Big al- Thanks for the support, but understand broad evolutionary theory can explain a single population splitting into two such as apes splitting into humans and apes. However, don’t listen to people who say that our common ancestor (if evolution was true) was not an ape. It would have been classified as a lower ape.

Deuc –You misunderstand. I have no interest in going over old posts every time you make unsupported assertions. I doubt any other readers here do either. Even if you had one post addressing the idea of irreducible complexity, that does not address the other claims you made. In fact, looking over your post, your understanding of IC is badly skewed and as it has not been shown that IC systems can arise by evolution (this is just assumed by people like you) then the logical induction to make is that of intelligent design.

Your ideas of what constitute ‘basic facts’ is nonsense. Notice how simple observation supports both your examples. No hypothesis is required to support them. So you make a category mistake by claiming this is analogous to your ‘facts’. The poll above indicates 53% of americans disagree outright with your ‘basic facts’. Your facts are merely attempts to bluster and bully without providing a real argument. Keep repeating them. The public is noticing just how shaky the claims are because people (like you) do not make arguments to support their claims. You’re doing ID and creation science a favour every time you don’t make an argument.

Lets look at one of your basic facts to speed the process of noticing how empty your claims are
“There is evidence that things spontaneously come into existence.”
David Hume said “I never asserted so absurd a proposition as that anything might arise without a cause”. Your basic fact is a logical absurdity, worse than magic, and would mean our universe is chaotic and irrational, and science would be impossible.

Alchemist: It sounds suspiciously like you want to impose on me your ideology about everyone having a right to believe what they want? You mentioned hypocrisy?

Big Al 30
A common ancestor producing two species is actually a simple concept and not shaky at all.

Consider any species let us call it ML (missing link). It is a relatively successful species and spreads out to cover a large area. Then through environmental change (eg, Ice age) or geological change (eg, continental drift) populations of this species get separated preventing the sharing of genes between populations.

Because of the differing environments faced by these populations, different gene mutations will result in differing successful descendents of ML in each population. Darwin saw examples of this in the Galapagos, where finches on different islands had different shaped/sized beaks which resulted from natural selection driven by the differing environment on the different islands.

The Theory of Evolution predicts that given enough time the differing populations will evolve into different species. So one species can evolve into several differing species given the right conditions and enough time.

Of course my use of a large area in the above example doesn’t have to be that large; two valleys separated by a mountain range will suffice.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_evolution#Natural_selection
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Punctuated_Equilibrium

For an overview of Human Evolution see:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolution_of_Homo_sapiens

jeshua,
said that God and Science can live together in harmony. The best example of this that I know of is the person who first proposed the Big Bang Theory (he didn’t call it this, one of his greatest critics did), the Catholic Priest Georges-Henri Lemaire. He was also an astronomer and an amazing mathematician.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georges_Lema%C3%AEtre
http://www.catholiceducation.org/articles/science/sc0022.html

My opinion is that both can co-exist, just not in the same class room (or this forum by the look of things).

Grey,
Currently a number, lets say 45% (Gallup poll,) of Americans believe in Creationism. Before Darwin it would have been closer to 100%. So the number of people that appear to believe in Creationism has declined. If you go back a couple of thousand years ago close to 100% of the world’s population believed that the world was flat, now how many do?
http://people-press.org/commentary/display.php3?AnalysisID=118
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flat_earth

Ignorance is bliss, scientific understanding takes hard work. Unfortunately people are lazy.

