More Intelligent Design

[monster]

So what if there is a god, but s/he is actually a product of evolution rather than the mastermind behind it? What if one twig of the hairless ape branch developed extreme intelligence, telepathic capability and an ability to be invisible to the human eye? As a group they are omnipresent and omniscient, and individually are physically similar to humans.

Maybe about 2000 years ago they got a little worried about the human population and the possibility of it’s self-destruction and determined to intervene? Being genetically close, they decided to provide an advisor to the human race. By cross-breeding with the humans they produced an ambassador accepted by and visible to the humans and yet able to see and communicate with themselves. The human mother was known as Mary. The rest, as they say, is history.

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Is this really a less valid proposal than Intelligent Design?

[xoxoxoBruce]

Welcome to the Cellar, Monster.
limey expat, huh. This place is getting awfully civilized.

Oh, by the way... the creative writing section is further down.

[Urbane Guerrilla]

The January 16th Mallard Fillmore has a good intelligent-design joke.

[wolf]

You could have linked to it, you know ...

[mrnoodle]

All the fighting and such is fun, but I don't see what part of evolutionary science discredits the notion of intelligent design. Let's assume that everything in existence evolved from some prior form, so on and so on back for gazillions of years. There's no proof of that, of course, but from the few connections we've been able to make, there's a relationship amongst similar species, etc.

The science of figuring out those connections and hypothesizing what earlier forms might have been is one thing. Mandating that the only possible beginning is a big bang, or forcing children to learn that we all come from a single-celled organism 1 x 10^1000000000 years ago is, to me, just as self-serving, and just as big a stretch as saying "God started it all". What makes you so sure you're right? Your "proof" of man's origins ends at the Paleolithic era, and most of that is inference and guesswork.

I don't think your big bang trumps my God. In even the most skeptical of minds, they are only on equal footing, at best.

[Urbane Guerrilla]

Originally Posted by mrnoodle

All the fighting and such is fun
<snip> just as big a stretch as saying "God started it all".
<smaller snip>I don't think your big bang trumps my God. In even the most skeptical of minds, they are only on equal footing, at best.

I'm a believer myself, Noodle -- because I don't know for certain
why the Big Bang went and banged. You could say God did it, and speak no worse nonsense than anybody else. However, don't ever mistake science -- a way of knowing -- with a belief system of any kind. This is the intellectual failure of the anti-science religionists, and the pitfall you can fall into if you have never studied science, but only belief systems -- philosophy and metaphysics, if you like. These people mistake, or purport to mistake, a method of knowing for a manner of believing. Then they purport to be puzzled when they are laughed at.

This is the sort of thing Unitarians and Episcopalians, to name two religious brand-names, come up with, trying to interface spirituality with natural history -- a via media. There's dumb religion and there's smart religion, which leads me to...

Is there not a big-D Divine wisdom in a Creation that goes of itself? Look at all the trouble it saves, not having to bust a miracle for every species, and having been at that for 650 million terrestrial years straight. It's also the most divinely ethical way to do it -- miracles, after all, look suspiciously like God is cheating, fudging with the established natural laws. You could allege that God isn't really cheating but instead following some "higher-order law" or something. This is less an explanation than a dodge.

[mrnoodle]

Originally Posted by Urbane Guerrilla

However, don't ever mistake science -- a way of knowing -- with a belief system of any kind.

That's just it. Much of science is belief. Sure, there are lots of things that are scientifically proven. But even certain empirical data relies on the opinion of the observer as much as it does hard fact. Pick any newspaper on any day of the week, and you'll find a story of a researcher who has found new evidence (that was there all along) that completely refutes earlier beliefs about something. Not something like "grass is green because of chlorophyll". But almost everything else that's not so cut and dried.

It's almost like scientists who are also atheists are bound and determined to find a pattern, but deny that this absence of chaos could have anything but a chaotic origin. I personally believe that it's vanity in many cases -- they want to feel like they're discovering things alllll on their own, and there's no intelligence higher than theirs in the cosmos. It would be humbling to have to admit that all of the "Eureka!" moments you had were merely moments of enlightenment that allowed you to see someone else's bigger picture.

All that aside, my main point is: some may have you believe that science is purely a game of facts, but if you stripped away the conjecture, theory, wishful thinking, and yes, pure faith, you'd be left with very little.

[Happy Monkey]

Originally Posted by mrnoodle

Pick any newspaper on any day of the week, and you'll find a story of a researcher who has found new evidence (that was there all along) that completely refutes earlier beliefs about something.

