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To: thames_sider who wrote (1063)	3/4/2002 12:48:20 PM
From: Neocon	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 21057

For all I know, dinosaurs were created to make oil for us to discover. As for the pace, maybe the Intelligence, once setting Nature in motion, has a preference for letting it be as "natural" as possible. Thus, it interferes economically. It will not perform a miracle when a providential "nudge" will do, and is not constantly fixing defects in individuals. After all, MS is not a flaw in the overall human design, it is a "kink" introduced later. As for advantages that we don't have, nothing obliged the Intelligence to make us supermen. Maybe it suited its purposes to see what we would make of what we had. The postulated Intelligence would exist outside of time or space, such that, for it, all that happens would be different aspects of something eternally present. Thus, boredom is not a factor, and shortcuts are irrelevant. There should be an appreciation of the way that Nature operates, and what can be done with an economy of means, even if it takes awhile to put everything in place. The point is that no one created it. There is no infinite regression. Bad things happen. That could mean, as the Deists thought, that God made the heavens and earth, but does not busy Himself with overseeing human history. It could mean that some version of the Fall is true. It could mean life was meant to be a challenge, and we are graded, in the long run, on how we handled our burdens. None of it directly contradicts the idea of Intelligent Design........ Again, the problem with real complex systems is that nothing makes sense out of contex, and everything has to be adapted to work together. A little nerve tissue, a stray bone, some premature cartlidge, won't work. Random and incremental changes are too blunt an instrument. There have to be occasional leaps, and/or ways contrived to allow for development without killing the "host". Do not assume that everything can be materialistically explained, when you don't know. But more than that, it is not merely a question of whether the precise mechanism has been discovered, but whether the type of explanation used is sufficient.