You are wrong again. Life is a part of nature. The assumption that there is an intelligent designer of life is just a special condition of the assumption that there is an intelligent designer of the Universe. Obviously, if life exists then the laws of nature in this Universe permit it. Your contention that life cannot arise naturally is patently false and those that make this contention have been fighting a rear guard action ever since Wohler synthesized urea. Every new discovery is another nail in the coffin of the long discredited notion that a motivated deity builds menageries of creatures with a DNA tinker toy set for his own amusement.
"When you have an intelligent Man designing computer programs, you do not have Natural Selection, but you do have Intelligent Intervention." -- Southack
This exemplifies the crux of your misunderstanding. A single man alone with his computer writing code is admittedly a special example of intelligent design. But that is not what is important to the question of evolutionary change. Expand the scope of your examination to include the entire society of computer users over the face of the earth. What do you see now? I see millions of men using and writing code by combining pieces and algorithms that already exist. Once the piece exists it matters not at all how it came into being, only that it is replicated and transmitted with modification for some other purpose. The butterfly sort is a simple example. Or code breaking algorithms. Or encryption. This stuff is everywhere but it was invented a relatively few times. Likewise there are mountains of discarded pieces of code that don't exist anywhere else than in the original form. Are you starting to get the picture? What works survives and is replicated. The more it is replicated the more likely it is to be modified and adapted for other applications. What doesn't work or is not replicated may become extinct. Evolution is what happens to populations, not to individuals. Only when you make the transition from the component to the systemic level can you construct the block diagrams and model the transfer functions.
"To claim, as you do above in fact, that intelligent control is relatively unimportant misses the ENTIRE controversy at hand!" -- Southack
I really don't see this as a controversy. I see it as a case of gross misinformation and religious doctrine masquerading under the title of "The Intelligent Designer Hypothesis" in order to justify a misplaced belief in a literal interpretation of Genesis. There is no credible scientific foundation for this belief but it persists due to the incredulity of its proponents and the impoverished state of their knowledge of biology.
That's not only an incorrect "summary" of my position, but also wrong on its face.
You say "The assumption that there is an intelligent designer of life is just a special condition of the assumption that there is an intelligent designer of the Universe", yet that's not the case at all. The assumption is not a special condition of any such thing, but rather follows from the evidence which we have in hand of intelligent designers creating all of our computer programs.
You can't produce examples of computer programs produced randomly from any chaotic environment (i.e., nature), but in contrast to your discredited and disproven position, I can produce MILLIONS of examples of computer programs produced by intelligent designers.
That's a recurring theme in our debate: I can always produce evidence of intelligent intervention, but you can never produce evidence of natural processes creating similar levels of order from chaos.
On the contrary, this illustrates your lack of understanding. The reason that it is important how a program or life form came into being is because that answers our central questions to this very debate.
Was Life "created" by some intelligent entity or did Life self-form? When answering that question, one NEEDS to see how other mechanisms that store data, process data, and replicate data (e.g. computer programs) came into being.
Once we accept that computer programs are designed and built via Intelligent Intervention rather than natural selection, we can begin to grasp that it isn't the programs that are evolving per se, but rather that the designers of computer programs are evolving and improving their creations.
It's a pity that you can't move such facts into your side of this debate...
"I really don't see this as a controversy. I see it as a case of gross misinformation and religious doctrine masquerading under the title of "The Intelligent Designer Hypothesis" in order to justify a misplaced belief in a literal interpretation of Genesis. There is no credible scientific foundation for this belief but it persists due to the incredulity of its proponents and the impoverished state of their knowledge of biology."
Then you haven't been paying attention. This isn't about either Genesis or even religion. This is about science.
Intelligent Control, which you carelessly and unscientifically dismiss, is the PROVEN method by which all human software programs are created. Human software/hardware is the only thing outside of DNA which can store data, process data, and replicate itself.
We don't "know" how the first DNA sprang to life, and we have never witnessed abiogenesis in the lab, but we have seen computer programs execute in controlled environments. So while you've dismissed such knowledge, you've essentially thrown away all that we know about the only thing that resembles DNA on this planet.
For science, that's a tragedy.