Tim Peake or no Tim Peake, Intelligent Design is a kind of warmed-up Deism.
It was devised by scientists and lawyers who were too arrogant to ask the sort of clergy who were appointed to parishes or congregations containing lots of scientists and lawyers.
And I am being quite kind to it there, compared to St John Paul II on the subject.
It actually makes no positive claims but is a sceptical current mainly aimed at demonstrating some of the shortcomings in conventional evolutionary theory. And it rightly agrees with Richard Dawkins that natural selection, properly understood, is incompatible with design.
ReplyDeleteOf course it is a deistic argument, as it’s proponents have always said-you cannot demonstrate the existence of any particular kind of God from a mere First Cause or Intelligent Design.
As William Lane Craig says, it forms a cumulative argument for the Christian God when combined with the evidence for a first cause of the Universe, the fine-tuning of the Universe, existence of objective moral values and duties, historical evidence for the resurrection of Jesus.