Posted on 11/01/2005 6:27:26 PM PST by Tailgunner Joe
A president who consults religious lunatics about who should be on the Supreme Court... Judges who want prayer in school and the "ten commandments" in the courtroom… Born-Again fanatics who bomb abortion clinics… bible thumpers who condemn homosexuality as "sin"... and all the other Christian fascists who want a U.S. theocracy….
This is the force behind the assault on evolution going on right now in a courtroom in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania.
Last year, the Dover city school board instituted a policy that requires high school biology teachers to read a statement to students that says Darwin's theory of evolution is "not a fact" and then notes that intelligent design offers an alternative theory for the origin and evolution of life--namely, that life in all of its complexity could not have arisen without the help of an "intelligent hand." Some teachers refused to read the statement, citing the Pennsylvania teacher code of ethics, which says, "I will never knowingly present false information to a student." Eleven parents who brought this case to court contend that the directive amounted to an attempt to inject religion into the curriculum in violation of the First Amendment. Their case has been joined by the American Civil Liberties Union and Americans United for Separation of Church and State.
The school board is being defended pro bono by the Thomas More Law Center, a Christian law firm in Ann Arbor, Mich. The case is being heard without a jury in Harrisburg by U.S. District Judge John Jones III, whom George W. Bush appointed to the bench in 2002.
In 1987, the Supreme Court ruled that public schools could not teach the biblical account of creation instead of evolution, because doing so would violate the constitutional ban on establishment of an official religion. Since then Intelligent Design has been promoted by Christian fundamentalists as the way to get the Bible and creationism into the schools.
"This clever tactical repackaging of creationism does not merit consideration," Witold Walczak, legal director of the Pennsylvania American Civil Liberties Union and a lawyer for the parents, told U.S. District Judge John E. Jones in opening arguments. "Intelligent design admits that it is not science unless science is redefined to include the supernatural." This is, he added, "a 21st-century version of creationism."
This is the first time a federal court has been asked to rule on the question of whether Intelligent Design is religion or science. Eugenie Scott, executive director of the National Center for Science Education, which opposes challenges to the standard model of teaching evolution in the schools, said the Pennsylvania case "is probably the most important legal situation of creation and evolution in the last 18 years," and that "it will have quite a significant impact on what happens in American public school education."
Proponents of Intelligent Design don’t say in the courtroom that they want to replace science with religion. But their strategy papers, speeches, and discussions with each other make it clear this is their agenda.
Intelligent Design (ID) is basically a re-packaged version of creationism--the view that the world can be explained, not by science, but by a strict, literal reading of the Bible. ID doesn’t bring up ridiculous biblical claims like the earth is only a few thousand years old or that the world was created in seven days. Instead it claims to be scientific--it acknowledges the complexity and diversity of life, but then says this all comes from some "intelligent" force. ID advocates don’t always openly argue this "intelligent force" is GOD--they even say it could be some alien from outer space! But Christian fundamentalists are the driving force behind the whole Intelligent Design movement and it’s clear… these people aren’t praying every night to little green men from another planet.
Phillip Johnson, considered the father and guiding light behind Intelligent Design, is the architect of the "wedge strategy" which focuses on attacking evolution and promoting intelligent design to ultimately, as Johnson says, "affirm the reality of God." Johnson has made it clear that the whole point of "shifting the debate from creationism vs. evolution to the existence of God vs. the non-existence of God" is to get people "introduced to the truth of the Bible," then "the question of sin" and finally "introduced to Jesus."
Intelligent Design and its theocratic program has been openly endorsed by George W. Bush. Earlier this year W stated that Intelligent Design should be taught in the schools. When he was governor of Texas, Bush said students should be exposed to both creationism and evolution. And he has made the incredibly unscientific, untrue statement that "the jury is still out" on evolution.
