The scientific evidence for Natural Selection is overwhelming.

In this debate I made three arguments negating Pro"s position, and three positive arguments for creation by intelligent design. How does his rebuttals hold up? (1) Against the argument that mutation and natural selection don"t create new biological machines or add new information he again claims duplicating information is adding new information? I"ll leave it up to the readers to decide if NEW information is different from what came before! He also say that E.coli got bigger, so what? We have big humans and small humans, its just variation within the kind. He talks about greater adaptability to ingest more glucose, duh, they were bigger! A bigger stomach holds more food. Are humans who eat more and live longer turning into anything other than human? Such speculation is unwarranted. (2) In answer to how mutation got pass the repair mechanism of cells and DNA he says absolutely nothing. (3) Regarding the lack of observation made regarding evolution in these experiments with bacteria, fruit flies, peppered moths and so forth, he claimed that "speciation is the wild is far more probable than in the lab," but when I confronted him on the predators and contaminants of the wild that are carefully avoided in the lab, all he could say was "That is merely conjecture on the experiment." It isn"t conjecture. The scientists I quoted admitted its less likely in the wild. There are more bacteria on this planet than any living animal or plant, and they exist in every conceivable condition. Man didn"t discover E.coli yesterday, we"ve known about this bacteria for a while. So if this bacteria mutating the ability to ingest citrate under normal oxygen levels is so probable in the wild as Pro claims, why can"t he show me one single example of E.coli taken from the wild which has evolved this ability on its own? Why didn"t Lenski do it? If it"s so "probable" in the wild, why hasn"t it happened in the wild? He then expects me to read two papers on bacterial evolution in the wild and respond to them. Pro, did these bacteria evolve into anything other than bacteria, or did they run into the limits of variation? Evolutionists claim evolution in humans moves to slowly to be seen why the naked eye, that"s why they used bacteria in the first place because they have such a short life span, they can literally witness thousands of generations to see if evolution will occur. Common sense dictates that we should see more change in bacteria than in humans over time because we are far more complex, have better and more repair mechanisms, more stable environments, and are not as adaptable as bacteria. All he could say to this was that biologists don"t agree, and I challenge him to give us a good reason why. What about my positive case for design? (1) In response to my argument that minds are the only source of information, he says I need to provide evidence for this. Lets remember that he himself defined information as "adding genetic CODING which performs an action which otherwise was not present in the organism." A CODE is "a word or phrase used to represent a message in order to keep its meaning a secret," or "a set of signs used in sending messages by machine." (Oxford School Dictionary) We know that only intelligent beings develop words, phrases, signs and machines. In fact, according to the same evolutionists, it took a long time before our ancestors developed language, which began as pictographs, hieroglyphics, signs " all signs of intelligence. So even his own definition implies intelligent design. Then he attacks irreducible complexity as if that were an argument I made in this debate, it wasn"t! He claims Dr. Behe was refuted on this topic, but even if he was, that doesn"t make everything else he believes wrong, does it? Charles Darwin was proven wrong about the cell being a simple blob when science found out how complex it was, does that make Darwin wrong about everything else he said? Further, I don"t see that Behe was refuted. Scientists presented hypothetical organisms they believed to be evolutionary steps leading towards Behe"s irreducibly complex structures, but since very few or maybe none of those imaginative organism exist, its all just speculation on the part of over optimistic evolutionists. Pro knows that bacteria are not conscious to choose at will the mutations that would work, so he needs to argue that as they pass through all these random mutations they stumble upon the ones that work and these are preserved. But this argument is fatally flawed: The coding for biological machines is an extremely complex instruction manual. We could compare the instructions from DNA to assemble proteins to a long list of sentences with proper syntax, grammar, punctuation, the whole works. Now let"s take just a single word - deoxyribonucleic acid. What would be the chances of picking these letters in this exact sequence at random from the entire alphabet with your eyes closed? Impossible! "But natural selection isn"t random!" Pro argues, he says that that it only picks the letters that work. Problem is the letters D " E " O don"t work until the whole word is completed. Now if these first three letter are chosen by natural selection because they will work to spell deoxyribonucleic acid, it implies that natural selection already knows in advance what word it is attempting to spell, and thus we are back to an invisible intelligence again. So how could mutation A in Lenski"s experiment be chosen to prim E.coli to ingest citrate unless it was already known in advance what instructions it was planning to write out and that ingesting citrate was the aim? But only an intelligent agent could know this; bacteria don"t know anything. Unless this information was already programmed into the bacteria, we have no reason to think this particular mutation would be treated any different from the others. If the programming was already there, we are back to recessive traits in the gene all over again. Thing is, genetic coding for performing these kinds of tasks, especially with DNA and proteins, are vastly more complex than the 20-letter word "deoxyribonucleic acid." The smallest protein is 50 amino acids long, so am I to believe that each one of these 50 proteins was preserved one by one, by natural selection, because it primed the organism to become a protein? Where did the information come from to inform the original organism that it had to become a protein in the first place? What advantage did mutation A in Lenski"s experiment give E.coli before we even get to mutation B? The answer to this question will be telling, cause according to him natural selection only selects the ones that work. (2) To the charge that intelligent intervention by scientists illustrates the need for an intelligence to guide the process of development of biological forms, he says that the equipment wasn"t sophisticated. That doesn"t prove that blind nature can exercise the kind of care these scientists do with their specimens. (3) To the fact that evolutionists cannot identify a simple beginning, he says nothing, because he knows that the simplest form of life on earth is still mind-bogglingly complex. Pro makes a case that poor design disproves intelligent design. First of all, poor design doesn"t prove the designer wasn"t intelligent. We humans design things that fail at times. Some of the first planes or rockets crashed or exploded before we got it right, did the errors in those designs prove they were not created by intelligent people and thus must have come about by blind forces of nature? So specialists claim the giraffe has a nerve that is badly designed. Well, in their opinion it could have been done better, and they are right; because God is omnipotent, no matter what he does, he could have done better, because he is limitless. Pro is imagining God would be required to optimize everything he makes, but such is an arbitrary claim without foundation. I"m sure the giraffe isn"t complaining about how he was made. Take animals on the whole, God never created them to live forever, "born only to be caught and destroyed." (2 Peter 2:12) A perfect designer is under no obligation to make super animals, anymore than a prince is require to have all his cups made of silver and gold just because he can. They would last longer, so what? It isn"t necessary. And it isn"t necessary to give us limbs that grow back when lopped off, or better nerves for a giraffe. What"s more, his theory assumes as static theory of creation where God creates each creature individually and it cannot change, but that was never my claim in this debate. After God creates a kind, it is subject to micro-evolutionary change and the laws of thermodynamics, so these imperfections could be the result of micro-evolution. A good car that has eroded and damaged over the years is still designed. Further, it"s presumptuous to assume that one knows how God would create a giraffe"s neck, or anything else if he were to do so. We are in no position to know what higher off-setting reasons God may have for not doing something a certain way. Do you know the mind of God, Pro? Barrowand Tipler in their book The Anthropic Cosmological Principle, list ten steps in the course of human evolution, each of which is so improbable that the sun would have ceased to be a main sequence star and burned up the earth before they would have occurred. They estimate the odds of the evolution of the human genome by chance to be on the order of 4-360 (110,000), a probability to small to be faced. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986)., pp. 561-565) No wonder Pro argues that natural selection isn't random, and yet, mutations must randomly hit upon the right combinations in the right order BEFORE natural selection can select them. So Pro's argument doesn't counter the problem of randomness vs probability. I await my opponent's final rebuttal, thank you.