RE: now that's intelligent!
ORIGINAL: northstar
Yet intelligent design claims to be on par with current scientific findings that have been intensely and properly qualified.
Hi northstar,
I'm not the fire reacting to your oil as I partly agree. This thread isn't fresh in my mind, and rather than read it again, hopefully I won't be word-for-word repeating anything already said. Then again, I might be. 😉
Evolution as a complete and proven "fact" doesn't exist. It certainly exists as a theory with a lot of support. The facts strongly suggest that evolution is the reason for species-alteration in many instances. It doesn't explain such things as devolution, the many sudden jumps and missing links (it isn't enough to say that they exist but haven't been found yet: until there's a complete record we don't know, and the record is incredibly incomplete).
So while evolution exists as a good theory (which is why it is called "the theory of evolution" if you didn't notice), when anyone speaks of it as a totally proven fact which takes into consideration even bizarre and sudden leaps of change, they are actually - even if they are scientists - entering the realm of belief and faith. I'd disagree with the "properly qualified" bit.
On the other hand, I really do agree with you that ID is also a faith - very much so. It's what happens when the vast numbers of American evangelists today (I think about one-third the US population), many of whom take the Bible at literal, face-value, hit hard science head-on. They can't just dismiss science nation-wide, so they're IMO trying to meld their belief in some acceptable form onto science in its form. It tends to look a bit like trying to join plastacine onto aluminium with a blow torch at times.
From the little I know of ID, its foundations are in that clash of ideas. In other words, its origins are not fact-based or even theory-based, but political.
V
RE: now that's intelligent!
Can I jump in here?:)
In fact every darn thing in the world - as I understand it, is theory;)
Very little if anything is actually proven and that which is, stands time and again to be DISproven as we have seen many times.
The saying 'we create our own reality' may be more accurate than we imagine.
Joan
RE: now that's intelligent!
Yes!! That is really a very suscinct way of defining this controversial topic, Venetian.
What l meant when l said
"Yet intelligent design claims to be on par with current scientific findings that have been intensely and properly qualified."
is that ID basically has simple and intuitive [religious] ways to explain the universe and the origins of lifeforms, whereas the scientific community has methodologies to investigate the universe and the origins of life. And yet ID claims to be on equal footing with science.
The scientific community hashad to draw some consclusions because ID {claims that it is scientific and] has actually tried tohave the defination of scientific method redefined.
So what l am saying that has perhaps been echoed in different ways through this thread is that Intelligent Designis based on a belief and can't bea theory, a hypothesis or a conjecture, therefore it doesn't begin to bescience.:D
However, saying all of this, l completely believe inGod, and l am fascinated by the theories because they make you think.
l don't know if it is politically based but ...hmmm, now how do you come to that conclusion Venetian??
😮
Anyway, this has made me stretch my nuerotransmitters and it has inspiredmy God-spot to tingle!!!
cheers,
northstar:D
RE: now that's intelligent!
Hi northstar,
By "politically" based, I didn't mean along the lines of government party politics. "Politics" academically, as you may know, has a broader meaning. So I mean that ID is a concept that's linked to a religious belief-set, and is political in that sense: the politics of affirming evangilical Christianity against materialistic science.
My own "beliefs" are not too different to ID. In fact I've forgotten the real details by now of what ID is - but I'd oppose the ID idea on the grounds of its origins. It didn't begin with a quest for truth no matter what that truth may be, or (like science) as a way of explaining what we DO know. It's an idea, religiously-based, and then all square facts will be pushed into its round hole.
V
RE: now that's intelligent!
here-here!! yep...:)