Seems like we are in total agreement here then. What really bugs me about ID though, is that there seems to be a campaign going on that deliberatly tries to spread disinformation. I know that I may be unfair here, but I can't help blaming the moderate (majority) of christians for shielding that behaviour. I would have hoped for the moderate voices to be louder and more visible.
Yes, indeed, Genesis is quite specific about the process. The problem that I see, is that you really have to interpret it very metaphorically if you don't want it to be flatly contradicted by what we know through science. Which leads to the question how metaphorically the bible is to be interpreted in general. There seems to be no rule to decide. For me this raises the question whether there is any point in relying on the bible at all, but that's maybe a matter of taste, I guess.
I'm not sure if I follow you here. I hardly see dogma in evolutionary biology and I can very well see why the scientists in that field are really upset. Just take a look at some of the inane posts in this thread alone. The feeling among many scientists is that science itself is under attack, which is the reason that many researchers who work in other fields solidarize with biologists who are at the frontline.
I can assure you it occupies the mind of the non-believer more than the believer. The desire to know were we come from seems to be deeply embedded in the mind of any human being. It's just that the non-believers are not satisfied with an oversimplified answer.
Yes, that's what I meant.
Indeed thin ground. The formation of aminoacids from anorganic matter can be reproduced in laboratory (see the Miller-Uray experiment). Self-orginization and emergence seem to play a major role in the process of abiogenesis, but this is a relatively new field of science and is only recently really accessible to us mathematicians through the explosion in computation-capacity of modern computers. But as for how the exact details work out, nobody really knows. Another unsolved and most important issue is the problem of monochirality: why are all naturally occuring molecules of L-chirality? We have ideas, and monochirality is actually a strong indicator that all life on earth has one single origin, but here also we ultimately don't know. Divine intervention seems to be a very unlikely theory, though.
Keep in mind that WMAP, background radiation and so on only gives us an imagine of what happened immediately after the Big Bang. Gauge-theory, M-theory and the various flavours of String-Theory seem to be good bets, but unfortunately there is no observational evidence yet. The LHC is supposed to change that, but I wouldn't be surprised if we observe something completely unpredicted in the LHC. Baryon-asymmetry is another important problem that has to be solved and the LHC has an entire detector reserved for that single purpose. Let's hope the LHC will at least find the Higgs-particle so that gauge-theory would be set on a robust observational basis. Interesting times we live in...
To the contrary!
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