Posted on 10/21/2005 10:26:36 AM PDT by Behind Liberal Lines
ITHACA, N.Y. — Cornell University Interim President Hunter Rawlings III on Friday condemned the teaching of intelligent design as science, calling it "a religious belief masquerading as a secular idea."
"Intelligent design is not valid science," Rawlings told nearly 700 trustees, faculty and other school officials attending Cornell's annual board meeting.
"It has no ability to develop new knowledge through hypothesis testing, modification of the original theory based on experimental results and renewed testing through more refined experiments that yield still more refinements and insights," Rawlings said.
Rawlings, Cornell's president from 1995 to 2003, is now serving as interim president in the wake of this summer's sudden departure of former Cornell president Jeffrey Lehman.
Intelligent design is a theory that says life is too complex to have developed through evolution, implying a higher power must have had a hand. It has been harshly criticized by The National Academy of Sciences and the American Association for the Advancement of Science, which have called it repackaged creationism and improper to include in scientific education.
There are brewing disputes involving evolution and intelligent design in at least 20 states and numerous school districts nationwide, including California, New Mexico, Kansas and Pennsylvania. President Bush elevated the controversy in August when he said that schools should teach intelligent design along with evolution.
Many Americans, including some supporters of evolution, believe intelligent design should be taught with evolution. Rawlings said a large minority of Americans — nearly 40 percent — want creationism taught in public schools instead of evolution.
For those reasons, Rawlings said he felt it "imperative" to use his state-of-the-university address — usually a recitation of the school's progress over the last year — to speak out against intelligent design, which he said has "put rational thought under attack."
Yes, of course they are. Darwin himself concluded this in "The Descent of Man". You need to read my explanations again. The nature of your questions and remarks implies that you haven't understood my posts on this subject. I tried to put together a clarification, but I found myself just using the same form of words again. If all you want to do is recognise humans now, then a morphological or DNA test will suffice, and science can do this. (This is because humans are not a "Ring Species". If humans were a ring species then it is much harder to define what it is to be a member of that species.) But going backwards in time and pointing to "the first human" and "the last non-human" in our ancestors would not be meaningfuly and objectively possible. If you think that this means you've scored some kind of clever victory over "those stupid scientists who can't even define human" then I wish you joy of your victory.
I thought about this some more.
Imagine that "The Designer" makes specially for you 10,000 creatures standing in a line, and that those creatures form a sequence from ape to human, each changing by 1/10,000 of the difference between ape and human. Presumably you wouldn't just say that only the very last creature in the line was human? Now, you say you can recognise "other humans". Do you think that you would be able to confidently point at one particular creature in that sequence and say "that is the first human", and "The one to its left is the last ape". If someone disagreed with you about where the dividing line lay on what basis would you argue with them?
Sorry, that should be #407. This link is good.
I suppose I posted to the wrong person. Oh Well...
I didn't contend that religions reject evolution. I suggested that 'if' religions endorsed evolution as the 'best' choice, then...
And yet, contrary to your confident-but-empty-headed prediction, no one is rejecting evolution as a result.
I must have hit a nerve. You choose to decide I'm confidently empty headed based on one interaction, one where we seem to disagree? It was sarcasm. The idea that being that Cornell offers courses in religion but yet seems to treat followers of traditional religion with disdain.
It's religion they hate, along with rational thought, and they seem bent on redefining 'rational thought' to suit their needs, especially their need to attack religion.
Paranoid much? Some people never seem happy unless they can stoke a persecution complex.
Wow. That's quite a projection. I have seen little evidence that Cornell treats most conventional religious belief with anything other than contempt.
While I do not think "Evolution" (by natural selection) has any truth to it, and while I think Cornell is infested with many people contemptuous of anything smacking of religion (except perhaps Islam, which really isn't a religion, but rather a military organization) you are wrong in your suggestion here. I am the father of a recent Cornell grad, and have sat in on quite a number of classes there over the past few years. Many considered religion (e.g. Historical Jesus) and treated it with respect. This goes for both the professors and the students I encountered in these classes.
ML/NJ
I'm happy to hear it and stand corrected. I attended university in upstate NY not so many years ago and also was acquainted with Cornell students and, through certain profs, Cornell profs. It was certainly different then.
