We all know them, and politics in the last decade has had some notable representatives of the species. Now you can start to understand why they’re so confident.
It’s not just dumb people. Most beginning programmers, for instance, are incredibly confident after only a few months of learning (and yes, I was one of them — in my defense, I was a teenager at the time). It’s not until later that they begin to realize just how much there really is to learn in order to program well. The dumb ones apparently just never figure that out.
(Some people are undeservedly confident even before they start learning. A few years ago I had a fellow come up to me at a party and want me to teach him to program. He was going to reserve a whole afternoon for the task.)
Believing in intelligent design is not a form of retardation or incompetence, as the article suggests. Maybe some forms of creationism are, but the idea that there is a divine creator is not a form of incompetence, and I hate snarky articles that say otherwise. 🙂
Believing in a divine creator may not be, but in my opinion, believing that the world and everything in it was created from nothingness, in an instant and in its current form, with an airy wave of his/her/its hand, is.
I happen to agree that there is a creator, but I also believe that that creator works through the laws of the physical world, not by miracles. There’s too much evidence of them for me to think otherwise. And I certainly hope that you don’t take the complete idiot’s route and say that God just made all that stuff look so old to test our faith.
No, the Tiferes Yisroel, who wrote about fossils even before the term “dinosaurs” was coined but after the earliest fossil discoveries (he apparently liked to keep up with scientific happenings in his day) said that the discoveries of fossils and the like pointed to an ancient Midrash, that says that before this world (i.e. the 5,770 years of civilized creation) “G-d created and destroyed worlds” (i.e. made repeated waves of extinction.) and said this explains fossils and the like. (And dovetails nicely with current scientific theory of multiple waves of mass extinction…)
As far as miracles go, there’s sort of a law of conservation of miracle. If you read the account of the splitting of the sea of reeds (Yam Suf, or “Red Sea” in the KJV you’re probably familiar with.) you’ll note that there was a wind before the sea split, and so on. The same is true of all of the other miracles in scripture and elsewhere. G-d prefers most of all to work through nature, though sometimes events caused Him to have to stretch things a little. 😉
Then where’s the problem? It’s not the belief in a creator that marks idiots, it’s the rejection of science, regardless of evidence, simply because it disagrees with the person’s beliefs or the statements of the person’s guru.
The article painted with a pretty broad brush, “intelligent design” covers a lot of ground, though since I don’t think the version that’s being peddled to the public schools with that moniker is very “intelligent”, (well, neither is the way they teach science now, remember the planetary model of atoms from the turn of the 20th century, soon outdated not long after that date, in your late 20th century classroom? and I don’t even want to get into the pablum they use to teach history, half of your college liberal arts programs has to be devoted to undoing the damage that is done in high school) or devoid of religion-state issues, so I guess there isn’t a problem. 🙂