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."
Simple one-celled animals are vastly more complex than a Ferrari engine. Evolution works on the same principle as the emperor's new clothing. Once you figure it out, you'll never believe you ever believed in anything that stupid.
Anyone using Bush as a science advisor is in a big, big world of hurt. There's no evidence Bush knows the slightest bit about science.
Simple one-celled animals are vastly more complex than a Ferrari engine. Evolution works on the same principle as the emperor's new clothing. Once you figure it out, you'll never believe you ever believed in anything that stupid.
You apparently don't understand the TOE. I suggest you do some reading.
Well, Australia has never been known for scientific advances anyway. There's no reason to expect them to emerge from the dark ages now.
Wrong! The first criteria of Darwin's Theory is replication. Unless you can show me two Ferrari engines get together and produce a liter of little baby Ferrari engines, you're just blabbering more of the ignorance that's so typical of anti-science myth worshipers.
The more complex a biological system, the more obvious that it could only occur by evolution and not by design.
Well I meant it rather tongue in cheek, but yes, black monoliths teaching apes to pick up clubs or spores from space or divine intervention could be considered intelligent design. I personally like when new theories are introduced, look at "fossil fuel", or cold blooded dinosaurs...both those theories have been pretty much shattered in the last 20 years or so.
A very, very generous metaphor. I don't think I would have been that generous. I think I would have used the Chevy Vega....
I think it has to do w/ the moral license agency monopoly they have enjoyed (by implication, not outright advocacy). And the 'agents' don't want the competition. So, you are dead right about the tone. They sound just like the butch hair cut NEA types when they talk about home schooling and vouchers...
We have a federal system too. And the word 'should' also applies to us as well...
but, funny ....
"Anyone using Bush as a science advisor is in a big, big world of hurt. There's no evidence Bush knows the slightest bit about science."
Riiiiiiiigggggghhhhtttt..... you keep on repeating that. Light some incense sticks too while you are at it....
Not too surprisingly, the Creationists are ignorant of the difference between an automobile engine and a slime mold. Nor can they distinguish between the living and the non-living.
Well I meant it rather tongue in cheek, but yes, black monoliths teaching apes to pick up clubs or spores from space or divine intervention could be considered intelligent design. I personally like when new theories are introduced, look at "fossil fuel", or cold blooded dinosaurs...both those theories have been pretty much shattered in the last 20 years or so.
If ID were a legitimate, testable, falsifiable scientific theory, then it might be something new. But is is a rehash of ideas that have been around a long time.
Did you know that even the primary scientists who advocate this 'theory', Behe, Dembski and Denton, largely accept the TOE (common descent and random mutation). They think it explains most of the mechanisms of the evolution of biological systems. They just don't think it is enough to explain ALL of the complexity of biological systems. So they postulate that at selected points in the tree of life, at certain places in time, etc., that some other mechanism intervened, and that mechanism is the Intelligent Designer. Whatever and whoever that is and whenever and however the 'intervention' is done is unanswered.
Umm he's right Bush is President not Bill Nye the Science Guy. I'm sure if you asked GWB the ins and outs of Thermal Dynamics you'd get a grin and a what the heck are you goin on about boy look.
He's a quick guy but Scientiic Genius uummm no.
Tim Russert, Spring, 2004 ....
"Mr. President, what are your plans if you lose the election?"
Bush, "I don't plan to lose."
I guess this doesn't count that Bush has a good grasp of science. Ok. Fine with me....
Tim Russert, Spring, 2004 ....
"Mr. President, what are your plans if you lose the election?"
Bush, "I don't plan to lose."
I guess this doesn't count that Bush has a good grasp of science.
So your logic is that because Bush didn't plan to loose the election, and he won, that this is solid evidence he has a good grasp of science?
No I didn't. I thought the Theory of Everything (Virtual Chaos) has never been proven (nor disproved), did I miss something?
Good, we agree on something anyway!
No I didn't. I thought the Theory of Everything (Virtual Chaos) has never been proven (nor disproved), did I miss something?
What's the Theory of Everything? Never heard of it.
Also, so scientific theory is ever proven. But a scientific theory can be disproven. This makes scientific theories very vulnerable. Which is why the ones that haven't been disproven are so appealing and often very useful in everyday life.
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