I have an odd question. I understand that intelligent design is a tool/theory used by evolution deniers. But I am not exactly sure what it means, since what I have read comes across as intellectually dishonest. “Teach both sides” etc, when there AREN’T two sides.
However, I am a religious person who believes in evolution AND creation, etc. Since I believe in a supreme being who created everything, and we can OBSERVE evolution and all of the evidence for it, only idiots deny evolution. Therefore, evolution happens, and god chooses it to happen.
So my questions:
Would this belief make me something of an intelligent design subscriber?
Why is this seemingly simple explanation, that god works via evolution, so controversial for religious people? Religious folk are fond of sayings like, “God works in mysterious ways”, and for most people evolution is not at all obvious and fairly mysterious until it is studied more.
Nah, there’s a whole lot more to ID than simply believing that God had a hand in it. What you describe is more like “theistic evolution”… God did, indeed, create the organisms we have today, but He used evolution to do so.
To help with your second question, there’s a graph here which shows that over 50% of mainstream Protestants believe that evolution best describes the origin of human life, while less than 25% of fundamental Protestants believe the same.
No. Intelligent Design presupposes everything in the Bible is literal.
It’s controversial among people who believe the Bible is literal truth. Many religions take Genesis to be metaphorical and do not believe the Bible is literal truth. Catholics, for instance: the Catholic teaching is that the Bible says nothing about the length of the day in Genesis, so there’s no contradiction with the Biblical and scientific time frame. The belief that God causes evolution is fairly common, actually; it’s just that the Bible literalists make a big stink over anything that contradicts what the Bible says.
If you want a label, try out “theistic evolution” or “evolutionary creationism”:
IMO, it runs afoul of a shave with Occam’s razor. But it’s a way for a scientist who is a religious believer to reconcile their views, and has some prominent proponents. Robert Bakker, for instance.
not necessarily. Some of the leading ID proponents are not literalists (Behe, Demski).
The answer to the OP, is that ID is more than just a belief in “Creation” on a grand scale, though. It involves a specific set of premises about biology. Their most significant assertion is that some things in biology (they claim) cannot have evolved by Natural Selection. The claim is that they can’t be forther “reduced” to a more primative or develomental form, so therefore they must have been “designed” by non-natural means. Their canaonical anaology is that of a mousetrap, which they claim cannot be a mousetrapp, or serve any function at all if any part is missing. This principle is called “irreducible complexity.” While a number of alleged examples are pointed to by IDists (eyeballs and wings are typical examples, and Behe’s flagella is the closest attempt to anything superficially sophisticated), all them are fairly easily refutable, though. No genuine example of irredicible complexity has been demonstrated to exist.
If ypou believe God created the universe or that “God created evolution,” you are a theistic evolutionist, not an IDist.
Intelligent Design argues that some features are" irreducibly complex", and therefore much have been designed. It has been thoroughly debunked by real scientists. But in it’s most basic form, it doesn’t argue for any particular religion even if it has been used by Christian groups to attack evolution.
You seem to be getting at the “day age” interpretation of genesis.
I don’t think that the Catholic Church officially endorses this interpretation. But either way, Day Age has many problems versus modern cosmology, tectonics, paleontology, etc.
The pretense behind ID is that it’s not religious (this is so they can attempt to get it into classrooms as “science” rather than as a religious belief). They try to argue that a “designer” can be inferred, but that they aren’t saying it’s “God,” just some kind of magical, supernatural “designer.” Could be anybody. Could be Christ or the Lord. Could even be Ha Shem. They’re not saying, they’re just saying.
I think what Big T was talking about that book… Of Pandas and [something or other]… that was shown to have been a Creationist text where they had substituted “Intelligent Design” for “Creationism” in the text, but left everything else the same. But I don’t think Behe is a YEC, and he’s the major proponent of ID.
As noted, you have described Creationism, not Intelligent Design.
bolding mine
This has nothing to do with the Catholic position. The RCC recognizes the poetic nature of Genesis 1:1 through 2:3 and makes no claims regarding the length of days or anything else. The format of the poem describing creation is a set of pairings adding to six days, matching the creation of light (day 1) to the creation of the sun, moon, and stars, (day 4), he creation of the sky and ocean (day 2) to the creation of birds and fish, (day 5), and the creation of the earth, (day 3), to the creation of animals living on the earth, (day 6), then completed on a seventh day of rest. It is all poetic imagery designed to show that the world/universe was created in an orderly fashion by a God who imposed order on chaos. There is no connection between the Creation account and the scientific information about cosmology, biology, or evolution.
