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A Blood Libel on Our Civilization. Can I expell Expelled?
National Review Online ^ | April 28, 2008 | John Derbyshire

Posted on 04/28/2008 12:01:40 PM PDT by Delacon

What on earth has happened to Ben Stein? He and I go back a long way. No, I’ve never met the guy. Back in the 1970s, though, when The American Spectator was in its broadsheet format, I would always turn first to Ben Stein’s diary, which appeared in every issue. He was funny and clever and worldly in a way I liked a lot. The very few times I’ve caught him on-screen, he seems to have had a nice line in deadpan self-deprecation, also something I like. Though I’ve never met him, I know people who know him, and they all speak well of him. Larry Kudlow, whose opinion is worth a dozen average opinions on any topic, thinks the world of Ben.

So what’s going on here with this stupid Expelled movie? No, I haven’t seen the dang thing. I’ve been reading about it steadily for weeks now though, both pro (including the pieces by David Klinghoffer and Dave Berg on National Review Online) and con, and I can’t believe it would yield up many surprises on an actual viewing. It’s pretty plain that the thing is creationist porn, propaganda for ignorance and obscurantism. How could a guy like this do a thing like that?

I turned over some possibilities, but decisively rejected them all. The first thing that came to mind was Saudi money. Half of the evils and absurdities in our society seem to have a Saudi prince behind them somewhere, and the Wahhabists are, like all fundamentalist Muslims, committed creationists. This doesn’t hold water, though. For one thing, Stein is Jewish. For another, he is rich, and doesn’t need the money. And for another, the stills and clips I have seen are from a low-budget production. Saudi financing would surely at least have come up with some decent computer graphics. No, Ben Stein is no crook. He must then be foolish; and that’s sad, because I now think less of a guy I once admired, and whom my friends admire. Life, it’s just one darn bubble bursting after another.

To return to the matter of computer graphics for a moment, it seems that the producers of Expelled, rather than go to the trouble and expense of making their own, may have just stolen some. (The creationists have posted a defense here. There will probably be a lawsuit under way, which I shall report back on. Oh, and as I write this, I see a Reuters report that our defenders of faith and morality may have stolen some music too. How many more shoes will drop, I wonder?) It is at any rate clear that they engaged in much deception with the subjects they interviewed for the movie, many of whom are complaining loudly. This, together with much, much else about the movie, can be read about on the Expelled Exposed website put up by the National Center for Science Education, which I urge all interested readers to explore.

These dishonesties do not surprise me. When talking about the creationists to people who don’t follow these controversies closely, I have found that the hardest thing to get across is the shifty, low-cunning aspect of the whole modern creationist enterprise. Individual creationists can be very nice people, though they get nicer the further away they are from the full-time core enterprise of modern creationism at the Discovery Institute. The enterprise as a whole, however, really doesn’t smell good. You notice this when you’re around it a lot. I shall give some more examples in a minute; but what accounts for all this dishonesty and misrepresentation?

My own theory is that the creationists have been morally corrupted by the constant effort of pretending not to be what they are. What they are, as is amply documented, is a pressure group for religious teaching in public schools.

Now, there is nothing wrong with that. We are a nation of pressure groups, and one more would hardly notice. However, since parents who want their kids religiously educated already have plenty of private and parochial schools to choose from (half the kids on my street have attended parochial school), as well as the option of home schooling, now very well organized and supported (and heartily approved of by me: I just wish I knew how they find the time); and since current jurisprudence, how correctly I am not competent to say, regards tax-funded religious instruction as unconstitutional; creationists are a pressure group without hope, if they campaign openly for the thing they want.

Understanding this, the creationists took the morally fatal decision to campaign clandestinely. They overhauled creationism as “intelligent design,” roped in a handful of eccentric non-Christian cranks keen for a well-funded vehicle to help them push their own flat-earth theories, and set about presenting themselves to the public as “alternative science" engaged in a “controversy” with a closed-minded, reactionary “science establishment” fearful of new ideas. (Ignoring the fact that without a constant supply of new ideas, there would be nothing for scientists to do.) Nothing to do with religion at all!

I think this willful act of deception has corrupted creationism irredeemably. The old Biblical creationists were, in my opinion, wrong-headed, but they were mostly honest people. The “intelligent design” crowd lean more in the other direction. Hence the dishonesty and sheer nastiness, even down to plain bad manners, that you keep encountering in ID circles. It’s by no means all of them, but it’s enough to corrupt and poison the creationist enterprise, which might otherwise have added something worthwhile to our national life, if only by way of entertainment value.

