I thought I would post an interesting conversation I had with my friend Ben about Intelligent Design and Natural Selection and see what my thoughts my readers might have about our conversation.

Ben:   live for the swarm!
Brent: thinking about starcraft
Ben:   giving a presentation on particle swarm optimization
Brent: at work or some conference?
Ben:   here at work
Ben:   special interest group - knowledge data discovery
Ben:   SIG - KDD
Brent: nerd
Ben:   i like evolutionary computing
Ben:   genetic algorithms, ant colony optimizations, particle swarms, etc.
Brent: ok, I don't know what your talking about
Ben:   check it out on wikipedia
Ben:   it's kind of interesting and fun
Brent: I'll be sure to check that out if I every have a spare moment where I'm bored to tears! :) lol
Ben:   let's just say that genetic algorithms show that darwin might be right after all.
Brent: hmm...  don't you think darwin sorta goes against what the Bible teaches?
Ben:   not really
Brent: what about intelligent design
Ben:   why can't intelligent design drive evolution?
Brent: it's possible but I wouldn't think an intelligent creator would need to take time for things to evolve
Ben:   so you think the earth is only six to ten thousand years old?
Brent: it sorta takes away from God's greatness to say he took millions of years to create stuff.
Ben:   do you really think that time matters to God?
Ben:   God exists outside of our notion of time and space.
Brent: don't know I'm not God
Ben:   A million years is no different than a nanosecond
Brent: it is to us and we matter to God though so maybe he took that into consideration
Brent: an in the greek the word for day means 24 hours
Ben:   you mean hebrew?
Ben:   check this post out
Brent: well, not sure actually because the hebrew was translated into greek so it's been awhile since I've studied it and I don't know if that was the hebrew word or the greek word that was translated from the original hebrew.
Brent: what is your point?
Ben:   "Asserting that God is constrained by time is no less than asserting that he is constrained by gravity, velocity, distance, and acceleration, for all these things constrain time."
Ben:   time is meaningless to God.
Brent: how was I asserting that?
Ben:   "it sorta takes away from God's greatness to say he took millions of years to create stuff"
Brent: right, did that say anything about him being constrained?
Ben:   the notion of God taking time to create stuff
Brent: Let me put it this way if you could create the world's first AI robot that was totally awesome and you had the ability to do it in 1 hour you would take 4,000 just for the fun of it?
Ben:   all i'm suggesting is that the age of the earth and the amount of "time" God took to create the earth are two completely unrelated things
Ben:   i see what you're saying, but there's a disconnect-
Ben:   time to us is not time to God
Brent: which brings me back to my original point
Ben:   for example, it might take me an hour to create an AI, but that AI is several million CPU cycles old
Ben:   we're on two different scales
Ben:   i think in hours, the AI thinks in CPU cycles
Ben:   God thinks in God-time, we think in regular time.
Brent: If time matters to us as we understand it and we matter to God.  Wouldn't it be possible that he would take that into consideration and create the earth on your time scale to prove his greatness to us?
Ben:   it's possible
Ben:   but why bother?
Brent: to prove his greatness to us because we matter
Ben:   it's definitely possible, but that does not preclude God from designing the earth over a period of millions of "our" years 
Brent: so who is right?
Ben:   so the concluding point here is that intelligent design can drive evolution
Ben:   and nobody knows for sure
Brent: you? me? someone else?
Ben:   who knows?
Brent: so doesn't it boil down in the end to faith that you have to believe something because nothing is certain?
Ben:   yes
Ben:   for example, we don't understand gravity
Ben:   we can describe the phenomenon
Ben:   but why it happens? who knows
Ben:   what attracts two attoms together?
Ben:   no idea.
Ben:   but it happens.
Ben:   no matter how much scientists know, it still boils down to the fact that we don't know why the underlying laws of physics are the way they are.
Brent: true.  and that's just like God we can feel the effects of God but we can't possible know everything about him.
Ben:   yeah
Brent: mind if I post this convo on my blog
Brent: and can take out your name
Brent: I would be interested to see what others have to say about it
Ben:   go for it
Ben:   you don't have to take out my name