Beyond that, the scientific discoveries are accepted as established as long as one does not draw a conclusion that God could not be a part of it. The assumption of the church is that there is a great plan of creation and salvation, but that it unfolds in its own time and in its own way according to God’s will, without God actually tinkering with it (aside from the special cases of His involvement in the lives of particular humans and the Incarnation of Jesus.)
The smoking gun that they had done this (they literally went through an substituted the words “intelligent design” for “creationism”) was a botched cut and paste that left the words, “cintelligent design proponentsists” in the text.
Intelligent Design doesn’t simply mean that an intelligent creator made the universe. It’s specifically used as an argument against evolution. “Evolution isn’t what brought about the world as we see it, it was intelligent design.”
So where does that leave you, as someone who believes in both the divinely supernatural and evolution? Well, you’re a deist.
Join the august ranks of such individuals as George Washington, Benjamin Franklin and Mark Twain, though the idea that they would be atheists were they alive today is an arguable one.
PBS did an excellent program on the Dover trial where they explained how Of Pandas and People got shredded by the prosecution. I think it was a *Frontline *show.
You may be accurate, but nothing posted, so far, actually supports your conjecture. TThe entire reason that the phrase Theistic Evolution was coined was to describe theists, (those who beliefe in a personal god) who accept evolutionary science. Deists, generally, have a belief in an impersonal god that might have kicked off the universe, but that have little or no concern about its workings or the people who inhabit it.
Why is this a problem? ID can encompass evolution without any problems. You can have God provide the Act of Creation - the Big Bang - and let everything progress from there, with or without further interventions by God. ‘Let there be light’ indeed.
I don’t see where people have really addressed this. It doesn’t have a simple answer, but I’ll try to toss in some history, which itself will be greatly simplified. Can’t help it. Whole books are written on this.
Much of the problem goes back to the original Darwinian controversy. People in general, Christians and western Europeans and capitalists and imperialists and just about everybody that were affected by those isms, saw humans as the pinnacle. God had created humanity to have dominion over the earth, as the Bible says, and by extrapolation white civilized believers had dominion over non-white heathens. A neutral evolution, any notion that humans are mere descendents of apes, upsets all that superiority.
Opponents went off in two directions. Some retreated into protestations of biblical literalism, or at least a literalism that could be read to support every notion that since their God created them, they were indeed special. Others ostensibly embraced evolution but subverted it to confirm their superiority. This was the route of Social Darwinism, of survival of the fittest, of wealth capitalism, and of eugenics. Their dominion over lesser others confirmed their being the pinnacle of evolution. The two models were closely correlated to different levels of class and money, not surprisingly.
Today’s creationism is tied to this kind of sense of them vs. us that’s exemplified in the fundamentalist Christian dentist who is a power on the Texas School Board, the one who explained his adding conservative passages to the guidelines by “Somebody has to stand up to the experts.” Experts is a code word for all those who challenge their beliefs under a guise of science or secularism or liberalism or whatever set of alien values they espouse. That’s why creationism is now almost entirely a subset of conservatism (or perhaps the other way round).
Creationism can’t work for a myriad of reasons, but the biggest one is that it can’t answer “created what” and “when”? Evolution doesn’t address the creation of life in any way. If God created life and then left it alone, then evolution could be entirely true in every way and nothing would change. But creationists can’t accept that because it cedes all knowledge to the experts. So God has to intercede. But when? Does God create the phyla? The classes? Individual species? Each person? They can’t say. And don’t say. But evolution is totally concerned with every tiny change because each change is an answer to a question about why the change happened. But God makes all change happen so God must be the answer. So every claim of evolution must be rejected.
The issue is therefore that answers can come from an authority that is not God, not religion, not their particular sect’s version of religion. Their entire claim to moral authority is questioned and challenged. If they are wrong on such a basic issue of authority then why shouldn’t all their declarations of authority be questioned? And in fact these are challenged, by forces called secularism and liberalism and science and those others. Which is why fundamentalism is conflated with conservatism. At one level, for a large number of people, they are the same thing.
Intelligent design started with Behe, who is neither a creationist or a fundamentalist. In fact, to the proper audiences (like the New York Times) he says he accepts evolution, except when applied to structures he considers irreducibly complex.
The real creationists, finding a book by a real scientist on intelligent design, co-opted the term to apply to creationism, as the case of the textbook indicates. Behe, perhaps because he is getting big speaker fees and more attention than he could expect at Lehigh, hasn’t announced that they are all wet. But the term was borrowed by creationists, not created by them.