Posted on 03/08/2002 4:48:30 AM PST by cracker
State education officials never imagined they would receive so many inquiries about the upcoming debate over the teaching of intelligent design alongside evolution in the science curricula.
"We've been overwhelmed with the amount of interest,'' said Ohio school board President Jennifer L. Sheets of Pomeroy. "There are a lot of media outlets that want to attend and just in the past few days we heard there were some school groups interested.''
The intense interest prompted the Ohio Department of Education yesterday to move Monday's panel discussion on the topic to Veterans Memorial.
The Downtown auditorium seats 3,900, nearly 10 times as many as the facility at the Ohio School for the Blind, which had been set to host the morning event.
Board members began expressing concern about space after learning that a forum hosted by Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland last weekend drew more than 2,500.
"We didn't give people any indication that seating would be limited or on a first-come, first-serve basis, so we wanted to make an attempt to be accommodating,'' Sheets said.
Ohio has drawn national attention as the latest battleground for the intelligent-design movement. By a margin of 5-3, a state board subcommittee appears to favor including the concept in new grade-by-grade standards for what 1.8 million public- school students are taught about the origins of life. The full 19-member board, which ultimately will decide the issue, is more evenly split, with about a third undecided.
Although teachers will not be required to follow the guidelines, they will become the basis for a new 10th- grade graduation test and other student assessments.
The Education Department has received about 50 inquires about the controversy from the news media -- including one from The Guardian in London, England -- and stories about the Ohio debate have appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post and Christian Science Monitor. One story occupies a full page in this week's Time magazine.
Supporters of intelligent design say life is too complex and diverse to be explained merely through evolution, and an unidentified higher intelligence must have played a role. They acknowledge it could have been the biblical God, as creationists believe, but say they are open to other explanations such as extraterrestrial intelligence or another force.
Evolutionists believe that Earth is billions of years old and that life developed through natural selection from simple to more complex forms and eventually human beings. They argue that intelligent design is merely a new spin on a decades-old effort to get religion in the classroom and comes in the wake of a series of court rulings barring creation science from public schools.
"It's amazing to me that we are even having this debate. We should be working to improve science curriculum and not fighting off some medieval attack on science,'' said Lawrence Krauss, chairman of the Physics Department at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland and one of two advocates for evolution on Monday's panel.
"Basically, these people are not opposed to evolution but the teaching of science in general and they are trying to bypass the science community and peer review by going straight to the State Board of Education and legislature.''
Michael Cochran, a board member from Blacklick, said he has been amazed by the animosity from the mainstream science community to intelligent design. Cochran sparked the debate earlier this year when he complained that intelligent-design supporters were excluded from the team of mostly science teachers which wrote the proposed standards.
"The scientific community looks at them as lepers,'' he said.
Cochran, a member of the standards subcommittee, said he will ask for a vote as early as April to have intelligent design included in the standards -- despite suggestions from department officials that some on the 41-member writing team likely would quit in protest.
"I would expect them to make the changes we request. They are professionals, but if it gets to the point where the writing team won't do it, then we'll have to,'' Cochran said.
The board, which will not vote on the matter Monday, has until the end of the year to come up with the new science-teaching standards.
The second panelist supporting evolution, Kenneth R. Miller, a biology professor at Brown University in Providence, R.I., said intelligent design has no place in the classroom. Unlike other scientific ideas, intelligent design has not won the acceptance of the science community by having its supporters write papers for review and criticism by their peers.
"Being open-minded does not mean that adding two plus two equals five should be taught in math class . . . or teaching witchcraft in health is a good idea,'' Miller said.
"What you are really looking at is an intellectual movement that has a tiny base of people with scientific credentials making an attempt to get religion into the classroom.''
The panelists supporting intelligent design, Stephen C. Meyer and Jonathan Wells, both of the Center for the Renewal of Science & Culture at the Discovery Institute in Seattle, could not be reached for comment.
Bruce Chapman, director of the institute, attempts to refute the persistent arguments that intelligent design is about religion.
"That's just not what we're talking about. We're just trying to critique Darwin. If you have a theory, you are supposed to welcome criticism, but they don't want it,'' he said. "We just think that students are entitled to learn differing views.''
