If one worships a blundering tinkerer with a bad temper, well then, of course that deity might need the support of blatant and deceptive human propaganda...
I'd sooner believe in a deity that created the universe in six days, complete with the fossils of creatures who had never lived, and light shining down from stars that didn't yet exist. Who knows? Maybe the universe is only thousands of years old and all the evidence for things before creation is a simple backstory, like the background of an animated movie. Such a creative deity is every bit as worthy as one who simply let the energy of this universe spill forth billions of years ago like a firework launched into the void..
Or perhaps the universes are all cyclical as many cultures believe, and perhaps the first humans really did crawl out of a hole under that big rock over there.
Those are good stories. Humans are story tellers, and we use them to remember things and to exercise our minds.
Unfortunately in claiming an "Intelligent Designer" one must convince oneself that the design is "intelligent" when clearly that is not. If the human body is the work of an intelligent designer it is an extraordinarily lazy design cobbled together from parts that were laying on the shelf, and all held together by duct tape and a prayer. Because of this bad design we are all subject to great suffering -- minds that break down, mothers and babies dying at childbirth, failing backs and joints, cruel cancers and infections, autoimmune disease...
As a religious person one can only come to the conclusion that these apparent "failures" of design -- all this suffering -- are part of some greater plan, an aspect of purposeful Creation that we cannot comprehend.
A more reasonable point of view does not involve a Creator at all. Something happened. A universe spilled forth.
But with exactly the same physical consequence, an omnipotent Creator would have no need to fuss with the controls of the machine, no need to issue bug fixes and patches like some human software developer. The Universe arrived version 1.0, and
so it was; and God saw all that he had made, and it was very good. Such a God might stop by to visit, but He doesn't stop by to fuss with the physical plant; to replace the galvanized pipe in your house with copper, to upgrade your electrical service, to shift the orbit of the earth out a bit to compensate for global warming, to remove like an infected appendix the place in our mind that harbors the bloody minded racism that turns us against our fellow man.
It's my own inclination to believe in a Creative Force, and to see my own scientific explorations as a celebration of that Creation. As a practical matter it wouldn't matter at all if my explorations were motivated by a curiosity that was a simply another evolved trait of the human species. Not a big deal. The spiritual point of view is doubtlessly an evolved trait very similar to human curiosity and inquisitiveness, and when you bundle them all together, human motivations are never simple.
The Scientific American by Michael Shermer is informative. I was highly amused how the Pepperdine University audience was packed with the same sorts of folks who were persuaded to laugh at Dennis Miller's pathetic and twisted response to
The Daily Show.http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=ben-steins-expelled-review-michael-shermerIn my own experience the most outspoken critics of evolution are deceitful, and "Intelligent Design" is simply "Creation Science" in another skin, a pathetic attempt to suppress the human spirit and extinguish the sorts of curiosity that threaten various untenable faiths and false authority.
I seek Truth. "Intelligent Design" is highly tainted with obvious and deliberate falsehoods that poison the public discourse.
Printer-friendly format
Email this thread to a friend
Bookmark this thread
(1000+ posts)
Send PM |
Profile |
Ignore
