Posted on 08/04/2005 12:43:01 PM PDT by Crackingham
A leading Republican senator allied with the religious right differed on Thursday with President Bush's support for teaching an alternative to the theory of evolution known as "intelligent design."
Republican Sen. Rick Santorum, a possible 2008 presidential contender who faces a tough re-election fight next year in Pennsylvania, said intelligent design, which is backed by many religious conservatives, lacked scientific credibility and should not be taught in science classes.
Bush told reporters from Texas on Monday that "both sides" in the debate over intelligent design and evolution should be taught in schools "so people can understand what the debate is about."
"I think I would probably tailor that a little more than what the president has suggested," Santorum, the third-ranking Republican member of the U.S. Senate, told National Public Radio. "I'm not comfortable with intelligent design being taught in the science classroom."
Evangelical Christians have launched campaigns in at least 18 states to make public schools teach intelligent design alongside Charles Darwin's theory of evolution. Proponents of intelligent design argue that nature is so complex that it could not have occurred by random natural selection, as held by Darwin's 1859 theory of evolution, and so must be the work of an unnamed "intelligent cause."
Santorum is the third-ranking member of the U.S. Senate and has championed causes of the religious right including opposition to gay marriage and abortion. He is expected to face a stiff challenge from Democrat Bob Casey in his quest for re-election next year in Pennsylvania, a major battleground state in recent presidential elections.
SNIP
"What we should be teaching are the problems and holes -- and I think there are legitimate problems and holes -- in the theory of evolution. What we need to do is to present those fairly, from a scientific point of view," he said in the interview.
"As far as intelligent design is concerned, I really don't believe it has risen to the level of a scientific theory at this point that we would want to teach it alongside of evolution."
If you go by the standard that no scientific theory can ever be proven (and ape to man in a lab would NOT prove the theory of evolution ... it wouldn't even come close), then we must treat all other scientific theories the same way.
For instance, prove we can;t go lower than absolute zero in the lab.
Santorum is another Republican sell-out.
Prove what reasoning of mine leads to that. Also, how does a master designer ... which itself has low odds of occuring .. . improve the odds? You are using statistics improperly, because you ignore the fact that a supposedly low probability event did actually occur. Improbability is not impossibility. If we weren;t here, we wouldn;t be having this argument.
Would this be acceptable scientific proof?
I can;t think of any scientific theories off the top of my head that are considered "proven" by a calculation of odds that are based upon ... actually, what are your numbers based on?
If not, why and if so then I can then speculate that the complexity of life happening by chance is also statistically impossible therefore I can use my earlier theory that God exists and say that God had to do it, and evolution, well I think you get the picture. Show me it happening today or your just asking me to take a leap of faith.
I do have ecidence that the occurance of life is not statistically impossible. However, an intelligent designer is not needed for it not to be impossible. Statistically unlikely (I reject your term "impossible" ... "improbable" might be better) events happen every day ... SOMEONE wins the lottery sometimes, some people are struck by lightning several times, sometimes I have to pay less in taxes than I thought I would. The odds of life occuring on any particular planet are very small (as far as we know) ... the odds of life occuring SOMEWHERE are less small due to the vastness of space ... we just happened to be a lucky planet. The problem with your assumption is that there are plenty of places life did NOT work out ... but they, inherently, cannot ask the sorts of questions we are asking.
Show me it happening today or your just asking me to take a leap of faith.
By "it" do you mean evolution (I'll even separate it out into the wonderful terms "microevolution" and "macroevolution"), a specific species transition, life on another planet, or abiogenesis?
So you would deny Dembski's assertion: " Indeed, intelligent design is just the Logos theology of John's gospel restated in the idiom of information theory"
Then, do you believe that it should be noted that there are other alternatives when any sort of scientific theory is presented in class, even when those scientifc theories have no actual competing scientific theories to them, only opinions?
And if evolution is being presented as settled science, that's a problem with the teachers, not the science. ANY science class should fill a student with the idea that questiuoning science is good ... but it should also teach them the terms used in science, what a theory is, and how to properly argue against a scientific theory.
And why limit the noting that theories aren;t accpeted by everyone just to science? Why not argue in math, where people theorize that a number minus itself equals zero, by admitting that we haven't tried this for all numbers yet, we've only "guessed"?
It does seem part of the issue is that your teachers in public school did not understand the theory of evolution (or scientific theory in general) ... but that's a problem in ever subject in schools.
(And I hope you aren;t sending your children to public schools, or have at least found a good public school --- of the few there are!)
Thanks for the ping!
No, in the same way that if you deal a random hand of 8 playing cards you can't then look at the hand you dealt and say getting that specific hand is statistically impossible by chance.
then I can then speculate that the complexity of life happening by chance is also statistically impossible
Well you would have to explain how you determined it to be statistically impossible.
Show me it happening today or your just asking me to take a leap of faith.
So it takes a leap of faith to know something has happened unless it happens today? I guess that's geology down the drain. History class down the drain too.
Please note where I ever said it did. I didn't. If you have no idea how evolution--a scientific theory as to where humans came from--had a revolutionary effect on belief that humans came from a creator, you are completely and totally out of it.
Do you need it spelled out? Because I wrote as if I were having a discussion with someone who knew at least a little about the subject.
When Nietzsche had one of his characters say "God is dead" he was saying that the casual acceptance in European culture that God was the be-all and end-all and the only answer to all questions or whatever was dead. More than one thing contributed to this massive body-blow the Christian idea of God took, but evolution was a MAJOR contributor to that.
To spell it out very clearly, no, I am not saying Christianity died when that happened, so don't even try that silly "gotcha" stuff again. I am saying that the power of the church has never recovered from the battering it took in the 19th century, and the wider dissemination of the theory of evolution (which in fact preceded Darwin's most famous writings) was a large part of that.
You can go on denying that, but you're gonna look really silly. Have fun.
The majority of proponents of creationism approach it from an Islamic view. So what?
And common breakages..
If the same two books had the same spelling mistakes on pages 14,122 and 312 that would suggest they were derived from the same "common ancestor" copy that originally had the mistakes in.
What are the odds of two books copied independantly from one another getting the same spelling mistakes on the same pages?
(Perplexed Smiley.)
Wow, that is a bad theory. I'm glad that they have the theory of evolution instead, and not that pared-down misunderstanding of the theory that you saw somewhere!
The fact is evolution has never offered any incontrovertible evidence that man descended from ape,
It could NEVER provide incontrovertible evidence, only evidence that seems to fit the theory. Who's to say we couldn;t find something YOU'D consider incontrovertible, but the next day God appears before everyone and says "You guys are mistaken." Science should always allow for the possibility that it is wrong, but you seem to think that science should start to claim their theories are facts (I'm separating science from the individual scientists on purpose .. some may claim theory to be fact, but they are wong).
but yet you seem to believe it as settled science.
Then you are completely misunderstanding everything I have written. I in no way believe that the current theory of evolution is the exact answer to how life meandering its way through time on this planet.
But it's the best theory we currently have, and in order to be able to reach a more accurate theory, you need to start somewhere ...
When I was in school, I thought protons and electrons were as small as things got. Guess, what, there's smaller stuff! Should protons and electrons not have been considered the smallest things we knew of? If we didn;t, how could we have discovered something smaller?
You might want to take a big smell of that crap you are shoveling.
I'm very far away from you, due to the wonders of the internet, so if you're smelling a load of crap, I'll theorize it's coming from closer to you. You might want to start reading what I actually write instead of what you would need me to write to make arguments you have ready ...
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