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 ...
And yet you body contains thousands of known mutations, and you are still alive. Amazing.
And if your body does not contain mutations, where did all the genetic diversity come from after the hunm race was bottlenecked by the Flood a few thousand years ago?
I brought up the Kelvin/thompson question because I did some reading this afternoon. Yesterday I was humiliated by confusing Kelvin and Maxwell.
Today I was at a used book store and found a book called Grear Feuds in Science. It had a chapter on Kelvin and the age of the earth. There I learned about the name change from Thompson the Lord Kelvin, but no one mentioned why it became "kelvin".
Incidently, Kelvin revised his estimate upwards to billions of years, even before the discovery of radioactivity.
I've been wondering about this creationoid obsession with evolution's disregard of the origin of life. At first I assumed it gave them some kind of childish glee to be able to ask a question that science has not yet answered. But now I suspect the issue is deeper than that.
I think the hard-core, flat-earth, never-connect-the-dots (except for global conspiracies) creationoids view evolution as Darwin's deliberate point-for-point contradiction of Genesis. So when evolution is silent about something that Genesis mentions, then ... aha! Score one for their side.
I guess the Iliad is better than evolution too. The Iliad has Apollo's chariot pulling the sun across the sky. Darwin was too dumb to deal with that.
RussP wrote:
Oh, it doesn't? So are you admitting that the beginning of life cannot be explained in purely naturalistic terms without resort to intelligent design?
Dimensio replied:
Another dishonest creationist misrepresentation. Accurately stating that the theory of evolution does not cover the origins of the first life forms is not the same as stating that the origins of the first life forms cannot be explaned in naturalistic terms. Contrary to creationist lies, evolution is not an attempt to explain the entire universe within the context of naturalism. It has a specific scope, and it sticks to that despite the dishonest attempts to attack it on things that it does not address at all.
RussP replies:
Oh, I'm starting to see how this works. A basic question is now a "creationist lie." Read what you respoded to, dude! It's a frickin' *question*! A question cannot be a lie. Oh, yes, a question can be based on a false premise, such as "When did you stop beating your wife," but my question has no such premise.
You evolutionists have a very strong proclivity for distorting what people say, jumping to conclusions, then insulting people for tiniest of imagined "offenses."
As for whether "evolution" covers what happened up to the first living cell or only what happened afterward, that is purely a matter of semantics. If you cannot explain the first cell without resort to intelligent design, then why would you think you can explain the rest of evolution that way?
You evolutionists may honestly believe that you are completely objective and reasonable, but you are far from it. You correctly sense that any chink in the armor of pure naturalism will eventually lead to the collapse of the entire edifice, so you fight for your dogma tooth and nail. Any hint of open-mindedness is out the window.
You are uninformed. To deny the possibility of a Creator is to have a closed mind, something scientists should attempt to avoid. There are excellent books out that illustrate the scientific case for Intelligent Design( That is the title of one). Your bias for one theory over another is unscientific and biased. People are fond of saying that religion persecutes science but nowadays it is the other way around. Anything that goes against the current philosophy of materialism is attacked as "religion". Intelligent Design is the only explaination for the Universe that makes any real sense. How could something come from nothing? Answer that with something other than a theory.
"No one knows a fixed ratio between harmful, beneficial, and neutral. I personally suspect there's no one breakdown for all species and all time."
Does anyone have any ballpark figures for any species under any circumstances at any time? Orders of magnitude? Is it closer to 10 to 1 or 10,000,000 to 1?
This is some theory you have. Think about it. Dawkins and others talk about the amazing effects of natural selection, yet nobody has the foggiest idea about the "quality" of what is being selected from?
If 1,000 harmful mutations occur for every beneficial one, then how can natural selection select the beneficial one without getting many more of the bad ones along with it?
I'm really trying to understand your theory, folks, but I'm getting a lot more insults from you than information.
Curious that the organization who founded the 'Holy Inquisition' are now accusing others of being 'inquisitorial'. Big Lie, anyone?
It's blindingly simple. If the individual survives and breeds, it's been "selected."
I'm really trying to understand your theory, folks, but I'm getting a lot more insults from you than information.
Keep trying. It's not all that difficult.
Gravity has been proven to exist by scientific testing, which evolution in all it's ramification has not. There simply is no way to prove that evolution is a real property when studying man. What defines a human being is his or her ability to create. Hence the Caveman drew pictures of animals and the animals did not draw pictures of man. Man has always been an artist. Otherwise we would have some monkey spontaneously picking up sticks to draw something. And you know that hasn't happened, and it isn't happening today. It is a quantum leap from the monkey to the man.
Quantum placemarker.
What a leap. Evolution does not cover the origins of life because evolution only happens to living things. Biogenesis concerns the origins of life. If you creationists actually understood the science you were so heatedly denouncing, you wouldn't come across so often as scientifically illiterate.
You know this sort of thing really burns me. I was taught in public school back in the 60's that a theory and a fact are two separate things. One starts with an hypothesis, moves to a theory and finally after a proof has a fact that is verifiably. To my knowledge a theory is not a fact! What you are representing as science is simply another faith based system. Intelligent Design is another theory that makes more sense than the theory of accidental chance that we commonly call evolution. There is no sense in arguing with evolutionists since it is your Faith. What we have today is a state religion under the guise of "science."
I didn't realize you felt you and your cohorts were QUITE BEYOND being inquisitional! Fascinating. Perhaps it's evolution working in reverse?
It would help if the evolution side were infinitely more logical.
Let's get this straight before we break our brains any further. A theory equals a theory. ID and evolution are actually on equal footing since they are both theories that are plausible. To say that ID is not plausible is simply closed minded. I am willing to accept that Evolution might be right, and that does not change my religious opinions. Can you say the same about ID?
Absolutely and that in quadruplicate.
THX.
At one time, it was heresy to say that the earth was round. It made more sense that it was flat sense that way we wouldn't fall off.
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