@T.j_Runyon
What you argue doesn’t make sense to me. Why should I expect the intelligent designer to use a factory? Why should whether or not I believe that he uses factories count against intelligent design? I don’t know how he did it. Does that count against intelligent design that I don’t know? For goodness sake, no one knows how it happened. I suppose you could call hydrothermal vents chemical factories. And then say that the intelligent designer guided the process to produce what was needed. I could imagine all kinds of scenarios. But to demand that something be left behind as proof is kind of a joke. And that was my response to Timothy and the reason why I made the comment about factories being ludicrous and questions being pokes.
How do you know the Designer’s manufacturing process left no marks or signs in the finished product? Once again you’re just offering your own unsupported assertions. I guess I’ll have to keep pointing it out to you every time you do it.
I’m sorry you view critical analysis questions of your claims as “pokes”. How did you ever get any papers through peer review?
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You misunderstand. No one is demanding that. I think the issue is the ID community doesn’t seem interested in finding out if anything was left behind and that doesn’t come off as very scientific. I know there aren’t any “factories” on the sea floor. I understand the clear metaphysical implications of ID being true. But this conclusion is reached using means outside the natural sciences. But ID wants to stay within the sciences. So it seems like investigating something like materials that may have been left behind is something a truly scientific enterprise would want to do.
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Yep. This whole line of conversation started because Dr. G suggested looking for tool marks / signs of manufacture to tell if Mt. Rushmore was designed. When I asked why don’t ID proponents ever look for similar manufacturing signs in biological life I was told I was stupid for asking. I guess the rule is you’re not allowed to question ID’s claims because…reasons. 
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Damned if I do, damned if I don’t. @ Timothy
Why do you think ID deserves a pass from sometimes harsh critical analysis? Every other field of scientific inquiry has to run the same gauntlet but ID to too fragile?
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What you do is not analysis. You attack me me with hypotheticals.
I don’t attack you at all. I attack the things you claim about ID to see if they can withstand critical scrutiny. So far the answer is a resounding no.
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I had a serious proposal on the table that got highjacked by @Timothy and his argument about why I wouldn’t go looking for factories. BTW, as a rhetorical strategy, to pin someone against the wall for not doing something stupid, and then asking them how they know it is a stupid thing to do, when in fact they had themselves created that stupid thing as a stupid joke —- is perverse. My proposal involves the one thing that _is left behind from the beginning. _
That’s where to look. Not in imaginary factories. In science you begin by thinking about what nature tells you.
This is a good conversation, so as a moderator, I’d like to step in and say that there have been words shared in the past that were not so gracious. I think that Tim is being reasonable and realistic here, so hopefully everyone can see beyond the past and continue the dialog in this spirit.
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Critical scrutiny of imaginary objects will take you far, my friend
@T.j_Runyon as I said some posts back,
I think we are finally in a position to begin to answer some of these questions. We are accumulating enough depth of genomic and phylogenetic data to begin to get a read on the diversity and relatedness that is out there. Rather than look at individual molecules or pathways we need to look at the patterns.
There is the signal from the past. The factory on the floor? No. But what was made.
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But doesn’t that genomic and phylogenetic data tell us both that species are related by common descent and that the differences among species result from the sort of genomic differences that can be explained by known sorts of mutations?
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I think there are still some things to learn.
It’s certainly possible that the ambiguous skyward face form is what led Gutzon Borglum to choose this particular location in the first place.
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I don’t see Timothy attacking you personally. I see him attacking your claims–claims that make no sense. That’s very different.
This is where people have different opinions.
Of course there are. But what, specifically, are you talking about? I’m particularly interested in what you meant by “relatedness”.
This image choice is interesting and very appropriate for this conversation. Notice that the forehead and chin of the “face” are remnants of the mountain as it appeared at the time that the faces were carved by humans. Those aspects carved by humans end up forming the nose, cheek and eye of the face. So it is both aspects, the manual and the natural, in combination that form the shape that we recognize as a face.
In terms of a sculpture, an artist may utilize a naturally occurring aspect of her media and incorporate that feature into the end result. If this secondary “face” were intentional, you can see where the designer could position the nose, cheek and eye in order to complete the face. In this case, it is easy to see which aspects occurred naturally and which were chipped away by humans and explosives.
It seems that if this were an analogy for a newly evolved species, the evolutionary biologist would say that there is genetic evidence of common descent, and so there is no reason to assume that any outside intelligence has meddled with the process. The IDist might say that the just so evolutionary steps required to result in this newly evolved species are too unlikely to have occurred on their own.
In the case of the sculpture, the means by which one part of the face has been carved vs the other other parts that occur naturally are readily identifiable. In the case of an evolving species, it seems that the processes that occur, whether they are naturally occuring or due to intelligent intervention, are identical to one another.
As such, how could anyone identify a specific intervention? It seems as though it is truly a faith issue and not a science issue.
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@Mercer
I did not mean he attacked me personally. The thing that frustrated me was that I had made no claims. I had set up a ludicrous hypothetical as to why we didn’t go looking on the sea floor for manufacturing plants. Then it went back and forth from there.
I suppose you could say I made a claim: God did not build a factory on the sea floor. How do I know he didn’t? My biological intuition. That’s why saying he could have was a joke. I guess @Timothy_Horton didn’t get it.