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 ...
Perhaps it will meet up with Haydn's head.
"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?"
No, I'm saying that ID makes an extraordinary claim and provides zero backup for it beyond the ID proponents' personal opinion. Whatever ID is, it's not science.
"And what would this obervational data look like?"
I don't know--but far more importantly, neither does anyone in the ID community. If the ID community would engage in less arm-waving and more observation, then they'd get that evidence.
"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?"
In the paragraph quoted above, you made a huge non-sequitir...and you accuse me of making one.
Physician, heal thyself...
Bottom line, if there's anything to ID, then it will result in useful applied science. Evolution, for all its flaws, leads to real-world useful applied science (such as the development of new medicines, more reliable methods for locating petroleum deposits, et cetera). All ID need do is generate those real-world applied science results. Of course, in order to do that, the ID crowd would have to quit lobbying for "equal time" and actually do some real science.
"Advocates of Intelligent Design are not necessarily Biblical literalists"
Another non-sequitir--I made no such claim.
For someone who bitches and moans about imagined non-sequitirs of others, you sure as hell love using your own.
That would be momentum.
Strangely enough, I had just moved out of that building a few weeks before.
Small world, I guess ;)
Not in any classes I either took or taught. The only disrupters were either anti-war activists or religious activists or both.
This (the Einstein's brain story) is where a nimble creationist if there were one could accuse me of ... Morton's Demon. I saw a huge banner page trumpeting the return to life and rampaging activity of Einstein's brain, and decided to act as if it didn't exist.
Just preserving my rationalist, materialist, non-magical worldview.
Was he ever caught?
nonsense. You're not even in the same arena. You do not comprehend the nature of the question. Without understanding the origin of life you cannot possibly truly understand the continuance and advancement of life for those same forces must still be with us and having an effect which is not even considered by your freshman biology teacher.
It is rather like having a formula for life that includes a fudge factor and a constant, and all we understand is the constant. We have not yet begun to understand in mathematical/scientific terms driving forumlas of life.
"..do you imagine that that statement you quote was intended as a denial of evolution?"
Certainly not. I agree with much of the principles of evolution. The Bible does not disagree either. It makes no comment on the evolution of natural man.
"The Civil War: a theory in crisis?"
And here all this time I thought that gravity was defined as the force that attracts objects together.
Now angular momentum and conservation of same is a horse of a different color.
Old age? Sabre-tooth cats? Infections and other forms of bad luck?
(If I'da knowed there was gonna be a test I'da studied some.)
Pretty good, no sense in half measures.
Hydrology: a Theory in crisis!
< /anti-evo mode>
Yeah. Its all wet. Some folks think its the solution to all their problems though.
FYI, some of them don't. Phillip Johnson, for instance, does not. Not sure about Denton and Dembski. They seem to vacilate between accepting it and rejecting it.
Behe for sure accepts its.
More and more historians are turning away from the false religion of civilwarism.
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