Posted on 08/20/2005 5:45:53 PM PDT by Nicholas Conradin
By SEATTLE - When President Bush plunged into the debate over the teaching of evolution this month, saying, "both sides ought to be properly taught," he seemed to be reading from the playbook of the Discovery Institute, the conservative think tank here that is at the helm of this newly volatile frontier in the nation's culture wars.
After toiling in obscurity for nearly a decade, the institute's Center for Science and Culture has emerged in recent months as the ideological and strategic backbone behind the eruption of skirmishes over science in school districts and state capitals across the country. Pushing a "teach the controversy" approach to evolution, the institute has in many ways transformed the debate into an issue of academic freedom rather than a confrontation between biology and religion.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
Sounds like you and I were on the same road, you took a left turn and I took a right turn.
What I discovered is that what Genesis calls a DAY is NOT talking about a 24 hour day. I also found that there is nothing in the Bible that indicates this earth is a young planet. Rather the exact opposite. So one has to watch who does the translating.
Knock off the personal attacks.
LOL. Textbook example of question begging. This is why evolutionists make no headway with intelligent doubters. You can't do basic rhetorical logic so why should we believe you act rightly in the murky swamps of your obscure scientific venue? The question on the table is not does speciation occur. The question raised by anti-evolutionists is whether it is reasonable to extrapolate these small changes to larger ones. Therefore, your retort "never mind..." is precisely "begging the question."
The reason y'all get nowhere (in addition to a chronic inability to follow the rules of informal logic in discussions) is because you refuse to admit the weaknesses of the theory. I presented one, which on a good day an evolutionist will admit to. If you could demonstrate the evolution of major body organs or larger morphological shifts you would do so. And if you could, it would eliminate the carping of the naysayers. This can not be demonstrated. It is simply not credible to count this lack of demonstrability as a "0" in assessing the strength of your theory. It fails every test of logic.
NOTE: I have not said that the failure to demonstrate "macro" evolution or evolution "B" or whatever you want to call it disproves orthodox evolutionary theory. Did you hear that? It does not disprove it. Unfortunately, most evolution advocates can't grasp distinctions that fine.
But the fact that you can't demonstrate evolution of body types etc. is evidence. It is not supporting evidence. It is a lack of supporting evidence -- you wish you could fill the gap but you can't. The fact that evolutionists refuse to admit this is just as stupid as anything the creationists have ever said. You have fallen to the level of those you hate.
29+ Evidences for Macroevolution. Yes, macro-evolution.
Ichneumon's legendary post 52. More evidence than you can handle.
Post 661: Ichneumon's stunning post on transitionals.
Evidence of Evolutionary Transitions. There really is evidence out there.
Transitional Vertebrate Fossils FAQ. Yes, transitional fossils exist.
Fossil whale with legs. Land animal to whale transitional fossil.
Feathered Dinosaurs.
Archaeopteryx. Reptile-to- bird transitional fossil.
Archaeopteryx: FAQS . A true transitional fossil
All About Archaeopteryx.
Evidence for Evolution . Compilation of links.
Human Ancestors.
The Evidence for Human Evolution.
Comparison of all Hominid skulls.
Failure to substantiate argument from authority noted.
I'm an engineer too. But I don't claim argument from authority with authorities who I cannot substantiate. Such a claim carries zero weight and has zero credibility. Argument from authority itself carries at a maximum very limited weight, which makes your obsession with the qualifications of the evos round here curious.
That's what I always figured.
It was a whole raft of things that made me change my mind. But it was the realization of the mindset of many Christians on this issue that really drove me away. It would take much more time than I have today to explain.
What is interesting is that you stopped right there without persuing it further...probably because it fit your preconceptions and bias.
If you would have done a simple search for The Higher Learning Commision, you would have noticed that there is a simple error on Argosy's website in which the link is expressed as www.ncahlc.org, rather than the proper www.ncahlc.org/. The only difference is the slash at the end.
Once there, all you have to do is access their directory of institutions which shows 448 hits for either Argosy University of Sarasota, or University of Sarasota
That was only one of the two accreditation links that can be found on their website however...the second of which, CACREP (which you failed to mention...no surprises there) works just fine.
It's a diploma mill.
Well, show me that it is. All you've really demonstrated is your bias and laziness
...If it were a real university, it would be accredited by the State of Florida.
