Posted on 12/21/2004 7:59:02 PM PST by postitnews.com
HARRISBURG, PA-The American Civil Liberties Union of Pennsylvania, Americans United for Separation of Church and State and attorneys with Pepper Hamilton LLP filed a federal lawsuit today on behalf of 11 parents who say that presenting "intelligent design" in public school science classrooms violates their religious liberty by promoting particular religious beliefs to their children under the guise of science education.
"Teaching students about religion's role in world history and culture is proper, but disguising a particular religious belief as science is not," said ACLU of Pennsylvania Legal Director Witold Walczak. "Intelligent design is a Trojan Horse for bringing religious creationism back into public school science classes."
The Rev. Barry W. Lynn, Americans United Executive Director, added, "Public schools are not Sunday schools, and we must resist any efforts to make them so. There is an evolving attack under way on sound science...Read More
(Excerpt) Read more at postitnews.com ...
My point is that without a rigorous definition of love (or justice or any other such quality that you mention) and a rigorous way to measure such a quality, it would be difficult to do any kind of scientific determination that would make any sense. I was not suggesting that such a quantitative treatment would be possible, but rather suggesting that a scientific theory should not be faulted for failing to account for qualities that are difficult to treat scientifically.
It's sooooooooooooooooooooo impressive
SCIENTIFICALLY
that you are appealing to a political popularity contest
to SUPPORT your "SCIENTIFIC" stance.
Fascinating.
My perspective is
that one person and God is a sufficient majority to decide anything.
It's going to be fun watching Him humiliate the greatest wisdom of man with God's doggy bone foolishness!
that a scientific theory should not be faulted for failing to account for qualities that are difficult to treat scientifically.
Perhaps.
But then, one would think that PERHAPS such "scientists" would have the logical consistency and integrity to AVOID pontificating as though their methods were so robustly relevant, useful, functional, fitting etc. as to allow rational grandstanding of the most extreme illogical and grandiose lengths.
In other words, YA COULDA FOOLED ME! The religious fervor of said SCIENTISTS doesn't sound at all LIKE THEY appreciate the limitations of their "SCIENCE."
My main point was that the older scientists may have egotistical reasons for not wanting to see anybody come up with an alternative to evolution. I admit to over-generalizing here. There may very well be some older scientists who would be open to exploring an alternative scientific theory to evolution, but there also are older scientists who have staked their professional reputations and careers on evolution who would probably fight tooth and nail to prevent an alternative theory from being accepted. Such is the nature of science, though. This is not something that has arisen anew since the evo/crevo debate heated up in the last few decades. This was intended as a rebuttal to those creationists who see the scientific community as being engaged in some grand conspiracy to keep creationism (or ID) from seeing the light of day in the scientific world. What they fail to realize is that even were evolution to be completely falsified, science will revert to the "We don't know" position regarding the way that the diversity of life arose on earth rather than to the ID or creationist position. It will remain a "we don't know" issue until some scientist comes up with an explanation that fits the scientific evidence better than evolution does or shows that evolution is an incomplete theory, much like Einstein did with Newtononian physics. (Which, I admit to oversimplifying what went on in that case in my previous post). The main point that I was making is that ID and creationism are not scientific theories, and that's why, for example, creationist or ID ideas haven't been published in peer reviewed journals. There is no grand conspiracy to prevent them from being considered.
My question to you then is, assuming that an intelligent being set up the big bang as the original conditions for the universe, and then allowed the universe to procede from those initial conditions without interference, then from a scientific point of view, what difference does it make whether there was a designer or not? Wouldn't we be equally justified in saying that "here are the initial conditions of the universe and here is what happened based on those initial conditions." From the point of view of science, it makes sense to not assume that there is a designer (or not assume that there isn't one, for that matter) and just describe the initial conditions of the universe and the laws that describe how the universe has proceded from these initial conditions. If you don't postulate interference from a designer, then there might as well not be a designer as far as science is concerned. You would have two hypotheses that generate equivalent predictions. A) The universe proceded from some initial conditions according to certain natural laws, or B) Some intelligent designer set up initial conditions and natural laws for the universe and the universe has proceded from these initial conditions according to these laws. Both A) and B) give the same answers, but A) is the simpler proposition since it doesn't propose an entity that isn't needed to explain the data. Therefore, by Occam's Razor, science should simply hold to proposition A).
I don't know. I've studied science pretty extensively, and I have yet to see a scientific theory of justice (or love or any of the other qualities mentioned in the original post). Evolution is not a theory designed to explain these issues. It is meant to explain the diversity of life, not the origin of life, the origin of the universe, the weather in Siberia or any other phenomenon that creationists want to bring up in an attempt to discredit evolution.
