Posted on 07/27/2006 3:00:03 PM PDT by BrandtMichaels
What are Darwinists so afraid of?
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Posted: July 27, 2006 1:00 a.m. Eastern
By Jonathan Witt © 2006
As a doctoral student at the University of Kansas in the '90s, I found that my professors came in all stripes, and that lazy ideas didn't get off easy. If some professor wanted to preach the virtues of communism after it had failed miserably in the Soviet Union, he was free to do so, but students were also free to hear from other professors who critically analyzed that position.
Conversely, students who believed capitalism and democracy were the great engines of human progress had to grapple with the best arguments against that view, meaning that in the end, they were better able to defend their beliefs.
Such a free marketplace of ideas is crucial to a solid education, and it's what the current Kansas science standards promote. These standards, like those adopted in other states and supported by a three-to-one margin among U.S. voters, don't call for teaching intelligent design. They call for schools to equip students to critically analyze modern evolutionary theory by teaching the evidence both for and against it.
The standards are good for students and good for science.
Some want to protect Darwinism from the competitive marketplace by overturning the critical-analysis standards. My hope is that these efforts will merely lead students to ask, What's the evidence they don't want us to see?
Under the new standards, they'll get an answer. For starters, many high-school biology textbooks have presented Haeckel's 19th century embryo drawings, the four-winged fruit fly, peppered moths hidden on tree trunks and the evolving beak of the Galapagos finch as knockdown evidence for Darwinian evolution. What they don't tell students is that these icons of evolution have been discredited, not by Christian fundamentalists but by mainstream evolutionists.
We now know that 1) Haeckel faked his embryo drawings; 2) Anatomically mutant fruit flies are always dysfunctional; 3) Peppered moths don't rest on tree trunks (the photographs were staged); and 4) the finch beaks returned to normal after the rains returned – no net evolution occurred. Like many species, the average size fluctuates within a given range.
This is microevolution, the age-old observation of change within species. Macroevolution refers to the evolution of fundamentally new body plans and anatomical parts. Biology textbooks use instances of microevolution such as the Galapagos finches to paper over the fact that biologists have never observed, or even described in theoretical terms, a detailed, continually functional pathway to fundamentally new forms like mammals, wings and bats. This is significant because modern Darwinism claims that all life evolved from a common ancestor by a series of tiny, useful genetic mutations.
Textbooks also trumpet a few "missing links" discovered between groups. What they don't mention is that Darwin's theory requires untold millions of missing links, evolving one tiny step at a time. Yes, the fossil record is incomplete, but even mainstream evolutionists have asked, why is it selectively incomplete in just those places where the need for evidence is most crucial?
Opponents of the new science standards don't want Kansas high-school students grappling with that question. They argue that such problems aren't worth bothering with because Darwinism is supported by "overwhelming evidence." But if the evidence is overwhelming, why shield the theory from informed critical analysis? Why the campaign to mischaracterize the current standards and replace them with a plan to spoon-feed students Darwinian pabulum strained of uncooperative evidence?
The truly confident Darwinist should be eager to tell students, "Hey, notice these crucial unsolved problems in modern evolutionary theory. Maybe one day you'll be one of the scientists who discovers a solution."
Confidence is as confidence does.
Whoa, there. Those are not my standards, and do not attribute them to me. You made that stuff up, not me.
It is up to the person testing the hypothesis to show whether it is correct or incorrect, and to do so in a replicable fashion. Case in point would be the Miller-Urey experiments into abiotics. The hypothesis was that the early atmosphere on Earth had a strongly reducing atmosphere, and that organic molecules could form from interactions between chemicals in the atmosphere, and in the sea.
That hypothesis was shown to be correct, and the experiment has been replicated many times. However, one very important part of the hypothesis was that the Earth had a strongly reducing atmosphere. It is appearing to be more and more likely that the atmosphere was neither oxidizing nor reducing, and Miller-Urey does not work under such conditions. If some of the current theories of the early atmosphere are correct it would invalidate the experiment, and falsify the hypothesis.
That is the way science works. You can't just say "I think it works like this, prove me wrong!" If you think something works in a particular fashion, it is up to you to provide evidence for it. This is where Creationism/ID fails. There is no evidence for it. There are no experiments that can gather evidence for it. It is not science.
Could have occurred? Is that science as well?
Absolutely. Nothing is absolute. What we know today may be proven wrong tomorrow. An excellent example is the structure of the atom. At one time it was widely accepted that atoms were very compact. The model was called the "plum pudding" model of atomic structure, because it was thought that atoms were dense like pudding. Scientists conducted an experiment to show that it was true, and discovered quite the opposite: Atoms are mostly empty space.
(They were so surprised by the results that they thought there was something mechanically wrong with their experiment, and they repeated it until they were convinced that the scientific world's view of the atom was totally wrong).
