Posted on 08/08/2005 8:49:04 AM PDT by wallcrawlr
THE GOD VS. Darwin debate went to the White House last week when President Bush weighed in, stating in a roundtable interview with reporters that ''intelligent design" should be taught along with evolution in public schools. It's a move that has undoubtedly pleased the president's conservative religious base. However, it has also caused much unhappiness among those conservatives who want the Republican Party to be something other than a political arm of the religious right, including such strong Bush supporters as columnist Charles Krauthammer and University of Tennessee law professor/blogger Glenn Reynolds.
(Excerpt) Read more at boston.com ...
Scientists are more than willing to debate in public- that's what scientific journals are for.
Or are you talking about a debate in front of a live audience, where the creationists/ID'ers throw out 50 points in three minutes and then proclaim victory when the scientist can't responde to that smorgasboard in the alloted time?
The people of any given community have the right to ask that both evolution and ID are taught to their children. It's a very conservative concept. IMO.
(The President was stating his opinion, which many of us happen to share).
So your answer is go ad hominem?
The base is:
All of us, be we evolutionists, atheists, secular humanists, buddists, muslims, christians, communists, daoists, or whatever; have some sort of religious framework to their life, deem it involving God or not. Religious does not have to involve God. One's beliefs spring from some sort of belief framework based on their upbringing, what they read, where they have studied, who they have studied under, their reactions to those in their lives, without their lives (i.e. in the neigborhood...which could be local, country or global), what their physical experiences have been, what their spiritual experiences have been, their familial experiences.
All to say...we are all religious (even those who say they are not)...and the government school system is dominated and castle-ized by an athiestic and secular humanistic religious set of beliefs.
This is wrong at taxpayer expense, just as it would be if they were by any other.
It's disingenuous to expect a high school teacher, who's probably an english or political science major, to know anything about graduate level biology. The simple fact is that biology is a much larger and more complicated body of knowledge than radiometry, or physics in general.
You might as well expect high school teachers to be Biblical scholars. They're not educated to do that either.
Not hard for you to see.
But it is up to you and those who believe so to prove it with science, and this has not proved possible.
The topic has inspired me to ask outright: what is the freerepublic's official stance on Creation/Evolution? Does it even have one? I won't bother to give my views - do a search if you are curious. However, one of the problems I have with being a 'conservative' or a 'liberal' is that I always feel that by embracing that generality, I feel pressured to buy into a bunch of ideas that I don't believe in.
Cute, but they won't even allow for that in most cases.
Avoid the ad hominem and straw man attacks.
The Secular Humanist/teacher monopoly would go into gale force to disallow it based on a false religious argument.
They are religionists themselves, but don't admit it.
What kind of public debate do you propose, then?
Avoid the ad hominem and straw man attacks.
I have used no ad hominems or straw men. I've simply asked you a question as to what kind of debate you would want to see between a creationist and a scientist.
Furthermore, I've pointed out that a public debate already exists in the pages of scientific journals.
Science deals in evidence, not proof. The evidence for evolution is very strong.
The irony is, if a paleontologist finds some stone that looks like it has marks of carving or shaping, it is evidence for the presence of someone who did it.
If you find some form to electromagnetic radiation (as in SETI project) you ascribe it to higher intelligence.
When you find a bacterium in the mud, when just about all forces of nature are against it...the answer is,....
ta-da...why of course it evolved....
I would love to apply the same logic to the first
set of electromagnetic radiation we get from space(assuming we do, to date, we haven't), or some paleontologists claim that someone carved something out of stone, "why no,
it was erosion...(can't you see, mindless, purposeless, natural activity carved up those things you think are arrowheads?...?)
Nonsense.
The irony is, if a paleontologist finds some stone that looks like it has marks of carving or shaping, it is evidence for the presence of someone who did it.
If you find some form to electromagnetic radiation (as in SETI project) you ascribe it to higher intelligence.
When you find a bacterium in the mud, when just about all forces of nature are against it...the answer is,....
ta-da...why of course it evolved....
I would love to apply the same logic to the first
set of electromagnetic radiation we get from space(assuming we do, to date, we haven't), or some paleontologists claim that someone carved something out of stone, "why no,
it was erosion...(can't you see, mindless, purposeless, natural activity carved up those things you think are arrowheads?...?)
A Scientific journal would, no doubt, forbid any publishing by a respected creationist...since he cannot be a scientist and a creationist simultaneously.
Any evidence to support that scientific journals have allowed such publication?
ID proponents have had to fight through the same.
They are completely blind to the left's influence in education, and they look at educated conservatives who believe that the evolutionist monopoly in education should be broken as complete ninnies.
It's actually amusing if you back up and think about what they're saying, and don't mind being called names because you want kids to get a balanced education..... :)
One word does not an argument settle.
Maybe we should define terms, as to what you believe religious means.
Tell me about your beliefs and how you insist they are not religious, or boil back to some religious source?
Unfortunately the Libertarian Party (big L) has sold out on many principles the little l libertarians still hold to. I've seen more than a few cases of this support for government program 'pet projects' and stances from Libertarians lately
Sure. Because we can tell the difference between stones shaped by human hands and those shaped by natural forces.
If you find some form to electromagnetic radiation (as in SETI project) you ascribe it to higher intelligence.
Because we can tell the difference between natural electromagnetic phenomenon and intelligent transmissions.
When you find a bacterium in the mud, when just about all forces of nature are against it...the answer is,....
We have only ever seen life-forms created by natural forces. There is no evidence that any lifeform has been created through intelligent design. So, it is logical to conclude that all lifeforms came about without intelligent involvement.
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