Posted on 12/20/2005 7:54:38 AM PST by snarks_when_bored
Fox News alert a few minutes ago says the Dover School Board lost their bid to have Intelligent Design introduced into high school biology classes. The federal judge ruled that their case was based on the premise that Darwin's Theory of Evolution was incompatible with religion, and that this premise is false.
I didn't say that the science was conservative. I said that this decision was conservative, in response to posters such as Sybeck1 who try and paint this as some sort of repressive or activist judge.
If by atheistic you mean without religion or ignoring religion, this is true. Science always assumes that natural explanations can be found.
The original proposal for the "Big Bang", before Hubble, was by a religious astronomer who was seeking a way to scientifically detect God.
Which is the same thing that IDers are doing.
I'm just amazed that it's the religious folks who now reject the Big Bang, when they could as easily point to it and say "there is the evidence of God".
I am not vested in destroying religion. The faction of Christianity that insists on contradicting empirical reality will surely destroy itself as time marches onward and leaves y'all behind. What I am vested in is producing a top-notch scientific research establishment and the technological progress that requires it.
You have to have FAITH in order for that theory to hold any shred of truth. No evidence exists for it, never has, and in my view, it never will.
Patently false. There is plenty of evidence for the theory, or it wouldn't be a "theory." Words mean things, after all.
You might not want to admit it, but the evidence is there. Even the defenders of ID admit the evidence - they have to. They assert that evolution did in fact happen as the ToE posits, they only want to find some underlying cause.
Actually, whether you applaud this decision or not, this is manifestly the act of an activist court.
The constitution does not protect the citizens of this country from any government mention of tenets of religious belief. It merely protects citizens from being forced to join or support a particular church, or from being enjoined from enjoying the same rights and benefits as other citizens because of their own religious beliefs.
Even if ID is not science, the constitution does not have a clause which says that the government cannot teach unscientific items in a science classroom. I will note that most family-life stuff is offered in science classroom, and a LOT of that is not scientific, but is rather behavioral or ethical teaching. We teach lots of stuff that isn't pure "science" in science classes. You can like that our not, but the constitution does not prohibit it.
The Dover school board was voted out of office. THAT is how a democracy/republic handles officials who do stupid stuff. Everything stupid is not unconstitutional -- in fact very little IS.
An Activist court has decided that ID is wrong, evolution is right, and if the elected representatives of the people can't see that RIGHT AWAY, the court will, as a good, benevolent dictator would, step in and make it all better.
We can solve this problem easily. Stop using MY TAX DOLLARS to support public schools. Why is the government involved in teaching children ANYTHING? Where in the constitution does the government get the RIGHT to force me to give them MY money so they can force children to attend public institutions where public employees get to teach those children whatever the GOVERNMENT wants them to know, and deny them the right to learn what I want them to know?
That is much more likely UNCONSTITUTIONAL than teaching Intelligent Design.
I will make one more point, then I'm out of here -- The court ruled, and some here agree, that evolution does not deny the existance of a CREATOR. Well, I'm guessing the creator is intelligent, and I'm guessing people think the intelligent creator had a purpose in what he did. In other words, that Intelligent Design is NOT incompatable with evolution.
So, if ID is not incompatable with evolution, if we teach non-science in science classes all the time, and if we all have the freedom to express our own religious beliefs, how could it be UNCONSTITUTIONAL to mention Intelligent Design in a science classroom?
Do you honestly believe that the entire Catholic Church believes man evolved from a primordial goo without the assistance of an Intelligent Designer?
Yes. I do not need to prove such. It is self evident -as the judge stated there is a false premise. The false premise is what is taught.
Reading these 'crevo' threads clearly shows the results of many faithful believers of the false premise -the anti-religious postings drip and ooze like so much excrement from many crevo threads (science? LOL) -it is quite evident the false premise in action still even though many evolutionists (anti-Christians) have been zotted ...
People learn this bigotry -they are not born with it -- [it] is taught as part of the social engineered secular brainwashing -the religion of evolutionism almost as bad as communism... Deny it all you want...
Really? Is the Pope an athiest?
You do know that the Catholic Church has no problems with evolution don't you?
Make all the other arguments against evolution you want, but calling it "athiest" is merely showing your ignorance of faithful Christians who accept evolution.
