Posted on 10/07/2005 7:23:15 AM PDT by PatrickHenry
To keep this all in one daily thread, here are links to two articles in the York Daily Record (with excerpts from each), which has been doing a great job of reporting on the trial:
Forrest cross-examination a rambling wonder.
About the time that Richard Thompson, head law guy at the Thomas More center and chief defender of the Dover Area School Board, started his third year of cross-examination of philosopher Barbara Forrest, it was easy to imagine that at that moment, everyone in the courtroom, including Forrest, who doesn’t believe in God, was violating the separation of church and court by appealing to God for it to please, Lord, just stop.It wouldn’t have been so bad if there was a point to the ceaseless stream of questions from Thompson designed to elicit Lord knows what. He’d ask her the same question 18 different times, expecting, I guess, a different answer at some point. And he never got it.
Thompson, who said he’s a former prosecutor, should have known better. Forrest, a professor at Southeastern Louisiana University and expert on the history of the intelligent design creationist movement, was a lot smarter than, say, some poor, dumb criminal defendant.
Here is a summation of Forrest’s testimony: She examined the history of the intelligent design movement and concluded that it’s simply another name for creationism. And what led her to that conclusion? The movement leader’s own words. They started out with a religious proposition and sought to clothe it in science. The result was similar to putting a suit on your dog.
[anip]
Thompson was in the midst of asking Forrest whether she had heard a bunch of things that some people had said to indicate, well, to indicate whether she’d heard a bunch of things that some people had said, I guess, when the topic came up.
Thompson asked whether she had ever heard a statement by some guy — frankly, this one caught me off-guard and I didn’t catch the guy’s name — who said that belief in evolution can be used to justify “cross-species sex.”
This came on the same day that Thompson grilled Forrest about her opposition to the so-called Santorum amendment to the No Child Left Behind Act that seemed to encourage, sort of, the teaching of intelligent design. Our U.S. Sen. Rick Santorum is a friend of the intelligent design people.
He also has a strange obsession with bestiality, commenting that court decisions that uphold the right to privacy would lead to — naturally, and you know you were thinking it — man-on-dog sex.
Dover science teachers testified that they fought references to intelligent design.
Defense attorney Richard Thompson [he represents the school board] said differing opinions on whether teachers and administration worked in cooperation to create the Dover Area School District’s statement on intelligent design comes down to perspective.
Do you have a source for this nonsense?
A fossil of a diminutive human nicknamed "the Hobbit" likely represents a previously unrecognized species of early humans, according to the results of a detailed comparison of the fossil's brain case with those of humans, apes and other human ancestors...
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2005/03/050304175249.htm
Looks like the "vertically-challenged dude with a brain impedement" hypothesis has been falsified.
Luxury. In the old days we had to make do with XON/XOFF.
You mean (gasp) that evolution didn't keep on making people bigger, stronger, smarter, etc.? You mean, some actually had to adapt to local conditions by getting smaller and more efficient, and, in this case, may even have become a different species?
Maybe there's something to this science stuff after all!
I like that phrase since I can insert the most appropriate three words I can think of. And they are really good ones too.
My questions?
If evolutionists are willing to concede that some unspecified 'designer' may have created life forms, why is there a trial going on in Dover?
Do you concede that evolution cannot explain how original life forms came into existence.
It seems to me that your statement is nothing more than natural selection within species. Is that an accurate construction of your statements? I believe in natural selection; what some would call micro-evolution.
So, do you believe in the whole primordial soup thing that was taught in many schools, at least when I was growing up and that life came into existence from non-life?
If you concede that a 'designer' may have been involved in the creation of life, why do you think students should not be told of this possibility?
Given that the Dover school board has stated that evolution will be taught, and given your construct of evolution not having anything to do with how life came into existence; what's the problem? seems to me that the school board statement does not contradict anything in your statement.
Since ID wants to claim to be a science, it must account for observed phenomena that Darwinian theory accounts for, in this case, the observed commonality between all species. A simple way to put this is: "if there's a fossil gap, what is it a gap in?". The strength of Darwin's argument lies in the easily observed continuity of morphology, function and geological location you see when you match up lifeforms in the geological column, the fossil-established tree of life, and the independently derived DNA mutational clock tree of life.
Since it wants to be a science, unlike the micro-macro argument you are mistakenly assigning to it, ID can't just put blinkers on and and pretend it doesn't have to explain why the fundamental machinery every species uses is nearly identical across the board, to the extent that we can all pretty much eat each other. Darwinian theory provides an answer to these puzzles which can't be ignored so, as the quotes you were offered more than suggest, ID is a potential modification of Darwinian evolutionary theory, not an alternative to it.
ID suggests that God, or little green men, or whatever, descended from the sky and tweaked an ongoing process, not started one up from scratch, over and over. The latter would be the "poof" theory of evolution, which, while possibly true, can't even pretend to have scientific credentials, since it allows us to detect or predict nothing, which puts it outside of science's domain of competence.
I already explained this.
The designer (definitely NOT any recognizable deity, of course) is a bloody, psychopathic, murderous sadist who set out, with malice aforethought, to design an ecosystem that would maximize pain and suffering. I think it will be fairly easy to find confirming evidence for this conjecture, and pretty hard to find disconfirming evidence. Assuming that life forms are intentionally designed.
The problem is that they want to teach this in science class, teach it somewhere else, and it won't be an affront to science.
Do you concede that evolution cannot explain how original life forms came into existence.
I suspect he concedes that evolutionary theory doesn't presently explain the origin of life in any spectacularly compelling way.
So, do you believe in the whole primordial soup thing that was taught in many schools, at least when I was growing up and that life came into existence from non-life?
Nobody but creationists have been clamging the gong for spontaneous abiogensis for a very long time now. Gradual pathways such as the various forms of RNA world seem to better account for the available evidence.
"unlike the micro-macro argument you are mistakenly assigning to it,"
Believing we descended from apes is hard an argument over micro-macro evolution.
Believing we descended from apes is hard an argument over micro-macro evolution.
Well, yes, as a matter of fact, it is, and as has been pointed out to you repeatedly and definitively, both sides of the argument going on before the Dover schoolboard concede that evolution is occuring, and is the seamless source of the variety of species seen on our planet today, including the human species. Whatever the argument is that you seem to want to have, it is not related to the subject of this thread, and ID theory, as it relates to being a science, is not your ally.
I don't think creationists ever believed that. It would be totally opposite ogf their beliefs.
All things have an end ... except a sausage, which has two.
Only if she is a pantheist.
ID is part of a radical left wing plot to dumb down our schools by teaching charlatan pseudo science in class.
New 'Hobbit' disease link claim (September, 2005)
Indonesian anthropologist Teuku Jacob controversially took possession of the remains and declared them to be those of a modern human with the condition microcephaly.
This disorder is characterised by a small brain, but it can also be associated with dwarfism, as well as abnormalities of the face and jaw. For this reason, some scientists believe the condition could cause a modern human to look primitive in evolutionary terms.
Development of motor functions and speech may be delayed. Hyperactivity and mental retardation are common occurrences, although the degree of each varies. Convulsions may also occur. Motor ability varies, ranging from clumsiness to spastic quadriplegia.
What we have here is, a vertically-challenged dude - Frank - with a brain impedement.
"Hey - I resemble that remark."
~Frank Flores
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