Posted on 04/10/2005 3:53:04 AM PDT by PatrickHenry
A pro-evolution group has organized what appears to be a successful boycott of Kansas hearings on intelligent design.
Alexa Posny, a deputy commissioner with the state department of education, told the Kansas City Star that only one person has agreed to testify on the pro-evolution side for the hearings scheduled for May.
"We have contacted scientists from all over the world," Posny said. "There isn't anywhere else we can go."
Harry McDonald, head of Kansas Citizens for Science, charged that the hearings, called by a conservative majority on the state board of education, have a pre-ordained outcome.He said that testifying would only make intelligent design appear legitimate.
"Intelligent design is not going to get its forum, at least not one in which they can say that scientists participated," he said.
Backers of intelligent design, the claim that a supreme being guided evolution, say it is a theory with scientific backing. Opponents believe it is an attempt to smuggle religion into public education.
A cursory reading of the site you mention doesn't seem to be to be saying the earth is flat. Of course, if you believe some people believe it is, I won't argue because I don't profess to know what everyone else believes.
Beep. Circle takes the square. Science does not deal in "proof." Science deals in evidence. Your credibility has just taken a nose dive.
I haven't brought any forth yet, but really tell me what's the point? Am I suddenly going to change your mind with the facts, I haven't so far when it comes to getting you to realize that evolution is a belief not a fact?
Right. As if a lower-case "n" would cure the problem. Come on, A-Girl. First, you know that the anthropic principle is a mere speculation, far from being universally accepted among scientists, and it comes in a few different flavors -- all of which I can easily reject.
Second, is that (the anthropic principle) really the reason you're going to keep on bashing your opponents by characterizing their position with your bumper-strip misrepresentation "Nature did it!"? It can't be. Your pretext for clinging to your bumper-strip is itself a reification "get science to give up ..." used to justify your bumper-strip's claim that the scientific position is a reification of nature.
This leads to several questions:
Obviously the later questions depend on at least a qualified Yes to the first question. I am not trying to put you in a box. I simply want to know if IDers believe that variation is the working out of a program that has a direction or goal.
Then spake Joshua to the LORD in the day when the LORD delivered up the Amorites before the children of Israel, and he said in the sight of Israel, Sun, stand thou still upon Gibeon; and thou, Moon, in the valley of Ajalon.
And the sun stood still, and the moon stayed, until the people had avenged themselves upon their enemies. Is not this written in the book of Jasher? So the sun stood still in the midst of heaven, and hasted not to go down about a whole day. -- Joshua 10:12-13
If the Bible is the literal word of God, then that means that the Sun ceased revolving around the earth on Joshua's demand. Doesn't it?
185: I haven't brought any forth yet, but really tell me what's the point?
So, which is it?
BTW, on the evo side of the house, we know we won't change the minds of the folks we debate. However, we're not doing it for your edification. We do it so that nascent conservatives who are science minded are not led to believe the conservative movement is inherently anti-science. We do it so liberals do not get the ammunition they need to paint all conservatives as luddites. But mostly we're doing it for the hundreds or thousands of folks who lurk on these threads and who will compare the evidence presented by both sides and make their determinations based on such.
It's more for the Lurkers
(with apologies to Boston)
I woke up this morning and the PC's on
Logged onto FR to start my day
I got wrapped up in a crevo thread
A paradigm shifts and it slips my way.
It's more for the Lurkers (more for the Lurkers)
Hear the old canards the creos say (more for the Lurkers)
I begin posting (more for the Lurkers)
Till I feel a paradigm shift my way
I feel a paradigm shifting my way.
So many threads have come and gone
So many more await their turn;
Yet I recall as I battle on,
We do it so the lurker's learn.
Chorus
[Guitar Solo]
When the creo's canards are getting old
I grab some links and post away,
And think of a lurker reading this.
A paradigm shifts and it slips my way.
It slips my way.
Chorus
I have worked with people in the SDI stuff. Neither the Demcrats nor Republicans were interested in the scientific merit of the results.
However, evolutionary theory also predicts that certain things do not happen. What are the falsifying criteria for ID? What would ID claim cannot happen if the Designer wished it to be?
There may be but the theistic evolutionists ones get a lot of scorn from the atheistic ones and often have their work marginalized. I remember the E Forest Mims controversy in Scientific American. He is an electronics engineer who used to publish a column outlining practical problems and solutions in electronis. He was popular until word got out that he was a "born again conservative Christian"...he wasn't even into biology and he got booted out of the magazine for not having the proper "scientific" mind-set...the hue and cry coming from mainly atheistic evolutionary biologist readers or the magaizine. The implication was clear...you can't have religious principles and be a good scientist.
The intelligent design folks start with either a theistic premise or an extraterrestrial premise for example. If you read further, you would have noted my discussion of the Tautologous. Evolution indeed follows only from the evidence, the theory of which is induced from the patterns that are measured, seen, ect. My arguement is with those scientists who assume that anything that is tautologous or not testable is always necessarily false. Good science in the objective sence indeed deals only with the evidence before it...though the problematic part is to interpret the data into a form that can be systematically organized and interpreted meaningfully. In the end, SUBJECTIVE BIAS chooses the shape in which data is organized into hypotheses which can be tested and verified. It is this INDUCTIVE phase in which science has its most weakest flaw. It is also interesting once hypotheses are verified then a DEDUCTIVE process follows from those Hypotheses.
