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.
To come to this conclusion they had to reify organic information and machines. While it is known that intelligence can and does create complexity, it is not necessarily the only source of complexity. The assumption is that only intelligence can create this level of complexity so anything that can be construed as this complex must be from intelligence. They then use this to prove the inability of nature to produce complexity. I think this is called assuming the conclusion.
No consulting the official Darwin Central Archivist, I noticed. I think I'll go off to the corner and sulk, now.
you know, I can quote-mine inaccurately, too.
anybody can.
in fact, if someone so wished, they could inaccurately quote-mine the KJV and "prove" that the Bible says "There is no God"
a ridiculous example of a ridiculous tactic.
ID-is-hogwash placemarker.
If anyone doubts how brutal science is to frauds and hoaxers, try googling Inge Czaja.
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=Inge+Czaja+&btnG=Google+Search
Google allopatric and sympatric speciation.
Why should something as complex as evolution have but one mechanism?
Stop sulking. Your efforts have the full support of the Grand Master. But sometimes he worries about your attitude.
On behalf of the Grand Master, I am,
PatrickHenry
What DID we evolve from?
The flaw in this argument is most easily shown by applying it to areas other than living systems. For example this exact argument can be used to suggest intelligent design as an "obvious explaination" for the information necessary to build a tornado, the information necessary to build a pond, or the information nessesary to build a star. So Intelligent Design is an "obvious explaination" for anything at all. As the saying goes "A hypothesis that can explain anything ultimately explains nothing".
So the explaination of ID can be made in a snap, it doesn't require science at all, and it doesn't tell us anything that we didn't already know. However IDists aren't happy with ID being merely an explaination for the diversity of life, instead they want ID to be the ONLY explaination for the diversity of life. Therefore all their work is based on attacking natural explainations, even though they won't admit this. But check out the next paragraph:
There are also strong positive reasons for inferring design from the intricate machines and circuits now found in cells. Michael Behe has shown that these systems are irreducibly complex, that is, they need all of their parts in just the right place to function at all. This is significant, not only because (as Behe shows) natural selection cannot produce irreducibly complex structures such as the bacterial flagellar motor,..
The paragraph above illustrates the situation perfectly. It begins by promising "strong positive reasons for inferring design", but then instead begins attacking natural selection instead. That is clearly not a positive reason for intelligent design, but an a reason to doubt a natural mechanism. But this is all the IDists are left with doing. They are unable to make a positive case for ID simply because no positive case is necessary - anything can already be explained as ID. All they have left to do is rule out all natural explainations.
(as an asside, despite what the article claimed, natural selection and mutation can produce irreducibly complex structures)
..but also because we know that irreducible complexity is a property of systems that are known to be intelligently designed
This is simply not true. Many man made intelligently designed objects do not have the property of irreducible complexity. I have already mentioned that the origin of any object can be explained by Intelligent Design. A high enough intelligence could concievably build anything, including things that are not irreducibly complex.
What ID needs to do is come up with a way of ruling out ID for a given object, and such a method already exists, and has been used before science was known as science. The method people have always used for ruling out Intelligent Design of an object is by finding a good enough natural explaination to explain it instead.
ID is not science. I require no science at all to make the conclusion that a pebble on a beach can be explained by Intelligently Design mechanisms. However I do require science to make the conclusion that a pebble on a beach can be explained by natural mechanisms. That just about sums the whole thing up.
In fact, every time we know the causal history of an irreducibly complex system (like a car engine or an electronic circuit), it always turn out to have been the product of an intelligent cause.
Yet I have heard people make a case for naturally occuring arches or rock being irreducibly complex (take away any part and it falls down), and I can make the case for the sun being irreducibly complex. Take certain parts away from the sun and it won't function to sustain life on Earth. Are these not examples of naturally occuring systems that are irreducibly complex?
Unfortunately for you, science is not settled in courtroom, and word lawyering has no effect on reality. Flustered witnesses do not alter reality.
As for the case at hand, it does not depend on a case being made for evolution. It depends on making the case that the defendendents were motivated by religion.
This should be interesting, since ID is the most anti-God, anti-religious idea ever put forth. Anyone who has read these threads for long knows that ID is entirely incompatible with scripture.
OK… Is “random and undirected process(es)” a tenet of evolution or a philosophical statement?
I evolved from my parents.
"random and undirected processes" as applied as a description of the incidence of genetic mutations (due to: ionizing radiation, viral insertions, transcriptiopn errors, chemical exposure, etc...) is a core tenet of evolution.
applied to the full history of the sum of all evolution and its products? there it becomes more philosophical.
There is no unbridgeable difference between gradualism and PE. Neither is fast on a human time scale.
Well, I am a bit of a loon. Once you take into account my cyclical manic-depression and the fact that I hear voices (which of late have only been whispers, making it darned hard to hear them), I'm a fairly decent guy.
"Logically derived from confirmable evidence, evolution is understood to be the result of an unguided, unplanned process of random variation and natural selection.
Note the 'random variation' and the 'natural selection'. This little bit divides evolution into two parts, one is psuedo-random the other is not random at all. The Miller quote was a reference to evolution in whole being random. We can see that that idea is incorrect.
As far as the directedness is concerned, selection can be viewed as a directing process, although not intelligently directed.
I'm afraid your post didn't do what you wanted it to. Equivocating isn't usually a good idea.
Is the path of a hurricane undirected?
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