As a priest, I'm upset by the growing reliance upon even a few moderate Christians to support Intelligent Design [which I got in the new issue of New Scientist].
First, if there is such a thing as intelligent design, it is still no evidence for God. Aliens could have intelligently designed whatever the IDrs think was crafted.
Second, as a science, if design is open to falsifiability, we we are putting God up to scientific scrutiny. This may be a worthwhile task, but it is not the same as working to understand nature.
I do believe that hich school students should study epistemology, They could compare the way religious and scientific persons know and articulate the world. This kind of philosophical skill has some merit.
The problem is reflecting how evolution has been incorporated into popular morality. Does it justify the exploitation of the weak? Eugenics? Male promiscuity? Christians could contribute to popular culture if they instead examined the conflation of evolution with moral thinking, rather than attacking the scientific method.
Christians are implicitly attacking a method of thinking, not merely the theory of evolution itself. They don't have much to offer here, if only because many of the wonderful ideas and facts we know are the product of hard, scientific, empirical thinking. Not only has science offered an understanding of truth, that truth is reliable. It works.
What we can do is explose the limits of evolution in popular morality. That would make sense. But it's not science. It's our lives.
Update: bodyandsoul] discusses this in more detail.
One thing that always occurs to me when I hear intelligent design discussed by its proponents is the way in which it places the human being at the center of the whole debate. Because the eyeball is too complicated FOR US to understand how it developed, it must have been designed by God. Well, maybe we just aren't smart or sophisticated enough to detect the processes at work in the developent of the eyeball. But that never occurs to the IDers. They don't see how it could have happened so they decide it was done magically by God. Human beings are thereby once again understood to be at the center of everything because the human being's capacity to understand functions as the ultimate standard.
In a way ID actually diminishes the power and agency of God because it assumes that God could not work through an infinitely complex evolutionary process too complicated or subtle for us to grasp.
The constant tendency of conservative Christians to underestimate the infinite power and majesty of God in favor of their own cramped understandings never ceases to amaze.
Posted by: K | Jul 14, 2005 at 08:51 AM
Good point, K. ID-ers' God is Too Small!
Posted by: J. C. Fisher | Jul 17, 2005 at 10:36 PM
The whole theory is just silly.
It states that life is too complex to have been created without a designer, yet when you use the same governing rules to explain the origin of the designer. The designer would have been too complex to have been created without a designer also. For the theory to make sense there would have to be an infinite amount of designers.
Posted by: Austin | Dec 21, 2005 at 10:38 AM
mabey the theory of ID has just not been incorporated into the idea of evolution. What if the designer simply designed the building blocks for life (proteins, atoms and cells) to evolve from? then both theories would seem much more realistic... You can't make something from nothing
Posted by: Brian | Jan 26, 2006 at 04:51 PM
They must be very talented aliens. Where did they come from you goofball?
Posted by: MeStupid | Feb 26, 2006 at 11:49 AM