(September 10, 2014 at 11:18 am)Clueless Morgan Wrote: But, sadly, those who advocate for ID don't realize how vacuous and lazy a position it actually is.They may realize it and not care. I get the impression that ID wants to appear as if it is straddling a line between science and mysticism. It identifies what it sees as weak points in the theory of evolution and demands that those be explained satisfactorily. As long as they can keep coming up with proposed weak points, they can keep the con alive. There is no attempt at "defending" ID, since that might lead towards a religious discussion, and they want to avoid that because it could very well kill the whole idea of teaching ID in schools.
I don't think it's difficult to boil ID down to a "god of the gaps" approach for which the answer is "MY god." Once we do that, then the attempt at promoting it as some sort of serious scientific approach falls flat and should be dismissed.
"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
