To Juan's earlier post... Just getting back around to this...
If there is a designer, it is a fairly incompetent one: http://www.seedmagazine.com/news/2005/11/the_other_id.php The article points to a guy who came up with "incompetent design". A lot of the characteristics of our bodies actually indicate either that we evolved from simpler animals or that our designer didn't really know much about design.
Given the fact that I view human beings as creation as opposed to an accidental occurrence, I consider it the height of human arrogance for the creation to look at themselves and think "Gee, I think the creator made a mistake in making me this way". Humans cannot begin to create, on their own, the simplest biological lifeform, not to mention a multicellular organism, not to mention the human organism. We have no idea what that 'spark' of animation is that makes the difference between something alive and something inanimate. We are far from understanding how it all works, and are pathetically inept at understanding the most complex organ known, the human brain. Criticizing as inferior, an act or work or object that one cannot possibly duplicate themselves is sheer... I just don't want to be insulting.
An interesting scripture. Romans 9:20,21. "O man, who, then, really are you to be answering back to God? Shall the thing molded say to him that molded it, "Why did you make me this way?"
The fact that we share common design traits with other organisms on the planet should not be surprising, nor is it proof of evolution. A designer, or maker, would obviously reuse parts of earlier designs in newer ones. That is totally logical and to be expected of any designer.
The complexity of the universe and its systems are actually intuitively right to anyone who has had any exposure to complex systems and evolutionary theory.
Maybe you're a little to close to the subject. Is elegant the same as intuitively right? Have you ever created an elegant program? Assuming so, you probably realize that elegance was the product of your own intelligence. It was learned experience which likely culminated in something elegant. While we're at it, what is intuition and where does it come from?
I once wrote a simple program that evolved tree-like structures. After only a few generations and little computational time (think a few hours on an old Pentium 700Mhz) I was getting incredible complexity. The "genomes" produced had strange pieces of code that made structures in a very non-trivial way. This isn't the basis of my acceptance of evolution as a good enough theory to explain some things about living things, but it really made for good illustration of what a complex system can do.
Was it intutively right or did it need some debugging? It goes without saying that 1) it is far less complex than the electro-chemical operation of even a single cell organism, and 2) that the program did not create itself. There was your own intelligence behind it.
I'm not intending to perpetuate this OT thread much more than this but I felt the desire to respond.
Respectfully, Tom C.
