Posted on 04/23/2003 12:28:15 PM PDT by Remedy
Edited on 05/07/2004 9:05:58 PM PDT by Jim Robinson. [history]
Seventy-eight years after the famous Scopes "monkey trial," Charles Darwin is stirring up trouble again.
Or, depending on your perspective, it's state Sen. Mike Fair who's stirring up the trouble.
The Republican from Greenville, irritated that a study done for the Fordham Foundation gave South Carolina an "A" for how well it teaches evolution, is challenging the premise of Darwin's widely accepted theory. He bases his argument on the fact that no one was there when life began to make a scientific observation about it.
(Excerpt) Read more at greenvilleonline.com ...
Anti-Creationists Backed Into a Corner? Forrest Turpen, executive director of Christian Educators Association International, says it is obvious the evolution-only advocates feel their ideology and livelihood are being threatened.
CREATION : EVOLUTIONARY ARROGANCE (SHAMAN ALERT)
One of their communicants, in fact, calls them its "shamans." He says,
We show deference to our leaders, pay respect to our elders and follow the dictates of our shamans; this being the Age of Science, it is scien-tism's shamans who command our veneration. . . . scientists [are] the premier mythmakers of our time.1
The investment of these leaders of the evolutionary faith with such pontifical authority, however, tends to generate in them an attitude of profound impatience with such heresies as creationism. Instead of opposing the creationists with scientific proofs of macroevolution, they resort to name-calling and ridicule. A professor at a Missouri university fulminates at the "lunatic literalism of the creationists,"4 especially "the weirdness produced by leaders such as Henry M. Morris."5
And even such an articulate and highly revered evolutionist as the late Stephen Jay Gould, in a voluminous book of 1433 pages published just before his death, referred angrily to "the scourge of creationism."6 He had refused many invitations to debate a qualified creationist scientist with the self-serving and misleading explanation that it would be a mistake to dignify creationism and its scientists in this way.
Dr. Massimo Pigliucci, who has lost a number of debates with Dr. Gish and other creationists, laments the fact that, "many Americans are still enchanted with dinosaurs such as John Morris and Duane Gish of the oxymoronically named Institute for Creation Research."7
Although Dr. Gould would never debate a creationist scientist, despite the inducement of large financial incentives to do so, he was quick to criticize them in print, calling them "fundamentalists who call themselves `creation scientists,' with their usual mixture of cynicism and ignorance."8 Gould often resorted, in fact, to the standard debate technique of name-calling and ad hominem arguments commonly used when one has no factual evidence to support his position.
One writer laments that even after the pope reaffirmed the commitment of the Catholic Church to evolution in 1996,
40 percent of American Catholics in a 2001 Gallup poll said they believed that God created human life in the past 10,000 years. Indeed, fully 45 percent of all Americans subscribe to this creationist view.12
But why would the public favor creation? Only a statistical minority of the "general public" attends church and Sunday school. Could it possibly be that evolution is so contrary to evidence and common sense that people intuitively know that evolution is wrong? And could it be that many of these have studied the evidences for themselves and thereby found that evolution is not really scientific after all?
Media Bias Stifles Creationists' Scientific Findings, Perspective He explains that the secular media -- which he describes as atheistic and anti-Christian -- publishes most anything it can that appears to indoctrinate people and "hits against the Bible."
Loosening Darwin's GripA poll released in May 2002 by Zogby International found that nearly eight out of every 10 Ohioans supported the teaching of intelligent design in classrooms where Darwinian evolution also is taught. A survey by The Plain Dealer newspaper in Cleveland offered similar findings: 74 percent of Ohioans said evidence for and against evolution should be taught in science classrooms, while 59 percent said intelligent design should be included in origins study.
Intelligently Designed Films The two videos complement each other well. Unlocking the Mystery of Life develops all of Intelligent Design's major molecular-based arguments for an "intelligent cause" of life's complexity, and thus presents the positive case. Icons of Evolution, on the other hand, spotlights the problems of Darwinism: its censorship of key scientific information in public schools, and the scientific misinformation it spreads through public textbooks.
Umm...no. Nope. For every guy like this you can find 1,000 geologists who will say the contrary. And anyone who takes a few geology courses can make up your own minds.
Here is an important point to remember. That is, Darwin's "theory" of evolution was proposed a looonnng time ago from a scientific perspective. In most branches of science, theories are overthrown and replaced every other generation or so. This is very true in the natural sciences. BUT Darwin's "theory" was not proposed in the clean way that we would define theories today, nor did it define its terms well. But that said, even though there are several scientific weaknesses in the theory, even if Darwin's theory is knocked down (and I for one am sure that it will be) that doesn't suddenly mean we are going to go "da winna, Creationism!"
Religion, on the other hand, doesn't depend on facts. If some Holy Book says something is true, if some Holy person claims cosmic knowledge, then it's true. Pork is unclean, the sun circles the earth, people rise from the dead, cows are sacred, anything at all. And if two Holy visions are contradictory then, historically, the matter is settled by violence and bloodshed.
That's really abiogenesis and not evolution. Darwinian evolution is a property of DNA/RNA -- an adaptable coding system. There are no complete theories on abiogenesis because of the lack of evidence from 3.5 billion years ago when DNA/RNA first appeared. However, there is plenty of evidence for evolution of DNA/RNA in the last 1 billion years or so.
"Inherit the Wind": A Hollywood History of the Scopes Trial"
Can you give a accepted example of this?
evolution, as I have said many times is ANTI-SCIENCE.
The central point of science is the discovery of causes and effects and materialist evolution denies it. It proposes random events as the engine of the transformation of species.
This is totally unscientific, it is an attack on science which in order to expand human knowledge and human health and living standards needs to find the causes and effects of how our Universe functions.
Randomness answers nothing and leads to no discoveries.
In fact it opposes scientific inquiry and is a philosophical know-nothingism.
That is why evolution has been popular with the masses and virtually ignored by scientists.
It is ... pseudo-science --- for morons.
With a few words such as 'survival of the fittest' and 'natural selection' it seeks to make idiots think they are knowledgeable.
We see the idiocy of evolution and evolutionists daily on these threads. That is why they all repeat the same stock phrases, throw a few links (because they cannot even understand the concepts being discussed), but never give any facts showing their theory to be what they claim it is - the center of science. If it was, they should have no problem doing so. It is not, that's why they cannot.
sop ...
The theory of evolution is just that - a theory.
g3 ...
It may be a theory, but it is not a scientifically supported theory which is what evolutionists claim it to be. Anybody can have a theory about anything. It is whether a theory is valid that is the point. So you have not given any evidence for your side. All you have done is indulge in rhetoric, but you have not shown that evolution is science or have in any way refuted my statement that evolution cannot in fact be science because of its central proposition that 'evolution just happens'.
Such is not science.
539 posted on 03/13/2003 8:59 PM PST by gore3000
Actually, they are not separate issues. The "separation" is a recent phenomena...devised by those who cannot answer, logically, the question of the origin of life. Darwin spoke of it, Gould spoke of it...as have a number of others. If you can't explain where life came from, don't bother trying to convince me of the unproven mechanisms of evolution.
Suggest you investigate Information Theory, and a little Pasteur.
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