Jaffy, I agree that scientific theory is based on facts. However I disagree that belief in God is not based on facts. The whole Bible is evidence of God's dealing with people. The church is evidence of God's dealing with people. The belief of millions is evidence of personal experience of God's dealing with people. This is personal experiential evidence replicated millions of times and there is no stronger evidence then that. It is not laboratory evidence but experiential evidence. There are other sources of evidence in anthropology, archaeology and other sciences that prove what the Bible has recorded. So the belief is not just a fantasy or a delusion but based on facts. In that sense belief in God can be considered as a science. Science as a discipline just proves what God has created and this is where ID comes in.

grey, thank you, your grouping of the 51% creationism + 33% god/evolution finnaly confirmed what some of us have been saying, that id is nothing but creationism trying on a poorly fitting science coat in an attempt to find some validity.

actually you should be a bit carefull, that 51 percent believe that humans were created in exactly the form we are today according to the biblical version (coinsiding with the 48% who believe the earth is less than 10,000yrs old). this in fact runs in contradiction to the form of id that its advocates are suggesting should be taught in schools, which runs closer the the 'guided evolution', where the designer does the big stuf, like specisisation, and which is delibeatly not specific on the nature or identity of the designer.

so explain how the 51% literal creationists view is consistent with the 33% guided evolution, when one is a cristian creation story and the other is at least pretending to be nondenominational.

actually your hypocracy is begining to get a bit offensive. case in point, you berate another contributer about backing up statements:

"You continue to make authoritative statements about what is a ‘basic point’ without backing it up. You are the one putting forward the claims, so you are required to back them up. If you want to withdraw all your claims as being unsupported that is fine, but until then, the burden of proof is on you. "

while at the same time refusing to quailify your claims about the predictions and achievements of creation science (whatever that is), saying instead that you would 'fail to convince us'. well at least your honest, for none of your arguments have been in the least convincing, or even as i have allready suggested, consistent.

back on topic. boaz, i would agree with your position and am happy for id to be disscussed as a philosophy. my only concern with your position that christian schools teach what they like is that those children could be at a disadvantage in tertiary science education.

"Deuc -You misunderstand. I have no interest in going over old posts every time you make unsupported assertions."
Who's asking you to? I'm not using them to justify my points here, (as I've said I won't bother doing that without good reason) but they are resources that are available to those who wish to know.

You say my understanding of IC is skewed, so tell me why. I stated how evolution can produce (my understanding of) IC, no assumption there. And that would be a deduction, not induction, and it doesn't follow anyway. It is fallacious to say that a (claimed) failure to show one thing implies the contrary unless the thing to be shown would necessarily exist. Furthermore, it would be a false dichotomy to claim it must be evolution or ID. A different process not involving intelligence, or perhaps not involving design, could potentially cause it.

Well hypotheses are supportees, not supporters, but very few of my *points* need or are capable of a hypothesis either, eg. "evolution isn't about how life began". Point is that they are easily known, obvious or elementary, and things that I consider to be prerequisite knowledge for the discussion; and hence not worth examining unless sensibly challenged.

The poll: first, who cares what 53% of whomever thinks? Unless they're biological scientists I wouldn't necessarily expect them to have a basic understanding of evolution, and I certainly wouldn't expect the general population of America to know it. Secondly, that 53% are apparently young-earth creationists, so it's not like many of them will know much about evolution. Finally, there's not a thing on my list that is in direct conflict with "God created human beings in their present form exactly the way the Bible describes it." (The closest is #5 and silly as you may consider it, there are those that accept evolution is well supported and don't think it happened.)

"Lets look at one of your basic facts to speed the process of noticing how empty your claims are"
'bout time.

Wow OMG, David Hume said something, it must be true. Seriously though, it's also silly/fallacious to use a philosopher's response (I could stop here) to those who were mistakenly taking his epistemological examination of causation as an attack on the very idea of causation (IIRC). Point of interest: Hume made many criticisms against the design argument, who created the creator etc. Effect with no cause doesn't rule out science, cause with no effect would. Although even then it would have to happen in a manner that was deleterious before it would mean complete preclusion.

Temporary elementary particles form naturally in pairs all the time, only to annihilate each other shortly afterwards (except maybe for black holes & Hawking radiation). This process has observable repercussions, such as the Casimir effect. I won't claim it is as solid scientific fact, but there *is* evidence. It'd be better for the topic if you dealt with the top half of the list. Next!

And to others: we are apes, just like we still are mammals and vertebrates.