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The case for teaching intelligent design in public schools; part 2
TheCypressTimes.com ^ | 03/30/2010 | John Mark Burleigh

Posted on 03/30/2010 2:34:25 PM PDT by Patriot1259

aving established that the universe must have been created by an Intelligent Designer, let us now consider the issue of the origin of life in the universe. Though many believe science has proven that evolution is a fact, we will demonstrate that nothing could be further from the truth. At best evolution is a theory, a “guess” about the origin of life, and many scientists will tell you that there are a lot of unanswered questions. Even Darwin admitted as much in his Origin of the Species: “Long before the reader has arrived at this part of my work, a crowd of difficulties will have occurred to him. Some of them are so serious that to this day I can hardly reflect on them without being to some degree staggered.”

Evolutionist W. LeGros Clark wrote, “What was the ultimate origin of man?… Unfortunately, any answers which can at present be given to these questions are based on indirect evidence and thus are largely conjectural.”

Evolutionist G.A. Kerkut stated, “I believe that the theory of evolution… is in many ways a satisfying explanation of some of the evidence. At the same time I think that the attempt to explain all living forms in terms of evolution from a unique source… is premature and not satisfactorily supported by present day evidence… The supporting evidence remains to be discovered…. I for one do not think that it has been proven beyond all reasonable doubt.” After listing the seven non-provable assumptions upon which evolution is based, Dr. Kerkut stated that “these seven assumptions by their nature are not capable of experimental verification.”...

(Excerpt) Read more at thecypresstimes.com ...


TOPICS: Education; Religion
KEYWORDS: design; god; intelligent; publicschools
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1 posted on 03/30/2010 2:34:26 PM PDT by Patriot1259
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To: Patriot1259

What a pant load


2 posted on 03/30/2010 2:43:31 PM PDT by HospiceNurse
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To: HospiceNurse

Agreed.


3 posted on 03/30/2010 2:45:14 PM PDT by stormer
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To: Patriot1259
The way the question is usually phrased is this: "Should religion be put on an equal footing with evolution in public schools?"

The correct answer is "Only if the religion you choose is the RIGHT one."

In other words, to have an apples/apples comparison, you'd need a religion which operated on an intellectual level similar to that of evolution, and the only two plausible candidates would be Rastafari and Voodoo.

In fact, Rastafari would lend itself rather admirably to certain kinds of team teaching situations in public schools: a teacher looking for a way to put 30 teenagers into the proper frame of mind for indoctrination into an essentially brain-dead ideological doctrine like evolution could then walk across the hall to the Rasta class for a box of spliffs...

4 posted on 03/30/2010 2:56:24 PM PDT by wendy1946
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To: Patriot1259
The way the question is usually phrased is this: "Should religion be put on an equal footing with evolution in public schools?"

The correct answer is "Only if the religion you choose is the RIGHT one." In other words, to have an apples/apples comparison, you'd need a religion which operated on an intellectual level similar to that of evolution, and the only two plausible candidates would be Rastafari and Voodoo.

In fact, Rastafari would lend itself rather admirably to certain kinds of team teaching situations in public schools: a teacher looking for a way to put 30 teenagers into the proper frame of mind for indoctrination into an essentially brain-dead ideological doctrine like evolution could then walk across the hall to the Rasta class for a box of spliffs...
5 posted on 03/30/2010 2:57:17 PM PDT by wendy1946
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To: Patriot1259
"At best evolution is a theory, a “guess” about the origin of life"

False. That's what evolutionISM is. Google it.

6 posted on 03/30/2010 3:01:43 PM PDT by Matchett-PI (Sowell's book, Intellectuals and Society, eviscerates the fantasies that uphold leftist thought)
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To: Patriot1259
"At best evolution is a theory, a “guess”

And, at most, all religion is hypothesis

BTW, A Theory is not a "guess", it's a developed framework for experimentation and testing. I can explain that for you but the problem is I can't understand it for you.

