I was given the opportunity to do a paper in my English class on Intelligent Design. I only had 2 1/2 hours to write it and this is what I came up with. I had very limited use of the internet and it was NOT a research paper. The professor is (I think) Christian and knows that I am an Atheist. She was very excited to read my paper. I am posting it here because I would like feed back on the arguments I presented. I told her without proper research my ideas might have a few holes in them and she understood completely, again this was for an English paper.
Any help on the ideas I presented would be greatly appreciated :) I hope this is in the right forum.....
Is Intelligent Design Really Intelligent?
Is life on earth the result of intelligent design or did it all happen by chance? Intelligent design (or ID) is the theory that a superior being put the universe into motion. The majority of people who believe in intelligent design also believe it goes further than that, that God has a hand in our every day life. A smaller percentage believe that we are here due to evolution, that everything happened by chance. From my point of view Chance seems more logical. The ideology of Intelligent design does not justify birth defects; it can not be proven in the science lab; and is not an adequate argument for “gaps” in science.
A disturbing problem with the theory of Intelligent design is the overwhelming amount of birth defects, both structural and functional/developmental. Birth defects are caused by defects in our genes as well as environmental hazards. Intelligent design, with the accompanying belief in God, is that humans should be perfect. We were made by God in his image. Perfect. If that were true then our genetic code would not mutate. Hence there would be no birth defects and/or genetic mutations/mishaps. This however is not the case. The Center for Disease Control states that 120,000 babies in the United States are born with birth defects each year. If you look at this situation through the scope of evolution you will see that mutations in genetic code fit very well into the science of evolution.
The way our species has evolved over time has brought us to become a science dependant race. Everything from understanding our place in the solar system, to the atoms and molecules that make up our bodies, to the types of foods we can safely ingest, we got from scientifically testing theories, which is the reason we have the answers to those questions. Intelligent design is not a probable or acceptable theory due to lack of being able to test it which is why the scientific community does not recognize it.
There are some who view science as a great tool of the human race, however they can not let go of the emotion that accompanies Intelligent Design. They see the gaps in science as unexplainable and therefore attribute these unexplainable instances to ID. This is called using the God of Gaps rationalization. Using this argument is not conducive to science because everyday science is understanding more and more about the universe and the world in which we live. At one point in time science thought the earth was flat, but due to exploration, we came to the conclusion that the earth was in fact round. This is the way that science works.
Intelligent design, as fascinating as it might seem to some, is not a theory of scientific measures at this point in time. It simply plays on the emotions, as opposed to the intellect, of humans. So in the words of Christopher Hitchens I leave you with this “Exceptional claims demand exceptional evidence.", and Intelligent Design does not give exceptional evidence.
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The arrogance of pretending to know what a God might actually want is off-putting.
The only thing you know is that you read a book -- a book that was written 30-60 YEARS after the supposed events. Major events which, amazingly, went utterly and completely unrecorded by every historian contemporaneous with the alleged time period. And your books are not even eye-witness accounts.
You want eye-witness accounts? There are MILLIONS UPON MILLIONS of people in India who have witnessed thousands of 'miracles' performed by sathya sai baba in India. http://www.sathyasai.org/ Of course, just like EVERY OTHER CLAIM OF MIRACLES he is a fraud. But you can find millions of eye-witnesses who will swear he has performed miracles. Can you prove he isn't god?
With ALL of our knowledge today these people are still duped by parlor tricks, I really must get me some of those magic robes. Can you imagine how easy it must have been 2000 years ago?
They didn't even need a real person to go around and perform the tricks -- they just wrote some stories about what REALLY happened '30 years ago'. Take a few tales from Judas of Galilee, jazz them up a bit and then sit around abusing women and children for 300 years until Constantine needs some military backup against a larger group of Pagans, and voilà!
Oh, but I bet you've had a personal experience right? http://iconoclasm2000.blogspot.com/2011/02/but-i-had-personal-exper...
There is NO evidence that the biblical claims about Jesus or God are at all true.
So... The universe, unfolding mechanically as best we can observe, being the basis of existence is 'Ludicrous' because the body and eye are too complex to 'just exist'... But... an infinitely powerful creator god who watches us masturbate just existing = Solid Reason?
Do I have your logic there right? Look up the logical fallacy of Special Pleading.
And if you are at all serious in learning things, I posted a short review of a TINY fraction of the current information about abiogenesis: http://iconoclasm2000.blogspot.com/2010/12/abiogenesis-part-i.html
Huge progress have been made in the past 50 years in understanding the kinds of processes that must have been involved.
Don't have to. I'm not making a claim that there isn't one, just that there's zero proof of one, and no reason to therefore believe in one.
These are all really BASIC things that any visitor to a site called "ThinkAtheist" should have been over already.
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