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Well that's your problem. You refuse to believe in what you do no understand. Many things that was considered magic in the past have since been explained by science. The idea that the Israelites were provided manna in the desert was considered "magic" by many and therefor impossible. Yet studies have shown that the sap from the tamarisk tree easily fits the description of manna and provides a likely explanation. Many of the plagues of Egypt can be explained by natural occurrences. Even the parting of the Red Sea can be explained by a tsunami. That tsunami could have been caused by an volcano that erupting nearby, at the same time and could have caused many of the plagues. These are scientific explanations for what many have perceived as miracles, or "magic" as you put it. Was it a volcano and tsunami? I can't tell you. But I can guarantee that there is science behind what you call "magic".

Well known scientists like Einstein once claimed that the universe was static and could not have had a beginning. In the name of religion, a priest by the name of Georges Lemaitre worked with recent scientific discoveries to prove that the universe did indeed have a creation. Was the Big Bang "magic"? Two hundred years ago, some would have said the exact same thing you did. The one thing that Georges Lemaitre realized is that God works within the laws of the universe that He created. These universal constants are narrow enough that even the slightest variation of any of them would cause the universe not to exist at all. Is it magic? Read this page and others like for examples of how respected scientists and mathematicians are looking for rational explanations to what you might consider "magic". You don't have to believe it, but you should approach it with an open mind and admit that there is some science behind be belief.

Just because you don't understand something, doesn't mean that it's "magic" and can not exist. On the flip-side, "God did it" is not a valid explanation for things I don't understand. Galileo said it best:

"the laws of nature are written by the hand of God in the language of mathematics". --Galileo

God works within His own laws.

No, you're misunderstanding

Nope.

yet again.

Haven't yet.

Dembski does not deny natural selection.

I never said he did.

I've spoked wih Dembski in real life when he came to my campus (and stumped him, to boot), so I doubt you're going to win by mechanically repeating that Dembski and other IDers don't/can't believe in natural selection.

I never once said they cannot believe in natural selection, nor do I believe that. You're the one who is greatly confused.

You have me confused with others who assert ID == creationism. I did not say that, I merely said it is false that ID *excludes* the possibility of creationism.

What I have said -- and what is absolutely true -- is that ID does not exclude a belief in a literal six-day, 24-hour, creation. And unlike you, I actually offered a quote from an Intelligent Design expert backing me up. You illogically and quite falsely said he is not authoritative on the subject, but that Dembski is.

As I had that expert for a professor, not merely meeting him once but getting to know him over a couple of years, I think my appeal to authority fallacy is less fallacious than yours.

But you want to stick with Dembski? Fine. He said: "First off, design is not young earth creationism. This is not to say that there are no young earth creationists who are also design theorists (Paul Nelson and Siegfried Scherer come to mind)."

It's odd that normally I argue against people who say ID == creationism. I agree with you, fully, that this is false. But it is just as false that ID excludes creationism -- even young earth creationism! -- as Dembski readily concedes.

First I would like to point out that ID is falsifiable just as Evolution is falsifiable; as a matter of fact they are opposites of each other, in other words, if you prove one you disprove the other, this has been stated by many atheists.

Quote:
Evolutionist Quote of the Week

"Christianity has fought, still fights, and will fight science to the desperate end over evolution, because evolution destroys utterly and finally the very reason Jesus' earthly life was supposedly made necessary. Destroy Adam and Eve and the original sin, and in the rubble you will find the sorry remains of the son of god. Take away the meaning of his death. If Jesus was not the redeemer that died for our sins, and this is what evolution means, then Christianity is nothing."

- G. Richard Bozarth, The Meaning of Evolution, American Atheist, p. 30, Sept. 20, 1979.

For all of you who have not taken the time to actually delve in to the finer points of irreducibly complex systems here is an article that might help:

Notice the credentials of the author:
Joseph W. Francis
Associate Professor of Biology
Cedarville College, Ohio

http://www.arn.org/docs/odesign/od201/peeringdbb20 1.htm

I believe this man is no different than you or I in that he is in all security doing the best job he can and following the facts as he sees them.