For the Christian fascists, the fight around evolution and teaching Intelligent Design is part of a whole agenda that encompasses reconfiguring all kinds of cultural, social, and political "norms" in society. This is a movement that is fueled by a religious vision which varies among its members but is predicated on the shared conviction that the United States is in need of drastic changes--which can only be accomplished by instituting religion as its cultural foundation.
The Christian fascists really do want--and are working for--a society where everything is run according to the Bible. They have been working for decades to infiltrate school boards to be in a position to mandate things like school prayer. Now, in the schools, they might not be able to impose a literal reading of the Bible’s explanation for how the universe was created. But Intelligent Design, thinly disguised as some kind of "science," is getting a lot more than just a foot in the door.
The strategy for promoting intelligent design includes an aggressive and systematic agenda of promoting the whole religious worldview that is the basis for ID. And this assault on evolution is linked up with other questions in how society should be run.
Marc Looy of the creationist group Answers in Genesis has said that evolution being taught in the schools,
"creates a sense of purposelessness and hopelessness, which I think leads to things like pain, murder, and suicide."
Ken Cumming, dean of the Institute for Creation Research's (ICR) graduate school, who believes the earth is only thousands of years old, attacked a PBS special seven-part series on evolution, suggesting that the series had "much in common" with the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks against the United States. He said,
"[W]hile the public now understands from President Bush that 'we're at war' with religious fanatics around the world, they don't have a clue that America is being attacked from within through its public schools by a militant religious movement called Darwinists...."
After the 1999 school shooting in Littleton, Colorado, Tom DeLay, Christian fascist representative from Texas, gave a speech on the floor of the House of Representatives, blaming the incident in part on the teaching of evolution. He said,
"Our school systems teach the children that they are nothing but glorified apes who are evolutionized out of some primordial soup of mud."
The ID movement attacks the very notion of science itself and the philosophical concept of materialism--the very idea that there is a material world that human beings can examine, learn about, and change.
Johnson says in his "The Wedge Strategy" paper,
"The social consequences of materialism have been devastating…we are convinced that in order to defeat materialism, we must cut it off at its source. Design theory promises to reverse the stifling dominance of the materialist world view, and to replace it with a science consonant with Christian and theistic convictions."
Dr. Eugenie C. Scott, the Executive Director of the National Center for Science Education, points out:
"Evolution is a concept that applies to all sciences, from astronomy to chemistry to geology to biology to anthropology. Attacking evolution means attacking much of what we know of the natural world, that we have amassed through the application of scientific principles and methods. Second, creationist attacks on evolution are attacks on science itself, because the creationist approach does violence to how we conduct science: science as a way of knowing."
The Center for the Renewal of Science and Culture (another Christian think tank) says that it "seeks nothing less than the overthrow of materialism and its cultural legacies."
Teaching Intelligent Design in the schools is part of a whole Christian Fascist movement in the United States that has power and prominence in the government, from the Bush regime on down. And if anyone isn’t clear about what "cultural legacies" the Center for the Renewal of Science and Culture wants to overthrow--take a look at the larger Christian fascist agenda that the intelligent design movement is part of: asserting patriarchy in the home, condemning homosexuality, taking away the right to abortion, banning sex education, enforcing the death penalty with the biblical vengeance of an "eye for an eye," and launching a war because "God told me [Bush] to invade Iraq."
BTW simplicity doesn't erase complexity. Nor does simplicity account for complexity, if you deny that evolution does.
I have no idea what that means.
That part of the sentence appeared to be gibberish.
Explicate refers to a process of linguistic or logical analysis in which a matter is disentagled or extricated. Betty-boop's use of the word is quintessentially correct.
Predicate is both a noun referring to a part of speech and it is a verb meaning to establish. Note that I used it as a verb.
You are outdone by your sophistry.
First, mea culpa.
"The hypothesis does not however, as you suggest, contain a clause about randomness."
Sorry, I was wrong here, you did not contain that clause.
Now for the meat.
" The definitions of IC and specified complexity are straight from the ones who coined them, Behe and Davies respectively.
