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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r u saying all accidentalists r athiest? and only Christians believe in a designer? hmmmm what u been smokin mon?????
I wonder how many folks who ever come to these threads have ever read one single page of Darwins works.
Oh yeah? Well it was Christianity that built the car. My computer is Christian, too. In fact, anywhere matter has been crafted into a human implement, it is by definition a "fundamentalist Christian" entity.
It would appear that Mr. Buchanon would side with such people:
"We're going to bring back God and the Bible and drive the gods of secular humanism right out of the public schools of America."
Pat Buchanan, at an anti-gay rally in Des Moines, Iowa, February 11, 1996
A textbook example of circular reasoning!
Until you stop posting grossly erroneous nonsense, and actually learn something about the subject for a change.
1. Mutations are random.
Not entirely, but close enough.
2. Mutations are primarily lethal to the host.
Wrong. Try reading some science journals for a change, instead of those creationist pamphlets. In study after study, the majority of mutations are neutral, beneficial and detrimental mutations come in second, and lethal mutations are in a distant last place.
3. A single mutation confers no cellular advantage to the cell or over other cells.
Why, because you say so? ROFL! Sorry, you're wrong again. Try cracking open a biology book before you spout off about a subject you know next to nothing about (and most of the little you do "know" is wrong).
There can be no pressure to "select" this mutational aberration over other normal cells.
That's going to come as a big surprise to the tens of thousands of researchers who have directly observed selection in action. Are you sure you have any idea what in the hell you're talking about?
4. Random events do not and cannot predict an endpoint.
Could you try that again while making a coherent point?
5. Darwinists are stuck on stupid arguing incomplete fossil records and homologous appendages.
No, they're not -- is there any special reason you "forgot" to mention the vast amount of evidence along multiple independently cross-confirming lines? Oh, right, because your creationist pamphlets don't like to talk about that. They're not only "stuck on stupid", they're "stuck on dishonest".
Cell change occurs at a molecular biochemical level.
...which have effects on the organism as a whole. Duh.
6. Darwinists are secularists. The abstraction called "Nature" is there God. They are anti-God, anti-religious, pompous, self-absorbed, arrogant, self-deluded zealots who quiver in fear that anyone should discover the flaws of their beloved Theory, the Theory they genuflect to.
You haven't a clue -- the *majority* of American "Darwinists" are Christians.
Try again when *you* get beyond "stuck on stupid", ignorant, misinformed, and obnoxious.
I always wanted to see in the index of a textbook:
Circular reasoning. See "Reasoning, Circular"
Reasoning, Circular. See "Circular reasoning"
So you are saying it is planned or designed?
It produces a convergence upon adaptation to current conditions.
This is incoherent.
Sounds like Art Bell or something.
Are you talking about stem cell research?
ACLU stands for Anti-American Communist Libertine Union. Anybody who still believes in evolution ought to belong to it.
Buchanan makes no sense. his i.e. does not accuratley refer to his statement "matter evolved from non-matter".
I think he means to say life evolved from non-life.
Matter from non-matter is cosmology or something like that, not "Darwinism" or biological evolution.
Recursive: see Recursive
His grandfather in fact said in one paragraph what Darwin is famous for writing in a lot more than one paragraph.
LOL. Scientists never lie...lol
<Sigh.> I don't have any friends.
Actually, it would be best not to have public schools at all. But as long as they're there and we're all paying for them it is necessary to prevent any particular religion from gaining favor over another, whether it's atheism, or any one of the hundreds of religions out there.
The difference between evolutionist and creationist thought is dichotomous enough, and the intrusiveness of either view in a science curriculum innocuous enough, that grownups ought to be able to work out a both/and scenario in public schools.
The controversy is best reserved for the later years of education when the evaluative faculties of the student are developed to the extent they can express the strengths and weaknesses of both sides. It will teach them to respect not only the various ways science can be undertaken but also the people who do science either way.
Alas, however, we have Judge Joneses out there, along with his following, who are as zealous in establishing atheism by law as certain others are in establishing Christianity. Allowing a generic theological approach along side an atheistic one is probably, from a practical standpoint, the best we can do.
Are you saying anything unguided is random? I've come to consider that a purely creationist useage.
This ("It produces a convergence upon adaptation to current conditions") is incoherent.
Can't imagine where you're having the problem.
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