READ & WEEP -- Directly from the Court's ruling:
Those who disagree with our holding will likely mark it as the product of an activist judge. If so, they will have erred as this is manifestly not an activist Court. Rather, this case came to us as the result of the activism of an ill-informed faction on a school board, aided by a national public interest law firm eager to find a constitutional test case on ID, who in combination drove the Board to adopt an imprudent and ultimately unconstitutional policy. The breathtaking inanity of the Board’s decision is evident when considered against the factual backdrop which has now been fully revealed through this trial. The students, parents, and teachers of the Dover Area School District deserved better than to be dragged into this legal maelstrom, with its resulting utter waste of monetary and personal resources.
Slightly modified Jerry McGuire quote:
"Show me the evidence Jerry... Show me the evidence"
- plewis1250
It's not possible to know. Scientists are humble enough to say they simply don't know.
At least they know when God has them beat!
Yeah, that sort of baffles me as well; somehow thinking Big Bang Theory is part of Evolution is weird enough (though considering that Creationists routinely think evolution is a theory of the origin of life from non-life, which it is not, it's not that weird) but I don't quite get the religious hostility to the Big Bang; I mean, the alternative theory was a steady-state Universe which is even further from Genesis.
It is a theory, just as you claim creationism is. If you are going to say that creationism is nothing more than "theory", then evolution is nothing more than theory, in which case both should be taught as opposing theories.
You might wish to learn the scientific meaning of the word "theory" before you make your next post.
Profound ignorance of the basic terms of the debate doesn't exactly give your argument credibility.
That is the tortured dilemma of those advancing creationism under the guise of a supposedly secular movement within science. For them, the controversy is not about the hard evidence or any other aspect of science except some perceived contradiction with Genesis. The trojan horse of ID merely adds another layer of transparent dishonesty.
So out of one mouth we get all the usual sniping at the godless heathen materialists. But, out of the other mouth, the protest that we can't notice they're creationists. ID is just a reasoned scientific theory, you see.
Accidents happen. Humanity and matter itself were big ones.
"Many faithful people accept evolution, like, say, the entire Catholic Church." ~ narby
Which of the "several theories of evolution" (mentioned by John Paul II) are you talking about? Hahahaha
The Origin of Speciousness (Darwinism is an intrinsically atheistic theory. If...)
The American Prowler ^ | 11/18/2005 | George Neumayr
Posted on 11/18/2005 2:33:50 AM EST by nickcarraway
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1524371/posts
Only a small percentage of the American people support the evolutionary claim that life arose through purely material causes. Consequently, many Darwinists, recognizing that they need to win new converts lest they completely lose control over the debate, now loudly argue that Darwin's theory harmonizes with religion. As Brown professor Kenneth Miller put it in the New York Times recently, Darwin's theory isn't "anti-God." But this PR strategy of emphasizing the compatibility of Darwinism and religion is running into a problem: Darwinism's most celebrated experts -- that is, the scientists who understand the theory most purely and deeply -- admit that it is an intrinsically atheistic theory.
Edward O. Wilson's introductions to a newly edited collection of Darwin's writings, From So Simple A Beginning, is newsworthy in this respect. Wilson argues very straightforwardly that the attempt to reconcile Darwinism with religion is "well meaning" but wrong. The theory excludes God as a cause of nature, he writes, and any "rapprochement" between science and religion is not "desirable" and not consistent with Darwin's thought.
"I think Darwin would have held the same position," Wilson writes. "The battle line is, as it has ever been, in biology. The inexorable growth of this science continues to widen, not to close, the tectonic gap between science and faith-based religion."
Buttressing his argument that Darwinism is a godless account of nature, Wilson reminds readers that Darwin rejected Christianity, and that this "shedding of blind faith gave him the intellectual fearlessness to explore human evolution wherever logic and evidence took him." (Wilson's anti-religious prejudice is so strong he doesn't even consider the possibility that love of God might inspire a scientist to study carefully and reverently God's handiwork in nature.)
Theistic evolution -- the idea that an omnipotent God could use random mutations and natural selection to produce life; in other words, create not by his intellect but by chance -- is no more meaningful of a concept than a square circle. Wilson doesn't say this but he would agree with it. Natural selection necessarily means that nothing outside of nature is necessary to explain it, he writes. "Implicit" in the concept of natural selection is the "operation of blind chance and the absence of divine purpose." Nature is self-sufficient and therefore has no need for God. He writes that "we must conclude that life has diversified on Earth autonomously without any kind of external guidance. Evolution in a pure Darwinian world has no goal or purpose: the exclusive driving force is random mutations sorted out by natural selection from one generation to the next."
