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 ...
No they're not. If they were the whole picture we wouldn't still need the Bible. Even inspired by God He still had our mediocre languages to work with, maybe He should have given us a new language to go with them, then they could be perfect. But as it is they can't be, they're the inspired word of God, as filtered through fallible humans and recorded in our rather mediocre languages. It's like asking Da Vinci to make a masterpiece on a cave wall using only burnt sticks for pigment and tool, I'm sure the outcome would be the finest cave painting ever, but it would still just be a cave painting.
Because vague, inconsistent and incomplete is how the scientific method acheives clear consistent and mostly complete (science is never complete, there's alway a new rock to look under). This is how science has worked since the first Greeks monitored the shadow of a tree to try to figure out the size of the earth, this is how science will continue to work until God finally decides to hand us a nice manual, which I doubt He'll ever do because He seems to like us figuring stuff out on our own, if not then why did He make us so curious about everything.
After this fallacy of quantizing the continuum was asserted, two other models were raised: Irvin Bauer's model which is part math and part characterizations of biological life - and George Javor's which is entirely bio/chemical (and creationist).
If we were to go down the path you suggest (bio/chemical) - then I suspect we will run into a lot of subjective interpretations which will tilt to the ideology one brings to the table. Mathematics on the other hand is objective and also neutral to all ideology and theology.
I'm glad to pursue any of the models in any context (abiogenesis, life principle, fecundity principle, cosmology, geometry). But it would be a duplication to pursue it here instead of on the Plato thread where so much research has already been posted.
Macro-evolution conforms with the fossil record but is vanishingly improbable. Micro-evolution seems to happen in some cases, but the fossil record overwhelmingly displays stasis in species.
What's left after that?
Er, if I might ask, how can you not see that there is a sharp dividing line between life and non-life? If that makes it tough to defend abiogenesis, well that’s too bad. A thing is either alive or it is not. Any life-capable system is either alive or dead (unless it is Schroedinger's cat who "explained" quantum superposition...).
There is no “continuum” involved with the question, simply the question of whether a thing lives or not. Life departs abruptly, suddenly, “all at once,” as it were. A cancer patient may suffer for years, but his death needs only an instant to occur. That being the case, the inception of life (which I imagine precedes the physical occurrence of birth) may well also be quite sudden and abrupt.
And what does Darwin’s theory of evolution have to do with it? Darwin avoided the question of life altogether: He just assumed that “God made it” (like most people in his time), and then went on to look at the evolution of the forms living systems could take. He never, ever dealt with the phenomenon of life per se, nor did he spend much time speculating about how life “got started.”
To put it crudely, Darwin dealt with the outer forms or “husks” of living organisms, the rise of species, their transitions, etc., etc. So why are we having an Evo food fight over this issue of life vs. non-life? If you think that evolution = life -- or even that biology per se = life, for that matter -- then I think you’re very, very confused....
To repeat a statement you made: "...abiogenesis would be the *gradual* emergence of life-as-we-know it by the slow one-at-a-time accumulation of the *many* processes which, all together, make up the complex system that we are familiar with under the label of 'life'."
How do you know that abiogenesis is a "gradualist" process,"as opposed to assuming it "must be" a gradualist process?
And why do you say that "life is a complex process?" It could be the simplest thing in the world. The complexity enters in with how biological forms "wire into it." But again, that's not the same thing as what is life? That is only the how of life.
But life is what we were discussing over on the other thread, what observed characteristics it has in living forms and other matters, when a ginned-up "fallacy," "quantizing the continuum" so-called, popped up. It was a non sequitur from its first appearance, as its author almost certainly is aware.
Would you also say it's the statement of a blind-faith religious kook?
If you know how natural selection could eliminate recessive mutations, please tell me and I'll pass that proof on to that "someone".
To my - the four principal Creeds of The Church are the dogmatic statement of the Faith. And:
they're the inspired word of God, as filtered through fallible humans
People. And that is the 'filter' for the inspired Word of God. You question even that now?
until God finally decides to hand us a nice manual, which I doubt He'll ever do
Consider the four principal Creeds of The Church as your Table of Contents. It's not unknown for catechisms and lengthy treatises to be organized in that way.
The link works for me. It's probably to a journal that we are subscribed to.
You might use GOOGLE with "pier luigi luisi" as a search phrase. This should turn up references or even publically available papers. (Maybe GOOGLE SCHOHLAR would be useful.)
If it was to be wielded as a weapon in an assortment of arguments, then I felt I needed to make it very clear there was more poison in the handle than in the point. And "evolution" was the biggest target at the moment.
>> Right, but what I meant was that I really doubt he's all alone in that opinion. <<
Oh, I'm sure he is not, but neither are the ID people who do not worship a god.
It's easy to define life; the only thing we see defying the 2nd Law, NOT tending down toward equilibrium.
You and irony are not on speaking terms, are you?
From your bramble-patch posts, I can discern only one point that you are trying to make -- that "the" theory of evolution is in fact a collection of concepts posited to explain the inference from observation that all species have descended, with modification, from common ancestors. The significance of this point, however, is lost on me. Perhaps you can explain.
Oh well, ya gotta do what ya gotta do! LOL!!!
BTW Alamo-Girl, my little screed was almost entirely addressed to Ichneumon. I hope you don't think I was ranting at you personally!
Care to say what those are, and phrase it in the form of a sentence? I'll grant you your 'fact', so-called, just for sake of argument. But you also use this phrase - the theory of evolution. And you must mean SOMETHING . . by it? Yes?
It strikes me that this "activating force" covers far more ground than those two words might indicate. For example, we could say that life is "electricity" which is some kind of activating force. However, when I put electricity to my toaster, I have not really changed the nature of that toaster in the way that the "activating force" changes a living system that it inhabits.
Here we can speak of a continuum. There appears to be effects of the "activating force" that stretches from providing a "core" that innervates the entire "occupied" object all the way to a "self-aware identity" that occupies the object.
This is all speculation and since this "force" seems to occupy and cease occupation, it appears that as a mechanistic process it "could" have (perhaps, 'must have') developed other than simultaneous with the object it occupies and then leaves.
Imagine a something developing while steeped in a "radio-active" environment that permeates the entire something. Imagine that "radio-activity" have a short half-life such that 50 years later it is half, then 25%, etc., until it is gone.
Life draining/evaporating/halving/subsiding/preparing/readying to the point of being "out" of the formerly "steeped" object.
Someone call the mental squad...X is wildly speculating! :>)
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