Intelligent design. Philosophy of ignorance.

I've just discovered this site, so perhaps I'm late to this party. But Mr. Modulous' arguments are fascinating. I have begun to observe how destructive anti-ID reasoning is, from a purely practical viewpoint. To be an anti-ID'er you have to demean the great minds of history and you have to find flaws in life forms, in order to prove they weren't designed. Mod says It's actually quite the opposite. If evolutionists followed their theory to its logical conclusions they would see that thought itself is only an illusion, an electro-chemical phenomenon that happens to have survived through the generations. The evolved human thinks what he thinks because it works, not because it's true. It is precisely because through most of history men have believed that they were capable of objective thought, and because they believed the world to have been made, at least partially, for their discovery, that man engaged in discovery and analysis. The anti-ID'er must disregard the first piece of evidence he encounters - his own reason - in order to proceed.
But secondly, I think Modulus misunderstands Newton, and does so because he has such a prejudice against the ID-er. Newton was talking about the genesis of the planetary system, and to my knowledge no one has yet definitively explained that.
But why the prejudice against an ID'er? This prejudice is preventing you from thinking clearly about how an ID'er might work. The biblical God makes man from 'the dust of the earth', remember? You never find the rough edges of his work - everything is curved back on itself like our planetary globe. To say that God created something does not in any way detract from its naturalness. You have to confront incomprehensible things whether you believe in God or not. Is it in any way logical to think that a quart or so of grey matter can comprehend all reality? What is it that leads you to even try? That's the real question to me. I can't see why an evolved being should care about anything. The evolved being certainly shouldn't mind some tales of a creator if it helps get you through the night. Yet you do care, and deeply. Why? Perhaps you are something more than you thought you were? And if you could honor yourself this way you might then see that your internal image of the ID'er is way too small as well.
So I think you've got it precisely backwards. Just as the human who uses the power of the internal combustion engine can win a race against the runner, so the ID believing human has an unfair advantage over the naturalist who must spend all his time explaining away the obvious.

Well, I think you're just not looking at all the evidence. If you rule out the supernatural a priori than you can't consider that evidence. Just as much as the religious person, you have a world view that you *want* to be true, a world view where science is preeminent. I'm saying that you have to assume a supernatural element to even begin science, because we must in some sense be above the evidence we examine, not merely reacting to it as natural elements ourselves.

Fair enough. Same thing happens to me on these forums all the time. Now just read that over again slowly. You don't know what supernatural is yet you conclude it can't be investigated? With your above point in mind, I suspect that you may be more in love with a field of study than with truth itself. A thing is true or not regardless of our powers to analyze it. Trying to determine what really happened and preparing a court case are sometimes two very different things. I would turn that around - evolution can offer no reason why humans *should* be able to investigate; they only react to stimuli, and react in a way that tends towards the survival of the species. With regard to the evolution/ID debate, the evolutionist can only speculate on whether either theory is good for the species. If indeed humans can do more than react to stimuli, (those reaction modulated by genetics and environment) then we must look somewhere other than random mutation and natural selection to explain that phenomenon.