Posted on 01/20/2005 12:54:58 PM PST by Jay777
ANN ARBOR, MI — The small town of Dover, Pennsylvania today became the first school district in the nation to officially inform students of the theory of Intelligent Design, as an alternative to Darwin’s theory of Evolution. In what has been called a “measured step”, ninth grade biology students in the Dover Area School District were read a four-paragraph statement Tuesday morning explaining that Darwin’s theory is not a fact and continues to be tested. The statement continued, “Intelligent Design is an explanation of the origin of life that differs from Darwin’s view.” Since the late 1950s advances in biochemistry and microbiology, information that Darwin did not have in the 1850s, have revealed that the machine like complexity of living cells - the fundamental unit of life- possessing the ability to store, edit, and transmit and use information to regulate biological systems, suggests the theory of intelligent design as the best explanation for the origin of life and living cells.
Richard Thompson, President and Chief Counsel of the Thomas More Law Center, a national public interest law firm representing the school district against an ACLU lawsuit, commented, “Biology students in this small town received perhaps the most balanced science education regarding Darwin’s theory of evolution than any other public school student in the nation. This is not a case of science versus religion, but science versus science, with credible scientists now determining that based upon scientific data, the theory of evolution cannot explain the complexity of living cells.”
“It is ironic that the ACLU after having worked so hard to prevent the suppression of Darwin’s theory in the Scopes trial, is now doing everything it can to suppress any effort to challenge it,” continued Thompson.
(Excerpt) Read more at thomasmore.org ...
Confusing? Not when taking in the light that those IDers are really Creationists parroting the words of Henry Morris.
"Evolution is the root of atheism, of communism,nazism,behaviorism, racism, economic imperialism, militarism, libertinism, anarchism,and all manner of anti-Christian systems of belief and practice." Morris 1972
Sorry about having use the word "nazism" in a thread but its Morris's quote, not mine.
Biology is hard, it's incredibly complex. And of course when you dig deeper into biology you get into bio-chemistry, and then things get really ugly (reproducible results? well most of the time, but don't be suprised when it doesn't).
I've actually never been convinced low level science classes (like generalized jr high science, or even barely specific high school bio and chemistry) are actually a good idea. By necessity they present such a grossly over simplified view of things they set people up to misunderstand almost everything. These things are just so complicated, and in order to teach them in 32 weeks of 1 hour classes teachers basically have to lie. There's a reason college science takes such small slices of things. You see it in these threads, most of the creationists are saying stuff they learned in high school, and the stuff they learned in high school is crap, and it's not really their fault, their life took them down a path where they didn't need to learn more and they never found out their high school science teacher fed them a line of bull to avoid occular bleeding.
Yes, and = I = said, they just hadn't used the word gravity, yet? What?
laughable by modern scientific standards
More superstition. What's so great about article bloat, lack of referees, junk science and more junk science, and so on? Modern? The technology is much improved. And there are still great minds. But the minds of the Bell Labs journal on black bodies, information theory, and the rest, were perhaps even a cut above many 'great thinkers' today. Still - who knows?
Did I say no natural selection? NO.
That's the choice you have to make. Is evolution simply a force of nature, or something which might be explained? Is it caused, and can one discern that cause(s)? Natural selection is a partial attempt. Chance. Mutation. Etc.
If it is something which might be explained, then one needs a theory of evolution, or however many theories you like. But at least one. How would you state it - word for word? And then don't get mad if I suspect it might seem incomplete in the eyes of others who believe vaguely as do you in - the thing.
So contrary to creationist claims about this debacle, 1) the fraud was perpetrated by a Chinese farmer out to make a buck, not an agenda-driven scientist, 2) the mass-market magazine National Geographic was responsible for the premature announcement of its alleged "missing link" status, not the science community nor science journals, 3) actual science journals rejected it, and 4) scientists were the first to identify it as a fraud as soon as they got a look at it.IMO the real punch line of this joke is: 5) the body of the "Archaeoraptor" fossil actually came from Microraptor zhaoianus - another feathered dinosaur! Creationists just can't win for losing!
So your point is??? God isn't intelligent enough to design the universe?
In case you missed it, here is an excerpt and link to a thread posted recently on FR.
Antony Flew, the 81-year-old British philosophy professor who taught at Oxford and other leading universities, became an atheist at age 15. Throughout his long career he argued—including in debates with an atheist-turned-Christian named C. S. Lewis—that there was a “presumption of atheism,” that is, the existence of a creator could not be proved.
But he’s now been forced to face the evidence. It comes from the Intelligent Design movement, led by Dr. Phillip Johnson and particularly the work of Michael Behe, the Lehigh biochemist who has proven the “irreducible complexity” of the human cell structure. Though eighty-one years old, Flew has not let his thinking fossilize, but has faithfully followed his own dictum to “go where the evidence leads.”