That, and a great many other links can be found by cruising my freeper homepage:
Project Steve. Nat'l Center for Science Education: the overwhelming number of genuine scientists supporting evolution.
####Also, by the very nature of the words Intelligent Design (ID), it posits a deity. Thusly, it cannot be tested and cannot be a theory in science.####
This is why we are stuck with an unhittable baseball and an unmissable baseball bat! Science is today defined in such a way that it cannot consider the possibility of a deity. But that creates a philosophical dilemma. If a deity exists, science is defined in a way that puts it at odds with the truth.
There was a 1997 survey of scientists in which 5% supported the Biblical creation account, 55% supported evolution via purely naturalistic means, and 40% supported the idea that evolution occurred but was guided by God. I'd like for a moment to focus on that 40%. They certainly appear to be saying that purely naturalistic processes would not produce what we see on earth today. Such processes would not, for example, lead several separate structures that perform different functions to merge into one complex structure that performs a different function, such as an eye, via natural processes.
That's a pretty large percentage of scientists who feel there was a supernatural aspect to evolution.
Do I hold that position myself? Not really. It would be very easy for me to take that stance. I could avoid a lot of grief by just saying, "Yes, evolution occurred, though I believe it was God who controlled it and made it happen." I'd still be something of a second class citizen among the evolutionists, since theistic evolution is just as banned from science as ID or creationism. By the current definition of science, only naturalistic evolution qualifies.
I'm still of the opinion that evolution is largely an extrapolation. Because micro-organisms can mutate into different micro-organisms, it's assumed that over time they can produce a giraffe. Might that be true? Yes, I've said several times here that that might be true. Of course that's not good enough for some of the evolutionists. I would have to outright say that evolution did occur with absolute certainty to satisfy them. But I'm not here to tell everyone what they want to hear, I'm just here giving my opinion, which people are free to agree with or disagree with, and I don't treat them as an idiot because they choose the latter. And I know you don't, either.
Is it possible that those scientists who assert that evolution occurred with God's guidance would go even further and question evolution itself if it were politically permissable to do so? Maybe. Politics does play a role in science. In recent years we've seen the formation of NARTH, a dissident group of people in the fields of psychology and medicine who formed their own organization after the mainstream groups (such as the American Psychological Association) fell under the political control of the powerful gay lobby. NARTH was formed by people who found it increasingly hard to speak or publish in their field if they didn't endorse homosexuality as normal and healthy. We've seen what can happen even to evolutionist scientists who delve into politically forbidden areas of study (Shockley & Herrnstein's IQ research, as an example). Gould & Lewontin tried to destroy Edward Wilson when he did research in the ideologically denounced field of socio-biology.
Politics does play a role, and I would suggest that evolution is dogma today because of politics and ego.
Many people perceive evolution as an attack on their values, at least when it is presented as a virtual fact to the exclusion of alternative possibilities. They see it as part of the larger culture war in which the state rejects their values and tries to force secular values on their children. The longer this goes on, the more people will flee to private schools and homeschooling.
Eventually, evolution, at least the naturalistic variety, will only be taught to the poorest or dumbest kids. Of course, at that point that ACLU will likely try to use government power to force the teaching of purely naturalistic evolution on private schooled and homeschooled kids.
What happens to a society when it totally abandons faith for naturalism? Europe might be a good example. My money is on the fundamentalist Muslims to take the continent from the secularized native Europeans in a century or so. The Europeans who built the great monuments to God of the Renaissance era are long gone. When they vanished, so did Europe. Secular societies may be the least fit to survive.
Did the great scientists of the past totally segregate out the possibility of a God? Maybe we need a definition of science that Isaac Newton would have felt comfortable with.
Yes, I'm a huge fan of Chesterton!
####Maybe that was a sign. I've had ridiculously long posts typed up and eaten by the internet gods. to the best of my knowledge, civilization didn't suffer a wit####
LOL! Good point. My occasional longwindedness is likely not a virtue!
Hello stremba! You ask: "What difference does it make whether there was a designer or not?" It makes no difference in the world -- unless you're curious about the origin of the initial conditions and what makes a natural law a "law." If that's the case, A) will not do: It's like coming into a movie late, where one has missed the beginning scenes that set up the action of the rest of the film. You can follow the action, and make sense of it in some fashion. But since you missed the "set-up", perhaps your understanding of the film is not complete.
Actually, it appears the A) position rests on faith just as much as the B) position does -- if by "faith" we mean the acceptance of things as true which have not been empirically demonstrated.
