Fuck, I want to rip off his ugly ass sweater vest and ram it down his throat, watching this is just painful at how stupid his arguments are.

I don’t have a problem with borrowing from the efforts of other (that’s why we have academic publishing), but it would be nice of you not to poison the well in return. They are literally intellectual parasites.

That said, I think Tisdall’s idea of a lost debate would be one in which he personally was convinced that evolution is a fact. I suspect that will never happen.

FFS, I’m a stinkin’ carpenter and I believe I would have been more effective in dismantling the creotards arguments.

So- the best thing a presumably highly complex being – a creator of whatever spin – had time to do was create a first primitive cell? How ingenious, how stunning.

In this case the creationist argument that god created animals as they are makes a lot more sense – in the context of creationism of various flavours.

Don’t they ever come up with new arguments?

No, really this chap erred from the start by selecting the argument from ignorance. He failed to establish that the organism he described was unevolvable, falling into Behe’s “mouse trap” fallacy.

Actually, in scientific terms, he’s just using a different default assumption: any very complex entity without a proven natural provenance must have been created. Science assumes the opposite, in fact science starts out by assuming the absence of any sort of “divine intervention” in natural processes.

More importantly, recent work in chaos/complexity theory has demonstrated that many natural processes can (potentially) end up in a state of constantly increasing complexity. Thus scientists will always assume that life (or any other very complex entity) evolved from simpler antecedents, we just need to figure out what they were (through research).

Creationists, OTOH, tend to be very simple-minded people, and their reaction to the sort of complex explanations needed to understand abiogenesis is to throw up their hands: “it’s too complex for me; God is simpler”. They’ll never accept complex science, in evolution any more than in atmospheric thermodynamics. (Of course, that doesn’t mean that the current theories of either are actually correct.)

analgously, since we don’t know about civilizations pre written word/cuneiform/glyphs the history in history books doesn’t exist.

I don’t think mere acceptance (which I’m sure is abundant in that very undeveloped field) would remove their vulnerability to the observation that there’s a lot of hand-waving going on and not much in the way of detailed mechanism. But given the scale of the task and the scarcity of remnants from the origin of life, that’s to be expected.

No, really this chap erred from the start by selecting the argument from ignorance. He failed to establish that the organism he described was unevolvable, falling into Behe’s “mouse trap” fallacy.