This dishonesty showed up very soon after the creationists decided to don the mask of “alternative science” in the 1990s. A key episode was the Kunming conference of June 1999. In very brief — you can read the full story in Forrest and Gross’s Creationisms Trojan Horse (“A bad book, a very bad book,” shuddered the Discovery Institute’s Bruce Chapman when he saw it on my desk, like a vampire spotting a clove of garlic), pp.56-66 — there is a very interesting bed of extremely old fossils near Kunming, in southern China. Paul Chien, a little-known creationist of Chinese ancestry from San Francisco, acted as a front man for the Discovery Institute to organize a conference in Kunming, bringing in professional paleontologists from China and abroad, but without telling them of the Discovery Institute’s involvement. The aim was “to produce and then to promote a book containing the conference papers of [creationist] members immediately juxtaposed to those written by respected scientists in the relevant fields.” (Forrest & Gross, their italics.) When the real paleontologists found out what was going on, and how they had been brought across China, or around the world, they were not pleased. Embarrassing scenes followed. No book ever appeared.


Examples can be multiplied. The witty and mild-mannered federal Judge Jones, who presided over the 2005 Kitzmiller trial in Dover, Pa., felt moved to note that: “The citizens of the Dover area were poorly served by the members of the Board who voted for the ID Policy. It is ironic that several of these individuals, who so staunchly and proudly touted their religious convictions in public, would time and again lie to cover their tracks and disguise the real purpose behind the ID Policy.” The response of the Discovery Institute was to launch sneering, slanderous attacks on the professionalism and competence of Judge Jones (a church-going conservative Republican appointed by President George W. Bush).

So it goes with the stalwart defenders of truth and morality over at the Discovery Institute. So it goes with Ben Stein, apparently, since he has signed up with these mountebanks, for reasons that remain mysterious to me. The misrepresentations in Expelled are far too numerous for me to list here, and the task is unnecessary since others have done it. The aforementioned Expelled Exposed website is a great resource. Biologist P. Z. Myers, in a less organized way, has been pointing up the errors and deceptions in Expelled since the wretched thing hove into view. (Here he links to a whole stack of reviews, including a couple of positives.) Other science-literate bloggers have been weighing in, often very angrily. One of my favorite comments came from “Pixy Misa” (Andrew Mazels) who correctly called Ben Stein's accusing Darwin of responsibility for the Holocaust “a blood libel on science.”

I would actually go further than that, to something like “a blood libel on Western Civilization.” One of the most-quoted remarks by one conservative writer about another was Evelyn Waugh's on Kipling. It bears quoting again.

[Kipling] was a conservative in the sense that he believed civilization to be something laboriously achieved which was only precariously defended. He wanted to see the defences fully manned and he hated the liberals because he thought them gullible and feeble, believing in the easy perfectibility of man and ready to abandon the work of centuries for sentimental qualms.

Western civilization has many glories. There are the legacies of the ancients, in literature and thought. There are the late-medieval cathedrals, those huge miracles of stone, statuary, and spiritual devotion. There is painting, music, the orderly cityscapes of Renaissance Italy, the peaceful, self-governed townships of old New England and the Frontier, the steel marvels of the early industrial revolution, our parliaments and courts of law, our great universities with their spirit of restless inquiry.

And there is science, perhaps the greatest of all our achievements, because nowhere else on earth did it appear. China, India, the Muslim world, all had fine cities and systems of law, architecture and painting, poetry and prose, religion and philosophy. None of them ever accomplished what began in northwest Europe in the later 17th century, though: a scientific revolution. Thoughtful men and women came together in learned societies to compare notes on their observations of the natural world, to test their ideas in experiments, and in reasoned argument against the ideas of others, and to publish their results in learned journals. A body of common knowledge gradually accumulated. Patterns were observed, laws discerned and stated.

If I write with more feeling than usual here it is because I have just shipped off a review to an editor (for another magazine) of Gino Segrè’s new book about the history of quantum mechanics. It’s a good, if not very remarkable, book giving pen-portraits of the great players in physics during the 1920s and 1930s, and of their meetings and disagreements. Segrè, a particle physicist himself, who has been around for a while, knew some of these people personally, and of course heard many anecdotes from their intellectual descendants. It's a “warm” book, full of feeling for the scientists and their magnificent enterprise, struggling with some of the most difficult problems the human intellect has ever confronted, striving with all their powers to understand what can barely be understood.