Here's the pro-and-con editorials from the Op-Ed page today:
Next week, the State Board of Education will take up the question of whether Ohio's schools should teach intelligent design along with evolution as part of its science curriculum.
They should not, and we are indebted to distinguished Ohio scientists for demonstrating why they should not.
For example, Lawrence Krauss, chairman of the Physics Department at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, will testify before the board about the problems with intelligent design as scientific theory. As Krauss and others have pointed out repeatedly, proponents of intelligent design do not typically present their theories at scientific meetings; they do not submit their work for publication in peer-reviewed journals; in most ways, they are not even in the science ballpark.
In short, intelligent design is not just bad science, it is not science at all.
For this reason, the conclusion that many scientists draw is that intelligent-design theory is really religion masquerading as science. If it is not genuine science, it must be religion. The proposal for teaching intelligent design as part of a science curriculum is, thus, seen as a kind of Trojan horse by which religious education is smuggled into the public schools.
Given the provenance of intelligent-design theory, there is probably some truth to this Trojan-horse view. If so, intelligent design is not just bad science but also bad religion.
One of the claims that the State Board of Education is likely to hear next week is that there is not a single article on intelligent design in the scientific literature. For the most part, the same is true for the theological literature -- it does not carry articles on intelligent design.
Indeed, if you turn to the serious theological work being done at the intersection of science and religion, no theologian is championing the cause of intelligent design. In his book, God After Darwin, John Haught explains why. The problem with intelligent design, he writes, is that it leads us to ignore the novelty that is essential to life. It ignores the continual breakdown of fixed order that contemporary science irrefutably has established.
According to Haught, "By associating the idea of God only with the fact of order at the expense of novelty, a theology based on design is likely to attribute nature's disorder to the demonic. By exonerating ultimate reality of any complicity in chaos, such a theology removes God from the flow of life itself.''
Frederick Crews, author and professor emeritus of English at the University of California at Berkely, is even more blunt: Intelligent design, he says, embraces two clashing pictures of God, "one a glutton for praise and a dispenser of wrath,'' the other a "curiously inept cobbler of species.''
The scientists who have opposed intelligent design are right to insist that theology has no place in the science classroom. The reverse, however, is not true. Theologians always have insisted on, if not always observed, the importance of developing their work in dialogue with science.
No less an authority than St. Thomas Aquinas, for example, insisted that theologians must seek truth in the light of the best science available to them, because error about the natural world may lead to false claims about God.
In the work of contemporary theologians, such as Haught, John Cobb, Wolfhart Pannenberg, Sally McFague and others, one finds serious theologians wrestling in a sustained way with contemporary science in an effort to speak more truly about God.
This effort is found in the dialogue that the American Catholic bishops have begun with the establishment of the Committee on Science and Human Values. But this commitment is not found among religious thinkers who cite intelligent design but know almost nothing about contemporary science.
Any way you look at it, intelligent design is deeply flawed. Take your pick: bad science or bad religion.
Either way, we should not be teaching it in our schools.
John Lauritzen is the chairman of the Department of Religious Studies at John Carroll University in Cleveland.
plauritzen@jcu.edu
Don't forget to visit the Crevo List for all the latest!
As the State Board of Education debates revisions to the state science education standards, polls continue to show overwhelming support for teaching the origins issue in an open-minded rather than dogmatic fashion. But the defenders of a Darwin-only approach continue to insist that evolution, unlike other controversial subjects, shouldn't be debated but simply accepted as scientific fact.
Of course, Darwin's critics have never denied that some forms of evolution -- changes in the characteristics of a species, such as the color of moths or the beaks of finches -- can be observed and even manipulated to the benefit of humankind. But Darwin's particular claim -- that the appearance of living things, even "organs of extreme perfection,'' can be explained adequately by random variation and natural selection -- is quite controversial.
Nonetheless, it is often asserted that some form of Darwinism is the only theory that can legally be taught in public schools because other theories are religious and therefore unconstitutional if presented in a public school. The most authoritative pronouncement we have comes from the U.S. Supreme Court, which in 1987 ruled that a state legislature couldn't require "equal time'' for a biblically based perspective on the issue.
