Actually, if the ultimate goal is survival there would be no 'junk'. Everything would play a part in helping a species to survive. The fact that you can see examples of things that do not contribute to survival, like mans need for explanations, does not contribute to the evolutionary theory where things must evolve traits that contribute to survival in order to survive.

There is no "ultimate goal" in unguided natural selection, and coming to realize that is important if you are to understand what the theory actually tells us.  Naturally selected "designs" are in no sense intentional.  That means that inheritable features which have little or no impact on survival will tend to linger across generations.  For example, the fossil record and DNA comparisons tell us that hippos and whales had a common ancestor.  We see traces of legs in modern whales, but the fossil record shows legged whales.  Flightless birds still have wings, even though they don't use them for anything much.  Humans still have tail bones.  These are unnecessary, inefficient structures that an intelligent designer would have no reason to include in the design of modern whales, flightless birds, and humans.

So here is the point.  We can tell the difference between intelligently guided and unguided "designs".  Automobiles started out as "horseless carriages", but the intelligent designers removed the buggy whip holder, because they knew it wasn't needed.  Whales are not like automobiles, and the vestigial remnants of legs are like buggy whip holders that were never left out of the design.  There was no intelligence to remove the inefficiencies and useless "junk" that built up in the design over time.

And you have missed the difference between not having a purpose and simply not knowing what that purpose is.

Unguided selection has no "purpose".  You can, of course, mistakenly attribute purpose to any natural phenomenon.  For example, you might think that hurricane Katrina was sent to wipe out New Orleans because of all the sinful behavior of the inhabitants.

...Each variety resulting from reproductive isolation has a smaller gene pool than the original and a restricted ability to explore new environments with new trait combinations or to meet changes in its own environment. The long-term result? Extinction would be much more likely than evolution.

The question of whether an isolated population is large enough to sustain itself is a separate issue.  Those that are not will collapse.  Those that are will remain viable.  We are only talking about cases where viable populations become isolated.  Extinctions happen all the time.  Evolution is not an efficient design process.  It is not just about why certain biological designs succeed.  It is also about why the competing designs fail.  (BTW, TalkOrigins provides a list of 29+ Evidences for Macroevolution, in case you are interested.)

I would read Evolution: A Theory in Crisis, if I were you...

Thanks.  I've given you reading assignments as well, so you are entitled to your recommendations.    Denton's book, a classic precursor to Intelligent Design, is now quite old (1985), and it appears that evolution has weathered the crisis that he warned about.    After the Dover court case, all the hype and stuffing seemed to go out of the ID movement.  Right now, it seems in full disarray.  Maybe Mike Huckabee will get lucky and give it another political boost from the White House.

The fact that science must use empircal evidence means that natural selection is always possible to falsify. You yourself admit it is never final, comprehensive and absolute. ID on the other hand gives us reason and logic, plus is supported by the evidence. To say ID isn't scientific involves two false assumptions: First, it presumes there is a clear line of demarcation between science and non-science (with creation on the non-science side of that line).  Second, it presumes that disciplines outside of science have no place intruding upon scientific conclusions.  That would pit fact against faith.

You don't seem to realize that ID once was the prevailing scientific theory--back in the 19th century.  It was Paley's so-called "natural theology" that became received scientific theory.  Darwin used scientific arguments to overturn it.  The reason that it is called unscientific today is that it lingers on in spite of the scientific consensus that it didn't measure up to the expectations that it had created.  Attempted defenses of the modern version of Paley's old "natural theology" have been thoroughly debunked in every case, and that is why ID proponents have never really managed to get their work published in peer-reviewed scientific journals, as it surely would have been back in the 19th century.

However, the exclusion of ID from the realm of science is arbitrary for two reasons.  First, the fact is there is no clear line of demarcation between science and non-science.  Second, even if there were such a line, it wouldn't automatically mean that well justified conclusions from other disciplines could not have a bearing on scientific thinking.

Again, ID was tried and found wanting a century and a half ago.  Attempts to revive it have not overcome the objections to it that modern scientists have.

For someone who grants that one doesn't have to give up supernaturalisim, you seem to be advocating that it's an inferior explanation so we should give it up. Problem with your whole issue is that you seem to think God has to explain everything or evolution has to explain everything. I would hold that there's room for both. Evolution can explain why mosquitos can evolve to resist DDT, but it can't explain morals, or happiness, or pleasure, etc. The question is where does the evidence lead? Given all the evidence evolution simply falls short on many issues.

