The ambiguity of "design" is a recurring theme in these debates. Most
theistic evolutionists that I know object to the ID movement's attempt to
monopolize the term to represent themselves as the sole theistic alternative
to materialistic and atheistic evolution. As has been pointed out so often
in this forum, "design" can refer either to an intention or to the execution
of an intention. For theistic evolutionists, all of nature is surely
"designed" in the sense that it was brought about by God for God's
intentions. The execution of that design is left to science to explore and
evolutionary theory is simply one domain of that exploration.
Jim Hofmann
http://nsmserver2.fullerton.edu/departments/chemistry/evolution_creation/web
/
-----Original Message-----
From: Susan Brassfield
To: evolution@calvin.edu
Sent: 4/26/00 2:53 PM
Subject: Intelligent Design
Naturally, I've been thinking about ID a lot over the last few months.
My original opinion--that it's propaganda with no visible means of
support--has remained unchanged, but I had an idea about it recently and
I thought I'd share it with the list.
There are three main ideas about intelligent design: 1. nothing is
designed by an intelligent agent; 2. some things are designed by an
intelligent agent and some things are formed by natural forces; 3.
*everything* is designed by an intelligent agent.
#1 obviously is the naturalistic evolutionist position. It seems that
most of the ID proponents adhere to #2 and I've always been a little
astonished at that. You'd think that a group of people who want their god to
be omnipotent would say that he/she/it had designed *everything*. It
finally occurred to me that creationists *can't* take that position because
that means that everything simply is as it is. God made the Big Bang,
evolution and all the rest and the natural sciences merely examine God's
handiwork. That doesn't leave Genesis as a science text.
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