I take it, then, you must have also read “Signature in the Cell”. I plan on reading that next.
I find the assertion that all life came from a single primordial cell, which came about through some accidental combination of molecules and some type of energy utterly preposterous. Just the idea that only one cell would have arisen and survived in all of earth challenges all credulity. And only at that point in time and place, never to be repeated again.
I must say that Meyer has made a profound impression on me. I used to dismiss ID as just some bible literalists trying to put a scientific patina on religious dogma. Meyer, using scientific evidence and impeccable logic and no reference to biblical scripture, has won me over. He has also convinced me that it is the scientists who espouse only the materialistic world view that are the dogmatic, closed minded and intolerant ones.
With regard to the Designer or Designers, I too sometime think we’re just someone’s lab experiment and that all the problems and issues we face are just situations created by the Designers to see how their creations (us) deal with them. They might be using us as entertainment or as simply work in progress toward a better model.
The idea that we’re somebody’s experiment (God’s?) and that that god is less than perfect comes across strongly in the old testament. I was particularly taken aback at the passages in the old testament where God refers to himself as a “jealous god” as well as one who likes to be worshipped and feared - qualities belonging not to a perfect, all powerful being, but rather to a master (the Designer?) and an insecure one at that.
Ezekiel’s spaceships is another fascinating mystery in the old testament.
“I take it, then, you must have also read “Signature in the Cell””
Yes, I’ve read that too.
Another interesting book is “The Way of the Cell” by Franklin Harold. Not an ID book, but interesting nonetheless. Some of my favorite parts are after he makes compelling cases for how something works by discussing its design, he then feels compelled to assert that there was NO DESIGNER EVEN THOUGH IT LOOKS LIKE THERE WAS! Actually, I don’t think he really believes that, but feels compelled to occasionally throw a sop to the central dogmatists in order not be drummed out of their society, even though he had only emeritus status when he wrote the book.
BTW, my favorite Bible verse is:
“So God created man in his own Image”
That’s very consistent with my own theory of life creation and has several interesting implications, the main one being that humans strive to create in a manner similar to that which our creators strove(or strive) to create with, and furthermore we’re compelled to create sentient life just as our creators did (or still do). And the “like manner” part is what makes me think we can study and draw conclusions from what we as a species do and how we do it as an exemplar of how we ourselves were created.
Furthermore, the seven day cosmology in the Bible is surprisingly accurate for its time, especially if you consider a “day” to be a day in the life of our creators and not a human day.
The theory of ID opens up worlds of fertile thought and investigation. The theory of The Big Accident leads nowhere intellectually, because pretty much any road taken can lead only to the one conclusion that there’s no causality, because, hey, IT’S ALL JUST A BIG ACCIDENT! Or as Hillary so accurately phrased it, “What difference does it make?” In fact, it’s completely intellectually dishonest to apply design and engineering principals as a means to describe or explain the workings of the molecular machinery of life. There’s really a gigantic intellectual disconnect between the central dogma of “everything is an accident” and then proceeding with all of our studies and investigations as if cause and affect exist and that the things we study have meaning.