russadwan wrote:Good arguement. But were not talking about computers, were talking about the human body.
One must take care to spell "argument" properly if one wishes to enter into debate.
I was making an analogy to illustrate a point: one cannot present this argument:
X was previously thought to be useless.
X has been discovered to serve Y purpose.
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X exists because some intelligent being planned it as so.
The problem with this argument is that it assumes "Since something has a purpose, it was designed to exist". Such an argument is based on shaky logic, because it presumes the existence of a creator which is still in question. See the watchmaker's fallacy below for a more in-depth explanation.
My faith leads me to believe in Intelligent Design, but I cannot bring myself to support it as a counterargument to evolution. The weakness of ID: the watchmaker's fallacy.
The fallacy is illustrated as follows. Suppose you are walking through a field, and you stumble upon a watch. After examination of the mechanisms that drive the watch, you assume that nature is not capable of randomly producing such complexity and declare there must be a watchmaker that made the watch. While this seems perfectly logical, you can prove a key piece of information that does not exist in ID: you can prove that watchmakers exist and that no watch has ever been produced by nature alone.
When it comes to using ID to prove God's existence, there's a bit of a problem. ID states that since nature could not possibly produce humanity by chance, God must have created humanity. Unfortunately it commits the fallacy of begging the question twice. For the reasoning behind ID to be sound, one must prove both that human evolution is an incorrect theory and that God exists. Without concrete proof of these points, ID proves nothing.
In short, ID makes an argument of the form, "If you are wrong, I am right.", but does nothing to prove that its opponents are wrong.
One could of course say the same thing about evolution theory, but when it comes to logical debate scientific theories have the advantage of compelling evidence whereas faith-based arguments have very little to work with. The key difference between the two is this: Evolution theory must find a chain of ancestry that links Homo Sapiens Sapiens to some apelike ancestor. If it does so, all other theories are invalidated because evolution has been proven. ID must prove that God exists and that there is absolutely no link between humanlike apes and Homo Sapiens Sapiens. The first is impossible unless God decides to reveal Himself. The second is very difficult, as it requires solid proof that all possible places where fossils could be found have been examined and the evidence has not been produced, combined with proof that there is no way the fossils could have decayed or been destroyed by some other natural cause.
I don't think ID is going to make much progress towards scientific proof. Based on what I have studied, it seems much more likely to me that if man was created by God, evolution was the process by which God created man.