> I don't know how to answer that, except to say what you describe sounds like a bad way to build a tower. If we agree for the sake of argument that the tower is leaning, and one day we *realize* it's leaning, what you seem to be suggesting is, "Well, we did all this work. Better than starting over!" and continuing to build on the unsound foundation. No, better to knock down anything we discover is wrong, hit those same questions we answered incorrectly before, and try to get it right.
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Fair enough. I thought you were saying that because the tower is leaning so badly right now, we're clearly heading in the wrong direction and should make amends now -- which I clearly disagree with. Of course I agree that *if* the entire theory eventually becomes unsustainable, the next best explanation should be given the benefit of the doubt. Hey, that's science.

The way I see it, though, it's perfectly acceptable that there are a myriad of unexplained events in the bulk of the natural sciences. I mean, we're talking about a fully connected system involving quadrillions of creatures over billions of years of history. There is bound to be an *incredible* number of required laws/principles that we need to fit everything in, and we'll continue to need more as time goes on. We'll continue to need to make exceptions to principles which we thought were simpler. All of this is not to mention how absolutely mind-bogglingly impossible it would be to chronicle how every single one of the quadrillions of creatures in our planet's history has spent its life, so how could we expect to have a perfect record on explaining the details of every specimen found?

Anyway, I hope you can see my perspective, that the difficulties in evolutionary sciences I mentioned in my previous post are not difficulties I see in the theory, but difficulties in fitting details in, whether because we just don't have the required physical evidence yet or because one of the principles needs tweaking. Reality is just complex that way.

> > ...(2) a powerful entity would have had to deliberately create the genomes of all organisms humans have studied to make it *look* like creatures we think are related in specific ways really are...
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> Incidentally, if one accepts God in the first place, which one may or may not do, it's not such a big step to go from there to "creation according to a common plan." It seems to be less likely that the same God would create creatures utterly alien to one another to inhabit the same planet, than that this same God would play with variations on a common theme.
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To a certain extent, I agree -- that one way God could create a hierarchy of creatures would involve using similar genetic code for creatures that he wanted to have similar appearances/functionality/etc. However, it starts getting nutty when you wonder why so much genetic code is entirely non-functional in some creatures, yet almost *exactly* the same as crucial functioning code sequences in other creatures -- more than could be explained by simple mutational degradation if micro-evolution were all that takes place -- genes which could *never* have been useful for that species.

If God's hierarchical plan involved reusing pieces of genetic blueprints here and there, and if all that mattered in this process was the end product, there would be no reason to use code sequences from other creatures if those sequences had neither bearing on the form/function of the creature NOR were the simplest way to copy and fill in code just to have something there. He would have had to go out of his way to deliberately replicate code just to make it look like evolution had occurred.

I guess you could continue by saying that perhaps God knew a lot of the genes he'd be putting in creatures would be irrelevant, and maybe he knew that one day humans would get smart enough to be able to look for patterns this way and he didn't want to make it more obvious than necessary that all creatures were independently created, so this would be a better test of faith -- but for me, it starts turning into a leaning tower of its own.

> It's kind of like doubting the existence of Rembrandt because his paintings are composed of different colors of the same paint, instead of a little blue paint on the left, and a dresser drawer glued to the middle of the canvas, and the upper right corner permanently on fire, and a bit on the lower right that sounds like Bugs Bunny when you pull a string.
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> Come to think of it, that would be a pretty cool painting.

I don't buy it. [The argument, I mean. I'd buy the painting too.] No one would doubt that a painter existed, in this matter, because there's no conceivable mechanism by which paint could reliably be assembled to match up with our perceptions that distinguish a true painting from random coloration.

I think you might be trying something along the lines of the canonical intelligent design argument. My immediate counter-argument is that paintings do not replicate themselves with feedback mechanisms favoring certain visual patterns over others. If they did -- if paintings replicated themselves with random mutations and humans got to prune out the ones they didn't like, I am quite confident that you'd start to see more paintings, at first that had clearly defined regions, and then you'd start seeing some that had combinations of regions that resembled people/animals/trees/mountains. If you gave it enough time -- say, trillions of lines of replicating paintings and trillions of replications of each, you'd start to get some pretty fine and seemingly *creative* artwork. If each human judge were only involved in one act of pruning, any attribution of that seeming creativity would have to be given to humanity as a whole. The paintings would have evolved into forms that best suited their survival -- in this case, survival from being pruned by showing some order and merit by human artistic measures.