Acknowledging our opponents’ strong points | Uncommon Descent

I read a very good article that Brian Auten tweeted last week. It points out that we should acknowledge opponents' strong points in any debate. The article then give two strong points against intelligent design and admits that they are good but don't destroy intelligent design:

1. We have discovered scientific explanations for so many other previously mysterious phenomena, why not evolution as well? The laws God made are very clever and fine-tuned, and probably are sufficient to explain everything in astronomy, geology, chemistry and atmospheric science, for example, so it is hardly surprising that many would insist that they must be able to explain all of biology as well.

2. There are a lot of things about the development of life that give the appearance of natural causes. “This just doesn’t look like the way God would create things,” is an argument frequently used by Darwin, and by modern day evolutionists. There are also things that don’t suggest natural causes–such as the sudden appearance of nearly all the animal phyla at the beginning of the Cambrian era–but much of the history of life admittedly does leave us with a strong impression of natural causes.

These are points I've head many atheistic evolutionists use against Creationism and Intelligent Design. I don't think that they are strong at all. I think the laws and mechanisms we have discovered and harnessed in astronomy, physics, chemistry, geology, and the other known sciences don't demystify much at all. I mean we have only found more questions than answers. I think the same is true in Biology. The ratio of what we know to all that there is to know is a number much smaller than one and getting smaller approaching zero because the number at the bottom of that fraction is approaching infinity much faster than that numerator! As an engineer I have learned that if one does not know what the design specs were and the purpose it's hard to evaluate if it is the best possible design or not. That is how I see the universe. It's stupid to argue that the universe is ill designed when we can't possible know all the specs and purposes.







Acknowledging our opponents’ strong points | Uncommon Descent