Intelligent Design, Or Nature?
Since I look at the world around us as a naturally occurring system with the appearance of purpose and “design,” does that mean I agree with the Intelligent Design movement?
Not particularly.
The ID crowd is for the most part driven by religious conviction, specifically a western Judeo-Christian view of existence. I have little problem with that, as long as it’s not forced on me, others who don’t want it, or institutionalized in laws that everyone must follow. As I have said before, all -isms are are perfect until people get involved. Interpretations, belief systems (B.S.) and fundamentalist thinking cause the problems.
For some reason, many people need to believe that if there is an intelligence in nature and existence, it has to come from a bearded old man in the sky. Maybe it does, but I tend to think that this is our our attempt to make sense of things in human terms–not that there’s anything particularly wrong with that.
On the UFO Coverup Live! show that aired in 1989, one of the “government intelligence” people who appeared in shadow with his voice altered said “The aliens worship the Universe as a Supreme Being.” I have no idea where they got this concept, since almost everything they said was suspect, but the sentiment stayed with me for years until I heard a lecture by Alan Watts in which he said “Where there are rocks, watch out, because someday the rocks are going to start walking around.”
What he meant by this is that perhaps intelligence is an inherent property of all matter, that is, given enough time (billions of years?) and the right conditions, life and intelligence will naturally arise out of the elements. If we want to assign this to a discarnate intelligence, so be it, but perhaps the universe knows what it’s doing no matter what we have to say about it.
This “universal intelligence” may manifest in ways that are still unimaginable to us–or in ways that look like UFOs, or Bigfoot, or the Chupacabras etc.–at least in our perception of space-time. In other words the consciousness of matter may manifest in countless incarnations, and to think that it has to appear immediately comprehensible to us at this point in our intellectual evolution may be a mistake.
Call this “universal mind” what you will…
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Sep 12 2007 
September 12th, 2007 at 9:11 am
*applause*
Yes.
September 12th, 2007 at 10:08 am
Those ID fellows should re-watch the old “Planet of the Apes” movies. Good criticism of the idea that all sentient beings think they are made “in God’s image”. What most fundamentalists fail to imagine is that God LOVES variety.
And He/She may love fooling round too…
September 12th, 2007 at 12:07 pm
The problem with ID is that it is a philosophical belief, but it’s backers want it taught as a science.
Having said that, I find it hard to swallow that chance alone can account for all the complexity of the biological systems around us, even given millions of years. While evolutionary processes no doubt happen, I can’t help thinking that there is an intelligence guiding it along in places. We humans, with all our intelligence, can’t match the complexity that supposedly occurred by chance.
But the idea of a bearded, white-haired God sitting on a throne doesn’t make much sense to me either. I think that image only serves as comfort to people who have trouble identifying with a non-human creator.
September 12th, 2007 at 3:39 pm
Uth,
If you’re interested, you might take a look at Daniel Dennett’s “Darwin’s Dangerous Idea”. What evolution has going for it is it works as a heuristic with massive amounts of time(millions & millions of years). When one uses the word chance it seems to imply an image of intelligence arising in a compressed period of time. Intelligence as manifested as the arising of homo sapiens took a really long fu….ing time.
September 12th, 2007 at 3:56 pm
Yards,
Thanks, though I expect that not everyone will take these comments philosophically. Nothing I can do about that.
September 12th, 2007 at 4:01 pm
uth,
What I was trying to suggest was that there may be an “intelligence” inherent in matter, and that we sometimes try to assign something approaching what we think of as a will or thought process to it. That does not make it any less remarkable.
September 12th, 2007 at 11:52 pm
Worth pointing out that ‘Intelligent Design’ as a term shouldn’t be the exclusive property of religious fundamentalists…Francis Crick was pretty much an ID proponent, although of a different kind. And he was about as far from religious as you could get…
September 13th, 2007 at 10:19 am
Well I kick off my “mothershiplanding” blogbook with mention of Simon Conway Morris’ explosive book. “The New Orthogenesis?” (evolution due to some vaguely defined force) was the Nature review title of Cambridge University Professor Simon Conway Morris’ 2003 book Life’s Solutions: Humans in a Lonely Universe (CUP, 2004).
I’m reading John D. Barrow and Frank Tipler’s anthropocentric universe tome right now but the latest update is the “biocentric universe” model, arguing that measurement of time is subjective to the type of perception of the organism.
Or as Gurdjieff told Ouspensky: “Remember Time is Breath.”
Which brings me to Yogananda’s “breathless ecstasy” claim that humans have the chance of reincarnating as extraterrestrials on planets with a better or more sattva guna.
Yogananda disses the philosophy of Sri Ramana Maharshi who in turn dissed the philosophy of Sri Aurobindo. I find this conflict of views in Vedanta fascinating. Aurobindo was such an influence for social “evolution” (via Julian Huxley) that his ashram is now part of UNESCO. Yogananda was a follower of Ramakrishna who reached fame through the Freemason Vivekananda, calling science the “external path.”
Nevertheless I go with Sri Ramana Maharshi who was considered an avatar of Shiva. Universal Mind is Female, as the Taoists teach also. Sri Ramana Maharshi stated very radically:
“There is no evolution.”
The secret of random spontaneous symmetry breaking from universal mind is actually “randy ohm.”
September 13th, 2007 at 9:20 pm
Lloyd Pye has an interesting essay entitled Carpenter Genes in which he persuasively argues that neither strict Darwinian-based evolution or Intelligent Design as it’s currently put forth adequately account for creation. He also suggests there is another, perhaps more complete solution, but I won’t spoil it by telling what it is. You’ll have to read Lloyd’s short essay your self.
~R~