Science and Scripture - 'Intelligent design' theory definitely belongs in biology class

LAT ^ | September 28, 2005 | Crispin Sartwell

[Tailgunner Joe]

I DON'T BELIEVE that the universe was intelligently designed. I don't think that "intelligent design" is a scientific theory: It appeals to the supernatural and cannot be empirically tested. I think its proponents have religious motivations for trying to insert it into the curriculum.

But I also believe it should be taught in high school biology classes.

The federal court case that began this week originated in York County, Pa., where my kids go to the public schools. The school board of the Dover district mandated that a four-paragraph statement be read in high school biology classes, setting out intelligent design as an alternative to evolution for explaining the current configuration of organisms. Several Dover parents brought suit to prevent that statement from being read.

The issue is symptomatic of the continuing divisions in American culture, as severe now as when the Scopes Monkey Trial was raging in 1925. It tracks fairly closely the conflict between red states and blue states, the religious and the secular, Republicans and Democrats, and so on.

And though Pennsylvania is nominally blue, this county in the middle-south of the state is rock-ribbed red and Christian to the hilt.

To understand what the Dover school board was trying to accomplish, consider how you would feel if your children, in the course of a compulsory education, were taught doctrines that contradicted your most cherished beliefs — that blandly invalidated your worldview without discussion. Think about being heavily taxed to destroy your own belief system. That's how the people in this community feel.

[Mylo]

If selective pressure didn't result in a change in the phenotype. It does. Read something tailgummer.

I DO NOT TALK TO YOU. Are you starved for attention or something?

[Tax Government]

Creationism and evolutionism are not opposite. God is fully able to create via evolution. The dispute is artificial.

[Tailgunner Joe]

Showing that phenotypes change is not the same as proving that all species share a common ancestor.

[xzins]

ID is not a theory. It is a major criticism of darwinism, and it does not require a God for there to be intelligent design. It only requires an organizing principle.

One already proposed organizing principle is natural selection. It does not answer the mail. The complexity to too great to accept natural selection as the organizing principle.

There needs to be another principle proposed that is more intentional.

[A. Pole]

The hypothesis never postulated a mechanism, and nothing we know about DNA and genetic inheritance

Neither did Darwin. Scientific theory does not have to be all-encompassing in order to be scientific. It does not have to be right either to be scientific.

There are no Lamarkian concepts that "might" be returning.

Do you know the future? Do you think that science will be frozen at the DNA Jurassic Park paradigm from the 1970s (do not grasp at straws, I know that the movie is later)? Inheritance of acquired traits is quite likely to be vindicated in my opinion. (BTW, evolution theory was part of my major)

[A. Pole]

Creationism and evolutionism are not opposite. God is fully able to create via evolution.

Amen!

[Sun]

I'm happy to hear that the scientists you know are God fearing, and, yes, God DOES work in mysterious ways.

However, there are some parents who don't want their children to learn the evolution theory, because it is against their religion.

If schools teach evolution, why can't they also teach I.D., and let students decide for themselves?

Just because I provided a link with 400 scientists does not mean that there are more scientists who believe in Intelligent Design, and there will be more in the future.

I have read and read about evolution, and see no proof to support it.

Here's another excellent excerpt:

Those eager to expunge God’s fingerprints from nature weren’t concerned by this shortcoming in Darwin’s material explanation for life, because Darwin and his contemporaries thought a single cell was a simple blob of protoplasm. How hard could it be for nature to randomly produce something so simple?

In those days the cell was a black box, a mystery. But in the 20th century, scientists were able to open that black box and peek inside. There they found not a simple blob but a world of complex circuits, miniaturized motors, and digital code. We now know that even the simplest functional cell is almost unfathomably complex, containing at least 250 genes and their corresponding proteins.

Explains New Zealand geneticist Michael Denton, each cell “is in effect a veritable micro-miniaturized factory containing thousands of exquisitely designed pieces of intricate molecular machinery, made up altogether of one hundred thousand million atoms.”

The odds of a primordial soup randomly burping up even one protein strand of moderate length are dramatically less than 1 chance in 10150.