Gino Segrè’s book — and, of course, hundreds like it (I have, ahem, dabbled myself) brings to us a feeling for what the scientific endeavor is like, and how painfully its triumphs are won, with what sweat and tears. Our scientific theories are the crowning adornments of our civilization, towering monuments of intellectual effort, built from untold millions of hours of observation, measurement, classification, discussion, and deliberation. This is quite apart from their wonderful utility — from the light, heat, and mobility they give us, the drugs and the gadgets and the media. (A “thank you” wouldn’t go amiss.) Simply as intellectual constructs, our well-established scientific theories are awe-inspiring.

And now here is Ben Stein, sneering and scoffing at Darwin, a man who spent decades observing and pondering the natural world — that world Stein glimpses through the window of his automobile now and then, when he’s not chattering into his cell phone. Stein claims to be doing it in the name of an alternative theory of the origin of species: Yet no such alternative theory has ever been presented, nor is one presented in the movie, nor even hinted at. There is only a gaggle of fools and fraudsters, gaping and pointing like Apaches on seeing their first locomotive: “Look! It moves! There must be a ghost inside making it move!”

The “intelligent design” hoax is not merely non-science, nor even merely anti-science; it is anti-civilization. It is an appeal to barbarism, to the sensibilities of those Apaches, made by people who lack the imaginative power to know the horrors of true barbarism. (A thing that cannot be said of Darwin. See Chapter X of Voyage of the Beagle.)

And yes: When our greatest achievements are blamed for our greatest moral failures, that is a blood libel against Western civilization itself. What next, Ben? Johann Sebastian Bach ran a slave-trading enterprise on the side? Kepler started the Thirty Years War? Tolstoy instigated the Kishinev Pogrom? Dante was a bag-man for the Golden Horde? Why not go smash a few windows in Chartres Cathedral, Ben? Break wind in a chamber-music concert? Splash some red paint around in the Uffizi? Which other of our civilizational achievements would you like to sneer at? What else from what Waugh called “the work of centuries” would you like to “abandon … for sentimental qualms”? You call yourself a conservative? Feugh!

For shame, Ben Stein, for shame. Stand up for your civilization, man! and all its glories. The barbarians are at the gate, as they always have been. Come man the defenses with us, leaving the liars and fools to their lies and folly.



TOPICS: Crime/Corruption; Culture/Society; Editorial; News/Current Events
KEYWORDS: benstein; creationism; derbyshire; directedpanspermia; expelled; intelligentdesign; moviereview; panspermia
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To: ding_dong_daddy_from_dumas
What I find disturbing is the arrogance of some scientists and their ideological allies who pretend that they really understand life

Ah, hrm. I've not come across what you are discussing. I have come across a good amount of scientists that are pissed off because they have creationists telling them they don't understand science.

361 posted on 04/30/2008 9:34:53 AM PDT by Shryke
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To: Dog Gone

The theory of gravity didn’t enable plane flights. Plane flights and crashes are the result of a technology. I guess you could have used the study of fluid dynamics.

You obviously don’t understand what guilt by association is. That has to do with the point of view or behavior of one person being attributed to another because they have had some kind of connection - working at the same law firm, being related or something. It’s about connections that don’t logically man anything. This is tracing the historical development of an idea and what the underlying assumptions were. It’s simply cause and effect. If that’s not valid then the entire study of history is not valid.

I don’t see how the holocaust could have happened without Darwin’s theory. It was predicated on racial theories. You dismiss it as being a lunatic type of notion like Wright’s AIDS claim, a ridiculous comparison.

The idea of superior and inferior races flows inevitably from evolution theory, (which I don’t believe in). You apparently do believe in it. So your only real argument is that we just have to accept that there may be superior and inferior races, and unfortunately some people will misuse this idea, like Hitler. Instead, your argument is, “Since evolution is science, no one can say it could possibly result in anything bad, because then they are attacking science”, a stupid argument.

You’re basically arguing there can be no cause and effect with respect to evolution theory, since it’s science. Ideas have effects. Is it okay to say Marx, Christianity, the major philosophers have had effects, since they aren’t “science”? But then isn’t that still being anti-philosophy, guilt by assocation etc?


