User:IDinsurgent
From ResearchID.org, a nexus for researching Intelligent Design
My bio (condensed)
I'll add more later as I get the time, but to put it in a quick nutshell, I've been preoccupied with the debate over origins for several years now and have been an ID'er for the past two years. It's an honor to be on this site to add to the cause. I plan on majoring in a couple fields relevant to ID, but I cannot discuss those here.
Let's see if I can throw five-plus years of my life (with respect to the origins debate) onto this page as I get the time to...
So why do I even care? For the most part I have spent most of my time entertaining various viewpoints found in your typical political arena, but this tops them all. The question of who we are and where we came from isn't even a political question in my view, it's the question that defines all other ones that follow.
Once you determine whether mind preceeded matter or vice versa, you've pretty much had an impact on all things that pertain to society in general. For this reason, I can't possibly see why someone would want to avoid this topic. Needless to say, because of what's at stake, one shouldn't be surprised if people get very emotional over this (I certainly have).
I was into the origins debate for quite a while before I even heard of ID, or even became an advocate for it. A relative began giving me a few DVD's on the topic, and the one thing that impressed me the most was the fact that the debate actually had very little to do with religion. Perhaps it was the constant bombardment of PBS specials my parents would watch after the edutainment that is sesame street was over each day. I just had an immediate impression growing up that anyone who had an issue with ape-like origins had a religious motive behind it. But I for the most part didn't care much for the debate until I got a look at one of Coldwater media's greatest productions. From there, I didn't reject evolutionary theory altogether (and frankly, I didn't want to; it was interesting enough to show that there was still room left for research in the field), but I did feel there was more to the picture that people ought to know about. When I started searching the subject on the net and found a list of top criticisms of evolutionary thinking, it placed emphasis on cosmology, biblical accounts, etc.
In other words it assumed that the only type of person who would reject evolutionary thinking would be someone who thought everything came about in less than a week roughly 10,000 years ago. I felt that this was a gross distortion of the debate as I understood it from Icons of evolution, so it was natural for me to feel that religion was just a distraction issue in the debate. But doing independent research on the claims and people behind "Icons of Evolution" was just the beginning.
One of the main questions I had in mind after seeing Icons of Evolution over a dozen times was pretty straight forward: If these people reject evolutionary theory, then just what the hell do they want to put in it's place?
This was the seed of curiosity which after planted, eventually led to me to discovering ID. By total accident of course, no way in hell could you scientifically say it was my destiny to get involved in this right? I link to think otherwise, but that's just me...
So the constant online searches eventually led me to (you knew this was coming) wikipedia and the bastion of revisionism that it had force upon both the theory and people behind ID. I didn't really know it at the time (how far from the truth the entries were), but nonetheless I absorbed a lot of what wikipedia held as gospel. I kept getting this sense though, that perhaps it wasn't the full picture that they were passing on to wikipedia's visitors. Whether it was allegations that a think-tank had a grand theocratic agenda (which strangely included promoting representative democracy, free enterprise, etc), or the notion that the fellows at the Discovery Institute happened to have had no real credibility on the issue. What struck me this whole time was the fact that most of the arguments presented against ID on wikipedia had very little to do with the evidence. Instead of "Argument X for ID is false because of Y," it would instead be more ad hominem or rhetorical, instead of actually demonstrating that whatever feature in question evolved, or whatnot.
Needless to say, I decided almost immediately that it wasn't enough to look only at wikipedia to get an accurate look at the subject. So I did what common sense told me to, and actually took the time to look at the Discovery Institute's website. (to be continued)
What are my intentions for being here?
For ID to succeed in the long run, it isn't enough to just convince the majority of the public that Intelligent Design is a plausible scientific theory. It's also necessary that we implement a full line of research around it and continue to utilize it as such. This definitely seems to be where ResearchID comes in. The role that this site will play in advancing ID into the mainstream is probably far greater than even most of ID's proponents realize, and for this reason I am honored to be a part of it. Any research topics or questions that come to mind for me, I intend to post here. For one thing, I would expect this site to eventually become a haven for those who are supportive of ID but are not yet in research positions that would allow them to answer various questions or perform any potential experiments that they may have in mind.
Once I am up to par with how to manage and edit this wiki, I plan on starting one of my own on a separate subject. In the meantime, this will be something I'll use to smooth out the learning curve I have on formatting wikis. When it comes to debating ID, I must say that I've seen them all. By this I mean that I've seen every argument from accusations of theocratic agendas, early pandas drafts, the TTSS refutes irreducibility, ID is not science, puffer fish show how the blood clotting cascade formed, the RNA world shows without intelligent intervention how life started, Behe "calculated" malarial resistance likelihoods in Edge of Evolution, ID is not testable, and by the way... it's been blown out of the water, or "Judge Jones said... (fill in statement taken from ACLU briefing)," the scientists featured in Expelled are all just pathological liars, the explanatory filter detects design in things we know are not designed, or it somehow ignores the possibility of chance and law working in conjunction (don't bother asking critics for examples, they can usually be divided into chance and necessity anyway), ID is not science because it has no peer-review papers to support it (not to mention the fact that such papers keep getting rejected because ID isn't science because, well... it has no peer-review) the UPB is futile because if I shuffle a deck of cards, or throw a scoop of sand, or flip a coin a thousand times...
I've heard them all. I've been involved with this for years now, and the reason I've gotten involved with this site is because I have now reached a point where debating critics probably isn't going to benefit me in any way whatsoever. Just how do I know this? For the same reasons we can safely say we have a pretty complete fossil record of the Cambrian period. Anyone who has watched Darwin's Dilemma enough knows that the same basic fossil types keep showing up regardless of whether they come from China or the Burgess Shale, even after decades of digging. For this reason, we can conclude that it probably isn't very likely that anything new or unusual will show up making the Cambrian more explosive than it already is.
It's the same with debating critics. The same basic arguments keep showing up regardless of what sub-topic of ID I argue about. It's gotten to the point where everything I see tends to come verbatim from talk origins (don't BS me here, surely you've seen it yourself), or some post on Science[SIC]Blogs. I now feel I need to get involved more with building up a research project out of ID. Doing so will determine whether it becomes mainstream or remains a fringe view that only the oldest of librarians has some familiarity with.
