Hi jchardy, and welcome to the fray.
Pardon me for stepping in at this stage of the debate and essentially starting back at the beginning.
Thus, to adherents of ID:
Benefit or harm; gains or losses; release or hindrance; promotion or impairment; injury or healing; progress or obstruction (to a defined or observed improvement) are all phenomena of purpose, --- not chance.
They began with a faith (an optimism, if you will), that everything has a purpose or reason for being, and that nothing really was simply a throw of the dice in an ultimate vacuum of non-purpose.
In I.D., at the very least, they believe that God (or the Designer) Loaded the dice, probably from the very beginning.
They concede their fundamental lack of control of the process but take comfort in the wonder of it. ID adherents do not have a need to feel in control of anything. They only seek to understand the "how’s and why’s" insofar as they and science are capable of providing clarity.
Message 29: I am a scientist who believes teleological principles MIGHT have led to and through the processes ending in where we are today. In my 50 years of searching, I have not found any evidence to absolutely rule out a "Designer" implicit in our existence. But I also don’t believe in magic. I believe in purpose as a POSSIBLE REASON for the evolution of the universe and life through 13.7 Billion years. It’s certainly true that that’s enough time for probability to do a lot, but the final answers are a long way away, and to deny everything based on bias and vitriol or repugnance is not the way of science and it should not be the way of faith either. ...
Message 35: You bet I’m a teleologist! I don’t distance myself from ID because the general concept of Intelligent Design appears to me to be frequently somehow misrepresented and matches most closely teleological foundations. ...
It seems to me, that what you are describing is
Deism rather than ID, especially compared to the way ID is used in debate these days. To my mind the essential difference between IDologist and Deist is that Deists lets go of all previous religious beliefs, and uses science to the fullest extent to understand "life, the universe, and everything" (Douglas Adams) with open-minded skepticism, while IDologists fervently cling to previous beliefs and try to use ID as a crutch to prop up or support those beliefs. This difference causes many adherents of ID to attempt or claim that some findings of science are invalid, rather than looking at the evidence and science to see how we understand the workings of the universe etc.
See my thread
Is ID properly pursued? for more.
Let me know.
Enjoy.
Edited by RAZD, : clrty
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