[extropy-chat] Intelligent Design: I'm not dead yet

Robert Bradbury robert.bradbury at gmail.com
Thu Jan 26 16:18:18 UTC 2006


Slashdot is reporting [1] that the BBC is reporting [2] that more than 50%
of the people in Britian do not believe in evolution and more than 40%
support the teaching of creationism or intelligent design.  So this isn't a
problem for the United States only.

On top of that is this report [3] from Physorg that there are still people
out there who believe in intelligent design but they are laying low because
the time isn't right to push the ideas into forums that promote brain
washing people who have little experience in rational thought.

Mind you, I support the idea of "intelligent design" -- but it would be
*rational* intelligent design with testable hypotheses.  Of interest might
be [4] which documents the billions of adherents for various religions, many
of which have fundamental problems because they are built on foundations
which include arbitrary and/or irrational assumptions.  This isn't a small
problem and represents a fundamental problem for extropianism and
transhumanism in general.  It would be interesting to know what fraction of
"wars" that took place over the history of humanity were due to conflicts of
belief systems (i.e. faith based motivations) rather than conflicts of
resource availability (i.e. survival based motivations).  The crusades and
of course the various Israeli vs. Arab conflicts come to mind.  I ask this
because if even a small fraction of those "faith-based" thought machines
come to the conclusion that transhumanistic ideas (or even science in
general) represent a growing threat to their cherished belief systems then
you can kiss the singularity goodbye.

Sigh,
Robert

1. http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/01/26/1346255
2. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/4648598.stm
3. http://www.physorg.com/news10145.html
4. http://www.adherents.com/adh_rb.html
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.extropy.org/pipermail/extropy-chat/attachments/20060126/c3041461/attachment.html>


More information about the extropy-chat mailing list