A Revolution in Evolution Is Underway

Thomas More Lawcenter ^ | Tue, Jan 18, 2005

[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.

[general_re]

The fact that most evolutionists, including the vast majority I see on these FR threads, consider believers in God to be supertitious nimrods...

Name three. Three posters here on the crevo threads who think that believers in God are "nimrods", superstitious or otherwise.

Surely you can name names - you're not just making that up, are you?

[GarySpFc]

Psychotically enraged Darwinist-atheist-antiChristian response to follow.

Well, did you expect any less from God-haters?

[MineralMan]

Yes, and I'm still waiting for him to name the "mainstream" churches that don't believe in the items he listed. I believe I will not hear from him.

I'm calling nobody names here, nor am I referring to those who disagree with me as "nazis." I like discussion, but that requires both sides to present information. That is not happening with this particular question, it seems.

But, if someone knows of a "mainstream" church that doesn't honor the Nicene Creed, I'd be interested in hearing about it. And the LDS church is NOT a "mainstream" church.

[laredo44]

Psychotically enraged Darwinist-atheist-antiChristian response to follow.

Smug I-believe-so-hard-I-just-have-to-be-right know-it-all post located at #3.

If the Inquisitors had had you, the sun would still be revolving around the earth.

[MineralMan]

"Psychotically enraged Darwinist-atheist-antiChristian response to follow.

Well, did you expect any less from God-haters?"

Odd. I haven't seen any rage from any evolutionists here in this thread. It all seems to be coming from the other side. No psychotics, either.

[gdani]

In my opinion, the theory of Intelligent Design should be allowed to be taught as a theory since some people believe it, and perhaps aspects of astrology should be taught in school too

Sure.

And the Nation of Islam believes that the entire caucasian race originated 6,000 years ago from the tinkering of a mad scientist named Yakub.

Perhaps that should be taught as well?

[BayouCoyote]

BUMP.

[atlaw]

Maybe he's thinking about Unitarians. They're kinda' mainstream in parts of Minnesota. Or at least mainbrook. Ok, maybe maintrickle.

[1LongTimeLurker]

"Science is hard, let's do ID"

[MineralMan]

"Maybe he's thinking about Unitarians. They're kinda' mainstream in parts of Minnesota. Or at least mainbrook. Ok, maybe maintrickle."

Oh, not mainstream, the Unitarians. Oddly, though, there were a few of them among the Founders of this nation. Much maligned, though, the Unitarians, especially here on Free Republic.

And as for Minnesota, it's Catholics and Lutherans, mainly, with some Methodists mixed in there. Of course the Lutheran Church is much divided these days. All branches, however use the Nicene Creed, along with the Apostles' Creed.

Just the other day, I heard one of the Lutheran Synods called the "Misery" Synod. I thought that was pretty funny. They were formed in the state of Misery, I guess. [grin]

[discostu]

Well his original how has taken a beating, but that's standard in science, as new information is learned old explanations don't work anymore and new ones have to be developed. Electricity is another fine example, they couldn't really figure out which parts were moving around but they'd figured out something was, so they assigned their positives and negatives and it turns out they had it all backwards, thus why the "negative" side actually has more stuff than the positive side.

Darwin didn't come up with a theory that took God out of the equation. I'll requote the last line of Origin which PatrickHenry put upthread: "There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed by the Creator into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone circling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being evolved." Doesn't look like taking God out of the equation to me, looks like he stuck God right at the front of the equation, casting the whole book as an explanation of what happened after God finished Phase 1.

Dawkins is a shmuck. Anyone involved in this argument on either side that considers Darwin or the theory of evolution to be anti-religious is simply showing how little they understand the topic. It's not anti-religious, it's not really even religious nuetral, it is outside of religious discussion. It's about the mechanisms of life, what they accomplish and how they accomplish it, why these mechanism exist in the first place isn't even a topic. They're there and scientists want to know how they work.

[King Prout]

excellent line.

[sevry]

mutation is observable fact

I thought it was genetic. Are you saying, rather, that you believe you can observe genetic changes by what they produce?

heritable traits are observable facts

The lasting effects of the fall due to Original Sin come to mind.

prevalence of dominant and recessive alleles

Does this fit into you particular sense of what you mean by that four letter word - evolution? Perhaps, as a good scientist, you should state what you mean, precisely, scientifically, so that everyone will understand your meaning.

genetic drift is observable

Do you know what some mean by that term?

