oLiver: Seeing as you’ve asked the same question at least three or four times in my absence, I’ll answer it for you!

I believe the earth is billions of years old as this seems the most reasonable belief given the strong scientific evidence for it. However, I must add that I’m still very skeptical of the certainty with which scientists claim to know the exact ages of both the universe and the earth.

Why should we take Genesis above others? Its philosophical statements make more sense and/or are corroborated by evidence: The human condition, one God, and beginning to the Universe being three of the main statements.

AJ: Why bother with the semantical games? Most modern day ID proponents more or less believe in the evolutionary story of history. Yet, by confusing it with a term associated with young earth belief (creationism) you don’t help discussions at all.
The rest of your post seems to lean on the foundations of these confused definitions, so unfortunately I can’t really reply as I’m not 100% sure what you’re actually arguing. If you’re arguing that young earth creationism is bankrupt, I completely agree.
In terms of my own beliefs, I don’t believe things are as clear cut as you claim. There is most certainly strong evidence for evolution, but there is definitely some things which can be taken as evidence for ID. I’d suggest you consult John Lennox, Steven Meyer, etc. Personally I lean towards full scale acceptance of evolution, but it isn’t that much of a big question to me- I actually wish it was discussed less as my opinion is that people on both side of the God arguments make far too much of it sometimes. Some Christians put too much emphasis on God’s direct intervention and primary causation, and some Atheist types seem to think evolution is the answer to almost every question anyone ever asked, and they can take it to the point of absurdity sometimes. Any explanation will do- so long as it includes evolution!

[Part 2}
And no one on either side ever makes convincing arguments (to me, anyway) about why the truth of evolution would cancel out God or make him extremely unlikely.

Regarding scientific evidence, I can’t share your philosophies here as they make little sense to me. To see how little sense they make, do a little thought experiment. For the sake of argument, imagine there is a being who brought the universe into existence and is responsible for the natural laws we observe through science. That is, you’re imagining deism. Now, could such a God be detected by scientific research? Clearly not. In fact it was scientists and rationalists in the 18th and 19th century who actually came up with the concept.

Now, is such view of a God all that different from the God of theism? Yes and no. Yes if you swallow arguments against miracles. I find them weak. There’s no reason why, if God created the universe, he couldn’t step in and act within the world he created. And again, would such a God be detectable by Science? No, clearly not.

You claim that “anything that manifests in reality is measureable, demonstrable and verifiable” and is thus explainable and measurable by Science (implied by your positive response to my previous question). But this view is absurd. Why? Well there’s one thing that everyone agrees exists. Some claim that they are the only beings that exist (solipsism), others create thought experiments to help us ponder whether an evil demon is responsible for our world (Descartes). Most claim that we live in a universe, some claim we live in a multiverse. But there is something we ALL agree on: SOMETHING EXISTS. But this something cannot be measured or explained by science. Science does a fantastic job at explaining how the elements of the natural world work together, but it cannot explain why there is a world to begin with, much less why this world should have observable natural laws and appear so ordered and so finely tuned for life like us.

(part 3)

To argue that science must be able to measure ANYTHING, as you have, is clearly allocating a privilege and status to science which extends far beyond it’s actual scope.

Science doesn’t tell us that there is or isn’t a reason for existence and the universe- it can’t, it simply remains silent. However, in the interests of intellectual honesty, we all must admit that science itself is based on presuppositions that it itself cannot justify, and that there are certain questions which science simply cannot answer because they are outside it’s scope.

As Edward Feser says here (http://www.thepublicdiscourse.com/2010/03/1174) “For scientific inquiry itself rests on a number of philosophical assumptions: that there is an objective world external to the minds of scientists; that this world is governed by causal regularities; that the human intellect can uncover and accurately describe these regularities; and so forth. Since science presupposes these things, it cannot attempt to justify them without arguing in a circle.”
In fact, science itself must be taken on faith, as the legendary atheist physicist Paul Davies explains in this article (http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/24/opinion/24davies.html).

