More Intelligent Design

[Urbane Guerrilla]

Originally Posted by mrnoodle

All the fighting and such is fun
<snip> just as big a stretch as saying "God started it all".
<smaller snip>I don't think your big bang trumps my God. In even the most skeptical of minds, they are only on equal footing, at best.

I'm a believer myself, Noodle -- because I don't know for certain
why the Big Bang went and banged. You could say God did it, and speak no worse nonsense than anybody else. However, don't ever mistake science -- a way of knowing -- with a belief system of any kind. This is the intellectual failure of the anti-science religionists, and the pitfall you can fall into if you have never studied science, but only belief systems -- philosophy and metaphysics, if you like. These people mistake, or purport to mistake, a method of knowing for a manner of believing. Then they purport to be puzzled when they are laughed at.

This is the sort of thing Unitarians and Episcopalians, to name two religious brand-names, come up with, trying to interface spirituality with natural history -- a via media. There's dumb religion and there's smart religion, which leads me to...

Is there not a big-D Divine wisdom in a Creation that goes of itself? Look at all the trouble it saves, not having to bust a miracle for every species, and having been at that for 650 million terrestrial years straight. It's also the most divinely ethical way to do it -- miracles, after all, look suspiciously like God is cheating, fudging with the established natural laws. You could allege that God isn't really cheating but instead following some "higher-order law" or something. This is less an explanation than a dodge.