We know from both experiment and theory that reproduction with inheritance, variation, and competition does produce increasing complexity; therefore it is perfectly reasonable to propose that the complexity of life as we know it has arisen from this simple, observable process iterated over very long periods of time. We have no reason outside folklore to believe in omnipotent magical creators.

The problem with science is that it is not friendly to the general public. And it shouldn’t be: areas of expertise bring with them their own expert jargon. But that jargon makes the general public believe creationists sooner, because they speak a language they can recognize.

This is the last thing I will say here about Mr. Wagner. Reading his material, it seems to me his whole argument stands and falls on a single analogy, and he has rephrased this analogy in so many different ways as to expand a 3 line argument into pages and pages of text, but it is all still the same idea. But his analogy can just as easily be turned around to say the exact opposite. To whit:

1. No intelligent designer has ever been observed to design and build a practical working machine on a molecular scale. No molecular motors. Not even a practically useful inclined plane. Nanotech is still science fiction.
2. No machine, on any scale, has ever been observed to be capable of self-replication. Von Neumann probes are also still science fiction.
3. No intelligent designer has ever been observed to design and build a lifeform.
4. No intelligent designer has ever been observed to even be able to modify a pre-existing lifeform without using tools that were already pre-existing in some other lifeform.
5. There is at least 3000 years of recorded history of known intelligent designers at work, and an archeological record dating back over 2 million years. (Far longer than the 20 year Lenski experiment, for comparison)
6. There is a 3.8 billion year fossil record, and astronomial observations dating back to almost 13 billion years, and nowhere is there any evidence of any other intelligent designers more capable than the ones considerd in #5.

By the above, I can easily conclude with the same logic that the mechanism of intelligence is clearly utterly insufficient, incapable, obviously too feeble, to design and build the complex, organized, self-replicating entity otherwise known as life. The only alternate, therefore, is random mutation, genetic drift, natural selection, and the other mechanisms of the theory of evolution.

Do you not see how empty the First Cause Argument is? “Because of this, you eventually must come to a primary cause, which religions call God.” Might as well call it “mashed potatoes”. Either way it’s vacuous. Even if there was a First Cause (and I dispute that this is necessarily so), since we have no mechanism at this point in science’s fledgling existence for how the universe came into being, we can make no inference on the cause itself. Thus, the only appropriate answer to the question of the universe’s existence is “I don’t know how it came into being.” What you and everyone else has done since this argument came about (and really, it only sounds good – it is otherwise completely vacuous) is try to stuff god in the gaps of our knowledge. This is not positive evidence for a designer, or a creator, or whatever and the argument reduces to “I can’t figure out what the First Cause is, so it must be god.” Not exactly a worthy argument.