The problem with your approach is that one could equally well attribute the "evolution" of resistance to DDT in mosquitos to divine (or devilish) intervention.  Science doesn't prove material causation.  It assumes it.  When a reasonable material cause is found, science works the material explanation to death in the hopes of coming up with a better one.  Religion just provides untestable answers.  The reason why science has historically trumped religion is that it has consistently made progress in correcting erroneous explanations, as it did in the 19th century with Darwin's crushing attack on the scientific validity of natural theology.  And one other thing:  science actually delivers on its "miracles".  It is possible that your religious doctrine is correct about the nature of reality, but the historical record of religious doctrines in actually being correct is appalling.

Hmmm, that fact that we have to go looking for evidence seems to indicate we currently have little to none. And saying "It MUST have happened elsewhere." falls under the same thing as "It MUST have happened." You're basing faith that results will turn up due to your philosophy of naturalism. It's possible those expectations can fail. And you still face the problem that the creation of the universe is not a repeatable and testable event. Or the extinction of the Dinosaurs.

Does it disturb you that scientists cannot yet prove abiogenesis?  Do you think that it makes your untestable religious claim more viable?  That's the whole point of science, you know.  It doesn't always start out with a claim of infallible truth.  It is a method for discovering truth.  Religion offers only declarations of truth, and no method for discovering it.  You are correct that the expectations of a material explanation might all fail.  And I would still face the problem that the creation of the universe seems not to be solvable by scientific means.  That would nevertheless not get you even an inch closer to the claim that goddidit.  You are arguing a false dichotomy if you think it would.  Ignorance of the answer does not entitle us to claim knowledge of it.  Scientific methodology may fail, and its assumption of materialism be wrong, but it does have a record of fulfilling expectations.  Religion has a bad record in that department.

Those kind of questions seem to boil down to "If we are complex and thus created, God, who is even more complex, must be created." There are only two catagories of things that can exsist: created and non-created. We know the universe is created because it's running down...

Here you equivocate on the word "universe" as all of existence and "universe" as just the observable universe that we can detect.  When we observe the beginning of this "universe", we do not conclude that nothing physical existed before it or that something spiritual must have created matter.  We have nothing to license such beliefs.  Your argument fails, because it depends crucially on this equivocation of the term "universe".

One would expect something that had no beginning to not be constrained to time as we measure it. We would then expect that non-created thing to never change because, being outside time, it is the same at its beginning, its middle, and its end. A non-created thing must necessarily be eternal. Created things must come from something. "Out of nothing, nothing comes." So, if the created thing must come from something else, then it must come from something that exists prior to it. If we look at all the created things as a whole, they must come from a non-created thing. That is the only logical option open to us!

You arbitrarily exclude many other possible scenarios in which different physical universes, or even a "metauniverse", exist outside of our temporal framework.  Because you equivocate on the word "universe", you talk yourself into a completely gratuitous assumption about what is "contingent" and what is "necessary".  Worse yet, when you describe your god, you can't help but describe him as a being that exists in a temporal framework, complete with changes of state, causal events, and other properties that only make sense in our type of universe.  Don't forget that we are supposed to have been "made in his image", and he took "seven days" (whether metaphorical days or not) to accomplish our creation.  Surely even you must see that you aren't making a substantive claim here.  If there are such similarities between us and an uncreated being, then what exempts him from the need to be created?  This is where the divine "watchmaker" argument collapses under its own weight.  We can ground our design in some original model, but whence the design of the model?

We know the universe is a created thing. We know that it must come from something else. We know that some type of non-created thing must exist in order to have created things exist...

But we don't know the nature of the "uncreated thing".  It could just be a metauniverse that doesn't have a conscious mind.  We can explain our own consciousness in terms of unguided evolution.  Bodies need brains to keep out of danger long enough to create copies of themselves.  The greater our self-awareness, the more accurately we are able to navigate away from suffering and towards happiness.  Why would physical reality itself need to plan its actions?  It is not in any danger and it has no drive to replicate itself.  It has no need to avoid suffering or seek happiness.