The earth creates itself, according to Wilson, and man is like everything else on it -- a product of a "blind force." This means that man is no more special or purposeful than anything else. Yes, he possesses interesting "adaptive devices," which include a curious inherited tendency toward religion, but he is still an accident and an animal. This is why, writes Wilson, Darwin's theory is revolutionary: "it showed that humanity is not the center of creation, and not its purpose either."
WILSON'S COMMENTS, PRESENTED in an authoritative collection of Darwin's work, make the Darwinists hawking the theory as consistent with religion look either confused or opportunistic. They either don't understand the implications of the theory or they are willfully distorting the theory in order to gull the religious into embracing it. If they are doing the latter, they are reprising a game Darwin himself played very effectively: using the rhetoric of theism to upend theism.
Lest he lose his Victorian audience, Darwin made sure to conceal his hostility to religion in his work, and even presented On the Origin of Species as an extension of the tradition of natural theology. It wasn't until his unexpurgated autobiography came out long after his death that his view of life as godless became widely known. He reminded himself once in a note that he better "avoid stating how far I believe in materialism."
In his autobiography, he notes that he came to regard Jesus Christ's apostles as simpletons for believing in miracles. People of that time were, Darwin wrote, "ignorant and credulous to a degree almost incomprehensible by us." And even as he unveiled a theory of nature as a blind and brutal force, he rejected Christianity as a "damnable doctrine" on the very sentimental grounds that if true it meant some of his family and friends were doomed: "I can indeed hardly see how anyone ought to wish Christianity to be true; for if so the plain language of the text seems to show that the men who do not believe, and this would include my Father, Brother and almost all my best friends, will be everlastingly punished."
Of course, Wilson, who praises Darwin for his fearless, unflinching, hardheaded approach to thorny matters, sees no irony in Darwin's soft and emotional dismissal of Christianity as an unpleasant doctrine. (By the way, Wilson says that anybody who thinks Darwin "recanted" his view of Christianity is mistaken. "There is not a shred of evidence that he did or that he was presented with any reason to do so.")
Critics of evolution who observe that Darwin's theory is an account of nature that negates any role for God in life stand on very solid ground. They are not twisting the theory; they are stating it. Theistic evolutionists like Kenneth Miller, who has said that his Catholicism gives his Darwinism "strong propaganda value," are misrepresenting the theory for rhetorical reasons. Were they really serious about their position, they wouldn't spend their time browbeating figures like Austrian cardinal Christoph Schonborn for stating that Darwinism and religion are incompatible; they would spend their time debating fellow Darwinists on the theory's real meaning. Schonborn merely understands evolutionary theory the same way its most exalted exponents do.
IT WAS DARWINIST William Provine, not a critic of evolution, who said that Darwinism is the "greatest engine of atheism devised by man." Richard Dawkins, Thomas Henry Huxley, John Maynard Smith, and a host of other Darwinian experts, have made similar declarations of evolutionary theory's essentially atheistic character.
That evolutionists are downplaying this for PR reasons is understandable. What's not understandable is why certain religious are helping them. The modern religious who eagerly embrace random mutation and natural selection as an explanation of nature look as dim and craven as the hollowed-out Anglican ministers at Darwin's burial at Westminster Abbey.
If nature is not the work of divine intelligence but of blind chance, God does not exist. Darwinsim is a "universal acid" that burns through "just about every traditional concept," says evolutionist Daniel Dennett. This is illustrated by the increasingly wan and risible theology evolutionists within the Catholic Church are producing. Jesuit George Coyne, head of the Vatican observatory, is straining so hard to work God into his evolutionary schema that he has written that God is like a parent standing on the sidelines speaking "encouraging words" to earth. Kenneth Miller has declared, in a statement that would come as a great surprise to the doctors of the Church, that "randomness is a key feature of the mind of God."
Nietzsche wouldn't need to revise his view that "God is dead" were he to hear these descriptions of God. "Theistic evolution" is producing a theology of God as powerless and mindless, a God who is dead in man's thinking about life on earth. In separating God from nature, theistic evolutionists end up with a distorted view of both. And for what? To salvage a theory that Darwin's disciples like Edward Wilson have said is unavoidably atheistic?
The evidence is readily available. Kindly consult your local library.
You also might want to check PatrickHenry's homepage for the List o' Links - there you will find plenty of reputable sources that can give you the background.
But be careful - educate yourself, and you can't claim ignorance as a defense for factually incorrect posts any longer.
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