Tension Over Intelligent Design

International Herald Tribune ^ | 10/31/2005 | Joseph Rosenbloom

[Havoc]

The rant against Rome and Catholicism was just straight out of left field

Perhaps; but, I'm arguing the same things on another thread. The same stances are being proffered. And they have a common source it would seem.

[USConstitutionBuff]

Cry Havoc and let slip the dogs of war.

A little more love and a little less hate would be in order if you want to go on calling yourself a Christian, let alone one of the few "true" Christians.

And no, the words Christian and Creationist are not synonymous unless I'm using a definition unique to you. I'm not.

[Havoc]

Oh now there's an original charge. Since I debunk evolution now I'm a hater. ROFL. What next.. gotta love it.

[USConstitutionBuff]

I meant hate against other Christians and Catholics, who you deny are Christians; in regards to your rant.

Were we even talking to each other about evolution? I thought we were discussing "Creationist" vs "Christian". Which you strangely insist are synonymous according to a definition unique to you.

[Havoc]

Oh, really? So if I state that a wrench isn't a screwdriver, I guess I hate the screwdriver - or is it the wrench... lol.
And yes, we are talking about Creationist vs. Christian; but, that begs what a "Christian" is. I defined my terms. You seem to want a slop factor. Christians are creationists. Catholics are not; but, therein you have the problem of defining what a Christian is. Christians don't have a system of blood sacrifice, Catholics do. That isn't a small problem, that's a mountain trying to hide inconspicuously in your living room - between you and the TV I might add.

Guess it's difficult to see such relevancies when one proceeds from an uninformed stance..

[USConstitutionBuff]

No, it is difficult for a rational human being using commonly accepted definitions of English words to get their bearings when staring into the realm of madness.

You have nothing intelligent to contribute, just sectarian ravings and anti-Catholicism. I'm done with you and don't ever feel the need to speak of you or to you again.

Thanks!

[Havoc]

Well, that's fine. If you wish to use dishonesty as an excuse to exit, don't let the door hit you on the way out. You tried to paint me a hater and bigot with inanity, you failed and now you're taking your toys home. Go on. Beat it. Intellectual dishonesty is what we need less of, not more of. Your absence will only help.

[norton]

As usual; I'm only in and out of this absurd thread, however:

"an anti-evolution concept known as intelligent design..."

Is inaccurate, overly defensive, and quite illuminating.

ID does not say 'there is no evolution'.
It says 'Darwin's theory of origins (and variations) of (and between) species does not manage to explain the origins of life'.

What really, really, disturbs me is that 'science' seems on the verge of jumping off a cliff in order to 'discover' what actually did (per them) generate life...
...anyone for outer space seedlings?
...primordial glop with a lightening booster?
...gamma rays and one lonely but willing carbon based mutant?
...whatever...

[USConstitutionBuff]

More like your irrationality of using definitions unique to you to CORRECT me from using the commonly accepted definitions; then using the elaboration of your unique definition as an excuse to launch a barrage of hatred against a well respected faith shared by a billion of the inhabitants of this globe, Catholicism.

I like positivity and good spirited exchange of ideas and information. All I've heard from you is the chaos indicative of your name and wildly lashing out at any target, real or perceived.

Catholics are good people, leave them alone about their rites and practices and making unto graven images. It isn't anyone's business how they choose to do their "free exercise thereof".

[USConstitutionBuff]

Actually any Biologist would tell you that...

"Darwin's theory of origins (and variations) of (and between) species does not manage to explain the origins of life".

I think I've heard it explained about a hundred times on this board already that evolution through natural selection ASSUMES life, it doesn't explain the creation of it (just as the theory of gravity ASSUMES mass it doesn't explain the creation of it).

The subject of the origins of life is called Abiogenesis, and there are only a scant few papers on the subject. It is really Abiogenesis, not Evolution, where 'Intelligent' Design has a target rich environment. Evolution is observed just as Darwin predicted in numerous experiments, with additional confirmation from DNA comparison, and the fossil record. It is Abiogenesis that is actually the notion at the heart of most Creationists' chagrin, and it is the most attractive target for a pseudo-scientific assault like 'Intelligent' Design.

The only reason that 'Intelligent' Design doesn't go after Abiogenesis, where it might actually have an argument, rather than Evolution; is that there are MILLIONS to be made attacking Evolution, and all the people who would give them money to do so seem to be under the impression that the Evolution IS Abiogenesis.

[Havoc]

Thought you were through.. lol.

