Friday, May 05, 2006

Intelligent Design and Evolution

Recently I watched about Intelligent Design and Evolution arguments because of this post on Luca Trevisan's In Theory and started a thought-thread that ran in the background of my mind and I summarize the results of that thread in this post.

People believing in ID say that people who are atheists are agnostics. They show some silly psychological tricks to prove their correctness. They argue that omniscience is not true and hence atheists cannot be true. Infact their argument can be applied against them. They are not omniscient either. What I saw was they were trying to induce fear (of violating ten commandments) to make people believe in ID. They don't seem to have better tools!?

Most scientists never claim about non-existence of GOD. In fact the closer one is to being a true scientist the more he refrains from any such claims. This is not being agnostic, it's simply being rational to be useful in life by bringing in real results for humans. Read my post about results.

If the goal of ID followers is to bring peace and harmony to world then they better be more philosophical or spiritual instead of trying to be scientific or trying to reduce the value of scientific efforts. True scientific effort is one of the finest services to humanity. It is well known in scientific community that proving negative results is much harder than positive results. If scientists cannot prove non-existence of GOD they won't claim it. They only shift focus to what they can do best with their ability to understand. This is why Theory of Evolution exists and there are lot of applications using this theory in coming up with practical heuristics for material design using nanotechnology, genetic algorithms etc. There might be some mysteries about evolution like this one on Scott's blog but this does not rule out Evolution. Ruling out things because of their mysteries without keeping in mind their major applications is not being very rational. It is important that these mysteries crop up which slowly but eventually will be resolved to give us progress.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

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