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."
The logical conclusion to the battle between Evolutionism and Creationism is going to be the abandonment or the retention of religion based moral codes.
What? You think the TOE implies morality is useless? Has it occurred to you that morality may be beneficial to the survival of the species? I suggest you read up on Kant's Categorical Imperative.
Need that be elaborated upon?
Maybe for you, but I have children, and I intend to make their world and secure and rational as posible, and I intend to do whatever I can to insure the stability of my culture for all my descendents.
If your Id is so out of control that you endanger my children and their posterity, I will do whatever it takes to stop you from harming society.
That's pretty much it. Most people have children and want the world to be safe for them. The rest will conform to this standard or face the dangerous end of a gun.
It just so happens that you and I are born into the luckiest society that ever existed. The physical and political threats we face are a nit compared to what most of the world's parents face.
I would submit to you that the biggest proponents of Darwin's theory have been liberals and atheists. Need that be elaborated upon?
Yes.
And of course, that is how 'id'iots evolve! (Gotta have a fragment of a sense of humor here....)
While Evolution and Creationism can be fully compatible, in the context that Evolution is marketed, it must deny any sort of Divine guidance.
I would argue something ... you can't win a presidential election w/o harnessing scientific techniques to determine certain demographic questions. Winning a presidential, thus, means the runner has the wherewithal to determine how to do that...
He doesn't have to sound like a scientist, or look like one, in order to be the one to say 'Eureka!'. But, of course, he quotes Isaiah ... and 'scientists' cringe...
Maybe that is a really, really good thing.
Good grief!
LOL
"Darwinism", as popularly marketed is a godless theory used by the anti-religious left and their fellow travelers to deny any notion of a "Creator".
I think you have problem with the charlatans, and not with the TOE.
It is used to center Man as the epitome of nature.
I thought this is what the creationists did.
With Man as the ultimate arbiter of what is and will be, Man becomes infallible. The stronger and the further evolved are the masters.
You are talking about the Nazi theory, not about the TOE.
While Evolution and Creationism can be fully compatible, in the context that Evolution is marketed, it must deny any sort of Divine guidance.
So it's a marketing problem. This is a problem that can be solved.
Yep. This has demonstrated that there's no need to spend millions and billions doing time consuming and tedious research to settle scientific issues. They can be settled by politics and propaganda! Gee, I guess the Nazis and Stalin had the right idea all along. When will the textbooks with the Nazi theories of the hollow earth (hohlweltlehre) and the "Cosmic Ice Theory" (Welteislehre or "WEL") be coming out?
Man is not, and has never been, the center of the universe. For the religious, it is G_d which is center and it is man whom G_d is served by.
Maybe rabid Evolutionists are ideological brothers with Hitler. I can't say, for certain.
Actually wouldn't it be creationism (or spontaneous generation) that says it "just happened," that is to say not by a natural or creaturely mechanisms, themselves mediated by more fundamental and general natural laws (like newly evolved species or manufactured engines) but by divine miracle or divinely ordained and spontaneous fiat of nature?
Maybe rabid Evolutionists are ideological brothers with Hitler. I can't say, for certain.
At least now I know where you stand. You're qualification is ludicrous and disingenuous.
I can't believe you actually wrote this. It deserve its own wing in the museum of regrettable posts.
Gee. Bush and Nazis in a single post. Now, where I have seen that tactic before?
Oh, I forget. We're FreeRepublic, not Democratic Underground. Gotta keep reminding myself of that.
That's 'your', not 'you're'. I gotta stop relying on spell checkers.
"Darwinism" is a tool of the anti-religious left, eh?
Can you then explain why the left clung to non-Darwinian, principally Lamarkian, versions of evolution for most of the last hundred and fifty years (and many still do so)?
If Darwinism was so suitable for atheistic leftists, then why, for instance, would Stalin send Darwinian/Mendelian geneticists to the gulags and allow a neo-Larmakian kook like Lysenko to run (and ruin) soviet science and agriculture for decades?
Gee. Bush and Nazis in a single post. Now, where I have seen that tactic before?
How is this different from the 'Evolutionists' and 'Nazis' in a single post tactic?
I was thinking more along the lines of Communism.
Your offense is your problem.
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