Flew told Habermas, “This is the creature, the evolution of which a truly comprehensive theory of evolution must give some account. Darwin himself was well aware that he had not produced such an account. It now seems to me that the findings of more than fifty years of DNA research have provided materials for a new and enormously powerful argument to design.”
I believe that because that's what all scientific theories are: an attempt to explain. I have a very real sense of what theories are, I don't necessarily believe all theories, as I've said repeatedly my best guess is that the current theory of evolution is wrong, but because I understand the history of science that doesn't scare me away from scientific theorization. I understand the cycle of "observe, guess, observe some more, guess some more, repeat" that is the heart of science.
Particle physics has simple formulas and simple concepts?! BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA Thanks for telling the world you don't know a damn thing about physics. Really, you should be embarassed about that paragraph, so embarassed you should hit the abuse button on yourself and BEG the mods to get rid of it. I've told you what evolution is, multiple times, stop wasting time.
The whole thing is insufficient. The Church, God, Christianity quite simply CANNOT be explained by any 4 sentences. It's not possible, human language isn't that good. Maybe someday we'll invent a new concept of language that can do it, but right now the tools we have are simply not up to the task.
Of course much of what the Hubble has seen has caused massive quantities of scrambling in the astronomical community. We had predictions based on what we could see, Hubble saw something we couldn't see before, that something made us look at our predictions and say "holy crap, what a pile". So we made new predictions. This is most visible in the subsection of astronomy that's works out the creation of the universe, Hubble hosed them up one side and down the other. Which is the process of science, we observed, we guessed, we sent Hubble up to observe some more, and we are now guessing again.
We have tried to explain things as irreducable before. Cells were once the smallest thing, and atoms, and electrons, and quarks. And we keep finding new ways to disect irreducable things and find their reductions.
Evolution isn't difficult to define and quantify, you've been presented with well over a dozen rephrasing of the exact same definition. It's hard to explain HOW it happens, but the quantification of its occurance is easy, there's a bunch of charts already posted on this thread quantifying our best guess to the evolutionary chain leading to current species on the planet. Evolution is one of the hottest sciences today, it's the one going through the most internal discussions (totally seperate from the arguments with creationist, real evolutionary scientists don't have time to argue with people that simply don't believe, their too busy with people that believe but have a different idea), with some of the most interesting new discoveries, and demonstrating the reasons for the scientific method better than any other science today. If the science that's doing more of what science is supposed to do than any other today doesn't belong in science curriculum then we might as well just get rid of science curriculum.
You've just reinforced all my own prejudices.
No science before college.
But, also, no graduating college without 4 years.
K-12 teach concrete stuff like anatomy, maybe some "isn't nature neat" but stay away from biology and chemistry as science. Maybe some simple mechanics from physics.
Don't get me started, I can spew forever on this.
ping
They had used the word gravity, but it hadn't been quantified and explored, but they hadn't used it much in relation to what we now think of as gravity.
No superstition at all, and I'm not talking about article bloat. I'm talking about sample sets too small to be scientifically useful. Look up the Mt Graham squirrel, that's a squirrel that environmentalists "proved" was a seperate species because they "averaged" as slightly larger than squirrels of the same species on different mountains. Of course their sample set was only 12 squirrels, and they did a plain average not a mean average, so if one of them was a fatty it completely skewed their results. That is a classic example of laughable set of data, getting more data wouldn't have created article bloat.
No it isn't the choice I have to make. That's the choice YOU are trying to force upon me by committing the fallasy of the excluded middle. And of course the root of science is to explain forces of nature as not so simple. "Simply a force of nature" is a phrased used by people that don't like science to discourage scientific investigation, it's a way to write things off as not needing investigation. Science believes in investigating everything, that's part of the fun.
I just re-read my response and realize it could be mis-read.
Just to be clear: I completely agree with you.
"Given time -- absent any intelligent action -- random edits will geometrically always become gibberish."
hmmmm, may I suggest in good nature that your posts prove that point.
Hey, I couldn't help myself, it was a flame waiting to happen.
LOL.
Notice my admission in post #158. :-)
thanks for saving me the trouble. I doubt further reading will demonstrate that your efforts have had any salutory effect, but one can hope...
Exactly. LOL
I got it. It's an interesting accomplishment in human history that science has gotten so vast and complex we cannot effectively teach introductory level courses to the field as a whole.
Better to keep the masses uniformed. Less competition with the Church. I remember how the Church was opposed to letting the masses have a printing press. Something about knowledge and power ...
And in ten years you would have the US become a third rate nation. Gag.
"LOL. Being a Swedish Lutheran myself (presently in the ELCA, at least until the next synod free-for-all), with all the horse-hair shirt guilt and baggage that goes along with it, the "Misery Synod" is particularly apt."
I hate to say it, but I believe it was Garrison Keillor who came up the the "Misery Synod" thing. Of course, there's always the Wiconsin Synod, which makes the Misery Synod look like flaming liberals.
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