Scientists shun Kansas evolution hearing

Washington Times (via India) ^ | 08 April 2005 | Staff

[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.

---

We can't post complete articles from the Washington Times, so I got this copy from a paper in India. If you want to see the article in the Washington Times (it's identical to what I posted) it's here.

[MacDorcha]

Very New Age...just take whatever makes sense and call it your "truth".

How is it "New Age" to realize that the Bible, though accurate, was presented in a very simple manner for simple people?

It was a story to relate how Man first came to have thought. Does your science have a causation story for thought? So how do you know it disagrees with science?

[MacDorcha]

And you're dodging. Nice to know discussing it is beyond your wanting to find the Truth.

It shows that you would rather cling to your own personal Dogma than partake in a discussion that questions your outlook.

[mdmathis6]

""Zeus theory" accounts for it also. So what? A scientific theory must be testable. It must be falsifiable"

Yes, cite a tautology and we taunt you to oblivion...hail Ceasar! Hail almighty Science!

[MacDorcha]

It took me a moment to realize:

Your name would be a variant of "Baal" or "Belial" wouldn't it?

You postition yourself as an opposition to Christ, yet you try to refute that the Word has Truth.

Welcome to Freerepublic.

Try not to pervert the Word in to your own.

[jennyp]

The parts that don't make obvious sense at the time are going to be "analogies" just like "6 days" was an "analogy" for creationism. It's 6 YOM.

Hey, that's interesting! It does make a bit more sense than to simply say that the parts that don't make obvious sense to me must be analogies. Of course, that would tend to imply that we shouldn't care about what's written in the Bible, since it clearly wasn't written for us. (If it was, we shouldn't need to spend years trying to figure out which interpretation - literal vs. allegorical - would have seemed more reasonable to the original audience for each passage we come upon.)

Anyway... are you really saying that 6 literal days of creation would not have made sense to these illiterate nomads?

[js1138]

Now only amoebas, bacteria, and simple stuff like that don't necessarily die.

It's the nails that stick up that get pounded.

[Dimensio]

A cursory reading of the site you mention doesn't seem to be to be saying the earth is flat.

I never claimed that the authors of the site said any such thing.

Is this your method of argument? Pretend that your opponent said something that you wanted them to say and argue against that rather than what they did say?

[Dimensio]

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,

Ah. So you make excuses to cover up your complete and total lack of facts.

I haven't so far when it comes to getting you to realize that evolution is a belief not a fact?

How can you, when you don't provide any facts to support your claims? Are you saying that I should just take your word for it that you are right and everyone else is wrong?

[MacDorcha]

6 literal days may have made sense to Dark Aged peasants.

6 Yom makes perfect sense, and would have to them as well (as far as I can tell)

I see no reason they would disagree with "6 periods of time" given their understanding at the time.

[RobRoy]

Ooooh. This is one of the "icky" crevo threads...

[mlc9852]

I'm sorry - I thought you meant that site said that. I didn't want to argue, just discuss differing opinions. Again, I apologize if I offended you.

[Dimensio]

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.

That's great. I'm speaking of evolution as it is, not evolution as some crackpots with limited or no understanding of science have misrepresented it, and not evolution as you might think that some people have misrepresented it regardless of whether or not they did.

Evolution makes no claim equvalent to "there is no God". It is fundamentally dishonest of you to present a statement to the effect that all who accept evolution make such a claim. 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.

If you have an actual objection to this method, present it. Otherwise, I don't see your point. Science cannot make statements on things that cannot be objectively observed, are you suggesting that this is a bad thing?

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.

It seems as though you're taking a necessary property of the scientific method and railing against it for no reason other than that it does not presuppose your religious beliefs as fact.

Many evolutionists big hang-up with creationists is that Creationists hold to an unprovable tautology...

My big hang-up with creationists is that so many of them are shameless liars and many who aren't outright lying are still fundementally ignorant of what evolution is and what supports it yet they still speak as though they are experts.

yet by rejecting the tautologous and personally attacking the creationists, the evolutionists themselves violate the priciple of science...

And this statement makes no sense. But that's okay, since it seems to be predicated upon a faulty assumption.

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."

Do you have a method for accurately and precisely measuring "God"? If not, then how the hell are scientists supposed to consider the hypothetical interference of a construct that isn't even consistently and coherently defined and may not even be present in the first place?

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.

Uh, no. Evolution is a scientific theory. It is more often than not the creationists who misrepresent it as some kind of vast worldview that forms the basis of political, economic and sociological beliefs. It's just an explanation of events within biology, it's not an attempted disproof of any gods.

They can not be proven

No scientific theory can be proven. What seperates evolution from creationism is that there is a defined criteria that would hypothetically disprove evolution, however no one has yet bothered to present such a criteria for any particular creation story.

in the materialist sense because we can not go back in time and observe the processes that set life in motion.

Yes, and observing evidence and understanding natural processes is certainly not a justification for extrapolating known data to hypothesize and theorize upon past events.

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!

This is a rehash of the "if life is created in the lab, it proves ID" arguments that I see over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over again and nauseum.

[Dimensio]

Darwin makes the assertion of a Creator in his writing (The Origin of the Species, duh)

This makes his (and all findings based on such) theories and discoveries "not scientific"

Uh, no. Darwin was speculating on the origin of the first life forms from which evolution began. His speculation is not scientific, because it invokes the supernatural, but this speculation was not part of the theory of evolution, and thus it has no bearing on whether or not the theory itself is scientific.

If ID has, as was stated before, a tenet as part of the ID explanation that a God could have been responsible for anything, then ID is not scientific. If ID mentions the deity of a specific religion, then ID distances itself even further from science and becomes an outright religious statement.

[Dimensio]

Is it standard practice for you to reply to a counter that you can't refute with a non-sequitur?

[Dimensio]

Yes, cite a tautology and we taunt you to oblivion...hail Ceasar! Hail almighty Science!

Wow. He really must have made his point if you can't come up with an intelligent counter, but instead felt so threatened by his reply that you had to offer up this inane blather.

[MacDorcha]

"No, but if a belief has, as part of a tenet, any religious content, then it's not science."

By Darwin speculating about a Creator, he involves something else in the evolution process aside from self-organizing life. This means that Creationism is suggestable as the origin of Life and the reason evolution works in his theory.

He holds that God is probable, thus by your assertion, it should not be considered science, as it makes a claim of a sigular higher being. (This would be considered religious as well, as there are people who hold that their are many gods, and some hold that their is but one.)

[MacDorcha]

It isn't non-sequiur, it's just in this little aspect of education you ignored: philosophy.

You see, if science is going to make any assertions as to the world about us, it MUST provide a "given" or an absolute. A rule that can be applied to anything else. A universal application must be found in it for it to be "true."

Otherwise it is casual observations from idiots (the traditional hellenic kind) about the world, with no real clue about what the world means and no desire to find out.

[Dimensio]

By Darwin speculating about a Creator, he involves something else in the evolution process aside from self-organizing life.

Only if he was speaking on evolution at the time. He was not. He was invoking a Creator to explain a process not covered by evolution.