Posted on 12/31/2005 12:41:23 PM PST by streetpreacher
| Darwin's Pyrrhic victory Posted: December 28, 2005
By Patrick J. Buchanan © 2005 Creators Syndicate Inc.
"Intelligent Design Derailed," exulted the headline. "By now, the Christian conservatives who once dominated the school board in Dover, Pa., ought to rue their recklessness in forcing biology classes to hear about 'intelligent design' as an alternative to the theory of evolution," declared the New York Times, which added its own caning to the Christians who dared challenge the revealed truths of Darwinian scripture. Noting that U.S. District Judge John E. Jones III is a Bush appointee, the Washington Post called his decision "a scathing opinion that criticized local school board members for lying under oath and for their 'breathtaking inanity' in trying to inject religion into science classes." But is it really game, set, match, Darwin? Have these fellows forgotten that John Scopes, the teacher in that 1925 "Monkey Trial," lost in court, and was convicted of violating Tennessee law against the teaching of evolution and fined $100? Yet Darwin went on to conquer public education, and American Civil Liberties Union atheists went on to purge Christianity and the Bible from our public schools.
The Dover defeat notwithstanding, the pendulum is clearly swinging back. Darwinism is on the defensive. For, as Tom Bethell, author of "The Politically Incorrect Guide to Science," reminds us, there is no better way to make kids curious about "intelligent design" than to have some Neanderthal forbid its being mentioned in biology class. In ideological politics, winning by losing is textbook stuff. The Goldwater defeat of 1964, which a triumphant left said would bury the right forever, turned out to be liberalism's last hurrah. Like Marxism and Freudianism, Darwinism appears destined for the graveyard of discredited ideas, no matter the breathtaking inanity of the trial judge. In his opinion, Judge Jones the Third declared:
But if intelligent design is creationism or fundamentalism in drag, how does Judge Jones explain how that greatest of ancient thinkers, Aristotle, who died 300 years before Christ, concluded that the physical universe points directly to an unmoved First Mover? As Aristotle wrote in his "Physics": "Since everything that is in motion must be moved by something, let us suppose there is a thing in motion which was moved by something else in motion, and that by something else, and so on. But this series cannot go on to infinity, so there must be some First Mover." A man of science and reason, Aristotle used his observations of the physical universe to reach conclusions about how it came about. Where is the evidence he channeled the Torah and creation story of Genesis before positing his theory about a prime mover? Darwinism is in trouble today for the reason creationism was in trouble 80 years ago. It makes claims that are beyond the capacity of science to prove. Darwinism claims, for example, that matter evolved from non-matter – i.e., something from nothing – that life evolved from non-life; that, through natural selection, rudimentary forms evolved into more complex forms; and that men are descended from animals or apes. Now, all of this is unproven theory. And as the Darwinists have never been able to create matter out of non-matter or life out of non-life, or extract from the fossil record the "missing links" between species, what they are asking is that we accept it all on faith. And the response they are getting in the classroom and public forum is: "Prove it," and, "Where is your evidence?" And while Darwinism suggests our physical universe and its operations happened by chance and accident, intelligent design seems to comport more with what men can observe and reason to.
If, for example, we are all atop the Grand Canyon being told by a tour guide that nature, in the form of a surging river over eons of time, carved out the canyon, we might all nod in agreement. But if we ask how "Kilroy was here!" got painted on the opposite wall of the canyon, and the tour guide says the river did it, we would all howl. A retreating glacier may have created the mountain, but the glacier didn't build the cabin on top of it. Reason tells us the cabin came about through intelligent design. Darwinism is headed for the compost pile of discarded ideas because it cannot back up its claims. It must be taken on faith. It contains dogmas men may believe, but cannot stand the burden of proof, the acid of attack or the demands of science. Where science says, "No miracles allowed," Darwinism asks us to believe in miracles.
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I asked for a simple yes or no answer about a term you yourself introduced. You won't give one. That says more about your position than anything I could.
And to illustrate the weakness of yours, I pointed out that no judge would ever hold that the Constitution forbids giving money to the Klan, that indeed the people can be trusted to make that call. And again and again, you keep ignoring inconvenient points and hoping desperately that no one will notice. A sure sign of someone who can't keep his head above water in these types of discussions.
