Steven Jones [replying to Brian Harper]
>Let there be mo misunderstanding ID does not just claim that "some
>pattern in the natural world...is an effect of an Intelligent Designer." ID
>claims that the *whole* "natural world...is an effect of an Intelligent
>Designer"!
the only way we are currently able to detect design is against a back drop
of the natural world. Design does not resemble the natural world and
therefore we can distinguish it. (That's how Paley was able to see the
design in the watch and distinguish it from an undesigned starfish). If the
natural world is designed, then we have no way to detect it, since we have
nothing to compare it to.
>What will happen if "Intelligent Design" can be established scientifically is
>unclear. No one in the ID movement thinks it will make everybody become
>Christians. It might even help New Age and pantheistic type religions. In
>pre-Darwinian England and USA, a lot of intellectuals believed in design
>but were Deists. But there is no doubt that the re-establishment of design
>would also help Christianity enormously.
so you intend to use it as a recruiting tool. That's not a huge surprise.
>It would also help society. It is pretty clear that materialistic Western
>society is is deep trouble.
actually materialist western society is doing pretty well. Crime is down.
Illegitimate births are *way* down. And the economy is excellent. We still
have to learn to treat each other with more compassion and loving-kindness,
but that has always been the case.
>Having been an atheist in my teens and still
>remembering vividly the sense of hopelessness that brought, I am not
>surprised that young people who are taught in school that they are just
>cosmic accidents turn to drugs, violence, murder and suicide.
I have a feeling that has a lot more to do with people's cruelty to each
other and a callous neglect of teen-aged children that seems to be epidemic
even in "nice" families, than the lack of an overarching fantasy. Dickens
and Darwin were roughly contemporary and the world that Dickens portrayed
was far more cruel than ours and vastly less secular.
Susan
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Life is short, but it is also very wide.
http://www.telepath.com/susanb