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.
You're a CR? You're kidding, right?
no - the tony-numeric person believes that.
or whoever it was to whom you replied.
I accept what the evidence indicates: the Earth has been around for 4+ billion years, life has been cooking along for quite a long time, hominids began popping up about 6million years back, and our kind has been walking around thinking themselves the cat's meow for a piddling few hundred-thousand years.
Note to the humorless: it's that thing you don't understand again!
"Never mind that. Try explaining my three cat's ability to communicate their desire for a can of cat food to me. It works every time, and I can't even speak catlish. I'm pretty sure it's some form of telepathy."
Agreed. Based on the tone and tenor of how my cats meow, I know exactly what they want from me.
This type of comment has been common among creationists for the last 50 years (but I don't remember much further back.)
It's just it's so hard to tell these days. Youy live beside someone for twenty years, think you're pals, then sleep late one Sunday morning, and they're in the driveway with a barrow-load of rocks.
It's just it's so hard to tell these days. Youy live beside someone for twenty years, think you're pals, then sleep late one Sunday morning, and they're in the driveway with a barrow-load of rocks.
It's the same for dog barks. There are different barks for people or for other dogs, for instance. There's a specific bark that says "I need to go out" and another that says "I'm hungry."
I'm a little shocked by the Jewish divorce rate. Whatever happened the Jewish couple, married for 77 years, who filed for divorce? They were asked why they were divorcing after such a long marriage. Each answered the same, "We've always hated each other; can't stand being in the same room."
Then why did you wait so long to get divorced, they were asked. "We had to wait until the children were dead."
Note that other creationists support claims such as these. It's called projection.
It's possible. I mean there's as much evidence as for any other god dying for us.
It could be worse, though. The god in question could end up like Prometheus for doing something nice for people.
It doesn't mention age at divorce, so that could account for it.
"If "evolution" is meant in the broadest sense then yes, even I believe it happens! That's right; I think the variance in human skin colors, hair and eye colors, bone and facial structures, etc. are all the results of evolution—i.e. adaptation to the various climates to which people groups migrated after the dispersal from Babel, ca. 2200 B.C."
So you really think that there was no human habitation outside of Babel beyond 4200 years ago?
I selected one of the rocks -- not one small like a robin's egg, or large like an Idaho potato, but more medium sized, more "just right..."
Vitamin W?
The one with the camera! What you getting at, mister?
I have perhaps once seen a criticism from a creationist about such posts. I can only assume that all creationists and ID supporters support such claims. For that matter, I have never seen a creationists complain about Harun Yahya either, but some creationist did link to their site once.
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