AB,
Will you do something for me please? Will you read what I'm about to tell you, and actually think about it and then respond to that rather than repeat your misunderstanding of what evolutionary theory actually entails?
Will you at least try?
I would have no problem with natural selection if there was a virtually infinite number of beneficial mutations for it to work on. But this is not the case. The vast majority of mutations are not beneficial.
Yes, which is exactly what you'd expect to see if there was no guiding hand at the tiller. When cells divide they make copies of their DNA, and sometimes those copies are not exact - so they're "mutations". For the most part those mutations make no difference to the organism, and sometime they're harmful and so reduce or eliminate the likelihood of the organism passing on its genetic legacy to descendants. Sometimes though the mutation will benefit the organism - resistance to a disease, sharper eyesight etc - which will confer a greater chance of inherited genetic success in subsequent generations and so, over time, that mutation will become embedded.
If the natural selection process had to rely on purely random events to produce beneficial mutations, then I maintain that the description of "crude" is valid.
Then you maintain wrongly. You may think it to be "crude" (or "wasteful" would perhaps be a better description) but the unfathomably vast number of opportunities for it to occur means that it can nonetheless produce exquisitely well-adapted organisms like hummingbirds and octopi. The only way you could call it crude would be to draw an analogy with an engineer whose designs for computers kept producing machines that couldn't compute, or an architect who designed buildings that kept falling down. It's precisely because there is no designer that there's huge redundancy in evolution. If there actually was a "God" - or at least a competent one - then you wouldn't expect to see that redundancy at all.
In other words the wastefulness you think to indicate a designer actually indicates the
opposite of that - ie, no designer at all.
My argument is that there is evidence in the specific complexity of all life forms to indicate that some form of intelligently guided events are needed to produce sufficient beneficial mutations for evolution to work. You may argue that my reasoning is based on my personal incredulity, but the opposite argument is based on personal optimism.
No, that's not the problem with your "argument" - or at least it's not the main one. The main one is something called the lottery winner's fallacy - ie, the lottery winner says, "Wow! The odds against me winning were 14-million-to-one, therefore there must be something special about me" whereas in fact, from Camelot's perspective, the odds were pretty much one, but they just didn't care about who won.
Similarly you've just assumed that people and oak trees and bumble bees must have been the intended objectives all along, so the chances of producing them by random means stretches your incredulity too far. Just like Camelot though, the universe doesn't know or care what species will emerge or even for that matter whether any species will emerge at all. The process is essentially blind, and thinking little old Alan Burns to have been what was intended all along is just looking through the wrong end of the telescope. You need in other words to start from the bottom up, not from the top down.
There is no definitive proof in either case...
That's disingenuous - there's no "definitive proof" for
any scientific theory. Not for germ theory of disease, not for the theory of gravity, not for the theory of evolution. Not for any of them. What all of them have though is vast numbers of facts that all support them, a falsification test, predictive power etc such that they provide hugely powerful explanations for the way the world works. Your "in either case" is attempting a false equivalence moreover. There's no definitive proof for natural childbirth either, but you can't just introduce stork theory as your alternative and claim there to be no definitive proof for either as if they deserve equal consideration.
...but the fact that acts of human free will can be used to manipulate natural forces to create intelligent design is an indication that our universe is not entirely driven by unguided deterministic events.
Leaving aside for now your continued misunderstanding of "free will", yes our species and others can clearly manipulate our environments but that says nothing at all to the conjecture that there must also therefore be a divine manipulator doing the same thing.
