Posted on 03/17/2013 12:11:01 PM PDT by eagleye85
Intelligent design is just another form of creationism, creationism is profoundly unscientific, and such unscientific views do not belong in public classrooms. This, in a nutshell, is the argument of activist Zack Kopplin, a student at Rice University who began his battle against a Louisiana academic freedom law (the Louisiana Science Education Act) while in high school. He is the 2012 winner of the “Troublemaker of the Year Award.”
“Well, this law allows supplemental materials into our school biology classrooms to ‘critique controversial theories like evolution and climate change,’” said Kopplin in a March interview on the Bill Moyers show. “Now, evolution and climate change aren’t scientifically controversial, but they are controversial to Louisiana legislators, and, basically, everyone who looked at this law knew it was just a back door to sneak creationism into public school science classes,” he continues (emphasis added).
As discussed in a previous blog entry, the media likes to condemn as right-wing and fundamentalist the crowd that prefers creationism to evolution. Through the course of an article by the UK’s The Guardian we learn that such laws as those proposed in Colorado, Missouri, Montana, and Oklahoma are the product of a religious lobby, further the creationist agenda, and would be a feather in the caps of these two interest groups if these laws were to pass. Readers also learn that these states could be boycotted for their creationist educational laws. Kopplin, of course, is cited in the article for his opposition to the Louisiana law mentioned above. “It can be embarrassing to be from a state which has become a laughing stock in this area,” asserted Kopplin to the UK Guardian this January.
This month the media celebrates Kopplin’s “anti-creationism” activism with a full interview on the Bill Moyers show and an interview for the Washington Post. “Today’s fundamentalists, with political support from the Right-wing, are more aggressive than ever in crusading to challenge evolution with the dogma of creationism,” asserted Moyers in his introduction. “But they didn’t reckon on Zack Kopplin.”
“Going to college is tough enough without leading a campaign to stop creationism from being taught in school as an alternative to evolution, but that’s what Zach Kopplin, 19, has been doing for several years,” praises Valerie Strauss in her March 17 article.
“Evolution is, of course, the central principle around which all of the biological sciences revolve, and creationism is not a scientific alternative,” writes Strauss. “But religious fundamentalists continue to push for creationism to be taught in schools,” she continues (emphasis added.)
In the interview with Moyers, Kopplin rejects several forms of creationism, saying that “Intelligent design specifically rejects evolution, especially on a large scale.”
“Creationists like to break it up into micro/macro evolution. That’s not a legitimate thing,” he asserts. As for creationism, “Essentially, it’s a denial of evolution mainly based off a literal interpretation of Genesis.” Kopplin’s latest vendetta? Voucher programs. ““And so it’s become pretty clear: if you create a voucher program, you’re just going to be funding creationism through the back door,” he said to Moyers. You can real the CATO Institute’s Neal McCluskey’s response to Kopplin here.
“No, potentially serious, negative, unintended consequences could accompany freezing people out of religiously based education,” writes McCluskey. “For instance, traditional Christian morality calls for married, two-parent families, and one of the few things in social science that one would call pretty firmly established is that coming from such a family gives a child a significant leg up. Religious people also tend to have much greater stocks of social capital than the nonreligious, also generally a plus.”
“In light of those things, would it be worth undermining religion because you think creationism is nonsense?”
The Theory of Evolution is the model that most adequately explains the (unfiltered) data. Creationism is a pseudoscience designed to compel the scientifically illiterate by making religiously based arguments regarding biological processes.
Many academic institutions have shut down any such research and it is virtually impossible to get any grant money to explore the subject. Ben Stein covered the subject extensively in the movie "Expelled."
Except the actual evidence doesn't support it. Which is why evolutionary guru Stephen Gould of Harvard had to come up with his "syncopated equilibrium" theory - another elegant construct without a shred of evidence to support it.
C14 is worthless for items older than about 60,000 years. Do you think dinosaurs were around back then?
I didn't think there were any "dinosaur bones" to test. There are fossils of bones, but there's no bone there any more.
If they were fired for doing the test then the test got done. But any such test is an exercise in trying to prove a negative which is a logically flawed enterprise from the outset.
Oh, and for the record, Darwinism has yet to be proven either. The evidence simply does not exist.
No, they were fired for proposing to do the research. And no, it's not unreasonable to investigate a negative. Like all science, we investigate probabilities in order to ascertain predictability. .
Sure, I'll get back to you as soon as you show me someone who has observed this happen and measured and recorded it. Science is based on observation and measurement. Not internally consistent speculation.
Evolutionists believe that we evolved from something akin to paramecia. And they call folks who believe in ID “unscientific”? LOL Good thing I finished my Big Gulp before I read this. Bob
So it's not that anyone is preventing you from testing the hypothesis, it's that nobody is willing to fund your work. Maybe that alone says something?
Yeah, It says a whole lot. I think that's the entire point.
Any idea what the probability is of successfully modeling the universe to account for all the possible variables in order to be able to say you have actually calculated the probabilities of a particular event happening?
Well, sure. What data would not fit the creation framework? No matter what you observed, you could always say "God made it that way."
But what's the predictive ability of the creation framework? The evolution framework gives scientists a basis for making predictions--the classic example is why we need new flu shots every year and how they decide what to put in the ones we get. What prediction can you make based on "God made it that way"?
As for the "pseudoscience" charge, that's just name-calling by people with weak arguements who want to silence dissent. It's what liberals do.
If you would like to honestly address the dissent, here are 15 Questions for Evolutionists to get you started.
We've been working on it since the day man first recognized cause and effect and we'll continue to do so until there is nobody left.
Proposing to calculate the probability of intelligent design implies that we're done, and ready to apply that model to a given problem.
No, it’s merely investigating a hypothesis. A piece at a time. The same as all investigation.
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