Top Ten Scientific Proofs of Creation

Great Debates
322

Let me correct your ignorance. I’ve seen more computer design flaws than you ever will. I’m involved in bringing up new microprocessors and computers, and I also own data on field failures. I wish that we, as experts, could just look at it and see a design flaw.
Design flaws are not big holes in a design. They are statistical - something fails more often than it should, or is slower, or gives the wrong answer. Even when the flaw itself is not statistical, the input required to sensitize the flaw and observe its affects may be quite subtle. Remember, the famous Intel FDIV bug only showed up for a small set of inputs - and would have been no big deal if the comics hadn’t gotten hold of it.
When you find a design flaw late, and don’t have the time or budget to tape out a new version, you work around it - just like our brains worked around the blind spot in our eye.
Breech births are a design flaw. The Heimlich maneuver is a work around for a design flaw. Color blindness is a design flaw.

We know the design flaws in the human body statistically and through deep study. No, there aren’t obvious fatal ones, since they got removed by natural selection, just as design flaws that you will see in a shipped computer are subtle, since the obvious ones get caught during verification.
The human body just what you’d expect from an imperfect design process and an imperfect verification process. Hell, if someone in my company wanted to ramp a processor with as long an errata list as our bodies have, he’d get fired.
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323

Never used Vista, have you? :slight_smile: It just seems better designed because you are lucky enough to have avoided the bugs. When you see them all you wonder how anything works. Not that the stuff is bad, it is just that we don’t see the 99.9% of the cases where everything works perfectly.

324

Wrong again. Your find flaws using a specification of what outputs should result from which inputs and either the actual machine or a model of it. In fact, most of the tests applied to chips in a fab are produced by software which doesn’t have the slightest idea (in the very loosest sense) of what the chip does.
As for finding design flaws, the best approach we’ve found is to throw random instruction sequences at a simulation model of a new chip. When designers do it, they test only those things they thought about, the random testing finds flaws that appear when things happen which they did not anticipate. So, you don’t need to be able to design a body to know it is flawed. If that were true, we’d have no medicine to speak of.

325

When I was in the U.S.A.F. my job was crew chief for the B-52D. When that plane was on the ground one of my many duties was to inspect it for cracks, popped rivets and other flaws. I didn’t have the knowledge to smelt the steel, design the plane or put it together. Does this mean that I was incapable of doing my job, Jon55?

326

Actually, if we adhere to that as an analogy all the way, by Jon55’s logic you wouldn’t have been qualified to judge a plane as flawed even if it collapsed into a pile of scrap metal on the tarmac. Maybe it was supposed to disintegrate! :smiley:

327

Indeed. The assertion is being made that it isn’t a design flaw if we can fix it via medicine. And it doesn’t count as a flaw unless we can create a life form ourselves or create some analogously complex but totally unrelated system.

This denies the trivial observation that flaws can be flagrantly obvious. In addition to the flaws mentioned above, the fact that human male prostate glands grow throughout life even to the point of causing life threatening dysfunction (talking BPH, not even cancer, a separate defect already mentioned) is a design defect that cannot be hand waved away with the “secret benefit” nonsense. Flaws are flaws. Some reveal themselves only statistically, others are more obvious. They’re characterized as design flaws because an intelligent designer could and should have avoided including them in the final product. They are evidence for evolution because of the not-end-directed, whatever-worked-well-enough system of differential fitness of naturally occurring variation under selective pressure that is evolution.

328

What a comedian he/she/it is by ordering ethnic cleansing!

It is a huge problem, so huge that it was one of the main reasons why I had to conclude that if there is a god, the one of the bible was not it, I go more for what many founding fathers thought, for a more deistic entity that it may exist but for all intentions and evidence so far, he/she/it is not really interested on this neck of the universal woods.

*Hundreds of years ago, but he/she/it just remember it, yes, as mentioned, a laugh riot.

