Kalamata:
Kalamata post #458:
"You claim to have the book, but you didn't show quotes to back you your claims." I have the hard-copy c1989, 1993 Sixth printing 2003.
Kalamata: "Besides, what is wrong with believing an all-powerful God intelligently designed things as mind-boggling complex as cells?
Dumb Luck most certainly didn't create it.
Only a fool would believe that.
It is obvious to me, and anyone else paying attention, that evolutionists are trying to hide their hatred of God behind the veneer of science."
Most Christians would say that if God chose "dumb luck" to accomplish His purposes, so be it.
But then, how "dumb" can it be if it's all according to God's plans?
As for who really "hates God" more, who could hate God more than those who wish to confine Him to Creationists' "God of the Gaps" theology?
Kalamata: "Why are you so quick to support judicial rulings contrary to our Christian heritage?
Are you aware that the Supreme Court ruled this to be a Christian nation?"
Curiously enough, it turns out that modern conservative textualist Justice Antonin Scalia opposed the Court's Church v US 1892 decision precisely because it was, we would say, "activist" in trying to interpret the lawmakers' intent rather than the law's text.
Indeed, Scalia himself marked that SCOTUS decision as the point at which the Supreme Court first began to come off its rails.
Justice David Brewer, Republican from Kansas, wrote the Court's unanimous decision, and in 1905 explained his words in a book, "The United States: A Christian Nation".
"In fact, the government as a legal organization is independent of all religions.
Nevertheless, we constantly speak of this republic as a Christian Nation—in fact, as the leading Christian Nation of the world.
This popular use of the term certainly has significance.
It is not a mere creation of the imagination.
It is not a term of derision but has substantial basis—one which justifies its use.[4][5]"
We should further notice the case had nothing whatever to do with public schools, prayers or evolution, but involved laws prohibiting hiring contracts for immigrant laborers and should those apply to priests?
Justice Brewer said "no" even though the law's text made no such exemptions.
Justice Scalia pointed to that as the beginnings of judicial activism.
Kalamata: "Where is stare decisis when you need it."
Stare decisis is often overturned when SCOTUS feels more modern laws or consensus contradict it.
Kalamata: "That is what school boards are elected to do, not the ACLU, and not disgruntled, left-wing "science" teachers, or a handful of parents.
The school board voted 6-3 in favor of introducing ID.
That should have been it, until the next election.
But busybodies at the ACLU can't resist meddling in the affairs of others: no communist can.
It is in their blood."
Again I refer you to my post #468 for a long list of court decisions going back to 1968, defending evolution in public school science classes.
Kalamata: "I didn't claim science was moral relativistic, Joey.
When are you going to show us a few observed facts that support common descent, Joey?
You know you cannot, because all the observed facts support special creation."
All of that is just more of your slavish obedience to Denier Rules, in this case #1, #2, #5, #6, #7, #8 & #9. ![]()
>>Kalamata: "Besides, what is wrong with believing an all-powerful God intelligently designed things as mind-boggling complex as cells? Dumb Luck most certainly didn't create it. Only a fool would believe that. It is obvious to me, and anyone else paying attention, that evolutionists are trying to hide their hatred of God behind the veneer of science."
>>Joey wrote, "Most Christians would say that if God chose "dumb luck" to accomplish His purposes, so be it. But then, how "dumb" can it be if it's all according to God's plans?"
I don't know of any Christian who believes that way.
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>>Joey wrote, "As for who really "hates God" more, who could hate God more than those who wish to confine Him to Creationists' "God of the Gaps" theology?"
There are no gaps in creationist science. You must be referring to the evolutionism "god of the gaps" theology, that prophesies, "one day those gaps will be filled in."
This is Niles Eldredge on the "god of the gaps":
"For one thing, Darwin mused, paleontology in his day was still in its infancy. Surely, he wrote, paleontology would eventually provide full corroboration of his theory. Darwin actually believed that his entire theory of "transmutation" (or "descent with modification"—he never called it "evolution" in the Origin) would stand or fall on the eventual recovery of many examples of gradual evolution in the fossil record."
"But the collective inexperience of paleontologists did not completely allay Darwin's qualms. So, brilliant and thorough thinker that he was, he essentially invented a new field of scientific inquiry—what is now called "taphonomy" -- to explain why the fossil record is so deficient, so full of gaps, that the predicted patterns of gradual change simply do not emerge."