...Explanation leads to actions that preserve and strengthen survival.  Our ability to explain how things work gives us an edge in figuring out how to avoid, decrease and eliminate future dangers.

Yet many things have survived without this. Bacteria, plants, mosquitos, sharks, etc. Your problem is that explanation doesn't lead to survival it leads to knowledge and understanding. Immaterial things that aren't necessary to survival.

You still don't get it.  Bacteria, plants, mosquitos, sharks, etc., inhabit different environmental niches than we do.  They compete more directly with other organisms in those niches, and evolution guides their "design" to respond to different environmental challenges than ours does.  Both you and sntjohnny have an extremely superficial concept of how evolution works.  It doesn't tell us that life will produce only one type of organism--one size fits all.  It tells us that life will produce an overabundance of environmental designs, and those that produce more offspring than competing designs will win a foothold in a given niche.  It is about more than survival, because organisms become extinct all the time.  It is about adaptation.

And guess what those methodologies have proven: you can't make heads or tails out of what they're seeing unless the person they're studing tells them what he/she is feeling. Perhaps if you gave it some thought instead of automatic dismissals you'd learn something. How do you know that this particular neurological activity--strawberries touching the tongue, creating a chemical response through the body--how does anyone know what that activity feels good? You can't know that by looking at your machine. Someone's got to tell you how it feels. That's how. You need the report so that you can correlate specific brain activity with the feeling of pleasure or the feeling of pain.

Gosh, that must mean that scientists need to come up with very clever experiments to verify their hypotheses, doesn't it?  So they don't limit their experiments to one individual and one bowl of strawberries.  They look at a statistically valid random sample.  They publish their results for comparison against other studies.  They look for corroboration from other types of experiments.  You are right.  They can't know.  They can only speculate, conjecture, and....verify.  If the expectations created by hypotheses and theories keep getting met, then their confidence in those hypotheses and theories grows.  And the method seems to work very nicely--much better than trying to receive answers through revelation from a deity.

Indeed, for science to work at all, we need a soul on the inside to tell us what the outside feels like, looks like, smells like, tastes like and sounds like. Though science might probe the sense of smell and the sense of sight, science cannot tell us anything, not one single thing about the sensation of smell and the sensation of sight. Somebody's got to report that...

Again, you mention the undefined term "soul".  My experience has been that Christians are completely inconsistent in their description of what that word means.  Scientists look at many indications of mental activity, not just verbal reports.  You can just show someone a picture and use MRI technology to see what happens when the same picture is shown to many different people.  Such a method requires no subjective response from the subject.  I am beginning to suspect that you have never looked at a published report or read accounts of these studies.  You really don't seem to realize that scientists are as capable as you are of figuring out the weaknesses in their methodology.  Actually, they're more capable than you, because their work is reviewed and critiqued constantly by people even more clever than you, hard as that may be for you to imagine. 

You didn't even define the concept of "soul", so you neglected to take the very first step in proving its existence.

Sorry I try to argue in a way that assumes people have at least a High School education. Would you like for me to stop?

Oh, gosh, don't be so impatient with my ignorance.  Tell me what you think the word "soul" means.  Have mercy on the stupid guy with a Ph.D. in linguistics who has taught graduate seminars in semantics at an Ivy League university. 

...Neurologists have drawn the mistaken conclusion that since certain states are correlated, certain brain states are correlated with your soulish functions--memory, thinking, choices, feelings-- and that means there is no self, there is no soul, there is just a brain state. That is a big mistake.

No neurologist has drawn such conclusions.  I believe that there is a mind and a brain that sustains that mind.  It is easy to observe that physical effects on the brain--trauma, drugs, lack of sleep--changes mental states.  It is a completely unwarranted assumption that such mental states continue to change when the brain dies.

I am going to count on the fact that you have a self-conscious awareness of your own consciousness (I think therefore I am) as something different from your physical body.  That is just the most common sense approach to reality with regards to human beings. We just seem to know that to be the case. It's rather self-evident.

Another thing that is self-evident is that physical changes to the brain can shut down self-awareness.  For example, try chugging bottles of vodka--let's say ten.  I predict that you and those observing you will come to a startling realization about the brain-mind connection.  When you saturate your bloodstream with alcohol, it can cause you to lose consciousness, and even your life.  Isn't it funny how consciousness always seems to be impaired by serious trauma to the brain?  Do you think that there might be a connection between the physical brain and consciousness?  I do.

