There's no point in addressing this to Justin as he will not respond, so I'll simply address the readers of this thread.
Another cop out is saying that we can talk about design for anything, except in biology.
Who's said that? Do we talk about the design of mountains, rivers, plains, clouds, snowflakes etcetera? I seems to me we've only mentioned 'design' in the context of conscious animals shaping elements of their environment to serve a purpose.
Physical laws do not logically preclude a designer. Why do you think they do?
I think Articulett's point was that physical laws do not
require that there be a designer to explain their function. To postulate one is completely unnecessary.
That's an interesting hypothetical. Got anything even remotely approaching proof?
This strikes me as Justin simply being difficult. But what the hey...
When Darwin first proposed his theory he knew that the evidence pointed strongly to evolution by natural selection. But he was troubled by all the unanswered questions regarding its function. He didn't even know what the mechanism for heredity was (Mendel's work was technically available, but was virtually unnoticed at the time). The information that has accumulated since Darwin's time would boggle his mind. Many of the criticisms of evolutionary theory which were once considered serious threats are now viewed as quaint and naive. A huge number of fundamental questions have been answered. Justin's apparent assertion that science will never understand biochemistry enough to propose a theory of abiogenesis is groundless. There is no guarantee that we will discover a mechanism of abiogenesis, just as there was no guarantee that we would discover the mechanism behind heredity. But the likelihood that we will is great.
According to whom exactly? Belief seems just as high as ever, and every-so-often studies come out hinting that belief might be hardwired, which hints that it will never disappear.
God is disappearing from
science. The gaps continue to shrink. Belief in gods
may be "hardwired", but obviously people can overcome this.
The Big Bang is that. The Cambrian Explosion is kinda that.
*sigh* I don't know if Justin is being deliberately obtuse or if he simply has so many people on 'ignore' that he hasn't read any of the number of attempts to explain this to him. The universe didn't poof into existence at the Big Bang. There was no "before" the Big Bang. Time, as we perceive it, seems to start at that point, but asking what came before the Big Bang is like asking were the edge of the surface of a sphere is.
As for the Cambrian, as Skeptic Guy points out, it may have been fairly rapid on a geological time scale, but to describe it as a "poof" moment in time is just wrong. Why did life increase in diversity so much during that period? We don't know for sure. There is some fascinating geological evidence that suggests some good answers, but we'll have to wait and see. But the fact remains that life was around long before the Cambrian period and that it didn't "suddenly" pop into a great diversity of forms during that period.