Yeah and this is where Gilberts response departs from Sanfords, because Gilbert apparently isn’t a YEC, so instead of claiming life can’t be old like Sanford does, Gilbert infers SoMe InViSibLe FoRcE(wink) must have been maintaining genomes against genetic decay all the way since life’s origins.
Why the invisible force elected to design life so as to require constant maintenance against genetic decay over ~4 billion years, instead of just not designing life so it supposedly decays and requires constant maintenance, is anyone’s guess.
Genetic Entropy, to the extend it can even be tested (it technically can’t because it’s proponents can’t predict a magnitude of effect), at least according to Sanford implies life can’t be old. But we have overwhelming evidence life is old. What does Gilbert do? Instead of the most obvious conclusion that GE probably isn’t true, he takes GE as axiomatic and infers a supernatural phenomenon makes old life compatible with GE.
It’s sort of like having an a priori belief that a coin that was once flipped was a fair coin no matter what . Then the ID creationist comes upon a large collection of vast ages of recorded coin flips, sees that the coin has landed tails 90% of the time. Then the ID creationist concludes an unobserved invisible force, an incorporeal coinflipper in control of physics, must have made the (still assumed to be fair) coin land tails, instead of inferring that maybe the coin just wasn’t fair.
