well.....it is......duh!

As someone with an analytical mind Zoo...aren't you supposed to keep it open to possibilities outside the box?

What if Galileo was wrong? Or what if he was only half right? What if some things can be hypothesized and proved with evidence, and some things can't?

By ruling out the possibility science can't explain everything right now, you kinda take yourself out of the game.

-Even Mr. Dawkins at the end admitted to "alien intelligent design."

Toward the end of his interview with me, Stein asked whether I could think of any circumstances whatsoever under which intelligent design might have occurred. It's the kind of challenge I relish, and I set myself the task of imagining the most plausible scenario I could. I wanted to give ID its best shot, however poor that best shot might be. I must have been feeling magnanimous that day, because I was aware that the leading advocates of Intelligent Design are very fond of protesting that they are not talking about God as the designer, but about some unnamed and unspecified intelligence, which might even be an alien from another planet. Indeed, this is the only way they differentiate themselves from fundamentalist creationists, and they do it only when they need to, in order to weasel their way around church/state separation laws. So, bending over backwards to accommodate the IDiots ("oh NOOOOO, of course we aren't talking about God, this is SCIENCE") and bending over backwards to make the best case I could for intelligent design, I constructed a science fiction scenario. Like Michael Ruse (as I surmise) I still hadn't rumbled Stein, and I was charitable enough to think he was an honestly stupid man, sincerely seeking enlightenment from a scientist. I patiently explained to him that life could conceivably have been seeded on Earth by an alien intelligence from another planet (Francis Crick and Leslie Orgel suggested something similar -- semi tongue-in-cheek). The conclusion I was heading towards was that, even in the highly unlikely event that some such 'Directed Panspermia' was responsible for designing life on this planet, the alien beings would THEMSELVES have to have evolved, if not by Darwinian selection, by some equivalent 'crane' (to quote Dan Dennett). My point here was that design can never be an ULTIMATE explanation for organized complexity. Even if life on Earth was seeded by intelligent designers on another planet, and even if the alien life form was itself seeded four billion years earlier, the regress must ultimately be terminated (and we have only some 13 billion years to play with because of the finite age of the universe). Organized complexity cannot just spontaneously happen. That, for goodness sake, is the creationists' whole point, when they bang on about eyes and bacterial flagella! Evolution by natural selection is the only known process whereby organized complexity can ultimately come into being. Organized complexity -- and that includes everything capable of designing anything intelligently -- comes LATE into the universe. It cannot exist at the beginning, as I have explained again and again in my writings.

This 'Ultimate 747' argument, as I called it in The God Delusion, may or may not persuade you. That is not my concern here. My concern here is that my science fiction thought experiment -- however implausible -- was designed to illustrate intelligent design's closest approach to being plausible. I was most emphaticaly NOT saying that I believed the thought experiment. Quite the contrary. I do not believe it (and I don't think Francis Crick believed it either). I was bending over backwards to make the best case I could for a form of intelligent design. And my clear implication was that the best case I could make was a very implausible case indeed. In other words, I was using the thought experiment as a way of demonstrating strong opposition to all theories of intelligent design.

Well, you will have guessed how Mathis/Stein handled this. I won't get the exact words right (we were forbidden to bring in recording devices on pain of a $250,000 fine, chillingly announced by some unnamed Gauleiter before the film began), but Stein said something like this. "What? Richard Dawkins BELIEVES IN INTELLIGENT DESIGN." "Richard Dawkins BELIEVES IN ALIENS FROM OUTER SPACE." I can't remember whether this was the moment in the film where we were regaled with another Lord Privy Seal cut to an old science fiction movie with some kind of android figure – that may have been used in the service of trying to ridicule Francis Crick (again, dutiful titters from the partisan audience).

Of course, but you see...scientific method is a little different than being open to possibilites.

So, Zoo, what scientific method is used by atheists to come to a conclusion that there is no God?

I can see coming to an agnostic conclusion, since there isn't enough physical evidence to come to a definite conclusion, but atheists seem to use a lack of evidence as proof.

Fair enough, Zoo... good luck on the tests.

Many atheists do use the scientific to back their side. Most atheists I have encountered, myself included, are ones that lack the belief in gods, not the ones that believe there are no god or gods...although we most likely all do believe that the gods of the religions we have encountered not exist. Many of the religious ilk like to paint us as not "true atheists", but instead as agnostic. I suppose it is all in how you define your terms. To me, and those like me, an agnostic is one who believes but believes the god(s) are unknowable. Also, most atheists aren't trying to push "no god" into the science classroom, they feel that such matters are irrelevant to science and that religious support does not belong in government run organizations or laws.

The existence of God is not scientifically testable. Is the existence of an Intelligent Designer testable? If it is, the Intelligent design camp doesn't seem to be doing any experiments on it at the moment, and the burden of producing evidence is on them. Why aren't they doing some research and experimentation if ID is science? If I'm mistaken, and there is some, please provide some Peer reviewed paper links that substantiate ID, and I will relent. Until then, case closed.