QUOTE(Doc glasgow @ Thu 20th January 2011, 6:25pm)
QUOTE(Kelly Martin @ Fri 21st January 2011, 12:21am)
The ID/anti-ID fight is one between committed ideologues.
Looks to me like a lot of it is a fight between people who believe in NPOV on one hand and people who don't understand the concept on the other. Either of groups may or may not have religious convictions or be atheists, but that's largely irrelevant. Even a fair-minded atheist hasn't got a look in.
How can you describe ID when it's not close to being a single POV? Those guys know they want a God-of-the-gaps, but they can't decide which gaps need a god.
Once upon a time, god was the Prime Mover, and was necessary to make the planets go around the Sun. Now, it's admitted that they can do that without Him. Then, we needed God to form babies in the womb. Now that's starting to look pretty mechanical. Then anti-evolution proponents gave up on microevolution and admitted that you didn't need God to make teacup pomeranians or Great Danes from wolves, or even different subspecies on different islands. Now that can be automatic. Less and less for God to do....
So, what jobs are left? Do we need god to make humans from other types of apes? How about splitting other apes from each other? Or just to make primates from other mammals? Or make mammals from reptiles?
The reason Father Georges Lemaître won on the Big Bang question, is that he put his theoretical cards on the table and "placed his bet" on a prediction. The ID folks, by contrast, are "not even wrong." They are like nailing jello to a table. When Hubble found the universe expanding, Einstein (father of modern physical cosmology) said "I have made the biggest blunder of my life." (he had inserted a fudge factor into an equation just to make the universe static, because he thought it should be). Einstein saw that had he trusted his own math, he'd had the chance to make one more astounding prediction, like Dirac and the positron. But in both cases, the inventors didn't trust their own mathematical inventions.