More like your irrationality of using definitions unique to you to CORRECT me from using the commonly accepted definitions;

Accepted on what basis? And by whome? It isn't universally accepted as true. And if it were of what import is it? People can universally state that a Dodge Truck is a Volkswagon product. Don't let the fact that they'd be wrong bother you any. Afterall, it's belief that matters - right.. But don't let me rain on your parade. I mentioned a stark difference and you don't even bat an eye. You're an indoctrinate. You're stuck on your feelings. I'm stuck on practical facts. Until you get your head out of your feelings and start reviewing the facts, we've nothing to say to one another.

; then using the elaboration of your unique definition as an excuse to launch a barrage of hatred against a well respected faith shared by a billion of the inhabitants of this globe, Catholicism.

I don't care how well respected the group is. I really don't. God is no respector of persons, so why the heck should I be. Are Catholics nice people? Sure as heck are. My best friend growing up was one of them. Who cares. Isn't about them. It's about the religion - and more than that, it's about whether that religion is Christian. I could give a hang less that it even exists save that it pretends at something it isn't. If it didn't do that, I would not care a whit. I'd just evangelize heathens trapped in it like any other. Why, because heathen is a matter of belief - not a label on the person. God loves people, he just hates a lot of what they do - called sin.

I like positivity and good spirited exchange of ideas and information. All I've heard from you is the chaos indicative of your name and wildly lashing out at any target, real or perceived.

Oh bunk. You're all twisty and upset inside because someone challenged your worldview, you responded from your gut and now have to climb back up to some semblance of a high ground. I forgive the offense, that's a given, but I'm not stupid and neither is anyone else here.

Catholics are good people, leave them alone about their rites and practices and making unto graven images. It isn't anyone's business how they choose to do their "free exercise thereof".

I didn't bring Catholics into this. You did. I discussed the religion not the people. You're trying to confuse the two. And nobody is hampering their "free excercise" despite your dishonest attempt state otherwise. How they choose to worship is their prerogative and problem. That all has no bearing on whether they are Christian or not. That is another matter - one which you're doing your best to avoid in failing to address my prior points. If you're going to lay down a challenge as you did. It is proper to define terms. If you need to hide from that definition, you already understand you got problems. So, as I said, I thought you were through...

[13Sisters76]

For the science room, no free speech
By Bill Murchison

Dec 28, 2005


Will the federal courts, and the people who rely on the federal courts to enforce secular ideals, ever get it? The anti-school-prayer decisions of the past 40 years -- not unlike the pro-choice-in-abortion decisions, starting with Roe vs. Wade -- haven't driven pro-school-prayer, anti-choice Americans from the marketplace of ideas and activity.

Neither will U.S. Dist. Judge John Jones' anti-intelligent-design ruling in Dover, Pa., just before Christmas choke off challenges to the public schools' Darwinian monopoly.

Jones' contempt for the "breathtaking inanity" of school-board members who wanted ninth-grade biology students to hear a brief statement regarding Darwinism's "gaps/problems" is unlikely to intimidate the millions who find evolution only partly persuasive -- at best.

Millions? Scores of millions might be more like it. A 2004 Gallup Poll found that just 13 percent of Americans believe in evolution unaided by God. A Kansas newspaper poll last summer found 55 percent support for exposing public-school students to critiques of Darwinism.

This accounts for the widespread desire that children be able to factor in some alternatives to the notion that "natural selection" has brought us, humanly speaking, where we are. Well, maybe it has. But what if it hasn't? The science classroom can't take cognizance of such a possibility? Under the Jones ruling, it can't. Jones discerns a plot to establish a religious view of the question, though the religion he worries about exists only in the possibility that God, per Genesis 1, might intrude celestially into the discussion. (Intelligent-designers, for the record, say the power of a Creator God is just one of various possible counter-explanations.)

Not that Darwinism, as Jones acknowledges, is perfect. Still, "the fact that a scientific theory cannot yet render an explanation on every point should not be used as a pretext to thrust an untestable alternative hypothesis grounded in religion into the science classroom or to misrepresent scientific propositions."

Ah. We see now: Federal judges are the final word on good science. Who gave them the power to exclude even whispers of divinity from the classroom? Supposedly, the First Amendment to the Constitution: the odd part here being the assumption that the "free speech" amendment shuts down discussion of alternatives to an establishment-approved concept of Truth.

With energy and undisguised contempt for the critics of Darwinism, Jones thrusts out the back door of his courthouse the very possibility that any sustained critique of Darwinism should be admitted to public classrooms.

However, the writ of almighty federal judges runs only so far, as witness their ongoing failure to convince Americans that the Constitution requires almost unobstructed access to abortion. Pro-life voters and activists, who number in the millions, clearly aren't buying it. We're to suppose efforts to smother intelligent design will bear larger, lusher fruit?

