Thanks for pointing that out exchemist.
Huge does know what he's talking about when it comes to astrophysics(I think), I don't know why he has to embroil himself with biology to be honest.
In American schools I hear, they teach that we know the origin of life, not sure about this country.
It all seems like a mess to me.
I was under the impression that ID tried to explain all creation, including the universe, I've heard it somewhere. What is the point in ID? It's not important for faith, just an interest of mine.
Well you can look it up on Wiki. But essentially ID was a social engineering project dreamt up by a now deceased American lawyer called Philip Johnson, to get religion taught in US state schools, by the backdoor. This all came out when his strategy, summarised in something called the Wedge Document, was accidentally leaked. The idea was to create a pseudoscientific theory that the origin of life is
scientifically impossible to account for by natural processes, and therefore there must have been input from some kind of guiding intelligence. This guiding intelligence should on no account be called "God" however, or it would be deemed to be religion rather than science and therefore ineligible to be taught in biology lessons.
To get it accepted into the curriculum, they then waxed lyrical about the need for competing hypotheses, in arenas of science they claimed were areas of "controversy", to be taught equally, without bias. This tricked quite a lot of politicians and school boards, especially in the Bible Belt who were favourably disposed towards creationism. Indeed some of them leapt at it, as the scientific vindication of divine creation they had yearned for. (Needless to say, there is no such "controversy" as ID is not scientific, has published no peer-reviewed research in support, and has been ignored or summarily dismissed by professional biologists.)
ID got blown out of the water in the Kitzmiller (or Dover School) trial in 2005, in which some educated parents complained about it being taught to their kids and filed a suit. It became quite a
cause célèbre , in the course of which some of the cheating, bullying and misrepresentation by its supporters was unmasked. You can look the trial up on Wiki too if you are interested.
One obvious flaw in it is there is no way to test the hypothesis. How could you ever conclude the origin of life is impossible by natural processes and what would be the test of that? They had a crack at that with the concept of "irreducible complexity", but how can you show that something is so complex it can't possibly have arisen by natural means. They tried with the eye, but it has been shown how eyes have evolved. They tried with the bacterial flagellum, but that too has been shown to have an evolutionary precursor.
More profoundly, the very concept of ID is
anti-scientific. The argument is that natural explanations are impossible, therefore we should stop researching them, just meekly accept "God did it" by a miracle, and now we can all go home. That is like medieval explanations for thunder, or earthquakes, as "acts of God". It was the refusal to accept that type of intellectual passivity which, after the Renaissance, led to the rise of modern science.
All Christians accept the idea of God as Creator, but that leaves open the means used. Einstein and Spinoza, for instance, saw God as the fundamental order in the universe, i.e. the laws of physics by which we get chemistry and from there biology. No need for miracles at particular points in the process.