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To: Southack
You seem to have ommitted those items from your version of Occam's exercise, however. Do you honestly hold that you can have Evolution without Natural Selection and Random Mutations, or did you merely omit them so that you could force-fit Occam's Razor to unscientifically support your pre-disposed "answer"?

Natural Selection occurs and is observerd. Therefore it is part of the observable universe and is covered in both sets of assumptions. Mutation is also observed, and is covered in both sets of assumptions.

You are splitting hairs. As noted, there are also a few more assumptions I could add to ID in equally arbitrary fashion: that the Designer can create the universe, that the designer can change the universe, that the designer can cause the 'spark of life', that the designer can create species, that the designer created billions of independent separate speices, etc.... There, now that's three more for ID. But this is again, hair splitting.

Your whole defense of ID has been "well, ID can explain everything just as well as evolution." Except that ID ends up explaining that the world looks exactly like evolution predicts. It offers no additional explanatory power, and still requires that fundamental super-natural assumption of a designer.

I ask again - what does ID predict that is different from what evolution predicts? How would you falsify ID?

358 posted on 03/05/2002 10:10:09 AM PST by cracker
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To: cracker
"Natural Selection occurs and is observerd. Therefore it is part of the observable universe and is covered in both sets of assumptions. Mutation is also observed, and is covered in both sets of assumptions. You are splitting hairs."

No, I'm simply listing all the degrees of freedom for both theories, per the pre-requisites for Occam's Razor. If Natural Selection and Random Mutation are required for Evolutionary Theory, then list them as degrees of freedom on their half of your Occam chart. If they aren't required then don't.

But simply not listing something because you don't like the final answer in unscientific. Please see Post #194 for an honest example of Occam's Razor.

Also, please note that I am not the one who insists upon using Occam's Razor to choose between Evolution and Intelligent Deisgn. But for goodness sakes, if you are going to insist upon using Occam's Razor, at least use it honestly.

362 posted on 03/05/2002 10:18:20 AM PST by Southack
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