RE: My article "Intelligent Design on Trial"

Gregory,

Yes, it is my view that evolution functions as a "theory of everything."
Here I am defining "evolution" very broadly to mean the "modern creation
story" as it is sometimes called. That is, I include the big bang, stellar
evolution and the creation of elements, the origin of life (by far the
weakest part of the grand narrative), the origin of species, and the origin
of humans.

I'll illustrate briefly the kinds of questions that "evolution" addresses,
which ID does not address. According to the grand scenario, the sun is a
second or third generation star--in any case, it can't be a first generation
star, since it has a solar system composed of heavy elements that had to be
produced in an earlier generation of stars. The big bang produced only
hydrogen and helium, with all other elements being produced by fusion, and
the elements heavier than Iron coming via supernova explosions. An
observation that tests this theory is, that the sun & earth are both found
to be ca. 4.65 BY old and the universe is found to be ca. 13.7 BY old.
That's consistent with the grand narrative--which hardly proves it, but
counts for something.

ID simply can't answer those questions, indeed it studiously avoids them
most of the time. A few IDs, granted, will use cosmic fine tuning as a
design argument--an appropriate way to go, IMO--but this is not very common
anymore, and at the popular level ID includes only the assault on
"Darwinism," which leaves aside crucial issues about when/where/how features
of the universe came into being.

Is my point clear enough now?

Ted
Received on Wed Mar 8 19:17:46 2006