329

Well, if the human (and generally among mammals) airway/ esophagus junction was designed, the Hypothetical Omniscient Designer certainly sweated the details to make sure it looks just like something that started out as a pouch in a fish’s throat to hold a bubble of air.

Now I don’t know about you, but combined with the whole potential for smiting, I would go out of my way to appreciate what the Hypothetical Omniscient Designer built into the system, including any hypothetical constraints and ersatz design history. If He didn’t want us to beleive in evolution, he should not have built the world to look as if it has evolved.

330

If we (and all other organisms) were designed, then we were all designed with an enormous amount of evidence, both anatomical and genetic, for common descent. Whales still have remnants of hip bones, though they have no hips. Some snakes still have remnants of leg bones. Through the fossil record, we can see tons and tons of “transitional” forms, whether between fish and amphibian, amphibian and reptile, reptile and mammal, various stages of primates’ evolution, etc. And the predictions that the fossil and anatomical data make, like that our closest relatives are the great apes, are confirmed with genetic analysis.

Evolution has enormous predictive power. If we see fish in one geologic strata (representing a particular time period), and no amphibians, then see amphibians in a later strata, scientists make the prediction that an animal existed in between those strata with characteristics of both fish and amphibians. And with time, those predictions are usually accurate.

331

Good for you Jon55. Nobody understands everything. I surely don’t understand the big bang (for instance) that others have a better grasp of. Instead of attributing it to God or a higher force. I am comfortable with just saying “I really don’t quite get it”. I could investigate it further, but I don’t just say “God did it”. Many, many other things in life interest me more. That’s what I investigate.

I don’t need a God to love my neighbors, or forgive those that may have wronged me. That some people do need a God to fear or respect just to be a good person is disturbing. And a bit scary.

332

I just want to take a moment to respond to the “atheists will never agree with a Christian” sentiment.

I am an atheist who was raised as a devout protestant Christian, and simply lost my faith in any sort of super-natural phenomena over time. I don’t hate Christians, or distrust them particularly. In fact, I strongly support anyone’s first amendment rights to practice any religion of their choosing, as long as it does not conflict with other laws and personal freedoms. I would gladly lay down my life defending your right to worship the god of your choosing.

But what I do not have any respect for is willful ignorance of fact. Evolution is a fact. The theory of evolution is an expansive body of knowledge that explains this fact, in the same sense that the theory of general relativity explains the fact that gravity exists. There is no scientific debate about whether evolution occurs, in the same sense that there is no scientific debate about whether gravity occurs. Evolution is falsifiable, it makes predictions that have been tested time and time again, and the evidence supporting the overarching theory comes from numerous branches of otherwise unrelated fields of science.

Furthermore, it’s not hard to learn very, very basic information of why evolution has to be fact. If you do not accept biological evolution as fact you are being willfully ignorant. If you even knew 10% of the evidence for evolution, you’d know it has to be right. If you knew 100% of the evidence for biological evolution you’d be as adamantly anti-creationist as Richard Dawkins and his ilk.

But it doesn’t end there, with the ignorance, no. Creationists can’t just stop there. They have to go a step further with logical fallacy after logical fallacy. They constantly create strawmen to attack, or create circular arguments, or make ad hominem attacks against atheists, or so on and so on and so on. It is disrespectful, it is hurtful, it is rude, and it is wrong. People who make these kinds of logical fallacies after being corrected on them time after time don’t deserve respect or thoughtful argument.

Of course it doesn’t just end with the logical fallacies or willful ignorance, does it? No. Creationists then of course have to resort to the level of flat out lies and deliberate deception. And this is probably what pisses me off most about creationists. I STILL remember my sunday school lessons where I was told things like radiometric dating is just a flat out lie made up by scientists, and that the ages of the layers of the Earth were just arbitrarily decided by a cabal of scientists. I remember being taught that dinosaurs and humans lived together at the same time and there had been fossils and footprints of the two found to be from the same age! Of course the lies continue on from there, and it’s just shameful.

