Posted on 01/30/2006 10:27:35 PM PST by Sweetjustusnow
The two scariest words in the English language? Intelligent Design! That phrase tends to produce a nasty rash and night sweats among our elitist class.
Should some impressionable teenager ever hear those words from a public school teacher, we are led to believe, that student may embrace a secular heresy: that some intelligent force or energy, maybe even a god, rather than Darwinian blind chance, has been responsible for the gazillions of magnificently designed life forms that populate our privileged planet.
So is the Designer God or space aliens?
Because the "IDers" keep making false accusations against real science, and false claims intended to convince the public that their movement is science, not religion.
Countering both kinds of falsehoods requires discussing science -- the science which is being unfairly attacked by the IDers, and the false veneer of "science" which the IDers are trying to wrap themselves in.
Because the Darwinists are afraid of tackling the real issue, which is, religion in public schools.
We're not afraid of "tackling" that at all, and we discuss it very frequently. We discussed it practically non-stop during the recent Kitzmiller court case, for example.
ID isn't a theory, it's an untestable hypothesis.
Evolution is a THEORY, like general relativity. It is subject to alteration as new advances are made. It is even subject to being overturned entirely if evidence in support of generating a second opposing THEORY is sufficient to do so.
I am capitalizing 'theory' because it is a word often misused by those not familiar with scientific nomenclature. There is NO stronger scientific term than the term 'theory'. A 'theory' is the highest possible attainment that any collection of evidence of a particular result can attain. A theory is what we regard, in a loose sense, as 'fact' until something better comes along to usurp it (as often occurs; e.g. certain aspects of Newtonian physics by general relativity).
As for facts as the laymen sees them - something comepletely irrefutable - there is alas no such thing in science. As has often been said, there are no facts in science, only statistics.
When there is sufficient evidence to boost ID from a hypothesis to a theory, then we can talk about changing school curriculums. However, much of the ID hypothesis is simply untestable. An untestable, ergo non-falsifiablem hypothesis cannot be considered science. It is simply faith. Nothing wrong with faith, I'm all for it. But it doesn't belong in a science class. What next? Do we give equal say to the 2+2=5 crowd in junior math? Of course not. That would be ridiculous.
Or both at the same time...
Because the ID folks, and often the creationists as well, are trying to tell scientists that their religious beliefs invalidate 150 years of scientific research, and that "when we take over" we'll have a theistic science instead (see The Wedge Strategy).
Folks on the other side, many of whom actually do science, are fighting against this "theistic" version of science, which in reality would require tossing out all the normal methods of doing science, and most of the results. Can you imagine the budgets the NSF and other agencies would put into Evolutionary Biology or Paleontology if theistic science takes over?
(Paging Nehemiah Scudder!)
Okay.
I've read many of these threads. Speaking just for myself, I'd say that the ID'ers will eventually win. School districts will adopt the ID model, those families/parents who don't approve will make other arrangements for their kids' education. High-tech companies will shun (shun, I tell ya!) communities with ID studies. Science will get taught by second rate teachers, because science teachers with advanced degrees, etc will avoid ID school districts. It'll become an issue in regards to real estate prices, etc. And everyone will be left wondering "Whaaa happened?"
In the meantime, science and science education will march on...elswhere.
LOL! How does it follow that the adoption of certain axiomatic statements or principles requires "tossing out the normal methods of doing science?"
LOL!
Now you're just being mean.
Okay, I'll bite -- where in the Bible does it say *that*?
for the other God created man from the dust of the ground on day six before there was enough time for the erosion process to take place.
Let me get this straight -- you say that it must not have rained on Earth during *creation*, because God managed to find some dust to use (and we *know* that it's impossible to find dust if it has ever rained on the planet at any time in history, which is why dust no longer exists today, right?), so therefore it *also* must not have rained any time *after* Creation and *before* the Flood, because... well... because.
I think your analysis of the Bible needs some work.
PH, I think we have another one for your TIYBOC file...
I prefer the generic term "God" when using intelligent design as a starting assumption in a public context. Others seem to prefer "nature." A few toss out ideas that, to my knowledge, only have basis in the imagination and are meant not to advance discussion or debate but to heap ridicule on what is otherwise a matter worthy of serious consideration.
Because the nromal methods of doing science involve *not* arbitrarily "adopting certain axiomatic statements or principles".
Was that really so hard to figure out?
LOL! How does it follow that the adoption of certain axiomatic statements or principles requires "tossing out the normal methods of doing science?"