From their website:
Argosy University/Sarasota is licensed by the Commission of Independent Education, Florida Department of Education. Additional information regarding this institution may be obtained by contacting the Commission at 2650 Apalachee Parkway, Suite A, Tallahassee, FL 32301, 888-224-6684).
Your move Spassky
PLACEMARKER
Today the party line at the Discovery Institute (DI) is to insist that they don't want Intelligent Design to be taught in high school science classes, and even if they did the Intelligent Designer could have been aliens for all we know. And they're certainly not trying to bring religion into science classes! On Tuesday on MSNBC's Hardball, DI president Bruce Chapman assured us:GREGORY: Mr. Chapman, let me pull back for just a minute. Isn‘t this just a way to get religion to be taught in the schools?CHAPMAN: No, it is not just a way to put religion in the schools, not from our standpoint. We have expressly said, we didn‘t want religion to be brought into this at any point.
But if you want to know who is bringing religion into the—this whole argument over evolution, it is the National Center For Science Education, because I have right here an example from a Web site that they helped put together with taxpayers‘
money, federal taxpayers‘ money, to teach teachers how to teach evolution. And, in this, they give examples of how to bring religious people and their views into the classroom to instruct children that evolution and religion are perfectly compatible, and not only that, but evolution will help enrich your faith.
Now, I don‘t have any opposition to people having those views.
GREGORY: Right.
CHAPMAN: But I do have an opposition to somebody criticizing anybody who says that evolution is flawed as being implicitly religious, when explicit...
(CROSSTALK)
GREGORY: ... to respond to that in our remaining time.
SCOTT: Yes.
CHAPMAN: Explicit—explicit—explicit cases are being made for evolution and religion being linked by the National Center For Science Education.
He actually accuses the NCSE of being the ones to inject religion into the debate, as if religion was a bad thing. Then yesterday, the DI's Rob Crowther repeated the point on their Evolution News & Views blog:
Who's injecting religion into the debate? Not proponents of intelligent design. It's the dogmatic defenders of Darwinism that insist on bringing up religion, primarily as a way of avoiding talking about the scientific problems with Darwin's theoryLikewise, the DI's website is full of bland, public relations boilerplate. The ID spokespeople have retreated so far nowadays, it's enough to make you wonder why they even care about the subject at all!
But there was a time, early on in the movement's life, when they were young, brash, and refreshingly upfront about their true agenda.
The DI formed the Center for the Renewal of Science and Culture in November, 1996. The press release explained how the center came to be and its purpose. (NOTE: These references come from the Wayback Machine archive.)
Major grants help establish Center for Renewal of Science and CultureFor over a century, Western science has been influenced by the idea that God is either dead or irrelevant. Two foundations recently awarded Discovery Institute nearly a million dollars in grants to examine and confront this materialistic bias in science, law, and the humanities. The grants will be used to establish the Center for the Renewal of Science and Culture at Discovery, which will award research fellowships to scholars, hold conferences, and disseminate research findings among opinionmakers and the general public.
...
The new Center grew out of last summer's "Death of Materialism" conference that Discovery organized and which has gathered increased attention since the four keynote addresses were published by the Intercollegiate Review earlier this year.
"The conference pointed the way," Discovery President Bruce Chapman says, "and helped us mobilize support to attack the scientific argument for the 20th century's ideology of materialism and the host of social 'isms' that attend it."...
From November 1996 through the end of 1998, here's the text you'd find when you came to the CRSC homepage:
Life After MaterialismFor more than a century, science attempted to explain all human behaviour as the subrational product of unbending chemical, genetic, or environmental forces. The spiritual side of human nature was ignored, if not denied outright.
This rigid scientific materialism infected all other areas of human knowledge, laying the foundations for much of modern psychology, sociology, economics, and political science. Yet today new developments in biology, physics, and artificial intelligence are raising serious doubts about scientific materialism and re-opening the case for the supernatural.
What do these exciting developments mean for the social sciences that were built upon the foundation of materialism? This project brings together leading scholars from the natural sciences and those from the humanities and social sciences in order to explore what the demise of materialism means for reviving the various disciplines.
But that's just the cliff-notes version. Click on "About the Center", and you get the full, blistering indictment:
THE proposition that human beings are created in the image of God is one of the bedrock principles on which Western civilization was built. Its influence can be detected in most, if not all, of the West's greatest achievements, including representative democracy, human rights, free enterprise, and progress in the arts and sciences.Yet a little over a century ago, this cardinal idea came under wholesale attack by intellectuals drawing on the discoveries of modern science. Debunking the traditional conceptions of both God and man, thinkers such as Charles Darwin, Karl Marx, and Sigmund Freud portrayed human beings not as eternal and accountable beings, but as animals or machines who inhabited a universe ruled by chance and whose behavior and very thoughts were dictated by the unbending forces of biology, chemistry, and environment. This materialistic conception of reality eventually infected virtually every area of our culture, from politics and economics to literature and music.