Scientists speak about evolution:

"As by this theory, innumerable transitional forms must have existed. Why do we not find them embedded in the crust of the earth? Why is not all nature in confusion [of halfway species] instead of being, as we see them, well-defined species?"--*Charles Darwin

http://www.pathlights.com/ce_encyclopedia/01-evol1 .htm#top

More information about evolution the atheists don't want you to know:

http://evolution-facts.org/

More links:

http://www.icr.org/
http://www.trueorigin.org/ca_rh_03.asp
http://www.setterfield.org/simplified.html
http://www.origins.org/
http://www.trueorigin.org/

One of my favorites: "The Origin of Language and Communication"
http://www.trueorigin.org/language01.asp

I understand you will dismiss the authority of these scientists because the day they admit they are a Christian they all of a sudden become blabbering idiots. It reminds me of a friend of mine who teaches hand-to-hand combat to the special forces, he upset his teacher and his teacher demoted him from 7th degree black belt to white belt, like all of a sudden his knowledge was sucked out of him by magic, he is still one of the toughest guys I know, LOL.

BTW - Having a formal education in physics, and three engineering disciplines I was very skeptical when I came across this information. The problem was, as a scientist, I was curious and the more I studied the more I realized these other scientists weren't a bunch of crackpots. These scientists felt so strongly about what they had learned they sacrificed their careers in order to pursue alternate scientific postulations of the given data.

Given limited resources, they have driven discoveries in the field of science that the current university system has totally ignored because of the atheistic agenda. This is the very system that puts boundaries on scientific study based on personal beliefs and the ACLUs control by amending our constitution with Thomas Jefferson's unofficial letters to justify their atheistic position.

I think it is a sad state of affairs when an atheistic or

What a joke! Macro-evolution has to be the biggest lie that is being passed around the public as fact. It's not science. It's barely a false hypothesis. - For it to be scientific you must first start with observation. So far no one has observed evolution (one species changing into another). - Second, we must have a hypothesis based on the observeration. Well, we do have a hypothesis. - Third, it must be tested. Hmmm...haven't done this. Haven't even seen evolution yet. - Forth, others must duplicate your findings. Hasn't been done either. I would call evolution more of a faith than fact. I especially would not call it science as it has not even gone through the scientific method. There are multiple areas where evolution can be disproven or strongly argued against. We have the archeology, the fossil record, intelligent design, biology, etc. Just one example with the fossil record. What we have seen in text books it should look like a tree. However in reality we have a bunch of single cell organizisms. Then we have the Cambrian explosion when all other life came to be. Since then we have only had extinctions, no new species. We even have fossil records of humans existing at the same time as dinosaurs at the same time as all other creatures. Hmmm... http://www.origins.org/articles/chien_explosionofl ife.html

So there's no thing as an areligious position in anything?

Nonetheless, we do not expect that creationists should get equal time with Darwinians.

Knowledge is worthless if the right people don't have access to it. Who knows what sorts of inventions and discoveries we've missed out on because the person who could bring them to us lacked a critical element of the formula?

Anyway, it's good to see that science is starting to open up, hopefully with medicine to follow. There's another interesting resource I found, Origins, that has a great deal of scientific articles that may be of interest to people who are persuing that type of field, and no doubt a great deal more that will spring up now that the door has been opened to free scientific knowledge on the Internet.

Certainly not all design work has been religiously
based or motivated, but some of the best editorial
work has been done in a religious milieux:

The proceedings of this
1996 conference cover presentations of work done
from a wide variety of viewpoints. I found it
fascinating.

> (from renound astronomer Hugh Ross)

Hardly "renound".
All he appears to have done is write two fairly routine scientific papers back in 1975 and then become a creationist
.

In many peoples' minds this idea was discredited decades ago.

Yes, and that can be a bit of a problem, because it means that they won't listen to your arguments or even read the link that one provides as a supporting argument. From a simple epistemological perspective, you can be presented with as much evidence for design as you like and still deny that it is actually design, but merely something that has the appearance of design. This is Dawkins to a tee. But hell, even Dawkins tells us that stuff looks designed, and wasn't that what I said originally?