You posted to me once:
I will question the veracity of geology, radiometric dating, and any part of modern science that might support an old Earth and will continue to do so until I am convinced these methods are scientifically accurate.
You believe in a young earth, so if you were in charge of allocating monies to science, or on a school board, how would you treat any projects or studies which supported an old earth?
In other words, if you were in charge, would we still use "the normal methods of doing science" or would there be some changes made?
It might take a while, but I could probably come up with a few posts on FR threads threatening just that. Not to mention one advocating burning scientists at the stake.
I congratulate you for your consistency.
As an FYI, look up the alternate definition of maggoty some day. You might be amused.
Back-to-work placemarker.
Absolute, 100% hogwash. You wrote:
"people who abandon a belief in evolution do so not because of evidence, but because of evangelical conversions
Yet, I cited "Confessions of a Rocket Scientist" by Dr. Stanley Swinney in which he describes his own personal experiences as he shares the evidence that brought him to the conclusion of ID in the universe and away from evolution.
You completely avoided confronting this by writing:
"When he retired from research, he returned to Unionville, Iowa and became the pastor of Dunnville Baptist Church in Bloomfield, a church he had attended as a teenager." and "Our Vision: To see people come to recognize God through His revelation in creation, and to be reconciled to him through faith in Jesus Christ."
Uh, so what? This is no way invalidates the evidence he has examined.
You also wrote:
It's not based on an actual examination of the facts
Yet, that directly contradicts the story of Galbraith who said:
"...embark on what turned out to be a three or four year intensive study of all the available material on creation/evolution. At the end of that time, I was convinced that the creation point of view, from a scientific standpoint, was the only credible position that a thinking person with a scientific background could accept.’"
But instead of confronting this, you again swerve off to Galbraith's commendation of creation ministries.
Again, so what? If he came to believe Creation through scientific research, it certainly would not be incompatible for him to voice support for those who also believe it.
Again, I quote:
"A former Evolutionist, Dr. Wilder-Smith debated various leading scientists on the subject throughout the world. In his opinion, the Evolution model did not fit as well with the established facts of science as did the Creation model of intelligent design.
To which your response is?:
"If our student had been brought up in a Christian family he rapidly finds, for example, that the family Bible allegedly contains a mere collection of myths on creation, the flood, the prophets, and the life of Jesus Christ. Today's science teaches that human life did not arise with Adam and Eve. Rather, "pools of interbreeding genes" would allegedly better describe the scientific facts of our ancestry."
For the third time, SO WHAT?! He has examined the evidence, looked at the arguments and concluded that Creation is the better scientific model.
He went on to say: "The Evolutionary model says that it is not necessary to assume the existence of anything, besides matter and energy, to produce life. That proposition is unscientific. We know perfectly well that if you leave matter to itself, it does not organize itself - in spite of all the efforts in recent years to prove that it does."
Notice, he didn't say "that doesn't glorify God". He didn't say "I'm basing my decision on emotion, not science". He has examined it from a SCIENTIFIC STANDPOINT.
As for Gentry, you wrote:
"bases his entire case on *one* thing only, Polonium Haloes, which have been debunked repeatedly.
Yet, he says:
"Every question regarding the validity or implications of the polonium-halo evidence for creation has been systematically dealt with in our published reports. Every proposal for an evolutionary origin of polonium radiohalos has been systematically and experimentally falsified. No hypothetical, naturalistic scenario has yet been suggested that can account for Creation's "tiny mystery" of the polonium halo.
Of course, you can find claims to the contrary on the internet and elsewhere. But if these claims had any real substance, they would have passed peer review and been published in the open scientific literature. The fact that they have not been, or have themselves been experimentally falsified, demonstrates the fact that this unique evidence for Creation still stands unrefuted."
Now, you may not like his science or agree with his conclusions or the scientific conclusions of the others cited. Once again, SO WHAT? Scientists disagree on any number of things. They look at the same evidence, information, data, etc. and come to different conclusions, sometimes dramatically different.
And don't forget Dr. Parker.
"Creation, Facts of Life is a book written by Gary Parker, PhD. He earned his doctorate in biology, with a cognate in geology (paleontology.) Dr. Parker is a former evolutionist who spent years teaching evolution in college. After a three year analysis of creation science, he converted. Throughout his book, Dr. Parker demonstrated his own honesty and scientific integrity with a willingness to accept what science proved as he did his studies in science. He showed that he was truly in search of the truth first.
