re: #759 Obdicut

I understand what you’re saying (but I don’t agree). I get that you were being a bit cheeky in the original post and it just stood out as a stupid statement. I was going to type up a long rebuttal, but this being a dead thread & a pretty religious forum, suffice it to say that atheism has a long history and plenty of sound proponents (or rather, rebuttals of theism & the supernatural) predating Darwin for thousands of years.

^ I actually wrote that. Then it turned out I wrote a long piece anyway.

I was being slightly cheeky in saying that, because obviously people like Hooke, who were geniuses and natural scientists, had the opportunity for honest atheism.

Honest atheism? Really? You don’t need to be a genius to be an “honest” atheist at all. You just need to not believe in a deity. It’s simple! Anyone from 0-100 can play. ;)

But the position of “Designed things must have been designed by a mind, and the universe functions as a large design” was actually a perfectly reasonable position.

I don’t think that the core ID argument was ever a reasonable one. Pointing to the complex or unexplained to exclaim that it’s so mindboggling we have to posit a deist creator to make sense of it doesn’t help explain anything. There are still complex & unexplained things today - if “god did it” was ever an answer to a question, it would remain as valid today, until we’d patched yet another hole for the god of the gaps to peer through.

We had no conception of anything that could promote complex design in a way that would explain the variety of the animal world, and very few people had access to the information that would allow them to understand even the simple complexity of an ice crystal.

The history of evolution and the idea of a naturalistic explanation for the complexity of life stretches much farther back than you seem to acknowledge.
Here’s a Wiki article.

If you haven’t read Darwin’s Dangerous Idea, do so and it’ll give you a better sense of what I’m awkwardly trying to express.

I haven’t read this, and I normally like Dennett, but if it argues what you do here, I probably won’t like it. :/
_{..which won’t stop me from reading it, of course.}

I will agree with part of what I think is your point though - it has become increasingly easier to point out the hollow explanation of ID the more we learn about the universe and (most importantly) the more this knowledge spreads through society.

_{I’ll stop now. ;_;}