Posted on 12/27/2004 2:34:25 PM PST by Ed Current
The most censored speech in the United States today is not flag-burning, pornography or the press. The worst censors are those who prohibit classroom criticism of the theory of evolution.
A Chinese scholar observed, "In China we can criticize Darwin but not the government. In America you can criticize the government but not Darwin."
Polls show that the vast majority of Americans reject the theory of evolution, as have great scientists such as William Thomas Kelvin and Louis Pasteur. But that does not stop an intolerant minority from trying to impose a belief in the ape-to-man theory on everyone else.
Local school boards have finally had enough of this tyranny. From Georgia to Pennsylvania to Ohio to Wisconsin to Kansas, school boards are finally moving toward allowing criticism of Darwin's theory.
The Darwinists have propped up their classroom dominance by the persistent use of frauds and flacks. The fraudulent pro-evolution embryo drawings of Ernst Haeckel littered schoolbooks for 100 years, and it took specific action by the Texas Board of Education to keep them out of current textbooks even after the New York Times exposed Haeckel's deception.
Many textbooks feature pictures of giraffes stretching their necks to feed high off of trees, but genetics and observed feeding habits disprove that as a basis for evolution of their long necks. Moreover, the striking beauty of the colored pattern on the giraffes illustrates that design, not merely usefulness, is what animates our world.
Continued censorship of criticism invites additional fraud, so evolution has suffered more embarrassments than any other scientific theory. The Piltdown man was a lie taught to schoolchildren for decades, even featured in the John Scopes Monkey Trial textbook, and only five years ago a dinosaur-bird fossil hoax was presented as true on the glossy pages of National Geographic.
If Darwinists want to teach that whales, which are mammals, evolved from black bears swimming with their mouths open, we should surely be entitled to criticize that. Yet school libraries have refused to accept books critical of evolution, even when written by college professors.
Responding to the majority of their constituents, Georgia's Cobb County recently authorized a textbook disclaimer saying "Evolution is a theory, not a fact, regarding the origin of living things. This material should be approached with an open mind, studied carefully, and critically considered."
The American Civil Liberties Union claims this is unconstitutional and is seeking out supremacist judges to order classroom curricula to continue the censorship and forbid an open mind about evolution. If the theory of evolution were well supported, there would be no reason to oppose open debate about scientific claims.
In December 2004, a world-famous champion of atheism, Antony Flew, announced his conversion to acceptance of intelligent design underlying our world. The Dallas Morning News observed, "If the scientific data are compelling enough to cause an atheist academic of Flew's reputation to recant most of his life's work, why shouldn't Texas schoolchildren be taught the controversy?"
At 81, Flew can speak out because he is now free from the peer pressure that silences younger colleagues who fear loss of jobs, funding, or even dreams of winning a Nobel Prize. Evolution critics Fred Hoyle and Raymond Damadian were unjustly denied Nobel Prizes and their work was instead recognized by awards to less-deserving others.
Darwinists know they cannot persuade skeptical adults, so they try to capture impressionable schoolchildren. At our expense and against our wishes, children are taught that the world exists only for what is useful, not by design.
To typical schoolchildren full of wonder, we live in a world best described as a marvelous work of art. The snowflakes that grace us at Christmastime typify the artistic beauty that bestows joy on all ages but, like an acid, evolution corrodes this inborn appreciation of beauty and falsely trains children to view themselves as mere animals no more worthy than dogs or cats.
There is a strong correlation between belief in natural selection and liberal views on government control, pornography, prayer in schools, abortion, gun control, economic freedom, and even animal rights. For the most part, the schools in the blue states carried in the 2004 presidential election by U.S. Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., are strongly pro-evolution, while the red states carried by President George W. Bush allow debate and dissent.
It should surprise no one that the United States, land of the free and home of the brave, has the lowest percentage of evolution believers in the world. The highest percentage lived in the former East Germany.
The U.S. Senate of former Minority Leader Tom Daschle, D-S.D., quietly slipped a provision into the No Child Left Behind Act that requires, by the 2007-2008 school year, science testing by grade 5. That gives censors the authority to force 10-year-olds to believe and defend evolution.
It is long past time for parents to realize they have the right and duty to protect their children from the intolerant evolutionists. Hooray for courageous school boards that are finally rejecting censorship and allowing debate.
