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.
That says it all.
1) The old thread in which you allegedly "laid out your math in no way shape or form anticipates every possible unaided process, including the actual process of evolution,I was tempted to zero in on the usages in just that one post of "bogus" and "tragic brain damage," but the right choice was clear. "Dishonest or stupid?" It always comes down to that decision for anyone with a brain reading your stuff.2) At least half the posters on said thread spent their entire time thereon trying to pound such facts into your stupid head. I will link just one salient example, "Dishonest or stupid?"
No, we demand that you teach scientific fact. And the Theory of Evolution is, despite long years of attempts to discredit it by the god squad, the best explaination for how species developed on Earth.
ID proponents want people to have all the information and make up their own mind.
Then they should encourage children to go to church and indoctrinate them with religious teachings there.
ID is not science, and despite the fevered dreams of those at the Discovery Institute, never will be.
I can't imagine how anyone thinks they're going falsify a "theory" that says, "Well ... God coo-uuuuld have left it looking like that!"
No, it just comes down to math.
Speaking of which, perhaps in your *next* post you'll show your math that somehow contradicts my own.
Not!
If the other 'scientists' were willing to admit that there is no proof perhaps the rest of us (them) could have equal access to state our (their) case?
(without being maligned / denigrated for it?)
No, not even close.
Examine post #238 above. Notice that it shows off a potential biological machine. It also references the fascinating field of DNA computers.
Now consider that Man has already built robotic welders and asemblers capable of building new welders and assemblers, i.e. self-replicating machines.
Apply that feat of mechanical self-replication to DNA computers and biological machines.
Now ask yourself, does unaided Evolution or aided Intelligent Design best explain such self-replicating biological machines?
Over the past two decades, astrophysicists have been spectacularly successful [sic] in explaining [sic] the early evolution of the Universe. Existing theories can account well [sic] for the time span from the Big Bang nearly 14 billion years ago [sic] until the Universe began to cool and form the first large structures less than a million years later [sic]. But detailed explanations of how the original stew of elementary particles subsequently coalesced over time, to form the stars and galaxies seen in the present-day Universe, are still being refined. As they report on pages 181 and 184 of this issue, Glazebrook et al.1 and Cimatti et al.2 have discovered the most distant old galaxies yet. But the existence of these objects at such an early epoch in the history of the Universe seems inconsistent with the favoured theory of how galaxies formed. (Emphasis added in all quotes.)According to Wirth, these new studies provide the first solid evidence that as far back as 10 billion years ago there were already many old massive galaxies, and it is clear that even the best models cant fully explain the evolution of galaxies. Do galaxies grow much faster than predicted in the hierarchical models, that assume they coalesced from smaller objects? Or did the stars in these galaxies form in a substantially different way from our expectations? We may have to wait a decade for the next generation of larger telescopes, he concludes.
Either way, you're a lost cause, don't expect much more of my time. My work here is done, I've exposed you as a charlatan and/or a fool too many times to count now. Whether or not you're able to admit it, the lurkers should be quite able to see the shoddy quality of the anti-evolution arguments.Note his specific criticism is that, even as I told you some posts ago, you not only didn't model every conceivable unaided process, you utterly failed to address the specific process put forth by mainstream science."Monkeys" my hind end. Come back when you're able to properly analyze self-sustaining organic chemical cycles and *then* we'll talk.
If you've ever done that anywhere, please show your work and I'll get back to you. If that thread is all you've got, you are making unsubstantiated assertions and [once yet again] all you have for defense is that nobody can make Southack see.
I expect you will have the last word and that your next post will be it.
You'd be better served to see my rebuttal to Dan Day's flailing about before citing him. Click on the View Replies button to each of his posts.
Moreover, the *math* that I provided is valid for the probability of *all* possible forms of unaided sequencing.
If you want to attack that all-encompassing probability math, then you'll have to (finally) show your own work.
I think that it's interesting, I don't think that it supports your argument. Complexity itself is not a proof for ID. It just means that science has one more layer of investigation to conduct into the nature of the living machine.
Though this does bring up the interesting question of why you'd want to find proofs to support faith in the first place.
The "last word" should be you showing math to the contrary. You can't do that. Even the link that you provided (to my own thread!) shows merely that there are a lot of combinations of valid sequences...something that the probability math in that thread dealt with initially, anyway.
But that would require actually reading it...
Faith is a strawman, far removed from any scientific discussion of Intelligent Design or Evolution.
I don't think so, it's certainly driving your argument. And I imagine that it drives the whole ID movement nationwide.
ID isn't a mater of presenting intellectual choice or providing for reasoned debate. If that were the case then IDers would be pushing for the inclusion of other ideas that challenge established scientific fact. The fact that they aren't suggests that faith and a desire to proselytize to impressionable youth in a government funded forum is their (and your) real goal.
A creationist website. Couldn't you come up with something from a scientific journal?
Evolution is not scientific fact and it is not the best explanation of how species developed on Earth despite the fevered dreams of evolutionists.
And if you can scientifically prove that fact, I'll sign on wholeheartedly to whatever it is that you're promoting.
We are going in circle. How does it violate the first amendment?
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