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The reason I started looking at ID vs. evolution critically was because it fits a pattern of behavior that interests me. The common belief in extraterrestrial life fits this pattern, too. We find many different ways to think of ourselves and our actions as meaningless or immaterial. Doing so takes a lot of moral pressure off our every day decisions.
Were we to believe instead that we and our actions were important, that all of the universe was created entirely for the benefit of the few of us lucky enough to exist here on this planet, that our lives were important in a universal sense, that every decision we made carried the weight of universal consequence... Well, that's not the common conception of our existence is it?
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It should be a given that a little knowledge is a dangerous thing, but for fuck's sake, man, no one had more of a hard on for responsibility than motherfucking Sartre, and the two most influential materialists during the 20th century, Marx and Freud, were both arch-moralists.
Now I get it. When you refer to "ID vs. evolution" yaren't talking about the positivist endeavors of a scientific community (and its critics) so much as the masturbatory rants of self-appointed "advocates" commonly streamed over AOL chat rooms. Putting aside whatever, uh, personal reasons you have for attacking this most pressing issue, I have to say that you aren't giving the psyche nearly enough credit. I've known good and bad people, and can't say that the nitty gritty of their personal cosmologies had anything to do with the essential quality of character. The human mind is incredibly facile at inventing justifications for theft and deceit. I'll give you this: usually, the louder someone talks about their precious beliefs, the more ways they manage to fail at achieving any semblance of compassion or honor, thus rendering their professed ideals
even more hollow.
Question: of the two groups I mentioned, scientists and masturbators, only one is concerned with absolute truths. Can you guess which?
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