Faith and stuff

There is a movement in this country called Intelligent Design. It is a political movement who's goal is to allow, and in come cases mandate the teaching of the Judeo-Christian Creation myth in science classrooms. This is NOT a scientific movement. The basic premise behind ID is that there are certain structures and systems in nature that are too complicated to have formed from evolutionary processes as we currently understand them, therefore these things had to be formed by a "creator". The ID people are very careful to not say God because that would give them away, but with a wink and a nod everyone knows they're talking about. So the root of ID is:

"if we don't understand it God did it"

The obvious problem here is that to totally shuts down science. If we haven't figured something out by now then God did it and we might as well give up. I won't go into how nonsensical this is, there are plenty of people out there doing a fine job of that and they don't need my help.

What I would instead like to look at is the polar opposite view. There are a lot of scientists out there who are also atheists. Furthermore, they feel that anyone who is not an atheist cannot be an effective scientist. (Time for disclosure I'm a perfectly normal mainstream scientist who is NOT an atheist, and there are quite a few of us out there.) The view of the atheists seems to be that since there is no scientific evidence for God then God doesn't exist. So let's generalize that:

"If there is no scientific evidence for something then it doesn't exist."

Now, if you put it like that it also shuts down science. Since what they're essentially saying is that anything we don't have evidence for right now doesn't exist. So why exactly then do we continue to do science? The "bar" for scientific evidence is pretty darn high. Scientific evidence needs to have a host of qualities that ensure that it is valid and any conclusions we draw from that evidence have a pretty good shot a being close to reality. So it stands to reason that there are a lot of things out there that we don't have scientific evidence for that, nevertheless, exist. Think of all the things 100 years ago that we didn't have scientific evidence for that we simply take for granted today just because of advances in technology.

So in the end, I don't think that either model works particularly well and I'll just stick to my middle road.

... and if you're wondering what exactly that middle road is... join the club so am I.