Lois & Clark Forums Forums General Discussion Fun with Polls What do you believe in?

Hmmmm. I'm not passionately interested in evolution, which means I have so much less to say about this subject than I have about astronomy. Because of my somewhat lukewarm interest in evolution, I'm even less interested in ID.

The way I see it, however, there can be two reasons for a person to believe in Intelligent Design rather than in evolution. ID can be regarded by its supporters to be an intellectually stringent and highly scientific and coherent way of explaining the world. Or it can recognized as, but not acknowledged as, pure religon dressed up in scientific clothing.

The scientific reason for supporting ID would be that this theory is the one that its supporters find most scientifically plausible when it comes to explaining the emergence and diversity of life forms, more so than the theory of evolution. The way I understand it, that is how most ID proponents describe themselves: they are ID supporters because this is the position that, to them, describes reality in the most scientifically accurate way.

(One argument for ID is that the human eye is so complicated that it could not have come into existence without the help of a creator, so it must have been created from scratch rather than having evolved gradually. I think Marcus was arguing against this position with his picture of a tiny octopus, whose eyes don't resemble the human eyes at all, but work better than ours.)

Anyway, I think it is perfectly intellectually legitimate to be a supporter of ID if you honestly believe that the scientific arguments for this position are better than the arguments for evolution. (Of course I'd expect an honest ID supporter to be willing to reconsider his position if a supporter of evolution can present arguments for evolution that are better than the ID supporter's arguments for ID.)

But if there is no clear dividing line between ID and creationism, then I can't regard ID as a scientific position or a scientific belief at all. Because then the main arguments for ID can't be scientific but religious, and then ID is not a scientific position but a religious one.

Let me slightly amend that. There is only so much we humans can know. It is acceptable, indeed sometimes necessary, to say that you believe rather than know something.

But if you are a creationist, then you believe that the biblical story of the creation is the accurate one. This is not a scientific position, in my opinion. Consider what Genesis actually says about the creation of the world and the life on it:

This is a very weird description of the creation of the "sky", as if it was some sort of bubble of air suspended in the middle of an ocean of water. I don't see how anyone can argue that this is the best scientific description of how the Earth's atmosphere came into existence.

But Genesis contains even weirder statements:

Here in verse eleven, God creates vegetation and fruit trees on the Earth. But now look here:

What is going on here? Well, God creates the Sun and the Moon. But wait a minute. That means that the Earth not only existed before the Sun did, which is contrary to everything that astronomers believe about the formation of stars and planets, but it also means that the Earth was a living planet, full of vegetaion and fruit trees, before the Sun even existed. Okay, but it has been scientifically proven that most kinds of vegetation, and certainly all fruit trees, need sunlight in order to process the nutrients that they need to survive. According to the Bible there can have been no sunlight when the first fruit trees bore their first fruit because there was no Sun back then. But even so we should accept the Biblical statement that life forms that are totally dependent on sunlight existed before the Sun did? What kind of scientific argument is that?

Yes, I know. It says in verse three of Genesis that God created light, even though this light did not come from the Sun. So this light that had no source would have been enough to provide the fruit trees with the light they craved? Oh, but after God had created the Sun, this source-less light disappeared and was replaced by sunlight - not that the Bible tells us so, but it must have happened since the source-less light is gone now, and we have only sunlight left? But that light without a source must have existed and it must have kept the first trees alive and well, since the Bible tells us so?

Really. This is not a scientific argument. This does not make scientific sense.

If the ID proponents can't separate themselves and their beliefs from the beliefs of creationists, then I don't see how the ID people can claim to be supporters of science at all.

Ann