I do not see where faith comes into

I understand that. But with regard to this, if you cannot say what you mean, if you cannot present evolution as something other than a vague religious imperative, which can tolerate no heresy from Revelation, then you need to show a) that Darwin thought he was God, and b) just what you think that Revelation must be. Because if it's just science, it could just be wrong. But if it is science, it is a) falsifiable, and b) importantly, it can be stated succinctly, which you've yet to do. Throwing out words and phrases at random is no sort of scientific definition.

[GarySpFc]

Meanwhile, the Roman Catholic church supports the Theory of Evolution, as do most mainstream churches. They're believers in both a deity-originated creation, followed by speciation through the process of Evolution. The two are not incompatible in any way.

Please read the following, before making your comments:

Why Kansas Catholics Opposed
The Teaching of Evolution
By Jack Cashill, Ph.D.

Time after time at the now famous Topeka hearings on Kansas state science standards, the so-called "science educators" would cite Pope John Paul II to support their evolutionary position. And time after time, nearly apoplectic, the Catholic representatives at the hearings would just about jump out of their chairs.

Willfully or otherwise, the science educators misconstrued the Pope's position. This disturbed the Catholics at Topeka to be sure, but it did not surprise them. What has surprised them, shocked them really, are the dismissive editorials by their fellow Catholics who understand the Pope's position only superficially and who understand the science educators' not at all.

For the record, Pope John Paul II and the U.S. Bishops have no objection to certain theories of evolution as long as they allow for God's creation of the world and the special creation of man. This is a shrewd posture on the part of the Pope as it allows for the Church to adapt to new scientific discoveries without a challenge to the faith.

Unfortunately, the Church's position does not wash with evolutionary biologists of any repute or ambition. They may avoid conflict with the Vatican by either ignoring or misquoting the Pope, but in fact, Catholic teaching is antithetical to their own, and they know it. A little background here is in order. In 1859, Charles Darwin published The Origin of Species. This elegant and timely work made two basic claims: One is that living things experience what Darwin called "variations" or what we call "mutations"--genetic changes that occur randomly. The second is that a process he called "natural selection" preserves favorable variations and rejects harmful ones.

The best evidence Darwin could cite for this theory was the breeding of domestic animals. These obvious changes within a species--called microevolution--no one could deny then, and no one denies today, certainly not the Church, nor the much maligned Kansas Board of Education.

The question Darwin had to ask himself--the tough question--was whether this theory could account for macroevolution, the presumed bridge from one species to another and the mechanism he thought responsible for the vast diversity of life.

Darwin and his philosophical heirs answer an unequivocal "Yes." Richard Dawkins, today's most influential evolutionist, describes natural selection as "a blind, unconscious, automatic process" that is "the explanation for the existence and apparently purposeful form of all life."

That's a quote. The explanation. All life. What room does that leave for, well, say, God? Not much.

"In the evolutionary pattern of thought," said Julian Huxley on the occasion of the Darwin Centennial in 1959, "there is no longer either need or room for the supernatural. The earth was not created. It evolved."

No need. No room. And Huxley's sentiment is the rule, not the exception. The renowned biologist Stephen Jay Gould praises Darwinism as "a rigidly materialistic and basically atheistic version of evolution." Darwin made it possible," boasts Richard Dawkins, "to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist."

These are their own words. As to the inescapable ramifications of Darwinism, distinguished Cornell University Professor Will Provine, evolutionary biologist and neo-Darwinian, happily cites the impossibility of either free will or life after death.

The larger philosophy is often called naturalism, nature is all that there is; or materialism, matter is all that there is. In its most extreme forms, scientific naturalism provided a rationale for the terror of Nazi eugenics and the tyranny of communism. Wrote Marx to Engels of Darwin's The Origin of Species, "This is the book which contains the basis in natural history for our view."

Pope John Paul II has preached often against materialism and specifically so in an evolutionary context. Aware of this, the Catholics at the Topeka hearings objected not only to the undeniable connection between today's science establishment and the eugenics movement, but also to the implicit materialism of the proposed science standards themselves.

For all its harsh consequences, materialism would present a real challenge to the faith only if its own particular creation myth, Darwinism, was irrefutable. But Darwinism is hardly that. There is, after all, no evidence of existing transitional species as Darwin presumed there ought to be. None. There's no hard evidence of the same in the fossil record. Most species haven't changed at all. The major animal groups did not emerge gradually as Darwin predicted, but they exploded on to the scene. Nor did they die out gradually as Darwin said they would. Those that vanished, vanished in a geological heartbeat.

It gets worse. In one of his bolder moments, Darwin said "If it could be demonstrated that any complex organ existed, which could not possibly have been formed by numerous, successive, slight modifications, my theory would absolutely break down."

