A public service announcement: an article on “intelligent design” from the National Center for Science Education.
[If you want to know why I'm linking to this now, look at Leiter's post. The idea is that the more people link to this article in posts about intelligent design, the higher the article will show up in Google searches for intelligent design, thus steering the curious to an appropriate source of information.]
The width of the canyon that separates believers from non-believers in some industrial countries is startling, to say the least. But there is one crucial Philosophical point behind this discussion: the strange way premises and consequences are glued together.
The Intelligent Design of life forms and of the functioning of ecosystems as a whole is an undeniable property though, it is not obvious is that such property entails two things:
It is possible to assume that the laws of nature together form an intelligent system of some sort (not necessarily a Deity).
And the belief in God does not mean that God is not an evolutionary or did not cause things to evolve. There is no reason to believe that immutability is or is not an evidence of divine intervention or of supreme intelligence.
Moreover, the Bible is not a book about Natural History. There are no terms of comparison between a scientific theory and a sacred book. The question
is nonsensical, just like:
None can make any sense of either question and debate it rationally. None can compare things of completely different natures!
August 5th, 2005, at 12:04 am #