[extropy-chat] against ID

[Damien Broderick]

At 01:36 AM 11/19/2005 -0500, gts wrote:

>>Well, you could have said it better if...
>
>Yes, I suppose so, if my purpose had been to criticize the finer points of
>Newton's religion.

Don't be silly (unless you think accuracy is entirely irrelevant). 
Krauthammer was offering the soothing bromide that religion has nothing to 
fear from science--why, look, here are these two great scientists who were 
also believers! But Newton was *not* a supporter of the conventional state 
religion of his day, as Krauthammer carelessly claims, and Einstein was so 
far from being a conventional believer that it's more truthful to say 
candidly that he was an agnostic at the edge of atheism. Confuting 
"intelligent design" of the fundamentalist Xian variety requires more than 
a comforting claim that hey, the three-in-one God in whom we can all 
believe built the cosmos with a magic all-in-one spell that left no room 
for belated hands-on interventions.

Damien Broderick