The Social Fucking-Faux-Pas Of Intelligent Design/ The Current State Of Play.

FROM ELSEWHERE:

I don’t think I’m making a slight carping criticism. Or if I am it is pretty slight. But I did notice the fear factor when the topic of Intelligent Design came up.

I try to separate my own beliefs out some of the time and just listen to the quality of the arguments. So I was surprised at one stage when I was finding that as a rule things had changed with (for example) the abortion debate. I’d seen Ayn Rands screed on the matter and considered it pretty superior. But I did notice that her argument didn’t really hold up for later term abortions. It was predicated on the idea that these abortions were early term.

In any case I started noticing that the pro-abortion types had become typically hysterical and evasive. And the anti-abortion types has gotten their act together and were using pretty strong arguments. I can say that without regard to my own beliefs. I believe argument-quality to be a technical matter.

Likewise with the pro and anti Israel arguments. And this is probably a function of our leftist secondary school teachers cherry-picking the footage. But I had seen all these examples from the early seventies of these rational Arab intellectuals dealing with hysterical Israel supporters, and they just couched it in terms of diposession and property rights, whereas when I (it now seems a bit shameful) sided with the other side, I found pro-Israel types to be kind of crazy. Talking about Moses and all that. But later on the quality of the argumentation flipped and I feel the pro-Israel position is usually argued convincingly. I don’t think its any point me trying to hide that I’m a fervent supporter of Israel now.

This long-winded intro comes because I know intelligent design is a very sensitive subject. I myself am an atheist. I do expect to be believed when I say this. But recently the better intelligent design people have emerged as the more serious and committed scholars. The usual suspects simply refuse to take on their objections in a serious way.

Now the thing is you have people like me and this Berlinski fellow. And I’m certainly no intelligent design person in any sort of supernatural sense. I’m not necessarily an intelligent design person in the Von Daniken sense either, though a few matters have come to light recently which brings this possibility higher in the plausibility stakes in my view.

I’m looking for another paradigm. I don’t pretend to know what the answers are. But the road that leads to the answers is paved with the objections of the intelligent design people. These are pretty damn strong.

What I was going to say about Berlinski is I IMAGINE he’s coming from a similar point of view to me. I imagine he just want science to prevail. Personal belief ought not be important to science, properly considered, which ought to be all about method and process. Its that the process has fallen apart; this is why I find myself provisionally siding with the I.D. people these days.

The intelligent design arguments are better arguments, in all likelihood, for some more enhanced and sophisticated view of natural history, then for any idea of supernatural intervention. Lets get back to the science. If the bully-boys refuse to recognize the mystery, then you’ve cut off the scientific method at the knee-caps. Where do you go from there?

For the moment, until such time as a revamped paradigm of evolution is on the table, I will put about the tentative conclusion, that the universe is not big enough for Darwinism and the Big-Bang-Both. Because the sophistication of the individual cell is just astonishing. And until we have much better developed theory we have to assume there is a lot of extra-Darwinist mechanisms involved or else a lot more time involved. For the moment we have to downgrade the idea of evolution being a one-planet young-universe sort of deal. And the rejection of the Big Bang for this reason is not a bad thing its a good thing. Since the Big Bang is one of the most illogical, unscientific, and embarrassing theories on the books. The consensus science-maffia bully-boys ought to decide which theory they want to abort.

The reason why I bring up this powder-keg, is that it may not be a strategic thing for climate-empiricists, to offend our natural allies. None of the smarter ID people would ever likely fall for this trace-gas-hysteria. And all of the smarter ID people are coming up against this totalitarian streak in the world of public-sector science-worker nastiness.