Posted on 10/18/2005 3:56:52 PM PDT by Milltownmalbay
Eleven parents went to court in Pennsylvania last Monday over a new theory of evolution called Intelligent Design that is being taught to their 9th-grade children, according to The New York Times.
This decision came after the Dover school district decided to incorporate the theory, called Intelligent Design into the curriculum of 9th grade biology classes.
Intelligent Design is a theory of evolution that states that life is so complex there must be a designer or some ‘higher intelligence’ behind it.
Parents are defending their actions, claiming that the school is teaching religious creationism under the disguise of Intelligent Design. This, of course, would violate court decisions separating Church and State. Testifying in their defense was Brown University professor Kenneth R. Miller, a biologist who co-authored the high school textbook “Biology”.
Miller harshly criticized Intelligent Design, calling it “inaccurate and downright false in every section.” The professor expanded further, saying, “To my knowledge, every single scientific society that has taken a position on this issue has taken a position against Intelligent Design and in favor of evolution.”
Intelligent Design, while finding support in a few states, is primarily dismissed as an evolutionary theory by mainstream scientists. According to one prominent biologist, intelligent design “is not science, has no support from any major American scientific organization and does not belong in a public school science classroom.”
Yet board members are still maintaining that it is their duty to give the Dover students equal access to all scientific theories and it is not an attempt by the school district to infiltrate their religious beliefs among the students. "The whole thought behind it was to encourage critical thinking," stated board president Sheila Harkins.
Intelligent Design advocate Casey Luskin, from the Discovery Institute, said, outside the courtroom, “No one is pretending that Intelligent Design is a majority position. What we rebutting is their claim that there’s no controversy among scientist.”
A new survey that was just released seems to favor the alternative theory. The poll found that almost two-thirds of Americans are supportive of creationism being taught alongside evolution in public schools.
The non-jury trial, which has been referred to as Scopes II, is being heard under Judge John E. Jones and is expected to take five weeks. The atmosphere in the courtroom was tense and, even though both sides do not see eye to eye, it can be agreed that the trial will probably make its way up to the Supreme Court.
I couldn't agree with you more. Intelligent Design advocates need to convince mainstream scientists first before presenting this as a valid theory in schools. They have failed at this, so they are making an end run through school boards.
I have a lot of respect for people's religious beliefs, but this issue will do as much to damage the public's image of conservatives as anything out there. To attack very substantial scientific evidence because it doesn't agree with a 3000 year old creation story is not a good plan for establishing yourself as a credible thinking person.
Not only skeptics. This reporter who can't think straight is also arguing "A new survey that was just released seems to favor the alternative theory. The poll found that almost two-thirds of Americans are supportive of creationism being taught alongside evolution in public schools. "
Thank you for making yourself more clear and I apologize for purposely provoking you. However I thought that your reference to yokels was highly inappropriate. As for Scientists trying to limit the debate, what else can it be called when many in the scientific community join with the ACLU in attempting to exclude anything that deviates from the idea of undirected evolution from classroom textbooks?
Many textbooks still refer to the Stanley Miller experiment where he succeeded in producing basic amino acids while attempting to recreate the initial conditions of early earth but do not bother to get into the details of what have become nearly insurmountable problems with producing any of the complex components of even basic life systems in a controlled experiment let alone in the postulated primordial soup which would’ve likely produced nothing more than sludge. This is but one example of many.
As for the value of science I’m not sure where that came from, no one has suggested that science is not valuable. That is a typical assumption but that is not the question. What is in question is whether children should be exposed to only a very narrow view concerning the origin of life on earth a view that has come to be known as undirected Evolution.
"To attack very substantial scientific evidence because it doesn't agree with a 3000 year old creation story is not a good plan for establishing yourself as a credible thinking person."
Creationists believe in an earth less than 10 thousand years old. I don't know where you get the 3k figure. Even Bishop Pike claimed 6000 years.
But beyond that, ID makes no such claim and allows for a very old earth, in the billions of years. I think their side of the story needs a bit more exposure here so allow me to paste from an ID website:
"Intelligent design is a theory for making sense of intelligent causes. As such, intelligent design formalizes and makes precise something we do all the time. All of us are all the time engaged in a form of rational activity that, without being tendentious, can be described as inferring design. Inferring design is a common and well-accepted human activity...There is no magic, no vitalism, no appeal to occult forces. Inferring design is common, rational and objectifiable."
