ohwilleke

I'm posting this here, rather than another forum, since I think that people here can understand the nuances better.

Young Earth Creationism certainly makes sense from the perspective of Biblical literalism. The scientific view of evolution certainly consistent with atheism or deism.

What sort of religion does the kind of intelligent design now being pushed give you? Does this religion have anything to do with the Bible? I'm not convinced that it does.

Certainly, you have to assume that much of the Old Testament is myth. Moreover, you have to assume that if the early part is myth, that other unscientific aspects of the Bible are likely to be myth as well.

Even abandoning these parts of the Bible as myth has deep implications even for "liberal Christians". Most Christians, even the liberal kind, share a belief in original sin which Jesus sought to redeem. But, if your version of ID forces you to consider the story of Adam and Eve as a mere myth, there is no original sin to redeem. Similarly, the certainty of humans as made "in God's image" disipates, as does the Biblical dominion granted to humans over the plants and animals of the world.

You probably have to throw out in any version of intelligent design, god of the gaps, that is consistent in any rough way with modern science such unstated norms of religion as the primacy of humans as superior to other animals and plants. A fortiori, you must also, it would seem to me, have to throw out the primacy of the tribe of Israel. How can Jews be special among humans, when God isn't treating humans any different than plants and animals?

A Christianity that acknowledges the Big Bang eons ago, and an intelligent designer acting over hundreds of millions of years, rather than thousands of years, necessarily recognizes Earth as a tiny speck in a vast universe, which bring Earth from being center stage to a side tent in a million ring circus.

Does an intelligent design theory have, at its roots, a "Christianity must change or die?", premise contained within it, forcing it to a Spongian Christianity or Unitarian Universalism or some similar part of the theological universe?

scigirl

Excellent questions, ohwilleke. Nice to see you here at E/C!

I believe NeilUnreal has some good answers to this - at least he did long ago at the baptist board.

I'll be interested to hear what non-atheists say to these quesions.

scigirl

Grumpy

I'd imagine that ID does not, per se, conflict with Christian eschatology, even the most far-out millenialist view.

After all, if the Designer has a plan, that plan could just as easily involve the "catching up" of the Saved bodily into heaven, followed by tribulations. (Soon to be a major motion picture!)

Liquidrage

ID logical conflicts with Christianity.
However, this would not prevent people from being Christians.

Lets be honest.
If one does not accept a literal interpretation of the Bible yet still considers themselves Christian then they have already replaced logic with desire.

I say this because Christianity has already changed. I know very very few Bible literalists yet I know many Christians.
God and Christianity has become whatever people want it to be.

hezekiah jones

Worse, the "intelligent designer" is relegated to the decidedly anal pursuit of obsessive tinkering with arcane minutiae like specific bacterial organelles.

tgamble

That's the whole point. They want to make their religious drivel sound scientific. The courts ruled that creation "science" is religion so they have to disguise it with ID. It's pretty obvious who the alleged designer is supposed to be.

hezekiah jones

But they also know that this is a difficult legal case to make. Probably the only way to assemble that case, on establishment clause grounds, is to exhaustively document the history of the anti-evolution movement and portray ID as simply the latest incarnation of creationism. It's not an easy task, and furthermore its success would depend on judges that are more than willing to look beyond the plain text of any legislation that introduces ID into biology curricula to the history of the legislation, which lots of judges are not so keen to do.

NeilUnreal

"A firm push from the wings catapults our intrepid hero onto the stage. The limelight catches him totally unprepared; his jaw drops open and it looks for a moment like he may faint. The rapt audience prepares for the worst..."

Seriously, I'll give it some thought

-Neil

Principia

Over at ARN, there is a rather palpable, uncomfortable silence from the more knowledgeable IDists whenever trollish Fundamentalists start spouting religious anti-science propaganda. Ask them to stand up and defend science by rejecting idiocy like YEC, and you get no response. Ask these guys whether they want ID taught in schools, and they would say nay, but then immediately qualify it with 'Only if evolution is taken off the shelves' or something along those lines. Pressed further, they would say that it's the evolutionists (and atheists... they love conflating the two groups), who have a social agenda, as if we have something more at stake. At the end of the rope, they claim that evolutionists are close-minded, and simply have let their bias clouded their ability to see the true wonders of ID. Then they of course resort to the party line that while ID is not accepted now, the 'theory' is larger than the movement and will only continue to grow .

But, I agree with HJ that with the political clout these guys have, they can eventually out manuever the current roadblocks without putting up an ounce of scientific labor.