So here’s the deal. If a Christian can come in here and actually not resort to lies, not resort to continued logical fallacies, and is actually educated on evolution, and can make a sound logical argument for why they feel intelligent design is a superior testable theory to the theory of evolution, then I’d be glad to have that debate and treat it with the respect it deserves. Until then, you’re going to get the sarcasm and snide remarks you deserve (that are allowed in Great Debates of course).

333

First off, upthread you acknowledged it was flawed when you asked about your back pain. And second, you are moving the goalposts again. The human body is flawed. It has a lot of great characteristics, but it’s inarguably flawed (and so are the bodies of other animals). Plenty of examples have already been given.

I guess you’ve never had an ulcer.

Is there something magical about the number 175 miles per hour? Because we’ve created things that send impulses much faster than that.

Our reflexes are not “super fast.” And why do they top out at 175 mph? Surely it would be better if they were faster. If the impulses moved faster, you could take your hand off the stove without suffering as much damage.

334

Was skimming over the thread when I spotted this. The key difference is that the human knee is not some passive chunk of metal - it (ideally) is in a constant state of self-repair, such that it can indeed last a human lifetime - until the self-repair mechanism breaks down and it begins eroding, as I assume happened in your mother’s case.

I expect in my lifetime to see artificial joints made of futuristicky ceramics or whatnot that will outlive any human. Where’s your God then?

335

Why couldn’t Og, or whomever?

336

I cannot build a car from scratch, or even if you gave me all the parts in a pile, and yet I can see that the placement of the gas tank in the old Ford Pintos was a design flaw.

In fact, I’d be willing to bet you see design flaws in things you cannot build yourself all the time.

You (and many other religious people) seem to think that since scientists, which you falsely equate to atheists, do not have a god, they hold themselves up as god, and you seek to show us that we are not divine as god, since we can’t “build a man from dirt”. But, you see, we don’t believe in ANY gods. Scientists recognize they cannot make a person in a lab from scratch*. So what? The point is that God didn’t build a man from dirt EITHER. Not being able to make a person from dirt is utterly irrelevant, since no one (except the ignorant) thinks man was built from dirt anyway.

You are incapable of seeing the world without your religious lens. Rest assured that others don’t have that problem, though.

*yet. It may happen one day

337

That day might be one step closer.

338

GEEPERS, if you don’t believe in evolution, how do you explain the appendix? It’s vestigial, and if it gets inflamed, it can cause dangerous or even fatal problems if it’s not diagnosed quickly.

339

Recently, anti-evilutionists thought they’d gotten a boost when research suggested the vermiform appendix (I love that term*) actually does have a useful function:

“William Parker, Randy Bollinger, and colleagues at Duke University proposed that the appendix serves as a haven for useful bacteria when illness flushes those bacteria from the rest of the intestines. This proposal is based on a new understanding of how the immune system supports the growth of beneficial intestinal bacteria, in combination with many well-known features of the appendix, including its architecture, its location just below the normal one-way flow of food and germs in the large intestine, and its association with copious amounts of immune tissue. Research performed at Winthrop University-Hospital showed that individuals without an appendix were four times more likely to have a recurrence of Clostridium difficile. However, other research showed that there is a significantly greater rate of C. difficile infection among people with an appendix, with more than 80% of the infections occurring among patients with an intact appendix.”

So it’s far from a settled deal, but just maybe the appendix is more than a vestigial remnant that only serves to cause problems.

*Beyond looking kindy wormy in a lot of people, the vermiform appendix apparently is called that to differentiate it from other appendices in the human body (like the appendix testis). Sorry for the anatomical pedantry.

340

Waitaminit. Doesn’t the existence of an organ that aggregates bacteria contradict the idea that our immune system is so finely-tuned that it had to be designed and spring into existence all at once?

341

I explain it as an organ with a function that human beings, in their ignorance, have yet to discover. There is some research where scientists have begun to see a purpose for the organ.