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 ...
Ah, the old 'Evolution is a cult!' smoke and mirrors to fool the simple and fleece the rubes.
I can smell the stupidity from here.
"It isn't, and a consensus of the scientific community agrees."
So does the Supreme Court.
Yeah, I've heard that Nobel argument before. However, since the debate has been defined to exclude any possibility of God, it's a hollow argument. You're basically saying, "Come up with a better theory than evolution that doesn't rely on God".
Sorry. Can't be done. If God doesn't exist, then evolution is the best explanation for how life on earth came to be. It's the best thing anyone can come up with under those circumstances.
So we're stuck here like a broken record, arguing day in and day out.
One of World's Leading Atheists Now Believes in God, More or Less, Based on Scientific Evidence
The Associated Press
Dec. 9, 2004 - A British philosophy professor who has been a leading champion of atheism for more than a half-century has changed his mind. He now believes in God more or less based on scientific evidence, and says so on a video released Thursday.
At age 81, after decades of insisting belief is a mistake, Antony Flew has concluded that some sort of intelligence or first cause must have created the universe. A super-intelligence is the only good explanation for the origin of life and the complexity of nature, Flew said in a telephone interview from England.
Flew said he's best labeled a deist like Thomas Jefferson, whose God was not actively involved in people's lives.
"I'm thinking of a God very different from the God of the Christian and far and away from the God of Islam, because both are depicted as omnipotent Oriental despots, cosmic Saddam Husseins," he said. "It could be a person in the sense of a being that has intelligence and a purpose, I suppose."
Flew first made his mark with the 1950 article "Theology and Falsification," based on a paper for the Socratic Club, a weekly Oxford religious forum led by writer and Christian thinker C.S. Lewis.
Over the years, Flew proclaimed the lack of evidence for God while teaching at Oxford, Aberdeen, Keele, and Reading universities in Britain, in visits to numerous U.S. and Canadian campuses and in books, articles, lectures and debates.
There was no one moment of change but a gradual conclusion over recent months for Flew, a spry man who still does not believe in an afterlife.
Yet biologists' investigation of DNA "has shown, by the almost unbelievable complexity of the arrangements which are needed to produce (life), that intelligence must have been involved," Flew says in the new video, "Has Science Discovered God?"
The video draws from a New York discussion last May organized by author Roy Abraham Varghese's Institute for Metascientific Research in Garland, Texas. Participants were Flew; Varghese; Israeli physicist Gerald Schroeder, an Orthodox Jew; and Roman Catholic philosopher John Haldane of Scotland's University of St. Andrews.
The first hint of Flew's turn was a letter to the August-September issue of Britain's Philosophy Now magazine. "It has become inordinately difficult even to begin to think about constructing a naturalistic theory of the evolution of that first reproducing organism," he wrote.
The letter commended arguments in Schroeder's "The Hidden Face of God" and "The Wonder of the World" by Varghese, an Eastern Rite Catholic layman.
This week, Flew finished writing the first formal account of his new outlook for the introduction to a new edition of his "God and Philosophy," scheduled for release next year by Prometheus Press.
Prometheus specializes in skeptical thought, but if his belief upsets people, well "that's too bad," Flew said. "My whole life has been guided by the principle of Plato's Socrates: Follow the evidence, wherever it leads."
...Flew told The Associated Press his current ideas have some similarity with American "intelligent design" theorists, who see evidence for a guiding force in the construction of the universe. He accepts Darwinian evolution but doubts it can explain the ultimate origins of life.
"That is unacceptable by most."
What is unacceptable to people in the stage of Concrete Operations (Pater identification) is that we are not the created, chosen children of a God.
Oh, those pesky identity problems!!!!
The truth always bears repeating.
"In 1987, the Supreme Court ruled in Edwards v. Aguillard, that the belief that a supernatural creator was responsible for the creation of human kind is a religious viewpoint and cannot be taught in public schools along with the scientific theory of evolution."
So what? The supreme court also has changed its mind many times. It can change it again. Why are evolutionists so afraid of losing the monopoly on minds?
"Why are evolutionists so afraid of losing the monopoly on minds?"
Not afraid of losing any monoploy on minds.
Very afraid of slipping back into the Dark Ages of superstition and belief while others build sophisticated weapons with solid scientific knowledge.
"vulnerable children"
There is the rub! I have seen the NAZI propaganda movies from the 30s. They wanted children indoctrinated in atheistic evolution...it served their purposes well.
You can't say Trojan here. This is a family site. ;)
That's a very interesting article.
Actually the theory of evolution does not posit a creator at all. However, should you desire a creator to be added to the theory, which one do you choose? Do you include the religious pantheons as well?
Isn't it awfully jingoistic to think that man is the only intelligence that can manipulate nature to suit his own needs?
"And because YOU think evolution is a cultic belief does not make it so.
See how that works?"
I have no problem with that, I know it cuts both ways. You however won't allow competitive ideas.
Go Trojans! (I'm from Nebraska)
" I have seen the NAZI propaganda movies from the 30s"
Godwin's Law; you lose.
ping.
ROFL! :-)
"You however won't allow competitive ideas."
Wow, am I ever powerful.
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