{"id":150,"date":"2008-09-14T13:25:00","date_gmt":"2008-09-14T13:25:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/localhost\/wordpress65\/?p=150"},"modified":"2013-02-14T17:35:01","modified_gmt":"2013-02-14T22:35:01","slug":"spore-advertisement-intelligent-design","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.grayrinehart.com\/blog\/spore-advertisement-intelligent-design\/","title":{"rendered":"Is SPORE an advertisement for Intelligent Design?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Disclaimer:<\/span> I’m not an on-line game player (not since playing on-line chess occasionally while I was stationed overseas), so I haven’t played “Spore.” Maybe I will, but I doubt it.<\/em><\/p>\n

The first things I heard about the game Spore focused on the evolution aspect of the game, and made it sound as if the game was a computer simulation of evolution and natural selection. I didn’t see how that kind of long-term, random mutation simulation could be any fun to play, but it turns out that’s not the focus of the game at all. It’s a game that lets the player act as God, guiding the actions and development of little creatures in the computer.<\/p>\n

So I wondered if the game might be a subtle advertisement for Intelligent Design as an alternative theory to evolution. I couldn’t imagine that was the case — not since the game has a tie-in to a National Geographic video. But the ID possibility remained: after all, the player is presumably intelligent. And the player’s intelligence apparently guides the actions of a virtual creature that normally would be acting without volition (i.e., by stimulus-response and “instinct,” however that developed.)<\/p>\n

I went to the Spore web site<\/a> to see if my suspicions were correct. On the “What is Spore?”<\/a> page, the opening text is, “How will you create the universe?” Then the page enjoins the player to “create and guide your creature through five stages of evolution.”<\/p>\n

But life on the virtual planet doesn’t spring out of the local primordial ooze, nor does it give the player the option to “create” life — instead, life arrives inside a meteorite in a computer version of panspermia. So maybe Spore isn’t the best advertisement for ID, since it doesn’t address the central idea of where that life really came from.<\/p>\n

I’ll leave the answer to that question up to God.<\/p>\n\"Facebook\"<\/a>\"twitter\"<\/a>\"pinterest\"<\/a>\"linkedin\"<\/a>\"mail\"<\/a>by <\/span>\"feather\"<\/a>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Disclaimer: I’m not an on-line game player (not since playing on-line chess occasionally while I was stationed overseas), so I haven’t played “Spore.” Maybe I will, but I doubt it. The first things I heard about the game Spore focused on the evolution aspect of the game, and made it \u2026 Continue reading → <\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7,2],"tags":[394],"class_list":["post-150","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-faith","category-musings","tag-games"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.grayrinehart.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/150","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.grayrinehart.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.grayrinehart.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.grayrinehart.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.grayrinehart.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=150"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.grayrinehart.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/150\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1097,"href":"https:\/\/www.grayrinehart.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/150\/revisions\/1097"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.grayrinehart.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=150"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.grayrinehart.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=150"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.grayrinehart.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=150"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}