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 ...
If that were ID's purpose then nothing. But as its purpose is to get creationist ideas in the classroom your question has no application.
The explosion in scientific understanding in the last 300 years has occurred because of methodological naturalism. Many great scientists have been devout believers in their religions, but invariably the successful ones set "the hand of God" aside when trying to understand how the world works. If you want to believe that the hand of God lies in the ever smaller gaps in our understanding of the natural world then good luck to you, but there is no evidence that those who have that view are correct. The gaps keep on shrinking. Scientists will try to shrink those gaps whether cod-scientists push ID or not.
And what if both theories are roughly equivalent in their predictive value?
Yes, it's survival of the fittest.
Which is why ID claims that biological systems should be looked at to determine if they could have evolved naturally or had to be created by some other mechanism is good science. It tests the fitness of both theories. How is believing that evolution is a settled matter and that it's a waste of time challenging it with alternate theories better science than testing it to see if evidence can be found of a non-natural mechanism at work in the process?
When that happens we'll get back to you. As of now the mainstream theory of evolution makes numerous successful predictions and has been verified constantly against millions of observations over the last 150 years. Every genome we map could invalidate or radically change the standard ToE if the results were unexpected. Likewise every new species that we identify. Every fossil that we dig up..... And ID makes what falsifiable predictions exactly? (sound of crickets chirping)
You do realize, right, that from the point of view of the differential equations that form the mathematical basis of most scientific law, the "initial conditions" need only be a set of conditions known for some arbitrary time, which we call t=0, and not necessarily the condition of the system at its origination. That is, we need only, for example, to know accurately the current position of the plantets to know their positions at all past and future times. That is we can designate the current positions of the planets as the conditions at t=0, and then calculate their positions at any other time, including negative times, which would be past positions and positive times, which would be future times. There's no need to know where the planets were when they were first formed.
Then your battle is against teaching creationism in the classroom and with those who have ulterior motives, not with ID, itself. Similarly, I think the battle that many religious folks have with evolution is with the people who use evolution as proof that God doesn't exist rather than with the theory, itself. Of course there are also biblical literalists who have trouble with anything that contradicts the Bible, too. But I don't think those two groups completely overlap.
The explosion in scientific understanding in the last 300 years has occurred because of methodological naturalism. Many great scientists have been devout believers in their religions, but invariably the successful ones set "the hand of God" aside when trying to understand how the world works. If you want to believe that the hand of God lies in the ever smaller gaps in our understanding of the natural world then good luck to you, but there is no evidence that those who have that view are correct. The gaps keep on shrinking. Scientists will try to shrink those gaps whether cod-scientists push ID or not.
I believe that the marketplace of ideas is a lot like the marketplace of goods and services. Competition creates innovation and makes thing advance. When things appear settled, they stagnate.
Excellent response.
Why does God need six days then? Why not just create everything instantaneously all at once? Did you even read my post that deals with relativity, the big bang and how time measured from our current reference frame and time measured from God's reference frame immediately following creation would be different?
I knew that Geology 101 course would come in handy some day. ;) (actually 2 years of it as part of a Civ Eng major, and 2 years of soil mechanics)
I don't see many scientists who say that evolution proves that God doesn't exist. Some say that evolution makes God logically unnecessary, but that is not the same thing. No scientific discovery can ever prove the non-existence of God. OTOH there seem to be an awful lot of biblical literalists around who reject evolution on religious grounds if these threads are anything to go by.
This is true, fortunately for us the idea competition within mainstream science is absolutely immense.
So then it is gravity that is responsible for the moon moving away from the earth.
They already do and are too stupid to recognize it.
And a lot of scientifically literate believers in God also don't believe the Earth is 5,000 or so years old and so on. But just as ID gets used by biblical literalists as proof of their particular God, there are hard-core atheists who use evolution to undermine belief in God. This forum attracts a lot of Fundamentalists so it seems like there are a lot of them. Go to another forum that is dominated by atheist activists and you'll get a very different impression.
In the minds of many people, evolution is seen as incompatable with a belief in God. Teaching ID raises the possibility of guided evolution and makes it clear that religion can have a place alongside science. That's really not all that different from what my friend says he was taught in his Catholic school. As an added bonus, it encourages people to look more deeply into how biological systems work and change over time.
In many ways, it's a compromise. And unless you think a winner-take-all knock-down drag-out battle over teaching evolution or biblical creation in schools is a good thing, it makes a lot of sense to make a relatively harmless nod toward creationism. Remember, it's always possible that you could loose the "winner-take-all knock-down drag-out battle" and then you'll have a lot more to complain about.
Not always. If you watch programs or read books and articles about the history of various scientific ideas, you'll find no shortage of examples of people being laughted at by the establishment and fighting an unnecessarily difficult uphill battle to get their ideas to be seriously considered. I'm not just talking about boneheaded people who made rediculous claims.
For example, last night's Nova episode on PBS had an example of a geologist being laughed at by the mainstream because he suggested that the Scablands in Washington State were formed by a quick cataclysmic flood rather than over millions of years because the establishment felt that they had canyon formation all worked out and that his flood sounded too much like the biblical flood for their tastes. Someone had to find the source of water (a huge glacial lake) before people would take him seriously, even though the evidence suggested he was right years before. There is also plenty of infighting and posturing in various scientific disciplines that borders on playground argument level.
Scientists, like government bureaucrats, corporate executives, elected officials, and everyone else, are people. And just like other people, they can fall into the orthodoxy trap. And complacency only makes it all the easier.
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