Monday, 27 December 2004

Intelligent Design

I’ve mentioned this before, and I favor evolution over ID, but I thought I would address one of The Evangelical Outpost’s commenters, Mr. Ed:

Why is it that simple? It seems you are making ‘science’ an arbitrary label. What is it that makes ID antithetical to science. And what is so different about the set of deductions that leads to a theory of evolutions and the set of deductions that leads to a theory of ID?
Answer: ID is based on what is not known, whereas evolution is based on what is known, i.e. can be proven.

You know, it occurs to me that there is a solution to the teaching of ID in schools: have school vouchers.

5 comments:

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Answer: ID is based on what is not known, whereas evolution is based on what is known, i.e. can be proven.

I’m not sure I understand what you mean. Unless you assume that design cannot be found in nature then how can you claim that it is based on what is “known?”

 

Joe,

The people that are researching evolution are gathering observable evidence of how life came about. Based on what they don’t know—and things that we will probably never be able to know, e.g. what happened before the Big Bang—it seems safe to assume that there’s some intelligent design at work. But, it’s an assumption and it’s based on what I don’t know, rather than what I do know.

IIRC, St. Thomas Aquinas struggled trying to prove the existence of God. Ultimately, he wasn’t successful. The only way to prove intelligent design is to prove the existence of God and I don’t think the ID people have done that. Ultimately it rests on faith rather than reason.

 
Ultimately it rests on faith rather than reason.

Exactly. And this coming from an Evangelical Christian (that is, Evangelical by its true definition, rather than the definition assigned by liberals and the redundant MSM).

I happen to believe in Evolution because I believe that’s how God decided that the Universe should work. He established the laws of Physics, and Nature, and so forth. I believe that things work the way they do because He decided that was how they’re supposed to work. Why do so many of my fellow Christians have to reject the idea that God used the common literary tool of allegory when he inspired the various authors in writing the Bible?

I’ve never understood the rejection of Science by some Christians. What is, plainly just is. What we don’t (or can’t) know must be based on faith.

 

Boyd,

You’ll get no arguments from me. I believe in a Creator and have friends who are Calvinists. They explained to me that, in religion, there’s a gap between what we know in the Bible and what’s not verifiable. They bridge that gap with faith (my recollection of the conversation is sketchy, so I can’t remember all of the details). I see science the same way and would say faith bridges the gap between what we know (science) and waht we don’t know (everything else). I wish other Evangelicals took your perspective. Evolution can be God’s design as well.

 
The people that are researching evolution are gathering observable evidence of how life came about.

The problem is that they are researching things that they will never be able to have “observable” evidence about, i.e., how “punctuated equilibrium” occurred if evolution is to work. The macroevolutionary theory has huge leaps of faith that must be taken to arrive at its conclusions. The basic one being that if we just have enough time (say, billions of years), we will get man from a mixture of atoms.

 
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