Evolution can't even get started shaping biologiocal diversity without that biological life coming from non-life. For evolution to be a fact, you must have two things, minimally. First, you've got to have life coming from non-life--abiogenesis...

This is just utterly false.  You aren't even close on this one.  A god could set life in motion and just let evolution do the rest.  Alternatively, life might evolve from inanimate self-replicating processes in nature (i.e. abiogenesis).

...Second, you've got to have a change in that life from simple forms to complex forms over time. You must have the kick-off, and you must have the rest of the game.

This is false, too.  Evolution can, and has, led to simpler life forms.  We can 'devolve' as well as 'evolve'.  It all depends on what the environment selects for.

For evolution to take place, you don't even need life forms.  All you need is a self-replicating process in which the copy-producing process has some flaw or perturbation that produces slightly different copies from the original matrix.  Then you need a closed environment--a niche of some sort--that competing processes populate with copies of themselves.  Among the competing processes in the niche, the ones that are better at self-replication will overwhelm the ones that are poorer.  You can verify the process algorithmically in a computer simulation.  Dawkins does it in The Blind Watchmaker, and you can even run his program for it on the web.

The fact that no one knows how abiogenisis happens, apart from ID, and the fact that the simpilist forms of life are irreducibly complex throw a wrench in macro-evolution.

Scientists have lots of very interesting suggestions for how abiogenesis might have occurred, but none are yet confirmed.  That does not mean that science is incapable of confirming abiogenesis in principle.  As for irreducible complexity, it has been debunked over and over again.  An excellent summary of the refutations can be found at http://talkorigins.org/faqs/behe.html.

Here you equivocate on the word "universe" as all of existence and "universe" as just the observable universe that we can detect.  When we observe the beginning of this "universe", we do not conclude that nothing physical existed before it or that something spiritual must have created matter.  We have nothing to license such beliefs.  Your argument fails, because it depends crucially on this equivocation of the term "universe".

You have nothing to liscense the belief there was anything physical before the Big Bang, other than there MUST have been. You can't conclude there was something physical or something spiritual didn't create it. The arguements for something physical before the Big Bang have been repeatedly rebuffed. If there was something physical than what cause the Big Bang, and what caused that caused, and that cause, and that, etc. This is known as infinite regress. You don;t solve the problem you merely push it back a few steps and try to ignore it.

You arbitrarily exclude many other possible scenarios in which different physical universes, or even a "metauniverse", exist outside of our temporal framework.  Because you equivocate on the word "universe", you talk yourself into a completely gratuitous assumption about what is "contingent" and what is "necessary".  Worse yet, when you describe your god, you can't help but describe him as a being that exists in a temporal framework, complete with changes of state, causal events, and other properties that only make sense in our type of universe.  Don't forget that we are supposed to have been "made in his image", and he took "seven days" (whether metaphorical days or not) to accomplish our creation.  Surely even you must see that you aren't making a substantive claim here.  If there are such similarities between us and an uncreated being, then what exempts him from the need to be created?  This is where the divine "watchmaker" argument collapses under its own weight.  We can ground our design in some original model, but whence the design of the model?

Yes, forgive me for not taking the exsistence of aliens and alternate universes into account. I'll try not to base arguements off of life and the universe as we know it, since it's the only life and universe we know of. Shall I include the tooth-fairy and unicorns, since it's possible they must exsist somewhere? Or how about Pullman's world since it's possible that exsists somewhere too? This is an example of what is called "phantom arguements". You take unkowns that are only sustained by "possibles" or "could be" to try to refute known facts. Talk to me when you stop argueing SciFi.

You fail to see the distinction on why an un-created thing is exempt from creation? And you're a linguist? Frankly I don't see the God as described in the Bible as changing. He remains the same as He always was and will be. That we may see different sides of Him, does not mean he changes any more than saying you change from happy to angry.

But we don't know the nature of the "uncreated thing".  It could just be a metauniverse that doesn't have a conscious mind.  We can explain our own consciousness in terms of unguided evolution.  Bodies need brains to keep out of danger long enough to create copies of themselves.  The greater our self-awareness, the more accurately we are able to navigate away from suffering and towards happiness.  Why would physical reality itself need to plan its actions?  It is not in any danger and it has no drive to replicate itself.  It has no need to avoid suffering or seek happiness.

