euphemizing belief's origin

A recent conversation with an Intelligent Design supporter produced the following snippet...

I ask, "Why do you believe in a creator? It's fear, no?"

"No." was the response.

"Then why do you believe?" I ask.

"It gives me comfort."

pushing His buttons

Uh oh.

Methinks Kansas has left His grace by pissing Him off. I bet Topeka is now added to His crosshairs and will receive a rainfire of destructive meatballs proving Pat right.

But seriously...

The Best Defense is a Good, Um, Er... Belief?

Update: The CNN article seems to be deleted. Fortunately, the Internet Archive had a copy.

The Intelligent Design circus has recently made headlines in California. With "ID as science" proponents having their buttocks kicked in a variety of locations, it seems the strategy has changed. ID is now being proposed as a "philosophy" with social studies teacher Sharon Lumberg attempting to offer a "Philosophy of Design" course to her students.

Personally, I have no problem with a discussion of "intelligence". Such discussion would blend well with philosophical discourse. "What is intelligence?" is a tremendous question. But when it's framed as the intelligence of "That - out there" - not simply intelligence itself - folks, we have strayed far from science or philosophy.

The most telling part of this article is when CNN states that Sharon Lumberg "defended" her course with the following argument...

"I believe this is the class that the Lord wanted me to teach"

Is the Designer the Designed?

I'm wasting time following the "Intelligent Design"/Atheism debate. It's time to end it. I became interested in the faux issue only because it dealt directly with copyright issues in Kansas. I soon realized it was simply a childish debate over whether or not a god "out there" exists.

At first one may ask - "ID versus Atheism? I thought the debate was ID versus Evolution!" Well with many references to Darwinism it's understandable that one would come to such a conclusion.

In reality, this is about the age-old and pointless debate over the existence of "Him". Unfortunately, science has been unjustly cast into this battle. That is, evolution has been conflated with traditional atheistic and materialistic beliefs. For whatever reason, the image of the "Atheistic Scientist" has been popularized - regardless of the fact that one can accept universal common descent yet simultaneously deny the extreme materialistic stance. That is, one can accept evolution yet simultaneously question materialism.

William Dembski's tirade on "Darwinism and its atheistic pretensions" offers enough of a clue that the ID "movement" is not genuine, but merely an agenda. In another article, Dembski claims that "Intelligent design is not and never will be a doctrine of creation." yet follows this with the statement that ID "merely concerns itself with features of natural objects that reliably signal the action of an intelligence, whatever that intelligence might be." (emphasis added) Creationism or not, the use of the preposition/article "of an" and pronoun "that" are dead give-aways that Dembski's ID is about injecting the judeo-christian-islamic view of a single separate god into human consciousness. ID subtly sells "the designer" as nature's fuel while giving undue importance to the side-note that ID says nothing concrete about "the designer" itself. Indeed, a clever way to avoid the creationist label, but dogmatic garbage nonetheless.

Richard Dawkins, why atheism? It's not relevant to evolution. The theists are the ones with the burden of proof. We know one can neither prove nor disprove theistic claims (or leprechauns for that matter) through science. Science has it place, but exists through division of the observer and the observed. This division - though useful in gathering technical knowledge - is not reality and must not be worshiped the way many materialists do. After all, quantum theory casts a dubious cloud over the very belief that the observer is separate from the observed. Perhaps both extremes could learn from this branch of (un)knowledge. That is, science - you have a legitimate place but that's not all there is. Thought, no matter how grand, is limited. And theists? Why accept and invent absurd, superstitious beliefs to explain what you do not know?

Bill Dembski - arguably IDs most popular proponent - we hear you have a Ph.D. in philosophy. You claim to have studied other philosophies but write them off as "eastern mysticism" and "occultism" since your "conversion to Christianity". A separate, intelligent, "designer" Bill? Chew on this for a while and get back to me, would you...?

What if intelligence just is. That is, what if the designer is the designed? What does this make us?