The meeting place of faith and reason is proverbially darkish and unstable -- a place to which the discussants bring sometimes violently different assumptions about truth and where to find it. Yet, the recent remarks of the philosopher-theologian Michael Novak make great sense: "I don't understand why in the public schools we cannot have a day or two of discussion about the relative roles of science and religion." A discussion isn't a sermon or an altar call, is it?

Equally to the point, what does secular intolerance achieve in terms of revitalizing public schools, rendering them intellectually catalytic? As many religious folk see it, witch-hunts for Christian influences are an engrained part of present public-school curricula. Is this where they want the kids? Might private schools -- not necessarily religious ones -- offer a better alternative? Might home schooling?

Alienating bright, energized, intellectually alert customers is normally accounted bad business, but that's the direction in which Darwinian dogmatists point. Thanks to them and other such foes of free speech in the science classroom -- federal judges included -- we seem likely to hear less and less about survival of the fittest and more and more about survival of the least curious, the least motivated, the most gullible.

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Find this story at: http://townhall.com/opinion/columns/billmurchison/2005/12/28/180478.html

[13Sisters76]

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Phillip Johnson Archives

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Darwinists Squirm Under Spotlight
Interview with Phillip E. Johnson

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This article is reprinted from an interview with Citizen Magazine, January 1992.

Phillip Johnson has been a law professor at the University of California at Berkeley for more than 20 years. As an academic lawyer, one of Johnson's specialties is "analyzing the logic of arguments and identifying the assumptions that lie behind those arguments." A few years ago he began to suspect that Darwinism, far from being an objective fact, was little more than a philosophical position dressed up as science--and poor science at that. Wanting to see whether his initial impression was correct, Johnson decided to take a closer look at the arguments, evidence and assumptions underlying contemporary Darwinism. The result of his investigation is Darwin on Trial, a controversial new book that challenges not only Darwinism but the philosophical mindset that sustains it.

When did you first become aware that Darwinism was in trouble as a scientific theory?

I had been vaguely aware that there were problems, but I'd never had any intention of taking up the subject seriously or in detail until the 1987-88 academic year, when I was a visiting professor in London. Every day on the way to my office I happened to go by a large bookstore devoted to science. I picked up one book after another and became increasingly fascinated with the obvious difficulties in the Darwinist case--difficulties that were being evaded by tricky rhetoric and emphatic repetition. I then began delving into the professional literature, especially in scientific journals such as Nature and Science. At every step, what I found was a failure of the evidence to be in accord with the theory.

What was it that initially made you suspect that Darwinism was more philosophy than hard science?

It was the way my scientific colleagues responded when I asked the hard questions. Instead of taking the intellectual questions seriously and responding to them, they would answer with all sorts of evasions and vague language, making it impossible to discuss the real objections to Darwinism. This is the way people talk when they're trying very hard not to understand something.

Another tip-off was the sharp contrast I noticed between the extremely dogmatic tone that Darwinists use when addressing the general public and the occasional frank acknowledgments, in scientific circles, of serious problems with the theory. For example, I would read Stephen Jay Gould telling the scientific world that Darwinism was effectively dead as a theory. And then in the popular literature, I would read Gould and other scientific writers saying that Darwinism was fundamentally healthy, and that scientists had the remaining problems well under control. There was a contradiction here, and it looked as though there was an effort to keep the outside world from becoming aware of the serious intellectual difficulties.

What are some of the intellectual difficulties? Can you give an example?

The most important is the fossil problem, because this is a direct record of the history of life on earth. If Darwinism were true, you would expect the fossil evidence to contain many examples of Darwinian evolution. You would expect to see fossils that really couldn't be understood except as transitions between one kind of organism and another. You would also expect to see some of the common ancestors that gave birth to different groups like fish and reptiles. You wouldn't expect to find them in every case, of course. It's perfectly reasonable to say that a great deal of the fossil evidence has been lost. But you would continually be finding examples of things that fit well with the theory.

In reality, the fossil record is something that Darwinists have had to explain away, because what it shows is the sudden appearance of organisms that exhibit no trace of step-by-step development from earlier forms. And it shows that once these organisms exist, they remain fundamentally unchanged, despite the passage of millions of years-and despite climatic and environmental changes that should have produced enormous Darwinian evolution if the theory were true. In short, if evolution is the gradual, step-by-step transformation of one kind of thing into another, the outstanding feature of the fossil record is the absence of evidence for evolution.