[Eldredge, Niles, "Reinventing Darwin: the great debate at the high table of evolutionary theory." John Wiley & Sons, ISBN 0-471-30301-1, 1995, Chap.4, pp.95-96]
This is Richard Leakey on the "god of the gaps":
"Unfortunately, the fossil record is somewhat incomplete as far as the hominids are concerned, and it is all but blank for the apes. The best we can hope for is that more fossils will be found over the next few years which will fill the present gaps in the evidence. The major gap, often referred to as the 'fossil void', is between eight and four million years ago." [Leakey, Richard E., "The Making of Mankind." 1981, Chap.3, p.43]
This is Jack Szostak on the "god of the gaps":
"The problem of the origin of life, if you stand back and look at the whole thing, is a whole pathway all the way from planet formation to the various chemical steps, like making nucleotides, to assembling a protocell, which is what we're working on, and then on to the evolution of the genetic code, etc... What I meant when I said 'three to five years' was, given the building blocks, if we have the building blocks, we'll be able to generate an evolving protocell. There may still be gaps in our knowledge of how, prebiotically, to make nucleotides, or maybe gaps with what happens afterwards. We're just working on that little part of how you get the molecules to work together and act like a cell." [Mazur, Suzan, "Jack Szostak on Life in the Lab." Huffington Post, Aug 31, 2014]
This is Chandra Wickramasinghe on the "god of the gaps":
"Frequent and massive gaps in the fossil record and the absence of transitional forms at the most crucial stages in the development of life show clearly that Darwinism is woefully inadequate to explain the facts. What the fossil record does show beyond doubt is that new properties of life at the level of expressed genes have been introduced by successive experiments. Only when these experiments were successful did the changes endure. Lines with unsuccessful or inoperable gene additions simply died away." [Wickramasinghe, Chandra, "Evidence in the Trial at Arkansas." Pansmeria, 1981]
This is Christopher McGowan on the "god of the gaps":
"When we see gaps within a segment of the fossil record, we should remember that these gaps may not necessarily be as significant as they appear, because they may be bridged by features that are not preserved. For example, if we compared skeletons of the two living groups of whales, the toothed whales (including dolphins) and the baleen whales (including the gray whale), we would see many differences between them, especially in the skulls. But when we compare other features, such as the tail fluke, which is not supported by any skeletal structure, the complex brain, and the breathing apparatus, not to mention their complex behavior, which includes vocalization and much more besides, we realize that the two groups have a great deal in common and the gap between them is narrowed." [McGowan, Christopher, "In the Beginning: a Scientist Shows Why the Creationists Are Wrong." 1984, Chap.8, pp.95-96]
This is David Kitt on the "god of the gaps":
"Despite the bright promise that paleontology provides a means of "seeing" evolution, it has presented some nasty difficulties for evolutionists the most notorious of which is the presence of "gaps" in the fossil record. Evolution requires intermediate forms between species and paleontology does not provide them. The gaps must therefore be a contingent feature of the record. Darwin was concerned enough about this problem to devote a chapter of the "Origin" to it. He accounts for "the imperfections of the geological record" largely on the basis of the lack of continuous deposition of sediments and by erosion. Darwin also holds out the hope that some of the gaps would be filled as the result of subsequent collecting. But most of the gaps were still there a century later and some paleontologists were no longer willing to explain them away geologically. Simpson was the most prominent among them." [Kitts, David B., "Paleontology and Evolutionary Theory." Evolution, 1973, p.467]
Jerry Coyne on the "god of the gaps":
"These discrete clusters are known as species. And at first sight, their existence looks like a problem for evolutionary theory. Evolution is, after all, a continuous process, so how can it produce groups of animals and plants that are discrete and discontinuous, separated from others by gaps in appearance and behavior? How these groups arise is the problem of speciation—or the origin of species."
"That, of course, is the title of Darwin’s most famous book, a title implying that he had a lot to say about speciation. … Yet Darwin’s magnum opus was largely silent on the “mystery of mysteries.” And what little he did say on this topic is seen by most modern evolutionists as muddled."
