I saw a post on facebook’s evolution vs. ID group the other day that asserted that intelligent design is creationism. I think that this is a hugely narrow view of the world. I am a proponent of intelligent design as a likely hypothesis (In fact, I think both evolution and ID are likely, because a intelligent designer will use evolutionary algorithms when they make sense) but I am not a creationist in the traditional sense. My personal hypothesis, discussed elsewhere in this blog, is that we do a fair amount of editing of our own DNA across the millennia. However, even if that is not the case, I can think of many ways that intelligent design might be true without there being a single word of truth in the bible. <\/p>\n
One possible way is the endpoint-bound design process – i.e. we’re inside a quantum computer which has been asked to find a path between zero and a particular life form. Ancestor simulation, I think this is called. One can actually think of a lot of ways that you can have intelligent designers without talking about traditional creationism. There’s the oldie-but-a-goodie of us being the product of alien genetic engineers. There’s the classic of us being inside a time-based mobeus loop, and we’re genetically engineered by our future selves. <\/p>\n
I really think science should be approaching this with a wide open mind – and increasingly I suspect they are. One of the things that I really like are scientists that don’t hypothesize until *after* they have the data – just go out and take some measurements and see what you can find out. It does not strike me as that likely, given that there are a number of competing religions, that we’re going to find a correct and honest origin story in a religion. <\/p>\n
For that matter, I’ve talked about a number of times how your intelligent deity would almost certainly be working with us inside a virtualization container, which increases the unknowability factor by quite a bit. Of course, a intelligent deity would also know that *they* might be in a virtualization container, which means that no deity could honestly say, with any certainty, that they were omnipotent and omniscient. That’s a subject I’ve already harped on enough in this journal, I think.<\/p>\n
Anyway, my point is, it’s a lot of a leap to assume that just because someone thinks intelligent design is a reasonable explanation for our existence, they’re a creationist. Especially that they’re attached to any mainstream religion.<\/p>\n
I will now take off my tinfoil hat.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I saw a post on facebook’s evolution vs. ID group the other day that asserted that intelligent design is creationism. I think that this is a hugely narrow view of the world. I am a proponent of intelligent design as a likely hypothesis (In fact, I think both evolution and ID are likely, because a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sheer.us\/weblogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2915"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sheer.us\/weblogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sheer.us\/weblogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sheer.us\/weblogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sheer.us\/weblogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2915"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.sheer.us\/weblogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2915\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2916,"href":"https:\/\/www.sheer.us\/weblogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2915\/revisions\/2916"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sheer.us\/weblogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2915"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sheer.us\/weblogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2915"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sheer.us\/weblogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2915"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}