[ July 19, 2002: Message edited by: Scientiae ]</p>

EON_1

WHAT HIS CREATION TELLS US OF THE (CHRISTIAN) CREATOR

Assuming for the moment that we know nothing about god, we cannot say whether the constituents of universe exist as part of god, or as separate entities. Even if we could show the former to be true, we could not learn the nature of the whole by observing characteristics of the parts (the fallacy of composition). This is not to say that the whole cannot have some attributes of its component parts; we are only precluded from making that assumption. Even if that in turn was not the case, since science has never observed the characteristic of divinity in any natural object or phenomena, only (arguendo) that a divine being created all such things, we cannot conclude logically that the natural world is associated with god as parts would be to a whole.

So, instead of framing the inquiry in terms of a whole and its parts, we must instead frame it in terms of cause and effect. If we are to presume that god is the cause of all that is, we are bound by the supposition that effects are proportional to their cause.

Consider the five main characteristics traditionally ascribed to god by judeo-christian theology, and whether ID can confirm these conceptions of the designer. The characteristics are omnipotence, omniscience, omnipresence, omnibenevolence and perfection.

OMNIPOTENCE

The catholic encyclopedia (http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/) defines omnipotence as “the power of God to effect whatever is not intrinsically impossible.” The ability to design and create a universe certainly does bespeak a being of extraordinary power. It does not, however, necessarily lead to the conclusion that that power is without limits. As we cannot scientifically inquire into the subjective motivations of the intelligent designer, we cannot further determine what amount of his power he used in the act of creation, or whether the designer in fact did the best job it could with the (limited) power it had available.

OMNISCIENCE

Omniscience may be defined as the power to know all information at all times that such information exists (or has existed or will exist). An intelligent designer would require a knowledge (and an imagination) of a supernatural quality in order to conceive of, design, and create the universe. But we have no basis for assuming that vastly-superior knowledge to be without any upward boundary. There is no prediction or experimental method in ID that would permit measurement of the designer’s knowledge, so we can only impute god with a high, but not infinite, degree of intelligence.

OMNIPRESENCE

The third characteristic traditionally ascribed to god is that he is present everywhere simultaneously. Nothing in the concept of an intelligent designer necessitates this quality.

OMNIBENEVOLENCE

Simply put, god is completely “good,” having no qualities and performing no act that may be described as “evil.” Since we have no objective way to designate which things in the universe are "good" and which are "evil" in all possible cases, and we are once again unable to inquire into the designer’s subjective intentions through the auspices of ID, there is no rational or logical basis for the assertion that god is omnibenevolent. In fact, the opposite would be indicated. If humans would label a given action or event as “evil,” supposing as we must that the ultimate cause is proportional to the effect leads us to the conclusion that there is at least some portion of the designer’s personality that humans would subjectively judge to be evil. The free will counterargument similarly fails, in that there is once again no way to determine what the designer's intentions were.

PERFECTION

Nothing in ID leads us anywhere near the conclusion that the designer is “perfect” in any sense of that word. On the contrary, instances of poorly designed organisms abound (see the Talk Origins “FAQ for Jury-Rigged Design in Nature” at <a href="http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/jury-rigged.html)." target="_blank">http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/jury-rigged.html).</a> No hypothesis about the reasons the designer may have had for creating an imperfect universe can amount to more than idle speculation. As with every other traditionally-ascribed characteristic noted above, we can only know the effects of the designer’s mind; no empirical method will allow us to determine the contents of that mind.

CONCLUSION

The Intelligent Design movement, in its effort to insinuate itself into the sphere of scientific knowledge, must abandon the assumptions of dogma and myth if it is to claim empirical justification. Assuming that the world is designed, we can only logically infer of the designer an extraordinary level of intelligence, and an extraordinary level of power to implement what that intelligence conceives. We cannot, however, logically state that such intelligence and power is infinite, nor can we really ascribe any further characteristic to the designer beyond what is logically required to explain its creation. Although the possibility has been ignored thus far in this essay, we cannot even assume that creation was the work of a unique being. Instead of a singular hyper-powerful intelligence, there may be several. ID fails to provide any indication of number in this regard.

Significantly, the ancient metaphysical "Problem of Evil" remains, and in fact becomes more pronounced. All experiences we have with sophisticated (non-artificial) intelligences show that each has some kind of personality associated with it. Since ID cannot describe this personality for us, we are forced to look exclusively at its effects, and many of those effects would be called "evil" by the majority of humans observing them. If one wishes to counter that good and evil are subjective terms, it would force us to concluded that there is in fact no universal, objective moral code. In either instance, we are logically precluded from assigning the role of moral architect to the designer.

This is as far as objective inquiry can take ID. The remainder lies within the purview of faith. If faith, however, was a valid source of knowledge, the entire Intelligent Design movement would be theistically unnecessary.