Posted on 09/24/2005 7:20:09 AM PDT by gobucks
The brawl between evolutionists and religious neo-conservatives over how life began is coming down to the survival of the slickest.
For about 150 years Charles Darwin's evolution theory has held sway. But a new American theory, intelligent design, is getting a lot of press as scientists and intellectuals rush to the barricades to dismiss intelligent design as little else than "creationism" rebadged.
Already a DVD featuring American scientists claiming intelligent causes are responsible for the origin of the universe and life has become Australia's biggest-selling religious video and intelligent design is starting to permeate school courses.
Next year, hundreds of Catholic schools in the dioceses of Sydney, Wollongong, Lismore and Armidale will use new religious education textbooks that discuss intelligent design. At Dural, year 9 and 10 students at Pacific Hills Christian School have begun learning about intelligent design in science classes.
The chief executive of Christian Schools Australia, Stephen O'Doherty, says it is inevitable other schools will follow suit. Until last month, few Australians had heard of it. But debate broke out internationally on August 1 when the US President, George Bush, told reporters he supported combining lessons on evolution with discussion of intelligent design. "Both sides ought to be properly taught," Bush said.
Last month, the federal Minister for Education, Science and Training, Dr Brendan Nelson, gave intelligent design ministerial imprimatur, telling the National Press Club he thought parents and schools ought to have the opportunity - if they wished - for students to be exposed to intelligent design and taught about it.
Nelson's office said his comments were unplanned.
But his interest had been pricked by a parliamentary visit on June 20 by Bill Hodgson, head of the Sydney-based campus Crusade for Christ, who left a copy of a DVD Unlocking the Mystery of Life with Nelson.
The DVD featured a US mathematician, William Dembski, and other leading American intelligent design proponents claiming the complexity of biological systems is proof of an organising intelligence.
"ID is the study of patterns in nature that are best explained as the result of intelligence," Dembski said.
The DVD is distributed in Australia by a Melbourne-based Christian group, Focus on the Family. Its executive director, Colin Bunnett, says until Nelson's comments only 1000 copies had been sold over four years. "But it's taken off. We've sold thousands in the last few weeks," he says.
The intelligent design debate has more resonance in the US, partly because teaching about the beginning of life is problematic. A Harris poll in June found that 55 per cent of American adults support teaching evolution, creationism, and intelligent design in public schools yet many who favour a literal interpretation of the Bible found it difficult to accept Darwin's The Origin of Species.
One teacher, John Scopes, was convicted for violating a Tennessee ban on teaching evolution in 1925's famous "monkey trial". It was not isolated legislation. In 1968, when the US Supreme Court struck down similar laws, some states began pushing the teaching of "creationism" alongside evolution.
In Australia, the issue has been less hard-edged. The last tussle was in 1978 when Queensland's Bjelke-Petersen government bowed to creationists' opposition to social science courses. Of late, leading scientists have rebuffed intelligent design. The Nobel Prize-winning scientist Peter Doherty says it has no place in a science curriculum and the physicist Paul Davies rejects it as creationism in disguise.
Dembski, an associate research professor in the conceptual foundations of science at Baylor University in Texas, the world's largest Baptist university, said it should be taught with evolution in schools but not be mandated.
"Evolutionary theory and intelligent design both have a scientific core: the question whether certain material mechanisms are able to propel an evolutionary process and the question whether certain patterns in nature signify intelligence are both squarely scientific questions," Dembski says. "Nevertheless, they have profound philosophical and religious implications."
'Also, so' should be 'Also, no'. So much for relying on spell checkers.
Well, I see your point. In fact, I guess no evidence exists at all that Bush really understands science and scientists...
In fact, I guess no evidence exists at all that Bush really understands science and scientists...
LOL. He apparently knew enough to pick a science adviser who doesn't think ID is science.
You are arguing for Deism.