I would point out Bacteria doesn't have a brain and seems to have gotten along just fine. Plus plants. Plus for macro-evolution to be true it means simple organisims have survived for millions of years before they reached the point of having a brain. Plus coming up with an alternative based on "could" is not an immediate rebutal to the prior alternative ( I can always say "It could be God as described in the Bible" and it would have the same standing). I'm afraid you've failed at this point.

Also, your arguement fails because given that our universe is a created thing, all so-called meta universes would be a created thing and thus wouldn't be the "uncreated thing". We call this uncreated thing 'God'. Once His exsistence is established, it's simply a matter of finding the most consistent description of Him to know his nature. That's what the Bible does.

You still don't get it.  Bacteria, plants, mosquitos, sharks, etc., inhabit different environmental niches than we do.  They compete more directly with other organisms in those niches, and evolution guides their "design" to respond to different environmental challenges than ours does.  Both you and sntjohnny have an extremely superficial concept of how evolution works.  It doesn't tell us that life will produce only one type of organism--one size fits all.  It tells us that life will produce an overabundance of environmental designs, and those that produce more offspring than competing designs will win a foothold in a given niche.  It is about more than survival, because organisms become extinct all the time.  It is about adaptation.

The crows and ants have a different environment niche then we do, yet you still tried to show they need explanation like we do. You say evolution has led to our need for explanations and that has led to our being so abundant. Yet we see things even more abundant that doesn't need explanation. So where does this need for explanation come from? You assert science as the superior means of explanation, yet all I'm getting is evolutiondidit! Not very superior at all.

Gosh, that must mean that scientists need to come up with very clever experiments to verify their hypotheses, doesn't it?  So they don't limit their experiments to one individual and one bowl of strawberries.  They look at a statistically valid random sample.  They publish their results for comparison against other studies.  They look for corroboration from other types of experiments.  You are right.  They can't know.  They can only speculate, conjecture, and....verify.  If the expectations created by hypotheses and theories keep getting met, then their confidence in those hypotheses and theories grows.  And the method seems to work very nicely--much better than trying to receive answers through revelation from a deity.

  Yeah, it's not that they can see the same thing happening to different people. It's that they need to ask those people to report so they can determine what it means. For a science that only has third-person access where everyone has access to anything it studies, it seems remarkable that they need first-person access to what they are testing when it comes to happiness, pleasure, etc. This first-person access to thoughts and feelings is also another example of having a mind and a soul, which are not the brain.

Again, you mention the undefined term "soul".  My experience has been that Christians are completely inconsistent in their description of what that word means.  Scientists look at many indications of mental activity, not just verbal reports.  You can just show someone a picture and use MRI technology to see what happens when the same picture is shown to many different people.  Such a method requires no subjective response from the subject.  I am beginning to suspect that you have never looked at a published report or read accounts of these studies.  You really don't seem to realize that scientists are as capable as you are of figuring out the weaknesses in their methodology.  Actually, they're more capable than you, because their work is reviewed and critiqued constantly by people even more clever than you, hard as that may be for you to imagine.  ]

The "soul" as in you. Your consciousness, and how you have nonphysical feelings. While I'm not familiar with other's description for the soul, a soul as I have been taught is basicly your identity with your physical body being just a shell. One can see this in identical twins, where there genetics may be identical and the same living environment, but anyone who knows them know them to be seperate and distinct individuals.

As far as your showing someone a picture, sure science can test the sense of smell and the sense of sight, but science cannot tell us anything, not one single thing about the sensation of smell and the sensation of sight. Somebody's got to report that. Someone on the inside; science is on the outside. That's why I like to think of myself as pretty stupid. It makes it even more remarkable when I prove to be smarter then people with Ph.D.s.

Oh, gosh, don't be so impatient with my ignorance.  Tell me what you think the word "soul" means.  Have mercy on the stupid guy with a Ph.D. in linguistics who has taught graduate seminars in semantics at an Ivy League university. 

Wow. Yet you couldn't figure out what sntjohnny meant with his "INAE gene"?

