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Comment by npsimons | Hacker News Reader

This is very true, and I can't believe some religions that people think are the same.

As an atheist, superstitions have no relevance to me. That is to say, as an outsider, I don't care what it's called - and that goes for all religions/superstitions. Because they all are based on belief without evidence, they all look the same to me (ie, irrational).

That being said, I'd appreciate if people didn't use weasel words to try and hide their agenda, eg, "intelligent design" as really just another form of creationism.

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Believe me, I have no skin in the game, but that's not exactly true. Creationism, as it is most often used, is the belief that the Earth was created 6,000 years ago according to Genesis. Intelligent Design most often refers to God being the one who guided/created evolution, gravity, etc. which had the purpose of leading to humanity.

As far as Intelligent Design, Yudkowsky has another useful post [1]. It's part of his sequence "The simple math of evolution", and provides some interesting perspective on the subject.

[1] http://lesswrong.com/lw/kr/an_alien_god/

I think you should look more into the origins of this "Intelligent Design" movement or whatever you want to call it. But please don't read anything on the website of the OP.

Most atheist I know acknowledge the existence of religions. Based on your comment, I assume that you do not find the topic of religion interesting. However, religion is still a very rich subject with a lot of potential for research. However, in order to do good research, you will likely need a way of classifying and differentiating different religions in the same way we classify different species.

B-Con's comment raises a very interesting question for research. Namely, how is it that so many people think such vastly different belief systems are the same?

Of course, I suppose one's views on religion would be different if one grew up or lives with it being a significant part of one's life. As someone who has grown up with relatively little religion, I am in a position to look at it and be interested in religion as a phenomena.

To use your example, is 'intelligent design' really just another word for 'creationism'. Or, our these two different ideas being supported by different groups of people. If you say that all religion and irrational beliefs are the same, then the answer is a pretty clear yes, they are the same. However, you may find that 'creationism' represents the belief in a Genesis like account of creation, while 'intelligent design' is the remains of the creationism battle, and is founded on the idea that evolution is a non-nonsensical concept and that and that existence is the result of a deliberate conscious action by an intelligent agent. Assuming these are characterizations are true (which they likely aren't), you can then look into how these ideas came about, and look at how influence intelligent design is from creationism. Is it actually being proposed by the same people? Have there beliefs actually changed? Is intelligent design being supported by the children of creationist, because the children can see that biblical creation does not work but still believe that an intelligence is necessary for creation?

On an unrelated note, writing this comment made me curious about the intelligent design/creationism divide. Does anyone here have an insight into what is going on there?

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