7 posted on 03/30/2010 3:45:06 PM PDT by muir_redwoods (Obama: Chauncey Gardiner without the homburg)
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To: muir_redwoods
The problem is with the basic laws of mathematics and probability, with which evolution is essentially incompatible. The (proportionally) biggest group of people not buying into evoloserism is mathematicians, and not Christians.

The best illustration of how stupid evolutionism really is involves trying to become some totally new animal with new organs, a new basic plan for existence, and new requirements for integration between both old and new organs.

Take flying birds for example; suppose you aren't one, and you want to become one. You'll need a baker's dozen highly specialized systems, including wings, flight feathers, a specialized light bone structure, specialized flow-through design heart and lungs, specialized tail, specialized general balance parameters etc.

For starters, every one of these things would be antifunctional until the day on which the whole thing came together, so that the chances of evolving any of these things by any process resembling evolution (mutations plus selection) would amount to an infinitessimal, i.e. one divided by some gigantic number.

In probability theory, to compute the probability of two things happening at once, you multiply the probabilities together. That says that the likelihood of all these things ever happening at once (which is what you'd need), best case, is ten or twelve such infinitessimals multiplied together, i.e. a tenth or twelth-order infinitessimal. The whole history of the universe isn't long enough for that to happen once.

All of that was the best case. For the pieces of being a flying bird to evolve piecemeal would be much harder. In real life, natural selection could not plausibly select for hoped-for functionality, which is what would be required in order to evolve flight feathers on something which could not fly apriori. In real life, all you'd ever get would some sort of a random walk around some starting point, rather than the unidircetional march towards a future requirement which evolution requires.

And the real killer, i.e. the thing which simply kills evolutionism dead, is the following consideration: In real life, assuming you were to somehow miraculously evolve the first feature you'd need to become a flying bird, then by the time another 10,000 generations rolled around and you evolved the second such reature, the first, having been disfunctional/antifunctional all the while, would have DE-EVOLVED and either disappeared altogether or become vestigial.

Now, it would be miraculous if, given all the above, some new kind of complex creature with new organs and a new basic plan for life had ever evolved ONCE.

Evolutionism, however (the Theory of Evolution) requires that this has happened countless billions of times, i.e. an essentially infinite number of absolutely zero probability events.

And, if you were starting to think that nothing could possibly be any stupider than believing in evolution despite all of the above (i.e. that the basic stupidity of evolutionism starting from 1980 or thereabouts could not possibly be improved upon), think again. Because there is zero evidence in the fossil record to support any sort of a theory involving macroevolution, and because the original conceptions of evolution are flatly refuted by developments in population genetics since the 1950's, the latest incarnation of this theory, Steve Gould and Niles Eldredge's "Punctuated Equilibrium or punc-eek" attempts to claim that these wholesale violations of probabilistic laws all occurred so suddenly as to never leave evidence in the fossil record, and that they all occurred amongst tiny groups of animals living in "peripheral" areas. That says that some velocirapter who wanted to be a bird got together with fifty of his friends and said:

Guys, we need flight feathers, and wings, and specialized bones, hearts, lungs, and tails, and we need em NOW; not two years from now. Everybody ready, all together now:
OOOOOMMMMMMMMMMMMMmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm.....

You could devise a new religion by taking the single stupidest doctrine from each of the existing religions, and it would not be as stupid as THAT.

But it gets even stupider.

Again, the original Darwinian vision of gradualistic evolution is flatly refuted by the fossil record (Darwinian evolution demanded that the vast bulk of ALL fossils be intermediates) and by the findings of population genetics, particularly the Haldane dilemma and the impossible time requirements for spreading genetic changes through any sizeable herd of animals.

Consider what Gould and other punk-eekers are saying. Punc-eek amounts to a claim that all meaningful evolutionary change takes place in peripheral areas, amongst tiny groups of animals which develop some genetic advantage, and then move out and overwhelm, outcompete, and replace the larger herds. They are claiming that this eliminates the need to spread genetic change through any sizeable herd of animals and, at the same time, is why we never find intermediate fossils (since there are never enough of these CHANGELINGS to leave fossil evidence).

