wande wrote-
Quote:Does ID have any medical applications? Can ID be detected, tested, and used to formulate explanations about natural phenomena?
I'm not sure about that wande. My impression has been that, all other things being equal, which they rarely are, the religious people get ill less than irreligious people so medical applications are less needed for them. I think concentrations of religious people have lower suicide rates, lower murder and general violence rates, lower mental health problems, lower stress levels, lower venereal disease difficulties, lower teenage pregnancy rates, lower percentages of single parent families and generally all round better health and happiness ratings and so on and so forth. In a nutshell-less social problems and greater longevity.
Whether you consider those to be medical applications or to be natural phenomena is probably dependent on what sort of job you or one of your close relatives does.
People who work in the very large business of attempting to ameliorate these social problems will obviously see religious communities as useless for their careers and will thus favour irreligion for strictly Marxist reasons.
They are likely to derive their self-serving opinions from professional journals which represent the professions benefitting from pathological social conditions and which are written and controlled by the elite of the "caring" community who may be presumed to know what they are doing when they concentrate on cures for the sick and dysfunctional rather than on prevention. They would be unlikely, for example, to publish any surveys which show how healthy people live and possibly obstruct the commissioning of such surveys in the first place.
It is odd though that very few people who support pure scientific logic live their lives according to its obvious principles and that they have singled out religious belief for denigration can only be due to traditional religious precepts getting in the way of their sexual preferences or other self indulgencies which alternative treatments don't do.
Which is a long winded way of saying that they are a bunch of deluded hypocrites to put it at its mildest.
Before you rush to respond with witterings about N Ireland and Iraq please take note of the phrase "all other things being equal" which is meant to refer to economic and political considerations which are often the principle cause of the pathologies I have mentioned. Religion is often dragged into those sad cases because it offers a simple explanation and thus enables those with low attention spans to spout without too much intellectual effort in company which knows no better.
I refer you to Ivan Illich and his famous paper Medical Nemesis.
