A reply to David...

David says,
"...this blogging thing is quite addictive.... maybe it is a mental illness... Wait, lucky for me, mental illness does not actually exist."

That's correct, as how can an illness be mental? Brain illness on the other hand does exist...so maybe it is a brain illness. Did you notice how I borrowed your neural nets by setting some patterns of thought against each other?

"Probability, that's just a concept that almost doesn't even exist."

"Infinity, the tension between that concept and reality explains all life!"

Once they are woven against each other, then you begin to answer yourself and I just borrow your own answers. It's easier that way. (Hmmm, it must be my lazy orientation. You see, I was born this way. Eventually, I had to come out of the closet as a lazy person. For I was living a lie...a lie, I tell you! Lazy rights!)

You still want to stick with minimizing probability,
"Whatever the statistic is, we hit that particular lottery."

So how about a story about minimizing probability....it's one I remember from somewhere.

Once upon a time in WWII an Allied spy was captured by the Nazis and he was to be shot to death by a firing squad of Nazi sharp shooters. So they put him against a wall, aimed their guns and fired. Yet not a single bullet hit the airman and instead the bullets formed an outline on the wall. The airman looked at the outline on the wall and said, "Wow...what are the chances?! Well, whatever the chances are it is obvious that I hit the particular lottery that favors my life. Because....I'm here, and that's the only way I can see the outline on the wall. If I was shot, then I wouldn't be here to see that I hit the lottery. Chance be praised!"

But actually, all the sharp shooters were spies themselves working from within the Nazi army who had gotten themselves assigned to this specific firing squad specifically to save the life of the airman. So they just looked at the airman until he said, "Oh, righto, thanks fellas..." Then he was thankful that circumstances had been shaped to favor his life, as he should have been all along.

"I object to a bogus use of probability to create a theory about the nature of the universe. ID theory seems to center around the idea that things are so complex someone must of has designed it. I can't make that leap."

What are the chances of your sentence...

Your sentence seems to center around the notion of your own sentience, as sentences typically do. Yet what is that? Is it scientific? Is it matter, does it matter? Shall I assume that your sentence is an artifact of the design, symbols and signs written by your mind? How shall I, and what are the chances that it is designed? Perhaps I should look to Nature first and argue that Nature selected the complexity and specifications of your sentence? Perhaps...I won't make the leap out of Nature either. Instead I will sit in her womb with you to keep you company down here in Plato's cave. And that's pretty nice of me! Let's not make any leaps in here, instead we'll keep things all gradual like.

Moving on...I'll type this slowly.

Dave Thomas says, "Frosties are free this weekend!" Just kidding. I think they actuallly are. It was that whole finger food incident. But another Dave Thomas says,
"The real "fog" in this debate is Biotic Message Theory, which explains all commonalities as evidence of the work of a single designer, and all differences as evidence of this designer's creativity. No observation could fail to fit this theory."

That's false. Those with the urge to merge know well enough that if empirical observations of Nature did not reveal typology over and over again, then their mythological narratives of Naturalism would fit sans vast leaps of imagination. I'd hate to see what they could do with a real pattern of evidence that fit sequence. Sequence is the sort of observation which would refute Biotic Message Theory. But instead message theory fits the evidence and the commonalities are types....such as DNA, which all life uses to store information, while there is a vast chasm between life and non-life. Empirical observations of Nature also illustrate that diversity is also made up of types, scales are found to be scales and feathers are feathers and so on. The pattern that is found is not one of sequence or Darwin's "infinitude" of intermediaries for each structure, i.e. the sort of feather...yet still part scale.

And note, the commonality of the type in DNA surpasses any form of information storage that we have yet designed.

So efficient is the mechanism of information storage and so elegant the mechanism of duplication of this remarkable molecule that it is hard to escape the feeling that the DNA molecule may be the one and only perfect solution to the twin problems of information storage and duplication for self-replicating automata.
....
It is astonishing to think that this remarkable piece of machinery, which possesses the ultimate capacity to construct every living thing that ever existed on Earth, from a giant redwood to the human brain, can construct all its own components in a matter of minutes and weigh less than 10^16 grams. It is of the order of several thousand million million times smaller than the smallest piece of functional machinery ever constructed by man.

(Evolution: A Theory in Crisis
By Michael Denton :337-338)

"Do you have a zinger I haven't seen yet?"

Are you going to be passive and have me zing your mind to see if it will sing? You can if you want. I thought you might want to try convincing me though.

Let's have a look at the main argument in plain english, "Things reproduce and stuff...and because they reproduce a lot, some live and some die. The ones that live might be slightly different than their ancestors. All these differences caused by some dying and some living can be added up over time until we come to structures like our human brains with 100 billion neurons and its visual system that computes the bioelectric signals, blurs them, fills in the blind spot, and so on. Ultimately, that's how you can read this. So it is a good thing that long ago, some apes didn't have enough bannas to eat but kept getting it on or otherwise we might not be here to talk about it. It must be that the more that things reproduce and starve and die, then the more they evolve. After all, it all had to be so or we wouldn't be here. "

Often, the main argument is soon to be followed with, "So you punched a hole in the theory of evolution. That doesn't matter. It's scientific or somethin', so disagreein' with me is just like disagreein' with gravity! "

And so on. Perhaps you have a zinger for me? I leave it to you. I meant to write something or other yesterday but I had a cold. And I didn't get around to reading the dialogue between ReMine and Dave Thomas either, perhaps we can write our own instead. I still need to polish up a misunderstanding about natural harmony. Perhaps another day...