I believe that Fester is extremely frustrated with the fact that no one who accepts evolution will concede to the cartoon strawman that he has of it. As such, he has taken to attacking evolution for "flaws" in explaining (or not explaining) things that it does not cover, and absolutely refusing to accept that it is perhaps his understanding of what evolution is that is in error, rather than evolution itself.
"That enough? I can give you plenty more.
Please don't misunderstand. I do believe that we are likely entering a period of global warming. I just tend to be skeptical of those claiming it is a man-made condition."
Thanks for the links, but they 2 things. One, they are essays on things that cause global warming. None specifically say man is not causing global warming as well. The official position of the scientific community is that man IS causing global wamring.
"That proposition is not connected with reality."
Wow diamond, that was terribly clever, you convinced me!
"What's the best explanation for general relativity? IOW, what drives the objective reality around which the theory has been formed? How much faith should we place in the tools we have for observing the universe, or do the tools themselves establish objective reality? How does self-consciousness fit into the Theory of Evolution? How does the Theory of Evolution account for the meaningful organization of information, i.e. what drives the particles of the universe into such patterns that they can be perceived by human senses?"
What does any of this have to do with... anything?
"You seem to NOT want an opposing point of view..
Perhaps, your theory is not superior to the other theory..
Watta wimp.."
How very clever, no really, that's a smart response. Lot's of substance, I see your central thesis and it's profound nature will have me thinking all week, really... it will... how could I be so blind....
I aplogoze for consuming electrons by responding to a post that is an equally mindless waste of electrons.
"No, I knew you wouldn't visit that site. I could tell by the tone of your posts that you are scientifically inquisitive only to the extent that you will accept some information but not all."
Come on! We are talking about science, no one on the planet is as far detached from science as religious groups. So why would I go to bible.ca to read abotu sciecne? It would be like posting a link to sesamestreet.com to prove a point about law. Like I said, there are hundreds of science webistes, if what you said was true, you could link to a website with an iota of credibility.
There is a difference between being open minded, and being stupid.
"That said, I cannot for the life of me understand the extreme positions on either side of this debate. I've talked to salt-of-the-earth religious people who reject evolution completely (one told me he'd "hate to be born a fish." I can't imagine what he meant by that), as well as scientific types who totally reject theology of any kind."
Is there any question which side of this debate you are on?
I think you've helped immensely in making that obvious.
Is there any question which side of this debate you are on?
Not in my mind. But if you'll remember, I linked that site in response to something you said about how the fossil record has never even been ambiguous in terms of its timeline of events, such as the juxtaposition of hominids and dinosaurs.
That site has photos of hominid prints in the same sedimentary level as dinosaur prints. How that happened isn't the issue; nor is it how whoever put that website up chose to interpret what those photos show.
For that matter, where I stand on the issue is just as irrelevant: I am open-minded enough to understand that evolution happens, and enough not to claim that I understand everything about it, as well as enough not to reject information entirely out-of-hand simply because its website address refers to something I feel is less than credible. That is what I call a closed-minded approach.
While your devotion and complete trust in science to the exclusion of all else is remarkable, I'll gently remind you that you chose to ignore my plain and indisputable point that neither side of this issue can be proved. To believe in intelligent design requires faith, and to accept evolution as the sole instrument leading to the development of Homo Sapiens Sapiens also requires faith.
Lurking ...
"Do prosecutors need to determine where the murderer got the weapon?"
A nice analogy.
>There is even evidence in the Bible to suggest that there was a civilization on the earth prior to Adam and Eve... which was destroyed by God sometime between verse 1 and 2 of Genesis<
No Sale, not buying this.
I agree that the Bible doesn't say the earth is only 10,000 years old. But "some" creationists contend that it does.
Actually, on a previous thread, it was posted that (and I don't remember the exact breakdown or wording, but this is the gist of it) something like 18% of Americans believe that evolution occurs without any reference to God and something like 33% believe that God created the universe and that evolution is a creation of God. Thus, 51% of Americans actually believe that the theory of evolution is true. Last time I heard, 51% is a majority. Therefore, 51% of Americans believe in evolution, so it's pretty dishonest to claim that supporters of evolution are a minority.
You're not as smart as you think you are.. or pedantic rather..
Darwin only is Scopes re-dux..
Perhaps you missed a few of the finer points of the articles I linked. Allow me to post a few excerpts:
...The Kyoto Protocol, he warns, would radically raise world energy prices, hurting humanity’s ability to adapt without significantly reducing any warming trend.
