I urge people interested in psychic phenomena to pay more attention to the intelligent design debate. I know. Psychic phenomena are often portrayed as something espoused by the ignorant. You see scientific evidence for the reality of psychic phenomena and don’t want to be associated with another unpopular concept. However, a loss of academic freedom for one group is a loss for us all. Besides, intelligent design and recognition of psychic phenomena are both concepts that contradict materialism. So far materialists have been successful in depicting intelligent design advocates as religious bigots, and perhaps you aren’t feeling particularly sympathetic toward the political positions of the religious right. True, many supporters of intelligent design are religious. Nevertheless, the concept of intelligence/volition as a force of nature permits, but does not demand, a belief in a personal god. Theism is not the only alternative to materialism.
One alternative is to merely recognize volition/freewill as reality rather than the illusion the materialists espouse. All living systems, not just humans, have some ability to respond to stimuli, intelligently and purposefully.
CELL INTELLIGENCE
Inanimate objects do not. All living systems have some of our own ability to override automatic function in times of emergency, and make novel, fallible, spontaneous, subjective choices. Living systems have ability to monitor their own level of function, recognize weaknesses, and to explore novel responses. Furthermore if function is not immediately restored, intelligently organized biological systems have the ability to explore other possibilities immediately, without being removed from action by “natural selection”. Such adaptations are inherited epigenetically, as they develop, and only become encoded in the genome if persistent over generations. Biological systems do not occur randomly and natural selection plays no role in their organization.
Questions about Materialism
Berthajane Vandegrift, author of A Tiger by the Tail