The world is billions of years old
Life on earth is billions of years old
All of life on earth shares common descent
Evolution is a fact
The scientific theory of evolution is the best explanation of the fact of evolution yet found
There is no physical evidence of supernatural (Designer) intervention for the past several-million years
Please, give me your sources and also the ID proponents of these above statements.
Again, I support all of the specific scientific research of ID scientists. Behe, for example, simply focused on specific biochemical "machines" and revealed design not chance.
But please, enlighten me? Again, I don't believe Behe, for example, claims to be an expert of the age of the world;he is not a geologist. In the areas where Behe is an expert, his research does nothing to undermine a creationist view. His philosophical statements in other areas are irrelevant to me. Creationists are interested only in "real science" and ID scientists , as far as I know, are credible. So, your statements you attribute to ID scientists are meaningless to me unless they are backed up by their own research. But..I would appreciate your sources with specific quotes from from identified ID researchers who have made these statements. Otherwise, your post is a bunch of generalizations and dubious in nature.
Creationists do not deny micro-evolution as long as the definitions in the discussion are specific.
From the Dover transcript, Behe being examined by a friendly lawyer.
It is hard to format this so I'll put it in a post on its own.
1 Q. I want to return to Ernst Mayr and ask you
2 are the parts of Darwin's theory as he's listed
3 here well tested?
4 A. No, they are not. If you look at the
5 top ones, evolution as such, common descent,
6 multiplication of species, those are all well
7 tested. The claim of gradualism is in my
8 opinion rather mixed. There's evidence for,
9 and some people argue against it. But the
10 component of Darwin's theory natural selection
11 which is sometimes viewed as the mechanism that
12 Darwin proposed for evolution is very poorly
13 tested and has very little evidence to back
14 it up.
24 15 Q. I want to go through in a little bit more
16 detail on some of these claims. Going back to
17 that first claim, and I believe you testified
18 probably akin to an empirical observation, is
19 that correct?
20 A. Yes, evolution as such that the world
21 is changed over time, and life as well.
25 22 Q. Does intelligent design refute the
23 occurrence of evolution?
24 A. No, it certainly has no argument with this
25 component of Darwin's theory. As a matter of
19
1 fact I think there is a, on the next slide
2 there's an excerpt from Of Pandas and People
3 where the authors write, "When the word is used
4 in this sense, that is the sense of change over
5 time, it is hard to disagree that evolution is a
6 fact. The authors of this volume certainly have
7 no dispute with that notion. Pandas clearly
8 teaches that life has a history, and that the
9 kinds of organisms present on earth have changed
10 over time." And let me make the point that
11 Ernst Mayr calls this component evolution as
12 such. That is the basic idea of evolution.
26 13 Q. So when you hear a claim that intelligent
14 design is anti-evolution, are those accurate?
15 A. No, they are completely inaccurate.
Here is another one:
Q. I'm sorry. I'm pointing to down here, and that's
-- you're not that good a mind reader. Now bacteria had
been on the Earth for billions of years, correct?
A. That's right.
And another one:
Q. Okay. And no human laboratory can duplicate all
of the selective pressures that have existed in the
billions of years that bacteria have been around?
A. That's correct. So we can't rule out all
explanations. We have to investigate to see what are
likely.
For the record, I have no reason to doubt that the universe is the billions of years old that physicists say it is. Further, I find the idea of common descent (that all organisms share a common ancestor) fairly convincing, and have no particular reason to doubt it.
Spin it how you like, despite his attempts to hand the age of the universe off to experts in other fields, Behe is a molecular biologist, and as such is aware of the mountains of bio-molecular evidence that clearly indicates common descent and the billion-year duration of life on earth (and the earth can hardly be younger than life on it is ;) ). He is an expert talking about his own field of expertise, and he is the foremost brilliant ID scientist. In his own work he repeatedly talks of the billions of years over which the bio-molecular processes he observes the modern results of have been operating.
Michael Denton is another case. He started by doubting evolution, and even wrote "Evolution, A Theory in Crisis" in 1986 in which he expounded many of the standard creationist arguments and clearly rejected evolution. By 1993 however as he learned more, and as the crushing genomic data came in he had reversed himself in his book, "Nature's Destiny" (added emphasis mine):
One of the most surprising discoveries which has arisen from DNA sequencing has been the remarkable finding that the genomes of all organisms are clustered very close together in a tiny region of DNA sequence space forming a tree of related sequences that can all be interconverted via a series of tiny incremental natural steps
That is the definition of evolutionary common descent! Denton's entire thrust by then had reversed itself. So convincing is the molecular data for common descent that he is now a total advocate, and says that evolution is an inevitable result of God's grander design of the universe.
So, do you agree with these brilliant ID scientists who have used their specific scientific knowledge to infer that evolution has occured, and that life on earth is an ancient phenomenon, or do you disagree with their scientific conclusions?
No he didn't. He didn't do any "specific scientific research" which "revealed" any such thing.
He did however say that since he couldn't personally see how something might have evolved, he couldn't imagine any other possibility than design. But that shaky line of "reasoning" is a far different thing entirely from "specific scientific research" which "revealed design not chance". And by the way, evolutionary processes are not "chance", even though they do have a stochastic component.