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."
"Forget about Genesis doesn't apply to you anyway."
Forget about Evolution, doesn't apply to you anyway.
Why not? Is the system of evolution so incompatible with Chrisitan thought? I don't think so.
Such a shining example of that on this very thread.... :)
If you think both systems through, and don't compromise the basic tenets of either of them, they are incompatible.
Most people don't bother, so they accept a mishmash of both sides.......not a total acceptance of evolution, and not a total acceptance of Scripture (even the New Testament).
That's where 'theistic evolutionists' are sitting.........on a wobbly fence.
Let me make one thing perfectly clear. You didn't present a coherent thought in any of your posts, so there was no need to try to 'argue' with you.
I just posted Scripture, and you mocked it.
You need to take the capital 'G' off the word 'God' in your posts.
What you believe in is a god of your own making.........not the One who created you and the universe.
Now....... I liked it better when you were talking to yourself, so you can go back to not pinging me again, and we'll both be happy. (At least I will).
That is your opinion. I have no issues seeing evolution (which has tons of evidence to back it up) as Gods "design". ID, on the other hand, has no evidence and no validity.
Evolution does not contradict the existence of God.
If you are a Christian you believe in a designer. ID is neutral on th aspects of evolution that you believe.
Perhaps not.......especially a generic 'God' which many believe in. But the discussion was about Christianity.
You cannot believe the whole of Scripture and believe the whole of evolution.
Anyone who tries to do so must make compromises either in his faith, or in his acceptance of evolution. Many people do that........and I would guess that most Christians reject the parts of evolution completely incompatible with Scripture and accept the rest.
Not yours. You made him up out of whole cloth, and refute the Scripture (not me......the word of God).
Now would you please honor your previous commitment and stop pinging me? Please?
You are nothing, if not boring, and it is tedious to keep making sense out of your nonsensical posts.
You are free to reject the God of the Christian Scriptures if you so desire. It is just not without consequence, and you should perhaps consider that.
As a Christian I accept that some parts of the Bible are not literal. Genesis, while beautifuly written, is questionable.
If you accept that human beings evolved from animals, you don't accept the whole of Scripture. If you accept that God created man, uniquely and in His own image, you don't accept the whole of evolution.
As a Christian, you have to make a choice, but you can't completely accept both.
No IMHO you speak for yourself at this point. I accept both with no issues.
My faith in God is totally seperate from my understanding of evolution. I accept both as wonderful gifts, one on an intellectual level and the other in my heart.
The fact that we may have evolved from some primordial soup, only strengthens my belief that the ways of God and his design for us are not knowable. For me this is exciting, we, as humans, think we can figure out everything and lo and behold, God throws another curveball.
Scroll up the thread and you will see a series of Scriptures I posted with commands of Scripture to use our minds, as well as our hearts.
If you read Scripture, you know that humans are completely unique from animals, and were created separately, in God's image. The whole process of redemption through Jesus Christ is predicated on that uniqueness and inconsistent with the process of evolution.
And there is great cognitive dissonance if you accept Scripture as valid and then look at the (failed) attempts of finite minds to prove that humans evolved from animals. If you use your mind in your faith, as commanded, the two systems don't blend. You have to choose one more than the other.
I dispute that -- see I don't dispute that Nazis dictated content. It's just not happening here, and irrelevant to this discussion (which is why I called your parallel vaccuous and bogus....it IS).
Again, my comments were not directed at the president, as I'm not aware of any initiative on his part to dictate the content of science curricula by political fiat. (I won't hesitate to criticism on that specific ground if he does so.) However I AM aware of numerous efforts, both currently and in the past, by advocates of ID or creationism to do so.
No, they aren't doing so through the mechanism of a totalitarian state, obviously, but there is clearly a sensible comparison IMHO.
If I'm wrong then why won't creationists and ID'ers content themselves with battling this out in the relevant fields of professional science? If they succeed there then their ideas will be incorporated into science curricula as a matter of course and there won't be any need for the political fights and popular controversy they are currently heavily engaged in.
We, instead, to they repeatedly target curricula?
Until the leftist lock on schools is loosed, there will never be academic freedom in any institutions other than private ones.
(And I apologize for the inference that you were talking about the President. On the thread where he advocated academic freedom by allowing ID to be taught in science classes, a number of your colleagues accused him of communist/fascist control over schools. It, of course, was a ludicrous accusation......which is why I was surprised when I thought you had used it. I apologize again for my mistake).
I would also prefer a totally private school system, and agree with vouchers and every other measure to work towards it. However we are stuck with large numbers of students subjected to the public schools for the foreseeable future.
In this unfortunate context it is my view that the single most effective way to limit and eliminate leftist pablum in the curricula is to insistently demand that high, hard-nosed and objective academic standards be applied to subject matter inclusion (and exclusion). Attempts by ID/creationism advocates to influence the curricula through the inclusion of ideas that have not previously earned standing in relevant fields of professional research -- that is to insist they be put into the textbooks before the science journals -- contradicts and undercuts this strategy. What's worse it does so in a field that should be most favorable to conservatives, as leftists are far less represented in the physical and biological than in the social sciences.
How can conservatives insist that the curricula must not be altered to appease, placate or protect the "self-esteem" of identify groups when they are trying to do that very thing in biology?
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