[Coyne, Jerry A., "Why Evolution is True." Oxford University Press, 2009, Chap 7, pp.184-5]
This is Sol Tax on the "god of the gaps":
"It is a feature of the known fossil record that most taxa appear abruptly. They are not, as a rule, led up to by a sequence of almost imperceptibly changing forerunners such as Darwin believed should be usual in evolution... This phenomenon becomes more universal and more intense as the hierarchy of categories is ascended. Gaps among known species are sporadic and often small. Gaps among known orders, classes, and phyla are systematic and almost always large. These peculiarities of the record pose one of the most important theoretical problems in the whole history of life: Is the sudden appearance of higher categories a phenomenon of evolution or of the record only, due to sampling bias and other inadequacies?" ["The History of Life", by George Gaylor Simpson, in, in Tax, Sol, "Evolution after Darwin Vol I - The Evolution of Life." 1960, p.149]
Richard Dawkins on the "god of the gaps":
"Before we come to the sort of sudden bursts that they had in mind, there are some conceivable meanings of 'sudden bursts' that they most definitely did not have in mind. These must be cleared out of the way because they have been the subject of serious misunderstandings. Eldredge and Gould certainly would agree that some very important gaps really are due to imperfections in the fossil record. Very big gaps, too. For example the Cambrian strata of rocks, vintage about 600 million years, are the oldest ones in which we find most of the major invertebrate groups. And we find many of them already in an advanced state of evolution, the very first time they appear. It is as though they were just planted there, without any evolutionary history. Needless to say, this appearance of sudden planting has delighted creationists. Evolutionists of all stripes believe, however, that this really does represent a very large gap in the fossil record, a gap that is simply due to the fact that, for some reason, very few fossils have lasted from periods before about 600 million years ago. One good reason might be that many of these animals had only soft parts to their bodies: no shells or bones to fossilize. If you are a creationist you may think that this is special pleading. My point here is that, when we are talking about gaps of this magnitude, there is no difference whatever in the interpretations of 'punctuationists' and 'gradualists'. Both schools of thought despise so-called scientific creationists equally, and both agree that the major gaps are real, that they are true imperfections in the fossil record. Both schools of thought agree that the only alternative explanation of the sudden appearance of so many complex animal types in the Cambrian era is divine creation, and both would reject this alternative." [Puncturing Punctuationism, in Dawkins, Richard, "The Blind Watchmaker." W. W. Norton & Company, 1986, Chap. 9, pp.229-30]
This is Colin Patterson on the failure of the "god of the gaps" religion:
"It seemed obvious to [Darwin] that, if his theory of evolution is correct, fossils ought to provide incontrovertible proof of it because each geological stratum should contain links between the species or earlier and later strata and… it would be possible to arrange them in ancestor-descendent sequences and so build up a precise picture of the course of evolution. This was not so in Darwin’s time and today, after many more decades of assiduous fossil collecting, the picture still has extensive gaps." [Patterson, Colin, "Evolution." British Museum of Natural History, 1978, p.106]
And, to sum it up, we present Michael Ruse, interviewed by Peter Dizikes:
"While scientists and creationists often square off over the scientific evidence for evolution, the source of the ongoing dispute is deeper. 'This is not just a fight about dinosaurs or gaps in the fossil record,'' says Ruse, speaking from his home in Florida. 'This is a fight about different worldviews.'" [Dizikes, Peter, "Evolutionary war." Boston Globe, 23 Oct, 2005]
Mr. Kalamata
>>Kalamata: "Why are you so quick to support judicial rulings contrary to our Christian heritage? Are you aware that the Supreme Court ruled this to be a Christian nation?"
>>Joey said, "Curiously enough, it turns out that modern conservative textualist Justice Antonin Scalia opposed the Court's Church v US 1892 decision precisely because it was, we would say, "activist" in trying to interpret the lawmakers' intent rather than the law's text. Indeed, Scalia himself marked that SCOTUS decision as the point at which the Supreme Court first began to come off its rails."
That is incomplete, and therefore deceptive. Scalia agreed with the court that our nation is a Christian nation, and his objection had nothing to do with that fact. Rather, he objected to the court not following the law, which was on immigration policy:
"The Court proceeds to conclude from various extratextual indications, including even a snippet of legislative history (highly unusual in those days), that the statute was intended to apply only to manual labor—which renders the exceptions for actors, artists, lecturers, and singers utterly inexplicable. The Court then shifts gears and devotes the last seven pages of its opinion to a lengthy description of how and why we are a religious nation. That being so, it says, '[t]he construction invoked cannot be accepted as correct.'..."
"Well of course I think that the act was within the letter of the statute, and was therefore within the statute: end of case. Congress can enact foolish statutes as well as wise ones, and it is not for the courts to decide which is which and rewrite the former…"
"I agree with Judge Calabresi (and Professor Eskridge makes the same point) that many decisions can be cited which, by subterfuge, accomplish precisely what Calabresi and Eskridge and other honest nontextualists propose. As I have said, 'legislative intent' divorced from text is one of those subterfuges; and as I have described, Church of the Holy Trinity is one of those cases. What I think is needed, however, is not rationalization of this process but abandonment of it. It is simply not compatible with democratic theory that laws mean whatever they ought to mean, and that unelected judges decide what that is."
"It may well be that the statutory interpretation adopted by the Court in Church of the Holy Trinity produced a desirable result; and it may even be (though I doubt it) that it produced the unexpressed result actually intended by Congress, rather than merely the one desired by the Court. Regardless, the decision was wrong because it failed to follow the text. The text is the law, and it is the text that must be observed."
