Jones said: >Except for the obvious semantic problem.... whatever that ID >impetus or intelligent "force" turns out to be - the "hidden >influence" which is finally ascertained to be the formative >influence for life, then that force will then be labeled as "God."
Why? If some day people make intelligent robots, which by definition did not self-assemble, they would not be obligated to call humans God--Humans would simply be another link in the chain God used to make them (if they happened to be religious robots). <G> And Jed said: >Wrong, wrong WRONG. I find this argument very annoying, as I have said >before. It solves nothing. It just pushes the problem off to another >planet. Somewhere, sometime intelligent life must have evolved entirely by >natural forces. Since it happened somewhere there is no reason to think it >did not happen again on earth. Annoyed or not, one of the questions evolution tries to answer (or is supposed to try to answer) is whether or not life such as we are even CAN evolve on its own. It either can or it can't--this is a worthwhile thing to know. If it can't, then science should go in search of that intelligence which did the designing--and that intelligence in no way has to be God for that logic to hold, as Jones incorrectly supposes. The second half of your comment simply assumes that God is unnecessary, but it doesn't tell us whether or not protoplasmic life can evolve on its own. That is why I specifically said perhaps Electromagnetic organisms. Of course, panspermia alreadly suggests life began somewhere other than on Earth. Finally, ID isn't supposed to solve anything--it is supposed to open up the debate to a wider range of hypotheses. Of course, there are Fundamentalist groups trying to sneak in Creationism (capital C) to the public schools under the guise of ID. But so what? Special interest groups do that all the time. Those who oppose them would do themselves a big favor if they would simply co-op the idea themselves, admit that "one of the things we try to find out in biology is whether or not it is even possible for life to begin on its own," and then go on from there teaching exactly what they do now anyway. Jones also said this stuff: >BTW that force in question - the one which is capable of >influencuing raw chemicals to assemple into anti-entropic >structures, and then influences at every subsequent stage - the >"intellignet" development of more-and-more anti-entropic features >into what becomes "life"... that force looks very much like a >collection of "memes"... etc. Well, maybe that force does, but it doesn't look anything like the God of Christians, Jews, or Muslims. If "God" is just another part of the Universe but not the Creator of it and outside of it, why worship him/it at all? Jeffery D. Kooistra
