[extropy-chat] intelligent design homework

[Adrian Tymes]

--- The Avantguardian <avantguardian2020 at yahoo.com> wrote:
> --- Adrian Tymes <wingcat at pacbell.net> wrote:
> > ...I was going to debate your points, but on this
> > one you are correct.
> > If you want a more thorough proof of why "evolution"
> > is not the same as
> > "God's will" than I can provide, go talk to
> > professional biologists.
> 
>       Hold on tiger. I AM a professional biologist and
> although I can prove that, given an existing organism,
> evolution can proceed without the existence of God,
> nothing that I know, nor experiments that I can
> conceive of with existing technology, can prove that
> evolution can proceed without some a priori life form.
> Nor can I prove that evolution is NOT the will of God.

In this case, "God's will" != God's will.  I meant "God's will" and
"evolution" as in ways to justify things.  Evolution could indeed be
God's will...but believing that still means one believes evolution.
Believing in just God's will, without reference to the specific method
(say, by erasing all teaching of evolution), leaves room for a lot of
provably false beliefs.  (It's a lot simpler to believe that God just
poofed monkeys and man into existance, than to believe that God slowly
influenced mutations and chance encounters over many millenia in order
to evolve the chimpanzee genome into the homo sapiens genome.  Thus,
teaching just "God's will" in place of evolution naturally leads to the
former, erroneous belief, even though the latter is technically
consistent with "God's will".)

If intelligent design was being pitched as a philosophy - the reason
behind evolution - instead of as a "science", with the request that
teaching of ID take resources away from teaching of evolution, then I
suspect there would be a lot less resistance.  But that is not the
case.  ID is explicitly being proposed as an alternative to evolution.

Which really is a shame.  ID as a justification for evolution, instead
of an "alternative" to evolution, could be furthered for >H causes.  If
one believes that God used evolution to create mankind, that suggests
that (responsibly) taking advantage of the universe we've been
presented may in fact be God's will...including such things as altering
ourselves to be longer-lived, more intelligent (more capable of
perceiving God's wisdom?), et al.  Why fight the Catholic church if we
could co-opt it?  (Or, failing that, most of the Protestant churches.)
And that's just the Christian part of the world...