Still, I guess science, by its method, is pretty much stuck with the A) position. For it is probably impossible to validate the origin of the initial conditions and natural laws by means of empirical methods. Given that all known physical laws break down in that first teensy moment of Planck time following the big bang, science really has no way to find out much about the very earliest conditions of the universe. Thus, science is forced to come into the movie late, as it were.
Thus as you say, stremba: "... by Occam's Razor, science should simply hold to proposition A)." I figure science doesn't really have a choice about that. If it followed B), it wouldn't be science. And I think the leading figures working explicitly on ID theory (and the raft of scientists who do not so self-identify, but are working on the same core problems, e.g., information theory) are sticking to A).
This, I think, is the main difference between ID and "creationism": Creationism follows the B) method.
Thank you so much for writing.
Tsunami of Quix's ignorance placemarker.
That is a falsehood. I know many scientists that would disagree with you. So, you cannot say "unanimously."
Nobel laureate Brian Josephson believes in spoon benders. Nobel laureate Linus Pauling spent the last part of his life claiming that megadoses of vitamin C cures just about everything. William Crookes spent the last part of his life pushing spiritualist claptrap. Despite that, I have to say that there's no evidence that the spoon benders are anything but frauds, that vitamin C doesn't do all that Pauling claimed, and that spiritualism is pure Barbra Streisand.
If one does not want to call ID a "scientific" theory then they should at least have the sense to realize it is an alternative explanation.
Agreed...but ID has no predictive utility, hence it's not science. ID consists of looking at something, saying "I can't think of any way this could have happened," and inferring that it's the result of Go^H^Han intelligent designer. The creation myth at the beginning of Watership Down is an "alternative explanation," but that doesn't mean it should be taught in science class.
I've been of the opinion that ID and creationism both follow the B method, and that science -- in its procedures -- uses the A method.
Yes I know, Patrick. Yet I tried to lay out some distinctions in my last that seek to discriminate the fundamental differences between the two. I guess I didn't succeed! Oh, well....
Really? What sort of situations?
Many scientists have no difficulty at all accepting A and going forward in their own discipline. If they are challenged to explain their lack of curiosity, they will often appeal to the Anthropic Principle:
Proponents of the anthropic principle suggest that we live in a fine-tuned universe, i.e. a universe that appears to be "fine-tuned" to allow the existence of life as we know it. If any of the basic physical constants were different, then life as we know it would not be possible. Papers have been written arguing that the anthropic principle would explain the physical constants such as the fine structure constant, the number of dimensions in the universe, and the cosmological constant.
The three primary versions of the principle, as stated by Barrow and Tipler (1986), are:
Weak Anthropic Principle (WAP): "The observed values of all physical and cosmological quantities are not equally probable but they take on values restricted by the requirement that there exist sites where carbon-based life can evolve and by the requirements that the Universe be old enough for it to have already done so."
Strong Anthropic Principle (SAP): "The Universe must have those properties which allow life to develop within it at some stage in its history."
Final Anthropic Principle (FAP): "Intelligent information-processing must come into existence in the Universe, and, once it comes into existence, it will never die out."
Hawking, for instance, offers the "imaginary time" cosmology which suggests an origin for physical constants but nevertheless requires a big bang, a beginning of real time.
Steinhardt offers a "cyclic universe" model which says that the universe recycles (my term) and thus time never ends, it does however still have a beginning.
Ovrut, Steinhardt also offered an "ekpyrotic" model which suggests the universe begins from a collision of branes (membranes or planes) in higher dimensionality. This also requires a beginning for the branes.
And of course there are the numerous other multi-verse and multi-world theories - all of which propose a regression of finite universes creating others. All of these merely move the goal post to prior causes, and there is always a beginning.
The most engaging (IMHO) theory is Max Tegmark's "Level IV" which is a radical Platonist solution - that all existents in our four dimension space/time block are actually mathematical structures in a higher dimension. His is the only closed theory.
My point in this summary is to underline what betty boop said - namely, that Intelligent Design scientists are always of the "B" group and are joined by a few, but prestigious, others who don't identify themselves with Intelligent Design arguments. The "others" are typically physicists and mathematicians - information theory is a branch of math.
Weak Anthropic Principle (WAP): "The observed values of all physical and cosmological quantities are not equally probable but they take on values restricted by the requirement that there exist sites where carbon-based life can evolve and by the requirements that the Universe be old enough for it to have already done so."I herewith propose the following:
Weak but Religious Anthropic Principle (WRAP): "The observed values of all physical and cosmological quantities are not equally probable but they take on values restricted by the requirement that there exist sites where faith-based carbon-based life can evolve and by the requirements that the Universe be old enough for it to have already done so."
1300?
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