Re: Neither Intelligent nor Designed

The reason why the retina in the eye is inverted is because it allows the eye to process the vast amount of oxygen required in vertebrates.  It creates a blind spot but that is not a problem because people have two eyes. The design of the eye was optimized so a tradeoff was inevitable in order to create the best overall result.

Corinthian’s reference is worth studying but much of it does not contradict some of my thinking about ID.

Flounders lie flat on the sea floor and in the adult both eyes are on the same side of the head, but when young the eyes are on opposite sides of the head and one moves to the other side! The earlier stage is a clue to an evolutionary path. The result is a wrenched and distorted skull.

It can suggest flounders evolved from a normal looking fish. I can assume this using only my evolutionary frame of mind. Perhaps young flounders are optimally designed to survive in their ecosystems. Perhaps young flounders use their eyes so they can train their skin (which I think has the ability to change its color) for purposes of camouflage. Adult flouders can't look at the sand. I don't know. I like flounders.  I think they are a unique design and they are one of the many things that keep the natural world from being boring.  Should we not have flounders if there was in intelligent designer?

Penguins possess hollow bones although they do not have the same need for minimal body weight as flying birds. 
 

Does it hurt?   Everyone who saw the movie "March of the Penguins" knows they have to travel long distances and solid bones would probably contibute to keeping them weighted down.

Why should moles, bats, whales, dogs, and humans among others possess forelimbs based on the same bones that have been adapted in each case unless inherited from a common ancestor?

Perhaps this is design is based on expressions of the same gene.  A designer might decide to use common genes to create different features between different animals. Are they saying that the wings of bats or flippers on whales are not optimally designed?

For the beta chain of hemoglobin, the number of amino acid differences compared to that in normal adult humans of 146 amino acids appears in parentheses after the listed animal: gorilla (1), gibbon (2), rhesus monkey (8), dog (15), horse and cow (25), mouse (27), chicken (45), frog (67), and lamprey (125) (Campbell 1987). Clearly, species more closely related to man have fewer differences from humans in their hemoglobin.

I wouldn’t think you would need to be an evolutionist to think something like that would be true.

Unlike most other snakes, boa constrictors possess small vestigial hind legs. Crabs possess small useless tails under their broad, flat bodies, remnants of some ancestral form.

If you take Genesis literally, God said to the snake, "You will crawl on your belly.".  This tells me the snake had legs.  Fossils snakes that had legs may not have existed 10,000 years ago but it is just something to think about.  So I could say the creator made something that appeared to be evolution happen very quickly.

Destructive Mutations

Is it any more than an overweening human ego that proposes intelligent design for such a poorly designed creature? In this egoism, creationists confirm in a perverse way that they have great difficulty rising above their animal origins. It is by reducing influence of ego that the nobler aspects of human nature emerge in humanistic values, values which have been appropriated by some religions.

Are we blaming our behavior on genes again? I thought the human genome project disproved that belief.

I also ask questions like, “Why does our matter universe have to be perfect with everything designed perfectly for there to be an intelligent designer?” “Even if the Earth was designed perfectly does that mean everything on it will stay perfect?” “Why does God have to keep everything on the Earth perfect if this is not God’s home in the first place?”

The term “vaya'as” probably meant that God created some animals using other animals. Is this why there are gaps in the fossil record? The term “vaya'as” means creating something from something else such as a table from wood.  "Vayivra" could mean to create something fundamentally new.  Both terms were used in the first chapter of Genesis. These descriptions have been lost in modern Bibles and this was probably due to inexact translations.

I am not an expert on this subject.  Just think how much better an expert on ID might have debated this information. 
 

Hosea 4:6 "My people perish for their lack of knowledge."  I guess they determined that mutations would be the total fault of a creator.  I guess they have determined it has nothing to do with the four causes of disease that are listed in Kevin Trudeau's books.