The Wrath of the Intelligent Designer - any challenges?

[jporter]

On Sep 28, 2005, at 12:28 PM, rcfchess at aol.com wrote:

> I think it has less to do with the "correctness" of any given idea 
> than the separation of church and state. Please don't tell me that 
> creationism is an idea separate from religion; that would make it 
> hypocritical as well as stupid.

Using the creation story v. the big bang in order to evaluate
the validity of either is fruitless since it leads to infinite regress
in both instances: Who designed "The Designer", and, what
preceded the origin of time? It is not what the debate is really
about.

However, one can start mid-stream: by explaining  the origin
of life from the inanimate universe from which it emerged  Science
has not yet been able to accomplish this. If science is able to
achieve this, the proof that validates the theory will be the
creation of life "in the test tube" from inanimate building blocks.

Such an accomplishment, however, would lend more evidence to
Intelligent Design than to  an explanation based on "randomness,"
since the life so produced would be an artifact of culture, and no
one argues convincingly  that cultural artifacts are anything but the
result of intelligent design, or at least, a hybridization of 
intelligent
design and chance.

jody

Religion and Science are obviously both cultural artifacts. The meta-
question would be- what is the ultimate source of such artifacts- are
they spontaneous inspirations, or do they flow from some "higher"
intelligence? Any explanation based on a "higher intelligence"
is immediately confronted with questions about free will, good
and evil, sacred and profane, etc. Explanations for the ultimate
source of cultural artifacts based on randomness or chance avoid
that dilemma, but leave open the whole question of what is ethical
behavior, and what is not, and why.