Sunday, August 28, 2005

Something From Nothing: How Intelligent Design Searches For The Free Lunch

Enough flummery for today, here's the bottom line:

Intelligent design is the direct OPPOSITE of what Christianity, and before that Judaism, has been teaching for thousands of years. There is nothing intelligent about a being who creates everything out of nothing...for how can nothing be an indicator of intelligence? Nothingness is from whence the magician pulls the rabbit, and not how a God with a modicum of smarts would even begin to search for a manner to create something. And in fact how can there be nothing, for we all know how nature abhors that vacuum. People discover God not from a careful scientific study of nature...the sky above, the mud below and the twinkling cosmos of beyond...but rather from revelations derived from the experiences of private encounters with God. This most often happens in dreams or dreamlike states of being, and always harkens back to ancient ideas depicting a primitive anthropomorphic projection of humanity upon the universe.

Because these revelations are quite special, quite unobserved and quite non-repeatable, there can be no science involved in ID or the "study" of creationism, which is in fact the field of non-study and totally lacking in intellectual effort.

"Nothing from nothing leaves nothing," the song goes, "and you gotta have something if you wanna be with me." Let intelligent design into the schools and you must then let in Abominable Snowmen, Lock Ness Monsters, aliens and their UFO's, acupuncturing scam artists, mind readers, clairvoyants, tea leave readers, astrologers, witches that crinkle their cute little noses to make things appear and disappear...from nothing, by the way, and the chiropractioners who administer a rousing massage and call it science.

And yes, universities have been fighting the pin-pushers, the spine crackers, the chanellers and the star readers for as long as there have been universities, so alternative explanations have always been subjected to the scientific method, and if found wanting, discarded as nothing more than con jobs to entice the sick, lame, and lazy. The something new in all of this is the attack on the lower levels of education by the antithesis of education itself, namely ID.

All of this proves the irrefutable fact that a "different way of looking at things" doesn't make it a scientific way, and teaching is all about what's real, not what's imagined. Andplease, no protestations that what once was thought to be real has been proven false time after time, for you fall into the intellectual trap that science always leaves for the unwary. Old castoff ideas HAVE BEEN supplanted. By scientists striving to get it right, not by feelings gleaned from an epiphany. It was the scientific method that developed the process of administering medication to cure polio, not pulling a vaccine out of a hat. Science created airplanes, automobiles, computers, plastics, virtually EVERYTHING you see in the world around you today, and it didn't come from nothing.

Repeat after me and you'll begin to feel lots better...snapping one's fingers and proclaiming "let there be light" is nothing from nothing and NOT science. It can be believed if it makes you feel warm and cozy, but happiness is a personal state of mind and not something up for debate. And by the way, since God had not yet created the sun, where was all this light coming from?

Okay, okay, I know. Nothing. But do you really want "Bewitched" taught in schools because, it's another way of looking at things? I Dream of Jeannie? My Favorite Martian?

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