That's what separates the different definitions of "belief" between science and religion. Scientists don't believe in theories in the same way religious people believe in God - if a new experiment throws doubt on an old theory, and it is reproducible and verified, the old theory is out the window, and science is none the worse. In fact, it is some the better. That's not a weakness of science, it's a strength.

[richlevy]

Here is an example of how to go about changing a theory that was untestable from the beginning.

Church Tradition of Limbo Heading for, Well, Limbo

But limbo, that netherworld of unbaptized babies, worthy pagans and even a few Muslims, is very much on the way out--another lesson that while belief in God does not change, the things people believe about Him most certainly do.<script language="JavaScript"> var bnum=new Number(Math.floor(99999999 * Math.random())+1); document.writeln("

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<!-- END:AdSolution-Tag 4.1 --> This month, 30 theologians from around the world met at the Vatican to discuss, among other dilemmas, the problem of what happens to babies who die without baptism.

The conferees do not like the word for it, but what they were really doing, as theological advisers to Pope Benedict XVI, was finally disposing of limbo a concept that was never official church doctrine but has been an enduring medieval theory of a blissful state among the departed, somehow different from both heaven and hell.

Unlike purgatory, a sort of waiting room to heaven for those with some venal faults, the theory of limbo consigned children outside heaven on account of original sin alone.

The theory has long been out of favor anyway, as theologically questionable and unnecessarily harsh.

Before you pagans begin celebrating, note that they have not decided what will replace limbo. They could send the babies to heaven and everyone else to purgatory.

And it has some real-life consequences. The church is growing most in poor places like Africa and Asia where infant mortality remains high. While the concerns of the experts reconsidering limbo are more theological, it does not hurt the church's future if an African mother who has lost a baby can receive more hopeful news from her priest in 2006 than, say, an Italian mother did 100 years ago.

What kind of cynic would propose that theological judgements are politically motivated?

[Urbane Guerrilla]

Originally Posted by mrnoodle

That's just it. Much of science is belief. Sure, there are lots of things that are scientifically proven. But even certain empirical data relies on the opinion of the observer as much as it does hard fact. . . All that aside, my main point is: some may have you believe that science is purely a game of facts, but if you stripped away the conjecture, theory, wishful thinking, and yes, pure faith, you'd be left with very little.

Watch it, Nood; in your first four sentences you're in the very pitfall I warned against.

Now your last sentence is better thought, but what all that is for is to find new lines of inquiry, when you give it a good look. From conjecture and/or wishful thinking comes the quest to truly know, by in large part finding facts and proof thereof.

As others have put it, really a godly endeavor.

We have as great a hunger for knowledge as for religiosity -- just look at how much intellectual effort has been spent at each.

[Elspode]

1. Ever wonder where all that stuff that falls into black holes goes? I like to pretend that it comes out in another dimension. Maybe it accumulates in a big cosmic garbage bag until the bag breaks like the wimpy one in the Hefty commercials, creating another Big Bang there.

2. Until Science matured enough (note I didn't say 'evolved'...that would have been like making a bad pun) to explain many things, religion *was* politics. Every political system is nothing more than a set of rules and regulations with someone at the top of an hierarchy anyway. So, instead of Freedom and the Constitution, substitute God and The Bible, and - voila'! Religion as Government!

3. Just because Science can't explain everything yet doesn't mean that Religion can...and vice versa. Both are fallible. Both have merits. Yes, there, I've said it. I'm a religious pragmatist, and I like it that way. I want my science and my deities and invisible powers too. If this was a free country, I could believe this without anyone trying to make me do otherwise by teaching me their unprovable crap. I'm not trying to teach anyone my unprovable crap.

Teach what is verifiable as Science, teach the rest as Philosophy, or Religion, or Sociology...whatever. Use it as Show and Tell, maybe.

[Happy Monkey]

Nothing in science discredits intelligent design, because intelligent design is unfalsifiable. And because it is unfalsifiable, it is not science. And because it is not science, it should not be taught in a science class.

[xoxoxoBruce]

we all come from a single-celled organism 1 x 10^1000000000 years ago is, to me, just as self-serving, and just as big a stretch as saying "God started it all".

I'd believe God started it all, even that he planned how it would develop from that single cell. I won't, however, believe he's had his hand in since it started, only that he wound it up and let it go.

[Urbane Guerrilla]

Sorry, Wolf, I searched up the King Features Mallard Fillmore and they didn't have anything newer than about mid December 2005. At a guess without looking, is that Bruce Tinsley's site?

[Urbane Guerrilla]

Right you are, Happy Monkey, and well nutshelled.