To GreenEarth, post #54:
One: In the example with the rubber bands, it does not prove that order can come from disorder. It just proves that through the laws of friction, random rubber bands can get tangled up into a wad, not a ball. Actually, this wad of rubber bands is disorder, not order, because before they were separate items with different shapes, colors, and sizes with their own respective orders (such as mass and what have you) and now they have become mixed up into a convoluted mess. Also, they did not become a "rubber band" atom either. They were laying on top of each other, not forming into a single rubber band. And of course they weren't "designed" to do this because rubber bands are easier and more practical to use when not wadded up. There can be unknown "uses" of a device that were previously undiscovered, such as the accidental discovery of using a magnetron to melt chocolate, which was later to be invented into a microwave. However, that does not mean there wasn't a designer who made the rubber bands in the first place. Rubber bands didn't make themselves; man used the materials around him to invent the devices.
Also, later in that article, the writer says that "Intelligent Design has no scientific credibility whatsoever" and that "there's not the slightest evidence for it, and it is untestable and unfalsifiable." OK, first, this reference you cited obviously is coming from a biased standpoint so it's difficult to trust anything they say. And secondly, "untestable and unfalsifiable"? Just because it can't be proven in a lab makes it false? Yet the writer contradicts himself by saying it's impossible to prove it's false, when he says with absolute certainty (as evident in the rest of the article as well) Intelligent Design couldn't possible be true.
One more thing: why does he say that Intelligent Design, "as a philosophical notion [it] doesn't attract interest amongst philosophers either." What? What about the billions of people who have believed in some form of Intelligent Design throughout the past few thousand years (in almost any religion)? He also says "as a philosophical notion, it is completely empty of content". Again, this make no sense at all. If there is no God, there is no absolute purpose to life, unless you call surviving a purpose (which it is not, it's nature). If there IS a God, then everything has a purpose, and a meaningful one at that, because an Intelligent Designer would not create something that lacked the values of Himself. What He created and what He was would be represented in what He makes, just like what a painter paints is a representation of who he is.
Two: The will to survive is not freewill as animals have. Freewill is "the power of acting without the constraint of necessity or fate; the ability to act at one's own discretion." Survival is a constraint of necessity or fate, so an animal's will to survive cannot be freewill. Freewill is to make decisions out of choice, not force. Like in morals, for example. You can choose to do wrong or you can choose to do right. No one can force you to do either. It's your choice on how you act. It's your choice on what you do with our life. Why? Because humans alone have been given the concept of freewill.
Three: Having the same values is not the same thing as acting on those same values. You can tell me not to steal a cookie from the cookie jar, but that doesn't mean I will obey you (figuratively speaking, haha). When people kill each other, and when people do not treat others as equals, they are both suppressing those core values in their hearts and choosing not to follow them. This brings us back to freewill. We have the choice to follow these basic moral laws, but that doesn't mean because of that freedom that these morals laws don't exist.
Four: The big bang theory and the theory of evolution still have a major flaw: they go on the premise that, with enough time, anything can happen. Yet tell me: if you break a glass bottle on the floor, will it, with enough time, evolve and rebuild the fragments into a glass bottle again? Of course not. That's absurd. Why then is it so easy for many to believe that man, the most complex creature on the planet, could have evolved over time into the creature it is now as well? (Also a note, I don't believe in macro evolution, but I DO believe in microevolution. I accept the notion that there could have been a single breed of dog created at the beginning of time; and, within it, containing all the possibilities of genetics, could have "evolved" into other breeds of dogs. However, that is not even remotely similar to a dog evolving into a completely different species. Variations within species are possible, however.
