Jon writes:
I was just repeating something that an atheist said on some Intelligent Design discussion. Again, when I get time I'll see if I can find it. One thing is for sure, his fellow atheists didn't go ballistic over HIM saying it.
You seem to prefer anecdote over scientific rigour, so let me tell you a true story about me.
I'm a hard-end atheist in that I go one step further than that devil Dawkins and am prepared to drop the 'probably' out of the slogan 'god probably doesn't exist.' That 'probably' is put in there because scientifically, it's correct - we can't know; we can only be sure beyond reasonable doubt. My statement that there is no god at all, is as much a belief as yours is that there is.
Now, I became an atheist before I knew anything at all about evolution, so please lodge somewhere in your brain that it is not always science - and particularly Darwin and his wickednes - that is the cause of atheism. My personal evidence to you is that it is not.
Secondly, much later in life, I heard about ID and got very excited about it. Perhaps it was right, perhaps ID demonstrates that evolutionary theory was wrong! So I started reading about it and at first found it very convincing. I thought it (Behe) was well researched and argued and I was going along with it.
In my naivety I thought that what i was reading was science. I had absolutely no idea that it was not from a standard scientific source - i had no reason to, because i had no idea that there was what you fundies in the states call a 'controversy'. So please believe me, i had no prior position on this stuff and if anything, wanted it to be true because i enjoy iconoclastic events in science.
But I contued reading around the subject and got increasingly annoyed by it all; it was a house of cards, a complete snow job done not for scientific purposes but for religious reasons. I found it hard to believe that religion would be so dishonest. I had no experience of the legnths believers would go to to distort and manipulate, I genuinely thought that believers were good people with a harmless delusion.
Of course we all know diferent now with the Catholic revelations of global child abuse, Islamic terrorism and so on, but back then, religion for me was just a dying and harmless hangnail from a bygone age.
Up til that point I'd had no interest at all in these sorts of discussions, here in the UK, religion is pretty much defunct as a political force, we're a secular society and religion, whilst it's still everywhere you go, is background noise only. We live and let live.
So what I'm trying to say is that your assumption/assertion that ID was dismissed because it wasn't useful, is very, very wrong. Science doesn't qualify facts and theories by whether they are useful or not - they stand on their own merits. Had ID been shown to be correct it would have been extraordinarily useful and science would have absorbed it into its lexicon. Hence my excitement. But it was shown to be wrong. And that's a rational end to it.
If you can't/won't accept all that as a general truth from the scientific community at least take it as a personal truth from this single atheist and non-scientist, me - ID was dismissed because it was WRONG, no other reason.
Edited by Tangle, : Copy/paste cock-up
Life, don't talk to me about life - Marvin the Paranoid Android
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