But isn't it possible, as many Darwinists say, that the fossil evidence is just too scanty to show evidence of Darwinian evolution?

The question is whether or not Darwinism is a scientific theory that can be tested with scientific evidence. If you assume that the theory is true, you can deal with conflicting evidence by saying that the evidence has disappeared. But then the question arises, how do you know it's true if it isn't recorded in the fossils? Where is the proof? It's not in genetics. And it's not in the molecular evidence, which shows similarities between organisms but doesn't tell you how those similarities came about. So the proof isn't anywhere, and it's illegitimate to approach the fossil record with the conclusive assumption that the theory is true so that you can read into the fossil record whatever you need to support the theory.

If Darwinism has been so thoroughly disconfirmed, why do so many scientists say it's a fact?

There are several factors that explain this. One is that Darwinism is fundamentally a religious position, not a scientific position. The project of Darwinism is to explain the world and all its life forms in a way that excludes any role for a creator. And that project is sacred to the scientific naturalist-to the person who denies that God can in any way influence natural events.

It's also an unfortunate fact in the history of science that scientists will stick to a theory which is untrue until they get an acceptable alternative theory-which to a Darwinist means a strictly naturalistic theory. So for them, the question is not whether Darwinism is true. The question is whether there is a better theory that's philosophically acceptable. Any suggestion that Darwinism is false, and that we should admit our ignorance about the origin of complex life-forms, is simply unacceptable. In their eyes, Darwinism is the best naturalistic theory, and therefore effectively true. The argument that it's false can't even be heard.

Surely there are some skeptics in the scientific world. What of them?

Well, there are several, and we can see what happened to them. You have paleontologist Colin Patterson, who's quoted in my first chapter. He made a very bold statement, received a lot of vicious criticism, and then pulled back. This is a typical pattern.

Another pattern is that of Stephen Jay Gould, who said that Darwinism is effectively dead as a general theory-and then realized that he had given a powerful weapon to the creationists, whose existence cannot be tolerated. So now Gould says that he's really a good Darwinist, and that all he really meant was that Darwinism could be improved by developing a larger theory that included Darwinism. What we have here is politics, not science. Darwinism is politically correct for the scientific community, because it enables them to fight off any rivals for cultural authority.

Darwinists often accuse creationists of intolerance. But you're suggesting that the Darwinists are intolerant?

If you want to know what Darwinist science is really like, read what the Darwinists say about the creationists, because those things-regardless of whether they're true about the creationists-are true about the Darwinists. I've found that people often say things about their enemies that are true of themselves. And I think Darwinist science has many of the defects that the Darwinists are so indignant about when they describe the creationists.

Across the country, there has been a growing trend toward teaching evolution as a fact-especially in California, your own state. What does this say about science education in America?

This is an attempt to establish a religious position as orthodox throughout the educational establishment, and thus throughout the society. It's gone very far. The position is what I call "scientific naturalism." The scientific organizations, for example, tell us that if we wish to maintain our country's economic status and cope with environmental problems, we must give everyone a scientific outlook. But the "scientific outlook" they have in mind is one which, by definition, excludes God from any role in the world, from the Big Bang to the present. So this is fundamentally a religious position-a fundamentalist position, if you like--and it's being taught in the schools as a fact when it isn't even a good theory.

Why should Christians be concerned about a scientific theory? Why does it matter?

Well, not only Christians should care about it. Everyone should. It is religion in the name of science, and that means that it is misleading people about both religion and science.

Copyright © 1997 Phillip E. Johnson. All rights reserved. International copyright secured.
File Date:2.22.97

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[Havoc]

Survival of the fittest is a knard. If it worked, the theory would stand on it's own. As it is, it has to be protected and forced on everyone. Kinda funny isn't it.

[Malygris]

REMOVING RELIGION FROM SCHOOL WAS NOT AN ATTACK ON RELIGION. IT WAS DONE TO PROTECT MINORITIES FROM HAVING THE MAJORITY FORCE IT'S BELIEFS ON THEM AND VICE VERSA.

An example to illustrate my point :

I believe that the Flying Spaghetti Monster created the universe. I want prayers to the FSM in school before every spaghetti dinner.

You think that's silly ?

Me too. Yet, logically, it's no more silly then believing in a guy living on clouds that created the universe since there is as much evidence of one as of the other.

If you, Christians, can have what you want then all other religions must be accomodated too if they ask for it.

You'd have to teach the FSM's creation myth.
Kids would pray to the FSM before every Spaghetti dinner.

Do you want your schools to be like that ?


Protestants seperated from the Catholic Church, it would be more logical to say that you're the one who isn't Christian.