The greatest difficulty for both evolutionists and Creationists is that we can't go back in time. The Subjective Biases of both camps send both sides down different paths with each side coming up with plausible sounding theories and data to support their views. The Creationists start with a Tautologous premise, evolutionists ignore that premise or view it in the negative. Until the physics folks invent a time machine in which all concerned can go back and see what happened we'll never know, we'll only have at best educated guesses from both sides of the arguement,(and name calling on both sides)!
It's appalling that this organization is painting "conservatives" as flat-earthers. However, this is just what you predicted PH.
Indeed it is true that the SCIENCE of Evolution can make no claims on the Tautologous. Atheistic EVOLUTIONISTS and ADHERENTS( adherents such as Sanger, Lenin,Engels, Pol POT,Hitler) on the other hand (who assume all taulogous arguements have no basis in anything that truly exists) make those claims all the time and tell religiously minded scientists to go and shove it.
And yes since David Hume(who hated his religious father) wrote his philosophical treatises regarding materialism and inductive reasoning, his approach was adopted increasingly by scientists wishing a more orderely objective testable method to their work. Hume basically said "All is sense data, you can only know what you feel, see, taste, measure...real knowledge can only be induced from these and that which is true are patterns that are repeated or repeatable over time". Sound familiar...this is the basis of the current scientific method.
It seems you really don't know the philosophical history of the founding of modern science or of its birth out of a Judeo-Christian western consenses.
Many evolutionists big hang-up with creationists is that Creationists hold to an unprovable tautology...yet by rejecting the tautologous and personally attacking the creationists, the evolutionists themselves violate the priciple of science...hence "There is no God or if there is, then God is tautologous to the arguement and not to be considered, therefore the only thing we can know is what we measure touch, feel, see, inducing hypotheses from these data then testing it for accuracy."
Evolution and Creationism are tautologies....they can not be proven but they are mainly sign posts of the great Descartes vs. Humes style Rationalism vs. Materialism debates of the 1600-1800's. They can not be proven in the materialist sense because we can not go back in time and observe the processes that set life in motion. Men might succeed in time in some lab to recreate the guessed at conditions of 3 billion years ago and create some blob or other that jiggles and seems to reproduce....but the question would then arise that human inteference in these conditions created that blob...surely it took some deus ex machina influence to create(since man wasn't around back then) it on the Earth 3 billion years
ago under the same conditions. The controversies would rage on even further with more name calling on both sides!
Truly I can understand the desire to avoid another Galileo fiasco - but the pendulum has swung too far in the other direction.
There are several disciplines of science where scientific materialism hinders progress by the "Nature did it!" presumption. These include cosmology, information theory, theoretical physics, studies of consciousness/mind and historical sciences.
And it is not limited to the non-religious studies either. In Biblical Archeology, the presumption is that prophesy is impossible and therefore any reference to an event which actually occurred is used to date a manuscript after the date of the event. In this case, the archeologists were caught flat footed when, based on the ancient manuscripts of Enoch speaking of Herod’s reign, dated them to after Herod’s birth – only to have that presumption refuted by the later discovery of a copy of the manuscript in the Dead Sea Scrolls, carbon dated to 200 B.C.
How bizarre! The IDers have figured out how to separate science from religion and that's a problem???
Those who believe the Designer is God are not "hiding their light under a bushel" - they're talking about science here.
You highlighted the problems that many pro-evolutionists have with ID'ers....they see them as having a more religious agenda. They are so antireligious(or anti-tautolgous) that any one who proposes a divergent view on the origins of life orthodoxy, that the main body of evolutionary biologists hold to be true, is only a boogeyman conservative intolerant science phobe christian in a scientist's lab coat with geeky pocket protectors!
I cannot speak for the "Intelligent Design movement" - for those answers, you'd need to keep up with the lead group at the Discovery Institute.
Here are my responses to your questions:
Well, okay. I understand you better. But the bumper-strip version of the scientific view of those who aren't philosophical materialists would be be "Not necessarily." (In my always humble opinion.)
At any rate and as I can recall as it has been awhile, the Republican primary initiative was a space-based platform to intercept ICBMs. The most cost effective solution was brilliant pebbles to detonate incoming in the range after lift off and before approach to avoid civilian collateral damage. The Democrats, to try to make the system totally unachievable, insisted on the most unlikely and costly approach of "shooting a bullet at an incoming bullet". All of this because of the fear of space-based defense and mutually assured destruction (also a Democrat policy).
Thus we do not have a national missile defense though we do have the regional ability to shoot a missile down with another missile (not totally effective). Israel's arrow system (funded in part by us during Clinton's years) was the first "national" missile defense - but only so because of the size of their nation.
At any rate, the politicians are more concerned about these sweeping issues - I doubt many of them have much interest in the details.
Indeed. The contention is between ideologies/theologies and it spills over into the science.
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