If you do not believe in Intelligent Design then how could you explain mountains and canyons?

Well obviously it was Slartibartfast since he likes doing the fiddly bits with water.

This question is obviously a joke since most people assume gravity rather than emotions decide where water flows. However it is possible to create a theory of physics underpinned by agency (i.e. free will). I wrote a paper on the topic in 2000 as part of my philosophy studies.

Having atoms or rivers with emotions or desires does not however prove intelligent design. E.g. Do the lwas of nature decide what decisions agents (like humans or gods) freelay have, or are our thoughts and actions the result of our nature?

Even if we could prove that evolution of the cosmos and life on Earth was designed, it would still not prove the existence of traditional human ideas of gods. It would not prove that Popes and Kings have divine rights to rule others or that Zeus hurls lightning from the sky. It would not prove our star/sun who we call Sol is pleased with human sacrifices.

The type of ID theories being pushed by religious extremists is in my opinion as scientific as belief in Santa or the Tooth Fairy. I actually have some sympathy for ID theories that are based on logic and science or serious metaphysics, but as long as the kintergarden level arguments for religious ID ideas are about the like of Dawkins will attack any ID ideas.

The sad fact is in the times the Bible stories originated the world was flat and there was Heaven above and Hell below.

Science can tell us much about how old the universe seems to be and whether some godlike intelligence is likely at play in the design of the universe.

Religious stories are likely to be as reliable as rolling a dice to decide what is true and what is false; or no more accurate than an intelligent persons informed guess.

It would be silly to think that plains just decided to change. Canyons were carved by water erosion over millions of years (for instance, the grand canyon was carved by the Colorado River.) in a similar fashion to what happens when you poor a bucket of water near the shore-line on a sandy beach. Mountains were pushed up by the movement of tectonic plates. This is still occurring in many places around the world. Mountains that still rest atop fault lines grow a measurable amount each year. This is because the plates are still grinding together along the earth's crust, which pushes the top of the crust upwards. In response to your question about the water, water will always flow downhill unless pulled by a greater force, like the gravitational pull from the moon that brings waves onto shore. There are also many cases where water is driven from an underground spring with massive pressure. Lakes atop mountains with rivers flowing from them are often caused by the spring filling any depression near it (forming a lake) and then continuing to fill until the lake overflows part of its border, creating a river.

Oh dear! So have you not had an education or is it that some extremist sect or cult has indoctrinated you so well you are no longer Christian or living in the real world?!

The Pope, Catholic Church, Church of England and mainstream churches all accept the big bang and evolution!

Lord Carey the former Archbishop of Canterbury put it rather well – “Creationism is the fruit of a fundamentalist approach to scripture, ignoring scholarship and critical learning, and confusing different understandings of truth”!

Nice that Christians and atheists can agree and laugh together even if it is at fundie expense!

But behind the laughter is the despair at the fundamentalists striving so hard to destroy Christianity by turning it from a religion to an ideology!

Surveys suggest that 29% of American Christians are so extremist in their beliefs that they fall well outside of the accepted bounds of Christianity!

My answer to the question to which you referred.

You complain of being insulted when your entire question is phrased as an insult, not only to the intelligence of Yahoo! users but to the intelligence and painstaking work of thousands of anatomists, palaeontologists, zoologists, biochemists, geneticists, geologists and molecular biologists. These people have worked very hard over years obtaining an actual education and very often in their fields are paid only slightly above average salaries and in a few cases, have not been paid at all.

You pose this insult in the face of explanations of biological evolution that are available in school books, any number of popular works on science published over the past century and in the face of hundreds of factual pages on the internet. If you wanted a real answer you would have asked under biology, yet you chose to ask under religion since you know that you will get some answers that agree with your rot. Is that not true?

Real information on this is only a few mouse clicks away, yet you choose to ignore this and to post insulting nonsense and long refuted drivel. You are lazy, gullible, dishonest and wilfully ignorant and deserve every word of the treatment you got.

Study geology and you will understand this.

I've been watching national Geographic shows for some time, and I can tell you, it's a fascinating story how those mountains and canyons get built. We now have a pretty good idea of how Yellowstone developed (that took some doing)

Yes, it would be a stretch to say that because plains can't feel things.

Mountains on the other hand...

Yup, that's quite a stretch indeed. That's why I'm so fond of things like plate tectonics. Well, that and I'm in my California home right now. We know all about plate tectonics here, let me tell you.

Yeah let's just take this intelligent design idea to its utmost for all its worth or whatever.

One lady emailed me telling me intelligent design proves Jehovah God.

But for me intelligent design proves Winky God, so now we're at an impasse. What now?

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Tectonic movement