I think you make a common mistake here. A Creator needn’t—and for these discussions shouldn’t—be tied to a particular Creator. It has nothing to do with religion, any religion. The fact is the Darwinism, which is indisputable in most areas, does a poor job—or is mum—on the origins of life. As far as theories concerning the origins of life, a Creator is a distinct possibility. Dawkins seems to admit as much, yet opines that even IF there was a Creator, that it was a more intelligent being from another world. To me, you can easily slice that to be what many people mean by a “Creator God”. As an aside, if there is such a being, such as Dawkins makes allowance for, the question arises who created the world the Creator of our world exists in, and so on.
The point is that discussing if we were Created is not, and should not be, tied to religion of any flavor.
If you say so. It’s still tied to faith and that’s not compatible with science. You wanna call ID a theory, that’s fine. But it’s a religious theory, not a scientific theory. What is this Creator if not some divine being? I’m not saying that’s not a possibility; hell, I’m agnostic. But it doesn’t belong in a biology classroom, because there is no way to prove it. You could just as easily suppose that we all live in the matrix and what we call life is simply just a computer program or that we descended from some ancient alien civilization. Speculate all you like, but don’t try passing it off as science.
I also feel that it’s such a cop out for ID subscribers to belittle Darwinism for the very reason that it doesn’t try to posit a definitive answer to what started life. It’s honest to say we don’t know. It’s dishonest to say that because scientists don’t know the full story, a) what they do know is bunk, and b) our story is much more accurate.
You’re missing the point of Brown Eyed Girl’s post: regardless of wether the question of a creator can be tied to a specific religion or not, the discussion is fundamentally a spiritual or philosophic question, not a scientific question, and as such, should be taught in a science class.
That’s not the idea of evolution. Evolution just deals with the change in life, not how it began. If creationists have a beef with that, they should tackle the theory of biogenesis (which is actually on much shakier ground than evolution). Incidentally, many “evolutionists” (such a stupid word) believe that a Creator made the initial bit of life, and that the natural process of evolution took it from there. There’s no science behind that, but it’s a lot less nuttier than throwing out all the evidence for evolution.
I will add that I don’t think it’s wrong at all to question and explore ideas like ID at all. I simply that the forum needs to be the proper one. There are many college-level courses that I think should be available in high school grade levels, public or private. Philosophy and comparative religion were my favorite courses in college. It’s a pleasure to see diversity and innovation in thinking, a hallmark of our humanness. I don’t necessarily agree with many of the sharp minds that came before my time, but they contributed quite a bit to my own independent thinking.
I couldn’t begin to say whether ID has any merit as a philosophical idea, but it stands a much better chance of being taken seriously if it’s adherents stop trying to pass it off as the end-all, be-all scientific explanation for our existence. Take it to Philosophy 101 and see if it can muster there.
I can’t find it with Google, and I couldn’t find the Pit thread, but basically Stein said something about “those atheists who knocked down the World Trade Center.”
Maybe it does and maybe it doesn’t. So far the most solid explaination I’ve seen of ID is that it just tries to knock holes in Darwinism. It doesn’t seem to have any ideas of its own.
By the way, it should come as no surprise to anybody, but enthusiastic fans of “Expelled” include the Confabulating Doughboy himself, Rush Limbaugh:
"Darwinism, of course, does not permit for the existence of a supreme being, a higher power, or a God. "
“No intelligence allowed” has never rung more true.
Question: why are the IDiots so obsessed with using “Darwinisim” to label their opponents? Is “evolution” that scary a term?
As I understand it, it’s largely a rhetorical sleight-of-hand, because they can point out how some more modern refinements in the field of evolutionary biology differ from Darwin’s original proposed model (e.g. gradualism vs. punctuated equilibrium) and say, “See, now they think Darwin wuz wrong!”
I don’t read “how we came to be” as the origin of life, but as the origin of human life. Even if a god planted the first RNA, we are still descended from (and are) apes, and that’s what bugs creationist types.
As for the origin of life, there are a lot more than two possibilities. There is being seeded on purpose or accidentally from space, there is a deity, there is evolution of self-replicating molecules into RNA, there is life forming in clay, in thermal vents, and probably a bunch more I’ve never heard of. But do you think a compromise of teaching god may have created life but humans evolves according to neo-Darwinian principles would satisfy these clowns?
It’s also an attempt to paint evolution as a 19th century construct and to convey negative connotations of “survival of the fittest” - at least that’s the way it comes across.
There’s nothing new about using negative or misleading terminology to attempt to define your opponents (i.e. “pro-abortionist” or “The Democrat Party”).
Being termed a “Darwinist” is still a helluva lot more respectable than being a creationist.
To be scrupulously fair, couldn’t the ID crowd rightly make a similar complaint about being referred to as “creationists?” The notion of Intelligent Design may not actually be any more scientific than Biblical creationism, but it’s fairly distinct in its public approach to scriptural authority.
ID’ers could reasonably point to the “creationist” label as an attempt to paint them as indistinguishable from the Bible-toting crowd; when in reality Intelligent Design makes no definite claims about the identity of its hypothetical space alien (or indeed about much of anything).
Also, lumping Intelligent Design in with “creationism” makes it more difficult to distinguish it from my own pet theory, Swarm Design; which is entirely distinct from either ID or evolution, and which I fully expect to be taught in schools alongside those theories once my exciting and informational film is made.
Regardless of position… both sides seem to have an issue with how life arose ORIGINALLY. An uncaused, eternal God… I think most people have a problem with.
So, how exactly does evolution contradict Intelligent Design? Why can’t they have their cake and eat it too? I mean, if IDers want to say god jumpstarted the whole process, how does evolution continuing the process negate their belief? I don’t get that part. And how invested in god as the intelligent designer are they? Could it be an alien civilization? Well, I guess then you’d have to explain how that civilization came to be.
I don’t know. It just seems so pointless to me. We can speculate all we like, but we’ll never really know, right? Do we have to know? Does it really change anything?
Unfortunately for that approach, it fails on its own merits. Intelligent Design says nothing more about Creation or abiogenesis than does Evolutionary theory.
They cannot teach Johnson’s philosophy in science class, because it has nothing to do with science.
They can’t teach Dembski’s “statistics” in science class because his statistics are bullshit and have nothing to do with the development of life.
That leaves only Behe’s incomplete mousetrap. Unfortunately for the ID crowd, when Behe pretends to wear his scientist hat, he does not address the issue of (abio)genesis, either, and accepts much of neo-Darwinian science. His only claim is that at selected points of history, an Intelligent Designer had to have intervened in (not replaced) neo-Darwinian evolution. Since he offers no evidence for divine intervention at the beginning of life and has had debunked all his claims for an Intelligent Designer shaping evolutionary development, that pretty much leaves the whole ID movement outside the realm of science.
(Phillip E. Johnson is a lawyer who believes that secular humanists are going to destroy civilization by eliminating a belief in a god and he has decided to make biology the battlefield on which to thwart them. All of his publications are opinion pieces trying to demonstrate why evolutionary science must be false on philisophical grounds that ignore actual science (in whivch he has no training).
William Dembski attempts to claim that evolution could not have occurred because it is simply improbable from a statistical perspective. No serious mathematician, statician, or actuary has found any of his arguments tto be anything other than laughable (and I have heard that he got some of his math wrong, as well, although I cannot confirm that).)
