I had my own reaction to Quigley’s anti-Intelligent Design
column last week. He seems to have inspired many responses from both sides in letters and a column.
The blatantly bible-thumping
IDers are easier to dismiss. But the intellectual IDers remind me the devil will appear in a pleasant form.
Below, Edenburn
demolishes his own argument with one word: “current”. He seems to allow that someday science will prove ID wrong. But that’s just the
devil seeming pleasant. IDers believe it cannot be proven wrong. Precisely what they falsely accuse evolutionists of believing. mjh
Note: I have added an “ID” category to gather related entries; see link to left.
—–
ABQjournal: Intelligent Design and Finding New Ideas By Mike
Edenburn, For the Journal
Mr. Quigley’s description of ID as a proposition is appropriate. I might expand on it a little by
describing intelligent design as the “proposition” that scientifically derived empirical evidence suggests that design by an
intelligent agent is the best current explanation for the origin of a variety of natural systems, particularly in
biology, and that natural laws and chance alone, the basis for the theory of evolution, are not adequate to explain these
observations. …
[I]nnovation usually comes from looking at things in different ways and adopting new paradigms. Some of
the greatest scientific discoveries in history have come from thinking outside the box, and those have been good for business.
—
Mike Edenburn is a mechanical engineer, former systems analyst at Sandia National Laboratories for 35 years, and a member of New Mexico
Intelligent Design Network
—
There’s no box like that little black book. Not to say
great and creative minds haven’t belonged to powerfully faithful believers. Just that fundamentalism by its nature requires closing your
mind.
—–
ABQjournal: Letters to Outlook
You are presenting the study of evolution as being necessary to achieving a quality
education. Somehow I cannot grasp how the study of man’s supposedly evolutionary climb from monkeys is going to help me learn to read,
write and add 2+2. If anything, my observation of our school system is that we are evolving back to the primate era.
Gary Hays
Albuquerque
This one is too easy. Hays doesn’t realize apes (“monkeys”) and humans evolved from a
common ancestor that was neither ape nor human. He also doesn’t realize we ARE primates.
—–
Quigley’s claim
that “ID is bad for business” is just plain laughable. Please tell me what makes more sense in education — simply accepting evolution as
truth, or evaluating evolution in light of a competing theory and then examining the evidence to see which has a greater claim to truth?
Hank Happ
Albuquerque
The devil himself speaks here. Open-minded and well-educated people
— even liberal people — must consider competing theories equally. Then must we allow astrology in the astronomy class?
—–
The scientific support for a creator’s involvement in the origins of life and universe is overwhelming.
Earl
Godwin, M.D.
Albuquerque
Please. An essential tenet of ID is irreducible complexity — that we
cannot grasp that which is most god-like. It is anti-science and anti-progress; it insist we must hit a point beyond which the answer is:
god did it.
—–
The proponents of ID are religious fundamentalists who are taught from birth to believe that the
worldly things of this life are of no importance; that salvation, that is, the life of the world after death, is all that matters. The
total lack of empirical evidence for this belief is irrelevant as Tertullian, an early Christian priest, said: “I believe because it is
absurd.”
The fundamentalist theocrats of all the monotheistic religions will never give up; their self-image depends on
continuing the control over the masses of the deluded faithful. It is this power, not salvation, that is the prime motivation to the
preachers, the witch doctors, and the theistic con artists. George Orwell would have understood.
Ross Milner
Albuquerque
Amen, Brother Milner!