kevinmillerxi
Posts: 92
Joined: Feb. 2008
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Okay, here’s a question with an unfortunately long lead-up: The way I see it, one reason ID is so controversial is that it argues mind precedes matter in the form of a creative intelligence; whereas classic evolutionary theory says that mind is a product of matter. Intelligence is one of the last things to appear on the scene.
But when confronted with the question of how life began, many evolutionary theorists allow that perhaps Panspermia had something to do with it. This theory is broadly accepted as a scientific possibility even though it also posits that mind came first and matter—at least the highly organized arrangements of matter we call living things—second.
So my question is, why is one theory so controversial and the other not? What if you stripped away all of the religious and political baggage from ID? Would the theory be more acceptible then? And wouldn’t ID and Panspermia become nearly indistinguishable? After all, both argue that perhaps the best possibility for explaining how life began is a higher intelligence that seeded it on earth. We can argue all day about what the nature of that intelligence really is. But that’s beside the main point: Do we need intelligence to explain things like the origin and diversity of life or not? Classical evolution says no, ID and Panspermia say yes. Two different answers to the same question. I fail to see how one answer is scientific and the other not. That being said, I’m sure someone is going to go off about the scientific method and how the IDers aren’t serious scientists, that they’re a bunch of liars, etc. But once again, that’s beside the point. Never mind their methods or their ethics. Is the question the ID community is asking scientific or not?
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