The cultural consequences of this triumph of materialism were devastating. Materialists denied the existence of objective standards binding on all cultures, claiming that environment dictates our moral beliefs. Such moral relativism was uncritically adopted by much of the social sciences, and it still undergirds much of modern economics, political science, psychology and sociology.
Materialists also undermined personal responsibility by asserting that human thoughts and behaviors are dictated by our biology and environment. The results can be seen in modern approaches to criminal justice, product liability, and welfare. In the materialist scheme of things, everyone is a victim and no one can be held accountable for his or her actions.
Finally, materialism spawned a virulent strain of utopianism. Thinking they could engineer the perfect society through the application of scientific knowledge, materialist reformers advocated coercive government programs that falsely promised to create heaven on earth.
Discovery Institute's Center for the Renewal of Science and Culture seeks nothing less than the overthrow of materialism and its damning cultural legacies. Bringing together leading scholars from the natural sciences and those from the humanities and social sciences, the Center explores how new developments in biology, physics and cognitive science raise serious doubts about scientific materialism and have re-opened the case for the supernatural. The Center awards fellowships for original research, holds conferences, and briefs policymakers about the opportunities for life after materialism.
The Center is directed by Discovery Senior Fellow Dr. Stephen Meyer. An Associate Professor of Philosophy at Whitworth College, Dr. Meyer holds a Ph.D. in the History and Philosophy of Science from Cambridge University. He formerly worked as a geophysicist for the Atlantic Richfield Company.
This text was later lifted whole to become the Introduction of the infamous Wedge Document.
They also helpfully explained themselves further in their "What is Materialism?" FAQ:
#1. What is Materialism?
For these purposes, it has little to do with greed. Or wanting to buy too much at the mall to boost your self-esteem.
Materialism is the modern day philosophy that holds that matter is all there is. It's the philosophy that says "If you can't touch it, smell it, taste it or explain it through the hard sciences, it doesn't exist." Men are merely complex machines and not spiritual beings.
And it's approved by most intellectuals around the world.
One other thing: we're out to topple it.#2. What is Naturalism?
It's another word for materialism. There are no discernible differences. Kind of like "soda and pop," " shrimp and prawns." Naturalism states that nature is " all there is."
#3. OK, then what is Darwinism?
Darwinism is the belief that we evolved not only from the apes, but that we started from nothing other than purposeless mass. As late Harvard evolutionary biologist George Gaylord Simpson said, "Man is the result of a purposeless and natural process that did not have him in mind. He was not planned."
Charles Darwin is to Materialism like Karl Marx is to Communism. Like Adam Smith is to Capitalism. This is not to say that Darwin himself is responsible for the full course of Darwinism since his death. But he opened the door.
#4. Materialism, Naturalism, Darwinism, all these isms,
what do they have to do with me and my life?Materialism is a powerful philosophy of life today because it sets the boundaries for what is right and wrong in society. It explains the ''rules'' that govern our civilization. It goes to the very intellectual roots of society, the very foundation that our social and cultural institutions are built upon.
Indeed, if materialism is right -- as most intellectuals propose -- then ''God'' is merely a figment of our imagination. Therefore, God didn't create man; man created God. Doestoyevsky once said that ''if God is dead then all things are lawful. '' Might makes right. The State is the ultimate enforcer of rules.
Let's look at how materialism has infected the legal system, welfare and popular culture.
Materialism teaches us that God is dead. It follows that divine revelation cannot be the basis of human law.
Human law can only be based on upon the current opinion of the people who have the power to make and interpret laws. In our society, that power rests in the hands of an elite class of judges, lawmakers and other experts.
" We hold these Truths to be self-evident, that all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights" quickly loses much validity if our "Creator" does not exist. Result: a culture of irresponsibility and victimhood.
The present culture took decades to develop. Look at a 1930s text in criminal law that upholds the materialist foundation:
"Man is no more responsible for becoming willful and committing a crime than a flower for becoming red and fragrant. In both instances, the end products are predetermined by nature."