The point of my argument is that I don't believe we will be overtaken by machines because I believe in actual design rather than inevitable onward upward evolution which merely seems like design. In all cases of actual design, there is a lossy effect. You cannot design and build something which has more intelligence than you, because you had to use your intelligence in order to design and build it. Where is the extra intelligence going to come from in order to get a smarter end product?

Clearly Bert Bert forgot to evolve by natural selection.

Natural selection won't work. Let's assume that Bert Bert makes lots of replicas of himself and then picks the best one to take over the job. This will minimise the rate at which the system degrades. In order for actual improvement to take place, there has to be an improvement over the original. In the real world, this improvement is supposed to happen by chance, which seems a bit far-fetched, given that even relatively trivial things can't happen by chance. Without the supposed benefit of random changes, we are back to Bert Bert making a better design under his own steam, and if he can do that (I say that he can't, but if he could) then he doesn't need natural selection.

A stone axe cuts better than my hand does.

And so on. Yes, pretty much any example of a tool, right down to Ugg the Caveman walloping someone with a club-shaped lump of wood, disproves my theory if your assertion is relevant. Fortunately, it itsn't.

Even the earliest computers could perform mathematics faster and more reliably than a room full of accountants. That's why they were useful at all. But someone has to tell them what math to perform. And even where they make decisions about what math to perform, someone had to tell it how to make those decisions. And if we get programs to figure out how to make decisions on their own, then someone will have to have told them how to do that. See a pattern forming?

The only threat here is if a lower grade of intellect can be overcompensated by increased speed -- assuming that computers even would be able to out-do us in think-speed were they performing the same abstract mental tasks. It's not like we know enough about our own thought processes to tell how much CPU power they'd need. People tend to make the simplistic assumption that because computers can add numbers billions of times faster than they could, that the speed increase will scale up with the problem of general intelligence. Or maybe people just think that brains are the product of an undirected random process, and we can do better with electronics -- ironic, given that it's that very same randomly-evolved brain which thinks it can do better.

Like I say, if we face a threat from technology, it will probably be because we invent something lethal to ourselves or wreck the environment or stuff the gene pool or blow ourselves up. It will not be from producing the next step in evolution. That stuff is good for science fiction writing based on a theme of hubris, but it is not realistic.

But I don't subscribe to this view. Go ahead and call me names if you like, but at its most fundamental level, life looks designed. And this is a view that fits in well with normal experience: when you create something, then it is necessarily a subset of your total ability. If I were able to create a computer which was smarter than I, then presumably it would also be able to create a machine that was smarter than it, and so on. Where is all this additional information coming from? Out of thin air, apparently. I can't help but feel that this notion belongs in the same category as perpetual motion or pulling oneself up by the bootstraps.

Did you ever see the game The Neverhood? There's a huge wall of text in that game which is a sort of parody of the biblical style of narrative. Some of it is very funny, and some of it is just bizarre. If I recall correctly, the story of Bert Bert is relevant to this discussion. You see, Bert Bert was created by Quater in his own image, which means that Bert Bert also thought he was effectively Quater, and so Bert Bert created Bert Bert in his own image, and so on. The regress was not infinite, however. Like an accumulation of genetic errors, or noise in analog duplication, each successive Bert Bert was less of an image of Quater. After a few generations, the name was no longer Bert Bert but itself started to mutate and drift in an interesting variety of ways. Eventually, there was an end to the regress, as the final Bert Bert (whatever his name was) found himself unable to create a living replica of himself.

In short, if we are really clever, we may be able to create something that approximates ourselves fairly closely. I think that the act of creating something essentially proves the creator to be greater than the creation. If we are going to wipe ourselves out with technology, it won't be because it out-evolved us.

The Famous Brett Watson

therefore, even if Darwin's theory of the origin of species is eventually disproved or superceded, any creationist theory dependent on this timeline would still be wrong.

Thank you. You are right in this point. I do add, however, that refuting _a_ creationist timeline does not prove evolution.

Michael Behe and Philip Johnson have some interesting scientific critiques of evolution.

In the spirit of open-mindedness, may I present

Molecular Machines and Irreducible Complexity,

Philip Johnson, and

Access Research Network.

I can only vouch for the writing of Philip Johnson and Michael Behe, and must warn you that there is "young-earth snake oil" to be avoided, but probably not at these sites.