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Pastimes : Let's Talk About Our Feelings!!! -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Lane3 who wrote (97643)	3/11/2005 9:11:51 AM
From: epicure	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 108807

Don't you think ID is all things to all people? Obvious ID is "God" for some people (especially people who think God really ought to be in the public schools and this would be a dandy way to get him there.) On the other side of the spectrum are folks who see ID intelligence as an almost (or totally) mechanistic intelligence- who don't see anything God like in it (at least not as God is recognized in the major denominations of the world.) Actually come to think of it a lot of words are like that. Many words mean completely different things to different people- we just don't bump up against it often because we don't go around defining what we mean, and most people always assume the other guy is using the word exactly as he or she would.

To: Lane3 who wrote (97643)	3/11/2005 9:43:33 PM
From: Brumar89	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 108807

I guess I would say it is the theory that those complex structures and processes which appear to be designed and which cannot be reasonably imagined as being produced by a natural process, like natural selection, because of their irreducible complexity (see my earlier post for meaning of this phrase) - are in fact the products of some intelligent design. Who is that intelligent designer is an open question. We all know how most people will answer the question, which is the problem for many people. Francis Crick, who I think we can assume knows a little bit about DNA, has hypothesized that aliens from another planet seeded the earth with living organisms (see his book Life Itself). The reason he has produced this farfetched theory is that he thinks there is no natural way that life could have come into being on earth. I accept Crick as an informed opinion on that subject - if not on the spaceship idea. On one end you have people using ID as code for creationism. Well, I think those would be 1) creationists and 2) those supporting darwinian evolution (Richard Dawkins or example). You seem to be presenting the opposite extreme, that Darwin works fine for critters big enough to observe with the naked eye but you need intelligence as a precursor supplement. Well, I'm saying that there are probably things that natural selection can explain and accept it as an explanation for those things. But having read Behe, I now know there are very complicated structures and processes - I mentioned a few in the previous post - which Behe and plenty of other people (like Crick mentioned above in regard to DNA) don't think can be explained by natural selection. I accept that assessment. ID is a theory that says those things which natural selection can't explain and which appear to be designed - are in fact designed. OK, that's my understanding. What is the point of advocating ID if all one is saying is that Darwin has limits? If Darwin has limits and it clearly does, then what is the explanation. ID is one. I will tell you that there are other theories out there - panspermia (Hoyle and Crick), "complexity or chaos theory" (Kauffman and Wolfram), symbiogenesis and Gaia theory - Lynn Margulis. And ID - Behe and Dembski - the big names in this area that I know about so far. I'll soon be posting a long post in reply to cosmicforce's post of last night - I wrote it over lunch and emailed it home - this will be my post on this subject tonight. There will be more there.