Posted on 10/24/2008 7:45:19 AM PDT by Soliton
The courts have made it very clear that biblical creationism — even with the lipstick of Intelligent Design — cannot be taught in U.S. public schools.
Isaac Newton, Albert Einstein, Sigmund Freud, Kurt Goedel, Alan Turing and B.F. Skinner are other luminaries on Dennett's list of philosophers who weren't actually philosophers. But when Newtown explained planetary motions with a single equation, when B.F. Skinner proposed that human societies were governed by subconscious behavioral rewards and when Darwin presented his theory of natural selection, they were being scientists. They were not positing belief systems.
Taken together, their collective scientific ideas presented a view of the universe that was machine-like, autonomic and somewhat random, respectively. Of course such a view provided plenty of fodder for philosophical rumination. But that fodder and the philosophy fed by it are not the same thing.
What I liked most about Dennett's talk was his celebration of Darwin's main point: that a beautiful and complex Earth system does not require a fastidious designer. In contrast, Darwin's metaphorical "tangled bank" arose from the sum of countless smaller, less complex events over long periods of time. Elements became compounds, which became auto-catalytic molecules, which became prokaryote cells (without a nucleus), which became eukaryotic cells (with a nucleus), which became tissues and organs, which become colonies called organisms, which become ecosystems in which individuals interacted and automatically shaped each other.
(Excerpt) Read more at courant.com ...
How can it be a good article when the first sentence is an out and out lie?
The elitist courts (antithetical to the wishes of the people) have declared that you can't FORCE schools to teach biblical creationism, which creationists overwhelmingly agree with (since forcing it would just lead to hatchet jobs against it). They have not banned all mention or teaching of it. This is a typical and severe distortion of the facts by the Hate Media.
My public schooling was basically a cult indoctrination. I pray that someday you recognize that your reliance on courts to maintain a monolothic presence in the education system is precisely because Darwinism is a failed historical model that deserves to be relegated to the same status as flat-earth theory.
These are belief systems.
A secular humanist view of the world is a worldview and is exactly equivalent to a religion. You have all kinds of reasons for thinking that life crawled out of the sea and started living on the land. And maybe it did. But you don't KNOW.
Then why does Christianity offer rewards and punishment based on your behavior?
Contrary to your assertion, creationism may NOT be taught in public schools as science by SCOTUS decision.
I guess I'm a dumb hick because this seems like a non-sequitor. Can you express this thought in more than one sentence?
Not necessarily, but perhaps you are not up on your science. "Behavioral rewards" means reward and punishment for desired behavior. You objected to:
B.F. Skinner proposed that human societies were governed by subconscious behavioral rewards.
Yet you live his behavioral theories every day as a practicing Christian
Hatred for all things ‘Biblical’ defines the modern hardcore liberal Evolutionists on Free Republic and their allies in the leadership of the Democrat Party, (the far left leaders of the Democrat Party are all hardcore evolutionists).
Both of these groups hate American historical values, they love liberal judges and judicial activist courts, and both of these groups worship the Big Government public school monopoly above all.
No matter how destructive the Public School Monopoly becomes, the hardcore Evolutionists will still worship the Big Government Public School.
The Free Republic Hardcore Evolutionists and the other Big Government Lefties love the Big Government Public Schools because it is their way of using the point of a gun to promote their materialistic religious views.
The hardcore evolutionists on Free Republic who claim to be small government libertarians are the worst liars of all and have proven they are actually for the worst extreme of Big Government Force. In fact they blubber about their Big Government Public Schools in almost every thread.
The Free Republic Hardcore Evolutionists always appeal to Big Government and favor an Oligarchy reinventing a new 'living, breathing, evolving, judge-made Constitution.
The Free Republic hardcore evolutionists worship Big Government at its very worst (public school monopoly) but claim libertarianism as a convenient, dishonest excuse for the extreme moral liberalism they spew on this conservative forum.
The Free Republic Hardcore Evolutionists are liars of the worst kind. They repeat the liberal dogma of the far left at DU and the Daily Kos.
Like all liberals, they want the Big Government, centalized power to undermine parental authority while using Big Government Public Schools, (run by liberals) to indoctrinate other people's children.
His belief system is supported by mountains of empiricle evidence, yours isn't. That is the difference between science and religion
I presume you mean Darwin's belief system. The problem with the molecules-to-man hypothesis, is that it is undemonstrated. Instead, pleas are made to adaptation and/or genetic mutation as being the mechanism for evolutionary progress. The presumption of naturalistic mechanisms are sufficient in and of themselves. This is the scientific naturalism worldview, which I do not think Newton and others prescribed to, but many moderns do.
There are many questions. And science, such as it is, has answered some, but is ill-suited to answer many (according to Popper).
Karl Popper changed his mind. Please read to the end. It isn’t very long.
Karl Popper on the scientific status of Darwin’s theory of evolution
When speaking here of Darwinism, I shall speak always of today’s theory—that is Darwin’s own theory of natural selection supported by the Mendelian theory of heredity, by the theory of the mutation and recombination of genes in a gene pool, and the decoded genetic code. This is an immensely impressive and powerful theory. The claim that it completely explains evolution is of course a bold claim, and very far from being established. All scientific theories are conjectures, even those that have successfully passed many and varied tests. The Mendelian underpinning of modern Darwinism has been well tested, and so has the theory of evolution which says that all terrestrial life has evolved from a few primitive unicellular organisms, possibly even from one single organism.
However, Darwin’s own most important contribution to the theory of evolution, his theory of natural selection, is difficult to test. There are some tests, even some experimental tests; and in some cases, such as the famous phenomenom known as “industrial melanism”, we can observe natural selection happening under our very eyes, as it were. Nevertheless, really severe tests of the theory of natural selection are hard to come by, much more so than tests of otherwise comparable theories in physics or chemistry.
The fact that the theory of natural selection is difficult to test has led some people, anti-Darwinists and even some great Darwinists, to claim that it is a tautology. A tautology like “All tables are tables” is not, of course, testable; nor has it any explanatory power. It is therefore most surprising to hear that some of the greatest contemporary Darwinists themselves formulate the theory in such a way that it amounts to the tautology that those organisms that leave the most offspring leave the most offspring. And C.H. Waddington even says somewhere (and he defends this view in other places) that “Natural selection ... turns out ... to be a tautology”. However, he attributes at the same place to the theory an “enormous power ... of explanation”. Since the explanatory power of a tautology is obviously zero, something must be wrong here.
Yet similar passages can be found in the works of such great Darwinists as Ronald Fisher, J.B.S. Haldane, and George Gaylord Simpson; and others.
I mention this problem because I too belong among the culprits. Influenced by what these authorities say, I have in the past described the theory as “almost tautological”, and I have tried to explain how the theory of natural selection could be untestable (as is a tautology) and yet of great scientific interest. My solution was that the doctrine of natural selection is a most successful metaphysical research programme. It raises detailed problems in many fields, and it tells us what we would expect of an acceptable solution of these problems.
I still believe that natural selection works this way as a research programme. Nevertheless, I have changed my mind about the testability and logical status of the theory of natural selection; and I am glad to have an opportunity to make a recantation. My recantation may, I hope, contribute a little to the understanding of the status of natural selection.
From “Natural Selection and the Emergence of Mind”, Dialectica, vol. 32, no. 3-4, 1978, pp. 339-355
Skinner based his writings concerning human behavior upon data generated in the laboratory following the scientific method. Check out the Journal of the Experimental Analysis of Behavior for examples of the reports of what has been termed, "Skinnerian Psychology."
"Doctrine"? "Metaphyscial research programme"? I think Karl is pulling our legs.
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