The Religious Cult of Evolution Fights Back

PostItNews.com ^

[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

[Doctor Stochastic]

No, I just pointed out that the paper was short on sequitur and long on undefinined terms.

You are right though about the charges. Trying to circumvent the peer-review process (as Meyer and von Sternberg are charged with) is serious. If shown, it puts Meyer and von Sternberg in the same class as Rather and CBS.

[Right Wing Professor]

Just when I think you guys have hit rock-bottom, you go lower.

You mean, like when we compare our adversaries to bank-robbers? Or their beliefs to pedophilia?

Your sepulchre is really gleaming white today, MM. Nice job!

[Michael_Michaelangelo]

*sigh*

Thanks for the heads-up. Perhaps the moderator will correct it for me.

Post # 193 is the correct one.

[VadeRetro]

Weren't you previously known as the disease "ALS"?

I think he was previously "MarkOfHumanFeet," THEN he was ALS, but I may be oversimplifying too.

[Right in Wisconsin]

Well I can say "No" back to you all day long. You need more than a kindergarten argument to convince me that saying we were created from a mistake is not a religious philosophy.

[balrog666]

I think he was previously "MarkOfHumanFeet," THEN he was ALS, but I may be oversimplifying too.

I lose track all too easily. After seeing "medved" return as about 8 different names, I gave up.

[js1138]

The reviewers did not necessarily agree with Dr. Meyer's arguments or his conclusion but all found the paper meritorious and concluded that it warranted publication. The reviewers felt that the issues raised by Meyer were worthy of scientific debate. I too disagreed with many aspects of the Meyer paper but I agreed with their overall assessment and accepted the paper for publication. Thus, four well-qualified biologists with five PhDs in relevant disciplines were of the professional opinion that the paper was worthy of publication.

LOL. So a paper reviewed by three unnamed experts, plus an editor with an acknowledged creationist bias agreed to publish a paper whose arguments and conclusions they disagreed with.

Several this about this stand out. It is always possible to write an article in which the arguments and conclusions are sound. Why would experts not continue the editing process until they agreed with the arguments?

Second, if the experts disagreed with the arguments and conclusions, why didn't they say so at the time of publication? Why not append a disclaimer indicating the article was published solely for encouraging debate?

I have to conclude that Sternberg got caught with his hand in the cookie jar and had to backpeddle.

I will expect you, in future posts referring to the Meyer article, to mention the fact that the people who accepted the article for publication disagreed with it.

[Junior]

Science was birthed from Christianity...

Science was birthed with the resurrection of classical learning at the end of the 15th century. Prior to that the Church discouraged any delving into the workings of God's creation as being improper. One could more accurately make the claim that science was birthed from classical Greek agnosticism.

[js1138]

From your second link:

"People who would be appropriate to review the paper would be evolutionary biologists, and I doubt that any evolutionary biologists reviewed the paper."

I guess I wasn't watching the first time this came around. Must have been during the election campaign. Leave it to creationists to misrepresent the status of publications, and quote them again and again after they have been repudiated. The Meyer article is and always will be peer reviewed. It's an article of faith.

I eagerly await the names of the three expered who decided it was worthy of publication.

[Doctor Stochastic]

I didn't think it was so much the unsoundness of the arguments as the lack of them. A string of statements doesn't necessarily rise to the level of an argument. (Nor does a poodle of sofas make a sentence.)

Introducing new terms to explain previously undefined terms is usually correctable by editing. In this paper, it seem to be a major compositional device though.

[js1138]

Vade's post suggests that Sternberg is an ex-editor. The evo mafia strikes again.

I wonder what would happen to an editor of Skeptical Enquirer who slipped in an article by Uri Geller.

[VadeRetro]

Also from that link:

Sternberg's association with the Baraminology Study Group is not mentioned, but his status as a Fellow of the International Society for Complexity, Information, and Design (motto: "Retraining the scientific imagination to see design in nature") is.

Having caught several of my own typos today, I'm especially qualified to point out that they misspelled "restraining."

[Alacarte]

What?

4 paragraphs of unaccountable opinion. Don't take your lame arguments against evolution up with me, take it up with the scientists in the life sciences, cause you are saying they are all wrong, and you and bob the plumber at church are the real science experts.

The AAAS and NAS have less than subtle online statements regarding their position on evolution AND ID. I feel no need to defend evolution when the actual scientific community goes out of its way to publically defend it.

"If created...it must be sustained by principle and law. If laws...those laws could be found out, tested and retested by man. Man could then build technologies based on those laws."

