I woke up this morning and realized I believe in intelligent design. My deduction was simple:
- Darwinian origins cannot be proven as fact, they are therefore beliefs
- Evolution within the species is clearly provable so I believe in that
- As a software developer, I see similarities between our world and the virtual world, and based upon the following experiences and assumptions, I choose to believe in the intelligent origin of man
- I’m a computer programmer, and with my marginal understanding of genetic algorithms, it would be just so incredibly difficult to “program-in” the type of “logical leaps” from one species to the next
- If I were designing my own virtual world, I would program in many different models of living things separately, and even allow them to modulate and refine themselves through reproduction, but it would just be unnecessary (and illogical) to create “a single line of code” that would eventually grow into everything
Again, this is just my belief, and I choose to believe this because doing so allows me to reconcile and strengthen many of my other beliefs and perspectives. In realizing this, I’m much more supportive of people who don’t want Darwinian origins taught in school, because it is a belief, not a fact. I have to give credit to Jim Wallace credit for initializing this thought process. I heard him on a talk radio show about the passing of Jerry Falwell, and he surprised me when he said he didn’t believe in Darwinian origins, but did believe in evolution within species.
Update: I also reported these ideas to my wife and spurred a serious debate. She’s an agnostic and a very intelligent scientist. I explained to her about why I like science so much, and how I accept many of its laws to be facts. Science can reliably put into communicable form a quantitative measurement, which can be repeated relatively-easily and indefinitely. For instance, it is a fact that at our atmospheric pressure, water boils at 100 degrees Celsius. That fact can be proven over and over again easily and readily. Based upon that and the zillion other scientific facts, it can become convenient to go “out of bounds” in good faith for practical implementation of scientific theories. For example, it is not as easy to replicate all scientific experiments as our boiling water example. How can we prove unequivocally as fact that if you brush your teeth, you will get less cavities? Unfortunately, we cant. Human teeth and the conditions to which they exist are too complex a subject to study effectively. However, from a more practical perspective of simply trying to act in good faith to get fewer cavities, you can spend a reasonable amount of money to study a wide variety of people’s teeth and the conditions under which they exist, gather data, analyze the data, and come to the conclusion, the belief, that if you brush your teeth, you will get less cavities. What I’m talking about here is statistics, and more specifically the confident value. To me, statistics is, like psychiatry, a pseudo-science. Don’t worry, I’m not saying that is negative. I hold statistics and psychiatry in high revere, and believe that if the data analyzed by statistics and the subjects studies by psychiatry were less fleeting, they really could be real sciences. Due to the transient (i.e. mortal) characteristics of the human mind and the entropic characteristics of our environment, we unfortunately cannot unequivocally prove these matters to be facts. In an effort to be clear, I will again state that I believe both psychiatry and statistics to be phenomenally valuable and miraculously effective when put to practical use.
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