The ability to detect intelligence is common to all people. So common in fact, that we use it every day. Whole fields of study are based on it such as forensics, archaeology, cryptography and so forth. Efforts to discover extraterrestrial life (known as SETI: the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) rest on the ability to detect design. Ironically, SETI efforts are driven by naturalists looking for the vindication of their worldview and Neo-Darwinism that a life-filled universe would provide. Detecting design is not some highly complex or miraculous process, it is a simple and very common process inherent to the human race.
Dembski states that IDT is valid science in the face of common objections by naturalists. Naturalists claim science can't point to a creator or designer. This view has become popular in society: "Science and Religion are separate realms." They make this a priori claim at the onset of their arguments. But this is a logical fallacy because they are artificially limiting science by saying what it may or may not do before any research is done. IDT is a valid path in science that can stand independent of religion and philosophy (whether that belief system is Christianity or naturalism).
Biochemist Michael J. Behe further drives home the point that IDT is valid science2:
"To a person who does not feel obliged to restrict his search to unintelligent causes, the straightforward conclusion is that many biochemical systems were designed. They were designed not by the laws of nature, not by chance and necessity; rather, they were planned...
"The conclusion of intelligent design flows naturally from the data itself - not from sacred books or sectarian beliefs. Inferring that biochemical systems were designed by an intelligent agent is a humdrum process that requires no new principles of logic or science. It comes simply from the hard work that biochemistry has done over the past forty years, combined with consideration of the way in which we reach conclusions of design every day. Nonetheless, saying that biochemical systems were designed will certainly strike many people as strange, so let me try to make it sound less strange.
"What is 'design'? Design is simply the purposeful arrangement of parts...The scientific problem then becomes, how do we confidently detect design? When is it reasonable to conclude, in the absence of firsthand knowledge or eyewitness accounts, that something has been designed? For discrete physical systems - if there is not a gradual route to their production - design is evident when a number of separate, interacting components are ordered in such a way as to accomplish a function beyond the individual components. The greater the specificity of the interacting components required to produce the function, the greater is our confidence in the conclusion of design.
"...there must be an identifiable function of the system. One must be careful...A sophisticated computer can be used as a paper weight; is that a function?...No. In considering design, the function of the system we must look at is the one that requires the greatest amount of the system's internal complexity. We can then judge how well the parts fit the function.
"The function of a system is determined by its internal logic: the function is not necessarily the same thing as the purpose to which the designer wished to apply the system. A person who sees a mousetrap for the first time might not know that the manufacturer expected it to be used for catching mice...but he still knows from observing how the parts interact that it was designed."
Here are some Key Concepts/Definitions regarding IDT, provided by the Intelligent Design Undergraduate Research Center.
Framework
The following is the framework from which IDT theory and its implications in culture, science and theology are being studied and discussed.3.
1. A scientific and philosophical critique of naturalism, where the scientific critique identifies the empirical inadequacies of naturalistic evolutionary theories and the philosophical critique demonstrates how naturalism subverts every area of inquiry that it touches.
2. A positive scientific research program, known as intelligent design, for investigating the effects of intelligent causes.
3. A cultural movement for systematically rethinking every field of inquiry that has been infected by naturalism and reconceptualizing it in terms of design.
4. A sustained theological investigation that connects the intelligence inferred by IDT with the God of Scripture and therewith formulates a coherent theology of nature.
Point #1 has been successfully achieved through critiques by scholars such as Phillip Johnson, Michael Behe, Michael Denton4and others. Point #2 is the testable origins model, or IDT. Point #3 will come from the successes of #1 and #2. Point #4 has been spearheaded by the efforts of astronomer Dr. Hugh Ross5and his Reasons to Believe organization.
The Model
The following are the model/theory parts that would (or do) logically point to intelligent design in the universe6,7:
1. transcendent creation event where all matter, energy, spacetime began (Big Bang)
2. cosmic fine-tuning
3. fine-tuning of Earth's, the Solar System's and the Milky Way Galaxy's characteristics
4. rapidity of life's origin
5. lack of inorganic kerogen
6. extreme biomolecular complexity
7. Cambrian explosion (sudden appearance of most species during same time period)
8. missing horizontal branches in the fossil record
9. placement and frequency of "transitional forms" in the fossil record
10. fossil record reversal
11. frequency and extent of mass extinctions
12. rapid recovery from mass extinctions (mainly through appearance of new species)
13. duration of time windows for different species
14. frequency, extent, and repetition of symbiosis
15. frequency, extent, and repetition of altruism
16. speciation and extinction rates
17. recent origin of humanity (as opposed to common descent)
18. huge biodeposits (needed to sustain humanity)
19. molecular clock rates (which show humanity's recent origin)
Creationists believe in an earth less than 10 thousand years old. I don't know where you get the 3k figure. Even Bishop Pike claimed 6000 years.
