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 ...
Course most people can observe gravity in action daily. Nobody can observe evolution (except God, who is the only one that lives long enough to percieve such slow magic).
Even if you did have some idiot teacher express his views on the origins of life, that does not make it part of the TOE. No, no, no, no, no, no, no.
Feel better now? Gravity is a law, and can be proven - an apple falls from the tree. I frankly don't care what you use to back up your allegation that its only a theory. Seems to me like your backpedalling and equating gravity and evolution with the same scientific soundness. Woe is you.
Maybe but I won't hold my breathe betting that the old boys network will ever let that new young blood advance far enough that they would be allowed to express a contrary opinion that would be considered 'legitimate' by anyone. That would be dreaming. It's a vicious circle - a good technical paper won't be considered because the author doesn't have sufficient standing in the academic community. And he can't get sufficient standing because of holding a view that contrary to the established view. If you want to read a good opinion of this problem, Phillip E. Johnson describes it very well in his book Darwin on Trial. It's been awhile since I read it but as I recollect, his view was that the only reason why he personally was successful at being heard was that he bypassed this problem by advancing down a parallel path of academic achievement outside of the field of science (he originally was much more well known as a lawyer) and then coming in at a higher level that avoided this 'failure to advance' problem if you get the gist of what I'm saying.
Huh??
So you're not going to acknowledge responsibility for posting an isolated sentence from Feduccia's Origin and Evolution of Birds to the effect that Archaeopteryx was a bird, claiming it means he believes A. is not a transitional species, even though in the very first paragraph of that same book that you cite he states it is a transitional species.
Well, I think people need to be reminded you did this, so that they realize that anything else you post needs to be checked out in detail, and that nothing you post should be taken at face value.
If evolution doesn't cross the bounds of origin of life, why would there be such a debate about teaching ID? Isn't the true debate that we were either created intelligently or created mistakenly?
First, their supposed rebuttal begins with -- and is characterized throughout by -- a condescending tone and personal attacks on Meyer's motives.
Not a promising beginning to the daunting job of defending a sow's ear against the charge of not being a silk purse.
Four-fifths of the way down the page, and the counselor is still telling the jury what he's going to prove someday:
Second, GME claim that Meyer's article contains "serious mistakes" that include "errors in facts and reasoning.” Yet, as we will show, GME misunderstand and/or misrepresent important aspects of Meyer's argument. This calls into question the relevance of some of their critiques and their overall judgment about the quality of Meyer’s reasoning.
By comparison, the "GME" paper is very specific in its charges and summons solid evidence.
Bibliographic search engines such as PubMed make it easy for literature bluffers to compile long lists of citations. The literature bluffer, however, rarely explains the arguments or evidence contained in the publications on the list. That would defeat the bluffer's purpose, which is not really to address the merits of the case, but rather to overwhelm the reader with the apparent weight of scientific authority. The reader is then left with the work of actually studying the publications and assessing their relevance.
The charge--well, one of the charges--is that Meyer like Behe before him ignores the existence of gene duplication, subractive mutations, and several other elements that destroy the "It has to happen this way or it can't happen at all" strawman origin of biological complexity. Supposedly, this slight can be justified by the controversial--Nay!--conjectural nature of such elements, which are not recognized in real science.
The citations document that Meyer like all IDers routinely and brazenly filters reality, presenting a picture edited to the desired effect, ignoring the obvious issues, knocking down strawmen, etc. The treatment of the elements (gene duplication, subractive mutations, etc.) inside the papers is thus not the real issue. The issue is whether such elements are recognized and dealt with routinely in the real scientific literature and they are.
Furthermore, the citation list is only evidence for two charges against Meyer, specifically the selectiveness of citations and the dodging of relevant issues. So far, this defense of Meyer promises to deal with only a fraction of the criticisms of Meyer's paper raised by "GME," who in several places mention that their criticisms are only a preliminary outline of the problems with Meyer's paper and are not an exhaustive list.
Then, the promises are not fulfilled. The offered refutation is in the mail, somewhere. All we have are the wish list of promises. You can ask Mark Geragos, attorney for Scott Peterson, if a high-falutin' opening statement is good enough.
subtractive
Actually all Western Civilization realizes he value of the Reformation. You might even say Western Civilation would be a lot like the Middle East right now without it.
Modern day evolutionists are like the cartoon character that happily saws off the branch of the tree...while standing on the branch. Mock the Judeo/Christian tradition to your own peril. It is the tree that gave you shelter to formulate your ridiculous theory in the first place.
Meanwhile, back on FR, anyone not believing in ID is an atheist.
What about a person that thinks the Universe was created by design yet doesn't believe God exists? Speculating that conscious beings -- the third macro element of existence; mater and energy the other two -- with several magnitude more advanced technologies living in other universes routinely design and create new universes. Also, that conscious beings wielding greatly advanced technology in our Universe may be creating universes by design and controlling our Universe on a macro level to ensure that a "big crunch" implosion cycle never happens.
Analogous in part to Earthlings curing death billions of years before relocating to another solar system to avoid the Sun burning out.
Actually she opus'd in a particuarly vile and disgusting manner, insulting Jim and every other Freeper.
I once saw a list of comparisons of Evolutionists and evolution to the Medieval Church and its Priests.
It starts out:
1. They both practice their arts in big mostly empty buildings (Cathedrals, Museums)
2. They both worship old bones and relics (Bones and artifacts of the Saints. Bones and artifacts of Dinosaurs.)
3. They both talk to the uninitiated in arcane and confusing language.
4. They both will not allow dissent.
The list goes on but alas...time presses.
You have a Merry Christmas.
Not only that, but the "species" categorization (as well as "genus", "family", "order", "phylum", "kingdom", etc.) was first established by Linnaeus when he published his book Systema Naturae in 1735.
Note that this is 124 years *before* Darwin's publication of "On the Origin of Species"... So anyone who might try to claim that the "species" concept was developed by evolutionists to "rescue" evolution or "attack" creationism clearly isn't playing with a full deck.
Furthermore, Linnaeus wasn't even an "atheist scientist", he was a devout Lutheran and the son of a clergyman.
Interestingly, while Linnaeus created the modern hierarchical taxonomy that is still used today to classify plants and animals (and the other Kingdoms of life), he *also* tried to classify *minerals* into the same taxonomy. Linnaeus believed that a similar conceptual layout would help order all of God's creations.
The reason this is significant is because Linnaeus's hierarchy "fit" living things just fine, but was such a failure in sensibly classifying minerals that it was soon abandoned. Life *is* a hierarchical system, minerals are not. Now note: Evolutionary processes automatically create hierarchical family trees. Also note that there's no requirement that a deity, while separately creating different forms of life, would have to use a hierarchical pattern -- after all, such a pattern wasn't used for minerals or most other types of diversity in the world.
Yes, I *have* noticed that your conception of evolution and evolutionists is akin to a cartoon...
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