intelligent design, right and wrong

Surprisingly, almost all humans agree that if they have enough resources to feed, house, and protect themselves and children, they'd consider that a positive thing.We all set our own standards, to be sure, but our own instincts are too powerful to ignore. People want food and shelter. Biologically you can count on that.Sure, some people might decide that a world of peace is a bad thing. But you can count on them being in the vast, vast minority. Just because there's no god to set standards doesn't mean you can't count on certain aspects of human behavior.

Animals have instincts. Those instincts are always aimed at survival, reproduction, and propogation of genes. Ours are no different.There's clearly nothing divine about instinct. What are the odds that it would come out this way by random mutation and natural selection? 1/1, in my opinion. Prove me wrong. Your personal incredulity doesn't count.

Then you've rested it on a non sequitor.Assume there IS an absolute right and wrong. Why can't you ignore it? What stops you?Eventual judgement, probably, by some deity.Ok, so now assume there is no absolute right and wrong dictated by a deity. Only the conventions that human societies establish for themselves.What happens if you break these rules? You get judged by whatever body was put in place by society to do the judging.What's the difference? Either way you get judged.Tell ya what. Do whatever you want - take whatever you like, kill whoever you think needs killing.See how far it gets you. You'll be judged far sooner by our laws than you will be by your god's.Our society has mechanisms to ensure that a person's own conception of right and wrong tends to agree with the conceptions of the society as a whole. No absolute morality is required for this phenomenon; just a knowlege of sociology.

The founding fathers were not Christians in the sense that you think they were; they believed in a god that set the universe in motion and no longer needs to intervene in it. In a sense, the founding principles of America that they set up were held to be based on natural law (as created by God), not on God's law as revealed through the bible. A slight distinction, but one nonetheless.As for "Judeo-Christian" principles, can you show me where democracy is mentioned in the bible? Or perhaps you can tell me why, out of the ten commandments, only three or so have been made into American law? Heck, "thou shall covent" is the foundation of your consumer economy.Honestly, your "Judeo-Chrstian principles" fail to explain why we severed ties (through rebellion, which is contrary to the bible) with a nation whose monarchy regularly brought out the bible to justify its rule. How can "Judeo-Chritian principles" be used to defend two totally different froms of government?Also, perhaps you've heard of the First Amendment? Perhaps you could explain how that's a "Juedo-Christian principle"?

Sorry, forgot to address this in my last post: Hrm, maybe I can give some context.In the past, people did not know what caused the sun to rise and set. Or rather, they thought they knew - the sun rose and fell because of the actions of a powerful god who made sure that happened, every day - and could suspend the process whenever he/she wanted to. In other words "god does it" was the explanation for the motion of the sun.Now, with our greater knowledge, we know that "God does it" isn't really accurate. We know that the sun doesn't rise and set at all; rather the Earth rotates so that the stationary sun appears to rise and fall to our perspective.Basically the arguments for a lot of intelligent design, creationism, etc. comes down to "scientists don't know how this could happen naturally so obviously god must have done it." But throughout history, the explanation "God did it" has always been replaced with a natural mechanism. How do you know that this is not the case for intelligent design?All ID arguments rely on a lack of scientific knowledge. But we know that knowledge increases, so isn't it reasonable to assume that scientists will eventually be able to explain whatever "evidence" exists for ID?Basically what I'm saying is that a failure by science to have explained something, so far, is no evidence for ID because, eventually, science will have a natural explanation.ID is basically an explanation from ignorance. The flaw in such an explanation is that it inevitably gives way to naturalist explanations supported by data. So what's the point of intelligent design if it's not an enduring explanation?Maybe that explains my question. I'll ask it again: What's the difference between something we don't yet have a naturalist explanation for, and something we'll never be able to explain naturally? How do we tell the difference?

No, not really. If the earth were closer or farther away (outside of the so-called "Cinderella zone") life either would have evolved differently, or not at all. If the sun were in a different place we'd either say "how come the sun is in the right place for our kind of life?" or we wouldn't be here to say anything at all.What I want to know is, why can't the sun be a little closer to Minnesota? It's freezing today! Sure. What if god accomplished life on earth through evolution as scientists have hypothesised? Could you live with that? What if it appeared that god never had to intervene in evolution at all? it certainly looks that way.I guess my point now is, if you're willing to accept the scientific story of how god gave rise to the universe we percieve today, why bother with anti-evolutionism and so-called "Intelligent design" theory? You misunderstand what moral relativism means. It doesn't mean I accpet all behaviors as right and proper. It means that I don't believe in an absolute soruce of moral codes. Human beings are left on their own to agree on moral principles that work for all persons in their society. Clearly, slavery as a moral principle doesn't work so well for the slaves. Ergo, slavery is bad.I would point out that in many societies that allowed slavery (including ours) they used the bible to justify it. The most barbaric societies today, the ones with the worst morals, appear to be the ones whose laws are held to be universal morals handed down from their god. That's why we have a separation of church and state in this country.[This message has been edited by crashfrog, 05-20-2003]

Arg, I'm an idiot. Of course, you're right - it's the "Goldilocks zone". Don't know what I was thinking.