Exactly what part of that didn't you understand?
Your incredible blanket claim that "people who abandon a belief in evolution do so not because of evidence" is laughable on its face. As if you know the mind and decision-making process of everyone who's decided that evolution is not the answer.
"you haven't even established that all four of these men were even "evolutionists" to start with as you assert"
LOL. That's it? That's your final fall-back position? I guess quoting them and/or sources well-acquainted with them isn't good enough for you? And what about Parker? He taught evo in for years in college. Oh, right, he's the one you wanted to ignore. How convenient.
These men are motivated by "defense of the faith" considerations, not the evidence
As opposed to evolutionists who aren't motivated to "defend their faith" in evolution? Naaaaah, that wouldn't happen would it???
"Darwin's book, On the Origin of Species, was published in 1859. It is perhaps the most influential book that has ever been published, because it was read by scientist and non- scientist alike, and it aroused violent controversy. Religious people disliked it because it appeared to dispense with God; scientists liked it because it seemed to solve the most important problem in the universe-the existence of living matter. In fact, evolution became in a sense a scientific religion; almost all scientists have accepted it and many are prepared to 'bend' their observations to fit in with it." - Lipson, H.S. [Professor of Physics, University of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology, UK], "A physicist looks at evolution," Physics Bulletin, Vol. 31, No. 4, May 1980, p.138.
""Our willingness to accept scientific claims that are against common sense is the key to an understanding of the real struggle between science and the supernatural. 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 absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door." - Lewontin, Richard C. [Professor of Zoology and Biology, Harvard University], "Billions and Billions of Demons", Review of "The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark," by Carl Sagan, New York Review, January 9, 1997.
"Another reason that scientists are so prone to throw the baby out with the bath water is that science itself, as I have suggested, is a religion. The neophyte scientist, recently come or converted to the world view of science, can be every bit as fanatical as a Christian crusader or a soldier of Allah. This is particularly the case when we have come to science from a culture and home in which belief in God is firmly associated with ignorance, superstition, rigidity and hypocrisy. Then we have emotional as well as intellectual motives to smash the idols of primitive faith. A mark of maturity in scientists, however, is their awareness that science may be as subject to dogmatism as any other religion." - Peck, M. Scott [psychiatrist and Medical Director of New Milford Hospital Mental Health Clinic, Connecticut, USA], "The Road Less Travelled: A New Psychology of Love, Traditional Values and Spiritual Growth," [1978], Arrow: London, 1990, p.238.
""Spencer's belief in the universality of natural causation was, together with his laissez-faire political creed, the bedrock of his thinking. It was this belief, more than anything else, that led him to reject Christianity, long before the great conflict of the eighteen-sixties Moreover, it was his belief in natural causation that led him to embrace the theory of evolution, not vice versa. ... His faith was so strong that it did not wait on scientific proof. Spencer became an ardent evolutionist at a time when a cautious scientist would have been justified at least in suspending judgement. ... for him the belief in natural causation was primary, the theory of evolution derivative." - Burrow, John W. [Professor of Intellectual History, University of Sussex, UK], "Evolution and Society: A Study in Victorian Social Theory," [1966], Cambridge University Press: London, 1968, reprint, pp.180-181, 205).
"It is no more heretical to say the Universe displays purpose, as Hoyle has done, than to say that it is pointless, as Steven Weinberg has done. Both statements are metaphysical and outside science. Yet it seems that scientists are permitted by their own colleagues to say metaphysical things about lack of purpose and not the reverse. This suggests to me that science, in allowing this metaphysical notion, sees itself as religion and presumably as an atheistic religion (if you can have such a thing)." - Shallis, Michael [Astrophysicist, Oxford University], "In the eye of a storm", New Scientist, January 19, 1984, pp.42-43.
"Unfortunately many scientists and non-scientists have made Evolution into a religion, something to be defended against infidels. In my experience, many students of biology - professors and textbook writers included - have been so carried away with the arguments for Evolution that they neglect to question it. They preach it ... College students, having gone through such a closed system of education, themselves become teachers, entering high schools to continue the process, using textbooks written by former classmates or professors. High standards of scholarship and teaching break down. Propaganda and the pursuit of power replace the pursuit knowledge. Education becomes a fraud." - George Kocan, Evolution isn't Faith But Theory, Chicago Tribune, Monday, April 21, 1980.
