Intelligent Design Theory: Science or Religion?

such as the various creation stories humans have come up with

As we all know

As some of us know

Well I have never met a humanoid and I don't know of a scierntist who has met one either.

More to the point, except in a broad statistical sense which provides insights only to the central tendencies of the behavior large groups of people, science cannot today provide a complete understanding of the thoughts and behavior of a single human person.

Furthermore we have very sound scientific reasons to conclude that such understanding and scientific predictability can never be attained.

Our own thoughts, feelings, intellectual and spiritual (if you don't like that word substitute existential) aspirations are indeed a part of observable reality that science cannot explain. Where does that leave your proposition?

I thought the

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As we all know

as a link from the previous paragraph concerning what most of us knew way back when Jennifer still had teeth was quite witty.

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As some of us know

would have been even wittier.

where a culture (pygmie, say) has no familiarity with the method.

Bernie wrote-

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where a culture (pygmie, say) has no familiarity with the method.

Where on earth did you get a racist idea like that from?

There's every reason to assume that our grasp of complex matters will continue to increase as you and I have witnessed in our relatively short lifetimes.

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More to the point, except in a broad statistical sense which provides insights only to the central tendencies of the behavior large groups of people, science cannot today provide a complete understanding of the thoughts and behavior of a single human person.

I should think "today" is a key word here. There's every reason to assume that our grasp of complex matters will continue to increase as you and I have witnessed in our relatively short lifetimes.

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Furthermore we have very sound scientific reasons to conclude that such understanding and scientific predictability can never be attained.

Surely this isn't black and white and it isn't appropriate to cast the matter that way. Our understandings will increase even if we cannot achieve something which might be described as 'total understanding'. But in what sense is that a failing of scientific method and in what sense a failure of any sort of biological or mechanical entity to achieve 'total understanding'?

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Our own thoughts, feelings, intellectual and spiritual (if you don't like that word substitute existential) aspirations are indeed a part of observable reality that science cannot explain. Where does that leave your proposition?

We are learning now much about how the brain works and its consequences for 'mind'. And we'll learn much more.

So I presume you refer to the subjective experience...what it is like to be, or to be 'me'? And I agree, that is a realm which seems somehow quite unique and which seems to sit outside of the physical universe (even if necessarily of it). It is a puzzling aspect, no question. For myself, this is where the interesting questions sit. But, again, for me, a Creator has no necessary part to play here. And certainly not the old burning bush fellow who speaks to people in the desert and conveniently gives them land which is already inhabited by others who got there first.

The answer is No on every point. We have every scientific reason to conclude that even if one could postulate a complete description of the state of every cerebral neuron, we could not predict the next observable action or thought of a human subject. Moreover we have equally good reason to conclude that such a complete description of the state at any given instant is itself unknowable. Here we run into both fundamental quantum uncertainty and as well the intractable problem of predicting the future state of a highly non linear dynamic system, based on an approximation of a present state. Both are fundamental and impenetrable barriers.

Though you didn't respond to the issue, we are still left with the scientifically unanswerable question of how it all came to be.

SO, "not really worrying about a god" does make the day go by in a less complicated fashioned.

I suppose it is possible to live one's life without ever wondering how it all came to be and the 'whys' of our existence. However my strong impression is that this is at best an unusual condition.

Why not the I ching or a Satan worshipper or an Indian shaman ripped on peyote?

In the study of ideas, it is necessary to remember that insistence on hard-headed clarity issues from sentimental feeling, as it were a mist, cloaking the perplexities of fact. Insistence on clarity at all costs is based on sheer superstition as to the mode in which human intelligence functions. Our reasonings grasp at straws for premises and float on gossamers for deductions.

georgeob1 wrote:

The "reality we can observe" in science is very limited indeed. Just as the conceptual models and images of an otherwise entirely workable quantum theory fail to satisfy in their entirety, requiring notions of complementarity and in some cases immeasurable (or at least unmeasured) entities - not to mention an impenetrable uncertainty in the quantification of some basic concepts we do rely on - we encounter even greater conceptual difficulties and uncertainties in understanding ourselves, our fates, and the origins of it all.

I'm not claiming that the reach of observation and theorizing is unlimited. I am claiming that religion does nothing to extend these limits. Just because scientists don know something about certain things, that doesn't mean religion does.

Then of course there is the problem of origins. Scientists speak blithely of the "singularity" that preceded the big bang. In other speculations they consider an infinity of parallel universes and infinite cycles of creation and destruction, of matter and anti matter. All of these are alike in that they do not permit scientific examination, understanding and prediction. Next to them the "god hypothesis" as Thomas terms it seems rather tame. Certainly there is neither a scientific nor an esthetic reason to rank the "god hypothesis below them - quite the contrary, in my view.

By this I certainly don't mean that scientific inquiry should stop or be externally limited. We should press on as far as we can go. However science has so far established the existence of barriers through which we cannot pass. Very odd in this circumstance to insist that an undefinable singularity, or infinite regression, or infinity of parallel universes is "scientifically" preferable to a creator.

And therewith that important word is given a positive meaning of the highest significance which henceforward will be assumed in using it. In the same way as we have elected to distinguish the Soul as the possible and the World as the actual, we can now differentiate between possible and actualculture, i.e., culture as an idea in the (general or individual)existenceand culture as the [/I]body of that idea, as the total of its visible, tangible and comprehensible expressions--acts and opinions, religion and state, arts and sciences, peoples and cities, economic and social forms, speech, laws, customs, characters, facial lines and costumes. Higher history, intimately related to life and to becoming, is the actualizing of possible Culture.

We must not omit to add that these basic determinations of meaning are largely incommunicable by specification, definition or proof, and in their deeper import must be reached by feeling, experience and intuition. There is a distinction, rarely appreciated as it should be, between experience as lived and experience as learned (zwischen Erleben und Erkennen), between the immediate certainty given by the various kinds of intuition--such as illumination, inspiration, artistic flair, experience of life, the power of "sizing men up" (Goethe's "exact percipient fancy")--and the produce of rational procedure and technical experiment.

The first are imparted by means of analogy, picture, symbol, the second by formula, law, scheme. The become is experienced by learning--indeed, as we shall see, the having-become is for the human mind identical with the completed act of cognition. A becoming, on the other hand, can only be experienced by living, felt with a deep wordless understanding. It is on this that what we call "knowledge of men" is based; in fact the understanding of history implies a superlative knowledge of men. The eye which can see into the depths of an alien soul--owes nothing to the cognition-methods investigated in the "Critique of Pure Reason," yet the purer the historical picture is, the less accessible it becomes to any other eye. The mechanism of a pure nature-picture, such as the world of Newton and Kant, is cognized, grasped, dissected in laws and equations and finally reduced to system: the organism of a pure history-picture, like the world of Plotonius, Dante and Giordano Bruno, is intuitively seen, inwardly experienced, grasped as a form or symbol and finally rendered in poetical and artistic conceptions. Goethe's "living nature" is a historical world-picture.

The evidence for a 'beginning' of the universe, combined with the limitations of the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics should put to rest any conjecture that the universe might be eternal, don't you agree?

Then of course there is the problem of origins. Scientists speak blithely of the "singularity" that preceded the big bang. In other speculations they consider an infinity of parallel universes and infinite cycles of creation and destruction, of matter and anti matter. All of these are alike in that they do not permit scientific examination, understanding and prediction. Next to them the "god hypothesis" as Thomas terms it seems rather tame. Certainly there is neither a scientific nor an esthetic reason to rank the "god hypothesis below them - quite the contrary, in my view.