intelligent design or natural selection?

Question

Which explanation best accounts for the wonders of nature, intelligent design or the Theory of Natural Selection?

Answer 1

I believe this earth is a real garden, I mean a real garden planted by God. I've had gardens before, and the joy of gardening is to plant things, make the best possible environment for them, and watch them grow. I've changed the garden as the need arises, and I use tools to do it.

Does that mean that somebody has to decide whether I changed the garden, or the tools changed it?

Is it possible that natural selection is God's way of getting things done? It's not as fast as a motor driven cultivator, but then God has a lot more time to get stuff done in the garden than I do.

Answer 2

Who says Intelligent Design has a problem with Natural Selection? As the Dutch botanist, Hugo de Vries, said, “Natural selection may explain the survival of the fittest, but it cannot explain the arrival of the fittest.” That statement is just as true today.

Natural selection is a logical process that anyone can observe (and it was actually a creationist named Edward Blyth who seems to have first wrote about it in 1835–37, before Darwin). We can look at the great variation in an animal kind and see the results of natural selection. For instance, wolves, coyotes, and dingoes have developed over time as a result of natural selection operating on the information in the genes of the dog kind.

But natural selection can only operate on the information already contained in the genes; it doesn’t produce new information. There are limits. For instance, you can’t breed a dog to the size of an elephant, much less turn it into an elephant.

The different dogs we see today have resulted from a rearrangement or loss of information from the original dog kind; no new information was produced. That is why you can breed wolves to get to chihuahuas, but you can’t breed chihuahuas to get to wolves.

And the thing is, what are they? Dogs. What were they? Dogs. What will they be? Dogs. The same could be said for Darwin’s finches, peppered moths, and so forth. There is a big difference between subspeciation (variation within a kind) and transspeciation (change from one kind to another).

Answer 3

Natural selection.

Intelligent Design is merely an argument that attempts to present the traditional biblical explanation in a more believable form.

Answer 4

The Theory of Evolution is supported by evidence, just like the Theory of Relativity of the Theory of Gravity. Evolution works with mutations and natural selection.

Intelligent design just says that "god did it" and tries (miserably) to deride evolution, offering no alternative but a religion. Evolution is supported by 99% of scientists with many different beliefs, but intelligent design is usually only pushed by evangelical Christians in the United States, most of them ignorant of science. The rest of the educated world knows better.

Answer 5

First biblical creation took 7 days
BUT
Dinosours have existed in fossil record since 230 million years ago, and most died off 65 million years ago.

Homosapien fossil remains, the oldest that exist are 200,000 years ago in africa.

If the god made the world, the animals and mankind in seven days how can dinosaurs have died off 65 million years before mankind was on earth. That is a very long 7 days.

Intelligent design rejects the scientific age of dinosuars, and claims that carbon dating is wrong. How much more of science does intelligent design need to reject to make ID plausible.

Additionally on to Noahs ark. There is not enough water in the world to cause complete flooding. Even if all ice melted, which has happened before, the water level would not even be close to covering the whole earth, while it would raise total earth water level by around 50 feet, anything that is now 50 feet above sea level would still be above water, additionally even factoring in strange tidal activity there is still no way to submerge all land at once under water.

Additionally getting two of each animal is physically impossible, to fit that many animals would require a boat the size of europe. There are over 10,000 bird species in the world. There are at least 2 million types of insects. There are over 5,400 species of mammals. There are over 8,000 species of reptiles.

OH and what about the food? An adult elephant can eat 300 to 600 lbs of food a day, a pair that is 600 to 1200 lbs a day. 600 x 30 days equals 18,000 lbs of food just to feed the elephants. Also need to feed the other millions of animals still.

Then you could say well god suspended the need for food for the animals, well if he did that why didnt he suspend drowning, and just not made noah bring them along.

Part of the problem of christianity is you have to bury your head in the sand to try to ignore what science has proven.

Or instead you could realize the bible was not a factual account of events and was instead not meant to be taken literally, but this would cause all sorts of doctrinal problems, and disturb peoples beliefs.

Answer 6

Isn't Natural Selection intelligent? What they call intelligent design is actually Magic Design.

Answer 7

Neither. I'm an atheist, however, natural selection has a variety of flaws. It would a rather lengthy post for me to argue some of the clear examples where selection and speciation are not correct.

Just quick examples would be mouse populations in Italy and Chicago which show genetic drift and speciation can occur in 70 years, not over thousands and millions of years.

Further, speciation would result in too many species that would be infertile and be unable to sustain any populations. Quick example here, would be the Ligers, the offsprings of Tigers and Lions which are normally sterile and infertile. The same is true of equine species -- producing infertile and sterile donkeys and mules.

Answer 8

Oh dear God I hate intelligent design.

Evolution has countless good examples of it working in the fossil record, in bacterial drug resistance, and even in the human genome. Intelligent design has a political agenda rooted in superstition, no verifiable facts, and a few examples of what it refers to as "irreducible complexity." Somehow a couple random examples of biological functions whose evolution we can't figure out disprove the entire multitude upon multitudes of evidence to the contrary. Though most of the examples have been disproven in one way or another all of them still persist in circles of ignorance where neowitchdoctors say they teach rational thought. Doesn't it make much more sense to assume that those couple examples of irreducible complexity are just examples whose evolution we haven't been able to figure out yet, rather than proof that God intelligently designed the universe? I mean if intelligent design were true, wouldn't irreducible complexity be found in thousands or millions of examples rather than just a handful?

Lots intelligent design propaganda preys upon seemingly logical but ultimately empty reasoning like "Have you ever known a car that didn't have a builder?" "Have you ever seen a painting that didn't have a painter?" Wow! I'm convinced! Because we don't know how the universe was created must therefore mean that your idea of how it was created must be true!

Evolution is a theory based upon a plausible explanation of a set of evidence upon earth. Intelligent design is based upon God-only-knows what, or in other words nothing. Science, by definition has to be theories based upon verifiable facts. To make people teach intelligent design in a science classroom is like asking astronomer to teach astrology or math teachers to teach numerology. It has no basis in reason and spends all its time trying to find and attack the smallest of cracks in the evolution theory rather than covering up its gaping holes. Why do you think it does that?

Answer 9

Maybe there is another choice besides creationists and random evolution believers. The intelligent design could just be a mathematical template.

Here is a commentary on this topic: http://www.a2dvoices.com/realityCheck/commentary/darwin.html

Answer 10

Everything is made by someone and God also known as Krishna, Allah, Jehovah, Vishnu, etc.) is the Supreme Person and Creator of everything. Life comes from life. God created everything and we manipulate all His energies, so we are actually little ity bity co creators. We can make nothing we can only put what He has made together. He is so wonderful. for info on elaborate details on the Creation (the ancient Vedic texts) go to srimadbhagavatam.org/... Its all in there.