You realize none of this logic follows right? If created, it must be sustained by principle and law? You are talking about magic man!

"Almost back to the belief that life spontaneously arises from dirt. That rotting meat turns into worms. (But those clever evolutionists are pretty sly about that claim. They disguise the life from dirt fable by cloaking it in the magician's scarf of lots of time...lots and lots of time.)"


What are you talking about??? Are you some young earth creationist with wild regurgitated arguments and no understanding of science? Cause nothing in this paragraph makes sense! Rotting meat turn into worms... WHAT!?!?!

"Too bad evolution cannot be tested, and no discernible laws or principles appear on the horizon to describe the (forces? force? Gaia? Tinkerbelle? Magical inherent properties of insensate matter?)"

Evolution CAN be tested, where do you anti-evolutionists get off making wild claims like this, over, and over. Everytime a fossil is found, evolution is tested. If a horse skeleton was found in a layer of rock 1 billion years old, evolution would be canned. Evolution has predictive power, and everytime those predictions are tested, evolution is tested. You have no idea how science works. Just because we cannot see something happening does not mean it is untestable by science.

All your lame points are moot. Whether evolution is testable, and qualifies as science is a decision for the people who practice science, and they say evolution is by far the best explanatory model we have.

Strange I don't see the militant campaign against germ theory... oh wait, it doesn't conflict with your antiquated dogma!

[puroresu]

Ichneumon, I readily agree that there's no requirement for God to create hierarchies among living things, but there's also no reason why He couldn't or wouldn't. Minerals, after all, aren't living things so why concern oneself with hierarchy among them? God, as described in the Bible, is quite fond of hierarchy among the living.

And should we be surprised that evolution and hierarchy are compatible, given that the theory has to at least minimally conform to the observable natural world to be believable? The theory was designed to accommodate hierarchy. It isn't as if the theory was put forth and we later discovered hierarchy among living things, thus adding support to the theory.

[js1138]

My motto: Retraining the scientific mind to ignore methodological naturalism."

For those who wish to see design, I have a fake marble bathroom countertop. You can see anything you want in it.

[Long Cut]

Dude, spend some time on these threads...you'll be AMAZED how often you'll see a creationist claim thoroughly refuted to the point of laughability, and then re-used in the very next thread, often by the same person.

You'll see the same charicatures of the TOE repeated, refuted, and repeated again as if they were still valid. You'll see creationists post PAGES of spam, Bible passages, and ranting sermons and call it an "argument". You'll see them accuse evolutionists of everything from Soccatry-In-Fief to Barratry-On-The-High-Seas, then whine of "anti-Christianism" when called on it.

How many times on THIS VERY THREAD has it been repeated that evolution does NOT deal with abiogenesis? How often has it been ignored?

[Long Cut]

Sorry, Man...I was having a hectic day. The wife and I are preparing to host a Christmas dinner at our house for 15 people, and we're going nutso.

We've got 20 pounds of good roasting beef alone to cook (which is aging now), plus the sides. It's fun, but stressful, especially with a 18-month old tearing about.

[Designer]

"What kind of reverend works to REMOVE religion from public life and make sure that our government follows no god at all?"

Hope I offend anyone, but; Methodists and Prestbyterians for starters. Loaded with Liberals. Followed closely by other main-stream Protestant religions, and the inner-city Catholics as well. Unfortunately, we see it all too often.

[Alacarte]

"Please cite your source that 100% of the scientists support evolution."

Is a technicality the best you people can do. I should not have said 100%, I cannot prove that. Though I would really like to meet the scientist in the life sciences that does not believe evolution, if he exists, I bet he's a real asset to his research...

Is this better? The scientific literature 100% supports evolution as the best explanatory model to explain the diversity of life. Every major journal in the life sciences I've looked at has an online statement saying exactly this. Some even go so far as to denouce ID and creationsim as trite! How many other scientific theories have the scientific community gone out of their way to defend like this?

Why do you people persist with this? Go do some reading in the ACTUAL scientific literature before you start tellign people what it says. Do searches in the journal indexes for papers on ID/evolution. Stop reading what the morons at the discovery institute say the scietific community thinks. Go read for yourself what the scientific community thinks!

There should be absolutely no debate on this topic. The scientific community says evolution is the best model, and ID is NOT scientific. All this information is readily available, go look at it.

[Dimensio]

Well, it looks like sasportas has ignored any and all responses to his or her initial posting and has run away like a coward. How unfortunately typical that so many creationists decide to run in, spout off a series of blatant, brazen lies, and then run away without responding to the fact that they just exposed themselves as being more dishonest than Michael Moore.