Intelligent Design
So, we should teach both sides, eh? Ok, sounds good, as long as the full strength of the evolution argument is permitted to crush the wimpy Intelligent Design. We're talking books vs. pamphlets here, so as long as Darwin isn't hogtied, I'm sure the wily old geezer can beat the snot out of the upstarts. A fair fight, however, may be too much to ask for.
I've spent a good part of today reading wikipedia, everything from the basic tenets of Methodism to Maimonides to Transubstantiation. With all that spinning in my head, plus a bunch of crap about ID, I've come to a couple thoughts:
Maimonides makes an interesting point (in the twelfth century, no less) that those who anthropomorphize God are lazy and just don't get it. Dude even gets pissed at people saying "hand of God." The scholar's genius workaround is that when any adjective is applied to God, like mighty, we ought consider it to be a homonym of mighty, but actually a totally different word (easy to say of biblical Hebrew, a language in which everything is spelled the same anyway). The point is that it's stupid and insulting to assume that anything about God is in any way the same as anything about you, me, a rock, etc. I'd extend this a bit further to say that anyone who can't wrap their theology around evolution is an uncreative heretic who wants God to design things like a mere person might.
Also, there's a reason that evolved organisms look designed. Now, here's where it might be good to "teach the controversy," since I wouldn't have thought about this if not for reading the inane arguments of IDers. They like to point to how similar the tiny mechanisms of life are to human machines (whatever they mean by that; consider the pump versus the protein pump). If there are any similarities, though, I think it's not best explained by organics being designed, but rather design being an organic process, an evolution of memes. Think about it - the human design of a watch took hundreds of years and generations of designs to perfect, and started from very simple models made of components (gears, springs, etc.) that themselves are simple machines that took hundreds of years and many generations to perfect. So, rather than bend evolution to fit into the Intelligent Design paradigm, maybe we ought to model our notion of design on concepts of evolution. Take that, ID.
I've spent a good part of today reading wikipedia, everything from the basic tenets of Methodism to Maimonides to Transubstantiation. With all that spinning in my head, plus a bunch of crap about ID, I've come to a couple thoughts:
Maimonides makes an interesting point (in the twelfth century, no less) that those who anthropomorphize God are lazy and just don't get it. Dude even gets pissed at people saying "hand of God." The scholar's genius workaround is that when any adjective is applied to God, like mighty, we ought consider it to be a homonym of mighty, but actually a totally different word (easy to say of biblical Hebrew, a language in which everything is spelled the same anyway). The point is that it's stupid and insulting to assume that anything about God is in any way the same as anything about you, me, a rock, etc. I'd extend this a bit further to say that anyone who can't wrap their theology around evolution is an uncreative heretic who wants God to design things like a mere person might.
Also, there's a reason that evolved organisms look designed. Now, here's where it might be good to "teach the controversy," since I wouldn't have thought about this if not for reading the inane arguments of IDers. They like to point to how similar the tiny mechanisms of life are to human machines (whatever they mean by that; consider the pump versus the protein pump). If there are any similarities, though, I think it's not best explained by organics being designed, but rather design being an organic process, an evolution of memes. Think about it - the human design of a watch took hundreds of years and generations of designs to perfect, and started from very simple models made of components (gears, springs, etc.) that themselves are simple machines that took hundreds of years and many generations to perfect. So, rather than bend evolution to fit into the Intelligent Design paradigm, maybe we ought to model our notion of design on concepts of evolution. Take that, ID.
posted by onlooker at 12:57 PM
2 Comments:
K, wait. I'm not getting this. So, since some organisms look like machines that humans have made (and I am tentatively willing to accept that), therefore they were designed by some intelligent being(s)? Hmm, the conclusion doesn't necessarily follow. What if human machines were designed to look like living organisms, since you know, the organisms were there first? And who the heck says that our creations are divinely inspired anyways? Aren't many of them made to destroy God's creation and other living creatures? ID is whack.
Yeah, that's sort of the point I didn't get around to making - that our designs look like natural organic structures because design itself is a natural, evolutionary process (albeit of memes rather than DNA), and there happens to be a lot of convergent evolution going on.
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