jim1130:
I am trying to get a handle on “Intelligent Design” (ID) definition and it seems if I refer to the Wedge document, court rulings (PA ruling), opinion pages, newspaper articles, etc. I am told by others that I am getting “misinformed.”
From my interpretation, ID is not science (if science is defined as something that can be tested); ID is a combination political/religious movement.
I have been told ID has existed for thousands of years, beginning with the ancient Greek philosophers, and that it is not new nor is it a result of the Fundamentalist movement that originated in the US in the 19th century and gained steam after the 1925 Scopes Monkey trial.
Who out here has a clear clean grasp of ID and can help express it without sending me to more internet sites?
Thanks! Peace!
Jim
ID is not the denial of evelution. ID simply says that the universe has a complex design which suggests some kind of designer. Scientists who haven’t sacrificed their brains to the politics of the modern scientific establishement have come to this very reasonable conclusion. Now as for it being scientific, that depends on what you mean. Modern society uses the word science, usually, in reference to empirecism. However, empericism is not the only way to determine truth and, in fact, deductive logic is much better at determining truth because it PROVES truths, whereas, empericism only establishes levels of certainty. In past times, deductive reasoning was considered science and thus philosophy that employed deductive logic was considered science. That is why the medevels said, "Theology is the queen of sciences and philosophy is her hand maid. If we use the original defiinition of science: the reasonable and systematic study of basicly anything, then, of course, ID design is a science because the existence of God has been proven through the use of reason alone. Socrates did it, then Thomas Aquinas polished the proof and modern philosophers have gone further in the process of fine tuning the proof for the existence of God.
Yet, these proofs are not based on empericism and, for this reason, are not considered science by modern empericists who have hijakced the word science for their own purposes in an act of philosophical elitism. It is a bit sneaky on their part. If something agrees with their limited and falicious materialistic philosophy, they call it science. If it does not they play a psycho-social game with peoples’ minds, undermining other sciences by not calling them sciences. Even if the science that proves the existence of God is based on better reasoning than their empericism, the snear their noses at it.
Even though we need not use empericism to prove the existence of God, we can though. This is the argument based on design that most people mean when they are discussing ID. The argument goes as follows: The universe displays complex design, and thus suggest a designer. This is based on emperical data of the world around us. We look at a cell, DNA, the human mind, all emperical data, and we see a design and understand that a design requires a designer. Thus, this arguement does fit into the emperical categories that allow for it to be defined as “science” by modern empericists. They may object: But the scientific method is not employed! Its not testable, predictable, and repeatable. Well, In response I answer that neither is the science of evolution or “big bang” cosmology. We cannot precdict how they would work in the future, we cannot repaeat them, or test them because they are unrepeatable events from the past that are either too grand in scale or take too long to occur of us to test them. Yet we have a pretty good idea that they did happen, even without the scientific method, because of of the emperical data available. The same is true with ID. We have enough emeperical data to suggest that ID is a reasonable theory and probably a true theory. For anyone to deny this reality, one must remove their brain, and put away some where for safe keeping.