Obvious problems with punctuated equilibria include, minimally:

1. It is a pure pseudoscience seeking to explain and actually be proved by a lack of evidence rather than by evidence (all the missing intermediate fossils). Similarly, Cotton Mather claimed that the fact that nobody had ever seen or heard a witch was proof they were there (if you could SEE them, they wouldn't BE witches...) This kind of logic is less inhibiting than the logic they used to teach in American schools.

2. PE amounts to a claim that inbreeding is the most major source of genetic advancement in the world. Apparently Steve Gould never saw Deliverance...

3. PE requires these tiny peripheral groups to conquer vastly larger groups of animals millions if not billions of times, which is like requiring Custer to win at the little Big Horn every day, for millions of years.

4. PE requires an eternal victory of animals specifically adapted to localized and parochial conditions over animals which are globally adapted, which never happens in real life.

5. For any number of reasons, you need a minimal population of any animal to be viable. This is before the tiny group even gets started in overwhelming the vast herds. A number of American species such as the heath hen became non-viable when their numbers were reduced to a few thousand; at that point, any stroke of bad luck at all, a hard winter, a skewed sex ratio in one generation, a disease of some sort, and it's all over. The heath hen was fine as long as it was spread out over the East coast of the U.S. The point at which it got penned into one of these "peripheral" areas which Gould and Eldredge see as the salvation for evolutionism, it was all over.

The sort of things noted in items 3 and 5 are generally referred to as the "gambler's problem", in this case, the problem facing the tiny group of "peripheral" animals being similar to that facing a gambler trying to beat the house in blackjack or roulette; the house could lose many hands of cards or rolls of the dice without flinching, and the globally-adapted species spread out over a continent could withstand just about anything short of a continental-scale catastrophe without going extinct, while two or three bad rolls of the dice will bankrupt the gambler, and any combination of two or three strokes of bad luck will wipe out the "peripheral" species. Gould's basic method of handling this problem is to ignore it.

And there's one other thing which should be obvious to anybody attempting to read through Gould and Eldridge's BS:

The don't even bother to try to provide a mechanism or technical explaination of any sort for this "punk-eek"

They are claiming that at certain times, amongst tiny groups of animals living in peripheral areas, a "speciation event(TM)" happens, and THEN the rest of it takes place. In other words, they are saying:

ASSUMING that Abracadabra-Shazaam(TM) happens, then the rest of the business proceeds as we have described in our scholarly discourse above!

Again, Gould and Eldridge require that the Abracadabra-Shazaam(TM) happen not just once, but countless billions of times, i.e. at least once for every kind of complex creature which has ever walked the Earth. They do not specify whether this amounts to the same Abracadabra-Shazaam each time, or a different kind of Abracadabra-Shazaam for each creature.

8 posted on 03/30/2010 4:05:07 PM PDT by wendy1946
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To: HospiceNurse
That is being generous.

Amazing how people who might possibly want to be taken seriously on this issue cannot seem to differentiate between evolution and the origins of life, or the difference between a scientific theory and a “guess”.

Ludicrous.

9 posted on 03/30/2010 4:07:20 PM PDT by allmendream (Income is EARNED not distributed. So how could it be re-distributed?)
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To: Patriot1259
Yet anohter implicit assertion that it is impossible for life to have been designed with the ability to evolve.

Intelligent Design and Evolution are presented as mutually exclusive and contradictory theories.

WHY?

10 posted on 03/30/2010 4:14:37 PM PDT by tacticalogic ("Oh bother!" said Pooh, as he chambered his last round.)
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To: tacticalogic
Because cdesign proponentists are attempting a “Trojan Horse” to smuggle creationism past the walls, that is why.

But your point is quite valid. To it I add this query...

What would be a more intelligent design, I design something that adapts to changing circumstances, or I design something that cannot change in response to changing circumstances?

