Posted on 11/18/2005 4:34:43 AM PST by StatenIsland
Why intelligent design proponents are wrong.
Because every few years this country, in its infinite tolerance, insists on hearing yet another appeal of the Scopes monkey trial, I feel obliged to point out what would otherwise be superfluous - that the two greatest scientists in the history of our species were Isaac Newton and Albert Einstein, and they were both religious. Newton's religiosity was traditional. He was a staunch believer in Christianity and member of the Church of England. Einstein's was a more diffuse belief in a deity who set the rules for everything that occurs in the universe.
Neither saw science as an enemy of religion. On the contrary. "He believed he was doing God's work," wrote James Gleick in his recent biography of Newton. Einstein saw his entire vocation - understanding the workings of the universe - as an attempt to understand the mind of God.
Not a crude and willful God who pushes and pulls and does things according to whim. Newton was trying to supplant the view that first believed the sun's motion around the Earth was the work of Apollo and his chariot, and later believed it was a complicated system of cycles and epicycles, one tacked on upon the other every time some wobble in the orbit of a planet was found. Newton's God was not at all so crude. The laws of his universe were so simple, so elegant, so economical, and therefore so beautiful that they could only be divine.
Which brings us to Dover (Pa.), Pat Robertson, the Kansas State Board of Education and a fight over evolution that is so anachronistic and retrograde as to be a national embarrassment.
Dover distinguished itself this Election Day by throwing out all eight members of its school board who tried to impose "intelligent design" - today's tarted-up version of creationism - on the biology curriculum. Robertson then called down the wrath of God upon the good people of Dover for voting "God out of your city." Meanwhile in Kansas, the school board did a reverse Dover, mandating the teaching of skepticism about evolution and forcing intelligent design into the statewide biology curriculum.
Let's be clear. "Intelligent design" may be interesting as theology, but as science it is a fraud. It is a self-enclosed, tautological "theory" whose only holding is that when there are gaps in some area of scientific knowledge - in this case, evolution - they are to be filled by God. It is a "theory" that admits that evolution and natural selection explain such things as the development of drug resistance in bacteria and other such evolutionary changes within species, but that every once in a while God steps into this world of constant and accumulating change and says, "I think I'll make me a lemur today." A "theory" that violates the most basic requirement of anything pretending to be science - that it be empirically disprovable. How does one empirically disprove the proposition that God was behind the lemur, or evolution - or behind the motion of the tides or the "strong force" that holds the atom together?
In order to justify the farce that intelligent design is science, Kansas had to corrupt the very definition of science, dropping the phrase "natural explanations for what we observe in the world around us," thus unmistakably implying - by fiat of definition, no less - that the supernatural is an integral part of science. This is an insult both to religion and to science.
The school board thinks it is indicting evolution by branding it an "unguided process" with no "discernable direction or goal." This is as ridiculous as indicting Newtonian mechanics for positing an "unguided process" by which the Earth is pulled around the sun every year without discernible purpose. What is chemistry if not an "unguided process" of molecular interactions without "purpose"? Or are we to teach children that God is behind every hydrogen atom in electrolysis?
He may be, of course. But that discussion is the province of religion, not science. The relentless attempt to confuse the two by teaching warmed-over creationism as science can only bring ridicule to religion, gratuitously discrediting a great human endeavor and our deepest source of wisdom precisely about those questions - arguably, the most important questions in life - that lie beyond the material.
How ridiculous to make evolution the enemy of God. What could be more elegant, more simple, more brilliant, more economical, more creative, indeed more divine than a planet with millions of life forms, distinct and yet interactive, all ultimately derived from accumulated variations in a single double-stranded molecule, pliable and fecund enough to give us mollusks and mice, Newton and Einstein? Even if it did give us the Kansas State Board of Education, too.
Originally published on November 18, 2005
The quote by Sam Francis is about the Janet Jackson - Justin Timberlake Superbowl Show.
But that wasn't the point, was it? The point was not just to hurl a pie in the face of morals and good taste but also of white racial and cultural identity. The message of the ad was that white women are eager to have sex with black men, that they should be eager, and that black men should take them up on it.
...
Breaking down the sexual barriers between the races is a major weapon of cultural destruction because it means the dissolution of the cultural boundaries that define breeding and the family and, ultimately, the transmission and survival of the culture itself.
I Am Spartacus!!!
Sorry....wrong thread.
That's B.S. (BTW, it's also literally Naziesque. That each culture is associated with a specific tribe or ethnicity -- and that "blood" determines culture -- was the PRIMARY presupposition of Nazi ideology. See, for instance, Alfred Rosenberg's The Myth of the Twentieth Century. Without jumping to conclusions, I'm advising other freepers to keep a close eye on your rhetoric, RobbyS.)
According to your homepage you're a Texan, and therefore an American. Your own culture -- the American culture -- is the creation of hundreds, if not thousands, of tribes. Even Texas culture is a rich amalgam contributed to by many tribes (e.g. ethnic Germans, Hispanics, and whoever it was that developed barbecue).
Heck you can even go back thousands of years to, for instance, Rome, and find a multi-tribal origin of it's culture -- Etruscan and Latin -- and later deep incorporation of cultural elements from many others from Greeks (Greek culture itself also being multi-tribal) to Germans.
I'm very happy in an interracial marriage. And her cultural values are certainly more moral and conservative than many on these threads. What kind of a breakdown is that?
An excellent, well-written article.
Thank you.
Of course evolution is not the enemy of God. Evolution is the mechanism God used to create life.
The problem (OK one of the problems) with ID and its proponents is that THEY are the ones that diminish God. The ID view is that God couldn't get it right to begin with, so He had to tinker with the system afterwards.
Prepare yourself for the Blaspneme Legion's counterattack.
Thanks for the ping!
I'm here! What can I do for you, Stingy Dog?
Likewise.
The good Dr.K is really gonna piss off the snakefondlers with this one.
You have accidentally hit rhe nub of the matter. Sociobiology is hated because it raises questions asssociated with Nazism. But Nazism did not come from nowhere. It was a bastard child of Darwinism, because Darwinism was quickly appropriated by those looking for a scientific vehicle that could carry the notion that some human groups were naturally inferior to others.
In a society such as ours with a faith in egalitarianism, that is a dangerous notion, and for that reason sociobiology is unwelcome. It weighs heavily on the soul of anything who ascribes to the doctrine that all men are created equal.
Hey! Get a clue! Despite what the Creatio-fascists would like, this is a Chat Room.
Sorry, Junior, but mlc9852 is correct. It's the subject of an implied verb "is", as in "better than he is".
In You treat her worse than I treat her, t. is a strong or subordinating conjunction, attaching an adverbial clause to its owner worse. In You treat her worse than I, the same account may be given with the explanation that there is an ellipsis of treat her; or t. may be called a weak or coordinating conjunction linking the two similarly constructed nouns you & I. In You treat her worse than me, the same two names for t. are possible, but the ellipsis is of you treat (not treat her), or the similarly constructed nouns her & me (not you & me); those are the possibilities if the sentence is said with the only sense that an educated person gives it. But an uneducated person may mean by it You treat her worse than I treat her; &, if it is to be so taken, t. is not a conjunction of either kind, but a preposition governing me. Doubts whether a word is a presposition or a conjunction or both are not unknown...It is obvious, however, that recognition of t. as a preposition makes some sentences ambiguous that could otherwise have only one meaning, & is to that extent undesirable.
Boldface added by me.
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