I love articles and posts with such useful economical headlines.
Either way, from both perspectives, pro or con, it is a "Big Deal" only to persons so easily obsessed as to be on my lifetime Avoid at all Costs list...
"It is precisely because intelligent design relies exclusively on scientific methods, evidence, and reasoning that the Darwinist establishment is going bonkers"
Ouch....even a falling house of cards still hurts. I feel your pain Darwin freaks...but you'll get over it.
At another level, the sloppy and lazy science that is in so much evoutionary work is easily criticized for the simplistic logic and simplistic nature.
Someone like Philip Johnston and otheres are very sharp people who know logic argument and rhetoric.
Their citicisms hit a nerve because they are right in their criticisms of the intellectual efforts going in to much evoutionary discussion.
It took these lawyers and other religious conservatives to point out the tautologies and banal ideas put forth because mainstream active biologists pay no attention to the archaic and essentially anachronistic students of evolution.
The big guns of ID like Michael Behe, accept common descent as a given.
Denton, author of "Evolution: A Theory in Crisis," believes in fine tuning, the idea that the universe was set up at creation to produce evolution. Denton's ideology is one hundred percent compatible with mainstream biology.
I haven't been able to figure out why creationists think ID supports a young earth interpretation.
Whatever the courts may decide, the intelligent design cat is already out of the bag. President Bush and Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist have endorsed acquainting students with ID.
May I be the first to say that if you reject ID you are against President George W. Bush!
"You are either with us or with the terrorists."
/sarc
Religious explanations are also just theories - crappy, primitive, unscientific theories.
The Dover school board, by the way, did not cut back the teaching of Darwinian evolution in its schools
The judge offered a far less flattering description of the school board members who voted for ID...and the voters turned them out of office.
Any train of thought relying on "God made it." is not scientific.
I haven't had much to say on this subject, mainly because there is a much bigger issue here that nobody really talks about. The controversy over Darwinian Evolution vs. Intelligent Design in public schools overlooks the fact that most students these days lack the basic rational and logical thought processes to study science in any meaningful way in the first place. There is really no reason -- from a scientific standpoint, that is -- to teach scientific matters to kids who are increasingly incapable of handling many of the basic reading, writing, comprehension, and mathematical skills that used to be taken for granted in this country.
The answer is easy. ID let's the "God people" get their foot in the door. It's nothing more complex than that.
The Darwinists have had a monopoly on American education every since Clarence Darrow tried to defend the right of a farming community to have their kids taught the Bible in school.
All we are talking about now is to suggest to kids that maybe there just might be scientific, statistical reasons for believing that the General Theory of evolution is simply not in accordance with the facts.
Maybe it is, maybe it isn't. I have always thought that there were insuperable difficulties in explaining the nature of things by a purely Darwinian account. But that isn't the issue. The issue is whether science will be laid down by judicial fiat rather than experiment and rational argument. At present, it is laid down by judicial fiat, as confirmed by that recent judgment.
NO ARGUMENTS ALLOWED. It's all Darwin, all the time, and you'd better like it, because the judges won't have it any other way. It's not a monopoly as long as no one is making any money off of it.
Oops, what's that you say? People ARE making money off of this monopoly? Salaries, research grants, teachers unions, cushy jobs that might be at risk if Darwin doesn't maintain his monopoly, funds flowing in to the ACLU to defend their turf?
Oh, well, so it goes. We can't allow any discussion, because ONLY DARWIN IS SCIENTIFIC. NO OTHERS NEED APPLY.
Either this writer is ignorant or a liar. It's very rare to encounter an argument in favor of ID where the proponent does not get the facts wrong either by deliberate misrepresentation or rampant ignorance. Lying about ID is not the way to begin an intelligent discourse.
1) It provides a platform for certain libertarians (whose cultural familiars are liberals) to vent their hostilities about the religious. "Rightwing Christians are defiling the Holy Altar of Science"-- these guys just want a stick to beat rightward religious with.
2) Leftists want badly to chip off votes from vulnerable GOP pols in battleground states. They'd love to embarrass enough pols and libertarians with the "uncouth" associtiation with the extremely effective Christian right--at least enough to knock a few GOP Senators out of office. Just enough to turn the Senate Democratic.
And the leftists goad the libertarians into doing their work for them--"Save Science From the Heathen!"
But the claims of IDs main proponents cannot be accepted on face value. There is no objective measure for detecting design in situations where we don't have clear direct information. (We know, for instance, the origin of watches.) Claims that such have been developed do not withstand critical scrutiny. There are evolutionary scenarios to produce irreducibly complex structures, despite the ubiquitious pretense among ID-ists that there are none. And of course, as Dover trial Judge Jones noted, ID is a repackaging of creationism.
No, it indeed "isn't science," Mr. Peterson. That's the big deal.
Yes, because ID offers NO FALSIFICATION CRITERIA, therefore cannot be refuted. Moreover, ID has failed completely and utterly to "demonstrate affirmatively that life exhibits evidence of design". The complete demolishing of Behe in Dover is ample testament to that -- forcing the leading light of ID to admit that his examples were a)not IC and b) that Common Descent is true and C) that God might not exist anymore based on his review of the evidence. Yeah, a great victory for the affirmative demonstation of design.
Nonsense. They got caught red-handed on both points in the Dover case, which is why they got slam-dunked in the ruling.
As for the title question, one might as well ask what's the big deal about Clinton getting a blow job and lying about it. If one believes that truth matters and that rule of law matters, then it's a big deal; if not, then I suppose it isn't.
He must have gotten that idea from my tagline!
Or would a large body of opinion, scientific and otherwise, insist that anything that points to a creator, regardless of the evidence, is automatically "not science"?
We don't have to "suppose" any such thing. We have real-world examples.
If there is, in fact, "a large body of opinion, scientific and otherwise" asserting that (for example) chihuauahs descended from wolves by unguided natural selection, then Peterson is right. If no such position being seriously advanced, then Peterson is wrong. A simple, testable prediction from the theory. I leave the checking of the prediction against the facts as an exercise for the student.
Well,.....it's either Intelligent Design or Un-Intelligent Design!
? What lawyer gnostic union group signs your paycheck,.....or gives you vested-intrest Stocks?