Posted on 09/20/2005 7:02:45 AM PDT by Right Wing Professor
ITHACA, N.Y. - Lenore Durkee, a retired biology professor, was volunteering as a docent at the Museum of the Earth here when she was confronted by a group of seven or eight people, creationists eager to challenge the museum exhibitions on evolution.
They peppered Dr. Durkee with questions about everything from techniques for dating fossils to the second law of thermodynamics, their queries coming so thick and fast that she found it hard to reply.
After about 45 minutes, "I told them I needed to take a break," she recalled. "My mouth was dry."
That encounter and others like it provided the impetus for a training session here in August. Dr. Durkee and scores of other volunteers and staff members from the museum and elsewhere crowded into a meeting room to hear advice from the museum director, Warren D. Allmon, on ways to deal with visitors who reject settled precepts of science on religious grounds.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
I don't believe your myth about your relatives. Prove it. produce them in a laboratory.
Thats my heritage.
Cute, but this does not constitute a 'dispute'.
I don't believe you. Reproduce your results in a laboratory. The Civil war never happened, and you have no way to prove it did.
I never claimed it wasn't.
Event the advocates of ID -- Behe, Dembski and Denton -- accept the fact that evolution happened.
However, I believe at least some of them claim that evolution does not explain everything that has happened.
But science is an activity that seeks natural explanations. Always has been.
Are you saying that science would reject, out of hand, evidence that defies a natural explanation simply because considering it would be unscientific?
No one says evolution is random. Variation is random, but selection is not random.
Correct. But nature can only select that which mutates at random. If it can be shown that a biological feature could not arise through random nutation and natural selection, then it would suggest that something else is involved. That would be the proof of the theory. Just because ID advocates have not come up with a solid example does not mean that such an example does not exist, any more than the absence of a transitional evolutionary form in the fossil record means that it doesn't exist.
In realty, the evidence for either evolution or ID won't be crystal clear. It will be very much like looking at the evidence that the Civil War happened. You put all of the evidence together and decide what seems most plausible and probable. But it's a leap of faith either way.
Your opinions are biased by your interpretation of science -- that it must deal only in natural explanations. You assume that there are natural explanations for everything and therefore when confronted with an unknown, you simply assume that there is a natural explanation for it. Similarly, I suspect you look for natural explanations for things like coincidences, lucky breaks, etc. For you, if any possibility that it's natural means that you will believe that it's natural. But ultimately that's begging the question, not testing your theories. If you exclude any possibility of non-natural evidence or explanations, you'll be left with only a natural explanation, no matter how unlikely. But that doesn't really prove that the natural explanation is correct. It only proves that if you exclude all the evidence that contradicts your theory, there won't be any evidence that contradicts your theory.
A religious person looks at the unknown and things like coincidences and lucky breaks and might see the hand of God at work. They can't be certain, either, or prove it. But ultimately it's a matter of faith either way, that the unknown can be explained by the person's assumptions about how the universe works.
No one says life is a random glob of molecules. The argument is about the specific history. You do not have a theory unless you can produce a history that can be out to the test.
Why does it need to have a specific history? Do I need to know how Mount Rushmore was funded or why the sculptor wanted to carve it to prove that it was carved by the hands of a human being? You see that stuff all the time in archaeology -- features of a settlement are identified as being man made as opposed to being natural (with some fuzzy lines when dealing with fire pits and very primative tools) without necessarily knowing why an artifact was created or by whom.
What you are essentially doing here is going beyond the demands of science. You are trying to make ID comply with the structure of the theory of evolution. Either that, or you are fishing for a specific creation story so you can knock it down. Please go bait someone else if that's the case. I'm not a Biblical literalist.
Beats me.
Are you claiming that so long as it's possible to imagine a natural explanation for something, that no amount of evidence could ever make you believe that it wasn't natural but was, instead, designed?
It's the ultimate Behe problem: there's a lot of arm-waving, but no observational data to back up the arm-waving.
And what would this obervational data look like?
Very well. All the Discovery Institute need do is produce one new antibiotic using the concept of "irreducible complexity" as its touchstone instead of the concept of "natural selection and survival of the fittest."
Nice non-sequitur there. I suppose we should just purge Mendel, Keppler, Newton, and perhaps even Darwin himself because, gasp!, they believed in a divine being and we all know that religion is worthless and entirely incompatible with science, right?
