Talk about rapidly changing your position
Your first post claimed that Creationism is where science and religion meet. Now you back off from that to claim that Intelligent Design (a much different position) is where they meet. You throw a huge website at me. And then you immediately go on to rail against people who say that there is definitely no God.
Let's take those one at a time, shall we?
You originally said that, Science and Religion meet here with Creationism. Creationism generally means something rather specific, it means the theory that God created the world exactly as outlined in the Bible, complete with The Flood, every surviving species surviving on Noah's Arc, etc just a few thousand years ago. You haven't defended that. The website that you pointed me at very specifically doesn't defend that view. They relabel it young-earth creationism and right [link|http://www.godandscience.org/evolution/intelligentdesign.html|here] point out that you have to reject the poor "science" of young earth creationism (science in quotes because what passes for science among young-earth creationists very definitely isn't).
Instead it defends the view of Intelligent Design. ID is the theory that evolution is broadly right, but there are gaps that can't be explained, and those gaps are filled in by God. Which gaps need filling in varies between different believers. For instance Michael Behe explicitly accepts macro-evolution as a process but sees God needed to fill in some of the steps along the way, such as abiogenesis, the evolution of eukaryotic cells, and the eye. The authors of the website that you pointed at doesn't accept basic macro-evolution.
What about the website that you pointed me at? Obviously I don't have time to review the whole thing in detail. So let me just grab one page and talk about that. How about [link|http://www.godandscience.org/evolution/evolution.html|General Rebuttal to the Theory of Evolution]? Well first they draw a fairly artificial distinction between micro-evolution and macro-evolution. Secondly they accept micro-evolution (the actual process put forth by Darwin) but then reject that micro-evolution as a process could explain any larger transition from speciation on up.
Uh, oh. First factual mistake. That divisions between species can occur through a series of gradual changes is well-established. One of the most spectactular demonstrations are so-called [link|http://www.cs.colorado.edu/~lindsay/creation/ring_species.html|ring species]. In one place there are two species. But if you take one of them, and go from location to location you find that each interbreeds with the next until you reach the original location - at the other species! There you have what are clearly 2 species and a complete chain of intermediate forms in current existence!
We then have the classic out-of-context quote, this time directed at a 1996 article that I don't have access to. Obviously points of major change are not examples of equilibrium - had they been in equilibrium then change would not have happened. And the biologists in question were asserting their opinion that micro-evolution is not a sufficient mechanism for certain specific gaps (namely the origin of life, the emergence of eukaryotic cells, and the origin of the human capacity for language), well OK, that is an opinion. Oh, right. The origin of life is indeed outside of standard mechanisms of Darwinian evolution (a fact first noted by Darwin). The emergence of eukaryotic cells (ie cells with organelles like mitochondria) is believed to have happened by the emergence of a symbiosis with one bacteria being engulfed by another. That process is indeed outside of simple Darwinian evolution. The origin of the human capacity for language, there is a point of disagreement. One biologist has trouble seeing how it could have happened through micro-evolution, others have no trouble with that, and with the sequencing of the human genome complete there is ongoing research on which genes differ between us and chimpanzees. I have confidence that in the next few decades we will have a pretty good idea which genes give us coherent speech (we already know a couple of key ones which most of us have, chimps don't, and which cause serious speech problems in people who lack them). Research continues.
Going on, they present gradualism versus punctuated equilibrium. The approach taken here is to give all of the traditional arguments that the punctuated equilibrium folks take against gradualism, and then casually dismiss punctuated equilibrium as impossible. They also provide a lack of context. For instance they discuss the amazing punctuation of the boundary of the Cretateous-Tertiary Period without mentioning the punctuation point, an asteriod hitting the Earth, wiping out most species, leaving a layer of dust around the world, and leaving a still-visible crater after over 60 million years. The destruction of an existing order created huge numbers of opportunities. The radiation out from there is quite understood.
I would comment on some of the misrepresentations that I see there (particularly of the Cambrian explosion), but I want to get to their casual dismissal of punctuated equilibrium. First of all they overstate the coincidence needed for punctuated equilibrium to happen. You do not need to isolate a population and then have a series of mutations happen. Instead you isolate a population with normal levels of genetic variability, and chance elimination of variability through inbreeding will drive that population to a somewhat different form. Normally that form won't be better than the original, and reintegration with the main population is a disaster for the isolated segment. But this kind of genetic experiment is going on all the time (and has been identified in the wild right now), and one success in 5 million years of attempts is enough to explain a punctuation.
Secondly when attempting to dismiss a theory, it is unfair to ignore evidence put forth for that theory. For instance Gould and Eldredge's original paper didn't just hypothesize the process, they actually traced a type of tribolite through 2 punctuations, in each of which they were able to locate the punctuations (one in a mine in upstate NY, the other in a mine in China IIRC) to a specific locale over a period of a few thousand years. That is, they didn't just look at a fossil record and say, "How did this sudden shift happen?" Instead they looked at a fossil record where they had detailed documentation of where and when the shifts happened, and found that not once, but twice in a row the shift happened in a small space in a small time in what apparently was an isolated population.
I could go on through that page with more examples of bias, distortion, and omission. I could do the same with the website as a whole. But I think that my point is clear. While I can see how convincing that site might be to someone who doesn't clearly know the facts involved, and who is inclined to believe what they have to say, it isn't convincing me nearly as well as you might hope.
So let me quickly brush over the final point, your railing about attempted proofs of the non-existence of God. Oddly enough I didn't attempt to prove the non-existence of God. For one thing I know better than that, I am fully aware that the existence or non-existence of God is not amenable to proof. Or, more precisely put, there are many "demonstrations" available, but each has a strong tendancy to confirm for all readers their prior belief system on the subject.
My prior belief system says that any God able to create the Universe must, a prior, be far more amazing than the Universe created. Going further, if we consider geological time to be The Eiffel Tower, all of human history is a small fleck of paint partway up the tower. The entire history of science fits on a speck of dust on the fleck of paint. And I am but an amused microbe who hears other microbes going on about how we are clearly the purpose of this whole edifice, what it all leads to, and I'm laughing to myself about the lack of perspective.
But that is my belief. I have no vested interest in anyone else (you, for instance) agreeing with me, and no way to convince you to agree with me even if I wanted to.
Cheers,
Ben
PS Next time, please pick a clearer position and stick to it. While addressing umpteen different positions may be kind of fun, it gets very tedious after a while.
