Evolution is a legit scientific theory, whereas Intelligent Design is not

First, one small clarification: I did not intend any joke by referencing the Despicable Me movie, I provided the link in case anyone was not familiar with this bit of high culture. And on the other side of the coin, I don't think it's legitimate to claim that one's links provide arguments. If Pro believes that proper evidence for evolution has been found and/or demonstrated, I think he should present it explicitly within the text of the debate. As I pointed out, prediction is not proof; it is, in skillful hands, merely a tool to work towards proof. The phrase 'correlation is not causation' is appropriate here: For many years people knew that going outside when it was cold and damp was likely to make you sick. They could correctly predict this. But we now know, of course, that a 'cold' comes from a virus and is not directly related to the cold or the damp. Pro attemps to equate my example of a house built of playing cards with the 'Texas Sharpshooter fallacy'. But there is a major difference. The card shuffle is a combination of simple actions, so indeed, one outcome out of many is guaranteed. The house of cards, by contrast, requires great skill. It is not merely shuffling cards, but laying them on edge, often two or more at a time, without disturbing the structure already built. It is, for all practical purposes, simply impossible for a house of cards to occur at random. No gust of wind through a window, no hurricane, no tornado can build a house of cards. Long time periods won't help - the statistical certainty is that, given enough time, it will be flat on the ground. That's the natural selection of playing cards. Long periods of time only make this failure certain, and will eventually destroy the cards themselves. A billion years won't help you built a house of cards, only good eye-hand coordination will. Life shows this same sort of fragility. Organisms die all the time, whole species go extinct. Life is not the Rock of Gibralter but a house of cards. Life is built of the simple elements of earth, but stacked in forms that do not occur elsewhere in nature. I submit that life is like the house of cards - no mathematical games of statistics can explain it. Our common sense tells us that it is simply impossible that it happened at random. Some might try to claim I am addressing abiogenesis and not evolution, but that would be sophistry - Darwin's premise of the eye, for instance, is that just such a building, layer by layer, small unguided change by small unguided change, is possible. So, has anyone shown that it is, even in principle, possible? You've got to be brutally honest with yourself here if you have already accepted evolution: The answer is simply "no". What the overwhelming preponderance of data has shown is that the DNA provides a statistically bounded range of 'descent with modification'. Richard Lenski has watched over 50,000 generations of e. coli without seeing anything to suggest the e coli will ever be anything but e. coli (1). 50,000 generations of homo sapiens, to put this in context, would require some 1 million years. This is exactly the sort of accelerated testing used in other fields of study, such as medicine, to determine what outcomes are likely over longer periods of time. So I think it's time to drop the fanciful fantasy that life could arise and refine itself spontaneously. It was fanciful to start with, and even the advanced science and technology of the late 20th century failed to demonstrate that it was even possible, much less prove that it did happen this way. Which is to say, evolution is NOT 'legit science' it's just a rather confused jumble of data and non-specific claims. (1) http://en.wikipedia.org...