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.
Is it time to ping your list?
But of course I never said that. I merely pointed out that there is a middle ground wherein biological phenomena can be explained by something that is neither naturalistic, nor "supernatural" (again, I think by this you refer to God).
There can be no middle ground in the question of where the diversity of life came from. You've avoided answering the question with the human design misdirection again.
LOL! You continue to miss the point, and I begin to think you miss it deliberately. It's not a "misdirection" (LOL!) to provide the example by which your statement is refuted.
If, as ID states, that complexity in the natural world cannot arise except through an intelligent agency, then it is impossible for a natural world intelligent agency to exist with the capacity to create complexity.
Your comment shows that logic works great, even if you start from a position that ignores reality. If it's really "impossible for a natural world intelligent agency to exist with the capacity to create complexity," then humans could not possibly practice genetic engineering. But humans do practice genetic engineering, so clearly your statement is not consistent with reality.
But in any event, ID is not required for complexity, because we have found and demonstrated that evolution can produce it.
And we have also found and demonstrated that complexity can be produced by intelligent design (by humans). And thus your absolutist position on the matter is not logically justifiable.
And evidence of design-by-evolution exists in spades, particularly in DNA evidence that you've ignored from my previous posts.
I'm not "ignoring" anything. I have no problem with the idea that naturalistic processes can and do play a role. (And you will not find any post of mine on this or any other thread that says otherwise.) But I am also saying that you can't simply rule out the possibility of intelligent agents somewhere along the line, because we know for a fact that it's possible for intelligent agents to produce biological phenomena.
I'm happy to discuss any scientific and logical objections you have to what I've said. I am not willing to continue in the present mode, where you simply ignore what I do say, and replace it with your ideological ramblings that have nothing to do with what I've said.
You're not worth talking to. Have a nice life.
Another bluff. You really are quite amusing in your inability to admit that you are insisting "a non-human designer" can be found..
I've explained it several times.
No one here agrees that you've "explained" anything. You're making unsupported circular type statements.
If you read them and still have questions about what I am trying to convey, please ask me.
You've made it pitifully clear that you can't, - or won't -, make logical answers. But please, feel free to continue.
You're not worth talking to. Have a nice life.
I have a nice life, -- and I will continue to spend some time to calling bluffs about "non-human designers" thanks to you..
Really? We have newspaper accounts, government records, original correspondence, photographs and whatnot for Lincoln. We have a book with a couple of iffy second-hand accounts for Jesus. The two are not anywhere near comparable.
You do understand that the subject of these threads, and the proposition of Intelligent Design is to explain where species came from? That includes humans.
I'm sorry I was unable to effectively communicate this to you a long time ago, but the fact that humans can mimic biology (often using evolutionary tools) is meaningless to the question of where species and humans came from.
Your point of human intelligent design is completely irrelevant.
Ping to post 308. I have no idea what r9's problem is. He's off in the nether regions somewhere. I guess he thinks that if he can get us to acknowledge that humans can design biology, then that's relevant somehow.
I think he's trying to prove that other 'intelligent designers' exist by using us as examples.
And of course alien 'intelligent designers' may indeed exist.
The question then arises: -- Are these aliens Gods? -- and, - who created them?
We are met with silence from the ID faction.
I've been making the point that if, as ID claims, complexity and information are impossible to arise in nature without intelligence, then at some point a supernatural intelligence is required or life would not exist.
Yes, a space alien that evolved somewhere else could have "planted" life here, but if intelligence is REQUIRED for life to exist, then the only answer is the supernatural.
And since science, by definition a study of the natural world, cannot go into the supernatural, the ID is not science. At best, it is a philosophic argument, and at worst an erroneous faith.
Wolf
You do understand that one part of science is to investigate assumptions, and that's what I'm doing. You keep saying these large things about what science can do, and then dismiss as "irrelevant" the direct proof that your large statements are wrong. I think you need to do a bit more thinking about your own position before taking such a strident stance.
I'm sorry I was unable to effectively communicate this to you a long time ago, but the fact that humans can mimic biology (often using evolutionary tools) is meaningless to the question of where species and humans came from.
I read an interesting article the other day about how scientists have re-created the genetic structure of the Spanish flu. They sequenced the gene, and then synthesized it. The importance of that story is this: in the process of synthesizing the gene, they could just as easily have placed new information into the gene sequence. Now, I'm sure you recognize that this is one approach by which humans could create new species -- and it would be by neither naturalistic nor supernatural means. Once again your position that it "can't have happened that way" is compromised.
Your point of human intelligent design is completely irrelevant.
Only if you want to avoid the logical implications of what you've been saying, narby. The fact that humans practice intelligent design makes it blindingly obvious that you're wrong when you say ID is impossible. Whether it actually happened is of course a different question, but your out-of-hand rejection of the ID hypothesis is not scientifically justified. You're replacing science and rational thought with ideology.
I never said that human ID was impossible.
I said that the claim that life and species cannot exist without ID is false. Complexity and information accumulation *can* be accomplished by natural processes like evolution.
The central premise that some form of ID was *required* for the various species to exist on earth is false.
I understood your point that humans *can* practice ID the first time you made it. Indeed, I already understood that concept. Duh.
What you have continually failed to understand is that merely because humans practice ID is irrelevant to the hypothesis that ID created the species of earth.
I agree that the proper semantics of the word "proof" mean that there is no proof the civil war occurred and no "proof" that evolution produced the species of earth. But it's too bad that Darwin Central can't get together and decide that for the purposes of this discussion we'll go ahead and use the word "proof" of evolution.
I also wish we could change the word "theory" of evolution to "process" of evolution too, for the benefit of the uneducated.
This won't happen, of course. But I can dream.
No one thinks ID is impossible. How could it be impossible? It is impossible for it to be impossible. What's the point?
The only question of interest is whether it is necessary, and ID advocates have no curiosity about that. If ID is a serious intellectual proposition, it should be trying to demonstrate its own irrelevance.
The problem is not that the biodiversity of life on Earth could not possibly ever have been "designed" by a higher intelligence carrying out a genetic experiment. I doubt anyone on the Evolution side would make that claim. No, the problem with that explanation is that it assumes that not only was that biodiversity created through some sort of genetic engineering, that genetic engineerig was carried out so that it looks exactly as if evolution had actually produced the results.
It's the equivalent of saying that even though we think we have an excellent naturalistic understanding of how rain occurs, rain is actually caused by aliens orbiting in an invisible spaceship, but they by coincidence or design have made all of the observable effects of their "rain beam" look exactly like a natural phenomenon.
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