A Third Path: Intelligent Design
For a long time, the battles concerning whether there is a God or not, and if so, what role he/she might have had in the creation of the universe, has been presented in the media as a battle between Darwinists, who believe that everything evolved over a long span of time in a process referred to as survival of the fittest, and Creationists, who believe that God created everything one sunny October morning some 4,000-odd years ago. Fossils and the like are explained away by Creationists in various ways that make sense to them.
My own beliefs settled somewhere in between: I believe the world is much, much older thatn 4,000 years, and I believe that all living beings evolve over time, and I also believe that there is a set of beings I refer to as our Creators who have had some kind of hand in our creation, though I admit I haven't really thought it entirely through. (There is much precedent for there being more than one Creator from the human perspective. Perhaps more on that later, if I remember to make a post on how the word used to refer to God in the Bible is a plural almost every time it is used, and how even conservative Biblical scholars pretty much have decided that yes, the ancient Jews worshipped more than one God, including a Goddess.)
Today, I read an article forwarded to me by one of my brothers, and it goes further into that unexplored territory than I have gone before. It concerns a third way of thinking about the universe as approached by people who say that there must be an intelligence that has designed life--hence, their beliefs are called Intelligent Design.
This article can be found here: http://www.spectator.org/dsp_article.asp?art_id=8543. It is long and perhaps a bit much for the casual reader, but if you can, I encourage you to stick with it all the way through. The concept of Intelligent Design certainly has caused me to take another look at my beliefs, in a good and positive way, and also addresses something that I believe is a subtle, pervasice cause of much that is wrong with our culture (world-wide) today: The lack of belief in there being any kind of meaning or spiritual component to life, the lack of belief in any kind of soul, the lack of belief in there being anything anyone can do that matters in any way.
Since I have already asked you to go read a rather lengthy article, I will continue on this subject in another post.