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.
Here! Here!^)
Cordially,
She replied, without batting an eye: God is nonexistent only if you don't believe in him.
Do you have an actual argument against the theory of evolution, or are you just going to toss out insults and dishonest references to the "FSM" even though I've never brought up the subject because you lack the intelligence or honesty to do anything else?
There, there!
Which all just goes to show that there is no statement that denigrates evolution, however deranged, that a creationist can make without attracting support from other creationists.
Tony has clearly stated on several occasions that it is he believes religion stops Christians from indulging in anti-social behaviour such as rapine and pillage. We all need to be alert in case Tony ever has a crisis of faith. As part of the same thought process he implies that all 'evolutionists' (whatever they are, but they seem to be identical in his mind to atheists) are deranged sociopaths who have no concept of morality.
Where can I find this book? I just serched in 4 major libraries including the American Library of Congress and the Russian National Library and I see no references, either direct or indirect, to any G. Glurdjidze or to "The Life of Joseph Stalin."
I am especially skeptical given the fact that Stalin sent Darwinian biologists to gulags for their beliefs.
That one's easy. All the salt water lakes dried up so we have salt for our table and new fresh water lakes sprouted up from normal rainfall.
A cop out before exactly what authority? Atheism undermines its own authority.
Hey thanks for the words. Evolutionists seen to want to discuss only the life-change subset of how things came to be. They do not want to see that life is a just one thing that is a reality. If their science is restricted to what has happened to life since it was created, well OK. But life does not evolve from nothing. There was a first. They touch but a part of the elephant and conclude that is all we need to know. [wonder what part?] I guess matter doesn't matter.
The claim that evolution leads to rape and pillage needs a bit of polish before it's ready for publication. In particular, there's the nagging problem of evidence -- neither Darwin, nor the 9,000 biology teachers in the US, nor the thousands of biologists employed in the biotec industry, seem to be running amok. When we start seeing headlines like "Another biologist arrested for rape!" we can start to think seriously about such a conjecture. Until then, it ain't nothin'.
Pretty big leap there. You went from the study of a 'subset' - cosmology - to a default of God being the explanation.
Granted, without the universe there is no life but we as humans can divide the universe up into somewhat discrete parts for specialized study can we not? As humans we are specialists in our approach to learning, dividing (and conquering) the entirety of our existence into easily handled compartments. The study of evolution is just one of those compartments and does not include the explanation of how or why the universe started. Ask the Big Bang people how it started.
If you have a question about evolution, however, I'd be happy to do my best to answer it.
"Making up an answer of "an all-powerful supernatural entity did it" is a cop-out, not an explanation. Just because you can explain absolutely anything with it doesn't mean that it's really "better"."
It's ony a cop-out if you claim it to be the only possible answer.
ID is a theory.
It is true that the "all-powerful supernatural entity did it" theory has been used througout history to explain things that were were able to prove had more mundane explainations once we learned more.
Theories should be questioned. That's the point of the scientific process. Right now what we have it evolution being taught by itself as the only viable theory, which is about the same as teaching that it's a fact. It's a purposful representation of it as more than a thoery because the liberals in our education system don't want to let students consider that there may be a God.
This is really no diferent than the Catholic church trying to crush scientific theories which they felt contradicted their faith.
"What hypothetical observation would falsify Intelligent Design? Be specific. If there are absolutely no hypothetical conditions under which Intelligent Design could be proven false, then Intelligent Design is not science."
Do you understand what a theory is? Just because I don't know how to prove or disprove something does not mean it's not a scientific theory. The search for a way to prove or disprove such a thing is part of the scientific process.
Do some research on Saint Thomas Aquinas for some examples of someone trying to prove or disprove religious theories using the scientific method.
By the way, I studied St. Thomas Aquinas at a public university. It was taught as part of philosophy as was the class I took on logic. Without understanding how to think locically you won't get far in science or philosophy.
Acutally pure sciences tend to have a lot more in common with philosophy than with more applied uses such as I learned in my engineering classes.
" You shouldn't attempt to argue science if you don't even understand how science operates. Theories do not become laws.
"You shouldn't attempt to argue science if you don't even understand how science operates. Theories do not become laws. Laws are not graduated theories. Laws and theories are two different kinds of statements. Laws are generalizations about observations from which future observations are predicted; the "law" of gravity is a generalization about how gravity has been observed to operate in the past from which future predictions about gravitational operation can be made. Theories are an attempt to explain the cause behind observed phenomenon."
You're comment doesn't support your assertion. The law of gravity started as a theory that was then proven to a resaonable standard through experimentation. You observe something. You theorize about it. Then you set out to prove or disprove it. The Newton's laws started out no differently. The laws of thermodynamics started out no differently.
Your theory that laws did not start out as theories is obviously false.
"There's no theory that the world itself "evolved"."
Amusingly enough there has to be such a theory for you to be able to say it's false. You can't discount something until after it's been theorized because without they theory there's noting to discount.
"Please try to understand the scope of evolution before launching an attack on it."
Well, I guess I wasn't specific enough to prevent nitpicking. Please replace where I said the world with living organisms. They still had to start from something in order to evolve, and the theory of evolution does not account for where those first organisms came from.
"Actually, science can only address the natural universe. It cannot address the supernatural in any way. If a religion touches on the supernatural -- and most do -- then science cannot involve itself."
For that to be true you would need a perfect understanding of what is "natural" and what is "supernatural".
Typically things that cannot be proven or disproven end up being considered supernatural. So what makes it so that the theory of evolution isn't considered to pertain to something supernatural?
The stars at one point in time were considered supernatural.
Many things that we have come to understand through the scientific process were once thought to be supernatural.
We're back to the days of the inquisition with the roles reversed.
Religion and science are only incompatible for those who close their minds to one or the other.
The reality of life is that there is much more that we do not know than we actually know, and it will always be that way.
The scientific process is merely an orderly way to learn more about what we don't understand.
These barriers between science and religion are merely mental constructs that are barriers to learning because they limitations on what you are willing to consider possible regardless of you're ability to disprove it.
That's not science. That's dogma.
It's easily proven to not be science through the scientific method.
And what did all the herbivores eat for the next few centuries, while all the land on earth recovered from salt poisoning? And why didn't the carnivores eat the herbivores the moment they were released (and then starve)? And how did the topsoil recover? And how many zoos with tens-of-thousands of species could manage with 8 staff (and no running water, power, waste-disposal, trucks of food-delivery)?
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