Answer correctly, win a free beer from me!

Nobody that matters wrote:

Grady wrote: In truth aliens from outer space visited earth and bred with the apes. :VeryScared:

Sailors always take advantage of the local girls.

rofllol

PITG - I'll buy you a lovely glass of red wine instead!

towermonkey wrote: We're all mutants!!! Do I win a beer?

Some of us more so than others...

Grady wrote: In truth aliens from outer space visited earth and bred with the apes. :VeryScared:

Going Scientologist on us Grady?

bailey bud wrote: I believe that evolution has limitations - in terms of its scientific utility, and its ability to explain very big and fundamental questions.

To those ends, I think ID is a fairly interesting area of study. It works down to the fundamentals of knowledge (how do you really know something???) It's not really high-school level thought.

That said - while ID is an interesting and engaging discussion of science and knowledge - it's not science.
(Richard Dawkins' claim of godlessness isn't science, either)

I am totally on board with your idea of putting ID in philosophy classes (definitely more suited to college level than high school).

Does evolution really have limitations, or are we merely lacking the in-depth knowledge, and processing power to fully grasp the meaning of it all yet? We haven't even conclusively worked out, scientifically, how the universe actually formed so we can't even address questions like "How did it all start?", much less "How did it transform into what we see today?", "What will it be like in the future?" or "What does it all mean?" Early civilizations were much more superstitious, and likely to believe in higher powers, than many of our societies are today. Knowledge has a way of reducing the inconceivable; how do we not know that one day we will come to understand all the physics of what has occurred and not need a higher power to explain anything? Or will there always be the "unexplainable"?

If I may ask TM, why? I find enough beauty and wonder in the explainable alone to fill my heart and soul, so it puzzles me that others have a need for the unexplainable. Any enlightenment you'd like to shed, or anyone for that matter, would be appreciated!

Nobody that matters wrote: As much as science learns, there will still be a boundary. Those that figured there were four elements thought they had it covered, everything was explained. Even as science advances, it tends to uncover more questions than it answers.

Besides...

"The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science."

I don't think I can agree on the "mysterious" being the most beautiful thing we can experience. The most beautiful things I've experienced are far from mysterious: realizing that the man I had been dating for only a month would be, with absolute clarity and certainty, my future husband because I put my hand on my stomach while talking to him on the phone, 2,000 miles between us, and felt our children - having emphatically decided up to this point in my life, that I did not want children. Or the first time I felt my son kick me in utero, and feeling him enter the world as I gave one final push. These are far from mysterious events - they are the effects of powerful hormones on a physiology that has evolved to respond immediately and deeply to feel connected with another life, and protect and nurture it so as to continue the species. (Yes, my husband complains often about my lack of romantic nature - he's much more mushy and emotional than I, but it doesn't mean that I don't deeply appreciate what I have).

Frankly, the mysterious annoys me - I want to know everything!

As much as science learns, there may always be a boundary; but, if we're still around a million years from now we might not even care. We will be a different species by then, and care about much different things than we do now. I read an article recently about some other country that was opening an underground nuclear waste storage facility. The scientists in charge were locked in a great debate concerning how to label the entrance to the place - 10,000 years from now, when the radioactivity will still be deadly for 25 times that length of time, in what method can they label the entrance so as to accurately communicate the dangers of disturbing the contents because no language that's spoken on earth today will be around then so you can't put STOP in 200 languages and hope it's good enough. Reading that article hit home for me the notion that we tend to apply today's priorities, and limits of knowledge, to future generations, and not realize how radically different life will be from what we know.

towermonkey wrote: It would take away a frontier, a drive to learn that which is unlearnable. (Google Chrome tells me that isn't a word.)

Good point. At this stage in our development, the drive to learn is powerful indeed and to lose it would likely spell the end of our existence for what drive would we have to better our lives, and do more than just survive from day to day. But again, who's to say that that drive wouldn't lessen as we slowly mutate into a different species over the course of several millennia, (as our brains change, so too do our thought patterns) and not knowing the unknowable is completely acceptable and never given a second thought?