Intelligent Design

The Core RPGC Main Forum
1

Or, “What have I gotten myself into?”.

Backstory: I do some voluntary writing and whatnot for the school paper of my university. Now over the summer, the project I signed up for is to write a debate about that thing coughbullshitcough called intelligent design, since it seems to have reached our shores as well. Dear lord on both accounts. As such, I am interested to hear some opinions about it.

Yes, I am aware of the Search button, but all the old threads are several months or more old. It doesn’t really matter, but it doesn’t hurt to see if newer peeps have something to say.

Since it’s a debate, I’ll have to nuance it to present both sides’ opinions. Oh, this is gonna smart.

puts on sunglasses against the gleam of Sin’s fangs :wink:

2

This is actually a fairly good summary of the concept as well as its various weaknesses. I don’t think RPGC as a whole would really be a good judge because ID is typically believed to be merely Judeo-Christian Creationism in disguise. That misunderstanding though comes about because of some Creationists trying to relabel themselves as THE Intelligent Design. Creationism is one form of Intelligent Design, but not all Intelligent Design is J-C Creationism.

3

Ack. Lovely. Even Europe isn’t invulnerable to stupidity I suppose. Ehehe.

4

There are two magazines I read that take great pleasure in dragging things like Intelligent Design over a hot bed of coals. Naked and screaming. Skeptic and Skeptical Inquirer. If you have access to an electronic journal database, I’d recommend taking a look at both of them. Any issue of either from the past couple years will have something concerning ID. The bias should be obvious, but the articles will at least give you the names/places published of the work of the IDers.

5

I’m not sure what it is you’re supposed to do… Is it a both sides of ID paper? Or an ID vs evolution paper?

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984: Thanks, I’ll have a look at it :slight_smile:

Star: Yeah, but don’t worry, there’s no chance it’ll creep into the schools here. POSSIBLY in the semi-religios private schools, but they’re already being hounded by the… whatever it would be called. The school department of Sweden, I suppose. Actually, admitting to be religious will often give you odd looks in most places, and as such there’s no way anything like ID would be accepted in the university world. At least not in the science department. Possibly in the religion studies as a crackpot theory.

RPT: That sounds intruiging. I should be able to get to those journals through the college library databases.

Sin: Well, ideally I should give both sides a chance to speak, so I’ll just present what ID [STRIKE]wants to be[/STRIKE] stands for - then I’m free to trash it with any means I can. As far as I know, most people here haven’t heard about it. Only the chief of the school paper seemed to have any idea what I was talking about when I brought it up.

7

An important issue you might want to discuss is why Intelligent Design is completely irrelevant to science classes, but still relevant to philosophy classes (see St. Thomas Aquinas). An interesting thought is also how someone who actually THINKS can realize that intelligent design can coexist with evolution peacefully, since the mechanical workings of the world and the spiritual meaning behind it are completely separated. Scientific fact should not be disputed by religious theory anymore than scientific fact proves atheism.

I personally do not agree with intelligent design, but it is a philosophically defensable point (NOT a scientifically defensable point at all).

8

ID is a dreadfully silly idea, but he who pays the piper picks the tune. Intelligent communities will teach science and succeed in the scientific economy, while these backwater ones will be an interesting side-show amusement.

9

I bashed ID in one of my biology reports and got 100% on it :slight_smile:

Well, it wasn’t hard. The E-Journal archive I was using had 99% of the journals relevant to ID bashing ID and the other 1% remaining diplomatically neutral (and at the same time not making a point!)

10

I can give you a summary of it or some of the the other arguments if you need it.

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what’s ID I believe in no religion just evolution

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It’s the idea that life is so complicated, that evolution would have taken far longer than it did and some higher being had to speed it up and/or makie sure that it came out the way it did.

13

Intelligent design is the belief that evolution occurred not because of natural selection, randomness, whatever-other-mechanism-for-evolution-there-is but because of some supernatural being/force willing it to occur. What scientists see as natural selection or genetic drift would be defined under Intelligent Design as an event or series of events occurring because of some outside force choosing for it to occur. The main fault with ID isn’t what it teaches at face value (I see it as a perfectly fine philisophical/theological point of debate); its fault is that many of its proponents choose to present it as a science when it meets pretty much zero criteria to be defined as an actual scientific theory.