362 posted on 04/30/2008 10:11:16 AM PDT by lasereye
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To: WVKayaker
No bias there, huh?

Of course I'm biased. I'm biased for fact and against fiction. For civilization and against barbarism. I'm not neutral between the fireman and the fire.

Science IS a religion,

If you really, truly believe that "science IS a religion," you are establishing yourself as someone living outside of the umbrella of Western Civilization. Enjoy!

363 posted on 04/30/2008 10:31:50 AM PDT by Alter Kaker (Gravitation is a theory, not a fact. It should be approached with an open mind...)
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To: scottdeus12
My bad, I thought you’re tagline used to read Godless Athiest...

No, you're probably thinking of someone else. I am very much a Believer.

364 posted on 04/30/2008 10:33:51 AM PDT by Alter Kaker (Gravitation is a theory, not a fact. It should be approached with an open mind...)
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To: tpanther
No amount of SO-CALLeD science (as IF!!!! That science/seance is liberal 'hogWASH" with per se science papers and snowflaiks made out of FAKE ATOMS) and BTW NO PAPER STUFF is needed by me to know that evilushun is MAGICAL GOO to yuk LIKE It wAs eched in COURT OR SOMTHING!!!! And FRANKLY ThaT's WHAT HAS been proved by REAL science that allows ALL theories to be heard EVEN When their WRONG! *






*(For some reason, I suspect you'll find the foregoing a perfectly convincing line of argument.)

365 posted on 04/30/2008 12:10:50 PM PDT by atlaw
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To: Ken H
By securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.

Oh, good, you know. The contextual poverty of your constitutional quote could easily have lead me to think you believe that the power of Congress to promote the progress of science and the useful arts is unlimited (or that you intend to leave that impression with others). In fact, the power is very narrow in its enumeration and application.

Given that your advanced understanding of our Constitution has now been indisputably established, perhaps you can enlighten the whole forum as to where in The Constitution the enumerated power of the Feds to fund and regulate education can be found. The text you quote is accurate, but it entirely has to do with the right to property, and not at all to do with education.

366 posted on 04/30/2008 12:44:56 PM PDT by YHAOS
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To: Shryke; All

I used to think it was ridiculous too, then, things happened I could see first hand like “Christmas” disappeared from the school calendar here with no explanation, later found out the Georgia ACLU threatened legal action, and predictably, like a tent the NEA types folded, partly because these liberal lunatic secularists don’t have a problem with it and subsequent censorship; of all things Christian particularly.

There are hundreds if not thousands of examples and science class is HARDLY excluded!


367 posted on 04/30/2008 12:49:14 PM PDT by tpanther (The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing-----Edmund Burke)
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To: YHAOS
The contextual poverty of your constitutional quote could easily have lead me to think you believe that the power of Congress to promote the progress of science and the useful arts is unlimited (or that you intend to leave that impression with others).

You asked a simple direct question, I gave a simple direct answer. Anything else you read into it came from your own imagination.

Given that your advanced understanding of our Constitution has now been indisputably established, perhaps you can enlighten the whole forum as to where in The Constitution the enumerated power of the Feds to fund and regulate education can be found.

It does not exist, IMO. James Madison flat out said the power of Congress to regulate commerce among the several States was intended as a negative and preventive provision against injustices between States, rather than a power to be used for positive purposes of the central government - source

The text you quote is accurate, but it entirely has to do with the right to property, and not at all to do with education.

I did not know that! /sarcasm

My turn - Do you think the federal war on drugs is constitutional?

368 posted on 04/30/2008 1:34:54 PM PDT by Ken H
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To: tpanther; atlaw
tpanther: I'm not quite sure what the post to which I am replying has to do with my last point.

Perhaps I wasn't clear, so let me repeat it. The Discovery Institute is very well funded and supposed to be supporting research into ID. It's got lots of senior fellows on its payroll, like Michael Behe, who are funded very generously and supposed to be doing research.

So where are the results this well-funded ID research? Where are the findings? Where is this research that the supposed Stalinist science "establishement" is refusing to publish?

Surely it must exist somewhere. Kindly point it out to me, because I've searchend and searched and can't find it.

If it doesn't exist, then I submit that Ben Stein doesn't have much of a case. You can't fault the supposed science "establishment" for censoring something that doesn't exist!