"At this point, it is necessary to reveal a little inside information about how scientists work, something the textbooks don't usually tell you. The fact is that scientists are not really as objective and dispassionate in their work as they would like you to think. Most scientists first get their ideas about how the world works not through rigorously logical processes but through hunches and wild guesses. As individuals they often come to believe something to be true long before they assemble the hard evidence that will convince somebody else that it is. Motivated by faith in his own ideas and a desire for acceptance by his peers, a scientist will labor for years knowing in his heart that his theory is correct but devising experiment after experiment whose results he hopes will support his position." - Boyce Rensberger, How the World Works, William Morrow, NY, 1986, pp. 17 18. Rensberger is an ardently anti-creationist science writer.
" "When it comes to the origin of life on this earth, there are only two possibilities: creation or spontaneous generation (evolution). There is no third way. Spontaneous generation was disproved 100 years ago, but that leads us only to one other conclusion: that of supernatural creation. We cannot accept that on philosophical grounds (personal reasons); therefore, we choose to believe the impossible: that life arose spontaneously by chance." - George Wald, winner of the 1967 Nobel Peace Prize in Science, in Lindsay, Dennis, "The Dinosaur Dilemma," Christ for the Nations, Vol. 35, No. 8, November 1982, pp. 4-5, 14.
""Evolutionary theory has been enshrined as the centerpiece of our educational system, and elaborate walls have been erected around it to protect it from unnecessary abuse. - - What the 'record' shows is nearly a century of fudging and finagling by scientists attempting to force various fossil morsels and fragments to conform with Darwin's notions, all to no avail. Today the millions of fossils stand as very visible, ever-present reminders of the paltriness of the arguments and the overall shabbiness of the theory that marches under the banner of evolution." - Jeremy Rifkin, Algeny (New York: Viking Press, 1983), pp. 112, 125.
""A five million-year-old piece of bone that was thought to be a collarbone of a humanlike creature is actually part of a dolphin rib, ...He [Dr. T. White] puts the incident on par with two other embarrassing [sic] faux pas by fossil hunters: Hesperopithecus, the fossil pig's tooth that was cited as evidence of very early man in North America, and Eoanthropus or 'Piltdown Man,' the jaw of an orangutan and the skull of a modern human that were claimed to be the 'earliest Englishman'. "The problem with a lot of anthropologists is that they want so much to find a hominid that any scrap of bone becomes a hominid bone.'" - Dr. Tim White (anthropologist, University of California, Berkeley). As quoted by Ian Anderson "Hominoid collarbone exposed as dolphin's rib", in New Scientist, 28 April 1983, p. 199
Naaaaah, no agenda there.
I say that YOUR interpretation is wrong.
I don't believe that the Bible has errors, I believe that humans can interpret the Bible wrong.
I believe that you are human, and thus prone to both error, and to the first of the seven deadly sins, which is pride, and that you are guilty of that sin in making the claim that the only available option to your being wrong in your interpretation of The Bible, is for the Bible itself to be wrong.
I also believe that you are so deep into your sin of pride, that you believe yourself capable of understanding the full magnitude of His Creation, as well as being unbelievably naive in the belief that the complexity of Creation can be set down in words that could be comprehended by people who, at the time that the stories were told, could barely understand disease.
"My family is not scion to any animals or plants or insects. "
Pride again.
If they are, and if it is ever proven beyond the shadow of a doubt that humans ARE related to monkeys, rocks, and bugs, it is because He willed it so, and to believe that He couldn't, is to place constraints on an omnipotent God via your pride.
Man evolved from dust, just as it says in Genesis, and coincidentally, evolutionists believe that all life began from dust.
Whatever science finds, they will only find God, for you to believe otherwise is your sin speaking through you again.
No, they don't. You misunderstand how and why science is done. It's not about "prefering nature as a starting assumption". It's about determining how nature operates when its "rules" aren't being actively rewritten (if indeed they ever are -- we have yet to spot them ever being changed or violated).
The whole point of science is about learning nature's "rules" and processes -- how the Universe works when it's not being screwed with. That's no "assumption of nature", that's the *purpose* of science -- studying the behavior of nature, of the Universe.
OK, three mistakes, or two mistakes and one fraud. And you have to plow up most of a century of science to find that much.
Big deal.
Now, perhaps you can address the other 99.9999% of the evidence that is neither mistaken nor fraudulent?
Or did you think your three examples would make all of it suddenly go away?
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