A case for intelligent design often is made from the starting point of, "Something has never come from nothing." Many ID believers can accept certain aspects of evolution that are fairly irrefutable at this point (though natural selection driving evolution isn't accepted by most IDers, IME), but the starting point of life is where they would like you to believe there is controversy. If something has never come from nothing, how could life just suddenly be?

I've dabbled in discussion with this crowd numerous times and boy oh boy do they hate to hear about consensus opinions of relevant experts. Deferring to authority, fallacious! Yet of course they have no qualms with accepting the probability estimates of life occurring naturally in the universe by Discovery Institute's very own Stephen Meyers at face ****ing value.

Truth be told, the science isn't super strong when determining how life started on earth. Asteroid crashing into earth with organic material? Was there the right amount of energy and inorganic materials for RNA to naturally formulate on our planet billions of years ago? Were there multiple dawns of life on earth, perhaps with former events not sticking or ending in extinction?

What are your thoughts on Intelligent Design? Compatible with evolution? Pseudoscience?

For reference, and pay attention to that discrepancy between scientific consensus on evolution vs public opinion. Public acceptance of evolution in US is worst of the developed world:

Facts you make up to win arguments on the internet aren't facts.

Do ID'ers believe that God came from nothing?

God created nothing only to emerge from it to show that he could.

what a boss

God is a shout in the street, friends!

Oh ****, back from your jail stint Proph?

Reality is there is more proof of Santa Claus being real than God

To stir the pot:

Astronomer Hugh Ross lists 200 parameters required for a life-bearing planet. Comparing the chances of a planet falling within these parameters by chance alone with our best estimate of the total number of planets in the universe (10to the 22nd) he estimates that there is ‘less than 1 chance in 10to the 215th’ of even one habitable planet existing in the universe ‘without invoking divine miracles’.

Stephen Meyers: "To generate a single functional protein of 150 amino acids exceeds: ‘1 chance in 10to the 180, well beyond the most conservative estimates for the small probability bound. . . it is extremely unlikely that a random search through all the possible amino acid sequences could generate even a single relatively short functional protein in the time available since the beginning of the universe."

Atrocious moderation diminished my desire to post here.

Until kerowo is replaced or removed, there will be a lull in posting.

lol, you stupid cock.

At first was neither Being nor Non-being.
There was not air nor yet sky beyond.
What was its wrapping? Where? In whose protection?
Was Water there, unfathomable and deep?

There was no death then, nor yet deathlessness;
of night or day there was not any sign.
The One breathed without breath, by its own impulse.
Other than that was nothing else at all.

Darkness was there, all wrapped around by darkness,
and all was Water indiscriminate. Then
that which was hidden by the Void, that One, emerging,
stirring, through power of Ardor came to be...

Who really knows? Who can presume to tell it?
Whence was it born? Whence issued this creation?
Even the gods came after its emergence
Then who can tell from whence it came to be?

(Nasadiya Sukta, Rg Veda X,129)

Fred Hoyle on life beginning on earth:

"...life cannot have had a random beginning...The trouble is that there are about two thousand enzymes, and the chance of obtaining them all in a random trial is only one part in 10 to the 40,000power, an outrageously small probability that could not be faced even if the whole universe consisted of organic soup. If one is not prejudiced either by social beliefs or by a scientific training into the conviction that life originated on the Earth, this simple calculation wipes the idea entirely out of court....The enormous information content of even the simplest living systems...cannot in our view be generated by what are often called "natural" processes...For life to have originated on the Earth it would be necessary that quite explicit instruction should have been provided for its assembly...There is no way in which we can expect to avoid the need for information, no way in which we can simply get by with a bigger and better organic soup, as we ourselves hoped might be possible a year or two ago."

The various fine tuning arguments are fun but one often gets the impression that we might not really know enough to actually calculate probabilities for these things, or understand how to interpret the probabilities.

For example a lot of the time calculations dealing with the possibility of life presuppose that "life" requires a physical/chemical substrate like what we find on earth, i.e carbon-based, requiring water, oxygen, and etc. But there is no real reason to think that is true.

With regard to Hoyle, modern biologists think his specific arguments are dubious. For example:

Unlikely things still happen.

Link with the relevant math please?

Even if that's true, unlikely =/= impossible.

Please tell me this is sarcasm...

Molecules don't form by random chance. We have chemical rules and ****. It's not like Vietnam.

We leak all manner of foul issues from every single orifice.
We spend a third of our lives unconcious.
We have to eat and drink daily or we die.
We need to maintain a steady temperature or we die.
Our bodies break and briuse with very little effort.
We are laid waste by any number of organisms so small they can't
be seen with the naked eye.
We are vulnerable to thousands of other animals, large and small, across the planet, that can kill us with a single bite or a sting.
We spend an extraordinary amount of time trying to wipe each other out.
And we barely live long enough to make a difference to anything.

This doesn't sound like intelligent design to me.
More like accidental, chaotic design.

One bone, two bones, lots of bones and sonic the hedgehog makes more sense to me.

https://answersingenesis.org/reviews...ur-inner-fish/

http://livinglifewithoutanet.com/201...and-evolution/

Intelligent Design is an intellectually bankrupt pile of garbage. Anybody who claims to accept this "theory" is either totally ignorant, a religious fundamentalist, or both.

This was all covered in detail in the Kitzmiller trial, about which there was a special 2-hour episode of NOVA as well as at least three books.

An ID claim that the multiverse theory is essentially posed to fill the same gaps that ID does, and that evidence is equally lacking (or present, depending on your take).

"...the great question, of course, is why these fundamental parameters happen to lie within the range needed for life. Does the universe care about life? Intelligent design is one answer. Indeed, a fair number of theologians, philosophers, and even some scientists have used fine-tuning and the anthropic principle as evidence of the existence of God. For example, at the 2011 Christian Scholars’ Conference at Pepperdine University, Francis Collins, a leading geneticist and director of the National Institutes of Health, said, “To get our universe, with all of its potential for complexities or any kind of potential for any kind of life-form, everything has to be precisely defined on this knife edge of improbability…. [Y]ou have to see the hands of a creator who set the parameters to be just so because the creator was interested in something a little more complicated than random particles.”

Intelligent design, however, is an answer to fine-tuning that does not appeal to most scientists. The multiverse offers another explanation..."

http://harpers.org/archive/2011/12/t...al-universe/3/

Intelligent design is political speech for 'let us teach our religious creationism in the guise of... science!'

Amen, spank!

I prefer to attack the intelligence part of the claim.

The designer was clearly a ****ing moron if he thought he'd done a good job with wisdom teeth.

And making us fornicate where we pee is just a bit dickish.