And their agonized and protracted humilitation will be a continuing source of uplift.

Eh. Too close to the Gaia Hypothesis, which is just icky.

I asked last week, but you didn't answer, whether it is possible to be in the midst of an existential crisis all unaware.

Here's what's really going on.

There are 4 classes of hoax, from the mere jape (Type 1) to the straight con (Type 4).

In Type 2, an intelligent, or at least well educated, ideologue tells hoi polloi deliberate lies for their own good.

In Type 3, the most interesting, the teller of lies forgets that his High Purpose was based on a subterfuge and begins to believe his own Press Clippings.

The most obvious example of this in recent American public discourse is Global Warming and such of its John the Baptists as Steven Schneider, although the most prominent Type 3 in our history was Ronald Reagan.

Type 3 is interesting not only in the sense that it is like watching an intellectual train wreck developing, but also in its psychological effect.

Once embarked on a Type 2 hoax, only a strong and confident personality, if his hoax tends toward success, can resist morphing into a Type 3.

It feels so good. The Type 3 hoaxer a) knows himself to be a benefactor of mankind; b) the possessor of arcane, secret knowledge that sets him apart from ordinary men; c) a noble crusader under constant attack from Dark Forces.

This leads to something akin to a self-induced form of paranoid-schizophrenia, and although not utterly beyond the Hoaxer's intellectual control, it often proves almost as difficult to reverse out of as paranoid-schizophrenia the organic disease is.

Then there is the embarrassment factor.

One understands that if a large group of people spend 150 years declaiming their intellectual and moral supremacy in a scientific pursuit, yet after all that time not one has ever proposed any theory, concept or observation in that field, they may pull up the drawbridge and spend the rest of their time hurling literary bolts at the peasants actually laboring in the field.

Of course, when the peasants bring out a potato, the Hoaxers do deign to eat it.

Otherwise they'd starve.

Yes, as the paradigm shifts its adherents are always unaware, until they shift to denial.

Orrin:

I agree that Darwin's theory has many flaws, but are you saying that you don't in any way think that there is something to evolution?

Vince:

Not at all. Darwin observed how easy it was for farmers to change animals by breeding them and, probably correctly, that such breeding might occur in nature as well, resulting in similar effects. But that isn't evolution. We have no idea why evolution occurs or how. Some kind of intervention from without--whether by a Designer or by gamma rays or whatever or some combination--seems most likely.

Okay.

Well, that was quick.

From Intelligent Design to the random Gamma rays of Darwin in two days.

Still, a person is ne'er wiser than when they can admit to a mistake.

A doctor can bury her mistakes, but an architect can only advise her client to plant vines - Frank Lloyd Wright (paraphrased)

Not Gaia, David, but (if you read all the way down) Teilhard.

I saw where he was heading 20 paragraphs before he got there.

It's hard to believe that anyone who wants to be taken as a serious thinker would touch the noosphere at this late date.

A terrible crisis of faith?

Hardly. If someone were to demonstrate tomorrow that some Hairy Thunderer was behind it all, that would clean up a lot of materialistic puzzles all at once.

After all, that is what materialism is about: trying to figure out what is, no matter what it may be.

It is the religionists who will have a crisis of faith as they learn the God they have been worshipping has nothing to do with the real thing.

Jeff:

That's demonstrated, the crisis will come as you're forced to accept it. But we're here for you.

I'll be forced to accept it when someone finally explains to me "What the friggin Universe does!" If something has a purpose, it has to actually do something specific for the designer. Self-serving guesses by wannabe immortals won't suffice.

Robert:

Same as any of our creations--it amuses Him.

ID, if correct, demolishes the Christian god.

Because if there was a designer, and he was the god Orrin worships, then logically there's no reason to stop there. Presumably a bigger god was fooling around with Jehovah for his own amusement. And so on back. The same argument that works for Jehovah remains as valid for any and all of a heirarchy of gods.

ID, if it is ever proven -- it won't be as it is self-contradictory logically, but we can speculate -- would rescue religion from its existential crisis, but the religion it would rescue would be Hinduism.

Harry:

Of course God has a Creator too.

That's 5 doctrines that would get you disfellowshipped at the Marsh Swamp Primitive Baptist Church.

What has been demonstrated is that all the counter-theories so far are all beyond laughable, and many intentionally commit the sin of false witness.

Harry is right--should ID be proven, every monotheistic faith collapses like a castle built on shifting sand.

It won't bother me in the least.

One other thing you should note--unlike Creationist/IDers, materialists have absolutely no vested interest in being correct.

Jeff:

Yes, the counter theories are no better than Darwinism. All are silly.

Harry:

Were one a fellow.

OJ writes: "We have no idea why evolution occurs or how. Some kind of intervention from without--whether by a Designer or by gamma rays or whatever or some combination--seems most likely."

"Gamma rays"?

"some combination"? What, God shoots a few gamma rays from heaven whenever he feels like creating a few new species of fungi, or beetle, or monkey?

Ha ha! You're kidding us, right? That's as wacko as anything I've ever read on the subject.

The darwinist explanation of how new species are made is so intuitive: if different groups of a population get split up from each other, they plough their own evolutionary furrows. Give it a bit of time and you've got different species. No need for gamma rays, my friend.

Anonymous:

Then why don't they ever speciate? I know that upon discovering this awkward fact biologists changed the meaniong of speciation to inability to produce offspring together, but that's not serious.

Harry: that is a great post.

You've nailed him.

If it is, the theory of evolution will be superseded in the same way any other scientific theory has been, at the advent of a better theory.

How many scientific theories have been superseded by the theory of "God did it with magic"?

It's not a facetious question, I'd like you to name an example. Give me one example of a bunch of emminent scientists holding a press conference and telling the world that according to their most recent tests, an observable physical process or condition is caused by God's supernatural power.

Good luck with that daddio. Evolution is a fact and is here to stay.

"Then why don't they ever speciate?"

Huh? Don't understand the question. Um. There's been lots of speciation. Hence all the species.

Do you mean why don't dogs suddenly turn into chickens while we're watching? Gee, I don't know, you tell me. Maybe God has run out of gamma rays.

nonny:

Agreed.

You're priceless.

nonny:

Agreed.

Orrin might get the ol' heave-ho at the Marsh Swamp Primitive Baptist Church, but he'd be a mainstream Latter-day Saint, religious ideas and politics included.

Well, except for his liberal views about black people