Posted on 06/07/2002 11:35:28 AM PDT by jennyp
To Seattle area residents the struggle over how evolution is taught in public high schools may seem a topic from the distant past or a distant place.
Don't bet on it. One nearby episode in the controversy has ended, but a far-reaching, Seattle-based agenda to overthrow Darwin is gaining momentum.
Roger DeHart, a high-school science teacher who was the center of an intense curriculum dispute a few years ago in Skagit County, is leaving the state. He plans to teach next year in a private Christian school in California.
The fuss over DeHart's use of "intelligent design" theory in his classes at Burlington-Edison High School was merely a tiny blip in a grand scheme by promoters of the theory.
The theory is essentially this: Life is so complex that it can only be the result of design by an intelligent being.
Who is this unnamed being? Well, God, I presume. Wouldn't you?
As unlikely as it may seem, Seattle is ground zero for the intelligent-design agenda, thanks to the Seattle-based Discovery Institute and its Center for Renewal of Science and Culture (CRSC).
Headed by one-time Seattle City councilman and former Reagan administration official Bruce Chapman, the Discovery Institute is best known locally for its savvy insights on topics ranging from regionalism, transportation, defense policy and the economy.
In the late '90s, the institute jumped into the nation's culture wars with the CRSC. It may be little known to local folks, but it has caught the attention of conservative religious organizations around the country.
It's bound to get more attention in the future. Just last month, a documentary, Icons of Evolution, premiered at Seattle Pacific University. The video is based on a book of the same name by CRSC fellow Jonathan Wells. It tells the story of DeHart, along with the standard critique of Darwinian evolution that fuels the argument for intelligent design.
The video is part of the anti-Darwin agenda. Cruise the Internet on this topic and you'll find something called the Wedge Strategy, which credits the CRSC with a five-year plan for methodically promoting intelligent design and a 20-year goal of seeing "design theory permeate our religious, cultural, moral and political life."
Last week, Chapman tried to put a little distance between his institute and the "wedge" document. He said it was a fund-raising tool used four years ago. "I don't disagree with it," he told me, "but it's not our program." (I'll let the folks who gave money based on the proposed strategy ponder what that means.)
Program or not, it is clear that the CRSC is intent on bringing down what one Center fellow calls "scientific imperialism." Surely Stephen Jay Gould already is spinning in his grave. Gould, one of America's most widely respected scientists and a prolific essayist, died just two weeks ago. Among his many fine books is one I kept by my bedside for many weeks after it was published in 1999, "Rock of Ages: Science and Religion in the Fullness of Life."
In "Rock of Ages," Gould presents an elegant case for the necessary co-existence of science and religion. Rather than conflicting, as secular humanists insist, or blending, as intelligent-design proponents would have it, science and religion exist in distinct domains, what Gould called magisteria (domains of teaching authority).
The domain of science is the empirical universe; the domain of religion is the moral, ethical and spiritual meaning of life.
Gould was called America's most prominent evolutionist, yet he too, was a critic of Darwin's theory, and the object of some controversy within the scientific community. There's a lesson in that: In the domain of science there is plenty of room for disagreement and alternative theories without bringing God into the debate.
I have no quarrel with those who believe in intelligent design. It has appeal as a way to grasp the unknowable why of our existence. But it is only a belief. When advocates push intelligent design as a legitimate scientific alternative to Darwinian explanations of evolution, it is time to push back.
That's what they continue to do in Skagit County. Last week, the Burlington-Edison School Board rejected on a 4-1 vote a proposal to "encourage" the teaching of intelligent design. Bravo.
Despite proponents' claims of scientific validity, intelligent design is little more than religion-based creationism wrapped in critiques of Darwin and all dressed up in politically correct language. All for the ultimate goal — placing a Christian God in science classrooms of America's public high schools.
"So the people who mean to do without the Constitution have come up with a slogan to keep up appearances: they say the Constitution is a “living document,” which sounds like a compliment. They say it has “evolved” in response to “changing circumstances,” etc. They sneer at the idea that such a mystic document could still have the same meanings it had two centuries ago, or even, I guess, sixty years ago, just before the evolutionary process started accelerating with fantastic velocity. These people, who tend with suspicious consistency to be liberals, have discovered that the Constitution, whatever it may have meant in the past, now means — again, with suspicious consistency — whatever suits their present convenience."