I doubt it was very different. The respectful ones are almost certainly a minority, but they do exist.
ML/NJ
Well, I suspect you are right and it's good to know, however my experience was not with the minority.
Only in your fevered imagination. All species are evolving and transitional.
"All species are evolving and transitional."
How do you know?
Because we see evidence for this ongoing process everywhere we look. Correlating evidence in numerous fields; biology, paleontology, bio-chemistry, genetics, molecular biology, zoology, botany. We see it occurring right before our eyes in ring species. Every living thing can be fitted into a nested hierarchy of characteristics. The fossils that we can find match the predictions that we make from the hypothesis that the nested hierarchy indicates that all of life is a tree from a single original ancestor long long ago. The molecular evidence, including errors and non-functional DNA matches the same predictions. The predictive power of the theory of evolution is enormous. God could have "designed" things to be that way, true, but only if God wanted to fool the observant into thinking that the process that He used was evolution.
Anyone who thinks that all of life on earth is descended from what could be put on a wooden boat a few thousand years ago needs much faster (several orders of magnitude faster) speciation to have taken place since then than anything that evos suggest is even vaguely possible in order to create the 20 million+ species that we can see now.
Evolution is not proved in the strict geometric or number-theory sense. Nothing in the real world ever is because we have no axioms or pure inductions in the real world. We can't even prove objectively that the universe was not created last thursday, intact with all of our memories (like Adam's navel). But we can be as sure that evolution is true as we are of any objective fact that can be checked with observations of the world around us. No scientific knowledge is more soundly based on the data available.
Sorry but I'll never buy the single ancestor argument. Just doesn't seem logical. But I do appreciate your efforts in attempting to educate me.
You commit the classical logical fallacy of argument from personal astonishment. "Seeming logical" is not a valid test of the truth of an idea. The evidence that supports or falsifies truth is what counts. I do wonder if common descent would seem logical to you if it didn't conflict with your religious beliefs? Somehow I suspect that if the Bible described something like evolution in Genesis then suddenly common descent would "seem very logical" to you.
Here is a question. You are in a room with 25 other people, what is the chance that 2 people in that room share the same birthday. If you haven't studied probability theory you will probably be very surprised to discover that the probability is around 60%. Now, does that "seem logical"? Because it is true.
Other illogical but true ideas: Light waves are bent by gravity. No mathematical system can ever prove all true mathematical propositions. The universe contains at least 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 suns like ours. Time slows down at high velocities. On the moon a feather falls at the same speed as a ton-weight. No two integers a and b exist such that a/b is exactly equal to Pi. All of these ideas seem intuitively illogical to most people, but they are all true.
Sorry, more like 75% of the top of my head (26 people in the same room sharing at least one birthday)
The issue isn't whether God exists or not. After all, a very large percentage of Americans believe in His existence already and evolution's appearance on the scene hasn't fazed us poor cretins.
The real issue is that Americans still have a right to the free exercise of religion and the schools and universities have a subtle way of beating up on them for it (remember prof. Paul Mirecki, who wrote a nasty comment about smacking the fundies in their fat faces and then went out and slugged himself when he was caught?).
Squelching debate simply isn't fair and it is also not American.
It especially isn't fair because a lot of scientists who aren't into the God thing actually see sort of a face in the carpet of the universe, and it, well, fascinates them. I remember astrophysicist Steven Hawkings stating in an interview with der Spiegel that the chances of this earth having come about without some sort of intelligence behind it were rather slim, and he is an agnostic.
The debate is still raging and I can't for the life of me understand how it is that people who are noted for their defense of "free inquiry" would take such delight in a court decision obviously intended to chill debate.
Besides, if this theory is so darned nonsensical, then have the debate and don't tell inquisitive school students they're not supposed to know about it. Otherwise, they--at least the smart ones--will think you're up to something.
Know what? I was brought up by religious fundies and it was precisely this dampening of inquiry that drove me away and into the arms of the Left (for about 40 years). I was especially incensed by their ignorance of the theory of evolution!
And it is precisely the desire to chill inquiry that is driving me away from liberal-left fundamentalism. Judge John Jones III will fuel this debate more than anyone with his Spanish Inquisitor's stance!
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