As someone who can tell the future, I predict this topic will contain childish name calling!!
"The current contender is “intelligent design,” a theory that according to advocates at the Discovery Institute “makes no religious claims, but says that the best natural evidence for life’s origins points to design rather than a process of random mutation and natural selection.”
I believe in Evolution and I believe in the Bible and God. "Intelligent Design" satisfies both my beliefs.
Here's my beef with "Intelligent Design." Science starts with the questions. "Intelligent Design" starts with the supposed answer.
Not 'again', but STILL!
The answer to the first question is easy: of course we do. Scientists control the scientific literature, and we decide whether to accept the credentials of those who wish to be included in our community. Attempts to force an extraneous agenda on the scientific community have always failed. When Stalin tried to suppress Darwinian ideas, he failed; all he managed to do was destroy Russian genetics research and kill another million people or so. When the Church tried to suppress heliocentrism, it failed; astronomical research merely migrated to countries where the Church held no sway. Ideologically based attempts to suppress genetic research on race and gender in the last 20 years fell prey to the rapid pace of genomics.
No school board or religiously run University can give scientific legitimacy to ID; the only legitimacy it could ever possess has to be earned, and ID is not earning it.
The second question - can people with an ideological agenda take control of the scientific curriculum out of the hands of scientists? - is harder. The answer is that probably in the short term they can. The results will be a weakening of already tottering science education in the US, and a brewing fight when scientists like myself decline to accept the credentials of students educated according to unscientific curricula. However, in my opinion, ID is destined to lose, because while it can be forced into schools; while it might even be forced into a couple of the more religiously oriented universities (like Baylor) it can't be forced into the hearts and minds of the scientific community. And those institutions which embrace creationism will simply be excluded from the body of the scientific community.
Ping
OK. If Darwin is a crackpot, and living things do not evolve, then please explain why we now have anti-biotic resistent bacteria.
IDers also seem to resent any discussion of the stupidity of their hypothetical designer.
I notice that here. The "bad pennies keep coming back" problem. Beat all the lies and fallacies to pulp on one thread and the same people or new ones are back with them somewhere else.
The actual history of life on Earth does not depend upon whether certain militantly ignorant people ever give up their attacks on it.
Submitting this idea just for the sake of muddying up the water and instigating thought: Why couldn't a creator intelligently design an evolutionary process?
Evolutionary theory has 150+ years of real, tangible, scientific evidence from many different fields to back it up. It makes intuitive sense and makes biological science fully comprehensible to an elementary biology student.
ID on the other hand teaches what exactly? What point do you wish to get across to the students? Life was designed? By whom? How? For what purpose? Can a biology teacher really answer these questions in the context of a high school science class? These questions will be asked. And if you really want to do some damage to your cause, bring up Noah's Ark, the Flood and a 6000 year old earth in science class as well.
If you ask impressionable children to choose based on scientific criteria, I absolutely promise you and other religiously motivated people are *not* going to like the result.
The theory of evolution is just a theory
The word theory means something different in science than it does in common usage. Theories are the result of a hypothesis, or educated suggestion, being tested and found to be consistent with observation. A theory coherently explains a large range of observations. It is in contrast to a law which simply expresses a regularity seen in observations without attempting to explain that regularity. Theories do not become laws. Laws are not somehow more certain than theories. Both are on equal footing in science.
There's no way life could have arisen from non-living chemicals/There's no way to get from the big bang to humans
Neither the origin of life nor the big bang is covered in the theory of evolution. Evolution only applies once life has begun. It makes no difference how life began.
The second law of thermodynamics makes evolution impossible
The second law of thermodynamics states that IN A CLOSED SYSTEM, entropy always increases. The earth is not a closed system. The earth receives energy from the sun. This release of energy from the surface of the sun at a temperature of 6000K to space at a temperature of ~3K represents an enormous increase in entropy. Therefore, even taking evolution into account, the entropy of the earth/sun system does indeed increase over time.
Creationism is just as valid a theory as evolution/Evolution is not really science
To qualify as a theory in science, an idea must explain observations in such a way as to be falsifiable. This means that it must predict something and finding that this prediction is not true would require abandonment or serious modification of the theory. Evolution meets this requirement. For example, evolution predicts that in billion year old rock layers, no fossils of modern humans will be found. It predicts that all organisms on earth will have nucleic acids as their genetic material. It predicts that it will be possible to observe changes in the genepool of organisms. All of these predictions have been borne out by observations. If any of them are not, then evolution would have to be seriously modified or abandoned. I am sure that someone with more knowledge of biology could provide many more such examples. Creationism, on the other hand, by its very nature can offer no such predictions. The most basic premise of creationism is that there is an omnipotent God who created the universe. By virtue of God's omnipotence, there is no possible observation that could falsify this premise. God could have made the universe appear any way He wanted it to appear.
Evolution has never been proven
Neither has quantum theory, or relativity, or any other scientific theory or law. Science never offers proof, merely strong evidence for an idea. Evolution is backed by a large amount of observational evidence.
Evolution isn't compatible with the Bible (or belief in God)
Evolution says absolutely nothing about whether or not God exists. Science in general makes no reference to God. Theories of gravity, electromagnetism, nuclear forces, quantum mechanics, and many other theories in science are make correct predictions (so far) without reference to God in any way. As covered above, God is simply not a proper subject of science. The idea that God exists (or the idea that He doesn't) is simply not falsifiable, and is therefore not scientific. There is no test or physical evidence that would be able to prove that those who believe in God are wrong. Similarly there is no test or physical evidence to show that those who don't believe in God are wrong. Both ideas are unfalsifiable and are thus outside the realm of science. I have heard arguments that "evolutionists are trying to eliminate God." This may be true, but it is beyond the scope of the theory of evolution to try to disprove the existence of God. This is the result of some subset of scientists (or non-scientific evolution supporters) trying to push their own opinions. I have also heard people who are entirely convinced that the Bible contradicts evolution entirely since evolution is not mentioned in the Bible. Such people need to remember that, while the Bible has not changed over all these millennia, our necessarily flawed human understanding of it has. We used to believe, as recently as 140 years ago, that the Bible said that the owning of another human being in a condition of slavery was acceptable, and some even went so far as to say that the Bible said that this was a desirable condition for both the master and the slave. We no longer believe this. Therefore the way we understand the Biblical word has changed. If you believe that your interpretation of the Bible is the only one that is possibly correct, then you are ignoring the fact that good people have struggled to understand the Bible for thousands of years. It is not a sign that someone is evil if he/she disagrees with your beliefs about what the Bible means.
The point of "The Wedge," as Philip Johnson has stated, was "Darwin on Trial." The ID movement can't be stopped now. It's too big. But it's fun to watch the Darwinists hang on and speculate as to when ID becomes common wisdom.
ping for a read
CURRENT contender? Makes it sound like this issue just came up in the last couple of months.
For reasons too numerous and complex to go into here, I think that the Theory of Evolution, as we understand it, is starting to show definite signs of collapse.
As we accumulate more knowledge, it is starting to look like evolution is an overly simplistic view of a very complex process - sort of like the theory that humans are the sole cause of global warming.
I'm sure that evolutionary principles (based mostly on external environmental pressures) play a part in some aspects of species change, but I think the main "drivers" have yet to be discovered or understood. If some choose to believe that these "drivers" are inspired by God, it's as good a rationale as any other out there right now.