Posted on 10/06/2005 6:13:37 AM PDT by Junior
HARRISBURG, Pa. - References to creationism in drafts of a student biology book were replaced with the term "intelligent design" by the time it was published, a witness testified Wednesday in a landmark trial over a school board's decision to include the concept in its curriculum.
Drafts of the textbook, "Of Pandas and People," written in 1987 were revised after the Supreme Court ruled in June of that year that states could not require schools to balance evolution with creationism in the classroom, said Barbara Forrest, a philosophy professor at Southeastern Louisiana University.
Forrest reviewed drafts of the textbook as a witness for eight families who are trying to have the intelligent design concept removed from the Dover Area School District's biology curriculum.
The families contend that teaching intelligent design effectively promotes the Bible's view of creation, violating the separation of church and state.
Intelligent design holds that life on Earth is so complex that it must have been the product of some higher force. Opponents of the concept say intelligent design is simply creationism stripped of overt religious references.
Forrest outlined a chart of how many times the term "creation" was mentioned in the early drafts versus how many times the term "design" was mentioned in the published edition.
"They are virtually synonymous," she said.
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. The statement says Charles Darwin's theory is "not a fact" and has inexplicable "gaps."
Forrest also said that intelligent-design proponents have freely acknowledged that their cause is a religious one. She cited a document from the Discovery Institute, a Seattle-based think tank that represents intelligent-design scholars, that says one of its goals is "to replace materialistic explanations with the theistic understanding that nature and human beings are created by God."
Under cross-examination by school board lawyer Richard Thompson, Forrest acknowledged that she had no evidence that board members who voted for the curriculum change had either seen or heard of the Discovery Institute document.
The trial began Sept. 26 and is expected to last as long as five weeks.
Creationism, on the other hand, is based on the Bible. ID is not about religion.
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You have an exceedingly narrow view about creationism. Every culture has a creation story, but only one culture's creation story is based on the Bible.
Given that your view is so narrow and incorrect, any conclusions you are drawing are suspect.
Coyoteman, what creation story do we have today for our featured guest?
It doesn't take much to see the guard drop. I cannot name one ID advocate on FR who hasn't at one time or another railed against methodological materialism.
No you don't.
For example, if I hypothesize that "a designer caused this bacterium to produce human insulin," I need not worry about where that designer came from in order to make my hypothesis, nor do I need to worry about where that designer came from in order to attempt to prove my hypothesis.
The Grand Master at Darwin Central has foreseen everything. If ID succeeds in the double-wides, it's religion and can't get into schools. If it succeeds in court, it's not religion, but it has no followers in either the double-wides or in science. So the ID camp has to settle for being just another creationist outfit, hawking goofy books and tapes, or else they're nowhere at all. Darwin Central sees all, knows all, and controls all.
On behalf of the Grand Master, I am,
PatrickHenry
Sorry, but you always have to hypothesize a causative agent if you want to be science. In the case of human activities, we can detect them because we know what kinds of things humans do.
If you want to attribute something to an "outside" designer, you need to have independent information about the abilities and motives of the designer.
For example, why does the designer employ random variation and natural selection to make things? What is the designer's motive?
You do have to worry about coming up with a falsifiable test that can affirm that it was a designer that caused the bacterium to produce human insulin. I'd really like to see such a test, especially one doesn't define the parameters of the designer. Note that failing to find an alternate cause is not proof of a designer in and of itself.
I don't consider it word-smithing to isolate the crucial distinguishing feature of something. Pattern analysis is also fundamental to many other fields. It is the philosophical imputation of design to some patterns that distinguishes ID from, say, X-ray diffraction crystallography.
But that isn't what "ID" proposes.
"ID" proposes that nothing as complex as life can arise without being designed by some intelligence. It goes without saying that the "intelligence" must be at least as complicated as the life it designed, so the question then becomes "who designed the designer". Since the chain of design must eventually have a beginning, the only possible answer is that the original designer was supernatural. I.E. God.
Your hypothesis is merely that an intelligence can in fact design something. Well, duh. But that's completely different than the claim of "ID", that complexity by definition MUST be designed.
Fear is only one reason and I'd guess only a small minority are motivated by what could be reasonably classified as fear. Most, I think, have a non-fearful religious motivation. Some small number have truly convinced themselves, on non-religious grounds, that ID is true by a fallacious, analogical argument from human design.
That's kind of hard to believe, since there is nothing remotely analogous to human design concpts in living things, nor is there anything designed by humans remotely similar to living processes. We haven't even figured out what it is we would need to copy.
But the main reason why it is hard to believe is that ID advocates are such cruddy liars. They will disavow religious intent on one post and claim that critics are religion bashing on another post.
here y'all go:
"May I end a sentence with a preposition?"
Contrary to popular opinion, no rule states that it is incorrect to end a sentence with a preposition. A principle of style, however, declares that one should not end a sentence with a preposition when one has a graceful alternative. As Theodore M. Bernstein says in The Careful Writer (Atheneum: 1968), "It is well to consider that a sentence ending with a preposition is sometimes clumsy, often weak." But Bernstein adds that "a preposition can itself provide strength at the end of a sentence." "This occurs," he says, "when the preposition carries real import and the verb has a rather low charge; in such instances heavy stress . . . falls on the preposition, and idiom declares that it appear at the end."
Bernstein's examples prove the point. How else are we to say, "He didn't know what he was getting into," "I found this tool, but I don't know what it is used for," or "I didn't know what it was all about"? Consider, he says, Shakespeare's "We are such stuff as dreams are made on" and such expressions as: "That is something to guard against," "He is someone you can count on," and "You don't know what I have been through." Bernstein wryly suggests that anyone who calls such expressions wrong will find that he or she "hasn't a leg on which to stand."
we do what we can... gotta earn my way out of the Janitorial Pool somehow, eh?
Sorry, but the hypothesis says precisely that.
In the case of human activities, we can detect them because we know what kinds of things humans do. If you want to attribute something to an "outside" designer, you need to have independent information about the abilities and motives of the designer.
Yes to the first part, and no to the second.
You're basically claiming that the motives and techniques of "outside" designers will always be completely different from anything we humans would do. That might be true, but then again, it might not be true. It would be scientifically stupid to operate on the assumption that we could never understand the work of non-humans, especially when they are supposedly engaged in an activity (engineering) about which we have an innate understanding.
One can quite easily operate under the assumption that any designer would use techniques, and have design motives, that we can recognize. This assumption may be invalid, in which case our tests wouldn't have any power, and we're no worse off than we were. However, the assumption might be valid -- in which case we'll have done ourselves some good by looking for it.
For example, why does the designer employ random variation and natural selection to make things? What is the designer's motive?
I'm willing to bet that you could think up an excellent motive all by yourself. Be that as it may, you seem to be trying to lure me into saying that random variation and natural selection never occur. Sorry, but I won't go there -- I can comfortably accept a world in which random variation, natural selection, and design, can all occur.
In the same spirit, though, let's take a different example, of a designer deliberately inserting a gene sequence into a bacterium or yeast in order to produce human insulin. (And, indeed, this is a real-world example of intelligent design.) What was the designer's motive? Would you really need to know it? No.
The thing is, if one can pinpoint evidence of a particular technique, there is NO REASON to also demand the designer's motive. The evidence of the technique is sufficient to verify a design hypothesis.
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