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 ...
"Real" science also presupposes that certain biological structures could not have involved intelligent design. This, too, is a null hypothesis. If science wants to go down a purely "falsifiable" road then it will omit valuable statements where both indiction and deduction are concerned. If that's all real science is about, you can have it.
Thanks for the ping!
This is a half truth that ignores what is important. Science, by definition, makes the assumption that phenomena are regular and "naturalistic". that is what science is.
Science will not claim that "structures could not have involved intelligent design". Rather, science would attempt to find ways in which this kind of intervention is unnecessary.
It is always possible that any particular instance of an object falling to the ground is a unique miracle, but science would argue that the falling is a regular phenomenon requiring no special explanation.
The claim that certain structures are outside the set of regular phenomena that makes ID not science. ID would be science if it had a research program designed to investigate this claim, and worked rigorously to find ways in which the irreducible could be reduced. That would be science.
It is the shutting off of curiousity that makes ID deadly to the mind.
#####Science will not claim that "structures could not have involved intelligent design". Rather, science would attempt to find ways in which this kind of intervention is unnecessary.#####
What if it's necessary?
Here's a thought experiment: meditate on the difference between a live skin cell and a dead skin cell. The difference is successful communication - the live skin cell is successfully communicating, the dead one is not. The DNA and the chemicals are as good dead as alive.
Successful communications occurs when a message is encoded and broadcast by a source and then received and decoded by its intended recipient. This is science and math, an area of research in cancer, for instance, for the National Institute of Health.
Finding a material cause (abiogenesis) requires looking for an origin for biological autonomy and semiosis (syntax or language) and the communication itself. After decades of research, Yockey says that life should be taken as an axiom (like wave/particle duality) - but others (Rocha, etc.) continue to search for an origin.
We Freepers are currently engaged in a wide ranging discussion of this subject beginning at post 253 on another thread. Or if you prefer to take a quick peek at a visual to see if it interests you: post 341.
I'm confident betty boop also welcomes you to join us in this respectful and wide ranging research project.
js1138, I'm pinging you also because of your reply to Stremba and your interest in such subjects. You know your views are always welcome!
Thanks for the abstracts. Being in a related, field, I can understand all that they are saying, except for some of the implications that I do not, as yet see. All scientists like good speculations and the discussions that they spawn. I am not sure I accept their conclusions, but at least they ar arguing from evidence and logic, not "I believe, therefore it must be true".
These Crevo threads bug me. The evo crowd provide links to real scientific information. The Creatinoids supply wild generalizations and unproven claims. Why do you bother?
Exactly. It will not see the Law of Gravity, for example, as the miracle it is, but it will borrow from this and other miracles all the while observing and testing them; all the while thinking something other than intelligent design is behind it.
That's okay. Science adds to knowledge, but hardly begins to scratch the surface where reality is concerned.
See, if 100% of the scientific community believes that evolution is correct, then how many scientists would disagree that evolution is correct? Zero. If even one member disagrees with evolution then your statment no longer holds. Since a simple googe search of the name Michael Behe proves that at least one member disagrees, your statement is false.
If this absurd comment was based on either a misunderstanding of english or willful ignorance you should now have the intellecutal tools necessary to avoid the same mistake in the future. If it was in fact a lie told because it appears more convincing to the scientific illiterates who may be reading, well, then I think you owe Asfar an apology.
It's funny you mention gravity and relativity. Reminds me of an article I read once...
Anyone who doubts that the bulk of the scientific community could be wrong about a fundamental question like [evolution] should consider the case of Newtonian physics, which was thought to be unshakable until Einstein disproved it. (Lest anybody quibble about the approximate validity of Newtonian physics at nonrelativistic speeds, may I point out that Newtonian physics was formerly thought to be valid at all speeds, throughout the universe, and this Einstein refuted.) Evolution is not a fraud being perpetrated upon the public, but it is a theory that has far too many problems to be treated as something that everyone is obliged to believe in on pain of being classified as a fool, as if it were the claim that the earth goes around the sun. Its credibility will continue to wane (or wax) with additional developments in biology over the coming years, but the absolute prerequisite for solving this intellectual puzzle is for free debate on the issue to be permitted again. I am quite happy to change my position if new facts come out, and I urge my readers that this is the only rational view.