11 posted on 03/30/2010 4:54:59 PM PDT by allmendream (Income is EARNED not distributed. So how could it be re-distributed?)
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To: wendy1946

you’re speaking nonsense no more reasonable than astrology. I won’t waste bandwidth with people like you


12 posted on 03/30/2010 7:18:38 PM PDT by muir_redwoods (Obama: Chauncey Gardiner without the homburg)
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To: muir_redwoods

Translation into plain English: “I didn’t really understand any of that, therefore you must be an idiot...”


13 posted on 03/30/2010 9:34:28 PM PDT by wendy1946
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To: wendy1946
"Translation into plain English: “I didn’t really understand any of that, therefore you must be an idiot...”

So, you can't think, can't write and can't even translate either. Must have been a heck of a head injury you suffered.

14 posted on 03/31/2010 2:18:47 AM PDT by muir_redwoods (Obama: Chauncey Gardiner without the homburg)
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To: muir_redwoods

How exactly can evolution be tested?


15 posted on 04/02/2010 4:47:07 PM PDT by schaef21
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To: muir_redwoods

Epithets aren’t arguments, Redwoods.....deal with Wendy’s arguments......


16 posted on 04/02/2010 4:53:55 PM PDT by schaef21
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To: schaef21
Evolution can be tested by proving that apes and humans have a common ancestor. This is easily accomplished if one understands that some viruses leave inheritable traits on the genome. If you get one of these viruses all of your descendants will have the same marker in precisely the same spot on the enormous human genome.

There are such markers on all humans' genomes. The same marker is on the exact same link of the genome of the chimpanzee proving that an ancestor common to both got the virus and passed on the change to all of its descendants; human and chimp.

There are many such examples. Coincidence is on the order of billions to one against.

17 posted on 04/02/2010 6:59:08 PM PDT by muir_redwoods (Obama: Chauncey Gardiner without the homburg)
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To: schaef21

Wendy doesn’t have an argument; she has a hopeful speculation based upon an absurdity. She and the other ID-iots are deluded.


18 posted on 04/02/2010 7:00:15 PM PDT by muir_redwoods (Obama: Chauncey Gardiner without the homburg)
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To: Patriot1259; HospiceNurse; stormer; wendy1946; muir_redwoods; allmendream; tacticalogic; ...

“In this country, evolution is taught in elementary schools as science. The only one’s in this country who object to that are conservative Christians, who are put down as anti-science.

“The arguments of the “pro-science” (mostly global-warming environmentalist type academic) zealots are absurd. Even if there were any science in evolution, teaching it in grade school is tantamount to teaching the Calculus to third graders who have not learned long division yet. First teach them some physics, some chemistry, some biology, some organic chemistry, cell biology, and genetics; then, perhaps, they will be ready to learn about evolution, but would probably know enough by then to see that it is all bunk.”

http://usabig.com/atnmst/jrnl_ii.php?art=88

Hank


19 posted on 04/02/2010 7:11:38 PM PDT by Hank Kerchief
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To: schaef21; muir_redwoods
How exactly can evolution be tested?

Evolution has BEEN tested, repeatedly, and has failed every test.

The most spectacular of such were the tests involving fruit flies in the early decades of the last century.Fruit flies breed new generations every other DAY, so that running tests on fruit flies for two or three decades will amount to more generations of fruit flies than there ever have been of anything remotely resembling humans on this planet.

They subjected those flies to everything in the world known to cause mutations and recombined mutants every possible way. All they ever got was sterile freaks and fruit flies. No wasps, hornets, butterflies, caterpillars, bees, ants, spiders, or anything else, just fruit flies. Several prominent scientists publicly denounced evolution as a bunch of BULLSHIT as a result of those tests including the famous case of Richard Goldschmidt who claimed afterward to be being subjected to something akin to Orwell's two minute hate seances of 1984 by colleagues.

The reason they never got anything but fruit flies is that our entire living world is driven by information, and the only information they ever had was that for a fruit fly. When the information code of RNA/DNA became known in the mid 1960s, the mystery was basically resolved. There has never been a valid reason for anybody with any semblance of brains or talent believing in evolution since that time.

20 posted on 04/02/2010 7:46:03 PM PDT by wendy1946
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