Posted on 02/07/2009 8:14:04 PM PST by 2ndDivisionVet
This past weekend I was speaking on the Intelligent Design vs. Evolution debate. After my lecture a student approached me and asked, “Mr. Carlson, when I tried to defend Intelligent Design in my public school science class, my teacher asked me, ‘which version of Intelligent Design are you talking about? Christian? Native American? Hindu?’ He went on to say to me, ‘If you want to talk about Intelligent Design, you can’t avoid having to give equal time to everybody’s story of creation. This is why it’s best to leave religion out of the science classes.’ Well, I didn’t know how to respond to this.”
This student was faced with a common response from opponents to Intelligent Design. Many who oppose the Intelligent Design position will argue that as soon as you open the door to supernatural creation, you necessarily open the door to any and every version of supernatural creation ever postulated by humanity. However, this just isn’t the case.
The reality is, in regards to the debate over whether or not Intelligent Design should be considered in our public school science classrooms, we are still dealing with the world of science, observation and experimentation. The fact of the matter is this, all people, no matter what religion or philosophy they adhere to, have access to the very same observable scientific evidence. So, whether you’re coming at it from an Atheistic perspective, Christian perspective, Native American perspective, or Hindu perspective, all of us have the same access to the observable scientific evidence. Now, with this being the case, we must ask two questions, but ask them in their appropriate environments: 1) In our public school science classrooms we should ask, “Does the scientific evidence point towards Naturalistic evolution or Intelligent Design?” And 2) Outside of our public school science classrooms we should ask, “Which religious worldview best explains the scientific evidence?”
The Intelligent Design position can be used by whatever religious worldview that wants to attach itself to it. However, those religious worldviews all have the equal challenge of explaining how their creation story best coincides with the observable scientific evidence. So, if you want to embrace a Native American creation story, you have to explain how it fits with the scientific evidence that we all equally share; the same is true for Christians, Hindus, etc… but this should be done outside of our public school science classrooms.
The point of all of this is that Intelligent Design is not about advocating one religious version of creation over another in our public schools. Intelligent Design is simply a position that points out the scientific evidence for some Intelligent Designer found throughout the natural world. Science cannot answer the question of who or what that Intelligent Designer is, but science can lead us to the conclusion that an Intelligent Designer must have been involved. It is left to the various religions to demonstrate why their version of the creation story best fits the scientific evidence for Intelligent Design.
So, what should be taught in our public school science classrooms? We should teach the scientific evidence for and against evolution and the scientific evidence for and against Intelligent Design. However, for those who are persuaded towards Intelligent Design, and who have the further desire to identify the Intelligence behind the Design, this is a pursuit that is rightly taken up outside of our public school science classrooms.
There are numerous reasons to believe that the highly complex DNA system underlying life on Earth has been devised by a very advanced civilization.
There's no supernatural about it!
“There are numerous reasons to believe that the highly complex DNA system underlying life on Earth has been devised by a very advanced civilization.”
I guess you’d better get started identifying them.
You’ll get to meet them eventually. 4 billion years is just too short a time to put this stuff together.
I think one calls that infinte regression. The earth was seeded by the Arcturians, who were seeded by the Saggitrarians, ad infinitum. What evidence is there that such a thing has happened? Even if we could create life in a testtube, and could cause things to evolve, we are starting in the middle of things and adding intelli gence to the process. This is manufacture.
Sorry, the statistical model for “calculating” the number of mutations, blah, blah, blah, is nonsense. It also illustrates why you don’t go to an engineer to get your physical.
Now, for evidence on Earth of panspermia, let's take the Cambrian Explosion for a possible example.
In the space of 10 million years or less, more "evolution" happened there than in all of time on Earth BEFORE or AFTER that period.
Asssuming that your time calculation is correct, you still only replace one mystery with another.
Nothing more common than taking out the trash.
The probability of a different method being used to get rid of it is near zilch.
The difference is that one can observe the trsh being taken away, or not being taken away. Speculations not based on observation are not science.
Balloons will not take us to the moon, but it was thought they could until Pascal took some measurements.
Just someone come up with a new DNA molecule ~ not a copy of an existing one, but a new one ~ from scratch. Then make it duplicate itself.
So you suggest that our planet's biological mechanism has a designer? That's the whole point of the ID movement.
That said, where did the "advanced civilization" come from?
Intelligent Design is a variation on Paley's Watchmaker Argument. If one were to find a watch on the ground, this person would not think it was naturally-occurring, but would conclude that it is man-made (and thus designed).
If that person were to walk a short distance and find a machine churning out watches like the one that was found, he still would not think that the watches were naturally occurring -- he would know that they were produced by this machine. Yet also, he would not conclude that the watchmaking machine were naturally-occurring. In fact, he would likely conclude that it took a more brilliant designer to design such a machine.
Your "advanced civilization" is analogous to the watchmaking machine. How did it come to be?
Building a structure with that capability that can be tossed like a spitball at a planet, and then terraform it, is definitely not a piece of "magic" ~ it takes designers somewhere.
Now, your question of WHERE may have relevance or it may not. My own thoughts on the matter are that "life as we know it" took a longer time to build than the lifespan of our universe.
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