Sunday, March 27, 2011

Intelligent Design Creationism Isn't about God


David Klinghoffer, posting on the Discovery website, says that his worldview might be attractive to atheists [What Intelligent Design Offers to Agnostics].
Intelligent design has as much to offer to the unbeliever or the unorthodox searcher as to the confirmed traditional believer. It might even have more. Does that surprise you?

Could it be a trend, with critics of intelligent design and others outside the familiar world of ID's friends and advocates at last realizing that ID isn't merely NOT the same thing as creationism? More than that, a couple have noted lately, intelligent design isn't necessarily even theistic.
Wow! That's what I call real NEWS for evolution. The idea that intelligent design might actually have nothing to do with a creator is truly astonishing.

Let's see how this plays out later on in his posting ...
Every real solution to this problem of despair assumes a reality beyond our mundane, one-dimensional and material one. How could it not? We are in despair, or fear falling into it -- whether we're religious or otherwise -- over the limitations of our own lives.

The ultimate limit is imposed by death, which we fear as no generation in memory seems to have done despite the overwhelming safety of our existence. In the meantime, while we are still alive, the lack of a sense of ultimate purpose and meaning that goes with the culture of materialism feeds the anxiety that underlies so much of that culture.

Materialism corrodes the confidence we might otherwise have that any search for meaning that we undertake is not necessarily in vain. Intelligent design offers the hope, by the refutation of materialist science, that "something is out there," whatever it might be, capable of granting genuine purpose to our existence. An agnostic like James Kirk Wall or a -- I don't know what exactly -- like Jack Scanlan should easily appreciate this.
This is why philosophy is so confusing. Let's see if I've grasped the logic here. Intelligent design is anti-materialistic but not religious. It implies the existence of "something" that is out there that gives David Klinghoffer some sort of purpose in life and makes him feel less afraid of death. That "something" can't be God because intelligent design isn't necessarily theistic.

You can't make this stuff up. All you have to do is read what the IDiots, themselves, write on the leading Intelligent Design Creationist blogs.


No comments:

Post a Comment