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What Coyoteman and other “evolutionists” fail to understand is the fundamental concept of burden of proof in science.

The same argument can be made much more strongly against the ID camp.

Like another poster, I don't have a religious stake in this argument. As a result, I can see the failings of both sides.

As for the evolutionist camp, quit being so scornful of the religious. And realize that evolution has gone through many, many theoretical changes over the years - from gradualism to punctured equilibrium and other variants - and still has difficulty explaining just what is going on. Which means the arrogant treatment of critics is often not warranted - and that the evolutionary camp needs to do a better job of criticizing those in their midst who harbor a hatred for the religious.

As for the ID camp - as long as the Young Earth folks are part of your movement, you've got far more serious problems than any evolutionist in reconciling with reality. The ID camp needs to do a much better job in rejecting the Young Earth arguments to better frame their own. One can argue that it was the hand of God instead of survivial of the fittest that drives the change in form that we see in the fossil record - but to deny the fossil (and geological) record is very old is, quite frankly, absurd. There is a clear progression of species and development in the fossil record - I remember reading a creationist pamphlet that claimed all major forms of life were present after the Cambrian boundary. Which is true if you don't count amphibians, reptiles, birds and mammals, among other things. Drive through the road cuts in Pennsylvania and tell us again that all that deposition, deformation, uplift and erosion was done in 6,000 years.

So at the end of the day, the serious and sober in this debate need to do a better job framing it - namely, the evolutionary camp needs to sanction those who hate and twist religion, and the ID camp needs to do a better job of those who hate and twist science.

But I don't see that happening. So the evo/ID threads on FR, and the debate in general, will continue to be a lot of heat but little light.

Too true. There is to much sound and not enough enlightenment in the debate.

This is why I requested that both sides logically present their cases. I was please when Coyoteman accepted my challenge, but disappointed when he tried to change the rules after failing to make the grade.

It is no shame to fail. Heck, I do it all the time. After all, it is not easy to come up with a logically supportable solution. It rarely is in science. It took me many a year to come up with a logical solution and I'm continually refining it and testing it.

I agree with your sentiments. But ‘he who pays the piper calls the tune’ and Behe and Dembski and the Discovery Institute are not going to alienate their most ardent supporters with a review of the data that clearly points to an old earth, an older universe, and common descent. Meanwhile anti-religious books by a particularly zealously atheist Scientists (a minority among Scientists)keeps falsely conflating Biological Evolution and Atheism in the public mind.

I wrote:

What Coyoteman and other “evolutionists” fail to understand is the fundamental concept of burden of proof in science.

You replied:

The same argument can be made much more strongly against the ID camp.

I reply:

I disagree, and I think this is the fundamental misconception that permeates most if not all of the evolutionist thinking about ID. ID is simply the default, common-sense position that applies when the attempt to explain life by purely natural mechanisms fails. And to say that attempt has failed is an understatement. We are a billion light years from explaining the origin of the first living cell by purely naturalistic mechanisms, for example.

You wrote:

As for the ID camp - as long as the Young Earth folks are part of your movement, you’ve got far more serious problems than any evolutionist in reconciling with reality.

I reply:

Not true. The fact that some ID proponents are “young earthers” has no scientific bearing whatsoever on the validity of ID theory that rejects such a notion. The only bearing it has is in “public relations,” and then only because it helps Coyoteman and others to demagogue the issue by conflating ID with young-earth creationism.