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

[WildTurkey]

ID and evolution are actually on equal footing since they are both theories that are plausible.

No. A theory becomes a theory from the hypothesis after many facts are analyzed to support the theory. ID has no supporting facts.

[RichardMoore]

The Supreme Court is not a good judge of truth. Dred Scott upheld Slavery and led to 600,000 deaths in the Civil War. And today it permits the murder of 4,400 babies a day, more than died on 9-11-01, and that's every day.

[WildTurkey]

Intelligent Design is another theory that makes more sense than the theory of accidental chance that we commonly call evolution.

ID is not a theory, it is a belief.

[Dimensio]

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*!

It's a non-sequitur question. You responded to the explanation that evolution does not explain the ultimate origins of life by asking if the person making the explanation was "admitting" that the origins of life cannot be explained in naturalistic terms without resorting to intelligent design. I'd say that the tone of my response was reasonable given the dishonest nature of your question.

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 asked a question that had little to do with the original statement and had hidden implications. Don't try dishonestly weasling out of it, I'm not that stupid.

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?

Who said that the first cell cannot be explained without resorting to intelligent design? This is your dishonest strawman, and your asking this now completely justifies the tone of my previous post.

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.

Oh, get off of your moral superiority stint. You asked a loaded question and dishonestly implied that evolution encompasses absolutely any purely "naturalistic" explanation, and that if something cannot be explained by evolution, it cannot be explained by naturalism. Stop pretending that I'm being unreasonable for calling you on your lie.

[RichardMoore]

I'm sorry, the problem is worse than that. If God does not exist then the universe cannot explain itself and we are left with something that has no explaination. How could all of this come from nothing? Evolution does not explain that. And it is the ultimate question. If you say there was a big bang then I would say what caused that? If you say some gases I would say were did they come from. Ultimately Aquinas explained these questions and evolutionist are looking into the sand for their own answers.

[Dimensio]

What hypothetical observation would falsify the "theory" of ID?

[ItCanHappenToYou]

The Supreme Court is not a good judge of truth.


However that may be, (and as sophistic as your silly little argument is) the SC`still sets the law of the land.

We are still a society that respects the law.

[WildTurkey]

I brought up Kelvin in a list of great scientists who staunchly disputed Darwin's theory of evolution

Kelvin thought the sun's heat came from gravitational compression and based his comments on that basis - WHICH WAS WRONG!

[RichardMoore]

You know I am reminded of the truth behind the Scopes Monkey trail. Old Darrow was supposed to be put on the stand to defend Darwin but he withdrew from the case and pleaded guilty thereby depriving Bryan of his turn to make a fool of Darrow and Darwin's Theory. There is much more evidence of the existence of an Intelligent Creator than there is that man was once a monkey.

[js1138]

How could all of this come from nothing?

Odd that you accept that something could come from nothing, then in the next breath, deny that something could come from nothing.

[ItCanHappenToYou]

Nice one.

[PatrickHenry]

Kelvin thought the sun's heat came from gravitational compression and based his comments on that basis - WHICH WAS WRONG!

The gravitional compression theory came from Hermann von Helmholtz. Kelvin agreed. I think Kelvin's only objection to evolution was that there hadn't been enough time for it to happen, and for that he offered his computations for the age of the sun. The Age of the Sun.

[RichardMoore]

Now you're talking! Education is violence. Public education is state sponsored violence. Abraham Lincoln was self-educated and I think he proved that a man can do great things without compulsory public education. Edison is another good example of someone who had little tainting from the school of conformity.

[Dimensio]

Ultimately Aquinas explained these questions and evolutionist are looking into the sand for their own answers.

Evolution does not address the origins of the universe.

Evolution does not address whether or not there is purpose behind the universe.

Evolution does not address what purpose there might be behind the universe.

Evolution is a theory about changes across populations of biological organisms. It does not, in any way, address whether or not any gods exist.

Your attack of evolution by dragging theology into the issue demonstrates that you are completely ignorant of the theory of evolution and thus you are completely unqualified to speak on it.

[VadeRetro]

I'm really trying to understand your theory, folks, but I'm getting a lot more insults from you than information.

You're doing this goofy tunnel-vision thing so you can keep whipping up on Spetner's saggy strawman. You're just boring on in, ignoring everything that isn't the strawman. What you ignore:

1. A vast body of evidence having no reasonable interpretation except the relationship by common descent of all life on Earth,

2. The irrelevance of details of mutation to the concept of variation and natural selection.

   It is clear that the variation exists everywhere and (as can be very rapidly observed in bacteria) reasserts itself even after genetic bottlenecking. You can't make bullet item 1 go away by using strawman models to "prove" the variation can't happen. It's like the creationist proofs that a bumblee can't fly the way an airplane does so its flight must be a miracle.

3. Spetner is wrong in the details of the biology, ligand specificity is not directly governed by binding string length as required by Spetner's theory, and ligand binding is not and "all or nothing affair". This invalidates his analyses. Even then, Spetner's own examples do not support his claims. Furthermore, when using his metrics Spetner swaps metrics when one shows inconvenient changes.

4. Then, there's Spetner's apalling disregard for what is known of the continuum of relationships among genes.

It is generally thought that bad mutations outnumber the good, but the neutral ones probably outnumber them both. It can hardly be otherwise if estimates that every human is born with 2-3 unique mutations are correct.

The good mutations tend to do well in life, barring bad luck. The bad ones are at a disadvantage or are simply unviable and tend not to reproduce as well. Neutral is neutral and there's apparently a lot of that. Most functional proteins have some resilience to mutation, having tons and tons of possible mutations that do not bother function. That is, practically every species has its own version of some proteins, a fact which forms the basis of molecular clocking. One of the mentioned criticisms of Spetner is he doesn't seem to know that.

[jwalsh07]

Odd that you accept that something could come from nothing, then in the next breath, deny that something could come from nothing.

Not odd at all since Moore has already stated his beliefs in God.

[VadeRetro]

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.

Monkeys don't, but apes do. We come straight from monkeys, you know.

Can someone tell me why every creationist argument is false? Why every word is a lie? Can someone explain this to me?

[Junior]

A theory in science is not the same thing as a theory in common usage. Theories are the apex of scientific findings. This is why Relativity is still a theory. A theory is a scientific framework consistent with the evidence that scientists can use for making predictions or for directing research.

[VadeRetro]

You're not supposed to say it came from nothing. You're supposed to say it came "ex nihilo." That makes it right.

[RichardMoore]

At one time scientists thought that draining the blood out of George Washington would save his life. Instead it killed him. We can play this game but the fact is that if evolutionists(materialists) give up their belief they will have to rethink their irreligion whereas if evolution is true it doesn't matter to creationists because you will still need some "original cause" to explain your "theory of everything." And it won't disprove the existence of an intelligent Creator. But I still find it hard to believe that monkeys which still exist today suddenly morphed into creatures that could paint a horse on a cave wall. Where are those monkeys today?