I see your Intelligent Design, and raise you one.

BTW, I got your random arrangement of molecules right here.

beerwulf, you were anxious to get your silly comeback into black and white, you didn’t read the passage. You know it, I know it.

The point was a simple one: He was given proof, and he still didn’t believe. That’s all. Nothing eartshaking here, no “gotchas”, theological or otherwise.

The only thing you got “caught” doing was responding as if you knew what the story was all about, when you didn’t.

Even liberal anti – religionists make mistakes sometimes.

As for proof, magic tricks (burning up bread and mutton) and pranks (wet wool) hardly qualify. Gideon seems to have been a very credulous man.

beerwulf, too arrogant to follow directions, he walks into a wall.

Typical liberal: I don’t have to read the Bible — I know what it says.

Just like Jesse Jackson calling Mary and Joseph, a “homeless couple”, with Mary “carrying a baby out of wedlock.” And he calls himself “Reverend.”

Liberalim über alles!

Yes, I have heard the story of Gideon. “The sword of the Lord and Gideon!” and so forth. All that proves is that Gideon managed to psyche himself up to punk the Midianites into fighting with each other, which means that he was a talented strategist and tactician. The story of his humble beginnings and an army whittled down from 32,000 to 300 sounds like so much priestly PR to me; without independent evidence (from a party with no stake in the outcome) it’s not a reliable source of evidence. And it’s very off point anyway.

By the way, I’m not trying to “use science” to trick anyone into believe in God.
Neither am I an undercover missionary.

By bringing the undefinable and unquantifiable supernatural you create way more problems than you solve.
Please explain.

Have you never heard the story of Gideon?

There’s a reason we exclude the supernatural from scientific theories – it’s unquantifiable and untestable, and becomes an enormous fudge factor. If you want to postulate the hand of a creator, you have to define that hand and make it testable, and design an experiment or field observation to do that test. And then you have to compare that creator against all the other possible creators and figure out how to tell if any of them are present and had a hand in human evolution. And then if more than one fit the data (so to speak), you have to figure out which one is the simplest one.

And so on, and so on. By bringing the undefinable and unquantifiable supernatural you create way more problems than you solve. ID is new lipstick on the same old pig.

Watch this blog for changes, though.

ID is an interesting case in point. Michael Behe and William Dembski (two of the ID movement’s luminaries) marshal mind-numbing detail and pseudo-mathematical hand-waving in support of a revamped Argument from Ignorance (”I can’t imagine a way in which X could have happened according to Y; therefore, X could not have happened according to Y”).

ID rests on the idea of irreducible complexity – some biological or biochemical system is irreducibly complex if it won’t work at all minus one or more of its pieces – and makes the (unsupported) leap to the idea that there is no way an irreducibly complex system could have come about through random processes. When someone says that “X” is possible, they are almost certainly right. When someone says that “X” is not possible, they are almost certainly wrong. It is completely possible that life could have arisen without there being a guiding hand sculpting it this way and that. It is also possible that there was a designer involved, but since that introduces a host of other questions (”What did the designer look like? Flesh-eating bacteria? What was the designer thinking? and so on), it’s a much less useful idea for getting reliable answers.

And since the supernatural creator would be by definition beyond our reckoning, it gives those of very little brain a lot of room to cheat.

A glance at the history of the Catholic Church versus science will show that from Copernicus to Galileo and beyond, when religious orthodoxy meets empirical science orthodoxy eventually loses. And say what you will about the Catholic Church, they at least learn their lessons. That’s why they came out in support of evolution and against “intelligent design”.

“This most beautiful system of the sun, planets, and comets, could only proceed from the counsel and dominion of an intelligent Being… All variety of created objects which represent order and life in the universe could happen only by the willful reasoning of its original Creator, Whom I call the Lord God.”  Sir Isaac Newton

“No way. T Rex in the Garden of Eden? Adam and Eve would be runnin’ all the time, scared shitless. But the Bible says it was paradise. “

Proponents of Intelligent Falling assert that the different theories used by secular physicists to explain gravity are not internally consistent. Even critics of Intelligent Falling admit that Einstein’s ideas about gravity are mathematically irreconcilable with quantum mechanics. This fact, Intelligent Falling proponents say, proves that gravity is a theory in crisis.

I thought that was why you came here – to flame and be flamed? Or did you come her to change others views or enlighten the heathens or debate serious subjects thoughtfuly and truthfuly or flame and be flamed?

I also think fart jokes are funny.