Never been one to let the carrier drop

I saw a post on facebook’s evolution vs. ID group the other day that asserted that intelligent design is creationism. I think that this is a hugely narrow view of the world. I am a proponent of intelligent design as a likely hypothesis (In fact, I think both evolution and ID are likely, because a intelligent designer will use evolutionary algorithms when they make sense) but I am not a creationist in the traditional sense. My personal hypothesis, discussed elsewhere in this blog, is that we do a fair amount of editing of our own DNA across the millennia. However, even if that is not the case, I can think of many ways that intelligent design might be true without there being a single word of truth in the bible.

One possible way is the endpoint-bound design process – i.e. we’re inside a quantum computer which has been asked to find a path between zero and a particular life form. Ancestor simulation, I think this is called. One can actually think of a lot of ways that you can have intelligent designers without talking about traditional creationism. There’s the oldie-but-a-goodie of us being the product of alien genetic engineers. There’s the classic of us being inside a time-based mobeus loop, and we’re genetically engineered by our future selves.

I really think science should be approaching this with a wide open mind – and increasingly I suspect they are. One of the things that I really like are scientists that don’t hypothesize until *after* they have the data – just go out and take some measurements and see what you can find out. It does not strike me as that likely, given that there are a number of competing religions, that we’re going to find a correct and honest origin story in a religion.

For that matter, I’ve talked about a number of times how your intelligent deity would almost certainly be working with us inside a virtualization container, which increases the unknowability factor by quite a bit. Of course, a intelligent deity would also know that *they* might be in a virtualization container, which means that no deity could honestly say, with any certainty, that they were omnipotent and omniscient. That’s a subject I’ve already harped on enough in this journal, I think.

Anyway, my point is, it’s a lot of a leap to assume that just because someone thinks intelligent design is a reasonable explanation for our existence, they’re a creationist. Especially that they’re attached to any mainstream religion.

I will now take off my tinfoil hat.

This entry was posted on Saturday, February 27th, 2016 at 4:15 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.