Some thoughts on Intelligent Design (ID)

Posted to the Paul Krugman forum on the NY Times Op/Ed website, hglindquist - 7:52 AM ET August 6, 2005, #44707 and hglindquist - 8:03 AM ET August 6, 2005, #44708:

If ID is an attempt by Creationists to present a rational concept, everyone should applaud. With reason as a guide, blind faith is quickly shown to be irrational ...

But to show the advance of reason that ID brings to Christian Fundamentalists I would like to quote Sir Isaac Newton (taken from Karen Armstrong's A HISTORY OF GOD--a recommended read, by the way):

"This most beautiful system of the sun, planets and comets could only proceed from the counsel and dominion of an intelligent and powerful Being. . . . He is eternal and infinite, omnipotent and omniscient; that is, his duration reaches from eternity to eternity; his presence from infinity to infinity; he governs all things, and knows all things that are or can be done. . . . We know him only by his most wise and excellent contrivances of things, and final causes; we admire him for his perfection; but we reverence and adore him on account of his dominion: for we adore him as his servants; and a god without dominion, providence, and final causes, is nothing else but Fate and Nature. Blind metaphysical necessity, which is certainly the same always and everywhere, could produce no variety of things. All that diversity of natural things which we find suited to different times and places could arise from nothing but the ideas and will of a Being necessarily existing."

Remember what Newton did for the Age of Enlightenment (from Wikipedia):

"There was a wave of change across European thinking, which is exemplified by the natural philosophy of Sir Isaac Newton, a mathematical genius and brilliant physicist. The ideas of Newton, which combined his ability to fuse axiomatic proof with physical observation into a coherent system of verifiable predictions, set the tone for much of what would follow in the century after the publication of his Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica."

One more thought, this time from Jean-Paul Sartre,(in translation, of course, from THE PHILOSOPHY OF JEAN-PAUL SARTRE, edited and introduced by Robert Denoon Cumming):

"Existentialism isn't so atheistic that it wears itself out showing that God doesn't exist. Rather, it declares that even if God did exist, that would change nothing. There you've got our point of view. Not that we believe that God exists, but we think that the problem of His existence is not the issue."

I accept that.

Now if I chose to take Kierkegaard's leap of faith to believe in God then I would have to deal with the rational consistency demanded by that belief, would I not? Many people I know, respect, and love have made this choice. They cover a wide range of ID advocates to Literal Creationists. Most of them are not stupid or uneducated.

I choose to believe that God does not exist and to deal with the rational consistency demanded by that belief.

Getting Literal Creationists to establish a standard of rational consistency via the concept of ID is a huge step forward, in my humble Existentialist opinion.

Maybe we will have a new Age of Enlightenment?!