From: Steve Petermann (steve@spetermann.org)
Date: Thu Sep 11 2003 - 16:35:09 EDT
Howard Van Till wrote:
> Scientific completeness or religious completeness? I think John Haught's
new
> book, Deeper than Darwin, offers a useful discussion of this distinction.
Thanks I'll check it out.
> Haught suggests that the way to understand ID is to see it as a movement
> that prematurely offers a religious answer to a scientific question.
Well I guess whether it is premature or not comes down to making judgment
calls on what standard science can deal with and what it can't. Clearly
religion has offered answers to many scientific questions in the past that
turned out to be wrong. So may ID. However, I don't thing Haught is being
completely fair if he characterizes ID as only a religious movement. Also I
don't think that science really knows how to deal with this issue.
Detractors just demanding that the same scientific criterion be met that we
find in normal science, may help to be dismissive but perhaps that doesn't
serve the true spirit of the scientific endeavor.
Clearly there are different personality types in the ID movement but it
appears to me that there *are* competent scientists looking at these
questions in good scientific faith. As an educated laity with respect to
biology, I am having a hard time knowing what to think. From all the
unprofessionalism and emotion on both sides, one would think this is more a
religious issue than a scientific one. The problem, as I see it, is that
with this level of emotion on both sides, *any* scientific assertion is
suspect, at least to the laity. I just wish the same level of objectivity
we normally find in science could be found in the ID debate. That seems to
be starting to emerge so we'll see.
Best Regards,
Steve Petermann
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