Posted on 09/27/2005 9:10:31 AM PDT by Crackingham
Dover Area School District's federal trial began yesterday in Harrisburg with talk ranging from divine intervention and the Boston Red Sox to aliens and bacterial flagellum. After about 10 months of waiting, the court case against the district and its board opened in Middle District Judge John E. Jones III's courtroom with statements from lawyers and several hours of expert testimony from biologist and Brown University professor Kenneth Miller.
On one side of the aisle, several plaintiffs packed themselves in wooden benches behind a row of attorneys from the American Civil Liberties Union, Pepper Hamilton LLC and Americans United for Separation of Church and State. On the other side of the aisle, nine school board members, only three of whom were on the board when it voted 6-3 to include a statement on intelligent design in biology classes, piled in behind lawyers from the Thomas More Law Center. Assistant superintendent Michael Baksa and superintendent Richard Nilsen shared a bench with Michael Behe, a Lehigh University professor expected to take the stand in defense of intelligent design.
SNIP
Miller, whose resume is several pages long and includes a stint as a professor at Harvard University, was the first witness called for the parents. Miller co-wrote the Prentice Hall textbook "Biology" with professor Joe Levine. The book is used by 35 percent of the high school students in the United States, Miller said. His were some of the thousands of biology books in which school officials in Cobb County, Ga., ordered stickers to be placed, warning that evolution is only a theory, "not a fact." Miller also testified in a lawsuit filed by Cobb County parents, and a judge later ordered that the stickers be removed.
Yesterday, the scientist's testimony was at times dominated by scientific terminology, though he jokingly told ACLU attorney Witold Walczak he would do his best to explain things in the layman's terms he uses with his mother.
Miller said intelligent design supporters think an intelligent designer must have been involved in the creation of life because science can't yet prove how everything evolved. He said the intelligent design idea that birds were created with beaks, feathers and wings and fish were born with fins is a creationist argument.
Intelligent design supporters often cite "irreducible complexity" in their research, he said. "Irreducible complexity" means that a living thing can't be reduced by any part or it won't work at all. So those living things could not have evolved in the way Darwin suggested; they had to be created with all of their existing parts, Miller said.
Intelligent design proponents often cite the bacterial flagellum, a bacterium with a tail that propels it, Miller said. Behe and his colleagues claim bacterial flagellum had to be created with all of its parts because it couldn't function if any of them were taken away, Miller testified. But scientists have proved that the bacterial flagellum can be reduced to a smaller being, a little organism that operates in a manner similar to a syringe, Miller said.
One of the biggest problems with the scientific viability of intelligent design is there is no way to experiment with the presence of a supernatural being because science only deals with the natural world and theories that are testable, Miller said.
Some people might suspect divine intervention last year when the Boston Red Sox came back to win the World Series after losing three games in a row to the New York Yankees in the playoffs. It may have been, but that's not science, he said. And intelligent design proponents haven't named the "intelligent being" behind their supposition, Miller said. They have suggested, among other things, that it could be aliens, he said. He said there is no evidence to prove intelligent design, so its proponents just try to poke holes in the theory of evolution.
Many, but not all. I'm glad you qualified your claim. Now you need to get rid of point 2) because it does not follow. Humans developed actions that enabled them to cooperate long before we labeled those actions as 'morals'.
"(1 and (2 above then are nothing but purely logical conclusions that flow from the materialist premise.
(1 - possibly. (2 - not at all. Saying morals are relative is not the same as saying they do not exist. They are based on the materialistic needs of social animals.
"Put another way, what other choice would a good atheist have, other than the Modern Synthesis, to prop up his belief?
You are assuming that all atheists base their atheism on the ToE. This is an unsupportable premise, and in fact can be shown to be wrong. I became an atheist well before I knew anything of evolution.
You don't need bones! You can trace many thousand years into the past with just words. For those who may have been stuck here, there is a good post over at:
Atheist and secularists are using up the remaining credit of a society and culture founded on morality which stems from universal religious principles.
Have fun using it up!
Anarchy/barbarism awaits, unless...
odd - my analysis of the record of human behavior indicates that there was no significant deviation from extant patterns, or "business as usual", correlative to the development of the ToE.
People have always used anything available to justify their nastiness. Prior to Darwin - and afterwards, people used religious tenets to the effect of "we are Deity's Chosen Folk" to attack and subjugate others. A snippet from the Genesis Flood myth was used to justify American slavery, as an example. The 30 Years War in the 1600's was as nasty as anything after Darwin's day, and it was fought (nominally) over which Christian flavor was to be on the continental menu. Islamists today use their "God-given" moral code to justify wanton violence of exactly the kind you describe against "pagans" and "heathens" and "infidels", just as many who called themselves Christians did in the none-too-distant past.
Your grasp of history needs remedial attention as badly as does your grasp of science.
At its core, the Darwinian religion reduces humans, created in the image of God, to mere animals.
define all the demonstrable physical characteristics of an animal. Then attempt to demonstrate how humans possess characteristics which are different in kind (rather than degree) from these animal traits. Good luck on that.
No. Not all evolutionists are atheists, but all atheists are evolutionists. If the dogma that humankind is simply the result of chemical and biological accidents has no more import or consequense than television programs, beach reading or sports teams, then why are these threads so many, so long and hotly debated, and why is this even an issue in society at large? The strong currents are under the surface.
Cordially,
Do you actually believe the stuff you post or are you doing it for kicks?
Thank you for your kind wishes. I hope you have a pleasant day, as well. So far, mine has been very nice, indeed. I have eaten well, I am surrounded by the people I love, and I am quite content.
I hope you are the same.
Well, now I understand.
Just let me know if you ever have a crisis of faith. So that we can get a police marksman to pre-emptively shoot you and protect the community since apparently the only reason that you don't rape and pillage is your religious faith.
Also, the "attendant rejection of evolution" comes not just from my belief in God, but from common sense. Macro-evolution has never been observed, never been tested, never been repeated in a lab, and never been proven.
THis is the constant litany of the evolution rejectors, that they reject it for rational reasons, not because of their religion. Funny that every single one of them accepts that their religion contradicts evolution, but hey, that's nothing to do with their rational opinion. Yeah, right.
Just FYI, I am not a Biblical 7 day creationist.
You are probably right. Stagnant, theistic societies like that of the Arabs, are probably more stable, and the European dark ages lasted longer than we have. I have even seen nostalgia for the dark ages on FR.
So if you were an atheist, you wouldn't go raping and pillaging anyway?
I guess I'm missing the point you're trying to make here.
So what is it that restrains the average Indian in New Delhi? Are they all barbarians over there?
Oh, cool! Thanks for the link!
"And fervid believers in evolution cannot handle the tiniest bit of criticism, one must swallow the entire cathecism whole or be labeled a crank, knuckle dragging uneducated drooling idiot - even "wicked". There is no possibility of rational debate with evolution fundamentalists."
Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha.
HA HA HA HA HA HA HA!
Yes, I'm laughing at you.
"Not all evolutionists are atheists, but all atheists are evolutionists. "
Interesting. I know some atheists who have no knowledge of nor any concern about evolution or any other scientific field. One is a classical musician. Another is an auto mechanic.
If you asked them what they thought of evolution, they'd laugh and tell you they didn't know anything about it, nor did they wish to.
One will play Bach on her violin for you and draw tears from your eyes. The other will listen to your car for 30 seconds and tell you precisely what is wrong with it. That's what they know about. The rest is of no use to either of them.
not entirely true.
some atheists are solipsistic existentialists, which philosophy precludes the possibility of both history and evolution.
such folk are loons, IMO
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