369 posted on 04/30/2008 1:50:15 PM PDT by curiosity
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To: lasereye
There have been plenty of racial conflicts throughout history, involving politics, religion, or some political philosophy, and most of these precede Darwin.

I perfectly understand cause and effect, and the difference between that and guilt by association. But blaming Nazi Germany on Darwin is even a ridiculous guilt by association argument, since it wasn't even mentioned by Hitler, and every esteemed historian that I've read never blamed it on Darwin.

Suddenly I'm now supposed to see the cause and effect? If evolution is so insidious, why aren't new Hitlers popping up all the time? Has it somehow lost its magic power?

So your only real argument is that we just have to accept that there may be superior and inferior races, and unfortunately some people will misuse this idea, like Hitler. Instead, your argument is, “Since evolution is science, no one can say it could possibly result in anything bad, because then they are attacking science”, a stupid argument.

If I had said either of those things, it would be fair to comment on them, but you made them up. You certainly do not speak for me.

370 posted on 04/30/2008 2:53:23 PM PDT by Dog Gone
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To: Dog Gone

You say it isn’t, but I and many others say it IS science. That is the theory of ID is scientific. We weren’t the first, & won’t be the last to disagree.

There are many things I disagree with too...there’s some rubbish in history books I’d HARDLY call history, let alone accurate, but there again, it’s in the history books BEING taught as history just the same.

I can chirp a million different times for years about my disagreements; well that is until these same propenents of censorship hijack the legal system to the point that THAT is disallowed too, but that too remains to be seen!

I CAN disagree till the cows come home.

Again, science is concensus. Among scientists, and everyone else. It changes, it isn’t etched in stone and to say what is or isn’t science is futile.

As far as fairies waving magic wands...that makes more sense to me than things just popping up from nothing, matter appearing from non-matter with zero intelligent thought behind such a thing, then life “naturally” progressing from “soup” to slither and slide over land, eventually just up out of nowhere (but over ga-jillions of years of course), sprouting limbs to walk, and so on, with no purpose behind it.

I don’t have a problem with the godless, but I don’t scream and whine and call to censor and ban and sue them to stop saying what they believe is science, history or what have you.

Such is America.

THANK GOD!


371 posted on 04/30/2008 2:58:16 PM PDT by tpanther (The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing-----Edmund Burke)
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To: curiosity

Which brings up a very VERY valid point....why all the lawsuits and secularist censorship for that which doesn’t exist? Why the effort, not only in science but just about ALL of society to censor the 10 commandments, Christmas and so on...? If GOD doesn’t exist, why all the fuss in the first place? IS it because secularists like Michael Newdow don’t want their kids exposed to fairy tails?

Ummmm...I think we ALL now know his daughter didn’t have a problem with saying “Under God” in the Pledge, therefore to just dismiss Ben Stein’s assertions, particularly without even seeing the movie is...well QUITE laughable!

That might sell in Denver during the hypocrat convention, but...

Which brings us back to Ben Stein’s movie and science. Are you saying Godless liberals and their agenda to censor anything remotely Christian hasn’t yet made it into science classes?

After the sheer MOUNTAINS of evidence of the whack-jobs infesting ALL of our culture from banning santa to the mere word Christmas in school calendars to the crosses in town logos, there for hundreds of years...THAT is simply unbelieveable, with or without Stein’s movie!

While it may be true there are some secularists that aren’t out just to censor opinions of believers, it doesn’t mean there are not those with an agenda that has NOTHING to do with science and everything to do with controlling science classes (and everything else)!

As far as your questions...good luck, I’ve looked and found lots of documents! Some I liked, some not, but I always kept in mind that nothing I read was going to “prove” anything, anymore than Darwin’s THEORIES did!

MAYBE it would take more than reading through the DOZENS of hits up front on a google search to discredit ID? Just a thought!

Say...if Ben Stein IS right...perhaps more correct than we know, a google search for the papers you’re looking for might not easily produce them! You DO realize there’s probably more political interest, a culture war over the subject than honest science!

This makes me curious...do you require research papers every time you say, take a new medicine, btw?

Also IS a documentary, (with no papers attached) “good enough” to merely propose a “theory”?

There was a documentary, I think A&E or perhaps National Geographic? about the couple (two scientists) that searched in vain to disprove God but were more than ever convinced He exists once completed.

I wish I could remember the name of that...

Now, in the end, rather or not this is enough “PROOF” is only relevant to YOU.