The challenge though is for all of the correspondents to choose one for our debate."
No, the challenge falls on Behe to prove IC exists. He has failed. I never disputed the definition. I merely said that the thing it defines is not real. He has failed to prove it as real, and your semmantic argument completely ignores that critical point, sans proof, it is not real.
"It appears we must also arrive at an agreement over the term “hypothesis” and whether there is a difference between a scientific hypothesis and a non-scientific hypothesis."
No we don't need to agree on what a hypothesis is. The world has a good definition of a scientific hypothesis, and yes there is a difference. I said right away that I wanted a scientific hypothesis. Your listed definition of scientific hypothesis is correct.
" A hypothesis (foundation from ancient Greek hupothesis where hupo = under and thesis = placing) is a proposed explanation for a phenomenon. A scientific hypothesis must be testable and based on previous observations or extensions of scientific theories"
Neither yours, nor the one posted by Amos fills the criteria. Neither is testable or falsifiable. Neither offers any explanatory power. You need to prove that it is both of those things. We are not in disagreement over terms. The definition that you offer, rules out the hypothesis you provide. Thanks.
Explanatory power...
" For instance, intelligent cause (choice of mates based on color or plumage) might be a better explanation for variation among tropical birds."
It might, if you postulated any mechanism or designer, but without those, there is no real explanatory power here. Using your bird plumage example, please show me the explanatory power of inferring a designer. There is none. If the designer can be anything and anyone, than there is no ability to explain the world based on inferring he exists. This is a weakness in a scientific theory. Moreover, if your assertion of the designer is vague enough that it can be either God (supernatural) or Aliens (natural), than no further inferrence can be made. Again, back up your contrary assertion with proof, or narrow your focus to something provable, until you do, this is philosophy or fiction.
Using your example of bird plummage, because evolution suggests a mechanism we can explain and make predicitions. We can predict that indiiduals with poorly colored or dull plummage will be less likely to mate and therefore less likely to affect the evolution of their group. We can predict that the ancestors of the birds we observe had less plummage. We can analyse the gene and look for copying errors, or markers that demnstrate the pathway through which this change arose, and having found those markers, we use them to piece together the geneology of the birds. We can use their ancestors to search for recessive traits that may not express themselves in the modern strain.
That is explanatory power. Those are testable and falsifiable.
ID has none of that.
Still disaggree?
Prove me wrong. Provide a test for you hypothesis, or provide a single detail provided by its explanatory power. Until then you are running from the hard questions by hiding in these semantic arguments.
And when I asked you not to duck the hard questions, I didn't mean that I knew you had done so before. Far from it, I don't know you from Adam. Merely that you came to the aid of Amos, who did run away, and has stayed away. I simply hoped that you would not do the same.
In short.
I know what hypothesis means. I know how to read. When I read the hypothesis you provide, it does not conform to the definition you also provide. If by doing so you mean to agree with me that ID is not science, thank you very much.
If you feel the ID hypothesis is simply a common hypothesis and not a scientific one, that is fine. It's not what I asked for but it's fine. However, a non scientific hypothesis is not science. Again, thank you for making this point abundantly clear with your concise definition.
That's good. And at least we could ask, what in evolution accounts for it, and if not evolution, what does account for it?
Actually, it's self-evident nonsense. Snowflakes from water vapor? Crystals from solution?
The self-evident is not nonsense.
Self-evident (adjective): clear or obvious without needing any proof or explanation:
Would you prefer 'obvious nonsense'?
False conclusion. Chaos generates all types of order.
Ah! At last --ring-a-ding-- an answer.
So there are two principles then, evolution and chaos. And chaos accounts for complexity, evolution for simplicity.
(I know this is self-evident nonsense, but have a heart for the rookies).
Reread how you used predicate, believe me, I wasn't wrong. Several people here called you on it.
Your desire to run from the substantive arguments is the really telling thing here. And I was right about Betty too.