Only a fool would state that a theory was proven to be 100% correct. Many people say that "evolution is both a theory and a fact". Don't misunderstand this. Evolution is known to occur, it can be observed to occur, and it has been observed to occur. That evolution occurs is a fact. That does not mean that the Theory of Evolution is a fact. It merely adds more support to it. Aspects of the TOE could change tomorrow with new discoveries. There is such an overwhelming amount of data supporting it that it is highly unlikely that it will ever be falsified.
Yes, I said "highly unlikely", not "absolutely impossible". No theory is ever absolute. Not ever.
Resources:
Biology (2005): Campbell & Reese, 7th edition, Pearson Publications.
Lecture and Lab notes, Freshman Biology, WSU, 2005.
As I remember, the discussion was about who founded non-governmental schools of higher learning in the U.S.
I hadn't known that. I had thought USC had once had a religious affiliation -- Methodist comes to mind -- but my research shows you're right.
FD2k3 is correct, but he left off the part about animal sacrifice and arcane rituals involving caffeine that network engineers sometimes do to get things to work ;)
Here's anexcellent reference on Hitler, the Nazis, and religion.
http://www.adherents.com/people/ph/Adolf_Hitler.html
Here's a sample quote:
From the start of the Nazi movement, "the destruction of Christianity was explicitly recognized as a purpose of the National Socialist movement," said Baldur von Schirach, leader of the group that would come to be known as Hitler youth. But "explicitly" only within party ranks: as the OSS stated, "considerations of expedience made it impossible" for the movement to make this public until it consolidated power... By 1937, Pope Pius XI denounced the Nazis for waging "a war of extermination" against the church... Catholic priests found police snatching sermons out of their hands, often in mid-reading
...the notion that the church either gave birth to Hitler or walked hand-in-hand with him as a partner is, simply, slander. Hitler himself knew better. "One is either a Christian or a German," he said. "You can't be both."
If you trot out your profession as proof that you understand science, it needs to directly prove that point.
Network Engineering can be tough and challenging and certainly requires intelligemce but it is not a science profession. Therefore it is not a proper answer to a claim of scientific illiteracy (although there are others).
"Therefore, I am convinced that I am acting as the agent of our Creator. By fighting off the Jews, I am doing the Lord's work." placemark
I implement large-scale ERPs, which I admit to being a trade.
And I have done network engineering and indeed had to sacrifice small animals (or a Grad student or 2, depending o availablity).
Which one? That the earth formerly had a reducing atmosphere or that organic molecules could form from interactions between chemicals in the atmosphere?
If you think something works in a particular fashion, it is up to you to provide evidence for it.
So how does intelligent design work? It begins with thoughts. What kind of evidence do I have to provide in order to assure the scientific world that thoughts are integral to intelligent design? It often, yet not always, ends with a combination of matter that performs specific functions.
Is it somehow mysterious, superstitious, or unscientific to suggest the building blocks of the particle world - consistently cause and effect related as they are - might entail a designer? I mean, we're not talking about proofs here. Just reasonable inferences, no less scientific than those asserting morphological similarities constitute a relationship in history.
What kind of evidence are you demanding here? A little man who looks like George Burns and pops out to introduce himself and state plainly that he is responsible for bringing about and sustaining a universe that is intellectually accessible?
Yes. Maybe they went to the same church ... ?
That would DISPROVE evolution.
Did you read my post directly above yours, documenting that undermining Christianity was an objective of the National Socialist Party?
You can also read there how the Nazis, in typical leftist fashion, dissembled and concealed their ultimate goals, so I'm sure they would not be above using superficial "religious" propaganda like your belt buckle in order to con and motivate the "rabble" in their army, many of them raised in Christian homes. Even so, there is nothing Christian about the buckle, and it bears the swastika, which is a pagan symbol. The eagle and swastika are Nazi Party heraldic emblems, not remotely Christian.
Jean-Fraud Kerry and Ted "Swimmer" Kennedy are nominal Catholics, but support abortion. Can we conclude from that that abortion is true Catholic doctrine? Of course not. The Church explicitly condemns it. Leftists of all stripes are expert phonies.
Wrong. I said I didn't think it was a significant distinction. Both the churches and the individual Christians are motivated by Christian principles.
What are the questions that should be asked of the ToE in a classroom?
Do you know of the charitable works of Buddhists?
Ignatz was accused of being a scientific illiterate. How many "scientific illiterates" do you think work as engineers. Do you know how much science is in an engineering curriculum? It's not what is usually construed as a "trade." That canard is just another example of the sneering, supercilious attitude so prevalent among the evoids. Ignatz also pointed out that he read a great deal of science.
I then asked how many of the evo-obsessed actually here do original research. No one has answered. People who do creative research don't spend all their time indoctrinating people and suppressing dissent; they look for breakthroughs. In many sciences, the ultimate thrill would be to overthrow established theory and supercede it. Not here, among the evoids, who wallow in the status quo.
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