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.
That would be a nasty loss. general_re is one of my favorite FReepers.
Generally speaking, I'm pretty depressed today.
We can't simultaneously know the position and momentum of a particle to better accuracy than given by Heisenberg's principle. By the logic above, this means we are unable to find anything out about physics we didn't know in advance.
There are many things in science which are simply impossible or unknowable. One may be an algorithm for detecting design in the absence of external information.
So technological advances aren't science? Hmmmm. And the fact that many of the things around us are designed, and that we can recognize them as such -- isn't scientific either? Hmmmm.
The problem is that your has a problem explaining what actually exists. For science to adhere to such an assumption is not terribly scientific.
Dear boy, without a theory about the properties of the designer, you can find patterns in random data streams without adding a jot or tittle to the sum of knowledge.
I don't recall many IDers referring to their position as a theory, but I would not be surprised if some do.
On the other hand, evolution is also not a theory because it cannot be tested. Evolution is a 'scientific model'; not a 'theory'.
This sounds like an opportunity for some big bucks. We could combine this with investments in zero point energy and cold fusion, go public and be billionaires.
Forgive me! I have been blind.
The foundation of ID is the fear that things can be explained naturalisticlly. It is an attempt to block further investigation.
Otherwise, ID would be doing what science does when it proposes a null hypothesis -- attempting to disprove it.
I don't view ID as a theory or a branch of science. I view it as pattern recognition and analysis.
Micro evolution is good science. Macro evolution is a faith-based extrapolation of micro evolution or in other words "given enough time stuff happens".
Not sure I agree with your assessment. Remember that, even though we know design can and does happen, the claim in question is that it's impossible to scientifically detect it.
If we took that approach for the Heisenberg principle, it would be like saying that if we can detect the one, then the other cannot possibly be detected under any circumstances, even though we know it exists. Obviously absurd, but that's the equivalent to what you're saying about "naturalistic vs. designed" systems.
There are many things in science which are simply impossible or unknowable. One may be an algorithm for detecting design in the absence of external information.
OK. Of course, if it's impossible to detect design, you're also stating that it's impossible to tell the difference between design and non-design. In which case it would be rather presumptuous to make any definitive statements at all about "naturalistic" vs. "designed".
But there's also another possibility: that one intentionally fails to look for a "design" explanation, in which case the availability of such an algorithm would be moot. And that's where "science" seems to be coming from in this debate.
The key to the puzzle is this phrase: "in the absence of external information." One can point to examples of naturalistic origin. One can likewise point to examples of "designed" origin. As you noted in a different thread, we can often recognize "designed things" because we understand how and why things get designed in the first place.
Because we understand the techniques of design, it might well be possible to look for evidence of those techniques in other places, even if we haven't got direct knowledge that they were applied in that instance. Foolproof? Certainly not. But it does suggest that there is a solution space within which we can look -- and that solution space can be expected to grow as humans become more capable with bio-engineering.
Hm. So the SETI folks are crazy, then? The problem with your comment (other than its smarminess, of course) is that you seem to be making your own unfounded assumptions about the putative designer; specifically, that it would be impossible for us to understand anything about him.
His posts are still with us and I just sent a Freepmail that was "delivered". Even if he is banned, it's better than what I thought you meant.
HALF of all Americans either don't know or don't believe that living creatures evolved. And now a Pennsylvania school board is trying to keep its pupils ignorant. It is the kind of story about America that makes secular Europeans chortle smugly before turning to the horoscope page. Yet it is more complex than it appears.
Alas, you're building a strawman here. One need not invoke God to say that something was designed.
SETI has a very specific hypothesis and is looking for a very specific phenomenon. If ID adopts a similar research program it could be considered scientific.
The TOE is falsifiable because it is predictive (although not in the sense IDers like to use the term "predictive"), and therefore is most certainly testable in that sense. It is "tested" every time a new piece of datum is checked against the assumptions and predictions of the theory. If the theory cannot account for it, and the datum is not flawed in some way, then the theory must either be revised to account for it or be thrown out if it cannot. So far, no data has ever been presented that would necessitate thowing the theory overboard in its entirety.
Now little 'e' evolution, as opposed to the Theory of Evolution (not sure which one you were referring to in your post), is in fact directly observable under both wild and controlled conditions and is not in dispute even by Creationists here, as far as I can tell. They just use the "micro-evolution" dodge to accommodate it, a term that AFAIK has absolutely no scientific meaning within the conceptual framework of the TOE.
If you're postulating life's "intelligent designer" was an entity of the natural world, and your reasoning is that complexities such as life and intelligence are impossible to arise via the actions of the natural world, then where did the "intelligence" come from?
By definition, the "intelligence" must describe an entity that we have not been able to detect by any natural means. I.E. the supernatural, that some call "God".
The IDers are essentially making the situation worse.
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