14

Its essentially a fatalistic argument.

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Or optimism come true, depending on the POV.

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No, no, definitely not “optimism come true.” For the “come true” part, it would need to have some arguments that stand up against criticism with evidence to support them, and it has none. It’s essentially wishful thinking that’s commandeered the better sense of a good number of people. There’s no relativism (of that type) in science. What you want to be true has no bearing on how things work. Maybe there’s some role for ID to play in philosophy, but it wouldn’t be the first time philosophy managed to detach itself from reality.

17

Optimism is wishful thinking by definition.

Reality is Philosophy’s plaything.

And if someone in my country wanted to teach ID in schools instead of evolution, I’d be every bit as mad as you. We just have different ways of lowering their level.

18

I personally believe it should be called Creationism, which I do believe in. Calling it Intelligent Desgin sounds like their trying to sneak around corners, instead of standing up directly for what they believe in.

Personally I believe that Intelligent Desgin is accurate, as I don’t think something can come from chaos, which a good number of evolutionary theories believed. Most humans and animals are very intelligent, this would indicate that something intelligent came before us, a domino effect as it were, the source of intelligence.

Of course this could mean that it could go on forever, one domino falling down over the next, with no end, this is why I believe there is a God, the ultimate source of the beginning.

I know that I’m in the way minority here, most video game players, and anime watchers favoring leftist thinking, and favoring evolution, no God believes, but I still stand by my guns here.

19

They don’t call it Creationism specifically because they are doing what you suspect, trying to sneak around corners. This came out quite well in Dover case, where the prosecuters showed how the ID-supporting book <i>Of People and Pandas</i> (something like that) changed its word usage from creationism to ID and the like after a previous court case discredited the idea of creationism as science.

Order is usually just a form of chaos not inspected closely enough. Some ancient folks used to consider the stars in the sky an example of perfection, since they were unchanging and showed up in the same patterns year after year. Now we know, of course, that they’re tremendous balls of burning gas that sometimes burn themselves out and from time to time explode in incredibly displays of violence. Or you could say that it’s the other way around, and things only seem chaotic to us because we don’t understand them well enough to comprehend their behavior.

Evolution is one area where we can and do understand how things work - we can see the progression from near the beginning right up to humanity and the other living organims of current times, no supernatural intervention required (and, importantly, because this is what the ID movement attempts - and fails - to suply, no evidence for supernatural intervention can be shown).

Only if you define “leftist-thinking” as “honesty” should we be defined that way. Not to say that some pushers of evolution don’t have their own agendas, but at its core the evolution/creationsm brouhaha is about whether you choose to acknowledge reality as best you can apprehend it, or whether you choose to understand it through a deceptive filter.

20

And have you read and studied both sides of the debate, reading books, articles, etc? Or simply bought evolution because the majority say it makes the most sense?

I personally have done my fair share of study of both, and came to the conclusion that only an Intelligent God could have created order, and intelligence wielding creatures that we see on earth.

I define leftist thinking as those who would do as they please, who see freedom as doing whatever you want to do, which is not freedom, that’s license. FREEDOM is being able and allowed to do what one must do, for the common good, even if that means denying something we ourselves want.

There is nothing deceptive about creationism though there is about Intelligent Desgin. There is nothing deceptive about religion. I’m not saying I’m a blind sheep, obeying the pope in everything, nor the bishop, I have to study the issue at best, and have discovered I agree with 80% of what they have said.

When the bishops decided that it was for the best for people to stand in front of the Eurcharist, instead of kneel, I disobeyed. Why? Because when I go to the judgement seat, I will be on my knees before My King. Why should it be different here on earth because my fellow men say so?

On an interesting note, to help Weiila, it might help to look up Thomas Aquimas’ book, Summa Contra Gentiles, Book 1. He speaks about the same things as the Intelligent Design, without skipping around corners. You should be able to find some of it by googling him.

Course you don’t have to, but just a suggestion. ^^

http://www2.nd.edu/Departments//Maritain/etext/gc.htm

This should help, I hope!