuring the fact that objects of different weights drop at the same rate is not a scientific statement because there are no conditions under which it can be falsified. Let me reserve comment on this idiocy, which has become evolutionary doctrine as a result of the rantings of that great evolutionary thinker, Jay Gould, for a moment.
Our empirical advocate then concludes his story with the statement that evolution is not a hypothesis, it is a rich theory that explains why the biological world is the way it is. He doesn't explain how it does this, he just claims it does, and he rests that claim on the same basis that empirical science rests all of its assertions, the evidence is so overwhelming that biologists have trouble understanding how someone could not accept it. To do so would be akin to studying whether the sun revolves around the Earth. (As an aside, this is quite refreshing. Usually evolutionists argue that to believe otherwise is to believe the Earth is flat, a notion that was never believed by anyone in the history of the world, but one that effectively silenced evolution's early opponents. For reference, the flat Earth notion came up by map drawers who wanted to keep potential sailors away from lucrative trade routes and thus populated the edges of maps with monsters and a line showing where the world ended.)
I'm waiting for more cogent facts and stimulating debate from the other side.
Your side doesn't have a theory. "God did it, so stop asking" is not a theory.
Once you have been able to formulate a theory, it should be heard and discussed and debated. And it will.
But the creationist PC machine hasn't yet bothered to come up with one. Until then, whining doesn't help your case - this doesn't get decided by emotion, only evidence.
No you don't have it straight.
The theory of evolution explains what we observe in the world (and just as importantly, what we don't). Any theory that hopes to subplant it must explain all that data and more.
ID has been heard and found lacking in testable observations. ID doesn't explain anything -- and can't say what we shouldn't see. (After all, if God aliens didit, then anything is possible).
..." He then states that Copernicus' picture of the planets circling the sun was a hunch rather than a theory and only became a theory after centuries of observation and thinking determined it was compatible with everything we knew about the solar system.
In fact, the Copernican picture was a theory, and it didn't become fact until we started shooting rockets into space on the basis of the picture. ..."
The author is ignorant (or misspoke) of history concerning Copernicus and his theory (and it still is a theory, BTW, theories don't graduate to be come "fact").
Until Copernicus, the Ptolemic earth-centric view was the accepted theory -- but it had problems, planets would reverse course and then move backwards (retrograde motion), eclipses and occults could not be predicted with any certainty.
In 1514 Nicolaus Copernicus wrote a tract called "Little Commentary" that outlined the basic axioms of heliocentricy. This hypothesis explained the retrograde problem and gave the basis to accurately predict eclipses.
The next 30 years, he spent expanding the mathematical under pinnings of this hypothesis and noteing the predicted motions and observed.
By the time De revolutionibus orbium coelestium was published in 1543 his hypothesis was a fully polished work deserving of the term theory.
Some 70 years later it received a major adjustment from Johannes Kepler by changing orbits from circular to ellipticals and deciding the Moon was in orbit around the Earth instead of a very fast and eccentric "planet".
The final theoretical evidence for the Copernican theory was provided by Newton's theory of universal gravitation around 150 years later.
Be wary of getting your "facts" from Apologetic websites.