Dating back to the 1960s, those who conceived the war on poverty believed that poverty could be eradicated because they believed its root causes were material: poverty, educational deprivation, crime, etc. Thirty five years later, we realize that throwing material resources at the problem has made it worse, not better.
By ignoring the moral and spiritual dimensions of poverty, we have ignored the real problems of poverty: family breakdown, illegitimacy and government-fostered dependency.
If morals are relative and nothing is absolute, anything goes. It requires no deep intellectual digging to see how materialism has assaulted popular culture.
Popular culture seldom portrays religion favorably yet often with disdain. Those characters who seem to hold traditional or conservative values will surely be mocked, seen as "square" and even "oppressors" of some sort of unalienable right bestowed upon humankind from Hollywood.
Much depends on how you define "evolution." Some people think evolution describes how things change over a period of time ( i.e. a finch's beak length, a moth's color etc). Others think that slow and
gradual change to one organism can be translated directly into how life itself was created.
At a very basic level, we think evolution might explain the survival of the fittest, not the arrival of the fittest and that it can explain some form of development, but not original development.
The Center is the intellectual base for the effort to overthrow materialism. Recruiting leading scholars from the natural sciences and those from the humanities and social sciences, the Center promotes the latest scientific research that undercuts materialism. Specifically, the Center awards fellowships for original research, hold conferences and briefs policy and opinion makers about the opportunities for life after materialism.
Postmodernists of the Right
So, what does it all add up to? The Intelligent Design advocates, like most creationists, are afraid of this scenario happening:
Or to put it another way: Creationists are afraid that the natural world gives us no objective standards by which to judge an action as right or wrong. Creationists believe there is no objective truth down here in the natural world.
Traditional postmodernists of the left also assume there are no objective truths. This is called "moral subjectivism". Postmodernists believe that "truth" is merely a self-serving social convention that's accepted by each interest group as the acutal Truth. They argue that all societal disputes are ultimately won by whichever interest group is more ruthless in pursuit of its own self-interest. So their solution to preventing this Hobbesian "war of all against all" is to support the underdog in any dispute, so as to maintain a tense standoff of equals. (Historically, postmodernists have tended to side with the left in any dispute, causing many people to wonder if postmodernism is itself a self-serving philosophy.)
Amazingly, creationists and the ID advocates - who are mostly political conservatives - largely agree with this moral subjectivism! Their proposed solution is to get the opinion leaders & intelligentsia of society to all believe in the same external Authority Figure, who can declare for all of us what He wants to define as right and wrong. They want His - perhaps arbitrary - pronouncements to stand in for the objective moral truths that the right-wing postmodernists believe don't really exist in the real world.
America's founding fathers would disagree with this philosophy. They believed, rightly, that we are able to use our reason to come to an understanding of objective reality. The Truths may not exactly be self-evident as Jefferson wrote. It may take much wisdom and painful experience in learning from history. But objective Truth is out there for us to discover. It's a pity that conservatives of the creationist stripe have lost confidence in the existence of objective Truth.
VV: What facts are we missing?
Rippin: Evolutionists have never observed their mechanism actually do very much.
VV: Begs the question, refuses to admit that failure to observe the mechanism in action at a macro-level is a weakness in the theory.
Rippin: Points out the failure to follow the logic trail.
Patrick Henry: Links that fail to address the point under consideration.
Rippin: For PH, do you admit that the fact that we have not observed the assumed mechanisms for evolution produce macro level changes is a weakness in the the theory of orthodox neo-Darwinism?
If, by the term "macro level changes," you are asking about a leap from one species to another in a single generation, you're not talking about evolution. Rather, that's a creationist fantasy, promoted at creationist websites, to be hauled out and ridiculed whenever they want to convince themselves they're bashing evolution. If you imagine that evolution is like that, you've got some catching up to do. Seriously. Why not give it a try?
The Theory of Evolution. Excellent introductory encyclopedia article.
Introduction to Evolutionary Biology. Another good introduction.
The Pocket Darwin. Very good, easily readable summary.
I wouldn't call a legal distinction to be a thin line of demarcation, although obviously, this distinction is lost on snotty and supercilious attitudes such as your own.
Other than that, and in reference to non existent credentials, see my reply to js1138 in post #407.
I'm making no assumptions. I understand the issues at a high level.
Logical fallacy #6 in the evolutionist arsenal. Assume the person you are speaking with is completely undeducated so you won't have to answer the question. My question is simple and legitimate. Since it is a rhetorical "mate in 2" I'll just explain it.
