Intelligent design (Introduction)

by dhw1, Thursday, October 27, 2011, 17:37 (4777 days ago) @ Abel

First of all, let me join David in welcoming you to the forum. As you may have gathered, we’re a mixed bunch, but most of us try to debate the issues rationally and tolerantly, and we usually find that less rational and tolerant folk leave us fairly swiftly!

You will certainly have gathered that I myself am an agnostic, which means that I neither accept nor reject such theories as ID. Inevitably I therefore find myself arguing against those who do have definite views either way, but I hope it will lead to further discussion, as all of us can learn from a rational probing of the arguments.

I’d like to ask you first about your claims concerning Adam and Eve. You believe the OT is primarily myth with a few kernels of truth, so it would be interesting to know how you distinguish between myth and truth. Why, for instance, do you believe that Adam and Eve were real people? When you say “man was here for a very long time before Adam and Eve”, do you mean the forerunners of homo sapiens, or humans like us? Did your gods specially create Adam and Eve? If so, how did the earlier humans get here? I agree that some of the OT (written by many different authors) may relate to historical fact, but why Genesis, which has less chance than most of being called historical? (Apologies for the inquisition, but it’s as good a way as any of gaining understanding.)

The second part of your post in my view provides an excellent summary of the gaps in evolutionary theory and the case against a chance origin of life on Earth. I’m sure David, a panentheist, will nod his vigorous approval, and indeed so do I. But if the chance theory strains credulity, so does your god(s) theory. You “don’t believe that God created the universe”, but that the universe created a “race of beings, brought about by the process of abiogenesis followed by evolution. This race’s design is much simpler than our own.” (Why simpler if they were so advanced that they were able to create us, whereas we are still incapable of creating even the most basic forms of life?) It appears that you do believe in abiogenesis and evolution, and only the time factor makes it unlikely on Earth. Instead you propose some other planet, where “the first hereditary molecule” (Dawkins). evolved into a race of – presumably mortal – beings. “The archaeological evidence of their existence is in the tools that they made.” That, in a nutshell, is the argument for ID: that we are too complex not to have been designed, so we are the evidence. David calls his “first cause” designer an eternal Universal Intelligence. As I see it – wearing my theist hat – the one advantage his theory has over yours is that it counters the atheist view that the mechanisms for life and for evolution (theoretically, simple forms don’t have to evolve into more complex ones) could assemble themselves by chance. Your theory is that the same mechanisms did indeed assemble themselves by chance, but on a different planet where they had more time. In the context of ID, you are therefore a theist on Earth, but would be an atheist if you were on Planet X. Is that a fair deduction?