Darwin knew nothing of the electron microscope and cellular biology. His champion, Richard Dawkins, knows a lot. As Dawkins notes, the nucleus of each cell contains more information than all 30 volumes of the encyclopedia Brittanica put together, complex, specific and perfectly ordered.

Richard Dawkins imagines the cell as a Xerox machine, capable, he says, "of copying its own blueprints," but "not capable of springing spontaneously into existence." So picture Dawkins on the brink of infinity, pumping what Darwin called "secretions" from his barely evolved brain, trying desperately to figure how this this wonderfully complex machine came to be. His best guess? No joke: "sheer, unadulterated, miraculous luck." It must have slopped itself together, he surmises, from some imagined chemical soup.

Luck indeed, it's a task scientists have never been able to duplicate in the lab. Not to be outdone, Nobel laureate Frances Crick argues that these first primitive life forms might have come to earth, hang on, in a spaceship sent by a dying alien civilization.

In truth, neither Dawkins nor Crick have a clue where these first cells came from. Neither do their peers. Indeed, when biochemist Michael Behe searched the scientific journals looking for a Darwinian explanation, he found instead "an eerie and complete silence."

Said Darwin , "I would give nothing for the theory of natural selection if it requires miraculous additions at any one stage of descent." One wonders how he would feel about utterly whimsical "additions" like spaceships or luck.

Still, America's public school teachers can present this goofiness in class as science but can not even address the rational possibility of a willful, intelligent creation of life. And the editorialists, even the Catholic ones, cheer on this kind of teaching, fearing to be cast among the anti-Darwinian few whom Dawkins calls the "ignorant, stupid, insane, or wicked."

Ironically, the loud, spiteful resistance from the establishment bodes well for the future. It is a sign not of confidence but of confusion. It may even portend a genuine shift in the paradigm.

Richard Dawkins himself admits that "the beauty and elegance of biological design" gives us "the illusion of design and planning." But trapped by a lifetime of scornful pride and self-congratulation, he will abandon his weary materialism no more eagerly than the Soviets abandoned theirs.

The very Catholic (9 children) Michael Behe is not so trapped. "Over the past four decades," he writes in the ground breaking book, Darwin's Black Box, "modern biochemistry has uncovered the secrets of the cell." "The result," he adds, "is a loud, piercing cry of DESIGN." In Behe's opinion, this observation is "as momentous as the observation that the earth goes round the sun."

Try as they might, the science establishment and their friends in the media cannot suppress this kind of news forever.

Jack Cashill, Ph.D., has written and produced an hour long documentary, The Triumph of Design and The Demise of Darwin, in collaboration with Phillip Johnson. Jack is a Fullbright scholar and a regional Emmy Award winner. See Jack Cashill News: America's Conservative Information Resource.

[Alamo-Girl]

Er, I cannot resist - it is just too tempting ...

Have you made the mistake of reading creationist claims that there are "no" transitional fossils -- and believing them?

Wouldn't every one of the examples of "transitional fossils" you provide in your exhaustive post actually be subject to the fallacy of quantizing the continuum?

[sevry]

a recessive trait simply became dominant.

Worse than that. I believe they miscounted, and the whole thing was ruled a fraud. I don't believe evolutionists talk about the 'pepper moths' much, anymore. But if there's an evolutionist who disagrees, correct me if I'm wrong.

[JFK_Lib]

Here we go again.

May I summarize it as follows:

Creationists:
Evolution is only a theory and not proven fact, so we should allow for students to hear other theories in school.

Evilutionists:
No, we should not allow any other suggestions as the theory of evolution is all that we have to explain the devlopment of the complexity of life as we know it today.

You ignoramus.

Creationist:
No, ID is a theory that accounts for this complexity as well.

You atheistic pedophile.

Evilutionist:
No, ID is not an acceptable theory because it is not science. Might try it in a theology class.

You preNeanderthalis, hairbacked, termite eating troglodite.

Creatist:
Says you, you absolutely morally bankrupt, sexually obsessed invertebrate.

Evilutionist: Yeah, says me, fat-boy!

Creationist: Pencil-neck monkey!

Evilutionist: Bible-banging No-Nothing!

Theistic Evolutionist:
Um can we act like adults here and discuss this calmly?

Creationist & Evilutionist together:
GO AWAY - WE'RE HAVING FUN HERE!


And the typical lurker thinks that the only choice is between godless materialism and fidelistic Creationism.

So sad.

[atlaw]

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.

[King Prout]

let's start from the top:
mutations in base-pair sequencing can be and have been observed directly through various methods.

get that little tidbit lodged deeply into your head.

then pe polite.

[mc6809e]

You know god just created all those fossils, buried in the ground, to test your faith in him. They never existed as real animals. </sarcasm>