Posted on 09/24/2005 7:20:09 AM PDT by gobucks
The brawl between evolutionists and religious neo-conservatives over how life began is coming down to the survival of the slickest.
For about 150 years Charles Darwin's evolution theory has held sway. But a new American theory, intelligent design, is getting a lot of press as scientists and intellectuals rush to the barricades to dismiss intelligent design as little else than "creationism" rebadged.
Already a DVD featuring American scientists claiming intelligent causes are responsible for the origin of the universe and life has become Australia's biggest-selling religious video and intelligent design is starting to permeate school courses.
Next year, hundreds of Catholic schools in the dioceses of Sydney, Wollongong, Lismore and Armidale will use new religious education textbooks that discuss intelligent design. At Dural, year 9 and 10 students at Pacific Hills Christian School have begun learning about intelligent design in science classes.
The chief executive of Christian Schools Australia, Stephen O'Doherty, says it is inevitable other schools will follow suit. Until last month, few Australians had heard of it. But debate broke out internationally on August 1 when the US President, George Bush, told reporters he supported combining lessons on evolution with discussion of intelligent design. "Both sides ought to be properly taught," Bush said.
Last month, the federal Minister for Education, Science and Training, Dr Brendan Nelson, gave intelligent design ministerial imprimatur, telling the National Press Club he thought parents and schools ought to have the opportunity - if they wished - for students to be exposed to intelligent design and taught about it.
Nelson's office said his comments were unplanned.
But his interest had been pricked by a parliamentary visit on June 20 by Bill Hodgson, head of the Sydney-based campus Crusade for Christ, who left a copy of a DVD Unlocking the Mystery of Life with Nelson.
The DVD featured a US mathematician, William Dembski, and other leading American intelligent design proponents claiming the complexity of biological systems is proof of an organising intelligence.
"ID is the study of patterns in nature that are best explained as the result of intelligence," Dembski said.
The DVD is distributed in Australia by a Melbourne-based Christian group, Focus on the Family. Its executive director, Colin Bunnett, says until Nelson's comments only 1000 copies had been sold over four years. "But it's taken off. We've sold thousands in the last few weeks," he says.
The intelligent design debate has more resonance in the US, partly because teaching about the beginning of life is problematic. A Harris poll in June found that 55 per cent of American adults support teaching evolution, creationism, and intelligent design in public schools yet many who favour a literal interpretation of the Bible found it difficult to accept Darwin's The Origin of Species.
One teacher, John Scopes, was convicted for violating a Tennessee ban on teaching evolution in 1925's famous "monkey trial". It was not isolated legislation. In 1968, when the US Supreme Court struck down similar laws, some states began pushing the teaching of "creationism" alongside evolution.
In Australia, the issue has been less hard-edged. The last tussle was in 1978 when Queensland's Bjelke-Petersen government bowed to creationists' opposition to social science courses. Of late, leading scientists have rebuffed intelligent design. The Nobel Prize-winning scientist Peter Doherty says it has no place in a science curriculum and the physicist Paul Davies rejects it as creationism in disguise.
Dembski, an associate research professor in the conceptual foundations of science at Baylor University in Texas, the world's largest Baptist university, said it should be taught with evolution in schools but not be mandated.
"Evolutionary theory and intelligent design both have a scientific core: the question whether certain material mechanisms are able to propel an evolutionary process and the question whether certain patterns in nature signify intelligence are both squarely scientific questions," Dembski says. "Nevertheless, they have profound philosophical and religious implications."
He'd have to answer that for himself.
Hitler was an occultist, who had very twisted ideas of G_d. Whatever "god" Hitler worshipped, it sure wasn't the G_d of Abraham.
It was you who introduced NAZIism. I was thinking more along the lines of Communism. Your offense is your problem.
Your post to which I responded...
The stronger and the further evolved are the masters.
You say weren't referring to Nazi's here? You say you were referring to communism instead. And you expect me and anyone reading it to buy that? LOL.
"Hitler was an occultist, who had very twisted ideas of G_d. Whatever "god" Hitler worshipped, it sure wasn't the G_d of Abraham."
I agree. He also was no evolutionist, though.
