aharvey,
In response to your post #14, you quoted Knight saying
Originally posted by Knight
Well the interesting thing about.... "Unlocking the Mysteries of Life" is it is not from a Christian point of view. It's religiously neutral.
and then you said
I don't know the program, but I do know ID. Are you saying that ID is religiously neutral? If so, by this are you referring to "organized, codified religion"? That is, if an idea says "there is a God," but does not say specifically that that God is the Judeo-Christian God, is that idea religiously neutral?
I believe that by strict definition, ID is religiously neutral. I also believe that if you introduce discussion that speaks of a supernatural creator, whether for or against, that would be theistic info. But to the point, there are numerous suggestions for who the creator of life was on our planet. I have heard from a different source that some suggest that it may not have been God, but rather simply a higher life form from an outer space visitor if you will. You need not know who the intellect was in order to understand and accept ID.
Lastly, the video is very well done, I have it myself and have watched it several times. It make no religious claims what so ever, it even mentions the issue about the religious implications and says that such concerns although reasonable, are not warranted. One statement openly recognized that the topic may hold some metaphysical implications, but concerning the scientific process, let the facts dictate true science, not speculation and unrealistic theories.
Then you quoted Knight
Originally posted by Knight
It simply makes a strong what? against standard evolutionary theory.
and then you said
Hmm. Is it a program about intelligent design? Or a program about the supposed defects of, er, "standard evolutionary theory"? Or do you perhaps define intelligent design strictly in terms of the defects of evolutionary theory?
It is about both, that intelligent design seems to be on the table again in terms of explaining the origins of life. Plus the deficit of Darwinian evolution is discussed and revealed where or how it is not supported by science. I believe that Knight meant to say, It simply makes a strong
argument against the standard evolutionary theory. The context even within that single sentence seems pretty obvious.
Origination of life is connected
to it's nature and diversification
As an interesting bit of fascinating information, it's a bit ironic don't you think, that Darwin's origin of species NEVER ADDRESSED THE ISSUE OF HOW LIFE ORIGINATED. Try as he might, his theory did not lend itself well to the origination of life. Apparently this gap of information ate at Darwin but he never published his view on the matter, subsequently his only writing about it was in a letter to a friend/college explaining how life may have been first conceived on this planet. But it is more like science fiction than it is science.
Irreducible complexity
and Darwin's confession
Let me see if I can reproduce some of Darwin's views and a confession that his theory would prove worthless if the mechanism for evolution was shown to be wrong. Because I could not remember them sufficiently, I plugged in the video, so here's some "interesting" quotes.
Natural selection acts only by taking advantage of slight, successive variations.
She can never take a great and sudden leap, but must advance by short and sure, though slow steps.
And that is one notorious feature of evolution, it is an extremely slow process. He also said.
Natural Selection is scrutinizing the slightest variations, rejecting those that are bad, preserving and adding up all that are good.
Of note, natural selection is more of a negative process, it mostly eliminates what is not beneficial. Charles Darwin also said
If it could be demonstrated that any complex organ existed which could not possibly have been formed by numerous, successive slight modifications, my theory would absolutely break down.
And that was apparently the focus of Michael Behe's book, "Darwin's black box".
Microbiology is highlighted as one of the main bodies of scientific learning against evolutionary explanations, and specifically because of the idea of "irreducible complexity". It seems that the more we know about a living cell for example and it's inner workings, the more we know that chance or random naturalistic explanations are unfitting. In fact, with the recent advances in DNA research and scientific knowledge, one of the leading chemical evolutionistic theoreticians and writers, Dean Kenyon sprouted wings and flew on over to the ID camp! How do you explain life at the cellular level without DNA which seems both crucial to life and serves up nothing but fresh hot "information" for how things should be run. It was the challenge of explaining the origins of DNA material and it's unique properties of being responsible for cellular replication among other things that finally represented the intellectual breaking point for Kenyon. Irreducible complexity of all individual molecular machines combined with the unmistakably complex information found in the DNA discovered by modern biology serve well to dismantle Darwinian evolution as the model for biology, yet most agree that natural selection is responsible for some small scale variation, but does not explain the vast majority of the diversity of life. Again, it only favors functional advantages and as such you cannot approach molecular machines, which naturally provide a functional advantage only after they are fully built and functional. So Darwinism can not get you new forms of life, it can only get you some modifications that already exist or can be expressed because of already existent genetic variation.
During the 19th century, scientists believed that there were two fundamental entities, matter and energy. But as we enter the 21st century, there's a third fundamental entity that science has had to recognize, and that is information. And so as we the encounter the biology of the information age, the suspicion is growing, that what were seeing in the DNA molecule is actually an artifact of mind, an artifact of intelligence, something that can only be explained by intelligent design. -- Stephen Meyer
When you but consider the majestic complexity involved in biology, and that each and every one of us all started out as a tiny microscopic single cell team from mother and father who's main feature was being a storehouse of DNA from each parenting host, and then from that information, you underwent a replication process and multiplied until you were formed into being a little baby that would end up growing as you did. It's mind boggling when you think of it.