jmog wrote:
I think you'll find that anyone who understands the science and believes in ID or creation, that person also understands interspecies mutation/evolution. However, said person might disagree with intraspecies mutation/evolution (aka a fish becoming a frog).
It's been my experience with creationists (not so much IDers) that the terms they use to describe evolution; microevolution and macroevolution have elastic meanings for them. For the scientist; Macroevolution is "any change at the species level or above" but a creationist will say any observed evolutionary divergence in biology as "just micro-evolution"
In my experience, IDers don't have a problem with this...they just say the only way it could have all happened were by the hand of some intelligence...or at the very least, the only way abiogenisis could have happened would be if there was some intelligence.
And, eventually this all eventually comes down to the cosmological argument because even if it were proved that monomers and amino acids could be formed spontaneously in the right conditions and that they can beyond a shadow of a doubt combine in ways, improving their chances to survive and replicate in competition, to the point where we would arrive at the world we have now rich in biodiversity....
the committed theist, unshaken by any evidence at all (just like the committed atheist)...will always retreat to the inference that some kind of intelligence must have at least cause the big bang which caused the earth to exist and to have the environment it had which allowed for monomers to form and so on until there were humans with conscious experience of the world.
The committed theist will never budge in the face of logical reasoning or evidence but perhaps only emotional persuasion because that belief goes right down to the essence of who we are.
I just really don't even see the point in arguing about it...you want kids to hear about and ask the big questions, have the local school board require a full year long philosophy class when kids are freshmen that would include logic, a brief history of philosophy, morality and ethics, and philosophy of religion/epistemology (which would include the ID and Creationist accounts and irreducible complexity and other things). People who learn philosophy do better on standardized tests, are better at critical thinking and ultimately more reasonable people anyways...and, philosophy majors could have new opportunities teaching at the high school lever rather than hoping to land jobs at universities.
Let scientists remain skeptics and work within the natural observable world and not worry about those big questions or "first philosophy"