From M-W.com
Explain -
3 : to show the logical development or relationships of
intransitive senses : to make something plain or understandable
Compared with -
"Explicate refers to a process of linguistic or logical analysis in which a matter is disentagled or extricated. "
There was no need to explicate by that definition, as the comments in the thread made the source of it completely clear. However, if you do not understand the nature of his comment, you need it explained to you in common language, rather than extracted. That's splitting hairs, I'll grant you, but it was menat to point out a trend. In retrospect, it was a rather low blow. Sorry Betty. However, my point stands.
Now, onto other standing points...
Still waiting for you to address ONE substantive point of mine.
Asking for specificity in a scientific discussion is not sophistry, it is science.
Nevertheless, my basic point stands: correlation, no matter how you measure it, is a property of random variables. Anything non-random by definition is not correlated with anything.
I don't think you understand correlation. It just means that two random variables are related. That's it, nothing more. Two correlated variables might be causally related, but that's that necessarily true.
You're trying to read too much into these simple definitions.
Evolution: Obvious war on God. God wins.
The OED has broader signification: "a mutual relation of two or more things, implying intimate or necessary connexion"
The OED goes on to give examples of correlation
in physics: to express the relations that exists between the various forms of force or energy, by virtue of which any one form is convertible into an equivalent amount of any other;in biology, mutual relation of associations between different structures "the normal coincidence of one phenomenon, character, etc, with another" (Darwin Orig. Species)
and geometry, the reciprocal relation between propositions, figures, derivable from each other by interchanging the words etc. etc.
Correlation does exist between random variables; "random variable", however, is just another name (used by probability theorists rather than analysts) for "measurable function." There is nothing "random" about random variables.
The mean of a random variable, g(x), is defined to be the average of g(x) over its domain (what x ranges over). If x is a discrete set (like the spots on a die) then the average is just the sum of the random variables divided by the number of elements in the set. For the die, (1+2+3+4+5+6)/6 = 3.5 Note that the mean, or average, or expected value need not be one of the possible values. If x is continuous, an integral replaces the sum.
The variance of a random variable is the average of the square minus the square of the average. It is a measure of the spread of the variable (the square root of the variance is the standard deviation.) For the die; one gets 1+4+9+16+25+36/6-3.5**2 = 2&11/12. This is the same as the average of the square of the variable minus its average.
The co-variance between two variables is like the variance, but instead of squaring the variable; one takes the product of the two variables. Let the variables be f(x) and g(x) and the respective means be f_bar and g_bar; also let the standard deviations of the variables be f_sdv and g_sdv; then the co-variance is just the average of (f(x)-f_bar)*(g(x)-g_bar) and the correlation coefficient is that value divided by f_sdev*g_sdev.
If the correlation coefficient is positive, the variables tend to increase together; if negative, one variable tends to increase while the other decreases. Perfect correlation is +1 and perfect anti-correlation is -1; 0 is perfectly uncorrelated. The correlation coefficient is actually the cosine of the angle between the random variables in the appropriate vector space.
If the random variables are produced by a statistical sampling procedure; there are tests to see if the magnitude of the correlation coefficient is meaningful. Any real-world sample will in general deviate somewhat from its true distribution and thus statistical tests are needed.
With real world measurements; small deviations from a zero correlation coefficient are insignificant; large ones are not. There are no examples of large correlations without some causation. It can be difficult to find out what the causal relation actually is; example: the number of heart attacks per year (in the US) is proportional to the number of mangoes eaten but mangoes are not believed to directly cause heart attacks. Both the number of heart attacks and number mangoes eaten are related to the population size; a better measure would be heart attacks per 100,000 population (which is closer to what is actually used.)
Most people think "simple" and "complex" are opposites. If a complex thing becomes a simple thing, or a simple thing replaces a complex thing, the system has lost complexity.
This thread seems to be the field laboratory for some creationist "Babble Your Way Out of Any Difficulty" seminar.
It can't be all that bad. You know chaos can generate order.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.