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."
Sounds like the sort of problem they have in the Muslim world and the Ozarks.
If science were based on formal proof that would be a bad thing, but it isn't.
Whether it's difficult or not to accept the judgment of science can be evaluated by looking at the reputation of science and the reputation of religion.
This can be inferred by the number of people and organizations claiming to be religious versus the number claiming to be scientific.
For example, patent medicines generally claim to have scientific backing. Even faith healers these days have taken to making scientific claims.
Another interesting phenomenon is the common practice on these threads of insulting evolution by claiming it is faith based, while others on the same thread are claiming ID is respectable because it is scientific.
Clearly everyone wants to ride science's coattails.
Even a broken clock is ....
Hmmmm. I have to say something here: this proverb doesn't apply to evolution.
" Sounds like the sort of problem they have in the Muslim world and the Ozarks."
First Cousin marriages were not uncommon then. Glad to see you are a bigot.
The ability to believe that evolution is simultaneously responsible for socialism and greedy capitalism is called doublethink.
"The ability to believe that evolution is simultaneously responsible for socialism and greedy capitalism is called doublethink."
Another word would be stupid. :)
The ability to believe that evolution is simultaneously responsible for socialism and greedy capitalism is called doublethink.
Thanks. I'm getting a little slow tonight.
Take it up with Barzun.
This is where creationists come to get their clocks cleaned and their midwives towed.
You mean, as in:
Hey, Sally Lou, if we get divorced, can we still be brothers and sisters??
" Would have no clue about half or full stoner."
I am sincerely shocked.
"There is nothing about evolutionary biology that addresses the difference in the MIND of flesh man vs. non human flesh, or whatever creature of the day we supposedly came from and what brought forth that difference."
There is nothing in the evidence that shows that mind is not matter. Ok Spicoli?
" You mean, as in:
Hey, Sally Lou, if we get divorced, can we still be brothers and sisters??"
Glad to see you historical ignorance. Hope it makes you proud.
"I am sincerely shocked. "
HA, you have no ability to be "shocked", really ought to tell you just how limited your mental state is in analyzing the mind of another.
"There is nothing in the evidence that shows that mind is not matter."
HA, these are words of a fungi draped mind.
That would apply to Noah's children.
I don't see how. A strictly literalist interpretation, sure, but the vast majority of Christians had already rejected such an interpretation long before Darwin's time.
There is no 'man' that God created.
Why not? It is perfectly reasonable to believe that man exists, and that God created him through the process of evolution.
Thus, sin as a concept is rejectable.
Why?
"That would apply to Noah's children."
This is a load of donkey dung. DNA disproves this and it is written that two of ALLLLL flesh were upon that ark. Whether it covered the WHOLE earth or only the WHOLE KNOWN earth to the writer, Moses.
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