Sounds rational to me...
Good question
#####Evolution is not a fraud being perpetrated upon the public, but it is a theory that has far too many problems to be treated as something that everyone is obliged to believe in on pain of being classified as a fool, as if it were the claim that the earth goes around the sun.#####
That pretty much sums it up.
To make the difference clear. ;-)
How do you demonstrate that something can't be done? It's a matter of imagination.
Great detective stories generally involve impossibilities. It is always up to the detective to imagine how something could have happened and then demonstrate how it is possible.
It is the job of science to imagine how complex phenomena are in fact, regular and lawful, then to demonstrate how they are comprised of simpler, well understood components.
It is not the job of science to assume that unknown things are unknowable.
Pastor Ichneumon... I'm honored.. more or less..
I know, I know, thats the why pBS puts in some of their propaganda pieces..
Like a lizard woke up and went DOH! I want some feathers..
Fish Scales to lizard skin to feathers is a bit of a stretch though but not too much evidently after you've swallowed the first installment of bull sperm.. and are pregnant with a whole cow.. I ain't going for it. Creationism is a bit of a stretch too.. Nah, I'm not goin for either of em..
Humans love a good story and not having one will fill the void with all manner of wild tales.. Joseph Campbell studied them all.. But the ol' boy learned to love a lie(myth).. SO, much for Uncle Joe.. Yeah humans do love a good story.. You take a few unprovable probabilities lay them along side each other and VOILA!.. you got a UFO!.. or Space aliens.. or even GHOSTS!... or even lizards crawling out of the ocean to become land creatures and deciding phooey on this, slithering back into the ocean to become WHALES... or amphibians..
NAH! I'm not buyin it.. cause once you buy it, you're expected to be quiet while the evolutionary Clergy produces even more scripture to support even more wild ass'ed senarios.. like a space rock landed(on earth) with the germ of life on it.. thus starting the whole process..
On the otherhand, if you gotta believe in something why not evolution.. I have my own take on String Theory.. so I'm not clean either... I'm just not self-righteous about it..
OK, ID has a research program that is indistinguishable brom mainstream science, with one improtant variation. When confronted with the first step, the detection problem, its default is to claim that an object is designed.
This may seem like a small difference, but it is really at the heart of what science is. So the research program of ID diverges from scientific methodology at the very first step in the analysis of a problem.
"Oh by the way - the rule is, "First person to bring up the Nazis in an online debate, loses automatically.""
I am not bound by someone's "rules" of discusssion. I was stating verifiable fact. The NAZI proganda films of the 30s relied heavily upon Darwinism and the concept(origin uknown) of "survival of the fittest." I was not calling evolutionary proponents NAZIs.
"No, but solid science did. The bomb was not built with religious belief and people's superstitions, but with hard core math."
Phyical sciences are "solid science"(at least more so than biological), whereas evolutionary theory is a guessamate. Your comparison doesn't work.
#####Great detective stories generally involve impossibilities. It is always up to the detective to imagine how something could have happened and then demonstrate how it is possible.#####
Perhaps we should say great detective stories involve improbabilities. If they involved impossibilities, the actions in question couldn't be demonstrated as possible.
But I know what you mean. And it's at this point that we always have our worldviews collide. Science has been defined in such a way that it must pretend God doesn't exist. It must find an explanation for things which don't require God.
The problem is, if God exists, the science in a particular area may be on a collision course with the truth. It would be as if I pointed to the Great Pyramid and asked you to explain where it came from, with the added requirement that you are not allowed to consider the possibility that it was designed and built. Could you come up with an explanation for the pyramid's origin under those restrictions? Sure. You could theorize that millions of years of floods, earthquakes, wind erosion, and other upheavals carved it. That would be the most plausible theory **IF** we ban design from consideration.
But how plausible would it really be? I would say that's my biggest problem with evolution. It really doesn't seem plausible. The constant hysteria over the possibility that an alternative theory might be given some air time indicates to me that evolution's proponents aren't very confident that it could survive unless well protected.
"One is supported by faith alone. The other is supported by evidence, logic, other science, and the scientific method."
Wrong, dead wrong. To hold to a ID origen is definitely based upon a logical analysis of what is observed.
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