“I made some shit up based on a creationist video I didn’t understand” is closer to the mark my friend
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You’re a blinkered indoctrinated closed minded religious apologist, who has zero interest in subjecting his religious beliefs to any kind of critical scrutiny. Also I suspect you’re simply parroting a very poor argument you’ve learned, but clearly don’t fully understand.
Have you not seen Ray Comfort peel a banana? 
Ding ding ding ding, and we have a winner… 
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Ohhhh poor baby. Is that your excuse for not being able to back up your arguments with admissible evidence? 
And since sourcecodewizard (SCW) is no longer with us, it might be a good time to summarize.
Intelligent Design is a phrase that was invented to get around the prohibition the US court system put on allowing Creationism to be taught as science in public schools. One judge even commented the Intelligent Design is the same as Creationism.
SCW asserted in another thread that it was obvious that the universe was designed, but offered no evidence to back that up. Further, he asserted that anyone who thought the universe wasn’t designed was brainwashed, but offered nothing to back that up either.
In this thread, he said he was going to prove mathematically that the universe most likely existed being guided by intelligent design - then proceeded to offer a lot of words that weren’t very mathematical, nor precluded that universe not being so guided.
Overall a pretty poor showing. So I have to wonder what was his point in posting here. Was it to try to refine his arguments? Was it to see his words published? He certainly didn’t do a good job of convincing the populace here. What he did do is add further evidence that there isn’t any evidence to support such assertions.
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Maybe he was trying to save our souls?
I run into a lot of people like this at school. They set up folding tables with religious literature, and use bullhorns to try to get converts.
I get upset with this stuff when people believe that I shouldn’t be a nurse because of my lack of religious devotion. A nurse who isn’t religious is–evidentally–not to be trusted. I have gone on job interviews, and the hiring managers try to sneak in innocent-seeming questions to evaluate my religious beliefs.
The reasons–as far as I can tell–are as follows:
- People need to be on the same sheet of music, because a maverick spoils the teamwork.
- Morality and ethics are vital in healthcare, and how can someone be moral if they don’t believe in God?
- Atheists cannot be trusted.
- God’s existence is a matter of common sense, so how can I hire someone as a nurse if they have no common sense?
And so on.
The guy in this thread reminded me of all the religious assholes that I have to deal with every day at school.
well well well, that is a sensitive topic. As atheist I do not have problems with people of different religions as long as they do not try to “convince” me (AKA proselitism).
Conversely, I would have problem with a believer doctor or nurse, if they are “excessive” believers. If I arrive in hospital with such severe condition that if I survive I will be like a vegetable in bed, I would prefer a doctor that “discretely” let me die.
I pity you for suffering such questions in job interview
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I have a slightly different take on this. I think there is a fear about people who think differently, who act differently, who believe different things, etc. For some folks, that fear is strong - and most religious people fall into that category.
What they want is for everyone to be like they are - something familiar. People who are different are not to be trusted. .So they try to either get people to behave like they do, or exclude them.
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That is in the human nature, it is always “we VS them” in a way or another (sometime even atheist behave like this, not wanting to bond with religious people)
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I can, if they keep their religion in the closet around me.
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He was trolling, or my name isn’t Huckleberry Finn.
Wow, please accept my sympathies, not sure I could cope with people as stridently arrogant as @sourcecodewizzard, in the flesh - so to speak, let alone regularly.
That’s a reasonable response to such ignorance and bigotry, I’d say. Kudos to you for pursuing your education anyway, well done.
Ah the old witch hunting spirit still going strong on the 21st century, lets label people who express such ignorance and bigotry as the cunts they are, while we can do it with impunity. 
I have been luckily spared such people on the whole, but you doubly have my sympathies and respect, if you have to deal regularly with that level of ignorant bigots.
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Thank you for the validation.
There have been reasonable people at school as well . . . I sometimes have the tendancy to get pissed off when I have to deal with the religious idiots.
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In other words, the very definition of arrogant and ignorant.
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I can accept that you believe this to be true but to state it as fact is just Utter nonsense.
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As a former design engineer, there are always choices to be made during the design process. Rather than trying to prove that there can be large odds of certain things happening, a better way to prove design would be to find alternative ways of doing things and explaining why those alternatives are worse.
But there are examples of things that ARE worse: Human eyes are not are good as the eyes of cephalopods. A giraffe’s laryngeal nerve goes a roundabout way through the neck. These things are consistent with evolution, but not consistent with design. Surely an intelligent designer would have done those things differently.
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But not all religious are like that.
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Hi! The Raelian message is a intelligent design book.
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Lots of pictures and speech balloons.
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I do not–for a second–buy into Intelligent Design, but the counter-arguments that things like the giraffe’s laryngeal nerve folding back in on itself (and many other biological design flaws) don’t impress me.
It seems just as easy to argue that a “flaw” in one context is an advantage in another situation.
As an example, eyes are generally beneficial for fish, but a fish native to a cave system may have no eyes at all, as eyes consume a lot of resources to grow and form . . . and why spend these resources if you live in a cave? This would be like swimming fins on a camel.
In humans, sickle-cell is an inherited disease that can kill you and/or make your life miserable . . . yet it often provides considerable resistance to malaria.
As another example in humans, Laron Syndrome (a rare inherited disorder) causes dwarfism, bone density issues, and possible intellectual impairment, yet these people are largely resistant to both cancer and diabetes.