I’m not a theorist or ID scientist, haven’t done research myself for years and years, so I don’t think I can help you...as I couldn’t even easily locate something on Darwin right now.

But my previous point was that you didn’t need the internet to submit papers within the past 20 years in Scientific Journals, let alone find them as easily as you assert.


372 posted on 04/30/2008 4:18:43 PM PDT by tpanther (The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing-----Edmund Burke)
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To: tpanther

The Scientific Method wasn’t developed to advance or protect the science of evolution. It applies uniformly to all natural phenomena that we can observe or even infer.

It certainly preceded Darwin.

Evolution has some problems with the Scientific Method, because it’s hard to run experiments to test it. You’d probably have to run a 40,000 year experiment to get a meaningful result. Perhaps longer, but species were involved that reproduced fairly quickly, that would give us some empirical test evidence.

But there is plenty of other evidence we have; the fossil record, radiometric dating, and genetics are just a few. And it also has a coherent theory of Natural Selection to explain how species change over time.

Intelligent Design only has a coherent theory of how things are today, but none of the other things that would provide evidence to support it. It’s a conclusion without much of an argument.

Nobody who didn’t already want ID to be the conclusion would argue that it’s science, because if it is, it doesn’t play by any of the scientific rules or methods.

It’s starting from the desired conclusion, and then looking anywhere for evidence to support it. And so far they have none, and probably never will because the desired conclusion is pretty firmly in the supernatural. Unless we can get God to perform magic tricks on stage before the camera it’s going to be very hard to prove that Adam was formed out of dirt and then a rib taken from him to form his wife. And how weird is that, anyhow?

I think I said it upthread, but I have no problem with anyone believing in ID if that’s what they want to do. I don’t think they should get away, though, with claiming it is science. It doesn’t get special rules just because it can’t produce any evidence.


373 posted on 04/30/2008 4:21:03 PM PDT by Dog Gone
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To: atlaw; All

Actually, I think you’ve just gone out of your way to prove several of my points.

Some people could have God come tell them he created science and everything else, yet they’d not only scream “BUT that’s NOT science” and just blame everything on the bad acid they did.

Say did you know Ohio discoverd 90% of it’s citizens believe in creation?

I bet you live in Ohio!

Oh well, there’s always Euroland!

Oh wait...


374 posted on 04/30/2008 4:41:36 PM PDT by tpanther (The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing-----Edmund Burke)
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To: Dog Gone

It’s starting from the desired conclusion, and then looking anywhere for evidence to support it.

>>>>>Sounds just like evolution and several other scientific theories to me!

And so far they have none, and probably never will because the desired conclusion is pretty firmly in the supernatural.

>>>>Like cell phones 300 years ago.

Unless we can get God to perform magic tricks on stage before the camera it’s going to be very hard to prove that Adam was formed out of dirt and then a rib taken from him to form his wife. And how weird is that, anyhow?

>>>>Well, doesn’t this really all come down to your point of view or perspective?

Take a medication, some scientists might study a drug for their entire lives and be married to the success of it, indeed as Freud was to cocaine. But any drug will do, take morphine, some would swear by it and proclaim it does (or doesn’t do) things it doesn’t (or does) do (according to others), or that it shouldn’t be so tightly controlled. ALL of them have run exhaustive experiments, written papers, run trial after trial. Indeed some doctors won’t even prescribe it out of all kinds of fears or biases. Some might steer away from it because of the DEA ALONE! HARDLY science...SURPRISE!

And yet most would agree morphine has a place in medicine, yet doctors agree, disagree, then back again on MANY drugs. So again, it’s concensus.

But saying a Dr. is a quack because of his beliefs or disbeliefs over medicine begs the question: aren’t they ALL quacks? Isn’t medicine a mixture of science and art? I know nursing sure is!

And let’s just go ahead and ban those we disagree with?

Science doesn’t come in a nice neat vacuum all by itslf, it’s influenced by religion, art, history, math...sheesh, can you imagine a history professor scream: “but, that’s not history”...or a math teacher scream: “but that’s not math”?

That’s not science has been said before: if you showed up in time travel to 800 AD in Europe with a cell phone and microwave, SCIENTISTS would burn you at the stake! Scientists are peole, they don’t know evewrything, they make mistakes and we’ve made discoveriesthat have literally redefined what we call science, so why the need to censor or prohibit free speech?