Yeah, here's a thought - you never answered my question. Why, if we don't yet have an natural explanation for the genesis of life, must we assume we never will have such an explanation and therefore conclude an intelligent designer?What's your evidence that our ignorance about abiogenesis will be enduring?

Hrm, did he? Or was the New Testament merely edited after the fact (not too hard considering it was written at least a generation after these events are said to have occured) to make it look like he did?Did you consider that possibility? And now that it has been presented to you, perhaps you see that you don't have faith in god at all - you have faith in a book. And what about a book would be worthy of your faith? I'm just asking.Also did you consider the possibility of Thesitic, god-directed evolution? Lots of people believe in that, but I don't, personally.

Not neccisarily. That's biblical creationism, not intelligent design. Intelligent design just says life one earth was intelligently created, maybe by aliens, maybe by a god, maybe by humans from the future, maybe some other way. It doesn't specify anything about the nature of the designer. And yet, edited and copied by innumerable, nameless persons. We don't have anything approaching the originals. There's considerable advantage to be gained for a group or person in a position to alter the bible. Also, the books don't say the same thing - Brian Johnson could fill us in more on that and I hope he will.So, really, there's no reason to believe they weren't altered. We can't ever know because we don't have the originals.

Belief in the bible as a literal account, you mean.I'm an atheist, but I believe the bible to be true; mythically true, in the sense that all narrative, fictional or otherwise, is true - it shows us truths about the human experience.The question is, why believe in the bible as a literal, historical account when the biological, archeological, and even simply logical evidence is against it?

Here's some right here, from another thread a couple of days ago:

quote:

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1)Population studies. Long-term observation of populations shows changes in trait frequencies with a correllation to trait usefulness in the environment. Offspring tend to resemble their parents in certain predictable ways (as shown by Mendel). Sometimes new traits seem to appear from nowhere - an organism has a trait that none of it's ancestors had. The change in trait ratios could be explained by a hypothetical "selection" process where organisms with beneficial traits are "rewarded" with more offspring, and organisms with detrimental traits are eliminated.

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2) Similarity of organisms: Organisms demonstrate an apparent, loose hierarchy of forms - particularly vertebrate life. In particular, the most similar but yet still distinct species tend to be geographically close to each other. One explanation for this is that if a population is split into separated groups, new traits accumulate in those populations until the populations could be classified as different species.

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3) The fossil record: Fossil organisms display sorting by apparent sophistication over depth of strata. One explanation for this is the gradual emergence of taxonomic forms over geologic time. This would be concurrent with an explanation of common descent for all modern life.

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That's kind of the highlights. As it turns out, there's a vast weight of evidence for evolution. Is there one bit of data that confirms the theory - a "smoking gun", if you will? of course not, that's not how we arrive at theories. But the vast weight of data, taken together and generalized, leads us to conclude that generally, ToE is a great explanation for all kinds of data.What more do you want?

Sometimes there isn't anything in between. At low levels, speciation happens in jumps. It's pretty simple to understand why there's no transitional form between some animals: What's the transitional form between you and your parents?There isn't one, of course. Yet you are different, in testable ways, than either of your parents. Evolution can jump (usually after long periods of stasis.) That's the theory reffered to as "punctuated equilibrium", I believe.Anyway, like the other guys said, we didn't evolve from apes. Apes and humans share a common ancestor. Just like you're not the decendant of your uncle, but you share a grandfather.But by all means, keep asking questions.[This message has been edited by crashfrog, 05-26-2003]

Personally, I doubt it. There's probably enough gene flow up and down the continuum of dogs (however slow that might be) to prevent speciation. However, if mid-size dogs suddenly died out, large and small dogs would be reproductively isolated from each other. In that instance I think they would speciate very quickly indeed.They're certainly on the way to speciation, I'll give you that. At this point dogs are kind of like a ring species, I guess.

What happened was, an animal that was just barely an ape gave birth to an animal that was just at the boundary for what we would call "human". When did this happen? Well, that depends on what you're willing to call an ape and what you're willing to a human.It's like trying to say when night starts. Of course, it's easy to tell the difference between noon and mindnight - but it's a lot harder to know when dusk has ended and night has begun. It all depends on where you draw the line, and there's a bunch of lines that, while mutually exclusive, are equally reasonable places to separate humans and apes.As she said, though, we're still apes. Primates, actually. But them's the breaks of hierarcheal classification schemes.