The Existence of God is fundamentally a philosophical and theological question to be pondered. It is shallow to suggest that God, if he did exist, would reveal himself from within a test tube. After all, would Hamlet be able to detect Shakespeare if he went looking in his attic? No, for Shakespeare was the reason for the story and the creator of the story, but not a physical part of the story itself. This is what I, and many philosophers and theologians, hold God to be: The ultimate playwright. The Grand storyteller. The Divine Mind behind the universe. In that context, I hope you can see why I believe that objections about God not being detected by science simply miss the point, and are extremely impotent.

Actually Dan, while some of those looking on don't believe that ID is dead, it is for the scientific community. The broader social community however, believe otherwise, which is why you occasionally see it twitch when they try and run a few volts through it when it suits their purposes. It's these attempts to convince the kids that it's alive and well that upsets most scientists and scientifically minded indivuals, because they really do believe in quality education and relegating obsolete hypotheses to the dustbin of history. We don't see caloric theory being resurrected do we? This is probably because it doesn't threaten a religious view of the world. But I'm sure that many would get very upset if it was to be presented as valid alongside modern theories.

ID has serious flaws that won't allow it to be resurrected, Zimmerman deals with the "argument from perfection" angle, but this isn't the most serious, as evidenced by the comeback "but the Designer could have designed us imperfect". You may not fully understand this, but the most serious flaw is actually the argument from chance. Dembski's work on "specified complexity" is predicated on events or phenomena that have less than 1 in 10 to the power of 150 chance of occuring randomly. Unfortunately he uses Gaussian probability to calculate the probability of a specific thing (eg. protein sequence) occurring by chance. This type of probability calculation relies on all the events in a string of events being fully independent of each other. Unfortunately that is not the way biochemistry works, biochemical reactions are not independent of each other.

For an example of how this sort of probability works, if I were to toss a coin 100 times in a row, and each toss is truly independent, the chances of all of them coming up heads are 0.5^100 or less than 1 in 10^30. If I were to try it, it would take a loooooong time (perhaps millions of years), if it were ever to happen at all.

cont'd

If however, a 'heads' result was to slightly improve the chances of the next toss coming up heads, say a 0.1% or so increased chance, then it would be much more likely to occur. In fact, an additional 0.1% chance over 100 coin tosses makes it better than 1000 times more likely, a 0.2% better chance makes it several million times more likely.

Evolution works just like this through natural selection, winners are more likely to produce winners. Selection happens at a lot of places, not just at the level of the external environment, deleterious mutations are often don't survive the gamete stage.

Also, Dembski ignores the fact that just about every species has a different enzyme sequence for nearly all enzymes, that do the same job in each organism, which means that there is very likely millions of combinations of amino acids that can do a specific job.

Which brings us to another problem with ID: Behe's "irreducible complexity". Every example of "irreducible complexity" that Behe has come up with has been shown to be reducible, and that homologs of the genes/ proteins involved are readily identifiable in other species, even though they don't have exactly the same sequences, they do the same jobs or related jobs, sometimes even different jobs while retaining the same or similar structure. This is entirely consistent with and supportive of evolutionary theory. That someone can mutate a part of a gene and have the system it forms a part of not work within a specific context actually doesn't tell us much about either evolution or ID, except perhaps which mutations are unlikely to be retained under specific conditions.

Anyway, that's my problem with ID, the probabilities are wrong. Without recognising the problem they have calculating the probabilities of particular strings of biochemical reactions, the Discovery Institute will be struggling to get ID's heart started, let alone have it stand up in court. I don't think I'll get into much discussion on this one, unless it's to clarify a point perhaps, because the theory of evolution is under no threat from these guys.

Rhian,
Thanks for your summation on the flood.

And I hope you can see my simple point. It is possible to investigate and evaluate evidence concerning a proposition, despite it relating to a Biblical event. The conclusion we might come to after viewing the evidence might be different (we’ll leave that for another day), but the point is that it is possible to investigate and evaluate the evidence.

Certain atheist leaning people want to have it both ways. They want to say that any proposition involving God can’t be scientifically evaluated, and then they say it has been evaluated and shown to be false. Well, it has to be one or the other.

In your post of last Wednesday (19/5) you’ve dismissed ID as unscientific, but I don’t see why. Scientists already employ tests to examine intelligence. For example, archeologists dig up a pot and find scratches or markings on the side, and then examine the markings to decide if they were deliberate markings of an intelligent agent (perhaps writing or art) or natural erosion.

Can’t this be analogous to ID?