Intelligent Design Theory: Science or Religion?

Thinking doesn't mean anything in a meaningless universe. How could it? If the universe is meaningless then everything in it is meaningless and thinking is in it so thinking is meaningless. Are you off your meds? It is only by giving the universe meaning, which is that it was created by a thinking entity, that thinking can possibly be thought of as having any meaning. So anybody who thinks that thinking has a meaning has conceded an intelligent designer or even a ******* stupid designer. A designer anyway. Intelligent or otherwise.

Writing in philosophical riddles is one way to throw up a barrier to objective thought and make one's life meaningful by default. The universe is meaningful thanks to science. Evolution is meaningful.

This is silly... but let me try again. First of all a science lesson.

Human beings mistakenly think that we are significant. In the history of the world, we are not. In fact if you represented the entire existence of the Earth by a mile, modern humans came around in the past couple of inches. Even in terms of resource, sure we are hurting ourselves... but from the point of the Earth, we are insignificant.

There are two types of resources. The first is matter (i.e. the atoms that are available for us to use). The second is energy.

1. There is very little matter that is leaving the Earth. The things we have put into orbit will come back (and be accessible to future humans). We have put a little matter on the moon, and a couple of robots on Mars or in space-- but besides that, we haven't lost any resources.

2. We are using energy that was from the sun, but was stored over the past million years or so. Most of the energy we use comes from the sun. It is not renewable in our lifetime (seeing as it takes tens of thousands of years to make fossil fuel), but on the timeframe of 1 million years, it is completely renewable and will be accessible to future humans.

I think you are missing the time frame involved.

The Earth will be destroyed in 5 billion years. Compared with the span of human life, even all life, this is a very very long time.

In the time before we need to leave the Earth, plastics will decompose, the continental shelves will move exposing brand new minerals to the surface, the surface of the Earth will be renewed. There will be new supplies of oil. The effects of todays humans will be completely insignificant well before 50 million years (just 1 percent of the time the Earth has left).

In fact, even if we destroy all human life, we will have more than enough time (and resources) to evolve all over again.

Do they get points for just being thick?

Was it a committee or is the designer like all designers, gay and single?

Richard Dawkins delivers this year's Open University lecture - and you can watch it live, streamed, from the Natural History Museum, from 7.30pm on Tuesday 17th March 2009

Professor Richard Dawkins’ lecture, presented to an invited audience at the Natural History Museum, will investigate if Darwin was the most revolutionary scientist ever, and examine the evolutionary theories of his contemporaries.

Richard Dawkins suggests that there are four "bridges to evolutionary understanding" and illustrates this with four claimants to the discovery of natural selection: Edward Blyth, Patrick Matthew, Alfred Wallace and Charles Darwin.

The fifth bridge of evolutionary understanding is identified as modern genetics " which he terms digital Darwinism.

After the lecture a questions and answers session will take place, involving a panel of Darwin experts and hosted by Jonathan Silvertown5, Professor of Ecology at The Open University and editor of the book 99% Ape. If you'd like to raise a question for consideration by the panel, please use the form below.

The panel includes: Jim Moore6, Professor of the History of Science at The Open University and co-author of Darwin’s Sacred Cause; Doctor Peter Skelton, Reader in Palaeobiology at The Open University and a contributor to 99% Ape and Steve Jones7, Professor of Genetics at University College London and author of Darwin’s Island: the Galapagos in the Garden of England.

The Annual Lecture is held in partnership with Darwin 200 and co-hosted by the Natural History Museum External link 8, and forms part of the Darwin 200 celebrations.
Watch the lecture live

7.30pm, 17th March 2009

Quote:

From The Sunday Times
March 15, 2009
There’s a new power in America " atheism
The faithless are a growing force as the churches duck the challenges of the age
Andrew Sullivan

There is one thing that is not allowed in American national politics " and that is atheism. “In God We Trust” is on the currency; and the number of congressional members who avow no faith at all are about as plentiful as those who are openly gay (none in the Senate; five in the House).

Under the last president, religious faith " evangelical Christianity or Benedict-style Catholicism " was a prerequisite for real access to the inner circle. But the requirement is not just Republican. Among the more excruciating campaign events of last year was a faith summit for the Democrats in which candidates vied with one another to express the most piety. Barack Obama’s Christianity " educated, nuanced, social " is in many ways more striking than that of, say, Nixon, Truman or Eisenhower.

Americans are losing faith, though; and those who have it are moving out of established churches. The nonreligious are now the third biggest grouping in the US, after Catholics and Baptists, according to the just-released American Religious Identification Survey. The bulk of this shift occurred in the 1990s, when they jumped from 8% to 14% of the population " but they have consolidated in the past decade to 15%.

