Intelligent design redux

Pinball1970

Pinball1970

Valued Senior Member
Moderator note: This thread was split from the following thread, on why people believe in God:

Why do people believe in God?

I think we can dispense with our earthly gods without much fuss. Why are there 5.8 billion people who believe in a god and only 16 % of the world's population is atheist?
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Trek said:
Do all scientists accept this?
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Here is an example of how the scientific community regarding Evolution as opposed to an intelligent design.

It is no exaggeration to claim Nobel prize winners in science are among the brightest people who have ever lived on our planet. Past winners include, Curie, Bohr, Einstein , Feynman, Heisenberg, Schrodinger and Dirac.

Elie Wiesel Foundation for Humanity Nobel Laureates Initiative. This organization has 38 Nobel laureates, who wrote a letter calling upon the Kansas Board of Education to reject intelligent design.

"Logically derived from confirmable evidence, evolution is understood to be the result of an unguided, unplanned process of random variation and natural selection.

As the foundation of modern biology, its indispensable role has been further strengthened by the capacity to study DNA. In contrast, intelligent design is fundamentally unscientific;

it cannot be tested as scientific theory because its central conclusion is based on belief in the intervention of a supernatural agent."
 
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Trek said:
Do all scientists accept this?
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This is kind of my thing. If you want to question the theory of Evolution then I would be happy to start a new thread rather than derail this one. Same with BB theory.
The reason they probably do not belong is that people can believe in a god but accept both the BB and TOE
 
Pinball1970 said:
This is kind of my thing. If you want to question the theory of Evolution then I would be happy to start a new thread rather than derail this one. Same with BB theory.
The reason they probably do not belong is that people can believe in a god but accept both the BB and TOE
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In fact, not only that, but the major Western Christian denominations ( Catholic, Anglican/ Episcopalian, Presbyterian, Methodist) all do. There simply is no problem, theologically.
 
exchemist said:
In fact, not only that, but the major Western Christian denominations ( Catholic, Anglican/ Episcopalian, Presbyterian, Methodist) all do. There simply is no problem, theologically.
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Yes and a high proportion of Jews. JW are Bible literalists and a few others.
Young earth creationists and the Intelligent design people do not care about science. You just cannot have a conversation with them. Even though they lost in court big time in the Dover trial.
I am so glad that I believed in Jesus and the teachings of the NT.
That was why I kept my faith, not because of a creation story.
Things could have been better but those messages are of love and peace ..... mainly.
There are some great Rabbi intellectuals who have been in debates and their religion is based around a relationship with god and their fellow humans.
Taking Genesis away does not affect that.
When I lost god Jesus had to go too, his messages remained.

His and others.
 
Pinball1970 said:
Yes and a high proportion of Jews. JW are Bible literalists and a few others.
Young earth creationists and the Intelligent design people do not care about science. You just cannot have a conversation with them. Even though they lost in court big time in the Dover trial.
I am so glad that I believed in Jesus and the teachings of the NT.
That was why I kept my faith, not because of a creation story.
Things could have been better but those messages are of love and peace ..... mainly.
There are some great Rabbi intellectuals who have been in debates and their religion is based around a relationship with god and their fellow humans.
Taking Genesis away does not affect that.
When I lost god Jesus had to go too, his messages remained.

His and others.
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I expect that's right but didn't want to include Judaism as I don't know enough about it. I do know, from Diarmaid MacCulloch's history of Christianity, that Jewish scholars contemporary with Origen (~200AD) read Genesis as they read Homer, as allegorical epics, rather than as literal descriptions of scientific fact. Also I don't know what position the Eastern branches of Christianity (Orthodox etc) take. It may be there is no set position, as they don't seem to have a particularly centralised approach to doctrine. Just as there isn't in Islam.

I don't think we know Trek 's denomination, do we? From what he has said, especially the somewhat equivocal stance on creationism and ID, I suspect some form of homespun Protestantism rather than membership of a major denomination, but I could be wrong.
 
exchemist said:
I expect that's right but didn't want to include Judaism as I don't know enough about it. I do know, from Diarmaid MacCulloch's history of Christianity, that Jewish scholars contemporary with Origen (~200AD) read Genesis as they read Homer, as allegorical epics, rather than as literal descriptions of scientific fact. Also I don't know what position the Eastern branches of Christianity (Orthodox etc) take. It may be there is no set position, as they don't seem to have a particularly centralised approach to doctrine. Just as there isn't in Islam.