Apparently we have our acronyms crossed. Every time you posted TOE, I thought you were referring to the Theory of Everything, which is a theory of theoretical physics and mathematics that tries to fully explain and links together all known physical phenomena, LOL. It is supposedly the final formula that could link together Relativity and Quantum Mechanics.
I'm really dense sometimes, you refer to the Theory of Evolution (or the Theory of Electricity, which I doubt), your posts make much more sense now......sorry for the confusion FRiend.
Apparently we have our acronyms crossed. Every time you posted TOE, I thought you were referring to the Theory of Everything, which is a theory of theoretical physics and mathematics that tries to fully explain and links together all known physical phenomena,
LOL. Sorry about that. On these evo/ID/creationism threads 'the TOE' is used all of the time to mean 'the Theory of Evolution'.
:) I thought for a while you were Roger Penrose or Steven Hawkins and would start posting equations of how Intelligent Design mathematically integrates into the Theory of Everything.....LOL. Sorry for the confusion and regards.
I found a dimpled spider, fat and white,
On a white heal-all, holding up a moth
Like a white piece of rigid satin cloth --
Assorted characters of death and blight
Mixed ready to begin the morning right,
Like the ingredients of a witches' broth --
A snow-drop spider, a flower like a froth,
And dead wings carried like a paper kite.
What had that flower to do with being white,
The wayside blue and innocent heal-all?
What brought the kindred spider to that height,
Then steered the white moth thither in the night?
What but design of darkness to appall?--
If design govern in a thing so small.
What does this do?:
"We take the side of science in spite of the patent absurdity of some of its constructs, in spite of its failure to fulfill many of its extravagant promises of health and life, in spite of the tolerance of the scientific community for unsubstantiated just-so stories, because we have a prior commitment, a commitment to materialism. It is not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation of the phenomenal world, but, on the contrary, that we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counter-intuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated. Moreover, that materialism is an absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door." ~ Richard Lewontin
"(Darwins's notebooks) include many statements showing that he espoused but feared to expose something he perceived as far more heretical than evolution itself: philosophical materialism -- the postulate that matter is the stuff of all existence and that all mental and spiritual phenomena are its by-products." ~ Stephen Jay Gould
"It is apparent that Darwin lost his faith in the years 1836-39, much of it clearly prior to the reading of Malthus. In order not to hurt the feelings of his friends and of his wife, Darwin often used deistic language in his publications, but much in his Notebooks indicates that by this time he had become a ‘materialist’" ~ Ernst Mayr
"Naturalistic evolution has clear consequences that Charles Darwin understood perfectly. 1) No gods worth having exist; 2) no life after death exists; 3) no ultimate foundation for ethics exists; 4) no ultimate meaning in life exists; and 5) human free will is nonexistent. .... Evolution is the greatest engine of atheism ever invented." ~ William Provine
"Origin of man now proved. -- Metaphysics must flourish. - He who understands baboon would do more toward Metaphysics than Locke." --- [Charles] Darwin, Notebook M, August 16, 1838 As quoted by Michael T Ghiselin in his book Metaphysics and the Origin of Species
Encyclopedia Britannica (excerpts):
"...At this time, however, Darwin began to lead something of a double life. To the world he was busy preparing his Journal of Researches into the Geology and Natural History of the Various Countries Visited by H.M.S. Beagle, which was published in 1839. ... Privately Darwin had begun a remarkable series of notebooks in which he initiated a set of questions and answers about "the species problem." .... Darwin kept this interest secret ...
..There was no place in Darwin's world for divine intervention, nor was mankind placed in a position of superiority vis-a-vis the rest of the animal world. Darwin saw man as part of a continuum with the rest of nature, not separated by divine injunction.
After the publication of the Origin, Darwin continued to write, while friends, especially Huxley, defended the theory before the public. ...
...Darwin met the issue of human evolution head-on in The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex (1871), in which he elaborated on the controversial subject only alluded to in the Origin. ...
