You have done a great job understanding the premise of my argument and I agree completely with your response with exception to some minor points of which I will address later.

Alright then, having confirmed that was your intended argument I can now explain why it is completely wrong.

It is a very common misapplication of probability. People have a strong tendency to think "unlikely to happen" is evidence something was deliberately made to happen when it is nothing of the kind. In fact, ANY complex random behaviour willl ALWAYS produce an improbable outcome. So arguing that "that was improbable, therfore it must not have been random chance" is the equivalent of arguing "it's really wet outside, it must NOT have rained." Making things wet is what rain does. And producing improbable outcomes is what complex random behaviour does.

Now, there are legitimate ways to apply probability to determine something was unlikely to happen without being "rigged"to happen that way, however in all such cases there are two necessary element that your example is lacking.

1. You must actually understand the full search space of possible outcomes.

2. The targetted outcome of the process must be pre-defined.

And you also have to understand what it means for a selected outcome TO be pre-defined. I can use two examples to illustrate this... the lottery, and an archery competition. Some people get it more easily with the latter, some with the former.

The Lottery

Let's say Joe Lucky bought a Powerball ticket last week. And today he won the jackpot.

The odds of him doing this by random chance were 195 million to 1 against.

Do we therefore have evidence the lottery may have been rigged? No. "That was unlikely to happen by random chance" is NOT evidence of rigging. In this case we had one of those necessary elements (we know all possible lottery draw combinations)... but we did not have the second. We did not "call the shot" ahead of time that Joe would win instead of someone else so saying it was improbable for him to win is both true, and absolutely meaningless to any argument that the process was designed to make him win. Anyone could have won, and it would have been equally improbable.

IF on the other hand we had waited for everyone to buy their tickets, THEN there was some action taken that clearly indicated someone was specifically banking on Joe being the winner (maybe Joe's wife enters into a binding argeement to buy some million dollar home they cannot possibly afford), THEN they did the draw and sure enough Joe won... that's when you want to start looking for the cheater.

Clear?

The Archery Competition

Alternatively, we could have a special archery competition. In this competition I have marked, in invisible ink, a tiny tiny target on a very large blank wall.

I then invited a million people to take a shot at the wall and see if they can hit the target. Or, alternatively, I invited one person to take as many shots as they want at the wall until they hit it.

The odds of any individual arrow hitting the target? Really bad. Eventually one hits it. Do we have evidence the contest was rigged because the arrow was extremely unlilkely to hit the target? NO. Once again, we had criteria one, but not criteria two. Nobody called the shot that would hit the target ahead of time.

If on the other hand before anyone started shooting I declared exactly which person/which shot was going to hit... start looking for the cheater.

And for the final variant on the archery competition, I'm going to actually cheat, and in doing so show you exactly what you're doing when you make this argument.

1. I announce an archery demonstration in which I will demonstrate I am the greatest archer of all time.

2. The focus of the competition? I will hit, in a single shot, a target at least 100 yards away. In the exact center. To the MICRON.

3. Everyone places their bets... almost entirely against me since the odds of me doing this are absurdly bad.

4. I line up, draw my bow, and fire an arrow through the air. It sails away and sticks into the wall of a barn over 100yards away.

5. I walk over to the wall, take out some precision equipment, and draw the target around where the arrow hit.

6. I declare that I am the greatest archer in the world, because obviously only my GREAT SKILL and EXPERT DESIGN of my shot and bow and arrow could have led my arrow to strike such an improbable target against all odds!

I trust you see the problem?

What you are doing is coming along after the universe has already "shot it's arrow", looking at what has happened, drawing the target around it after the fact, then declaring "WOW! It was amazingly unlikely the universe could have hit this target by chance... obviously it must have been expertly designed to do this!"

I'm sorry, but the argument is just plain wrong. In your case not only because you are lacking element two (nobody called the whot ahead of time) but you are ALSO missing element one. You have no idea what the possible search space of outcomes of the universe is!

Circumstantial evidence may be permitted in a court of law and also may apply to science but to use law as an analogy is missing one key element. Law is a man made system, its history can be tracked, logged and seen clearly, we know what it is made of. Physics is not, it can not be tracked, logged (wholly) and its lucidity is impaired by its lack of understanding. I may have stated that the principle of natural forms is the same as the flat earth theory but I see that that is flawed. Natural forms be they crystals or proteins or anything else may be (on the surface) made of components that are irreducibly complex.

I simply wished to state that nothing is concrete, nothing can be taken as absolute fact and a portion of the scientific world in the dark ages as in now is easily seduced by the easy answer when they come up against something that seems impossible. To state that circumstantial evidence is leaning towards and in favor of intelligent design is to state that there is no real evidence at all. I watched George Smoot at TED and I don't see the relevance to your argument (against my rebuttal on the subject of evolution vs creation) Of course evolutionary theory cannot explain the start of everything but nothing can (yet). I did not state that evolution was the only explanation for the existence of anything but is an explanation of the existence of complex life forms, life forms that up until the last two hundred years did not even understand anything about where they came from but now have a beautifully crafted scientific theory to explain it. It does not however explain how it all began and does not try to. But to invoke a creator is to throw in the towel and say I don't understand so I'll make something up and spout a load of scientific theory. What part may I ask are you the playing in the lawnmower analogy? The building blocks of an egg were not "designed" to be an egg they are a combination of pure elements that existed long before the existence of life.

