Intelligent-Design Debate Reveals Limits of Religion and Science

[kliljedahl]

by Robert Jensen
www.dissidentvoice.org
December 17, 2005

Despite the clashes between claims based in faith v. reason, it seems that most people -- on both sides of the debate about religion and science in the United States -- share a belief in a kind of magic. Sadly, this need for magical thinking undermines the ability of religion and science to deal with the complexity of the material world and the mystery of creation.

The difference between a belief in magic and an appreciation of mystery has never been clearer than in the debate over “intelligent design” and the alleged challenge it presents to evolutionary biology. In claims that religious people make about a designer, as well as many of the typical refutations of that position, we see our species’ hubris on display.

Our predicament is simple: We humans know -- and are capable of knowing -- far less than we would like to know about how the world came to be and what kind of beings we are. For all our cleverness and inventiveness, what we don’t know still dwarfs what we do know. In the words of Wes Jackson, a biologist and sustainable-agriculture researcher, we are fundamentally ignorant. That doesn’t mean we know nothing, but simply that we don’t know enough to understand as much as we would like, as deeply as we desire.

What to do in the face of those limits? One possibility is to acknowledge them and understand life as an endless engagement with the mystery that we can, at best, only partially comprehend. Another approach is to craft magical “solutions” that purport to give definitive answers. Unfortunately, too many take this latter path.

This is obvious in the arguments of supporters of intelligent design, an approach that holds that “certain features of the universe and of living things are best explained by an intelligent cause rather than an undirected process such as natural selection.”

[BlueEyedSon]

1. People on the "science side of the debate" DO NOT believe in "a kind of

magic."

That's total BS.

[kliljedahl]

2. Not totally

This paragraph makes perfect sense:

"Scientists know this, as do many lay people. But in a culture that glorifies the products of the scientific method -- especially our dazzling high-technology machines -- many believe that science offers definitive answers. In that sense, the culture corrupts science by demanding magical answers."



Keith’s Barbeque Central

[JNelson6563]

3. No kidding

What a pantload.