Revelation 4:11Intelligent Design
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Posted on 01/30/2006 10:37:25 AM PST by Michael_Michaelangelo
The debate concerning intelligent design and evolution has revealed some confusion about the concept of religious faith.
What constitutes religious faith? Traditionally, religious faith refers to a belief in a particular revelation, a specially delivered message, something we couldn't figure out by reason alone.
Thus, the Jewish people have faith in the revelation they believe was given to Abraham and is contained principally in the Torah.
Muslims believe in the message given to Muhammad by the angel Gabriel and recorded in the Quran.
Buddhists believe in the revelation that came to Siddhartha Gautama and will lead them along the eightfold path to Nirvana.
To sum up: religious faith is the "leap" required to accept a revelation as true. And once this leap of faith is made, one becomes a member of a like-minded community of believers and enters into their customs, practices and rituals.
On the other hand, an intelligent design theorist thinks more along the following lines. He observes, say, the traveling pattern of our own planet Earth, streaking faithfully through the skies and around the sun at approximately 65,000 mph and rotating at approximately 1000 mph. In addition, the Moon's orbit around us is also quite steady.
In fact, these orbits are followed with such regularity that we humans have translated this reliability into our days, months and years. Furthermore, our exact distance from the sun allows life to flourish here. Indeed if we were only a slight distance farther from the sun, we would freeze; a slight distance closer, we would fry.
An intelligent design theorist would find it very difficult to attribute this particular earthly pattern to random luck, or to some kind of blind force unaware of itself or of its own intentions. He would find it difficult because from his own human experience, he has learned that chance does not ordinarily produce such order.
Rather, his experience tells him that order is caused by some agent that is not a part of the orderly construct itself: a nest implies a bird, a roughly strewn dam across a stream implies a beaver and a lighthouse of Legos in a kindergarten classroom implies a deft young assembler. By this process of reasoning, the theorist arrives at the conclusion that there is very likely a designer of this universe.
But this conclusion requires no "leap" of religious faith. It is nothing more nor less than an opinion or conviction based primarily on logical inference. By itself it required of him no commitment, incorporates him into no community, enlists him into no religious culture of practices and rituals.
We really shouldn't equate a cool intellectual conclusion based on inferential reasoning with an ardent religious faith based on a special revelation.
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Revelation 4:11Intelligent Design
See my profile for info
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sounds like faith not science. Thats ok...just lets not confuse the 2.
bump
:)
Let the oft repeated discourse begin.
Sons high school debate topic bump
Not to confuse your issue further, but the article made a plea to logic. The word science is no where in the article.
(btw - your slip is showing)
"An intelligent design theorist would find it very difficult to attribute this particular earthly pattern to random luck, or to some kind of blind force unaware of itself or of its own intentions. He would find it difficult because from his own human experience, he has learned that chance does not ordinarily produce such order. "
Chance most surely DOES when you take into account billions upon billions of stars that have billions upon billions of planets. "Chance" happens all the time on the grand scale. You calculate the chance/probability and I'll count the stars and my number will be larger.
The puddle is perfectly content realizing that his hole fits him precisely so it must have been made just for him. . .
That sure is a lot of anti-matter to come....from where exactly?
The strangest thing happened to me yesterday. Someone called from 838-4421. Out of all phone numbers, what were the odds that someone with that number would call me? YESTERDAY! At 7:51 PM??? Such a low probability, one in hundreds of billions. How could any logical person attribute that to luck. Heresy!
By saying that an ID'ers observation of the regular order and special suitability of our solar system to our kind of life leads him to believe that this could not have happened by chance depends on an observer bias; the concept that the Earth and associated solar system is unique and singular; that it's the only planetary system around, and that it was designed for us to exist in.
But in fact astronomers are discovering many planetary systems out there that are not like ours and are not at all suitable for our kind of life. Combine that information with the various computer models of planetary formation and evolution and it becomes apparent that the creation of our Solar System by chance is a likely and scientifically demonstrable concept. It is becoming apparent that there are (or have been) billions and billions of various kinds of solar systems which either never developed an Earth-like planet in a habitible distance from it's primary star, or else were destroyed when a Jupiter-like planet closer to that system's primary caused gravitational perturbations which caused that Earth-like planet to be ejected from the system.
So if some enormous number of planetary systems have been created, it doesn't require ID for one or more of them to have developed intelligent life on an Earth-like planet. Random chance will serve just fine.
Now, I have no problem with someone saying, "well, my faith rejects this - it must have been by divine providence." Perhaps so. I believe it myself. But this is not scientific, and should not be taught in Science class.
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