ID as a Cultural Phenomenon (Humans)

by dhw, Tuesday, September 22, 2009, 18:10 (5540 days ago) @ xeno6696

Matt: The biggest reason I originally became an atheist, wasn't due to evolution or any other such phenomenon. I made a connection: what religion a person follows is largely determined by where you're born.-I sometimes wonder if the course of my own beliefs doesn't run perversely against the current. Darwin changed me (quite early in my life) from being an atheist to being an agnostic, and the connection that turned you towards atheism doesn't have the same effect on me, though your argument gives ample grounds for not accepting any ONE religion. Virtually every culture I know of entertains belief in some force outside our everyday material reality. The various myths and the characters that figure in them have taken on the status of literal truth, but I see them as images, and if you set aside the hocus-pocus, the fairy tales, the fetishism, the idolatry, the dogmatism etc., you come to that essential core of a "something" beyond our grasp. In varying forms, this unknown something was almost taken for granted in earlier times, when perhaps people were closer to nature than we are today, especially in the west. And so for me it's not the relativity of religion that is striking but the common ground. The fact that all these different societies believe in something would not persuade me to believe in nothing. -You are under the impression that ID is "a response to be able to hold onto both science and religion", in the sense that those who believe in it are really seeking a scientific justification for their innate beliefs. One can, of course, equally argue that rejection of ID ... which I equate with acceptance of chance ... is a response by atheists seeking a scientific justification for their innate disbeliefs (probably more prevalent on this side of the Atlantic than on yours). Both sides claim that science is on their side, whereas you and I know that science is (supposed to be) neutral. My subjective view of ID is that it has a believable premise (the complexity of life) leading to a shaky argument (some indefinable being), whereas atheism has the solid premise of the material world, and the shaky argument that life's complexities could fashion themselves. I can't base beliefs on shaky arguments, and so I stick in the middle, but that makes me wrong one way or the other, so it's nothing to be proud of!-(I've just read your post under "Two sides". Thank you. I will try to reply in the next day or so.)