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."
I seem to be one of the few people who listens to myself.
Your reply makes me wonder where you got such a strange idea in the first place. Can you enlighten us?
Yes of course, but they apply to different initial and boundary conditions differently. Or so it seems to me.
And I would strongly disagree that the processes that influence the assembly of organic molecules associated with life are qualitatively different than any other chemical system. It's all electronic attractions and repulsions and molecules trying to reach lower energy levels in one form or another. There's plenty of evidence that the creation of complex organic molecules is neither random or particularly difficult.
I'm sorry Alamo girl, I don't mean to belittle you, as you seem to be arguing in good faith. However, the criticsm of your statement in this post is withering.
"Therefore, if the mere existence of physical laws lead to order, how can chaos exist?"
As this says, by your logic, you have eliminated the concept of randomness at all. To say otherwise, you would have to demonstrate a physical system where the laws of physics were suspended. If you can do that, you should really stop posting here and collect your Nobel prize.
But instead of dealing with his criticsm, you dodged it completely, first by saying you had to leave then by citing a whole host of cosmological theories, and totally ignoring that the central tennet you hold to has been eliminated.
You must stay on point, this is water muddying.
No scientist is going to stand up and tell you that their cosmological model is complete or bulletproof. But evolution is not cosmology, and makes no cosmological claims. If you assume that ID does, than you are really operating on a universal fine tuning framework which postulates a supreme being who is supernatural. The supernatural is by definition ascientific.
Put another way, if you believe that you can prove God with cosmology, then he must also be disprovable. God is flatly an unequivically impossible to disprove. He exists beyond the realm of physical proof.
So again, the information you provide, seems to place the flavor of ID you advocate squarely outside of science and into the realm of philosophy. I agree, ID is philosophy and not science.
placemarker
But I must caution that personal assaults are disallowed on the forum, so to avoid problems it is always best to address the disagreements to the subject itself and not to any particular correspondent.
You assert that it is neither testable nor falsifiable and that it does not have explanatory power. I disagree.
Concerning the selection of mates being an intelligent cause vis-à-vis explanatory power you asserted:
you: As this says, by your logic, you have eliminated the concept of randomness at all. To say otherwise, you would have to demonstrate a physical system where the laws of physics were suspended. If you can do that, you should really stop posting here and collect your Nobel prize.
For instance, an additional time-like dimension would allow for all particles in 4D space/time to be multiply imaged up to 1080 times from as little as a single particle in the fifth dimension. Here’s a recent discussion for more on the mysteries of mass.
No doubt stochastic methods are quite handy in quantum mechanics and other disciplines, but frankly nobody can make a declarative statement of fact that randomness exists in space/time and expect anyone else to take it seriously since we do not yet know how many spatial and temporal dimensions actually exist - or whether we are looking at an actual particle or motion or one of n multiple images of one or more particles/motions in another dimension.
The subjects of order, complexity and randomness are very much related (especially in math) - and therefore, I assert it is a good idea to come to an agreement on the terms before we continue.
From your post I gather that you prefer the Kolmogorov definition of complexity. Thus if we observe a high degree of auto-correlation would we say the phenomenon is a low Kolmogorov complexity, i.e. the large string can be produced with a small expression as determined by Solomonoff induction, etc.
I do not however believe it is useful to equate order and auto-correlation. Hamlet for instance would have a high Kolmogorov complexity and a low auto-correlation. But we would consider it highly ordered.
Conversely, in the example you used of a string of "A"s, there is a high auto-correlation and low Kolmogorov complexity. But we would not consider it highly ordered. If physical reality consisted only of "A"s it would be at maximum entropy (LOL!)
However, it is inappropriate to view biology as autonomous among the sciences. At the root - all of biological life must obey the physical laws, rocks and rabbits are comprised of the same geometry and energy/matter.
Cosmology and mathematics inform astronomy, physics and quantum mechanics. They inform biology as well.
Another example would be emergence, emergent properties cannot arise without rules, i.e. the whole greater than the sum of the parts.
Such initial conditions, boundaries and rules are required in self-organizing complexity models, cellular automata, etc.
In these intelligent design discussions, I am keenly interested in the measures of complexity and the guides to the systems. And of course the related issues: information (successful communication), autonomy, semiosis.
Thank you, Alamo-Girl, as always, for your keen erudition and profound grasp of the subject at hand. I lack your meritorious training in the sciences. My background is in philosophy and theology, although I do not consider myself scholarly in any field. I am, rather, populist and Renaissance.
I have an eclectic intellectual palette with just enough depth to get myself in trouble. I sit at your feet in wonder when reading posts such as those you have just generated.
This brings me to an issue that troubles me deeply. I have, on this and other threads, been gang raped, mauled, slaughtered, buried and circle pi$$ed on my grave. Actually, it was not me to which these travesties were done. It was a cartoon characterization of me, created by my tormentors for their sadistic pleasure.
I do not have a background in the sciences yet am keenly interested in the impact that scientific thought has on society in general and our children in particular. Thus, I find myself injecting my opinions in matters where I am told I do not belong. I have never been much good at kowtowing to effete snobbery.
My assumption has been, since the late 90’s when I first encountered you and others on this forum, that anyone can play. The rules of the playground are simple: no cussing, no personal attacks, no chewing up bandwidth for self- aggrandizement.
Now, on this and other ID/evo threads, I find there is a gang of bullies on the playground that beats up anyone deemed to have broken its esoteric rules. If this were a purely intellectual exercise it would be acceptable. It is not. The attacks are personal and nasty.
