Bilnick wrote:What evidence does ID offer up that indicates a diety created life? Because we do not know or understand certain things therfore it must be a diety?
ID relies upon the assumption there is some diety that created things we cannot explain or has extremely low probability of randomly happening. Wouldn't you have to prove first that a diety exists before ID has any merit?
Don't shoot me if I'm wrong, I'm not totally studied on this. But, I'll try and address your points. (Wow, this turned out long)
First, I think a huge piece of evidence ID has for itself is the probability aspect. Like I said, given an infinite amount of time, every possible outcome of every situation is possible, even if it is 1 out of a billion-trillion-zillion chance of happening. However, it has been basically proven, and has been accepted by even the evolution side that the universe began at one point, and has not had an infinite past. Time may continue for an infinite length from now, however the possibility for life will not go the whole duration. The universe is fated to 1 of 2 outcomes (and there is scientific and mathematical backing for both of these that I can bring up if you would like). Either the universe will collapse in upon itself, or it will expand forever. Collapsing in on itself will remove the possibility of life. And if the universe expands for an infinite amount of time, there will eventually be an infinite distance between every planet, star, etc, allowing for no life. Given this, we are talking about a relatively short period of time where life is possible in our universe. Now we need to break the time down even more, to the lifespan of a star. Every star, including our sun, will eventually burn out and consume its surrounding planets, destroying any life growing on them. This means that any life that is growing within that solar system has the duration of the stars life to develop to a point where it can travel to a younger solar system to continue developing, or it will be consumed and life will have to restart from a single cell eventually. So, every race that could ever evolve in our universe, including humans, would have to race to that point in development before their star would consume them. So now, not only do we have the trillions to one ratio of proteins lining up to create the first form of life, we have the probability that this life will evolve at a fast enough rate to get out, which is minimal as well. Knowing that we far ahead in the evolutionary race than every other life form on earth, we must assume that either we are evolving non-guided at an exceptional rate, or that we were seeded by a race that survived their sun consuming them. Either way, the probability is very very minimal. And now, we must combine (multiply) the 1 in the trillions probability by this other minimal probability, to come up with an even more unlikely probability.
Now on to the unlikely hood of our specific situation. Now, we finally determined that the earth was not the center of the universe 100s of years ago. However, the more we learn about our universe, the more we discover random events which fell into place beyond perfectly to foster life on earth. The probability of our exact distance from our sun, the tilt of the earth, the atmosphere, the moon, our surrounding planets protecting us from catastrophic meteor collisions, and much more that goes over my head, all have a semi decent probability of occurring alone, but combining their probabilities into a single probability produces yet another staggeringly large ratio. Yet, all these things have come together, and so we cannot ignore that massively improbable event. And now we multiply this new insanely high ratio with our other from the upper paragraph, and we get a number that my brain would hurt to try and calculate.
Like I said, given an infinite amount of time, all possible events will occur, no matter their unlikeliness. However, we have had a set time for all these very very highly improbable random events to fall into place. And we are left with two possibilities when considering evolution vs ID. Evolution says that this random event did occur, no matter how improbable. And ID says that some force tipped the scales to ensure that these events would occur.
And to the point on a diety, it depends what you mean by a diety. Do you mean a conscious, active being such as the God of the bible? Or do you mean a force, like the Nameless from EQ (for lack of a better example) that unconsciously created everything? Either way, I do not believe that you have to first prove that there is a diety/force who created everything. To me, its an "if and only if" proof. If you prove that there is a diety/force, then you prove ID. If you prove ID, then you prove there is a diety/force. However, you cannot, say, prove ID and therefore say the Christian God exists, or that the Hindu Gods exist, or any other God you want to include here. If ID were proven, then you would have to sort out the religions to figure out which God it is.
Now that the math is out of the way, I'll say what I personally believe. I live math, therefore I sort basically everything I hear, see, know, etc, into two categories. Either it is an absolute, or a probability. I have ID filed in the "probability category". As much as I want to absolutely believe it, there is always that nagging thought in my mathematical head which says "there is that chance, no matter how small, that this is wrong". However, there are two important things filed under my "absolutes" category. First of all, is that if I die, and I'm wrong, I've lost nothing; however, if I die, and I'm right, I gain everything. And second, I am living a happy, fullfilled, content life filled with love. Something I did not have when I was growing up as an inner city, ghetto kid, who often had to outrun gangs just to get home in one piece. To me, the variable that changed my life was believing in God. Given the very, very, one sided probability, and adding my two absolutes to it, my mind is easily made up.