"Intelligent Design"

Today was a day for chatter about "Intelligent Design" (aka Creationism). Did you realize that as much as 50% of Americans believe in Creationism? All depends on who you count, I suppose. There's a large middle-ground of people who believe that evolution is God's mechanism of creation. Just, FYI, that is NOT what the term "Intelligent Design" is typically used to describe. "Intelligent Design" is strict Creationism, in which god creates existence in a matter of days. The middle-ground suggest that maybe Genesis is a metaphor. I'd go so far as to say that Genesis is a bad metaphor based on a primative civilation's limited understanding of their world. Bad by today's standards. I'd also be willing to wager that evolution is an only slightly beter metaphor to explain a part of what we observe around us -- based on the standards of 2500 AD.

Never the less, there are still a lot of people of refuse to think through what they observe in the world and choose to take overly simplistic views of the world. We call the vast majority of these people conservative. After all:

While it may not be true that all conservative people are stupid,
it is true that stupid people are generally conservative.
-- John Stuart Mill

Today's commentary on the Creationism / evolution debate via Echidnae and new museum where in the beginning Adam walked with dinosaurs. Don't you just love when science is subjugated by dogma?

To fill you in a little more on my own personal views. I believe that given our current understanding of the universe in which we exist, if there is a god, then his role has been to create very low-level, foundational rules that govern how the things in our universe interact with each other. That's what theoretical physics is about after all, isn't it? Trying to understand those basic laws and equations that govern the way the things in our universe are connected and interact. I believe that it is possible for what we call "life" to come into being as a product of the interaction of "non-living" things in our universe. I buy the "primordial soup" theory in which life came forth from a chemical sludge, and evolved over millions and millions of years into what we are today. I think that the existence of extremophiles helps support that theory.

I'd go from here into a discussion of what I believe the human "soul" to be, but that will have to be for another night.