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Author Topic:   Crop circles and intelligent design
Aximili23
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Message 1 of 3 (180626)
01-25-2005 10:17 PM


I want to begin by saying that I am an ardent evolutionist, and I think that creationism and intelligent design are a load of rubbish. But I do want to raise a certain point regarding one of the criticisms of intelligent design, mainly because I am at a bit of a loss as to how I can resolve this question by myself.
I have read before that one reason why intelligent design is unscientific is that you cannot effectively design any test to determine whether something, i.e. a protein, has been intelligently designed or has spontaneously occurred in nature. Put in stronger terms, to look at a biological phenomenon and conclude "intelligent design!" is said to be a highly unscientific way of thinking. And so I want to bring up the comparison between intelligent design theory and crop circles.
Whether they are created by pranksters or extraterrestrials (almost definitely the former, I think), crop circles as a phenomenon DO occur. Furthermore, it seems generally agreed that they are intelligently designed, even though we cannot claim to know definitively who or what designed each and every crop circle, and how they were made. So here, we have a phenomenon that takes place in the real world, the cause of which we have not always fully observed and therefore do not fully understand, and yet we can seem to agree that an unknown intelligence has guided this process. And this conclusion does not seem to be criticized as being unscientific.
So my question is, what is the inherent difference between our interpretation of crop circles as being intelligently designed, and a creationists interpretation of biological structures as being intelligently designed? Because I find the former to be completely reasonable, and the latter to be unreasonable, and I am wondering if this difference in my opinion is due to an objective difference between the two situations or whether I am just exhibiting a personal bias.
Your thoughts would be greatly appreciated.

Adminnemooseus
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Message 2 of 3 (180641)
01-25-2005 10:48 PM


Thread copied to the Crop circles and intelligent design thread in the Intelligent Design forum, this copy of the thread has been closed.

Adminnemooseus
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Posts: 3974
Joined: 09-26-2002


Message 3 of 3 (180644)
01-25-2005 10:50 PM


Thread moved here from the Proposed New Topics forum.

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