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I would like to emphasize this part: 'Mainly concerned with evolution as it “involves the question of man,” however, Pope John Paul’s message is specifically critical of materialistic theories of human origins and insists on the relevance of philosophy and theology for an adequate understanding of the “ontological leap” to the human which cannot be explained in purely scientific terms.'
Richard Dawkins is just hedging his bets in public.
"There's probably no God. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life."
So you think he was not promoting atheism? What was he promoting with this campaign?
So why did he do this?
Would you tell a child that there is probably no God and to stop worrying about Him?
I think Denton makes some good points. Its only natural that as humans we want to understand in practical terms how everything came to be as we are immersed in nature. I would like to think that God put His design in the laws of Nature which makes more sense as compared to a special creation that came from no where. In fact I think Gods design in nature were there from the beginning of existence itself. Even the quantum world works to those laws.ID was initially intended to be a legally-defensible way to insert creationism into public schools. This ended in what ID inventor Philip Johnson called a "train wreck" in Kitzmiller v. Dover.
Intelligent design (ID) is a pseudoscientific argument for the existence of God, presented by its proponents as "an evidence-based scientific theory about life's origins".[1][2][3][4][5] Proponents claim that "certain features of the universe and of living things are best explained by an intelligent cause, not an undirected process such as natural selection."[6] ID is a form of creationism that lacks empirical support and offers no testable or tenable hypotheses, and is therefore not science.[7][8][9] The leading proponents of ID are associated with the Discovery Institute, a Christian, politically conservative think tank based in the United States.
...
Although the phrase intelligent design had featured previously in theological discussions of the argument from design,[10] its first publication in its present use as an alternative term for creationism was in Of Pandas and People,[11][12] a 1989 creationist textbook intended for high school biology classes. The term was substituted into drafts of the book, directly replacing references to creation science and creationism, after the 1987 Supreme Court's Edwards v. Aguillard decision barred the teaching of creation science in public schools on constitutional grounds.[13] From the mid-1990s, the intelligent design movement (IDM), supported by the Discovery Institute,[14] advocated inclusion of intelligent design in public school biology curricula.[7] This led to the 2005 Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District trial, which found that intelligent design was not science, that it "cannot uncouple itself from its creationist, and thus religious, antecedents", and that the public school district's promotion of it therefore violated the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment to the United States Constitution.
ID has had a rocky path since, with some, including Philip Johnson ( at least initially a creationist) saying that perhaps the designer was "a space alien." Discovery Institute fellow Michael Behe now says that he accepts evolution, even though he thinks God has to step in now and then to make it work.
And another Discovery Institute fellow, Michael Denton seems to have become a deist in his book Nature's Destiny, breaking completely with creationists in an explicit way:
t is important to emphasize at the outset that the argument presented here is entirely consistent with the basic naturalistic assumption of modern science–that the cosmos is a seamless unity which can be comprehended in its entirety by human reason and in which all phenomena, including life and evolution and the origin of man, are ultimately explicable in terms of natural processes. This is an assumption which is entirely opposed to that of the so-called “special creationist school.” According to special creationism, living organisms are not natural forms, whose origin and design were built into the laws of nature from the beginning, but rather contingent forms analogous in essence to human artifacts, the result of a series of supernatural acts, involving God’s direct intervention in the course of nature, each of which involved the suspension of natural law. Contrary to the creationist position, the whole argument presented here is critically dependent on the presumption of the unbroken continuity of the organic world–that is, on the reality of organic evolution and on the presumption that all living organisms on earth are natural forms in the profoundest sense of the word, no less natural than salt crystals, atoms, waterfalls, or galaxies.
In large measure, therefore, the teleological argument presented here and the special creationist worldview are mutually exclusive accounts of the world. In the last analysis, evidence for one is evidence against the other. Put simply, the more convincing is the evidence for believing that the world is prefabricated to the end of life, that the design is built into the laws of nature, the less credible becomes the special creationist worldview.
Michael Denton Nature's Destiny p. xi
This erosion of creationists to deism is an ongoing problem, possibly accounting for the noted decline in number of evangelical Christians in the United States.
If there was such a designer who can create something that had the appearence of design to the level nature has then I would say they were the best disigner that was not really a designer that ever existedRichard Dawkins says that living things only look designed. They are not actually designed. That is false.
I think people should realize the following:
Unguided Evolution: Nothing made you.
Intelligent Design: An intelligence - God - made you.
Unguided evolution is supported by atheists and those who believe in radical individualism. That they are god. That they decide what is right and wrong and give no regard for God.
Romans 9:20
"But who are you, O man, to answer back to God? Will what is molded say to its molder, “Why have you made me like this?”
As Christians, we cannot afford to ignore the role of the Creator.
He offers opinion thinly disguised beneath a veneer of scientific talk. Which is unfortunate, in part, because that kind of thinking not only risks turning people against their faith but also risks turning people against science. As if we have to choose one or the other. I hate to think of all the scientifically talented individual and their potential discoveries that never happened, and fulfilling godly lives that were never realized, because somebody convinced them that an atheistic opinion is the equivalent of scientific thought. It isn't. The science itself is agnostic. A methodology for understanding how stuff works.Yes. The issue is that materialistic theories are not scientific theories at all, since they deny the existence of the supernatural, which science cannot do. Since science is, by its very methodology, limited to the physical universe, it has no way to affirm or deny God. Even Richard Dawkins admits that he cannot rule out the existence of God.
I do think there is an essential difference between design, which limited creatures do, and creation, which truly, only God can do. I don't like the IDer notion of God the Designer any more than the IDer concept of the Designer as "maybe a space alien."The universe was created because it exists. All of its systems were designed intelligently by an intelligent creator. We're talking about the Alpha and the Omega. The beginning and the end. God has all of space and time to work with. It's a mistake to assume that what we call evolution, or any such process that we encounter in the future, would be separate from his handiwork. Almost as much of a mistake as thinking that we have all of the detailed answers. We don't. We're not God. Although there's much that we can discover and learn, we creatures don't have his intelligence or perspective.
Some of them evolved into humans. Some of them are still living in every cell of your body. You can't live without them, and they can't live without you, even though they reproduce on their own, with their own circular bacterial DNA.Bacteria might evolve immunity to drugs over time, but they remain bacteria. The fortituitous combination of cellular material which allows a very, very small percentage of bacteria to survive a new drug and thus reproduce is already built in. But because they are the ones that survive, they tend to be the ones which reproduce. Ensuing generations are thus more likely to have this protection builit in, and so more and more will survive until they are effectively immune.
They don't become another species, and they certainly don't evolve into other phyla.
No. He's assuming that God, if God exists, is a deistic God, who doesn't care what we do or think.Richard Dawkins is just hedging his bets in public.
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