That would seem to be irrelevant to my point, which was that recognizing intelligent design is integral to the science of archeology. In other words, recognizing intelligent design is scientific.
Furthermore, an a priori assumption is not needed to recognize intelligent design – even a child recognizes intelligent design when upon observing the four faces on Mt. Rushmore. (Incidentally, the four will become five – the face of Donald J. Trump will soon be added. But I digress.)
No you haven’t. No, the “the function [sic] complexity evident in even the simplest [modern] cell” is in no way evidence that, before several billions of years of evolution of those cells, and the most simple modern single-celled organisms, their primitive precursors were not simple enough to have formed via abiogenesis. You have already been told this, so if it is “evidence” of anything, it is of your simple inability to learn.
It is however not irrelevant to the strength of your analogy. Lacking “who, when, where, how”, archeology has no context to work with, and would devolve to mere relic collecting. Lacking the grounding of those specifics, archeology would be vacuous.
But “archeologists” never “consider the recognition of intelligent design” outside The “who, when, where, how”. This renders the whole field of archeology, as it is actually practiced, “irrelevant” to your point.
Yes, but as I have pointed out above your argument lacks evidence. And now it even lacks a relevant analogy.
Please speak English.
I’m not talking about evolution, but abiogenesis.
(But since you brought up nested hierarchies … a nested hierarchy could be described as a family, and God likes families, hence he created nested hierarchies.)
Abiogenesis represents a scientific impossibility – everyone knows that, and everyone is aware of the reality of irreducible complexity. That is all the evidence one needs to come to the scientific conclusion that abiogenesis could only have happened due to divine creation.
“In science, ‘fact’ can only mean ‘confirmed to such a degree that it would be perverse to withhold provisional assent.’”
The reversion of life to simpler forms as one plows back in time is empirically supported by the fossil record. Its not fantasy or speculation. Huff and puff all you want, the data won’t go away.
Since you have refused to accept correction, its worth repeating that modern organisms are the products of evolutionary change spanning billions of years and as the fossil record indicates, life gets a lot simpler the further one goes back in time. Drop your silly claim that extant complexity has always been present.
That’s certainly according to you, not me. I am not surprised though, your stock in trade is strawmen.
Not entirely true, but living organisms are chemicals themselves, subject to the same laws of nature inanimate matter obey, so the probability that life could have been brought about by natural processes, known and unknown, remains an important possibility. That’s what the field of abiogenesis investigates.
Are you ready to retract the false claim that OoL researchers believe abiogenesis was purely a chance event?
You and those YECs who think so are dead wrong, because @swamidass exists.
You do now. You don’t have to thank me, that one was free of charge.
Yes. Completely. Calling unverifiable nonsense into question and advocating science and critical thinking instead of superstition and gullibility I take to be morally virtuous.
Bzzzt. Wrong! First of all you are describing a sort of moral nihilism, or moral relativism, not atheism.
But atheism makes no claims about the nature of morality, other than the entailment that if there are no gods, then morality can’t come from/be grounded in God/God’s nature. By that alone nothing about the reality or subjectivity of morality follows.
All you’ve done here is invoked the horrors that you take moral nihilism to entail, but you’ve done no work to connect moral nihilism to atheism. You must show that moral nihilism is a logically necessary consequence of atheism.
Good luck with that one.
Now it’s of course not even clear from your assertion what you mean by “objective worth” and how you would demonstrate the reality of that on theism. It’s all well and good to just assert that “God is the objective standard of morality, by definition”, but I could say the same about my pet budgie. Your ability to type that assertion into a browser window does not constitute proof, nor evidence of it’s truth.
None of whatever regimes you speak about were taking actions that are somehow logically necessary consequences of, or otherwise endorsed by atheism. So again here your argument is a failure.
Still not even a single reference from the primary literature cited to support your claim. You can name no single fact of physics or chemistry that entails the truth of your assertion. It remains nothing but your personal fantasy no matter how often you repeat it. 
The archeologist could be using scientific methods to determine this.
If he just says “this is too complex - it must be designed” then that would not look like science to me. As far as I know, archeologists do actually use scientific methods in their work.
I did. Here it is again.
Can you name any theory in science that is solely supported by the claimed disqualification of competing theories without any positive evidence for the theory under question?
That’s a God of the Gaps argument.
Sorry that I failed to respond to your question in a timely manner:
I would tend to agree that today’s concept of atheism—although there seems to be at least two definitions of atheism in common usage—is relatively new. When people refer to ancient Greek philosophers speaking of atheism, they tend to cite writers like Lucretius and Epicurus. I suppose that is OK in the sense that (like most modern day atheists) those philosophers couldn’t 100% confidently deny the possible existence of gods. (I don’t think any of them wrote, “No deity exists or ever has existed.”) From what I can still recall of my studies of long ago, they mostly thought that any gods which may exist simply don’t do much to interact with the world and the people who are most interested in them. They considered deities to be largely irrelevant in any case—and if deities do exist, they assumed that they surely would be nothing like popular traditions describe them.