If you insist that failure to be able to observe the proposed mechanisms of evolution producing macro level changes (regardless of the number of generations invovled) is NOT a weakness in the theory. Then logically, you have stated that ability to demonstrate this would not result in a strengthening of the theory. As a result, everything derived from fossil research is of no value either because all it does is give you at a distance what is lacking in direct observation.
NOTE...what I've demonstrated is not the orthodox evolutionary theory is incorrect, but that the theory, like any other has strengths AND WEAKNESSES. VV's original challenge to us could be construed to imply the theory has no weaknesses. Most hard core evoltunists will only make this concession behind closed doors with friends I guess. (Hence, admitting weaknesses to your friends but not your opponenets could perhaps be fallacy #7)
O mighty soldier, O man of war, at last you have a cause for which you can fight without endangering your soul; a cause in which to win is glorious and for which to die is but gain. Are you a shrewd businessman, quick to see the profits of this world? If you are, I can offer you a bargain which you cannot afford to miss. Take the sign of the cross. At once you will have an indulgence for all the sins which you confess with a contrite heart. The cross is cheap and if you wear it with humility you will find that you have obtained the Kingdom of Heaven.
-- Saint Bernard, sermon at Vézelay referring to the Second Crusade (1147-1148).
Not sure who did the translating.
...until you get a good enough lawyer.
although obviously, this distinction is lost on snotty and supercilious attitudes such as your own.
Sheesh, can't any of you guys make up your own insults?
It's also lost on me how you think it's a clever argument to flash an education doctorate as your certification of expertise for the Discovery Institute and its followers to be testifying about science in a public forum. But maybe that's just me.
If we could live for millions of years, while all other species retained their current lifespans, we could then observe the gradual accumulation of what you call micro-evolutionary changes. But we can't. We can, however, observe evolutionary changes with short-lived creatures, notably bacteria. There is other evidence:
Observed Instances of Speciation. That's right ... observed!
Ring Species. We can observe two species and the intermediate forms connecting them.
Ensatina eschscholtzi: Speciation in Progress. A Classic Example of Darwinian Evolution.
One gene produces major changes in stickleback fish. Stunning example of evolution.
The domestication of the russian silver fox (40 year fast track evolution).
The fossil record, however, is mostly what we have. It gives us evidence (choppy, of course) of such changes over vast periods of time. Where DNA evidence is available, the conclusions drawn from the fossil record are confirmed. With our limited lifespans, it's the best we can do. Why would you have us do less?
You have really stretched some points beyond redemption, to try to claim that I have made personal attacks. The list you made up a while ago is ludicrous. How about if you stand up like a responsible adult in a public forum and explain carefully how any of that was a "personal attack"? Personal attacks need venom and malice behind them, and to be directed at something personal about your deponent. You seem to consider simile and analogy to be personal attacks--if it suits your purpose.
You allow them (like coyote) to smear American Indian cultures with their distorted translations of American Indian creation stories. Well those American Indian cultures contributed universes more to America than these knuckleheads ever conceived of.
Typical of your scattergun approach to reasoning about this question. I did not "smear" Indian culture. I was placing alternative creation myths, which I related fairly accurately, on the same level as the anthromorphic argument. Was my deponent smearing scientists when he did so? If you can't actually bring yourself to think about the argument you are making, how likely are you to make an argument anyone can understand?
You allow the don_h and others to come here and tie a persons faith with the BTK killer and so on under the banner of 'argument'. And its all supposed to be cute and funny and intelligent.
Could you at least insult me in plain english?
To single me out for this, and allow all the rest here is very hypocritical and disingenuous at the least.
Nobody singled you out--you put a big red flag on your butt so nobody could miss you. You were, and are, out of line, even at the level of a college bullsession, and you haven't the gumption even now to step up to the plate and do the right thing, instead of behaving like a raving drunk.
Maybe allowing this kind of crap generates a larger audience for the Free Republic therefore greater $ contributions.
End this account.
Have the courtesy to ping me when you talk about me.
Does your mother know you behave like this?
...until you get a good enough lawyer.
And a grand jury can indict a ham sandwhich. Other than implying that all institutions of higher learning are removed from fraud by a single lawyer...what exactly is your point other than elitist divel.
it's also lost on me how you think it's a clever argument to flash an education doctorate as your certification of expertise for the Discovery Institute and its followers to be testifying about science in a public forum. But maybe that's just me.
I have no idea what you're rambling on about here, and neither do I care.
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