Failing to concede the truth, as you've done, is hardly grounds for intellectual celebration.
Posted on 01/22/2005 7:38:12 AM PST by PatrickHenry
A movement to drag the teaching of science in the United States back into the Dark Ages continues to gain momentum. So far, it's a handful of judges -- "activist judges" in the view of their critics -- who are preventing the spread of Saudi-style religious dogma into more and more of America's public-school classrooms.
The ruling this month in Georgia by Federal District Judge Clarence Cooper ordering the Cobb County School Board to remove stickers it had inserted in biology textbooks questioning Darwin's theory of evolution is being appealed by the suburban Atlanta district. Similar legal battles pitting evolution against biblical creationism are erupting across the country. Judges are conscientiously observing the constitutionally required separation of church and state, and specifically a 1987 Supreme Court ruling forbidding the teaching of creationism, a religious belief, in public schools. But seekers of scientific truth have to be unnerved by a November 2004 CBS News poll in which nearly two-thirds of Americans favored teaching creationism, the notion that God created heaven and earth in six days, alongside evolution in schools.
If this style of "science" ever took hold in U.S. schools, it is safe to say that as a nation we could well be headed for Third World status, along with everything that dire label implies. Much of the Arab world is stuck in a miasma of imam-enforced repression and non-thought. Could it happen here? Our Constitution protects creativity and dissent, but no civilization has lasted forever, and our current national leaders seem happy with the present trends.
It is the creationists, of course, who forecast doom if U.S. schools follow a secularist path. Science, however, by its nature, relies on evidence, and all the fossil and other evidence points toward an evolved human species over millions of years on a planet tens of millions of years old [ooops!] in a universe over two billion years in existence [ooops again!].
Some creationists are promoting an idea they call "intelligent design" as an alternative to Darwinism, eliminating the randomness and survival-of-the-fittest of Darwinian thought. But, again, no evidence exists to support any theory of evolution except Charles Darwin's. Science classes can only teach the scientific method or they become meaningless.
Many creationists say that teaching Darwin is tantamount to teaching atheism, but most science teachers, believers as well as non-believers, scoff at that. The Rev. Warren Eschbach, a professor at Lutheran Theological Seminary in Gettysburg, Pa., believes that "science is figuring out what God has already done" and the book of Genesis was never "meant to be a science textbook for the 21st century." Rev. Eschbach is the father of Robert Eschbach, one of the science teachers in Dover, Pa., who refused to teach a school-board-mandated statement to biology students criticizing the theory of evolution and promoting intelligent design. Last week, the school district gathered students together and the statement was read to them by an assistant superintendent.
Similar pro-creationist initiatives are underway in Texas, Wisconsin and South Carolina. And a newly elected creationist majority on the state board of education in Kansas plans to rewrite the entire state's science curriculum this spring. This means the state's public-school science teachers will have to choose between being scientists or ayatollahs -- or perhaps abandoning their students and fleeing Kansas, like academic truth-seekers in China in the 1980s or Tehran today.
Failing to concede the truth, as you've done, is hardly grounds for intellectual celebration.
Maybe it's the "member since this afternoon" signup date, but I suspect you're right here.
No it does not. Design is an iterative process that includes natural selection. Even the most carefully designed objects are just guesses. Those that work survive and get incorporated into more complex objects. No one ever designed a jetliner from first principles. Designs evolve.
Let's get something straight about the concept of evolution. It does not care about the source or cause of change or modification. The change may or may not be caused by a conscious entity, but selection operates on the change regardless of its source.
Darwin never made a single specific claim about how modification occurred. He couldn't. He knew nothing about genetics. What he observed and recorded is the fact that changes are subject to selection, and selection shapes the direction of change.
You are a conservative. You believe that free markets are more efficient than planned economies. Why is that? Surely intelligently designed economies should be better. If not, why not? The answer again, as noted by Darwin and Adam Smith, is that the invisible hand of selection is the best and most efficient designer, even when the objects being selected by the invisible hand are the product of a conscious entity.
Talk about gilding the lily! Dumbing down a creationist mathematical probablity strawman! What'll they dumb down next?
In brief, it is mathematically impossible, given the 17 billion years in age of our universe, for unaided processes to precisely sequence data longer than a few scores.
In brief, you'd have to model every possible unaided process to make such a statement. Please show your work.
Big Bang has had its ups and downs. Hardly a decade goes by that it isn't falsified.
"No it does not. Design is an iterative process that includes natural selection. Even the most carefully designed objects are just guesses. Those that work survive and get incorporated into more complex objects. No one ever designed a jetliner from first principles. Designs evolve." -js1138
Nonsense. Intelligent Design explains how computer viri are programmed (e.g. by an intelligent human programmer, among other methods). That the design doesn't start out perfect is irrelevant.
What matters is whether the *software* itself is evolving without aid, or whether it is the designer of the software that intelligently improves said software design over time.
Ditto for self-replicating machines, artificially intelligent software, cloning, etc.
Let's get something straight about Intelligent Design; it does not require that Darwinism be disproven for Intelligent Design to be correct.
At the present time, that's merely a side-effect.
I misspoke. ID does explain biological processes, in that anything in biology can be shown to be the way the Designer intended it. Therefore, ID can't be falsified, and is therefore not science.
The math for sequencing with or without aid/bias was provided in my original post to this thread in a link.
Now, since I've shown my work, your next post must be to show *your* math to the contrary (you can't).
Intelligent Design *can* potentially be falsified in regards to abiogenesis (see Steen Rasmussen's current experiment at Los Alamos for more on that angle).
In the meantime, Intelligent Design *can't* be falsified for its explanation of how computer viri, cloning attempts, artificially intelligent software, and self-replicating machines are created...simply because ID *is* the correct explanation to all of the above...and falsification of the truth is simply not possible in any honest debate.
Good link but loses the light-hearted touch as it goes along. The author could have had more fun with the premise.
YMBAFI... you think the cavemen were survivors of Noah's Flood.
YMBAFI... you think 99.99 percent of the world's scientists are members of the "religious cult" of evolution but the authorities in science (the other 0.01 percent) have proven them wrong.
YMBAFI... the people who think a "yom" could mean 100 million years as easily as a real 24-hour day are going to burn in Hell forever alongside Hitler, Stalin, and Stephen Jay Gould.
And so forth.
The Ayatolla's demand their teachings and only their teachings. In that respect, they have a lot more in common with evolutionists.
ID proponents want people to have all the information and make up their own mind.
Is this hard to understand or just hard to read?
The math in the link that I provided is valid for all sequencing processes. No exceptions. It is comprehensive.
Thus, your request was answered long before you even demanded it, yet you haven't been able to figure that simple reality out. Methinks that you may therefore be in a debate that is a bit over your head.
As predicted, you still haven't shown your own math to the contrary even though I've shown my work.
Perhaps in your next post...
(Ah to to give credit where it isn't due, come on, we all know that you can't show math to the contrary)
Your head being impenetrable is not my problem.
You still haven't shown your math to the contrary of the math that I showed.
Perhaps in your *next* post...
If the background microwave radiation predicted by the theory could not be found -- that would definitely be a blow against the Big Bang theory.
Well...I suppose I'll just vanish into thin air then.
The federal government has no business in local school matters. The Department of Education should be abolished and all powers and responsibilities for education returned to the states.
Fine, I agree with you, but how does that make violating the first amendment any more legal?
ID has had its ups and downs. Hardly a decade goes by that it isn't tried to be falsified.
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