![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
theatokosI want intelligent design to mean something other than what is means. I want intelligent design to be about awe and respect for a complex and beautiful world, a creation that is more than science can explain and just might reveal something to us about things - God, gods, Spirit, et al. - that hover just beyond our ways of knowing; I want it to mean that evolution and the wonderful world of science is created by god; I want the happy middle ground. But that is not what intelligent design theory is all about. To me, its description of skeptical and doubtful inquiry and science based in creationism sounds like a sullen child pouting in the corner saying "Santa Claus is true. Prove it. Just becuase you saw your parents one time doesn't make it not true. So there."
The fact that proponents of intelligent design don't use accepted and shared means of scientific inquiry, such as publically publishing or sharing information and experiments with outside scholars, is disturbing, but ultimately discrediting to their cause. Their science is weak and untenable. I am not worried at all that this will become acceptable science (although, I am worried that educators will have to teach it as equal with evolution). I wonder about the people that refuse evolution. I wonder if they observe anything, if they pay attention to even basic news reports. Germs mutate all the time; so many species are similar but different in detail, why have so many types of butterflies or frogs or mosquitoes?
Beyond the absurdity of the current debate, I am perplexed by a question that isn't raised in the media: Why do these people want a fixed world? Why try to prove that an uncreated being created the world as it is, one time only? One can argue that the theology from which intelligent design flows has as its god a fixed and never changing god, that the earth was created by this god for a singular purpose with a distinct linear history, that man is the apex of creation. These ideas allow for the world to be comfortingly black and white. We know our place in the universe and it's all about us. But I still don't understand why anyone wants an unchanging god. In a world so obviously filled with dviersity, with myriad ways of being and interacting with the myriad ecosystems in the world, it should be clear, so I think, to anyone paying attention, that change and diversity are vital and wonderful parts of this world. Evolution might be looked at as a reflection of deep relationship. Of course, selection and the need to eat others to live is also cruel. But what strikes me as profound about evolution, and profoundly missed by creationists, is that evolution is about finding ways to thrive and interact with our immediate enviroment, plants and animals and rocks and all. We grow and change and because of that we mature and fall in love and learn things and have babies.... and also fall out of love and get hurt and die.
Perhaps I am equally guilty of the hubris I accuse the creationists of having. I see the world in terms of relationship, through a trinitarian lens (though not in terms of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit) that speaks to me of love, possible only if we have the capacity for change, and an understanding of the sacredness of this world. Why should I assume that my vision is the way god actually funcitons?
[I write this at work and have been interrupted and have, alas, forgotten where I was going with this. Therefore, the end.]
The fact that proponents of intelligent design don't use accepted and shared means of scientific inquiry, such as publically publishing or sharing information and experiments with outside scholars, is disturbing, but ultimately discrediting to their cause. Their science is weak and untenable. I am not worried at all that this will become acceptable science (although, I am worried that educators will have to teach it as equal with evolution). I wonder about the people that refuse evolution. I wonder if they observe anything, if they pay attention to even basic news reports. Germs mutate all the time; so many species are similar but different in detail, why have so many types of butterflies or frogs or mosquitoes?
Beyond the absurdity of the current debate, I am perplexed by a question that isn't raised in the media: Why do these people want a fixed world? Why try to prove that an uncreated being created the world as it is, one time only? One can argue that the theology from which intelligent design flows has as its god a fixed and never changing god, that the earth was created by this god for a singular purpose with a distinct linear history, that man is the apex of creation. These ideas allow for the world to be comfortingly black and white. We know our place in the universe and it's all about us. But I still don't understand why anyone wants an unchanging god. In a world so obviously filled with dviersity, with myriad ways of being and interacting with the myriad ecosystems in the world, it should be clear, so I think, to anyone paying attention, that change and diversity are vital and wonderful parts of this world. Evolution might be looked at as a reflection of deep relationship. Of course, selection and the need to eat others to live is also cruel. But what strikes me as profound about evolution, and profoundly missed by creationists, is that evolution is about finding ways to thrive and interact with our immediate enviroment, plants and animals and rocks and all. We grow and change and because of that we mature and fall in love and learn things and have babies.... and also fall out of love and get hurt and die.
Perhaps I am equally guilty of the hubris I accuse the creationists of having. I see the world in terms of relationship, through a trinitarian lens (though not in terms of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit) that speaks to me of love, possible only if we have the capacity for change, and an understanding of the sacredness of this world. Why should I assume that my vision is the way god actually funcitons?
[I write this at work and have been interrupted and have, alas, forgotten where I was going with this. Therefore, the end.]
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2005-08-29 08:17 am (UTC)