Advocates of Intelligent Design are not necessarily Biblical literalists any more than advocates of evolution necessarily agree with past advocates of evolution who, among other things, had the last surviving Tasmanian woman stuffed to put her in their "missing link" collection in a museum.
Just a few people now and then butting in asking about evolution or religion in math class. .A bit disruptive but no more so than the anti-Vietnam-War groups did when I was in grad school. I would just point out that a math class was not the place for such discussions. I think these guys were just disruptive in general re everything.
Much disruption consisted in asking the same question over and over (different questions, some even about mathematics.)
I've not asserted my view on creationism here.
God is a spirit. Jesus said so. It states the same in Genesis. God made us in His image, with a spirit. God gave the "earthy", natural, animal form of man (hominid) a spirit, in his likeness, and thus created the first man Adam.
We were not "men" until God gave us a soul, a spirit, and the ability to receive the Holy Spirit by loving God back.
Adam was not the first hominid, but he was the first Man with a spirit. He "became a living soul". The last Adam (Jesus) was very different, he became a "life-giving spirit", somehow allowing us then to 'tap into" the Holy spirit.
"However, the spiritual is not first, but the natural, and afterward the spiritual. 47 The first man was of the earth, made of dust; the second Man is the Lord[b] from heaven. 48 As was the man of dust, so also are those who are made of dust; and as is the heavenly Man, so also are those who are heavenly. 49 And as we have borne the image of the man of dust, we shall also bear[c] the image of the heavenly Man." -- 1 Co 15:46-49
There is no doubt evolutionary processes exist. God would hardly design a system that could not adapt, heal and maintain itself.
In engineering we are still advancing our designs to incorporate the abilites to self-diagnose and self-heal. it is good design practice and we are nowhere close to that designed by God.
It is interesting that the advancment of man away from mere animals began about 10,000 years ago just as the Bible states. Hominids and other animals may have existed for many millenia before that, but not Man.
We are different from animals and have come to dominate the earth precisely becasue of God making us into men with a spiritual soul to drive us.
It is our spirit that drives us to seek wisdom and understanding. The Holy Spirit is a step beyond that which ensures a connectedness with the spiritual plane after our natural bodies have expired. While all men have souls and the capcity to accept the holy Spirit, not all men accept the Holy Spirt.
If we act like animals and do not accept the Holy Spirit or love God then...we are just animals, "natural only"...
"But the natural man does not receive the things of the Spirit of God, for they are foolishness to him; nor can he know them, because they are spiritually discerned." -- 1 Corinthians 2:14
You get it?
Change "defies" to "lacks" and the answer is yes. Science will always seek a natural explanation.
If it can be shown that a biological feature could not arise through random nutation and natural selection, then it would suggest that something else is involved.
That would be a good start. It's been tried, but here's the problem. If you don't know the actual history of a feature, you don't have any way of deciding whether it could evolve through incremental steps. The only known way of putting this hypothesis to the test is to search for the steps, either by finding currently existing intermediates, or by demonstrating possible steps at the level of molecular biology.
Basically, the only path open to science is to attempt natural explanations. Perhaps you can show me where this approach has run into a dead end.
A religious person looks at the unknown and things like coincidences and lucky breaks and might see the hand of God at work.
Some religious people might do this, but people who have been admonished not to look for signs might hesitate at attempting to read the mind of God.
Civilwarism is just a pagan religion. It has been completely refuted.
Teach the controversy! Let the children decide. Is your faith so weak that you can't stand any criticism? Why are you afraid to have the other side presented? Stop the censorship!
You forgot sarcasm tags
Actually, I come from a long line of anti-disruptors. My father once related how he accidentally thwarted a plot to end the Vietnam War by blowing up the library at Stony Brook. Hopefully it was merely a coincidence that, a few years later, what was to become his office at the University of Wisconsin was heavily damaged a few weeks before he arrived, when someone else tried to blow up the Army Math building. Or maybe it wasn't a coincidence, and being around various math departments while he was there was a particularly hazardous enterprise for some reason.
Again, gravity is what hurls the Moon away from the Earth. Not all things subject to gravity actually fall, some spring upward. Isn't science wonderful.
For the rudeness of their actions.
“But how easy is it to advocate for science at a time when many Americans, including the president, do not accept evolution, the idea that human activity is altering the earth’s climate, or other ideas science regards as more or less established?” Cornelia Dean question to Dr. Hockfield, President of MIT.
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