While Darwinists claim that this opinion restricts the science curriculum to Darwinism, they conveniently ignore the sentence from the court's opinion reassuring school administrators that "teaching a variety of scientific theories about the origins of humankind to schoolchildren might be validly done with the clear secular intent of enhancing the effectiveness of science instruction.''
Even when this sentence is called to their attention, Darwinists respond by claiming that only Darwinism is truly a "scientific theory,'' and that any suggestion of a purposeful intelligence as the source of the appearance of design in nature is religion, even if cleverly disguised.
Ironically, one of the most prominent Darwinists, Richard Dawkins, admits that the hallmark of living things is that they "appear to have been designed for a purpose,'' but he strenuously argues that "science'' consists only in presenting evidence to show that this appearance is illusory.
The theory of intelligent design, which is gaining support among biologists who study the origins issue, simply follows the evidence where it leads, just as the evidence from astronomy and physics led cosmologists to conclude that the universe, including time, space and matter, had a beginning in what we call the Big Bang. Sometimes science points beyond material causes to an immaterial explanation, as many physicists acknowledge. The theory of intelligent design suggests that scientists should be free to do likewise when it comes to biological origins.
It is particularly disingenuous for Darwinists to criticize intelligent design as "disguised religion'' when the latest hymn of praise to Darwin -- an 8- hour PBS special on evolution -- is subtitled "a journey into where we're from and where we're going.''
Not only did the series repeatedly address religion explicitly (including devoting the concluding hour to the topic, "What About God?''), but it regularly suggested that Darwin's theory has replaced traditional religion as the basis for knowing who we are and where we are going. Studying the evidence for the Big Bang, or for intelligent design of living things, will certainly generate philosophical -- even religious -- implications. But so, it is clear, does the assertion that we are the product of blind chance.
Opponents of teaching the origins issue in an open-minded way frequently point out that the theory of intelligent design is still a minority position and that most scientists favor some form of Darwinian evolution. That would be a telling point if proponents wanted to replace instruction about Darwinian evolution with intelligent design. But that has never been the issue. Our students certainly deserve to hear the case for Darwinism in its most persuasive form.
At the same time, Americans have always placed a high value on hearing evidence before passing judgment, and experienced educators know that students always benefit from becoming active participants in the process of learning, rather than remaining passive receptacles for a prepackaged belief system.
It's no wonder that the public continues to prefer an inclusive presentation of this controversy to more special pleading for Darwinism.
David K. DeWolf, is a professor at the Gonzaga Law School in Spokane, Wash.
ID proponents run into trouble when they try to argue that ID replaces or refutes or challeneges evolution in some respect - trying to offer religious answers to scientific questions. Religion in church, science in school: that's all the equal time we need.
This is only the first part of the humanist movement mantra: i.e. the marginalization of God in the public arena.
The second part speaks to the complete removal of God from society: i.e. the destruction of the church.
Here's a little sample of the famous "list-o-links" (so the creationists don't get to start each new thread from ground zero).
01: Site that debunks virtually all of creationism's fallacies. Excellent resource.
02: Creation "Science" Debunked.
03: Creationi sm and Pseudo Science. Familiar cartoon then lots of links.
04: The SKEPTIC annotated bibliography. Amazingly great meta-site!
05: The Evidence for Human Evolution. For the "no evidence" crowd.
06: Massi ve mega-site with thousands of links on evolution, creationism, young earth, etc..
07: Another amazing site full of links debunking creationism.
08: Creationism and Pseudo Science. Great cartoon!
09: Glenn R. Morton's site about creationism's fallacies. Another jennyp contribution.
11: Is Evolution Science?. Successful PREDICTIONS of evolution (Moonman62).
12: Five Major Misconceptions about Evolution. On point and well-written.
13: Frequently Asked But Never Answered Questions. A creationist nightmare!
14: DARWIN, FULL TEXT OF HIS WRITINGS. The original ee-voe-lou-shunist.
The foregoing was just a tiny sample. So that everyone will have access to the accumulated "Creationism vs. Evolution" threads which have previously appeared on FreeRepublic, plus links to hundreds of sites with a vast amount of information on this topic, here's Junior's massive work, available for all to review:
The Ultimate Creation vs. Evolution Resource [ver 15].
