Intelligent Design - the Creationists' Latest Wheeze

[jporter]

On Oct 3, 2005, at 9:10 AM, Malignd wrote:


> <<Yet the zeal of the anti-ID crowd rivals that of the
> evangelicals.>>
>
> This is wholly unprovable, is the same false parallel
> that Rob Jackson (and others) used, and is likely
> false.  People are correctly upset by intelligent
> design being taught as science because it is
> non-science, because it is a criticism of evolutionary
> biology that has, finally, nothing to do with biology.
>  It is an argument based on faulty logic that works
> from false premises and fails even on the premises
> from which it does work.
>

Why, do you suppose, that close to half of Americans
believe that some form of teleological explanation, be it
literal biblical interpretation up to and including ID, is
correct? (It's actually probably greater than half, but that
was one estimate I heard.) It's because they choose to.

Several generations, at least, have had Darwinian dogma
preached to them, religion-free, in public schools through-
out the land. Half of them, at least, have freely rejected it.

It is a great victory for those of us who appreciate the
evolving theory of evolution that a large segment of
those people who need a teleological version of reality
have come to the point where they at least accept the
design, the complexity of it, all worked out by the meticulous
application of experimental science, especially on the
molecular and sub-molecular levels.

I do not need to control their beliefs in God. If they want
to blame it all on God, at least many of them have come
to accept the incredible detail, the vast stretches of space
and time, and the realization that the earth is a tiny speck
of dust. This is progress.


> <<If you "believe" in evolution, than you must still
> explain religion in it's many forms, and any other
> form of culture, including science.>>
>
> This also is false and intentionally confuses terms.
> One doesn’t “believe” in evolution in any way similar
> to the way one might believe in religion.  One
> acknowledges the strength of the theory to address the
> question of speciation, which it does and has been
> doing for a century and a half.  This entails no
> obligation to explain religion.
>

How would you know how "one might believe in
religion"? Why shouldn't any theory which purports
to have unravelled the mystery of speciation need
to explain a huge part of our species?

> <<Furthermore, you must assume that consciousness
> preceded religion, or, you are left with the
> possibility that religion caused, or helped to cause,
> the further evolution of consciousness.>>
>
> Of course consciousness preceded religion.  Religion
> (separate from whatever one cares to believe about
> “God”) is wholly man-made.
>

So, if religion is purely cultural, where did culture come
from, or consciousness, or life, if you want to kick it back
that far. Darwinism has no answer. To his credit, Darwin
recognized that, but the majority of people who feel
threatened by those vast numbers who believe that God
is responsible for life, tend to downplay this and focus on
the explanatory power of Darwin's theory. The ID crowd
made their mistake by focusing on complexity and assuming
it cannot be explained by Darwinian logic. It can. However,
many biological systems cannot, and are more elegantly
accounted for by mechanisms other than Darwin's triad.

Furthermore, the majority of evolution of life on earth was
concerned with sub-molecular, molecular and cellular
evolution- that was the really hard part- and took most of
the time. Multicellular organisms were then relatively "easy"
and took much less time.

Most importantly, prokaryotes, often exchange whole
groups of genes, between members of their own species
and even other species. This cannot be explained by
Darwinism and violates some of its basic tenets. The
whole rest of evolution proceeded from these simplest
of organisms, and all life on earth is dependent on them
still.

How technical do want this discussion to get?
It's up to you.


> <<Besides arguments over the origin of life, there is
> the argument over "knowing", i.e., when did religion,
> belief, faith, etc. originate with respect to
> consciousness? Was there ever a time when
> consciousness was purely secular?>>
>
> Yes.
>

Perhaps.  How about language?


> <<And quite apart from whether or not God exists,
> there exists the possibility that believing- and those
> parts of the brain involved in belief- may have played
> a causative role in the further evolution of the
> mental apparatus.>>
>
> And, if so, the same can be said for thinking about
> anything that contributes to complexity of ideation.
>
> <<Did faith gave rise to reason, or reason to faith?
> From a physical, biological point of view it's
> difficult to say.>>
>
> I’d say it is indeed difficult to say from a
> biological point of view.  It would also be difficult
> to say how many seats in Wrigley Field from a
> biological point of view.
>

Not at all. Just ask the biological entities who designed
Wrigley Field why they choose that number of seats.

jody