No neurologist has drawn such conclusions.  I believe that there is a mind and a brain that sustains that mind.  It is easy to observe that physical effects on the brain--trauma, drugs, lack of sleep--changes mental states.  It is a completely unwarranted assumption that such mental states continue to change when the brain dies.

Seems that I've shown that since we have a soul that can only access things like feelings and the three are correlated. So if there is a correlation between the mind, body, and soul then there is one between the mind and the soul. When we die, the soul goes, and the mind goes with it. Now the only question is where?

Another thing that is self-evident is that physical changes to the brain can shut down self-awareness.  For example, try chugging bottles of vodka--let's say ten.  I predict that you and those observing you will come to a startling realization about the brain-mind connection.  When you saturate your bloodstream with alcohol, it can cause you to lose consciousness, and even your life.  Isn't it funny how consciousness always seems to be impaired by serious trauma to the brain?  Do you think that there might be a connection between the physical brain and consciousness?  I do.

Yes there's a connection between the immaterial mind and the material brain. I already said Death is a prime example. For there to be a correlation and a connection there have to be two or more things that are seperate, yet work together. That's  what I'm talking about. Happiness is an immaterial thing that science can not measure. Happiness is held to be very important yet science can't measure it in any empiracle sense. You state MRIs and neurology, but a study into how they tests reveal that they must ask the person they are testing on. They must get an answer from the soul that's inside before they can make any sense on the outside. This proves correlation between the mind, body, and soul. In which case the immaterial mind and immaterial soul are shown to exsist through reason rather than science. Nothing that is ultimately valuable to you can be classified, studied, probed or analyzed empirically by the five senses using science.

I'll even go a step further and say pain and pleasure are not material things. They are things accessed by the soul. You may say "Wait someone physically cuts me, it hurts. The nerves tell me I'm in pain." I'll grant that. You do things that are physical, that have an impact on your physical body, but the sensation of pain is not in your body. You know why? You know how I know this? Because you cannot measure pain by physical standards.

And how about this response: "It hurts, but it feels good." Have you ever said or heard that? I think dominatrixes make their living off that principal. Now, you make sense out of that in a purely physicalist way. It's painful, but I like it. It's a good pain. You see, even if the pain could be reduced to a mere physiological, neurological response, even if the meters could show that pain was really being felt, there is still an additional element of passing judgment on it, making an assessment, and those things clearly are not physical.

This is just utterly false.  You aren't even close on this one.  A god could set life in motion and just let evolution do the rest.  Alternatively, life might evolve from inanimate self-replicating processes in nature (i.e. abiogenesis).

In which case you're conceding that a supernatural event (life coming from non-life) happened.

...Second, you've got to have a change in that life from simple forms to complex forms over time. You must have the kick-off, and you must have the rest of the game.

For evolution to take place, you don't even need life forms.  All you need is a self-replicating process in which the copy-producing process has some flaw or perturbation that produces slightly different copies from the original matrix.

In which case your examples are the result of ID and simply prove micro-evolution, which isn't in dispute. Those algorithms had to be created on a computer, that was itself created. Plus you're getting out off topic. I am not refuting evolution or natural selection per se. Like I said I see nothing wrong in how this all fits into micro-evolution. My points are against unguided macro-evolution for the complexity of life. For which everything we know about DNA refutes your point. DNA is a code. And there is no such thing as a self-generating random code - for a code is an agreed upon representation of what it's trying to communicate.

Scientists have lots of very interesting suggestions for how abiogenesis might have occurred, but none are yet confirmed.  That does not mean that science is incapable of confirming abiogenesis in principle.  As for irreducible complexity, it has been debunked over and over again.  An excellent summary of the refutations can be found at http://talkorigins.org/faqs/behe.html.

Yes, I know. I said there are some ideas. There are competing models that have been suggested, but they're just starting places. They're just ways of saying, "Let's start here, and we'll see where it leads." There are possibilities, but no one knows how it happened, or even how it could have happened in enough detail to be compelling." In which case it goes back to they don't know how it happened. If they don't know how it happend by naturalistic evolutionary means, then how can they be sure it did? All they've got is "We are here so it MUST have happened." Which goes back to my point of macro-evolution being a philosophy more than a science.