The second half of the book elaborated upon the theory of sexual selection. Darwin observed that in some species males battle other males for access to certain females. But in other species, such as peacocks, there is a social system in which the females select males according to such qualities as strength or beauty. Twentieth-century biologists have expanded this theory to the selection by females of males who can contribute toward the survival of their offspring; i.e., female selection secures traits that make the next generation more competitive.
Although Darwin's description of female choice was roundly rejected by most scientists at the time, he adamantly defended this insight until the end of his life. While not universally accepted today, the theory of female choice has many adherents among evolutionary biologists.
The last of Darwin's sequels to the Origin, The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (1872), was an attempt to erase the last barrier presumed to exist between human and nonhuman animals--the idea that the expression of such feelings as suffering, anxiety, grief, despair, joy, love, devotion, hatred, and anger is unique to human beings.
Darwin connected studies of facial muscles and the emission of sounds with the corresponding emotional states in man and then argued that the same facial movements and sounds in nonhuman animals express similar emotional states. This book laid the groundwork for the study of ethology, neurobiology, and communication theory in psychology. ..
Throughout his career Darwin wrote two kinds of books--those with a broad canvas, such as the evolution quartet, and those with a narrow focus ...
Darwin worked alone at home, leading the life of an independent scientist (a privileged existence open to a fortunate few in Victorian England). Money from Robert Darwin made it unnecessary for Charles to seek employment.
After his return from the voyage Darwin knew he would never become a clergyman like his mentor, Henslow. Nor would he remain a bachelor like his brother, Erasmus, who was a man-about-town.
After drawing up lists of the benefits and drawbacks of marriage, he proposed to his first cousin Emma Wedgwood, whom he married on Jan. 29, 1839. She brought fortune, devotion, and considerable housewifely skills that enabled him to work in peace for the next 40 years.
Newly married, the Darwins moved into a house on Gower Street in London, but within a few years Darwin's increasingly poor health prompted them to move to the country. In 1842 the Darwins moved into Down House in the village of Downe, Kent, only 16 miles from London but remote from easy access to the city.
Charles and Emma Darwin had 10 children: two died in infancy and a third, Anne, died at age 10. The surviving five sons went away to school. George, Francis, and Horace became distinguished scientists, and Leonard, a major in the royal army, was an engineer and eugenicist.
William Erasmus was undistinguished, as were his sisters, who prepared at home to follow their mother into marriage. Henrietta married; Elizabeth remained single at Down.
Darwin was devoted to his wife and daughters but treated them as children, obliging Emma to ask him for the only key to the drawers containing all the keys to cupboards and other locked depositories.
Darwin noted in The Descent that the young of both sexes resemble the adult female in most species and reasoned that males are more evolutionarily advanced than females.
His attitude toward women coloured his scientific insights. "The female is less eager than the male," he wrote, "She is coy," and when she takes part in choosing a mate, she chooses "not the male which is most attractive to her, but the one which is least distasteful."
...Comfortable in English society, Darwin treasured his place and feared alienating those who he knew would be offended by his theory. ...
He was a beneficiary of this conservative English society, and his fear of ostracism was one of the forces that prevented him from publishing his theory sooner.
He also dreaded the hurt he knew that his ideas would inflict on his close friend Henslow and especially on Emma, both devout Christians, for whom his theory was heresy.
The conflict between his science and his realization of what publication would imply for the society he was so much a part of manifested itself in physical pain.
The once adventurous young naturalist was a semi-invalid before his 40th year.
Darwin's illness has been the subject of extensive speculation. Some of the symptoms--painful flatulence, vomiting, insomnia, palpitations--appeared in force as soon as he began his first transmutation notebook, in 1837.
Although he was exposed to insects in South America and could possibly have caught Chagas' or some other tropical disease, a careful analysis of the attacks in the context of his activities points to psychogenic origins.
Throughout the next decades Darwin's maladies waxed and waned. But during the last decade of his life, when he concentrated on botanical research and no longer speculated about evolution, he experienced the best health since his years at Cambridge. ...
