Posted on 10/05/2005 3:53:39 AM PDT by PatrickHenry
HARRISBURG, Pa. - A philosophy professor and two science teachers were expected to testify Wednesday in a landmark trial over a school board's decision to include a reference to "intelligent design" in its biology curriculum.
Barbara Forrest, a philosophy professor at Southeastern Louisiana University, is being called as an expert witness on behalf of eight families who are trying to have intelligent design removed from the Dover Area School District's biology curriculum. The families contend that it effectively promotes the Bible's view of creation, violating the constitutional separation of church and state.
Forrest's testimony was expected to address what opponents allege is the religious nature of intelligent design, as well as the history and development of the concept, according to court papers filed by the plaintiffs before the trial.
U.S. District Judge John E. Jones III was also expected to hear testimony from Bertha Spahr, chairman of Dover High School's science department, and biology teacher Jennifer Miller.
Under the policy approved by Dover's school board in October 2004, students must hear a brief statement about intelligent design before classes on evolution. It says Charles Darwin's theory is "not a fact," has inexplicable "gaps," and refers students to an intelligent-design textbook for more information.
Intelligent-design supporters argue that life on Earth was the product of an unidentified intelligent force, and that natural selection cannot fully explain the origin of life or the emergence of highly complex life forms.
The plaintiffs are represented by a team put together by the American Civil Liberties Union and Americans United for Separation of Church and State. The school district is being defended by the Thomas More Law Center, a public-interest law firm based in Ann Arbor, Mich., that says its mission is to defend the religious freedom of Christians.
The trial began Sept. 26 and is expected to last as long as five weeks.
There are several different styles of writing within the Bible. Much of it is literally true, but certainly not all of it. Those portions that are not literally true, do contain truth, but just not in a literal sense.
What qualifications do you have to pronounce on the solidity of various branches of science?
Probability of being true.
Well, I am glad that you are admitting that it is not a scientific theory in its own right. Maybe we are making progress.
Never said it proved ID, other than that if evolution is not true, can you propose other alternatives to consider?
Your or my incapacity to think of alternatives to ToE in no way validates supposed existing alternatives to ToE, which must stand or fall according to the extent to which they fit current observations, the successful predictions that they make, and the falsification attempts that they have survived. ToE has all of those characteristics in spades. So far no-one has ever proposed a scientific theory of ID that meets any part of the requirements of a theory.
Don't confuse the lack of desire to do so with an inability to do so. No one likes pounding their head against a wall.
You are destined to spend eternity in the Lake of Fire, playing with dice.
</internet idiot mode>
Actually, it was by a pro-evolutionist. I think there are intellectually honest evolutionists, even if I disagree with their conclusions.
Ok. But if evolution, which is capable of evolving intelligence is false, then where did your "intelligence" come from that created species? If there is a mechanism other than evolution for forming complex structures with "intelligence", then what is it?
This is your conundrum. If evolution, or some other detectable mechanism for generating species is impossible, then so is the existence of an "intelligence" in the first place.
Well, at least that'll take my mind off the torment.
Do I get a craps table?
Well, at least that'll take my mind off the torment.
Do I get a craps table?
One piece of evidence is all I ask. You totally clutter op the thread with one false allegation after another but you never show a shred of evidence for your bogus allegations.
That's what I was taught in a Southern Baptist Church camp sometime around 1972.
How do you tell the difference?
"Can you tell me how this date is so in error?
Easy. Carbon-14 years are shorter than Biblical years.
"ps. The site had no evidence of a flood.
All the evidence was washed away by the flood.
When you come out with this stuff you just expose that you don't know anything about science. Wishing things about ToE because you have a religious aversion to it doesn't change the facts. I know lots of professional physicists, and I have never met one who thought that mainstream biology (in the form of ToE) was less well founded than their own speciality. If anything most physicists who have examined the data would say the opposite, that ToE is amongst the best founded of all human scientific knowledge.
Maths OTOH is qualitatively different from *all* the natural sciences, because it doesn't have to cope with the natural world so it can deal with concepts like "axioms" and "proofs". Natural sciences cannot do that. The real world is a messy place for both physicists and biologists; remarkable then that they come up with so many successful predictions and failed falsifications.
"Teachers are the bottom of the intellectual pool"
That statement is a little too broad, I'd say. I've had some excellent teachers in my lifetime, ranging from one amazing guy who made an entire class actually understand differential equations...not an easy job...to an English teacher who got through to me on the importance of expressing onesself clearly.
For you to class all teachers as stupid is the height of arrogance, in my opinion.
All the evidence was washed away by the flood.
ROFL!
All the evidence was washed away by the flood.
ROFL!
He has a "truth-o-meter" supplied directly from God.
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