As far as irreducible complexity being debunked:
http://www.creationontheweb.com/content/view/3287
http://www.answersingenesis.org/creation/v18/i4/eye.asp

I've lost track of where things are.   Let me skim Cop's last response to see if I can find something I can respond to without tracking down the context.

"You can fill your bookshelf with books written in Chinese, but that won't mean that you can read and understand Chinese.  In your case, I doubt that those books serve any useful purpose other than as backup references for the narrow range of data and issues that you find in your ID/creationist set.  You don't see the bigger picture, because you only want to address a few pixels in the corner that you find a little blurry."

Ah, taking the moral high ground again, eh Cop?  Isn't this the sort of argument you detest when I make it when I say you don't understand Christianity?  You get to make the argument as it applies to evolution but I can't for Christianity?  Classic Cop.

I see you chose not to tell us how many books written by IDers and Creationists are on your shelf.

"It is clear that that is what you think you are doing.  However, you can only achieve that by confusing religious and scientific explanations.  Scientific explanations are never final, comprehensive, or absolute.  They are always subject to revision and refinement.  Religious explanations are fixed pretensions of absolute truth.  There is a very big difference between attributing a biological change to evolutionary pressure, which can be evaluated by repeated observation, and attributing it to the miraculous intervention of a deity, which cannot."

Nonsense.  For one thing, you atheists only resort to this idea that Science is provisional when you want to try to assume the moral high ground against religion.  In practice, this humility goes out the window.   I also reject your characterization of religion as having 'fixed pretensions of absolute truth.'  Not all religion is like that at all.  When there are such 'pretensions' they are usually associated with revelatory claims.  If these claims are valid, trusting them is logical.  If God tells you what the nature of reality is, Cop, and you have good reason to believe it is God, you'd be a fool to reject it.

So, the question has to do with the validity of the revelation.  If people believe their revelation is valid they are acting perfectly rationally.  It has nothing to do with a tendency to be an absolutist. 

"I explained it with the lightning rod example."

No, you didn't.  You used an example of intelligence producing something.  We want an explanation that does not require intelligence.

"What I learned from that exercise is that you really didn't put two and two together to make four."

Is this you acting with all the dignity of your gray hairs, Cop?

See, you've got nothing on me.  The only difference between your insults and mine are that there are no mistaking mine.  You on the other hand wrap yours in such a way that sounds like an argument, but it really isn't.  Its just ad hominem.

"No credible methodology.  You can use the terms "historical method" all you like, but you are no historian."

That's ridiculous.  You know what?  You aren't a philosopher of religion, so what the heck are you doing posting on religion in my debate board? 

I am aware of the fact that I don't have credentials as a historian but let's face it, none of us are going to be able to be credentialed in every area that we encounter and yet that doesn't mean we remain agnostic.  You admit that when you wander out of your area of languages and blather on about evolution, religion, and science.  I have produced arguments and substantiation from people who ARE credentialed, like Habermas and Craig to head off this nonsense.

"The compulsion is entirely yours, and it is driven by your need to believe in a god.  Lacking such a need, I also lack the compulsion to find ways to justify the belief."

I don't have a need to believe in a god.  I believe in a God because I am compelled to do so by the evidence as I understand it.

"As I've explained to you several times now, theism does not offer explanations."

I'm sorry, but since you are neither a theologian or a philosopher, you are not competent to make such assertions.  Your 'explanations' are nothing more than the mutterings of a laymen bent on justifying his world view.

Look we can all play! 

"Sure.  Science has answered the question of the origin of the species in an intellectually more satisfying way than Christian 'natural theology' did with Paley's famous "watchmaker" metaphor."

Well, that would be a matter of preference.  I find the 'scientific' answer for 'apparent' design to be intellectually bankrupt.  When you begin by conceding that something appears to be designed but it really ain't designed because you can imagine a way it ain't, that's not satisfying.  That's absurd.  If science could give us some way to definitively distinguish between something that really is designed and something that isn't, the explanation might actually be satisfying.  But this is exactly what you deny science can do, as evidenced by the fact that you do not believe that Intelligent Design is properly science.

"Just So" stories are just that.

"Really?  What is obvious to you is not always obvious to your readers.  That certainly was not obvious to me."

No surprise there.  It does tend to be obvious to many of my readers, actually.  Just not you.