I also emerged from many years of indoctrinated unthinking nihilism. It would probably have been earlier if I had had a friend to guide me. There is an interesting parallel with my discovery that Vitamin C and other natural substances have a profound beneficial effect on health. For years I believed, to the great detriment of my health, in the orthodox medical establishment’s claim that this is all hokum. After all, big establishment medical science can’t be wrong, right?

All this is coupled with the minds of the perverted people in power and who desire to influence the order of society in various ways for vcarious reason (mostly political and economic) results in a bizarre and corrupt enterprise.

Thus, I very rarely watch the news and I almost never miss anyhting useful or important.

This is why I am so passionate about ID. The conclusion of design or no design, when it comes to the universe and our existence, is not just an academic philosophical exercise, it impacts on a day-to-day basis how we lead our lives.

The same did hold for me; so I would argue that, for many people, ID evidence acted as the key that opened a very tigth intellectual cage.

The problem is that this debate is so far removed from the everyday life of the average person that they don’t realize its importance. The Darwinist/atheist camp has mass media, Hollywood, public education, the courts and politicians on their side. That’s a lot of firepower. What does the ID camp have other than a spirit of rebellion?

I strongly agree with Borne (#20): ID has the truth of evidence for any person who’s not biased and with a bit of common sense.
Don’t be worried about the strength of the other side and tthe virulence of ID rejection. There are just the symptoms of how ID ideas are potentially strong.

This is the big challenge, getting people to even consider the evidence. As many UD readers are aware, I was once a thoroughly convinced and devout atheist/materialist/Darwinist. I knew in advance that any challenge to this worldview had to be the product of scientific ignorance, wishful thinking, or fear of the fact that life is ultimately unplanned, purposeless and meaningless, as demonstrated by the “scientific fact” of Darwinian theory.

However, at the behest of a friend whom I respected, I read Michael Denton’s Evolution: A Theory in Crisis. I realized at that point that I had been misled and isolated from rational and evidential challenges to my worldview — challenges presented by the very rational and evidential processes that I thought supported my philosophical nihilism.

This is why I am so passionate about ID. The conclusion of design or no design, when it comes to the universe and our existence, is not just an academic philosophical exercise, it impacts on a day-to-day basis how we lead our lives.

If, through my influence and the evidence of design, even one person should be liberated from the burden and curse of the nihilism under which I labored for so many years, I will consider my life to have been well-lived.

I know many are desirous to stick a big pin into that gaseous, obnoxious zeppelin of human-descent-from-apelike-ancestor

Actually, many of us IDers accept common descent — IE, that humans descended from apelike ancestors. We just don’t believe that the evidence suggests that we made the descent without some intelligent input. Some of us even suggest that the intelligent input was applied far earlier than the appearance of the first apelike ancestor. We really aren’t a bunch of guys hoping to win a little ID battle as a stepping stone on the path to the grand Young Earth victory. ID lets the evidence present its own truth, in general it is not motivated to ultimately prove the accuracy of any historical or holy text.

How could this happen in an environment where there is no conceptualization aforehand?–DaveScot

Haven’t you heard? Time plus chance can do pretty much anything.

Most people don’t give a whit about evolution/ID, whichever one is true or not they don’t care because it is irrelevant to most everyone. Like Marxism, human-descent-from-apelike-ancestor is mainly embraced by those within the realm of academia. It sure makes for good book sales arguing about it!

We have to ask ourselves some questions here: why the push for gay marriages? why the clamoring for abortion-as-birth-control? why the push to expunge God from public view? why the push to teach as fact “human-descent-from-apelike-ancestor”?

Why?

It is a result of unbelief. Even should the president and courts declare ID must be taught in schools and human-descent-from-apelike-ancestor cannot be taught at all, this will avail nothing if the population at large have been given over to a reprobate mind, a population who call evil good and good evil.

The solution to unlocking the ironbox of unbelief in the mind of the population is via preaching Christ crucified. Not court cases, not school wars, not screaming blogs, not endless debates of who’s right or wrong. When people accept Christ (truly accept Christ, not give lipservice or play Church & Appearance of Goodness game) then and only then will the Holy Spirit lift the spiritual blindness and allow one to see the truth which is so plain to see to those who love God.

Sadly, the bible itself says that to many the Gospel is foolishnes and many will not believe. There is even a parable where Jesus says, “if they won’t believe the law and the prophets, they won’t believe even if one came back from the dead.”

That is the kind of unbelief we are looking at here, and trying to beat the children of this world at this game will prove difficult if not impossible, “for the children of this world are in their generation wiser than the children of light.”

Even if Darwin came back from the dead and told everyone God is “for real” he wouldn’t be believed, would be rationalized away because the iron lockbox of unbelief remains, a box only the Holy Spirit can open.

Read “puerile.”

To say nothing of irrelevant.

Awe, come on. I think it’s very relevant, not to mention funny. bFast was simply expressing his disgust at the obvious “bogosity” of Sean Carroll’s point of view. I feel the same way about Dawkins and PZ Myers, by the way. Those guys take themselves way too seriously and their insufferable pomposity is now legendary. It’s time for those Darwin fanboys to ingest huge amounts of castor oil or something of that nature.