...Veizer and Shaviv found only modest linkage between the earth's temperatures and CO2 levels. In fact, CO2 levels have been as much as 18 times higher than today during the Veizer temperature record. The earth's CO2 levels were 10 times higher than today's during the frigid Ordovician glacial period about 440 million years ago. Human CO2 releases, moreover, make up only about 3 percent of the natural carbon cycle....
...Meanwhile, the computer modelers and "researchers" willing to scare us about CO2 now divvy up more than $4 billion per year in government grants. The eco-activist organizations probably reap at least that much per year from CO2 scaring in memberships, subscriptions, and foundation grants from the frightened.
The primary basis for this assertion was a climate reconstruction that produced the so-called ‘hockey stick’ shaped graph, which shows that the 20th century was unusually warm compared to preceding centuries. A new evaluation of the underlying data used to create that graph by Canadian businessman Stephen McIntyre and economist Ross McKitrick raises serious questions as to its validity.
McIntyre and McKitrick examined the construction and use of the data set of proxies for past climate, which were used to estimate the temperature record from 1400 to 1980. Their review found four categories of error: collation errors, unjustified truncation and extrapolation, use of obsolete data, and calculation mistakes. Correcting for these errors, they found that temperature for the early 15th century was actually higher than the 20th century.
Now, I am curious as to the source of your claim that the scientific community has publicized an official position. Would you be so kind as to provide a link to a document released by someone with the authority to speak for the entire scientific community that says something along the lines of:
Dear World,
We, the scientific community of Earth, hereby officially take the position that man is the cause of global warming.
Sincerely,
The Scientific Community
Speciation has been observed both in the wild and in laboratory experiments. Better update your scientific knowledge. Read some scientific literature.
Evolution is a philosophy of godless materalism.
Evolution actually is the theory that all living things arose as a result of the changing of allele frequencies in the gene pools of populations of organisms. Where does this statement say anything at all about God? Is God unable to produce new species via the changing of allele frequencies in the gene pools of populations of organisms?
As a science, it is a fraud.
Actually, as science, it is a theory, and a theory backed by an enormous amount of evidence. It is a theory in the scientific, not the common, sense. In science theories are explanatory statements that are consistent with all known observations and are held with an extremely high degree of confidence. Evolution is in fact a good example of a scientific theory.
I am always amused by creationist "logic" that seems to imply that if evolution were only debunked that creationism would have to be accepted. Why can't they understand that were evolution to be debunked without any alternative theory to replace it, scientists would simply maintain that "we don't know how all the diversity of life came about." That is, until an alternative SCIENTIFIC theory was proposed.
Actually it means that the changing over time of allele frequencies in the gene pools of various populations of organisms gave rise to all the different species of life seen today. It does not mean that we are randomly created (in fact, quite the opposite; the process of selection is nonrandom). It does not mean that we are accountable to only ourselves. (I assume you are implying that evolution implies lack of a God, which it doesn't.)
"A man convinced against his will
is of the same opinion still."
[Alacarte: "Fossils are always found exactly where we expect."]
"We define stratigraphic disorder as the departure from perfect chronological order of fossils in a stratigraphic sequence. Any sequence in which an older fossil occurs above a younger one is stratigraphically disordered. Scales of stratigraphic disorder may be from millimeters to many meters. Stratigraphic disorder is produced by the physical or biogenic mixing of fossiliferous sediments, and the reworking of older, previously deposited hard parts into younger sediments. Since these processes occur to an extent in virtually all sedimentary systems, stratigraphic disorder at some scale is probably a common feature of the fossil record." (Cutler, Alan H., and Karl W. Plessa, "Fossils out of Sequence: Computer Simulations and Strategies for Dealing with Stratigraphic Disorder," Palaios, vol. 5, 1990, p. 227.)
Cordially,
You do know that speciation has been observed, right?
They created a star at CERN? Must have substantially reduced their heating bill.
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> aspects <<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> nonsense <<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<
So...in other words, you accept the inductive reasoning by which scientists observe some aspects of stellar behavior, and extrapolate the process of matter creation in stars, but you reject the same process when observing the morphological continuity of fossil remains in the geological column. Like most creationist fellow travelers, you have a pretty selectively choosy analysis of inductive reasoning as applied by various kinds of natural scientists.
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