You say that the belief in the existence of an omnipotent deity that created everything goes against the fundamental basics of science.

A supernatural entity that is "omnipotent" can serve any contrived purpose. Resorting to this kind of non-answer doesn't help us understand the world we live in. It just gives comfort to people who seek easy answers. But any deity is outside of scientific consideration, since the discipline is purposefully constrained to the natural world.

You see, that is the problem with a few evolutionist.

That's only a problem for you, because it doesn't assume the correctness of your position.

When God created the world, science was non existent because there was nothing except himself, so he didn't have to abide by science in order to create the world, and universe for that matter.

Like here. The time when religious claims have privileges is over. No one any longer has any obligation to give merit to unsubstantiated claims like this one. "When god..." nothing. Define god, show us that it exists, show us that it created the world, and then we can move from there. You don't have the privilege of assuming the correctness of your fairy tale. Put up or shut up.

So saying that creation goes against science is a poor argument in this case.

It goes against science because Creationism posits an untestable, unfalsifiable contention.

Creationism is a go-to answer that doesn't explain how the creation process itself works, how we can verify that it does work through testing, makes absolutely no predictions, doesn't increase our knowledge of the world, and doesn't benefit anyone in any other field of human endeavor except members of religions who believe it. It's self-serving.

I concur Chuck and have enjoyed this debate very much thanks to you.

I never stated that the BELIEF in an omnipotent deity went against the fundamental basics of science. Belief is personal and personal opinion is not evidence. I was simply stating that to invoke a creator when something too complicated arises is anthropopethic and unscientific. The word science comes from the Latin scientia which means knowledge or to know and nobody KNOWS of any evidence to support the god hypothesis therefore it is an easy answer to a very troubling question. As an advocate of evolution by natural selection I do not absolutely refute the god hypothesis but think it one of many that could be possible. It would be unscientific of me to state that anyone was clearly wrong as time and time again the commonly accepted rules are broken. To state that when god created the world science was non existent is to state that knowledge was non existent surely it (god in this case) had to have some knowledge of something, if not it could not have created anything. Also to state" Once he set everything in motion, that is when science came into perspective" is anthropocentric as perspective is defined as a personal view and there was no one to have a perspective at the dawn of life. To state that my argument is poor is poor in itself as the argument made was not what you disputed.

You say that the belief in the existence of an omnipotent deity that created everything goes against the fundamental basics of science.

I don't understand why you have trouble with this fact. It's like a sniper complaining on an archery field that he cannot use his rifle. God doesn't mix with science, those are the rules. Maybe it would be easier for you to accept if it were explained why:

Science works in the reducible, the provable, and the reproducible. In science, the elegant solutions are preferred, because they assume less. This is called parsimony. God, or any other supernatural idea, cannot be falsified. I'll give you an example; when a person prays to god, they expect a result, if they get a result, they thank god, if they don't get a result, they thank god for teaching patience, or think he's waiting. In both cases god is not permitted to be seen as failing the prayer test. This is a simple example, meant to illustrate how people will not allow god to be proven wrong, and would rather make up excuses. God is given power over nature, so no matter what test you devise to demonstrate incongruity of god with nature, god is excused out of it because he can simply make nature appear in a way that doesn't show his existence. The same can be said of any supernatural idea, it can never be falsified because you can always talk it out of blame. Going back to parsimony, we find that if you have an elegant solution, tacking on unnecessary components usually makes the solution less likely to be correct, or more convoluted without worth. God operates like this as well, by acting as a "solution + god" type explanation. God is superfluous.

When God created the world, science was non existent because there was nothing except himself, so he didn't have to abide by science in order to create the world, and universe for that matter. Once He set everything in motion, that is when science in itself came into perspective, in a creationist point of view. So saying that creation goes against science is a poor argument in this case.

This is the "talking out of blame" I was mentioning earlier. You can take solid premises, scientific ones which show that the universe and life were not created. You can then make a strong case using that evidence, which denies creationism. What happens? The supernatural explanation slips out of defeat because using an ad hoc explanation you simply explain that creationism, because of god, is now immune to scientific protocols.

This is why creationism is pseudoscience. It's mythology that lets people dress it however they want, with no restraints. Science plays by rules, but creationism doesn't, it ignores the rules of logic and science at will.

Funny, because whilst the evolution of mankind has been proved, the sudden creation of mankind is solely based on belief. It is difficult to understand how you consider truth to be bull crap and an unsupported theory to be part of some sort of vocabulary...

You do realize you just effectively declared "I refuse to understand what I am telling people I don't believe in!!!"

You're a genius you are.

That is the meaning that I intended as well, although in some cases I do consider the words to be interchangeable. The Bible contains accounts that have been proven impossible, such as Noah's Ark, and no one should take them literally. Instead, they should recognize that allegories have been used to illustrate a moral or spiritual lesson.

Science textbooks contain statements that, if you wish, you could observe to be true by recreating their conditions. One is fiction, the other is not, thus they do not fall into the same category.