But this isn’t just true of science, as I said before, liberals re-writing history books comes to mind. Hi-jacking the country in all kinds of ways.

As far as God’s ways being weird...you seem to want it both ways, it can’t be science and HAS to be supernatural, but something like creating man from dirt or Eve from his rib is weird? Isn’t that the very idea of being supernatural though? Yet, the supernatural has become natural to us with cell phones and micowaves over time...something evolution gets a pass on btw...but not ID?

How weird is everything just “is” with absolutely ZERO explanation how matter just big banged it’s way here and nothing has a purpose or explanation, not to mention there was once upon a time a big glob of cells, then salamanders, then rodents, then apes then oh yeah, man!?

It’s really perspective AND science.

And since science is run by imperfect humans, I’ll be a little open minded and not judging what is or isn’t science now, let alone what it might look like in the future.

If it’s “not science” what’s the harm in letting that play out?


375 posted on 04/30/2008 5:09:44 PM PDT by tpanther (The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing-----Edmund Burke)
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To: tpanther

It’s the rib thing that was weird.

And evolution has nothing to say about the origin of life and certainly the astrophysics of the Big Bang. It addresses the origin of species.

I think I kind of get what you’re trying to say about cellphones, but simply because they might have been considered supernatural devices three hundred years ago does not equate them with ID. They were at least something that could have been looked at, handled and studied at the time. ID is merely an argument. Much different.

If we could study ID, find evidence to support it, or do anything else except argue about it, then it would be in the scientific arena. This should not be that hard to agree with.

Nobody is banning ID. It’s out there and it sells a lot of books, and one movie that isn’t doing that great.

But you just don’t get to win the argument that it’s science and should be taught equally with other scientific disciplines until it’s something more than a conclusion.

I can make a bunch of conclusions about nature, but that doesn’t make them science. Teach ID all you want. But you may not teach it as science until you play by the scientifc rules that existed long before Darwin.


376 posted on 04/30/2008 5:32:37 PM PDT by Dog Gone
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To: Dog Gone
National Review Online

In an interview with the Trinity Broadcasting Network, Ben Stein said the following amazing thing in an interview with Paul Crouch, Jr.

Stein:   When we just saw that man, I think it was Mr. Myers [i.e. biologist P.Z. Myers], talking about how great scientists were, I was thinking to myself the last time any of my relatives saw scientists telling them what to do they were telling them to go to the showers to get gassed … that was horrifying beyond words, and that’s where science — in my opinion, this is just an opinion — that’s where science leads you.

Crouch:   That’s right.

Stein:   …Love of God and compassion and empathy leads you to a very glorious place, and science leads you to killing people.

Crouch:   Good word, good word.

You can see the whole shameful thing here. It's a pity Crouch didn't invite the Rev. Jeremiah Wright into the studio for a three-way conversation. It would have elevated the tone.

377 posted on 04/30/2008 5:57:17 PM PDT by Dog Gone
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To: tpanther

So, if ID is science, Ben Stein is saying that it’s about killing people.

Or, he’s admitting it’s not science.

He can’t have it both ways.


378 posted on 04/30/2008 6:30:07 PM PDT by Dog Gone
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To: Dog Gone
I think it was Mr. Myers [i.e. biologist P.Z. Myers], talking about how great scientists were, I was thinking to myself the last time any of my relatives saw scientists telling them what to do they were telling them to go to the showers to get gassed … that was horrifying beyond words, and that’s where science — in my opinion, this is just an opinion — that’s where science leads you.

Wasn't it scientists, many of them Jewish, who helped us put an end to World War II and all of its horrors?

It is pretty sad to see Stein now condemning all scientists just because he wants to trash those who study the evolutionary sciences.

Stein has jumped the shark on this one.

(The sound you hear is his reputation and any remaining credibility going down the toilet.)

379 posted on 04/30/2008 6:30:18 PM PDT by Coyoteman (Religious belief does not constitute scientific evidence, nor does it convey scientific knowledge.)
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To: Coyoteman

I agree, it’s gone.

It doesn’t mean I wouldn’t watch him host a game show again, but he’s totally discredited himself on this particular subject.

And frankly he’s hurt his standing to weigh in on other matters which are purely political. It’s a complete logic fart he’s ventilating and it doesn’t serve him well.


380 posted on 04/30/2008 6:48:36 PM PDT by Dog Gone
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