"Do liberals want big federal entitlement programs? Lo, the Interstate Commerce Clause turns out to mean that the big federal programs are constitutional! Do liberals oppose capital punishment? Lo, the ban on “cruel and unusual punishment” turns out to mean that capital punishment is unconstitutional! Do liberals want abortion on demand? Lo, the Ninth and Fourteenth Amendments, plus their emanations and penumbras, turn out to mean that abortion is nothing less than a woman’s constitutional right!"
"Can all this be blind evolution? If liberals were more religious, they might suspect the hand of Providence behind it! This marvelous “living document” never seems to impede the liberal agenda in any way. On the contrary: it always seems to demand, by a... wonderful coincidence---just what liberals are prescribing on other grounds."
... the eerie silence of 4 computers, 2 printers & 2 monitors being turned off for the first time in years...
The storm was MAJOR cool. But the best was over by the time we'd turned the computers off. One strike was so close that the initial crack was distinct & crackly, and the rumble came a few seconds later & felt like a 4.0 quake! I was very surprised that the electricity didn't go out.
(Transplanted midwesterner here being nostalgic for exciting weather - can you tell?)
And yet dolphins only exist because of humanity's good intentions -- all the second-order alliances in the world can't keep them out of the nets of a Japanese trawler fishing for tuna.
True, but so what? You could say the same thing about your local Indian tribe.
So that means the atheist, by default, believes in the Stupid Designer Theory. Stupidity is by definition lack of intelligence.
stu·pid·i·ty [stoo pídd tee ] (plural stu·pid·i·ties) noun
1. lack of intelligence: lack of intelligence, perception, or common sense
The atheist must now use stupidity (lack of intelligence) to explain everything:
Morality, intelligence, the universe, the beginning of life, plant and animal relationship/balance, etc… The atheist laughs and ridicules the Christian for their beliefs and calls them ignorant. Is the stupid designer theory is their doorway to enlightenment? Regardless it is incumbent upon the atheist and their stupid design theory to explain life:
"For two millennia, the design argument provided an intellectual foundation for much of Western thought. From classical antiquity through the rise of modern science, leading philosophers, theologians, and scientists. From Plato to Aquinas to Newton, maintained that nature manifests the design of a preexistent mind or intelligence. Moreover, for many Western thinkers, the idea that the physical universe reflected the purpose or design of a preexistent mind, a Creator, served to guarantee humanity's own sense of purpose and meaning. Yet today in nearly every academic discipline from law to literary theory, from behavioral science to biology, a thoroughly materialistic understanding of humanity and its place in the universe has come to dominate. Free will, meaning, purpose, and God have become pejorative terms in the academy. Matter has subsumed mind; cosmos replaced Creator."
And Gould's expanation: "a deduction from my knowledge of nature's factuality" is "nature was not constructed as our eventual abode, didn't know we were coming... and doesn't give a ______ about us (speaking metaphorically)." He says he finds such a view "liberating...because we then become free to conduct moral discourse...in our own terms, spared from the delusion that we might read moral truth passively from nature's factuality." It is indeed hard not to draw the conclusion that Gould has read his view about the process of evolution into his own moral position. How does he know that nature was not constructed for us if not from his studies of the natural world? How would he know it doesn't care about us unless somehow he saw this in his studies? Where else might he get such ideas?
"Stephen Gould has a materialist philosophy behind his theory of evolution. He believes that the material universe is all that exists, and that our own consciousness is a chance phenomena and does not come from a Creator. So, for Gould, where else can he draw his views about the meaning of life and what might be moral? His very thinking is a chance product of evolutionary processes that had no design, either to produce man or to give him a mind. Nonetheless, Gould trusts his mind not only to be able to distinguish between science and religion, he is sure that they should not influence one another."
