Intelligible Design

Sometimes I wonder if the future, in some strange metaphysical way, reaches down into our psyches and readies us to accept what is to come. Maybe we know things before we know them. By the time change is plain to see, we've unconsciously adapted to it and have learned to call it something else--God's will, human nature, life.

Let's say, for example, that the American Empire is just about over. Let's say China and India and other countries as well are set to surge ahead in science and technology, leaving reduced opportunities for upward mobility for the educated, while capital continues to roam the world in search of cheap labor, leaving a shattered working class. Let's say we really are becoming a society of fixed status: the have-nots, an anxious and defensive middle and what George W. Bush famously calls his base, the have-mores. What sort of shifts in culture and social structure would prepare us for this looming state of affairs? A resurgence of Christian fundamentalism would fill the bill nicely.

Intellectually, scientifically, even artistically, fundamentalism--biblical literalism--is a road to nowhere, because it insists on fidelity to revealed truths that are not true. But religious enthusiasm is not all bad. Like love or political activism, it can help troubled souls transform their lives. And if what we're looking at is an America with an ever-larger and boxed-in working class and tighter competition for high-paying jobs among the elite, fundamentalism is exactly the thing to manage decline: It schools the downwardly mobile in making the best of their lot while teaching them to be grateful for the food pantry and daycare over at the church. At the same time, taking advantage of existing currents of anti-intellectualism and school-tax resistance, it removes from the pool of potential scientists and other creative professionals vast numbers of students, who will have had their minds befuddled with creationism and its smooth-talking cousin, intelligent design. Already, according to a study by University of Minnesota biology professor Randy Moore, 40 percent of high school biology teachers don't teach evolution, either because it's socially unacceptable in their communities or because they themselves don't believe in it.

This article is so full of it I hate to agree with anything it says, but...

One statement appears true:

At the same time, taking advantage of existing currents of anti-intellectualism and school-tax resistance, it removes from the pool of potential scientists and other creative professionals vast numbers of students, who will have had their minds befuddled with creationism and its smooth-talking cousin, intelligent design.

Let the games begin!

At the same time, taking advantage of existing currents of anti-intellectualism and school-tax resistance, it removes from the pool of potential scientists and other creative professionals vast numbers of students, who will have had their minds befuddled with creationism and its smooth-talking cousin, intelligent design.

I'm no fan of Intelligent Design, but if anything is annihilating the pool of potential scientists and other creative professionals, it's the gosh darned forced mediocrity and catering to political correctness idiocy. That's far more hazardous to learning than the silliness that is ID.

There's only one way America will fail to be an economic, cultural, and military leader in this century, and that's if the isolationists or the globalists have their way.

The proper chart to the future is somewhere in between globalism and isolationism. It is no small wonder that the enemies of our country favor globalism for our foreign policy while enacting more conservative foreign policies for themselves. Globalism entails the surrender of our foreign policy to the international community while severely limiting our ability to affect the foreign policies of other nations. Isolationism is equally dangerous because it relies on the enforced maintenance of a status quo. To maintain an isolationist policy a nation must become increasingly authoritarian.

There are a lot of people who view illegal immigration as a great danger to this nation. That's really just a lot of fear mongering. Many of those same opponents of immigration reform dislike legal immigration and see the influx of immigrants as a threat to their culture.

I'll grant that illegal immigration is a serious problem, but it hardly threatens America. The terrorists aren't even a huge threat anymore because we're fighting them now, and no matter what terrorists or illegal immigrants can do to us - they cannot destroy the greatest republic this world has ever seen.

The true threat to our nation is liberalism. It is liberalism that pushes for the anti-assimilation policies for immigrants. I've met many immigrants from Africa, Mexico, Canada, Europe, South America, Asia, and the South Pacific. Assimilation is what they naturally want to achieve. It is the liberals among us who push for laws that would make immigrant assimilation more difficult. The liberals intend to splinter our nation and divide it along ethnic and cultural lines, rather than along political/philosophical differences.

Democrats and Liberals are working from a playbook that is aimed at driving a wedge between fellow Americans. Defeating liberalism is far more important than the questions of immigration. I for one am in favor of strengthening our borders and keeping out illegal immigrants, but I'm also in favor of immigration reforms. My island nation was absorbed into the United States a little over a hundred years ago. We willingly signed a treaty with the United States. Today, many of our people willingly volunteer and serve in the United States military with honor and distinction. A large number of the older generation and even my generation are welfare cases thanks to LBJ's Great Society. Our culture is bilingual, and ineffective educational policies that don't stress excellence in English have resulted in the continuance of the poverty/welfare cycle in yet another generation.

I'll have to end my rant here... Enough controversial stuff for one day to guarantee the flaming endures through the next couple of days. :-)

That's a good point. PC and the typical approaches of "educators" (as opposed to teachers) are lowering standards drastically.

But I feel very strongly about the scientific method, and that is the very spot the CS/ID folks are hitting. On a thread just today I couldn't get one of these folks to see something as simple as tree-ring dating--and that involves just simple counting! Its not even close to theory or hypothesis, just simple counting. That is what has me worried.

I am a scientist, and deal with other scientists daily. While some of Darwin's postulates are correct (like releasing white mice in a brown field will result in no brown mice: they will be naturally selected against: they will stand out and be eaten!), the idea of the human being just evolving from nothing is vapid. The evolving evidence from DNA (Genomics), proteins (Proteomics), and resulting metoblites that run and fuel the body (Metabolomics), is so complex that most of my associates believe in "Intelligent Design". A company that is a customer of mine has identified 25,000 diferent metabolites as of this date. This is a result of randomm action?I don't think so.

most of my associates believe in "Intelligent Design"

I'm curious, what is your academic discipline? Biology? I am also a scientist but I am a mathematician; most of my colleagues where I teach seem to operate under the assumption that ID is foolish, especially the biologists. (There's been a running conversation on our faculty listserv for weeks now on ID.)

