Re: Neither Intelligent nor Designed

Actually you don’t hold all sciences to your same rigorous standard.   After reading you post I understand why.  You seem to have a simplistic, surface understanding of chemistry and physics.   A deeper investigation would reveal those things that you think separate physics and chemistry from biology, do not exist.

Like your example of chemistry, evolution is also a model based on observation that does an excellent job of predicting the behavior of life.   Your claim that “we have a model, based on observation, which does an excellent job of predicting chemical behavior” also applies to evolution.  Within the Theory of Evolution you can find the predictions to fossils, intermediate species, the order of fossils in the sediment, phylogenetic relationships, mutations of DNA, anti-biotic resistance, conserved regions, base pair alignment and much more.  All of which have been confirmed.  Not only does it do an excellent job to explain the things that we see, it explains the things that we didn’t even know about.

Newtonian physics are crude approximations, so you should reject them.  The corrections of Einstein improved upon Newton, yet still remain approximations, you should reject them.   VSPER Theory is cannot explain all aspect of chemistry, you should rejected.  Bonding Theory you should reject.  Atomic Theory you should reject.  If you truly knew about science then you would reject all of science for the same reason.  It is why Feyman quipped “If you thought that science was certain — well, that is just an error on your part.”, and “Gould wrote “In science, 'fact' can only mean 'confirmed to such a degree that it would be perverse to withhold provisional assent.' I suppose that apples might start to rise tomorrow, but the possibility does not merit equal time in physics classrooms.”

You write “In chemistry, what we have a lot of observation” just like in evolution.  In evolution patterns are found and described.  The patterns give way to predictions (mentioned above) which have been confirmed.  Though you are wrong in thinking that chemistry is about regurgitating observations, this is a laughable, high-schooler’s view of science.  This is the grade 9 science you may know, it is not how real science is done.

Even your example of Newtonian physics is incorrect.  No one had observed Shoemaker-Levy 9 crash into Jupiter until it happened.  Like the way evolution predicted sediment and fossil order, physicists predicted the trajectory.  It is more than just describing what we have seen.  It that all that science was it would be useless.  Yet you demand that all forms of life be cataloged, described, and observed to evolve before evolution can be accepted?  Why don’t you demand that all possible gravitational interactions be measured and observed as well? 

I won’t even go into you hideous misunderstanding of theoretical physics and your false accusations of circularity.

You are quite wrong if you think that cells were unknown at the time of Darwin.  Robert Hooke discovered cells 200 years prior to Darwin and by Darwin’s time the Cell Theory had been around for around 20 years.

What is so remarkable about Evolution is that it is equally applicable to animals as it is to cells and they respond to the same forces as any other life form.

The deeper you delve into chemistry the more it becomes like physics and similarly a deep understanding of biology requires a vast knowledge of chemistry.   Physicists like to tell their chemist and biologist co-workers that it is all physics; mathematicians call physicists sloppy and imprecise.  In many ways physicists are right, enthalpy, entropy, Gibb’s free energy, van der Waal, Schrodinger, wave functions all subjects of chemistry which require an understanding of physics.   Naturally physics requires mathematics and for the most part people are mathematically illiterate.  This, I think, is part of the problem.

By the time Darwin proposed his ideas, there was already plenty of evidence from geology, fossils, and his own observations with living animals to suggest gradual change over time.  So he did observe evolution, he saw it in the fossil evidence.  From this he made his predictions which basically proven true so far.  Just like any science.  Observation then predictions and experimentation.   All three to this day confirm evolution, all current observations, the predictions still hold true and current experiments confirm evolution.  He didn’t have to observe every single episode of life any more than Newtown or Einstein had to check their ideas on every atom in the universe.  You are arguing two points but presenting them as one, just because you have questions about the origin of life it does not change the facts of evolution.  The gradual change of species is not dependent on knowing how life arose.

Like many people, you are confusing two distinct subjects; abiogenesis and evolution, and you argue them like they were the same issue.  Evolution is a fact, we have seen it happen in the lab with single and multicellular organism and we have seen it in the fossil evidence, we have geological evidence, molecular evidence, genetic evidence.  Abiogenesis, we have not seen in the lab or anywhere else.  What we have seen are various experiments starting with the famous Miller-Urey experiment and continuing with the work of others that have shown at least in theory that certain aspects of life could have arisen by random chance.  While the list of questions regarding your “hows” is important they are not essential for Evolution to be a fact any more than answering “how” a hammer falls is essential for Newtonian physics.  Dozens, Hundreds, Thousands of questions remain to be answered about chemistry and physics and as I said, you don’t take an all-or-nothing approach to those sciences.  It is not the unanswered questions that form the foundation any theory; again you show a misconception about science, it is the answered questions that from the basis for a theory.

Like a forensic scientist visiting the aftermath of an explosion he only caught as it exploded, we don’t have to see the actual event to figure out what happened.  It would be ridiculous to argue that because no one witnessed the actual explosion and they only saw the expanding fireball and aftermath that an explosion did not occur.   This is what you are doing; you are claiming the explosion never happened while you walk around in the aftermath.

I have gone through you various mistakes regarding science and the nature of research.  Your claim about evolution as religion is totally invalid.  It is based on misconceptions, and outright factual mistakes.  You also confuse 2 different issues and argue them as if they were one.

What is ironic is that you also hold some other supernatural views regarding the universe, “energy”, that could not be justified under any circumstances; views that not just lack convincing evidence, but are totally lacking in any evidence.