Re: The real lowdown on "Intelligent Design"


SilkUpholsteredChair wrote:
> WS Krispy wrote:
> > Decided to parahprase myself from an earlier post, because this is the
> > objective (yes, I said objective) truth.
> >
> > The "Intelligent Design" argument is nothing new. It goes back at least
> > to Zeno of Elea (generation before Socrates) and was most famously
> > advocated by William Paley (born in the mid 1700s) in his "an intricate
> > watch implies a Watchmaker" argument. It's respectable and can't really
> > be falsified, as cannot all questions that lead directly back to the
> > question of God. It's the simplest thing in the world to give God the
> > role of Primum Mobile who kicks everying off from a minute germination,
> > knowing perfectly how everything will roll out and develop. So it
> > becomes obvious that Darwinian Evolution and Intelligent Design are NOT
> > EVEN NECESSARILY MUTUALLY EXCLUSIVE: God could have designed everything
> > and then rolled it up into a kind of installation program, and we are
> > here observing each step of that install algorithm: we see these steps
> > occur by themselves and we conclude (in this scenario, wrongly) that
> > they are autopoietic (please look up "autopoietic" if you're not
> > familiar-- it's one of the most important words in the language:
> > http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/ASC/AUTOPOIESIS.html ).
> >
> > But even though the above is very obvious (after all, I thoroughly
> > grasp it and I'm not the absolute sharpest knife in the drawer), it is
> > apparently too nuanced for 1) the teachers and functionaries on our
> > school boards and governmental bodies overseeing Educational matters;
> > 2) The mainstream American media, and 3) Leftist atheists/agnostics who
> > don't actually use their own minds and in effect want to legislate Don
> > Freemanism onto our children. If these three classes of people could
> > just sharpen themselves up a little, a little tiny bit, they would see
> > what my first paragraph here entails and would arrive at the plain
> > solution: teach Darwinian Evolution as something that incontrovertibly
> > occurred, but its occurrence does not rule out (or in) a higher
> > intelligence operative on any number of levels behind the observable
> > phenomena.
> >
> > ---
> > wsk
>
>
> Sir Isaac, having established rules of motion, optics and written the
> mathematical principals (and the calculus), certainly had no problem
> with ID. Quite the contrary:
>

>
> His career had been one long quest for God; his research had spun out
> of this quest, as if by cintrifugal force, but he had no doubt that his
> science like his theology whoud redound to the greater glory of the
> Creator, to quote T. Ferris on Newton.


>
> This is not commonly taught in our great academic tradition where
> deduction and rationalism are ALL. I wonder why they're so afraid to
> teach it. No, on second thought, I don't.


It is taught if you take a history of science class. It's commonplace
there. There you'll learn that Sir Isaac wrote far more on alchemy (and
in which he passionately believed) than he did on physics or
mathematics. None of those notes were published during his lifetime
because they were no more PC in the eighteenth century than they were
in the twentieth, but they stayed squirreled away in his archives until
about the 1970s. He also wrote tons of theology, most of which you
would not find congenial. Though he was outwardly a conforming
Anglican, which he had to be in order to hold the positions which he
did, he was secretely a Unitarian and a believer in an exclusive and
esoteric faith which he traced to the high priests of ancient Egypt and
which he believed Jesus and other prophets revealed only to a select
few (such as himself). It tied in with his alchemy. He read the Bible
to find signs of the Beginning and signs of the End. The generation
that lived through the English Civil War was as tuned in to the End
Times as ours is and thought they were in them.

As to what you call his intelligent design theory: it was a very common
intellectual property in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
It's called the Argument from Design (or Argument for the Existence of
God from the Design of Nature.) Everybody used it. And it was hardly
in competition with any theory of evolution. There wasn't one. The
two sciences on which Darwin based his theory are geology and natural
history. Geology in Newton's day was rudimentary; people were just
beginning to look at rock formations in a systematic fashion. Natural
history was more or less where Aristotle had left it. Both of them
would have to develop for about 150 years before Darwin's propositions
would make any sense to anyone.

You can't go wrenching people 300 years out of the past to proof text
your arguments. You need to know what they were really talking about,
which might not actually turn out to support your claims.

.

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