To go into even more detail as to why your logic fails, you cited the fact that religious organizations are eligible for funds (for secular purposes) as evidence of some kind of government endorsement of these organizations. But does government endorse the views of the secular organizations that receive federal funds? Of course not. It doesn't care what those views are, just as long as the organization uses the funding to carry out the purposes that are intended for the money.
You asked an obvious strawman question, to avoid having to defend your actual position, which is that you want all religious organizations (mainstream or otherwise) discriminated against in federal policy.
My apologies, Doctor. You are correct, as usual.
It was toppled in 1859. Scientific scrutiny rendered a verdict long ago.
Your argument is self-referential, since you are making an ad-hominum attack on the critics of ID without saying what the weaknesses of evolution are, or how you would know they are weakness unless mainstream scientists openly discussed them.
ID fails not because it is wrong, but because it contributes nothing to the sum of knowledge. It does no research, proposes no research, suggests no lines of possible research, uses none of the money contributed for the promotion of ID to fund research.
Yes...but we already have inequality in educational outcomes across the country...and there seems to be little relationship between the quality of education and financial inputs...some of the most costly school systems produce the worst results. For example, in the "Kansas City Experiment" where a Federal court ordered lavish expenditures resulted in no achievement gains.
Kansas City spent as much as $11,700 per pupil--more money per pupil, on a cost of living adjusted basis, than any other of the 280 largest districts in the country. The money bought higher teachers' salaries, 15 new schools, and such amenities as an Olympic-sized swimming pool with an underwater viewing room, television and animation studios, a robotics lab, a 25-acre wildlife sanctuary, a zoo, a model United Nations with simultaneous translation capability, and field trips to Mexico and Senegal. The student-teacher ratio was 12 or 13 to 1, the lowest of any major school district in the country.
The results were dismal. Test scores did not rise; the black-white gap did not diminish; and there was less, not greater, integration.
Actually, "inequality" is a good thing, since students and parents are not all the same, they will have a much better chance of getting their needs met by the wider variety of educational choices that would be made available by getting the government out of schooling.
The Alliance for the Separation of School & State has an article addressing this:
How do you go about proving a negative? How many centuries, for example do you give science to plug the holes in Newton's equations before it becomes impossible? By what standard or logic or human experience do you declare something impossible?
You should be aware that every example of irreducible complexity from Behe's original formulation has become reducible with research.
Actually, I should revise my comment to being a combination of PHePH and faulty generalization: "some things are designed thus all things are designed."
And if ID proponents were honest researchers, that's what they would be doing -- attempting to prove the null hypothesis. Science cannot prove supernatural causes; it can only demonstrate natural causes. It may fail, but many problems have taken centuries.
Exactly, the gentleman was suggesting that the presence of organized matter in the universe proved that the universe was designed because organized matter is produced by design. (Of course, organized matter can be produced by design, but that in itself doesn't mean that all organized matter is produced by design.)
As usual, Dr., you hit the nail on the head.
Well, at what point do you decide that it's effectively impossible for Mount Rushmore to have been sculpted by unintelligent forces alone?
False. One must additionally give evidence that these IC phenomena can't or wouldn't have evolved. Behe's argument is woefully inadequate because he ignores, among other things, neutral changes and structures evolving through loss of function.
It seems to me that the appropriate target for ID is not Irreducibly Complex structures but rather Irreducibly Fit ones. That is, if one could find numerous systems in which all smallish changes *increase* fitness, it would be strong evidence against evolution of those structures.
Since a serious discussion of crime and punishment in colonial America would go far outside the point I want to make, I'll let this drop.
I'm not attacking religious believers. I'm attacking fundamentalists.
You use the term "fundamentalist" very broadly -- including, it appears, anyone who desires a restoration of traditional morality. You can reject the religious authority that that morality is based on, but authority do you offer as an alternative? Ayn Rand?
Universities don't, in general, give grants. The Templeton Foundation does, however. A few years ago, they had a grant program for researchers proposing to do research looking for scientific evidence of intelligent design. No one applied.
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