The "3000 year old creation story" is genesis.
Creationists can't agree on the age of the earth. One of these threads a few weeks back had an age something like 6217 years ago or some such. You are claiming 10 thousand years. Others go with the conventional 4.5 billion.
As for the <10,000 age--sorry, there is no scientific evidence for that. The perversions of data that are required to justify such an age are simply astounding when they show up on these threads!
"As for the <10,000 age--sorry, there is no scientific evidence for that. The perversions of data that are required to justify such an age are simply astounding when they show up on these threads"
Thank you for correcting me on my misunderstanding about the 3 thousand year old creation story.
Apparently you also misunderstood my post...I was not defending a 10k year old earth only pointing out the difference between creationism and ID. I posted earlier that these two always get lumped together so as to easily dismiss ID when in fact they are not the same theory. It seems to be a compulsion on the part of the anti ID crowd to do this. I think that it is because ID makes a much more compelling case and this creates discomfort for naturalists.
Sorry if I misunderstood the 10k bit. Archaeology and radiocarbon dating are two of my major studies, so I am somewhat sensitive on the young earth claims.
But I have to disagree on the CS vs. ID dichotomy. I think ID was invented in the late 1980s shortly after the CS in schools decision by the Supreme Court. I think it was designed, as the "wedge" document (which is now passed off as a fund-raising piece) claims, to get creation into schools and naturalism out.
Sorry if you don't agree, but that is where the evidence seems to lead. First, ID is not being pushed in non-Christian countries. It is not being picked up as a "science" anywhere else either. If there was any science there, any way of generating testable predictions or any explanatory power, it would be picked up elsewhere. Finally, the correspondence between supporters of ID and apparent religious belief on these threads is extremely high, nearing 100%. On these threads, at least, many ID proponents also throw in young earth, and bible literalism. This has led to some interesting posts!
All I am really interested in is that ID be evaluated as it is actually proposed by its supporters not as a "straw man" synopsis presented by its opponents for easy knockdown. Both sides do this i.e. ID supporters, and more so creationsists, often offer up a straw man of evolution for easy knock down, but on FR I see it more from the Darwinists.
When reduced to it's core arguent, SETI is indistinguishable from the principles of Intelligent Design, yet, how many here on this forum would characterize it as you just did here.
Incidentally, SETI itself refutes your claim that such things have never been applied to biological systems. Whether or not they succeeded is irrelevant
But the creation story that Creationists believe in and (rather arrogantly) refer to as The Creation Story was only formulated by Israelite priests from other creation stories less than 3000 years ago.
And who is Bishop Pike?
"Pike is a fish:" Buffy the Vampire Slayer
“Kissing up to a bunch of ignorant yokels makes those conservatives who do look like fools and plays into the MSM's caricaturing them as so.”
Yeah. Those ignorant yokels have a lot of nerve electing a school board without checking with us first, so we could put them straight on who to install. Guess we canÂ’t let those local hicks out unsupervised, either on election day or on board meeting nights. WeÂ’re going to need to set up a screening process at the polls and at the school board room, so the wrong people donÂ’t get in on meeting nights.
How are we going to keep them from gathering down at the local café, though? Who knows what sort of plots those hicks will hatch if they’re left on their own. We’ll have to form a company of Regulators to keep an eye on the little sneaks. The Regulators shouldn’t need more than baseball bats to keep those dummies dispersed.
That should do it.
I should think the first three are mandatory, and that the fourth could reasonably offered as an opinion, even if the home schooler were a church person.
This I do not get. Why should a scientist give a moonbat's patoot about Intelligent Design? The Intelligent Design people are saying, "Hooray, give us more science, we want to know all about this Evolution stuff! It's OK with me if you are an atheist, just give the facts, dude!"
For "scientists" to turn them down, and then gratuitously insult them by lumping them with Creationists is absurd ... and hardly very scientific.
What are "Intelligent Design Theory" and "Creation Theory"? What do they each predict? How could either be tested? What hypothetical observations would falsify each of those theories?
What about Natural Selection
What hypothetical observation could you propose that would falsify it, if any given observation of nature, is, ipso facto, an observation of Natural Selection.
Natural Selection is a mechanism within a scientific theory, and as such, it is subject to falsification.
My question still stands, like it or not.
How is it inaccurate? How is it "downright false in every section."?
Please read Miller's book, Finding Darwin's God. He gives a detailed rebuttal of Behe's Darwin's Black Box. In fact, he pretty much rips Behe's lungs out.
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