It’s hard to grasp how long these odds are—one followed by 150 zeros. We know that a lot of strange things can happen in a place as big and old as our universe, but as mathematician and philosopher William Dembski explains in the Cambridge University Press book The Design Inference, the universe isn’t remotely big enough, old enough, or fast enough to generate that much complexity.

Nor have attempts to explain this complexity as the natural outworking of the laws of nature proven successful. The best explanation? INTELLIGENT DESIGN. (emphasis mine)

excerpt from http://www.discovery.org/scripts/vi...nd=view&id=2350

Focus on last sentence, last paragraph: "The best explanation? INTELLIGENT DESIGN."

[GSlob]

"And it is curious that you put so much stress on ruthless struggle for survival, it reminds me some scientistic ideology from the first half of XX century"
Reminiscences are OK - it is the survivors who normally engage in reminiscing, usually after dessert over some brandy and cigars. Others do not survive to reminisce.

[PhilipFreneau]

>>>But in 150 years evolution has not been disproved.<<<

In the history of the universe God has not been disproved. What is your point?

[Mylo]

Obviously the bad part.

Darwin didn't postulate a mechanism for diversity, but he did for natural selection. He assumed genetic inheritance but didn't know about Mendel proving it.

If you say something "might" happen, I assume there is some evidence for it. You have no evidence for lamarkian concepts returning. Does the brain change the DNA code? Are we Telemutagenic? Wow, I didn't know I had super powers.

There were numerous tests done on acquired traits. If you have half of a group of men lift weights with their right arm, and the other half lift weights with their left arm and test the arm strength of the children they have after this experiment; what do you think they would find based upon the experiments that disproved Lamarkian inheritance of acquired traits?

[SolarisRocks]

You call others Nazi? Least you forget you are the one who thinks, in some cases, those who do things you do not like should be killed.

You show more nazi like behavior than anyone else I know own this site.

[Tailgunner Joe]

Are you Pro-life?

I believe in the death penalty, but not for innocent babies.

[SolarisRocks]

Yes I am.

[PhilipFreneau]

>>>The best proof of evolution are the creationists, for they have not evolved.<<<

There was no need for creationists to evolve since they were created as men from the beginning. Evolutionists, on the other hand, evolved from pond slime; but still retain the creativity of pond slime.

[Tailgunner Joe]

Sure you are.

[Sidebar Moderator]

We let the crevo threads be a little more rough and tumble than we would generally prefer for the forum, but there are limits.

Don't make us start taking names and sending people on a forced vacation or worse.

[PhilipFreneau]

>>>There is no "ultimate authority" with the force of law in Science.<<<

Of course there is. It is called peer pressure. Peer pressure in science is as coercive as the peer pressure that make school age boys wear pants that are so big and baggy that a reasonable person would think they were found in a dumpster.

[PhilipFreneau]

>>>How is denying the supernatural, out of hand, any more an act of faith than accepting it (the supernatural) out of hand?<<<

I will renounce my belief in God when so-called "scientists" can explain how the universe was created, and the name of the man who created it.

[so_real]

Extremely well stated. So much effort is put into attacking the ID position at all costs that the proponents of an evolutionarily pure education fail to reckognize they are chipping away at their own freedoms. It's a "forest and trees" scenario.

I've not heard the phrase "scientistic bureaucracy" used before, but it is an apt description. In the big picture, it is better to allow communities choosing to go a different way the ability to do so. Better that than to sacrifice their ability to make the choice (perhaps wrongly at times) for themselves, or to discharge parents from their responsibility to provide the education they feel is in their child's best interest.

In a "scientistic bureaucracy" home-schooling could become an illegal practice simply because the home-schoolers refused to teach evolutionary theory, or -- in a twist of fate -- because the home-schoolers refused to teach ID theory. Short-sighted people forget the pendulum swings both ways.

[so_real]

Nobody's forcing you to accept evolutionary theory.

Technically, the student taking a test on evolutionary theory is forced to accept it -- or is at least forced to fake acceptance of it -- for sake of his grades. A student who does not believe a chicken evolved from a tyrannosaurus would not receive a passing grade by checking that question 'false' on a quiz. Those who fear a theocracy should also fear a scientocracy.