I don't think we know Trek 's denomination, do we? From what he has said, especially the somewhat equivocal stance on creationism and ID, I suspect some form of homespun Protestantism rather than membership of a major denomination, but I could be wrong.
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I am not an expert but from what I have read Bible inerrancy in Christianity is fairly recent, 18th Century and IIRC a reaction to the enlightenment but I would have to check.
 
Pinball1970 said:
I am not an expert but from what I have read Bible inerrancy in Christianity is fairly recent, 18th Century and IIRC a reaction to the enlightenment but I would have to check.
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That is also my understanding. The paradox of the Enlightenment was that the new confidence people gained that the world was knowable, coupled with the "new broom" approach to theology of the Reformation, caused them to replace the idea of "mysteries" with a demand for precision. So they eventually started to try to apply that to the words of the Old Testament - with absurd consequences that are still to some extent with us today, at least among the less well educated.
 
exchemist said:
That is also my understanding. The paradox of the Enlightenment was that the new confidence people gained that the world was knowable, coupled with the "new broom" approach to theology of the Reformation, caused them to replace the idea of "mysteries" with a demand for precision. So they eventually started to try to apply that to the words of the Old Testament - with absurd consequences that are still to some extent with us today, at least among the less well educated.
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If you have not read Bart Ehrman I recommend him, he talks extensively on the NT but also all those early historians.
Absolutely not my strong point but I have picked up a lot from his lectures, books and debates.
The kind of atheist I want to be, knowledgeable and interested in arguments from other sides.
 
Trek said:
Where does this take place?
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Historically, some US states have tried to replace the teaching of evolution in school classrooms with the teaching of a thinly-veiled Creationism. There have been a number of interesting court cases over this. In several cases, the Creationists were found to be practising deliberate deception to try to get around the Constitutional separation between church and state.

There have also been quite a lot of arguments that US teachers ought to "teach the controversy" between Creationism and Science, even though there's no scientific controversy to teach. While it could possibly make sense to discuss the battles between Creationists and science in a social studies class, it makes no sense in a science class. But, if I understand it correctly, public schools in the US aren't allowed to promote a particular religion, again because this is unconstitutional. Nevertheless, there have been repeated attempts over the years to try to get around that prohibiting, essentially by dressing up religious teachings as something else - like pretending they are science, for example.
 
James R said:
Nevertheless, there have been repeated attempts over the years to try to get around that prohibiting, essentially by dressing up religious teachings as something else - like pretending they are science, for example.
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How do they do that?
 
Trek said:
How do they do that?
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The latest serious attempt was via the "Intelligent Design" movement. This was invented by an American lawyer (Phillip [sic] E Johnson, now dead) for the purpose of getting the religious idea of a creator taught in American school science lessons. It was a social engineering project, basically. ID masqueraded as science when it was no such thing, but it fooled a number of school boards, and even state legislatures, for a time.

Have you never heard of "Intelligent Design"?
 
Trek said:
Yes.
But how did they try to disguise “religious teachings” as science?
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By pretending ID, which claims there was supernatural intervention in nature, is a scientific theory when it is not.

(This became amusingly apparent in the Dover School (Kitzmiller) trial in 2005, in the course of which it was revealed that a creationist textbook, "Of Pandas And People", had been reprinted with the word "creationist" replaced throughout with "design proponent", in an attempt to get it accepted for teaching purposes in science classes. In one place this exercise even left a hilarious misprint "cdesign proponentsist": https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Cdesign_proponentsists )
 
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Trek said:
That didn’t answer the question :)
What “religious teachings” did they disguise the teaching of science with?
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Exchemist has outlined some details. Like I said google The details of the trial.

I.D is not science but was pushed as an alternative to the Theory of Evolution.

Creationism is based on Genesis so created kinds, man separate from other animals, fossils the result of a global flood,

Each created kind and features such as eyes and wings are evidence of an intelligent designer.

All nonsense and zero to do with science.

The teachers refused to take the creationist literature into the class room so it went to trial. Actual scientists presented evidence and demonstrated that ID is just Creationism in disguise.

Irreducible complexity was one of the main points used as evidence of a designer/ID which was promptly dismantled by the scientists.
 
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