I have been berated, belittled, insulted, maliciously taunted, pompously dismissed, accused of illiteracy (gasp), and told I cannot play because I do not know the rules. All on this one short thread!
I deem my tormentors to be college professors and graduate students, self-styled protectors of scientifica didactica. They are not research scientists, theoreticians or engaged in applied science. They are teachers: pompous, oafish, supercilious, ivory-towered elitists, the keepers of the keys, who grade peons like myself on our ability to follow their rules, as if we were all students in their vaunted classes. They remind me of a gaggle of lanate theologians protecting sacred dogma. As I said, I am not good at boot licking.
I am a layperson with opinions about matters inmpinging upon the teaching of science to children. I am also a theist who practices the presence of God-principles in my daily life. These I deem to be central to the nature system.
If there is no room in scientific methodology for foundational principles that are expressive of something other than happenstance then fie on science and fie especially on those who wish to protect the hallowed grounds of theoretical science from the incursions of God. I am okay with a raucous debate on the confluence of theism and science. What I am not okay with is being treated as a Neanderthal.
Not that I have anything against Neanderthals.
And thank you for your encouragements – but truly, I am nothing notable in any earthy respect at all.
The result is the dangerous “second reality” so obvious in Lewontin, Singer, Pinker and Dawkins – which would merely be amusing if it were not that, from their lofty positions of power over the sciences, they also effect public policy. Singer, for instance, suggests that parents be allowed to kill their children within months or perhaps a year after birth.
If any here would protest that statement, I welcome the debate! Remember though that methodological naturalism itself is a philosophy and thus science has never successfully made a wall between itself and all the other disciplines of epistemology. Science used to be most closely related to epistemology, BTW. Sad that it no longer is this way in the U.S.
I do not have a background in the sciences yet am keenly interested in the impact that scientific thought has on society in general and our children in particular. Thus, I find myself injecting my opinions in matters where I am told I do not belong. I have never been much good at kowtowing to effete snobbery.
My assumption has been, since the late 90’s when I first encountered you and others on this forum, that anyone can play. The rules of the playground are simple: no cussing, no personal attacks, no chewing up bandwidth for self- aggrandizement.
Now, on this and other ID/evo threads, I find there is a gang of bullies on the playground that beats up anyone deemed to have broken its esoteric rules. If this were a purely intellectual exercise it would be acceptable. It is not. The attacks are personal and nasty.
I have been berated, belittled, insulted, maliciously taunted, pompously dismissed, accused of illiteracy (gasp), and told I cannot play because I do not know the rules. All on this one short thread!
I deem my tormentors to be college professors and graduate students, self-styled protectors of scientifica didactica. They are not research scientists, theoreticians or engaged in applied science. They are teachers: pompous, oafish, supercilious, ivory-towered elitists, the keepers of the keys, who grade peons like myself on our ability to follow their rules, as if we were all students in their vaunted classes. They remind me of a gaggle of lanate theologians protecting sacred dogma. As I said, I am not good at boot licking.
But here’s the good news: when your correspondents turn to personal attacks it means they have run out of ammunition and have nothing left to use but verbal spitwads. It means you are winning the argument, and most all Lurkers see this and understand it.
On the downside, it discourages the Lurkers from joining Free Republic and posting themselves – because they wouldn’t want to be in your shoes, receiving a personal attack. When that line has been crossed, it is bad for the forum and is time to mash the abuse button.
That is what the abuse button is for. If a Freeper feels he has been subjected to a personal assault – or notice it happening to another poster – then he should complain directly to the moderator by mashing “abuse”. There are consequences, especially if the abuse button is hit by more than one Freeper. Some threads get removed, others locked, some banished to the smoky backroom, some Freepers get warned, some suspended and some banned.
It has happened around here many, many times and especially on religion, science and drug enforcement threads (we have a lot of libertarians evidently).
If there is no room in scientific methodology for foundational principles that are expressive of something other than happenstance then fie on science and fie especially on those who wish to protect the hallowed grounds of theoretical science from the incursions of God. I am okay with a raucous debate on the confluence of theism and science. What I am not okay with is being treated as a Neanderthal.
To the extent underlying principles are not translated to religious doctrine in publicly funded schools, I see no prohibition in the Constitution or by legal precedent in Supreme Court decisions of Lemon, et al.
In private schools and homeschooling – both of which are gnawing away at the establishment – there is no legal prohibition under the “establishment clause” but there remains a cultural prejudice against the body of believers so educated. Christians, however, were warned it would always be this way and we should not be intimidated by it (I Timothy 6:20-21)
After all, if there were no underlying, organizing principles to the universe and life – it would be completely unintelligible and neither science nor math would have anything to do.
God bless all of my Christian brothers & sisters!
1 Tim 6:
12 Fight the good fight for what we believe. Hold tightly to the eternal life that God has given you, which you have confessed so well before many witnesses.
But these are the very issues that the methodological/metaphysical naturalists absolutely refuse to apperceive, dear Alamo-Girl! Which is why there is so much "heat" and so little "light" in these debates.
Amos, don't let the abusive attacks get you down. Try not to take ad hominum attacks on you personally. They come from people who do not approve of how you think, but that is more their problem than yours, if you ask me. As a last resort, you can always take A-G's great advice and mash the Abuse Button. :^)
Thank you both for your excellent essay/posts!
I completely agree, A-G!
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