Years ago, I used to spend weeks at a time debating the evolutionists here on FR. I had the respect of a number of them, including Patrick Henry. I stopped for lack of time and weariness over going in circles: The same arguments came up every single time, with the same refutations and counter-refutations.
Re: Sternberg, the fact remains that his career has been crippled because he has dared allowed question of the ruling paradigm to have voice. The fact also remains that there was huge emotional outcry instead of scientific consideration for Meyer's article. Evolutionists have set up a situation where it is impossible for an IDer (let alone a Creationist) to get published and still have a career, and then turn around and deride their opponents for not having a whole lot of peer-reviewed articles and research. Well, duh. That's right up there with Democrats during the Clinton years asking why, if he really did sell our nuclear tech to the Chinese, the MSM wasn't all over the story.
It's a lie to say that evolution is portrayed as the *answer to everything*.
That's a bit of hyperbole on my part, true--but it's not far off. Evolution, the biological theory, has long since branched off into Evolution, the religion, in which everything, from the current forms of animals and plants to the first life to human morality to the universe itself all "evolved." It's become the catch-phrase answer for the non-theist, every bit as much a "god-of-the-gaps" as any Creationist could be accused of:
An atheist before Darwin could have said, following Hume: "I have no explanation for complex biological design. All I know is that God isn't a good explanation, so we must wait and hope that somebody comes up with a better one." I can't help feeling that such a position, though logically sound, would have left one feeling pretty unsatisfied, and that although atheism might have been logically tenable before Darwin, Darwin made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist.If Dawkins, the Charles Simonyi Professor of the Public Understanding of Science at Oxford University, didn't think evolution explained "everything," including abiogenesis, then it would hardly serve to make him "an intellectually fulfilled atheist." Ergo, he really does think that evolution, in one manner or another, explains everything that the theist points to God for--and more.
-- Richard Dawkins, The Blind Watchmaker, p. 6
I would disagree. I think that Dawkins' point was that before Darwin, being an atheist was not intellectually fulfilling because intellectual honesty demanded an explaination for the diversity of life as we observe it, and atheism denied any resort to God.
To the science of the time, it was a daunting task and no other area of science posed anywhere near such a glaring, and then-unanswered, challenge. Far from being an answer to "everything that the theist points to God for," evolution through natural selection provided the answer to the one big, giant, glaring, obvious thing that the atheist had no answer for at that time.
True. You were always sincere, and never nasty. Your posts were always welcome. (Sometimes wrong, but never malicious.)