[Church of the Holy Trinity vs. United States, 1892, in Antonin Scalia, "Matter of Interpretation: Federal Courts and the Law." Princeton University Press, 1997, pp.19-20, 22]
There are no congressional laws "respecting the establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof," and rightly so. However, the federal judiciary has created new "laws" out of thin air, and then ruled on them, rather than respecting the letter of the Constitutional text.
One of those new "laws" states the federal judiciary has jurisdiction over the religion of the several states. There is no provision for that in the Constitution, so the judiciary must resort to usurpation to support the "law" they unconstitutional created. It is a blatant act of tyranny by the judiciary.
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>>Joey said: "Justice David Brewer, Republican from Kansas, wrote the Court's unanimous decision, and in 1905 explained his words in a book, "The United States: A Christian Nation". >>Joey quoted Brewer: "In fact, the government as a legal organization is independent of all religions. Nevertheless, we constantly speak of this republic as a Christian Nation—in fact, as the leading Christian Nation of the world. This popular use of the term certainly has significance. It is not a mere creation of the imagination. It is not a term of derision but has substantial basis—one which justifies its use.[4][5] >>Joey said: "We should further notice the case had nothing whatever to do with public schools, prayers or evolution, but involved laws prohibiting hiring contracts for immigrant laborers and should those apply to priests?Justice Brewer said "no" even though the law's text made no such exemptions. Justice Scalia pointed to that as the beginnings of judicial activism."
You don't understand what you read, Joey, or you are not presenting it well. Both Brewer and Scalia agreed this is a Christian nation; and Scalia's objection had nothing to do with the immigrant being a priest. The immigrant could have been a wealthy developer, but not listed in the exclusions, and Scalia's opinion would have been the same. Bottom line, Brewer's court failed to follow the law, and Scalia objected for that reason, and that reason only.
By the way, Brewer goes on to mention the Christian nature of the historical charters on which the New World and the colonies were founded:
"The commission from Ferdinand and Isabella to Columbus recites that "it is hoped that by God's assistance some of the continents and islands in the ocean will be discovered." The first colonial grant, that made to Sir Walter Raleigh, in 1584, authorized him to enact statutes for the government of the proposed colony, provided that "they be not against the true Christian faith now professed in the Church of England." The first charter of Virginia, granted by King James I, in 1606, after reciting the application of certain parties for a charter, commenced the grant in these words: "We, greatly commending, and graciously accepting of, their desires for the furtherance of so noble a work, which may, by the providence of Almighty God, hereafter tend to the glory of His Divine Majesty, in propagating the Christian religion to such people as yet live in darkness and miserable ignorance of the true knowledge and worship of God." And language of similar import is found in subsequent charters of the same colony, from the same king, in 1609 and 1611. The celebrated compact made by the Pilgrims on the Mayflower, in 1620, recites: 'Having undertaken for the glory of God and advancement of the Christian faith and the honor of our king and country a voyage to plant the first colony in the northern parts of Virginia.'" [David J. Brewer, "The United States a Christian Nation." John C. Winston Company, 1905, pp.13-14]
And, so forth. The infiltration of Darwinism led to the breaking of those sacred charters, and the corruption of the Christian society that help create our Free Republic.
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>>Kalamata: "Where is stare decisis when you need it."
>>Joey said, "Stare decisis is often overturned when SCOTUS feels more modern laws or consensus contradict it."
I was being facetious. The concept of stare decisis has a corrupting influence. All interpretations, to be lawful, should be made on the original text of the Constitution, as amended; not on evolving case law.
I read at one time, perhaps here on Free Republic, a brilliant description of our current judicial system, based on two simple commandments:
1) Thou shalt fill the halls to the rafters with case law. 2) Thou shalt build more halls.
And that is the enemy of a Free Republic, in a nutshell.
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>>Kalamata: "That is what school boards are elected to do, not the ACLU, and not disgruntled, left-wing "science" teachers, or a handful of parents. The school board voted 6-3 in favor of introducing ID. That should have been it, until the next election. But busybodies at the ACLU can't resist meddling in the affairs of others: no communist can. It is in their blood."
>>Joey said, "Again I refer you to my post #468 for a long list of court decisions going back to 1968, defending evolution in public school science classes."
That is a good example of the corrupting influence of evolving case law. Let us go back to the days of the founding fathers and let then decide what is and is not allowed to be taught in public schools.
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>>Kalamata: "I didn't claim science was moral relativistic, Joey. When are you going to show us a few observed facts that support common descent, Joey? You know you cannot, because all the observed facts support special creation."
>>Joey said, "All of that is just more of your slavish obedience to Denier Rules, in this case #1, #2, #5, #6, #7, #8 & #9."
I ask for evidence of the foundation of Charlie Darwin's silly theory -- common descent -- and Joey replies with his silly, childish rules.
Mr. Kalamata