In humans, the appendix was considered a vestigal organ that had no functional purpose, and could endanger life if it became infected. As a matter of fact, surgeons–when doing abdominal surgeries for other reasons–often deliberately removed a healthy appendix in passing just to eliminate the possibility of appendicitis in the future.
And now we find that the appendix may be very, very important when it comes to managing a healthy gut biome of beneficial bacteria . . . as it seems that the appendix is a kind of backup reservoir of beneficial bacteria that can “reboot” the bacteria in the intestines if something goes wrong.
I.D. theories are dogshit because there is no evidence for intelligent design, and evolution is–quite probably–the most robust scientific idea that has (to date) ever been tested.
But I don’t consider supposed design flaws to be a valid argument, unless I’m missing a point.
If I’m talking out of my ass, please call me on it (and I’m not being sarcastic).
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When I consider your points in this post, I wonder if the idea of the “Uncanny Valley” is relevant.
The uncanny valley seems to have been predicted by Isaac Asimov in his early science fiction in the 1940’s when he explored a supposed “Frankenstein Complex” that is associated with anthropomorphic robots. The uncanny valley is the idea (which I am oversimplifying for the sake of brevity) that robots which are completely nonhuman in appearence are fine, but robots which are “almost” human in appearence invoke fear and/or disgust.
I believe that this uncanny valley is relevant to issues as diverse as school bullying, religious bigotry, anti-LGBTQ politics, and workplace discrimination, as it seems that being slightly different is a trigger for exclusion.
There are different ideas about why the uncanny valley exists. One suggestion is that a tribe of hunter-gathers would want to exclude someone who had different features (with Down Syndrome being a specific example), as this would protect future children from having genetic abnormalities.
Another idea is that someone who is behaving differently may have an illness.
Even today, we often tell children to avoid wild animals that appear friendly, as these animals may be diseased . . . with rabies (also called hydrophobia) being a specific example.
Yet another reason for this uncanny valley is that people who are different may be from another tribe, and trying to outcompete “us” for food, territory, and/or water access.
I have a professional interest in the uncanny valley, as a nurse is supposed to be a patient advocate, and is expected to fight for a patient’s interests . . . even if the patient is “different” in some way.
Please see below:
I also have an interest in the uncanny valley because something like 84% of all autistic people are unemployed or under-employed simply for being different, and I think that the uncanny valley is relevant in any discussion of autism.
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I’m not quite sure if I misunderstand you or not, and/or misunderstand your intention. If I do, apologies. If not, consider this a general reply on the topic.
Consider this: The proponents of creationism, a.k.a. ID, are deeply religious(*), and they believe in a creator god that is omnipresent, omniscient, and omnipotent(§). Their belief in bronze-age creator god myths concerning a perfect god that creates perfect creatures in a perfect environment is fundamentally incompatible with the observed flaws in nature and all the common threads between species. If the species were created or developed independently, from independent origins, why would all mammals have basically the same body plan, even the same body plan as lobe-finned fish?
I think you’ll have to explain this, as I don’t understand how one can consider the convoluted path of the laryngeal nerve to NOT be evidence for a common origin. It is basic topology. The laryngeal nerve and the aortic arch are intertwined in such a way that one cannot move without also moving or deforming the other. Consider an analogy - two interlocking hula hoops or doughnuts:
Here, you provably (mathematically) cannot move one of the doughnuts away from the other without the other one following, or deforming. And you can never separate them without breaking open one or the other, which would be disastrous if you open the aorta, and would be quite tricky if you had to open the nerve and then later reconnect it(#). Thus, the fact that we do have these interlocking circles/loops in the bodies of both the giraffe and in tiny mammals is very strong evidence that the aminals with this configuration somehow have a common origin. The creationist idea that it would be easier for a creator god to do this independently in lots of different species is quite frankly ridiculous. With that argument, they are giving up the omipotence and omniscience of their creator god, and admits that he/she/it has absolutely no creativity as far as body plans go, even in ridiculous cases like the laryngeal nerve.
The solution is as easy as it is obvious - the ancestors of the relevant fish had eyes that worked as intended, in an environment where eyes were useful, before they ended up in caves. After they were trapped in dark caves, their DNA still had the genetic coding for eyes, so they obviously formed - the fish could not choose to not have eyes. But now they don’t have any more practical use for the eyes, so there is no selection pressure to maintain their functionality. Thus, they still form, but there is nothing to prevent the individual parts of the eye to evolve/devolve into non-functioning or useless body parts, as the selection pressure is gone. In other words, non-functioning eyes in cave-dwelling fish is not an argument against evolution. Quite the contrary.
(*) I have never met or seen or heard of a creationist/ID-er that is atheist or otherwise consider themselves non-religious
(§) I’m talking here about creationists of the Abrahamitic kind, with jewish, christian, or muslim background. There are of course other creation myths alive today, like native American or native Australian (and probably also diverse Asian and African ones, but I know next to nothing about them), but they don’t count in this context, as they do their own thing and are not trying to push anti-scientific bullshit on the rest of society.
(#) One could of course consider a scenario where the nerve started to grow around the aorta, with branches on either side that later migrate to the other side, but that would be quite a stretch, literally speaking. It would require another toplogical hole in the nerve to form, with one branch forming and another one later degenerating. It is much, much easier to just distort and elongate the nerve to follow the aorta.
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