The debate between ID and Evolutionists is mostly a debate on “suspension of belief”. When you go see a movie you perform what is known as a suspension of disbelief in the sense that you make believe that the fiction in the movie is real no matter how far fetched. Now what a person who believes in Intelligent Design does is the opposite, he performs a suspension of belief in the fact that matter can automatically evolve itself into a human. And the evolutionist does the same in not believing that a god can assign a human out of thin air.
Both can be seen as miracles or can be seen as not possible. It is an aesthetic choice. A person can say that it is not possible for a jet to fly and cross oceans since it is so heavy. He can say that he can never believe that possible and if it does happen it is a miracle, something the mind can’t conceive. If we perceived the world with a time interval of a second equal to 100 years, we would see a computer pop out in front of us not having ever seen the intermediate events. It would look like a miracle. But then what is a miracle ? Anything can be seen as a miracle if you perform a suspension of belief. Even a particle that moves 1 cm can be seen as an absolute miracle, impossible to be true and happening.
Science tries to be coherent and honest and tries to explain things with what we see and know everyday, therefore the theory of Evolution is as close as science can get to a reasonable truth. Science always says : “I AM NOT SURE, I DON’T KNOW, I MAY BE WRONG.” The religious ID proponents are always sure of themselves, they possess the truth, they have no doubts. But if ID is right, they don’t know who the Intelligent Designer is. It could be a monster from a parallel universe, or an alien race, or we could all be in a computer simulation. We could be brains in a vat, the god could be any of a million possible things.
In case it wasn’t clear, what I wanted to say is that the Intelligent Design proponents find it impossible to believe that MATTER all by itself can SELF EVOLVE into organisms as complex as human beings. This to them seems like a miracle or impossible or as they always say like a tornado that can build a new functioning car by pure chance by going through a junk yard of scrap metal. But this is just a subjective impression of theirs based on what seems possible and impossible.
No one can really know or measure what is or isn’t impossible. We can only measure things according to what we already know and our everyday experience. Therefore science still does the best job in this even though it can never be excluded that supernatural events and items may be possible. Like a robot civilization that can travel through time and design humans.
The only way this thread belongs in NS is if it looses the creationist dogma entirely; it’s just not on. Evolution makes too much sense, and wisdom teeth on a created human makes none.
The only way the OT can make sense is if it just looks like that’s what happened. The question becomes, how were the authors looking? Is there any possible perspective from which evolution might look like something that might be described as it is in the OT?
I think there potentially is such a perspective. It involves midrash (the meditative exercise, not the texts), and it is interesting to consider that they did midrash in Babalon aswell; and there’s every reason to expect that this meditative exercise is an evolution of an early method of teaching writing (the exercises that produced the epic of Gilgamesh.)
In order to consider the possibility of truth in the OT it is helpful to suspend the disbelief that nothing besides individual humans can be conscious; accept that everything is conscious. Ritual is then as profound as neural function.
I’m an IDer and a literalist, i’m not a creationist.
Lets imagine that Intelligent Design is correct. Scientists agree that only some kind of intelligence could have designed the first cell and universe etc. Then you have to ask who or what is the Intelligent Designer ? You have 3 cases:
It is a religious God, then which one ? choose between Christian, Jew, Islam, Buddha, Tao or any of other many gods
Science Fiction Scenario: Alien Race, Brain in a Vat, robots, monsters from parallel universes etc. The wilder the scenario the more true it probably is.
Physical Laws are still valid only we don’t know the whole story. Maybe some things happen at the center of stars that can connect to the first cells, maybe there are parallel universes or aliens (even though these seem to mix with point 2, they don’t really deny science).
Maybe we can’t perceive events happening at very small time scales like 10 to the minus 50 seconds. If our mind was made in such a way as to perceive events every 100 years, we would see lots of miracles, computers pop out of thin air, jet planes pop out etc. Maybe we are seeing the world through an analogous limitation.
Now science can see linear events down to 10 to the minus 20 seconds I think. But we are completely blind to events that occur at smaller time scales. So if physics does alot of complex interesting things at those time intervals, we simply can’t see it and maybe the origin of the first cells has to do with what happens in those intervals. Even in this case the wilder the scenario the more true it probably is.
What? If this was a turing test i’d say you’re a computer. Did you read my post?
Meditating on the evolution of the primordial soup toward cellular organization is a very productive exercise. Functionally, a cell membrane is a wall, and so it is discussed in the OT, if you consider the Truth of ‘wall.’
I thought the Iman was a computer, but maybe I am too.
Another evolutionist answered as follows:
"You don’t believe that man was literally sculpted out of dirt do you? You don’t believe that God has physical lungs and trachea and mouth do you? You don’t believe God literally inhales O2 and exhales CO2 into the atmosphere. When God breathes life into the nostrils of man, surely this is a poetic way to describe a creation event-- surely God isn’t performing literal mouth to mouth, exhaling magical air atoms into the nostrils of man. Surely God does not even have a mouth-- or anything physical and imperfect. "
In my small list I made in the first post, this rule applies also to case number 1 where the mysterious Intelligent Designer could be a Religious god : The wilder the scenario the more true it probably is.
I can easily believe in this. What makes it so special compared to any other thing ? We simply perform a suspension of disbelief and say god can do all kinds of weird magical things like creating a man right from dirt. It is normal everyday things for a supernatural superpower entity with unlimited powers. He chooses to do it that way because it seems so much more spectacular compared to what we see everyday.
Well, what makes it special to me is that god would have to be some sort of deceptive asshole.
Well, the way i’m looking at i can see a place for the notion of real magic and, ofcourse the place of slight-of-hand is obvious. If there is such a thing as collective consciousness then it is possible that anceint shamen understood the ecological conscious dynamics without knowing the depth of them. It would be possible for that understanding to express itself in a rather removed fashion.
If there is such a being, a being so inclined, then this discussion would be moot.