Hi chocloateonly, welcome to the site.
I don't think this article was meant to reflect a submission to a scientific journal, it was an information piece written in a magazine, and therefore the substantiation is equally as bad as you would see in a newspaper, for example.
Nearly 100% of all archealogical finds support biblical accounts? If we say that archeology supports that certain peoples existed or that certain places existence, this may be true. But if it is referring to intelligent design, for example, this would appear to be false.
I think you may have turned around the words here. All the writer is saying is that historical Biblical accounts are confirmed by archaeological discoveries. I don't think the wroter meant to imply ID in any sense.
I dislike the idea of interlligent design, becuase it appears to start with a hypothesis (God created the world/us/eveything) and then tries to find evidence to support it. Evolution (regardless of whether you agree) is an attempt to take facts and events and make sense of them by establishing a theory that will support them.
I'm glad you say "appears to", since you seem to have a misunderstanding of ID theory. ID as a science is the search for evidence of design, and has no hypothesis relating to God or any other designer as a starting point, i.e. before looking at any evidence. If you believe that to be true of ID, then I could argue that neo-Darwinian scientists do the same, they seek to prove that life is caused by natural unguided processes, and look for, and custom-fit, evidence to support that theory.
(
http://teacher.nsrl.rochester.edu/phy_l ... ndixE.html) describes the scientific method. ID follows this method too.
ID starts with the observation of complex specified information (CSI). These are found in man-made instances, known to be caused by an intelligent agent or agents. Some things in nature display the same high levels of CSI. The hypothesis is that if we observe high CSI in man-made objects, then high levels of CSI in nature would indicate a likelyhood of design, and causality through an intelligent agent too. Through examniation and experimentation, biological structures can be tested for high CSI. I can elaborate on this quite a bit if needed, but suffice to say that we can reverse engineer and remove parts from biological structures to see if function is maintained.
Seeing as there is a constant debate, this seems fairly disingenous. It doesn't seem to me that the original ideas were dreamed up to run the church out. I find this an odd interpretation that is really just being inflamatory.
I agree with you here. It constantly seems as if one or both of the parties to the debate wish to create animosity between religion and science, and it simply does not relate in that way. For me as a Christian, science is the way that we describe God's creation, and there should be no battle lines drawn between the two.
All that evolutionery theory tries to do is explain why and how certain developments did or did not occur.
In the strictest sense, you are correct. However, just as certain parts of the church has been whipped into an anti-science frenzy, many scientists have taken atheist positions. Those positions are based on the mechanisms of neo-Darwinism, like natural selection, gene drift, gene selection etc, which they claim accounts for all traits, functions and species, and therefore no creator is needed.
If it were so persuassive, I think scientists, regardless of their beliefs would adopt it. That's what scientists do. They question everything.
For a list of scientists who have alternative thinking, see:
http://www.discovery.org/scripts/viewDB ... oad&id=443
From my point of view, the evidence has been lacking and is not something we should teach in the science classroom. Rather, it appears to me that many simply want to somehow discredit evolution, whatever that may take, as it runs counter to what they believe.
That seems to be the common response to the ID-Evo debate. I would encourage you to study the evidence for ID, and not to assume that ID is merely religion without any scientific basis. The evidence for evolution is not nearly as overwhelming as you may think, and I think it merits your time to investigate both sides of the argument without assuming that ID is religion in disguise.
In general, I don't think this article provides the best starting point for a discussion as it simply inflames both sides. A discussion of the issues may be interesting, but then they need to be extracted and discussed without the packaging.
You are right that it's always better to discuss the issues.