The stupid designer theory. Sure they might replace the word stupidity with natural selection and random variation, and also include other mechanisms (symbiosis, gene transfer, genetic drift, the action of regulatory genes in development, self-organizational processes, etc.). These mechanisms are just that: mindless material mechanisms that do what they do irrespective of intelligence. To be sure, mechanisms can be programmed by an intelligence. But any such intelligent programming of evolutionary mechanisms is not properly part of evolutionary biology.
No matter what word they choose at the time to describe their stupid design, it must come from a lack of intelligence. But does 'intelligence' tell us anything?
…mutation and selection are incapable of generating highly specific, information-rich structures that pervade biology. Organisms display the hallmarks of intelligently engineered high-tech systems: information storage and transfer capability; functioning codes; sorting and delivery systems; self-regulation and feed-back loops; signal transduction circuitry; and everywhere, complex, mutually-interdependent networks of parts. For this reason, University of Chicago molecular biologist James Shapiro regards Darwinism as almost completely unenlightening for understanding biological systems and prefers an information processing model. Design theorists take this one step further, arguing that information processing presupposes a programmer?
I believe this "program' analogy to be very accurate.
Write an extremely complex computer program capable of creating a living geometric being within certain parameters but allowing for an external tolerance. A good example of this is a seed (the program) growing into (creating a geometric being) a plant (within certain parameters) that receives Sun and rain from the environment (but allowing for an external tolerance). But even beyond this - the program can reproduce!
Can you write a program that can do this? If so, once you are complete, stand back and say, “There is no intelligence behind this program.”
Did everything come from stupidity? Even our own intelligence? Have we thunk ourselves stupid? Check you ‘Truth Table”.
When you take human language texts and create a histogram plotting the log of the frequency of occurrence of words against the log of the rank, the resulting plot is always linear with a slope of -1 for every human language. Likewise, when you perform the same plot for coding and non-coding DNA, the plot for the non-coding DNA exhibits a nearly perfect linear relationship (much better than that seen for the coding regions of DNA). The purpose or function of this "DNA language" was not determined. Another study showed that DNA contains large areas with unexplained patterns (4). Such patterns could not be the result of random chance as stated by Dr. H. Eugene Stanley (Boston University), "it is almost incredible that the occupant of one site on a gene would somehow influence which nucleotide shows up even 100,000 bases away."
From The Blind Atheist
If you can't find any evidence, you will need to either modify or discard your hypothesis.
Or explain why the evidence isn't there, which is kind of what punctuated equilibrium is all about.
You know, if there was no evidence of species evolving into another species, then you'd have a point. But Punk eek describes a pattern that should be found in the fossils whenever you find enough of them, and this pattern has been observed, in several instances. So punk eek as a process of speciation has been verified to hold true in at least some cases.
Obviously, you have never read the works of David Brin. ;^>
A wolf, for example, by definition lives in a den -- it can never train itself to create a spider web to catch a deer. In fact, it can never train itself to do anything.
Neither can a baby.
Humans are the only species that will do something simply for the hell of it.
Wrong again. Many species are "curious" and conduct activities unrelated to survival (i.e., for fun). Cats, dogs, porpoises, whales, otters, the list is endless.
I like that point on the evolution of the economy, jennyp!
Patrick Henry, general_re, VadeRetro: I wondered where the fedora brigade went!
But the legal system evolved. The monetary system evolved. The system of titles & title insurance, etc. evolved. If they didn't, then please tell me the names of the designers of today's legal, monetary, title, etc. systems?
"Dr. Piekoff relates in his book the statement of a journalist who basically nailed the direction in which the entire American society, from religion to government to education, is headed: "No serious thinker any longer believes in verifiable, objective reality."
"Because of that education, including math and science, can be taught in grade school or high school, to socialize children rather than to impart immutable facts like the times tables or the basic laws of physics. Where that leads, the inability to recognize certain truths as absolutes, is toward chaos and eventual dependence and rule by totalitarians."
"What is even more ominous is that by failing to educate the young, we are creating a society that will be even more easily manipulated in the future. No amount of money for education is going to change what is basically wrong with the present system. Blaming teachers unions is not even important in that regard."
