From: "Steve Ewing" 

On Wed, 16 Nov 2005 14:06:15 -0500, Gary Britt
 wrote:

> Again you keep arguing against a strawman.  That strawman is YOUR
> definition
> of an ID advocate and what they say.  ID can be advocated based *solely*
> upon the gaps in the scientific evidence and the fantastically high
> probabilities against non-life becoming something alive and then becoming
> modern man all through a billion happy coincidences and chance conditions
> being exactly right at every one of the billions of exactly right times.
> References to other books are entirely unnecessary.

You keep bringing up all these happy coincidences.  People do win
lotteries, you know.  The probability that you will flip a coin and it land
heads 100 times in a row is very high (too lazy to calculate it) yet the
probability that you will do so a 101st time is still 50-50.

There are many mutations that don't cut the mustard-- survival of the
fittest, y'know.  To say that conditions have to be "exactly
right" and so forth gets the argument backwards-- the mutations that
survive and pass on their characteristics are the ones that do so *because
of* the conditions, not *in spite of* them.  If conditions had been
different we may have all had three left feet and a hand growing out of our
foreheads; who knows?

Your description of ID advocacy seems to be spot-on:

   Evolution as a theory has holes, fossil evidence has gaps, look how
complex life is: there *must* be an intelligent designer!

It's all negative: there's no positive statements to test, nothing to prove:

   It was designed that way!  It had to be!  Convinced yet?  No?  Look at
the eye!  How complex it is!  Now, do you get it?

--
Steve 
http://www.qmss.com/~sewing

--- BBBS/NT v4.01 Flag-5