(December 15, 2016 at 1:58 pm)Catholic_Lady Wrote: I thought maybe ID meant that someone accepts evolution completely, but still believes that God was behind it all and set everything into motion to begin with.
That would be one way to define it, to indicate that there was an intelligence guiding the development of life. In the practical sense, the term is used as an alternative to "creation" because 'creationism' has become a pejorative term in certain contexts, as it is seen as promoting magic or mysticism instead of science. Hence the first attempt at redefining it was to call it 'creation science' but that fell flat. Intelligent design is a bit more ambiguous, which is why I think it's remained in use this long.
However, evolution does not seem to work as if it is guided intelligently. It's an inefficient process that leads to lots and lots of dead ends and extinct species. But it does a decent job of recovering from events that wipe out large numbers of species at once.
"Well, evolution is a theory. It is also a fact. And facts and theories are different things, not rungs in a hierarchy of increasing certainty. Facts are the world's data. Theories are structures of ideas that explain and interpret facts. Facts don't go away when scientists debate rival theories to explain them. Einstein's theory of gravitation replaced Newton's in this century, but apples didn't suspend themselves in midair, pending the outcome. And humans evolved from ape- like ancestors whether they did so by Darwin's proposed mechanism or by some other yet to be discovered."
-Stephen Jay Gould
-Stephen Jay Gould