"What is important is to recognize that the entire educational establishment, the philosophy behind it, is coming out of the same... cesspool of thinking---that gave rise to fascism and Nazi Germany and Lenin and Stalin."
I take it a human posted this ...
I wasn't going to respond to this, but now that f. Christian has put out an excerpt from an article that quotes Peikoff, said excerpt seeming to indicate that an Objectivist writer is vaguely insinuating that modern science is in bed with the Nazis, I must let Peikoff clarify just where Naziism came from:
True reality, [Hegel b.1770, d.1831] holds, is a nonmaterial dimension, beyond time and space and human sense-perception. In Hegel's version, reality is a dynamic cosmic mind or thought-process, which in various contexts is referred to as the Absolute, the Spirit, the World-Reason, God, etc. According to Hegel, it is in the essential nature of this entity to undergo a constant process of evolution or development, unfolding itself in various stages. In one of these stages, the Absolute "externalizes" itself, assuming the form of a material world. Continuing its career, it takes on the appearance of a multiplicity of human beings, each seemingly distinct from the others, each seemingly an autonomous individual with his own personal thoughts and desires.The appearance of such separate individuals represents, however, merely a comparatively low stage in the Absolute's career. ... It does not represent the culmination of the Absolute's development. At that stage, i.e., at the apex or climax of reality, ... distinctions of any kind, including the distinctions between mind and matter and between one man and another, are unreal....
The ethics and politics which Hegel derives from his fundamental philosophy can be indicated by two sentences from his Philosophy of Right: "A single person, I need hardly say, is something subordinate, and as such he must dedicate himself to the ethical whole. Hence if the state claims life, the individual must surrender it."
...
The state-organism is no mere secular entity. As a manifestation of the Absolute, it is a creature of God, and thus demands not merely obedience from its citizens but reverential worship. "The State is the Divine Idea as it exists on earth." "The march of God in the world, that is what the state is." The purpose of the state, therefore, is not the protection of its citizens. The state is not a means to any human end. As an entity with supernatural credentials, it is "an absolute unmoved end in itself," and it "has supreme right against the individual, whose supreme duty is to be a member of the state."
The above are the kinds of political ideas which Hegel, more than any other man, injected into the mind of early nineteenth-century Germany.
...
The direct source of the Nazi racial ideas was the theoreticians of racism.... These men accepted wholeheartedly the collectivist sentiment of the period's intellectuals, and then sought to gain for that sentiment the appearance of scientific support - by translating collectivism into the language of the favorite science of the time, biology. The result was a mounting torrent on the following order (from Vacher de Lapouge, a nineteenth-century French Aryan-glorifier): "The blood which one has in one's veins at birth one keeps all one's life. The individual is stifled by his race and is nothing. The race, the nation, is all." No amount of passion for biology (or for Darwin) could produce such an utterance. A dose of Hegel, however, could.
What the theoreticians of racism did was to secularize the Hegelian approach, as Karl Popper explains eloquently. Marx, he observes:
replaced Hegel's "Spirit" by matter, and by material and economic interests. In the same way, racialism substitutes for Hegel's "Spirit" something material, the quasi-biological conception of Blood or Race. Instead of "Spirit," Blood is the self-developing essence; instead of "Spirit," Blood is the Sovereign of the world, and displays itself on the Stage of History; and instead of "Spirit," the Blood of a nation determines its essential destiny.-- Leonard Peikoff, 1982, The Ominous Parallels, pp 34-35.The transubstantiation of Hegelianism into racialism or of Spirit into Blood does not greatly alter the main tendency of Hegelianism. It only gives it a tinge of biology and of modern evolutionism. [Karl Popper, 1962, The Open Society and its Enemies]
The 'nameless intelligent designer'(NID). I've gotten so used to calling the great IAM, God.
"In order to create the "new man" for the new state, one must first capture the language. Then they must capture the institutions such as the universities. The... totalitarians---have done that in the United States in the last half-century far better than if we had been invaded by Russians in the '60s. Instead we were invaded by the products of the Frankfurt School of Sociology and its generals such as Herbert Marcuse and Saul Alinsky."
And in California, the creature of choice is the gerbil.
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