Information and Evolutionary Mechanisms

However, this is observational data at play, not historical data. Historical data is more up for "interpretation", while observational data, while up for interpretation, can be easily crossed-referenced and played around with, making something easier to confirm.

You can keep telling yourself that all you want, doesn't make it true:

"Bacterial DNA in plant cells must have come from bacteria"

Please provide an alternate "interpretation" of equal or better value

With all due respect, that is a bogus, false dichotomy that YECs/IDers always try to pull.  I would love to see someone try to pull that in a court of law: "Your Honor, no one was there to witness the murder so we can't know what actually happened.  Forensic science is a *historical science* that is not as reliable as *observational science*."  Baloney.

Observation that we can repeatedly make: Eukaryotic cells (animals, plants, fungi, protists, algae) contain bacterial DNA and other bacterial components that are an integral part of eukaryotic cells involved in metabolism and photosynthesis.

Conclusion: The non-eukaryotic, bacterial components in eukaryotic cells must have come from bacteria.

Do you have a better conclusion that is more straghtforward and logical than this one?

I never said it was more reliable. I said historical science has more to do with the interpretation of limited data, but with observations that we can make in the lab, we have a better opportunity to cross-reference data and repeat the experiment, and slightly change the factors to get more data. Going with your analogy, we can show that DNA found at a crime scene matches with a suspect from a murder case using observable science, but it's up to us to interpret the data to show how it got there. The interpretations of the data matter, perhaps more so in historical science. If we were lucky, there would be data that would point to one interpretation over another, but that's not always the case.

Interpretations are equally important all the way around.  There's no such thing as "historical sciences" vs "observational sciences."  There are just as many inferences and interpretations in so-called "observational science," and there are just as many observations and experiments and hypothesis testing in so-called "historical sciences."

"Bacterial DNA in plant cells must have come from bacteria"

zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz

Impressive come back

I almost went with ZZZZZZZ, but I felt that would be like yelling so I kept it all lower case.

In post 39, tbwp10 correctly wrote (in part): "That still leaves us with bacterial DNA in plant cells, the presence of which we're still left to explain.   Under an intelligent design view that would seem to leave us with two options: (1) either the past evolutionary history of plant cells is the result of an intelligent designer, or (2) an intelligent designer has falsely made it look like plant cells have an evolutionary history." I would be interested in TruthMuse's reply to that.

In post 40, TruthMuse quoted Murray Eden, MIT, as saying: "No currently existing formal language can tolerate random changes in the symbol sequence which express its sentence. Meaning is almost invariably destroyed." I would be interested in knowing whether or not that is actually true as TruthMuse seems to be understanding it. Yes, meaning is *almost* invariably destroyed--but not *always*. Random changes to a symbol sequence, with myriad copies of the sequence, could lead from one sensible sentence to another, with lots of nonsensical sentences also resulting but thrown onto the slag heap, the way many unsuccessful organisms get left on the slag heap of evolution while few exhibit positive mutations.

One thing I don't understand is why arguing for the existence of an intelligent designer would seem to be also arguing for the existence of the Christian God. 

I'm practically convinced that if we're ever persuaded, by weight of evidence, to accept the concept of an intelligent creator, all the religions of the world will need to make a bonfire of all their holy works & start again.

It wouldn't.  In fact, technically an argument for intelligent agency would not necessarily seem to even require a supernatural agency.  I suppose one could imagine genetically engineered life by an alien race put on earth for some kind of experiment.  Improbable and begs the question of how the alien race originated, but strictly speaking, "intelligent designer" = "supernatural agent" doesn't seem to logically follow.

Well, if you keep your inquiry limited to only life, I suppose an alien lifeform would seem to do the trick. The trouble with that is life's environment is also part of the process; all of the ingredients for life are also part of the requirements. By requirements, we are talking about gravity, the expansion force of the universe, electrical charges, etc. Those types of things also are part and parcel part of the equation. Most other belief systems have something arising out of the universe, creating gods, demi-gods, all of the rest of creation. While Christianity doesn't do that, it is Creation Ex Nihilo, so it covers all of the bases revealing that the universe did not create itself or always was.

you're confusing arguments for theism with arguments for intelligent design

You cannot limit any topic to the cherry-picked variables to get the result you want; you have to look at all of the variables in play.

and you can't compare apples to oranges

Very true, natural selection should not be equated with something that builds with a plan, purpose, and design; it doesn't have a conscious opinion on what needs to occur and be maintained.

You're going off the rails again.  No one was talking about natural selection but similarities and distinctions about the difference between arguments for intelligent design and arguments for theism.  There are similarities for sure, but also important differences.

I'm not going off the rails; I've been consistent, the processes are all important; as the old saying goes, "looks can be deceiving". Just because of what something looks like, it can give us the wrong impression! Making declarations about billion of a year ago events due to similarities and dissimilarities you see in fossils is clearly not sound on looks alone. The process is either sound, or it isn't; from start to finish, a common ancestor isn't a sound hypothesis; there are just too many obstacles. It is an uphill fight all the way, even with an intelligence guiding the process. With each passing generation, the amount of things that could go wrong increases, the amount of things that have to correct increases, the amount of precise work required to cause things to operate increases, and the driving force for this is what? Nature typically moves in the opposite direction, so evolution would be an unnatural process, even supernatural, taking in the amount of specific functional complexity it is claimed to have overcome to give us the life we see today.

I didn't say you're inconsistent in your view.  I said you changed the subject.  We we're talking about something else.