He's getting so thin these days ~ has he picked up AIDS, or what?
What kind of reverend worls to REMOVE religion from public life and make sure that our government follows no god at all?
ID is not a scientific theory and should not be taught as an alternative to evolution in our schools.
Disputing evolution is saying that every scientists in the life sciences is wrong. Scientists from disciplines from genomics to paleontology rely heavily on evolution and support it 100%.
If you want ID taught in schools, fine. But under no circumstances may it be taught in science class, since scientists unanimously agree it is NOT science. Hence, the ACLU is spot on in this case.
ID must be taught in mythology or religion class where it belongs.
The school district is mandating that students be told there IS an alternative theory, but as I understand (correctly? incorrectly?), the teachers are not teaching that theory (ID), but telling students they may investigate it on their own if they wish.
Am I getting this right? I'm not really familiar with the whole Dover story...someone help with details?
Thomas More Law Center is defending the school district:
http://releases.usnewswire.com/GetRelease.asp?id=40949
"Intelligent design is a Trojan Horse for bringing religious creationism back into public school science classes."
That is not an accurate representation. Biblical creationism is definitely religious based, I know I am one.
However, ID is non-secterian and so vague that it cannot be tied to a specific religious belief system.
However, I will admit that if "unchurched" children are presented with the idea that mankind and the world about us may be the result of intelligence - a creator - it could cause them to seek answer in the Bible. That is what the radical groups want to avoid...people (shudder!) reading the Bible! (horror of horrors!) They might actually believe it.
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.
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.
The truth always bears repeating.
I really, really, hate it when the Da** liberals are right and the conservatives are wrong.
However, ID is not science.
Most people who argue the evolution vs. ID (or creationism) issue argue from the perspective of which perspective is "true." However, the definition of science isn't "truth."
Truth may be faith-based. And faith based truth is valid, but it is not science.
Science is defined by method. And central to that method is: 1) logic and 2) unbiased estimation. Namely, you cannot start out with a preconceived notion and set out to prove it. You may start out with an hypothesis and seek to prove or disprove it. Logic enters by: just because one theory is incomplete (or incorrect) doesn't mean another theory is true.
ID fails these tests. It is not science. It might be reasonable religion. However, there are far better examples.
Moreover, evoluton isn't religion and it isn't anit-religion. Many of us believe in evolution and we are also Christians. There is no logical connection between the two.
I agree with the poster who asserted that religious education is fine so long as it is identified as such. ID can be taught as religion, if someone wants to. It cannot be taught as science because it isn't. Evolution is ambivalent toward religion, and it is good science.
So.... how can it be good science if it has many discrepancies??? Because good science isn't defined by being "correct". It is defined by the mechanism and approach to discovery. Consider the history of gravity:
1. Concensus was that the earth was the center of the Universe.
2. Copernicus and Newton proved this wrong. Earth revolved around the sun. However, there was a universal frame of reference.
3. Einstein proved them wrong: all inertial frames of reference are equally valid. (Special Relativity).
4. Einstein proves them wrong again: all non-inertial frames of reference are equally valid. (General Relativity). Now, the earth can be the center of the universe again because it is a valid solution to the general relativity equations. However, gravity still scales as 1/r squared.
5. Recent cosmological evidence demonstrates that the 1 / r squared law is not correct. Everybody proven wrong again.
This is real science.
you know what, I evolved when I had to listen to this garbage. I went from a motivated A+++ student to an unmotivated, sleeping slacker. But I still got an A. All you had to do was reiterate the tripe on the tests....
My gosh, I've been in a thread on FR for two days with some of these people arguing exactly that. I think they are trolls that have gotten in somehow. Would not surprise me if they were involved in this case.
So true, so true.. A relgious cult..
It takes faith to believe a lizard decided to grow feathers..
I would know being a member of a religious cult with one member..
Its takes faith to drive from point A to point B and expect to actually get back again,
alive at that..
it often does not happen that way...
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I think there is a need to clarify terms (and thus perhaps
understanding). Evolution is NOT a theory, it is a fact.
What best explains the fact is Darwin's Theory of Natural
Selection. The overwhelming majority of serious scientists
accept this. I suggest that all who would like the details
elaborated in a scientific (but in language for the layman)
manner read the Nov. issue of National Geographic -- on
the cover: WAS DARWIN RIGHT? Let's not waste time fighting
yesterday's battles. I have a religious faith and have no
problem with evolution.
Thank you for the article.