My own personal take on ID is that I believe in a God who designed life to be able to evolve by itself. That is, I'm a theistic evolutionist. I think the most plausible case for ID can be made in the biochemical origins of life. But I don't think ID belongs in school; let serious scientists hash this issue out unless (or until) the biological community changes its overwhelming consensus on evolution.

Consider, there is a high probability that the majority of those you are at odds with (in these FR discussions) have been exposed to the type of science education you think is necessary & valuable to further our society. Despite years of students being taught the scientific method, many students somehow escaped learning it, including many who hold your position about evolution. Ask your tree-ring dating denier if (s)he had been exposed to the scientific method in school.

I don't care who is trashing the scientific method. I don't think it will stand this country in good stead in the long run.

We already get a huge portion of our Ph.D.s in the hard sciences from other countries.

But we seem to produce a lot of Ph.D.s in the 'fuzzy' sciences from our own population. This will come back to haunt us.

I don't care who is trashing the scientific method. I don't think it will stand this country in good stead in the long run.

I understand your position. Rigidity & strength are not the same thing.

Do you still use your slide rule? Point being, all of us learn a whole lotta things "they" tell us we need to know, but "they" are mostly wrong. Those who enter into scientific endeavors as their life's work will find little difficulty reconciling conflicts or quirks they've acquired during early learning about the scientific method.

You reject allowing science teachers from even mentioning ID, while I reject them teaching that nature is random & evolution is undirected. That which is currently taught "trashes" the scientific method, because there is no more chance of proving or disproving either "nature's randomness" or "evolution's drive", than there is to prove whether or not there is any kind of designer.

We already get a huge portion of our Ph.D.s in the hard sciences from other countries.

That is nothing new. Heck, we imported the idea of "Ph.D.s from Germany, about the same time we imported the idea of a mandatory public education. Mandatory education has harmed the quality of our nation's education. We waste resources trying to teach those who are disinterested & disruptive, while at the same time blowing away some of the motivation from those with a real desire to learn. Originally, the intended result of the system we use was a competent armed force, which worked just peachy when it was translated to an industry based economy. A friend had some old magazines & it was a trip to read the articles about our failing education system, written in the early 1940's.

But we seem to produce a lot of Ph.D.s in the 'fuzzy' sciences from our own population.

Where can we send all of our spares, cuz I think most of them are way too busy producing more of themselves at public expense? We should offer incentives to countries willing to take some of our lawyers off of our hands. My local HS district pushes the trades+, which IMO, is a very good thing.

This will come back to haunt us.

We need to rip elementary education away from the liberals to nip it in the bud.

All told, "Intelligent Design" is nothing but a disingenuous rehash of the "Active Principle" notion that held that mice were spontaneously created by leaving grain and burlap bags lying around and molds were spontaneously created in food by some mysterious unseen force.

As a man of faith, it pains me to have to deal with this resurgence of pseudoscience. It's nothing but the product of weak souls who cannot believe in God on faith alone and demand that science alter its own fundamental principles to give them a bogus "proof" on which to hang their belief in the Almighty.

I fear for their souls when the day comes that they kneel before the Lord and say, "I could not believe in You, o Lord, based on Your Word. I had to alter scientific principles to tell me You were real."

May God have mercy.

mice were spontaneously created by leaving grain and burlap bags lying around and molds were spontaneously created in food by some mysterious unseen force

I am afraid that ID isn't that easily dismissed, when discussing the biochemical origin of life. For example, San Francisco State University biologist Dean Kenyon, co-author of an influential late 1960s monograph on the origin of life, became a creationist. (His colleagues would not let him teach introductory biology because they did not trust him to teach evolutionary doctrine.) Other informed opinion also seems skeptical about the project of explaining the origin of life on Earth as purely the result of chance. Crick, the co-discoverer of the structure of DNA, speculated that life was seeded on Earth. Some propponents of evolution, who affirm that life developed according to chance and necessity (variation and natural selection), grant that the theory of evolution only speaks to life after it had originated. The honest truth here is that the origin of life is still very obscure. There are hints (the Miller/Urey experiment being one hint, another hint being the possibility that the genetic code was originally based on pairs rather than triples of basepairs of nucleotides) -- but the extraordinary complexity of even the simplest bacterial cell should give pause to any determined materialist.

Even though I believe that ID is a plausible explanation for the origin of life, I certainly would not believe in ID to bolster my faith, nor do I believe my faith requires belief in ID. The latter stance is an offshoot of the American Evangelical interpretation of Luther's doctrine of "faith without works" as meaning you must believe in the Scriptures (in particular that they are inerrant). I think rather we should heed Christ himself, when he warned his followers to care for the vulnerable (the parable of the sheep and the goats, Matthew 25; also see Matthew 7).

My own faith is based on history (what we know about the origins of the Church) as well as my own personal faith experience.

It's nothing but the product of weak souls who cannot believe in God on faith alone and demand that science alter its own fundamental principles to give them a bogus "proof" on which to hang their belief in the Almighty.

Are you brave enough to name the specific individuals you have in mind with this statement. Be specific please.

I think you are way off here and in fact you could not be any further off than you are. Your generally false accusation shows your ignorance or it shows your own "weak soul".

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