If you believe in god, you're an idiot...

[Alawen Everywhere]

Originally Posted by Messianic [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

This doesn't mean people are young-earth creationists - just because they're open to the idea of intelligent design. Anyone who's spent any real time debating or reading the academics in the field don't waste their time insulting people - they get right to the crux arguments. So get to them - and don't degrade others for having a belief you don't understand, particularly if you're not getting to the facts yourself, or perhaps don't really know them at all.

Originally Posted by Messianic [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

Well-credentialed people in the hard sciences tend to be agnostic or theist. Well-credentialed people in social sciences or humanities tend to be Atheist.

I was curious if you'd weigh in here and what your thoughts would be.

The source of Intelligent Design "theory" is a fundamentalist Christian project called the Discovery Institute. The Discovery Institute commissioned a viable argument for teaching creationism or the "controversy" of evolution in public schools. This culminated in the 1989 publication of "Of Pandas and People," a pseudo-science high school biology text.

The thoughts behind intelligent design have been around since the Greek philosophers. The "proof" of a creator changes from era to era as our understanding of underlying science increases. The most recent arguments center around irreducible complexity, with the most popular example being bacterial flagella. Interestingly enough, these arguments resemble Boggwin's logic of searching for an unknown and claiming that an unknown proves the existence of God. The Discovery Institute avoids naming God and favors the euphemism "the designer."

The big problem with ID is that it doesn't hold up to scientific process. As a theory, it's untestable nature causes it to fail. Its dearth of peer-reviewed publications leaves it with basically William Dembski and Michael Behe to defend it, and even Dembski bailed on testifying about ID after he saw the difficulties Behe had in cross-examination.

One interesting aspect of ID, to me, is lack of acceptance by the Vatican. Catholic policy has slowly evolved (heh) to accept the possibility of Darwin's theories but high-ranking church scholars reject ID. I don't quite understand the reasoning, but it has something to do with the difference between divine causality and created causality.

Personally, I find no credibility whatsoever in any of the origins, objectives or methods of the Discovery Institute. There are no other significant backers of ID. I find the entire project decidedly disingenuous, deceptive and surprisingly un-Christian. I have much more respect for people like RocketMoose who expresses his faith as faith and doesn't try to make it into what it is not.

On the other topic of who tends to be atheistic, theistic or agnostic, you offer some very broad generalizations with no supporting evidence. I think you know this is a completely vapid argument.