Actually Bush's comment was ambiguous. He merely said that the subject should be taught "appropriately". Everybody agrees with the literal sense of that statement, even those who believe the "appropriate" level of teaching is none, or that it is "appropriately" dealt with outside of science classes.
Nor did Bush suggest that politics or popular pressure should determine the content of science or science curricula.
You are the one gleefully applauding the determination of science content by those means. As you were apparently unable to decipher my post it is that tendency which is comparable to the record of Nazism and Stalinism.
Real conservatives believe in the free market; both in the economy and in the life of the mind. Real conservatives insist that ID or creationism earn its place, if any, in science and in curricula on its demonstrable merit, just as any other theory is expected to do. It is a leftist (and ultimately totalitarian) tendency to submit the issue to political fiat or the power of a populist movement.
If you prefer to call me a liar, so be it. That's your burden.
You just jogged my memory about something. A group of "biologists" from Australia are among the leaders of the crakpot movement that denies HIV exists.
They call themselves the "Perth Group."
True, but that was the public appeal. He appealed to a long tradition in Germany of blaming Jews for the death of Jesus.
Fine. But the left in general resisted Darwinism (in favor of neo-Lamarkian views) and did so very early and for a very long time. Since you insist that Darwinism is tailor made for them, how do you explain why they disliked it so?
If you prefer to call me a liar, so be it. That's your burden.
I'll give you the benefit of the doubt if you can show me where in the commy doctrine there is anything like the statement that 'The stronger and the further evolved are the masters.'
I'll also give you the benefit of the doubt if you say you were mistaken in your statement. I've done it too, so I'll just assume that's the case.
Seems easy to understand.
Some folks hold onto discredited ideas, long after they should just punt.
Actually, in spite of perception, the left is far more opposed to science than the right. True, they want money spent, but they want lots of it spent on junk, and they have their own pockets of PC nonsense, every bit as stupid as ID.
Ever heard the phrase, "God in the hands of angry sinners"? He just laughs.
God haters have been hating God since the beginning. God never could live up to the standards of the little gods.
Richard Lewontin is one of their more intellectually honest spokesmen:
"We take the side of science in spite of the patent absurdity of some of its constructs, in spite of its failure to fulfill many of its extravagant promises of health and life, in spite of the tolerance of the scientific community for unsubstantiated just-so stories, because we have a prior commitment, a commitment to materialism. It is not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation of the phenomenal world, but, on the contrary, that we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counter-intuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated. Moreover, that materialism is an absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door."
Anyone who begins from that premise is not a serious scientist.
Hey, I made a direct comparison -- at least in the limited sense of deciding the content of science and curricula by political power and popular pressure -- between the promotion of ID/creationism and Nazism/Stalinism. So take it out on me, ml.
Stultis, I think you're taking things the wrong way. I'm on your side, I think.
Your religion is not going to be taught in the classroom. What ID proponents are asking for is to have children taught that an unnamed designer is responsible for all of life, the pleasant and unpleasant together.
If you like sex education, you'll love ID.
Ask yourself why the Discovery Institute is not supporting this.
Ever heard the phrase, "God in the hands of angry sinners"? He just laughs.
God haters have been hating God since the beginning. God never could live up to the standards of the little gods.
Who said anything about hating God? Or did you just mean your God?
That doesn't even come close to explaining the phenomena. Why would leftists cling to Lamarkianism long after it had been discredited, especially when they had a highly creditable theory available, which you insist was congenitally favorable to their ideology?
Why did leftists argue that natural selection and random variation was inherently anti-revolutionary, and favorable to capitalist ideology? Why did even those leftists who considered darwinism compatible with leftist views go to great pains to refute such arguments (that is take them seriously)?
Obviously leftist did (and some still do, e.g. Jeremy Rifkin, many "new age" anti-Darwinists, etc) see problems with Darwinism, despite your insistence that they should have embraced it as ideologically favorable.
The trouble with Darwin is that all his sychophant followers can't prove his theory because Macro-Evolution never happened. One of the few instances still remaining in history in which blind and deluded followers who know it is only theory continue to treat the subject as de facto science. Bbbbwwwaahhhhaaaaaaa!
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