Responding to posts in reverse order here:
All designed things share the common trait of having purpose; being designed to fulfill a need or desire of a sentient being. Thus, to establish that any particular living thing is designed this purpose must be established, giving the need it fulfills and the sentient being it fulfills it for with evidence. Saying 'design' without the 'for who?' and 'by who?' and 'to do what?' is useless and says nothing.
Just being complex does not establish design; while a designer would want living creatures with error-correction code, so would life evolving in the absence of a designer, as larger amounts of mutations are harder to control via natural selection and more likely to lead to detrimental consequences than smaller amounts. And after a few billion years wouldn't you expect organic life to have become pretty complex? Why don't we look at all the flaws in living creatures that are easily explained by evolutionary theory and the concept of a nested hierarchy yet would be mind-boggling oversights or necessary hodgepodges had a designer had a hand in us? How about the existence of hiccups in humans? Evolution explains it as being a hold-over from when we were amphibians, a breathing pattern that helped us respire. To us now, however, it is useless, so if we are designed why do we have hiccups? Why do we have the optic nerve in front of the retina, rather than behind, creating a blind spot? Evolution explains it by showing that once you've already built the eye it is impossible to move the optic nerve's position without deconstructing the eye along the way, and as having the eye is more useful to us than not having a blind spot the eye stays. If we are designed, however, why is the optic nerve where it is, rather than behind like in say an octopus which evolved its eyes independently of our more direct ancestors? What is the purpose, why does it exist, and who passed the designer in bioengineering studies anyway?
Oh, and to deny that life could come about in any way besides direct intervention of an intelligent designer the way you describe would require ID theorists to rule out
any possible natural pathway to life; it doesn't take much to see that there are arbitrarily such possible pathways and thus this negative can never be proven. And let's not forget that saying 'I can't see a way for life to arise from non-life' or 'I don't know of any verified explanation for life arising from non-life' is not equivalent to 'life cannot arise from non-life'.
Asimov: Well, I don't know about you, but I just googled a bit and he seems to be a supporter of evolution. To quote:
Asimov said:
Asimov: They have that backward, and they have plant life being created before the sun. All the evidence we have indicates that this is not so. The Bible says that every plant, and every animal, was created after its own kind, which would indicate that species have been as they are now from the very beginning and have never changed. Despite what the creationists say, the fossil record, as well as very subtle biochemical evidence, geological evidence, and all sorts of other evidence, indicates that species have changed, that there has been a long evolutionary process that has lasted over three billion years.
Source:
http://www.positiveatheism.org/hist/asimov.htm
As for entropy, keep in mind that the second law of thermodynamics does not
prevent entropy from decreasing locally, only universally. A refrigerator, for example, reduces heat in itself by dumping it (plus more) elsewhere. Life itself reduces entropy locally by dumping it elsewhere; plants take in light from the sun, and thus their decrease in entropy is made up for by an increase in the sun's. Animals eat plants, getting the energy they've stored, etc. Also keep in mind that the idea of entropy is not synonymous with chaos or disorder or simplicity/complexity and the 2LoT does not state that things must break down, only describe the way heat flows and how much work can be extracted from a system.
You know that things appearing in movies can be doctored and changed, right? If you want to know what someone's opinion is or what someone says, who do you ask, someone who's talked with them or the person themselves?
What if Patterson was wrong?
Design can have a non-human origin without it being a supernatural origin. But what then would you propose? God's out, maybe extraterrestrials or a non-omnipotent creator? (no snappy remarks please)
If an artificial cell is created, what would you say next, and why is this irrelevant? Newton couldn't create gravity or mass, but his theories about it still made useful predictions. Einstein couldn't build a rocket ship that can reach relativistic speeds but his theories about that kind of thing still made useful predictions. I could learn a lot about how violins are played and what kind of sound they make without knowing where they're made.
P.S. If it turns out that there is not sufficient evidence to conclude living things were created by any designer, are ID proponents OK with admitting this?
P.P.S. What dogmatic doctrine of atheists religionists? What books or holy texts would be contained in this dogmatic doctrine, and why haven't I been told about it?
P.P.P.S. If atheist religionists are dogmatic then why does the theory of evolution keep getting updated with new ideas and evidence?
