Stu wrote: Maybe intelligence is part of the evolutionary process rather than the cause of it but in Darwinian theory there is no place for intelligence being part of the evolutionary process. As Douglas Futuyma says: Any investigation into whether intelligence is part of the evolutionary process is going to be done by ID advocates. The Darwinists aren't interested.
Those on the Dover school board that were pushing to get ID taught in school were creationists. They were clueless about genuine ID. ID is not creationism. ID has nothing to do with religion. ID has nothing to do with the supernatural. And ID is not anti-evolution if one defines evolution simply as âchange over time,â or even that living things are related by common ancestry. However, the dominant theory of evolution today is neo-Darwinism, which contends that evolution is driven by natural selection acting on random mutations, an unpredictable and purposeless process that âhas no discernable direction or goal, including survival of a species.â (National Association of Biology Teachers Statement on Teaching Evolution). It is this specific claim made by neo-Darwinism that intelligent design theory directly challenges. ID begins â with a seemingly innocuous question: Can objects, even if nothing is known about how they arose, exhibit features that would cause a reasonable person to suspect an intelligent cause was behind their origin? The first thing to note about the question is that you donât have to be a religious fundamentalist to ask it. You donât have to be a religious fundamentalist to consider it. In fact, you donât even have to be a religious fundamentalist to answer it. The question is a good one, as it stems from the fact that certain things do exist in our reality only because they were brought into existence by an intelligent cause. If human beings did not exist, for example, Mount Rushmore would not exist. Thus, Mount Rushmoreâs existence is dependent on intelligent causation. So one begins to wonder if there are other aspects of our reality that are likewise dependent on intelligent causation. If so, can we detect them? If so, just how reliable is our detection? Francisco Ayala, a former president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, says: âThe functional design of organisms and their features would therefore seem to argue for the existence of a designer." So one could be totally non-religious and infer design empirically. But Ayala goes on to say: "It was Darwinâs greatest accomplishment to show that the directive organization of living beings can be explained as the result of a natural process, natural selection, without any need to resort to a Creator or other external agent.â The question âHow Did the Appearance of Design in Living Systems AriseâHas Long Been Part of Historical and Evolutionary Biology. As detailed in Richard Dawkins book The Blind Watchmaker: Why the Evidence of Evolution Reveals a Universe Without Design, Darwinian theory was developed as a counter argument to the observed fact that living systems appear to be designed. Before Darwin 'there was no alternative explanation for apparent design.' Thus, Darwinian theory is essentially a rebuttal of design. As Dawkins points out so explicitly, it is a theory that seeks to show that the apparent design in nature is actually just an illusion. The denial of actual design in biology is central to Darwinian thought. While Dawkins could be right, thereâs no proof that the apparent design in nature is just an illusion. As far as physics informs us everything in the non-quantum universe is deterministic which by defintion means that randomness is an illusion caused by incomplete information of the chain of causal events. And even in quantum mechanics itâs arguable whether anything is actually unpredictable or whether the unpredictability is because we donât have a complete theory. The default position should be that randomness is an illusion since all the evidence points that way right now. Stephen Meyer says:
The question of who designed the designer may be a non question if you realize the creator created time as you understand it. There may be no creator of a creator if the creator is outside of time. Which by definition the creator would be be because time began after the big bang.
Uhhh, why does God need a God to create God? Your thinking is obviously that of a material, limited, time and space bound personality. I don't understand what is so difficult about the concept of God for you... The concept of an Eternal Absolute First Cause is really not that hard....
So your reason why âthe creatorâ would not need a designer is because the creator created time? Something that could create time without the time to create time, should need a pretty sophisticated designer too surely ? You have "the creator" being "outside of time", so why would the creator's designer not be there too?
i am following a meditation technique. i have a spiritual master. i believe in "sense" in the universe. BUT where all this intelligent design discussion, which has become so popular in recent years, is heading is middle age thinking. evolution in my eyes is one part of creation. one part of the big self experiencing itself. it cannot contradict any kind of "design", because it is part of that very design. i think a discussion between a biolologist, a priest and a buddhist can be very, very entertaining and fruitful for the three. but currently the issue is part of political campaigning or is at best abused by politics. better believe in charles darwin than assume that humans and dinosaurs existed parallel. you know what fundis say when you tell them that you can prove that dino-bones are hundreds of thousand years old? they say they were created "old" ... 6.000 years ago. they trust a book more than their very own eyes. F R I G H T E N I N G . and do not forget that there is so much evidence supporting darwin.
MAN wrote: Did you bother to read my posts? ID is not creationism! ID does not posit that humans and dinosaurs existed parallel. ID does not posit that natural history only goes back 6,000 years.