That's BS. In order to have a meaningful dialectic between evolution and religion, you would need a religion which operated on an intellectual level similar to that of evolution, and the only two possible candidates would be Rastifari and Voodoo. The debate would be between the evolutionists, and the voodoo doctors: Dick Dawkins vs Jr. Doc Duvalier.
The real dialectic is between evolution and mathematics. Professing belief in evolution at this juncture amounts to the same thing as claiming not to believe in modern mathematics, probability theory, and logic. It's basically ignorant.
Evolution has been so thoroughly discredited at this point that you assume nobody is defending it because they believe in it anymore, and that they are defending it because they do not like the prospects of having to defend or explain some expect of their lifestyles to God, St. Peter, Muhammed...
To these people I say, you've still got a problem. The problem is that evolution, as a doctrine, is so overwhelmingly STUPID that, faced with a choice of wearing a sweatshirt with a scarlet letter A for Adulteror, F for Fornicator or some such traditional design, or or a big scarlet letter I for IDIOT, you'd actually be better off sticking with one of the traditional choices because, as Clint Eastwood noted in The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly:
God hates IDIOTS, too!
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, 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. In real life, it's even worse than that. 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 (despite the BS claims of talk.origins "crew" and others of their ilk) 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 or hear them, they wouldn't be witches...) That sort of logic is less limiting than the ordinary logic which used to be taught in American schools. For instance, I could claim that the fact that the fact that nobody has ever seen me with Tina Turner was all the evidence anybody could want that I was sleeping with her.....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:
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.
I ask you: How could anything be stupider or worse than that? What could possibly be worse than professing to believe in such a thing?
Many Experts Quoted on FUBAR State of Evolution
"If a person doesn't think that there is a God to be accountable to, then what's the point of trying to modify your behavior to keep it within acceptable ranges? That's how I thought anyway. I always believed the theory of evolution as truth, that we all came from slime. When we died, you know , that was it, there is nothing..."
Jeffrey Dahmer, noted Evolutionist
Next, an attack on astronomers, who admit that the hallmark of celestial bodies is that they "appear to revolve around a stationary earth" but strenuously argue that "science" consists only in presenting evidence to show that this appearance is illusory.
The theory of intelligent design, which is gaining support among biologists who study the origins issue, simply follows the evidence where it leads, just as the evidence from astronomy and physics led cosmologists to conclude that the universe, including time, space and matter, had a beginning in what we call the Big Bang. Sometimes science points beyond material causes to an immaterial explanation, as many physicists acknowledge.
Physicists acknowledge no such thing. They don't posit an "immaterial explanation" for the Big Bang -- they note that they have no explanation at the moment, and attempt to come up with one.
In any case, "intelligent design" is not an explanation for anything. Besides the obvious evasion of the issue of the intelligent designer's origin, the problem is that any observation is compatible with an "intelligent design" theory. Some biological features are exquisitely crafted? The designer made them that way. Other biological features are horrible kludges? The designer made them that way. Everything bears some bits of resemblance to corresponding features in other related species? The designer made them that way. This "theory" is merely the invention of a more impressive name for "Ida Know".
Explain, in fifty words or less, the difference between this statement and the whine of the Jesse Jackasses of the world that lack of special government favors constitutes "marginalization".
You'll be able to do it fifty words short of your quota, because there isn't any.
Explain, in fifty words or less, the difference between this statement and the whine of the Jesse Jackasses of the world that lack of special government favors constitutes "marginalization". You'll be able to do it fifty words short of your quota, because there isn't any.
My statement refers to what the Humanist agenda is, not a complaint about the lack of government support for any religion. I'm not looking for any more favors from the state than you are. In fact, the state is only a necessary evil, allowed by God, because of the fallen nature of man.
The marginalization of God is utterly impossible, i.e. if you are a real Christian, everything you say and do, whether private or public is influenced by God. If the Humanists want to eliminate the influence of God from the public sector, then they must eliminate all Christians (which, by the way, is the ultimate goal of Humanism.)
And let's get one thing straight...Humanism is a religion where Man is God, and evolution is the method of salvation. You've got your priests and prophets, preachers and flocks. And now you've got the otherwise "neutral" state promoting your religion. Whereas the state formally promoted Christianity, now it promotes Humanism. I suspect, that somewhere down the road, it will change again.
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