As elsewhere in the West, mainline Protestantism has had the biggest drop " from 19% to 13%. Despite heavy Latino immigration, the proportion of Catholics has drifted down since 1990, and their numbers have shifted dramatically from the northeast and the rust belt to the south and west. Take South Carolina, a state you might associate with hardcore Protestant evangelicalism. It certainly does exist there " but in that southern state, the percentage of Catholics has almost doubled since 1990 and the percentage of atheists has tripled.

America, it turns out, is a more complicated spiritual place than the stereotypes might imply. Islam is still tiny " and integrated and largely successful. Catholicism, while buoyant among new Hispanic immigrants (who are, nonetheless, drifting rapidly towards evangelicalism in the southern hemisphere whence they came), has plummeted in its heartland. Think of Massachusetts, the home of the Irish and Italian and Portuguese. In 1990, Catholics accounted for 54% of all residents of the Kennedys’ state. That’s now 39%.

The bulk of these ex-Catholics joined no other faith group " and the number of residents claiming no religion at all jumped from 8% to 22%. Of course, the sex abuse scandal played a powerful part. One of the chief enablers and protectors of abusive priests, Cardinal Bernard Law, was based in Boston and escaped real accountability by being given a prestigious sinecure in Rome. The Irish and Italians in Massachusetts did not forget.

In many ways the most interesting dynamic is that between mega-church, politicised evangelicalism and atheism. Mega-churches have emerged in many suburban neighbourhoods in America and serve as community centres, as social-work hubs and as venues for what most outsiders would think of as stadium-style Sunday rock shows, in which religion looks like a form of fandom. Charismatic preachers " like the now disgraced Ted Haggard or the politically powerful Rick Warren " have built massive congregations.

The movement has spawned its own shadow pop music industry, coopts the popular culture as any brand-conscious franchise would and has a completely informal form of worship. Go to one of these places and it feels like a town in itself " with shops, daycare centres, conference rooms and social networking groups. The car parks feel like those in sports stadiums; and the atmosphere evokes a big match. In 20 years, the number of Americans finding identity and God in these places has soared from 200,000 to more than 8m.

This is not, one hastens to add, an intellectual form of faith. It is a highly emotional and spontaneous variety of American Protestantism and theologically a blend of self-help, biblical literalism and Republican politics. This is, in many ways, how George W Bush reframed conservatism in America " and with one in three Americans now calling themselves evangelical, you can see the political temptation. The problem was that the issues the evangelicals focused obsessively on " abortion, gays, stem cells, feeding tubes for those in permanent vegetative states " often came to seem warped to many others. Those who might once have passively called themselves Christian suddenly found the label toxic, if it meant identifying with such a specific political agenda. And so as evangelicalism rose, atheism and nonaffiliation emerged as a reaction.

It is impossible to know where this is heading, but the latest survey is a reminder to exercise a little scepticism when you hear of America’s religious exceptionalism. Yes, America is far more devout than most of western Europe; but it is not immune to the broader crises facing established religion in the West. The days when America’s leading intellectuals contained a strong cadre of serious Christians are over. There is no Thomas Merton in our day; no Reinhold Niebuhr, Walker Percy or Flannery O’Connor. In the arguments spawned by the new atheist wave, the Christian respondents have been underwhelming. As one evangelical noted in The Christian Science Monitor last week, “being against gay marriage and being rhetorically pro-life will not make up for the fact that massive majorities of evangelicals can’t articulate the Gospel with any coherence”.

The quality of the Catholic priesthood has also drifted downward: the next generation of priests is more orthodox, but also more insular and less engaged with the wider world. There are a few exceptions: the 29-year-old orthodox Catholic Ross Douthat has just won a treasured opinion column slot in The New York Times. But he is sadly an exception that proves a more general rule. American Christianity may be stronger in some pockets, but it is dumber too. In the end, in the free market-place of ideas and beliefs, that will count.

What one yearns for is a resuscitation of a via media in American religious life " the role that the established Protestant churches once played. Or at least an understanding that religion must absorb and explain the new facts of modernity: the deepening of the Darwinian consensus in the sciences, the irrefutable scriptural scholarship that makes biblical literalism intellectually contemptible, the shifting shape of family life, the new reality of openly gay people, the fact of gender equality in the secular world. It seems to me that American Christianity, despite so many resources, has ignored its intellectual responsibility. And atheists, if this continues much longer, will continue to pick up that slack.

I'm afraid I haven't the necessary information to provide a satisfactory answer.

Poor thing. Who told you that life was meaningless unless there was special friend behind it all?