Darwin died at Down House on April 19, 1882. ... his work remains central to modern evolutionary theory.
Excerpted from the Encyclopedia Britannica without permission. HERE
Huh?
"(Darwins's notebooks) include many statements showing that he espoused but feared to expose something he perceived as far more heretical than evolution itself: philosophical materialism
In order not to hurt the feelings of his friends and of his wife, Darwin often used deistic language in his publications, but much in his Notebooks indicates that by this time he had become a ‘materialist’" ~ Ernst Mayr
In order not to hurt the feelings of his friends and of his wife, Darwin often used deistic language in his publications, but much in his Notebooks indicates that by this time he had become a ‘materialist’" ~ Ernst Mayr Darwin connected studies of facial muscles and the emission of sounds with the corresponding emotional states in man and then argued that the same facial movements and sounds in nonhuman animals express similar emotional states.
His attitude toward women coloured his scientific insights.
his fear of ostracism was one of the forces that prevented him from publishing his theory sooner. He also dreaded the hurt he knew that his ideas would inflict on his close friend Henslow and especially on Emma, both devout Christians, for whom his theory was heresy.
Darwin's emotional life and his relationships have nothing to do with the validity of the TOE.
It is more likely, based on his correspondence, that his health improved because his theories were enjoying almost universal respect from the scientific community.
I might just add that if ID gets a foot in the classroom door, it will be permissible for teachers to lay disease and parasitism at the feet of the designer and ask what kind of murderous psychopath the designer could be.
You are not going to like having religion examined in science class.
You are not going to like having religion examined in science class.
AKA, the Nuclear Option.
Creationists are going to wake up one morning and realize that ID means attributing everything -- the most horrible diseases and the most wretched suffering -- to deliberate, conscious design. But since the designer is not identified(could be space aliens) the students will be left to imagine the motives for this cruelty.
When you step away from the picture postcards of pretty sunsets and look at all of life, religion is better off with the assumption that life is not planned in detail.
Creationists are going to wake up one morning and realize that ID means attributing everything -- the most horrible diseases and the most wretched suffering -- to deliberate, conscious design.
The sad part is, they already accept this. The argument is that it's our punishment for being sinners.
However, I've never been able to understand what all of the children tortured, used for medical experiments, and murdered in Auschwitz did wrong.
religion is better off with the assumption that life is not planned in detail.
The weak but aggressive cannot accept this.
What they don't seem to realize is that "Fall" theology is never going to be taught in science class. It's the faceless, anonymous designer or nothing. No purpose or motive or motive can be attributed to design without getting into theology.
So the designer will be responsible for all the evils of the world without the cover of religion.
I think that kids presented with the alternative of a non-purposeful designer and a psychopathic designer will opt for non-purposeful.
But creationists need not worry about this too much. ID will be crushed in court, and religion will be taught at home and in church, where parents can explain their beliefs.
I can't figure out why people who object to public schools teaching their kids about sex want those same schools to teach their kids the properties of the creator.
I think that kids presented with the alternative of a non-purposeful designer and a psychopathic designer will opt for non-purposeful.
I've always liked this argument. If you were God, why would you make the world the way it is when you could have made it differently?
Some of my favorite quotes from Heinlein.
-- I've never understood how God could expect His creatures to pick the one true religion by faith - it strikes me as a sloppy way to run a universe. [Robert Heinlein, Jubal Harshaw in Stranger in a Strange Land]
-- The most ridiculous concept ever perpetrated by H.Sapiens is that the Lord God of Creation, Shaper and Ruler of the Universes, wants the sacharrine adoration of his creations, that he can be persuaded by their prayers, and becomes petulant if he does not receive this flattery. Yet this ridiculous notion, without one real shred of evidence to bolster it, has gone on to found one of the oldest, largest and least productive industries in history [Robert Heinlein]
I don't mean to say there's anything wrong with religion, but it needs to stay out of science.
After all, without the basis of morality, it's really all about the id.
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