ok, i'm sober now, but i have yet to sleep.
At 7/1/05 03:11 PM, -LazyDrunk- wrote:
I see it creation as a planned, intelligent design. God saw something had to be done, and He made it so. Maybe He saw there was a need for gravitational laws and various other laws needed to bind what we call existance together. I can't go so far as to provide exact specifications, but He could've very well concocted something as complex and precise as what scientists accredit the Big Bang to. Like baking a cake, He intelligently designed the creation, and possibly, the Big Bang was when he stuck it in the oven to "complete" His little project.
Ah, the Intelligent Design argument. We had a big ol time with that one a few years ago when i was in school. A minister/divinity professor came to my (liberal arts) college to debate with an atheist philosophy grad student, sparked campus-wide dialog, everybody had something to say.
The minister's most colorful analogy was something along the lines of "You're walking along the beach and a watch washes ashore. You pick up the watch, and you say to yourself, 'this is a rather complex object. It must have required a watchmaker."
The flaw in that is that life is less like a watch and more like a diamond in the rough. You don't assume because it's shiny and can withstand the elements over a long period of time that it had to have an intelligent creator.
Of course diamonds aren't quite comparable to organisms either, other than they are tough and made of carbon. But my take on it is, we have a perfectly good explanation for the existence of life, including humans, in evolution, and the addition of an Intelligent Designer only adds unnecessary baggage that one has to "fit in" to the scheme of things rather forcefully to satisfy a need for belief.
What I don't understand is why humans are the animals to have evolved in such a superior way that they have no other species on Earth to rival itself. I don't believe we were merely poofed into existance here on Earth, but I believe the design of homo Sapiens superior intellect, from day 1 as an ape, using opposable thumbs to manipulate the world around us, to today as stewards of the planet, was something like frosting on the great cake of creation.
Foregoing a mind-bending tangent into the mechanisms of evolution, we can look at it as a kind of spontaneous design from an encapsulated level. Man developed intellect as a better means of hunting and surviving harsh elements given biological limitations below the brainpan. This is explained in depth in any anthropology 101 course. The only thing science views as special in mankind above other species is his ability to singularly cause mass extinction, which is an after-the-fact glitch, not a design element.
I disagree, on the grounds that our ancestors of millions of years ago had no thought or knowledge of the vastness of their surrounding universe, large and small. The further we dig into atoms and deeper we reach into space, the more organized chaos we see, harnessed somehow. Our ancestors knew only of survival, which they excelled at. Once they no longer had to worry about day to day survival, it opened the door to all the intricate introspection that came with all that free time.
I'm sorry, but your rebuttal doesn't seem to parse. It appears you've gone off on a tangent.
My allignment with faith's side, rather than strictly the scientific approach, is that I know many of the people around me would be truly miserable if they did not have faith. Some people really, really need it, to cope, to guide, to give thanks. Right now, there is no substitute for what religion does for them. It's helps them be better people. I've yet to encounter, personally, the nutcases who bend and warp what I believe religion was intended to be.. a foundation to grow upon.
I'm surrounded by said nutcases in my part of the country, and maybe sadly so, but i think those who need religion as the crutch you make it out to be possess a certain weakness and desperation unbecoming of the superior being you see mankind to be.
I don't need to be sat down every Sunday and preached to about the trials and tribulations, the lessons learned via the Bible/Koran/whatever
So you can throw out the establishment, but feel free to borrow their ideas, which one outside the establishment could easily view as flawed if not completely false...
Modern humanity craves order, and drawing lines is how we achieve this order. Ironically, it's where most of our problems are rooted... in those lines we've drawn.
I find that schools of thought which prefer chaos over order tend to be more successful endeavors, because this follows the natural flow of our entropic universe.