It is interesting to note that some Christian “heretics” of the Middle Ages were charged with “atheism” even though they most certainly believed in the God described in the Bible. In such cases, the “a-” prefix was more along the lines of “anti-” (against) rather than “without belief in”.
I’ve never tried to research who first wrote extensively against the existence of God (as sort of a “father of modern era god-denial.”) I do recall that there was a guy in the 1500’s named Menocchio (Pinocchio’s lesser known Italian countryman) who after denying the deity of Jesus also suggested that the God of the Bible was just a figment of human imagination. As a result, a roast was held in his honor. (That is, he was burned at the stake after a trial for the crime of atheism.) I think of Menocchio because he probably would have felt comfortable among many of today’s atheists.
Alas, my lifetime of exegetical research has been all for naught.
They haven’t directly told me, “Matt, we believe that, as an atheist, you are dishonest,” but I’ve unfortunately been told more than a few times why they believe people become atheists, or what atheists are like, and it’s never been anything so mundane as “they just don’t believe anymore”. It runs the gamut from dishonesty to hatred of God to sexual perversion. I prefer to err of the safer end of that spectrum.
I agree wholeheartedly with you. Thanks for the well-wishes!
Yep. Turns out that understanding words in their literary and cultural context ain’t good fer nuthin’ when there are people who can read an English translation of an ancient document and just automatically know exactly what the writer meant.
The trick is, of course, FINDING such a person.
That would be dead wrong, unless you are referring to the “family” of a bee or other organism that reproduces parthenogenically or asexually, like bacteria or amebae.
No family of a sexually reproducing species could be arranged as a nested hierarchy.
Sorry. I am saddened you no longer believe; but also very sad you expect to be treated that way.
This is way off topic now, but sometimes I feel like I’ve grown up in a weird vacuum unusual to other conservative families - maybe in a good way. I didn’t learn about creation science until last year. We never talked about evolution - and not in school. My family never brought up races or racism - though now I see prejudice in myself and my family, mostly from lack of exposure. We also really never talked about atheism. Oddly (or maybe not), criticism was reserved for other Christians because there was no one else to criticize in rural Midwest where I grew up. Homosexuality became a topic when I was in high school, but I honestly probably didn’t understand the term until I was practically in college. I lived in a bubble I guess - and didn’t think to explore any cultures outside. It’s always interesting for me to hear how different others’ experiences were now, and I wonder why I never thought about it as a kid. Thanks for sharing.
That’s not far off from Richard Dawkins’ position. He has stated that he can’t rule out the possible existence of deities, but he is pretty sure the Christian God does not exist.
Suppose we lived in a world in which we knew blood splatters and sea-shells on the beach usually spelled out messages in in written human languages without any intelligent beings being involved.
We would not then conclude design from the examples you provide above. Correct?
That is the correct analogy to the situation we find in real life. Things like the bacterial flagellum arise thru the unguided natural process of biological reproduction. So we do not conclude it to be the result of design.
Maybe think about the logic of your response…begging the question just a little bit.
I realize I was unclear there. I am referring to an individual instance of the flagellum, not the flagellum in general or as a “design.”
Yes, from what I’ve been told, scholarly confidence in that arduous process has been official declared a superstition (by some unnamed but totally authoritative academy of experts) and we can all save ourselves a lot of time and effort by consulting with someone entirely unschooled in Hebrew exegesis and ancient Near Eastern cultures.
This phenomenon is akin to the ubiquitous “any ten-year old child can read that passage and tell you exactly what it means” maxim—to which I usually reply with “That’s probably why every modern English Bible translation committee includes at least one ten-year old child who can ensure the final product will promote accurate hermeneutics.”
I wonder how much these official declarations cost. I’ve been involved, at times, in the manufacture of products where the tooling costs weren’t too bad but the need for certifications was really costly. Opening a file with Underwriters Limited, for example, and then doing something like a burn test can be a huge expense. It’s one thing to merely CALL something a superstition, but presumably quite another to have one of these certifying boards OFFICIALLY designate it as a superstition. But who pays the fees? Does it all come out of the Ark Park budget?
Did you think of me when you wrote this 
?
On a more serious note, thanks to discourse with you, I have learned that appreciating the cultural and literary context within which ancient texts were written is vital to deciphering their meanings. One area I still double down on is the “error” of the ancients with regards to insect legs number.
I heard of one committee that made the mistake of upgrading to a fourteen-year-old boy. That worked okay until they got to the Song of Songs, and the bathroom breaks just became far too frequent.
But, on a more serious note: the nifty thing about all of this work on the texts and their actual intended meaning is that it’s one of the few areas within theology where the results are as interesting to the unbeliever as to the believer.