Posted on 09/19/2005 3:32:34 PM PDT by dukeman
The Dover Area School district in Pennsylvania will soon defend its policy to require ninth grade students to hear a short statement about “intelligent design” before biology lessons on evolution.
Dover is believed to have been the first school system in the nation to require students to hear about the controversial concept. The school adopted the policy in October 2004, after which teachers were required to read a statement that says intelligent design is different than Darwin’s theory of evolution and refers students to a text book on intelligent design to get more information.
“All the Dover school board did was allow students to get a glimpse of a controversy that is really boiling over in the scientific community,” said Richard Thompson, president and chief counsel of the Thomas More Law Center, which is defending the school district, according to the Associated Press.
The civil trial is set to take place on Sept. 26 and will only be the latest chapter in a long-running legal debate over the teaching of evolution in public schools.
The controversy over intelligent design in public schools has received national attention with statements by President Bush expressing approval for the theory to be taught in class, along with the recent approval by the Kansas Board of Education to give preliminary approval to science standards that allow criticism of evolution.
Intelligent design theory states that some parts of the natural world are so complex that the most reasonable explanation is that they were made as products of an intelligent cause, rather than random mutation and natural selection.
In contrast to "creationism," which states specifically that God is the creator, intelligent design is more general, simply saying that life did not come about by chance. The "designer" could be anything or anyone, though many place God in the position of the designer.
Experts on the case include biochemist Michael Behe of Lehigh University in Pennsylvania, who is proponent of intelligent design. He holds that the concept of “irreducible complexity” shows that there is an intelligent creator. He cites the example of a bacterial flagellum, an appendage to a bacterium that allows it to move about.
"Whenever we see such complex, functional mechanical systems, we always infer that they were designed. ... It is a conclusion based on physical evidence," AP reported Behe as saying in testimony before the state legislative panel in June where he was asked to talk about intelligent design.
Critics of intelligent design have dismissed the theory as a backdoor to creationism, with some calling it pseudo science.
In a 1999 assessment of intelligent design, the National Academy of sciences said the theory was not science.
''Creationism, intelligent design, and other claims of supernatural intervention in the origin of life or of species are not science because they are not testable by the methods of science," the NAS stated.
The controversy over Intelligent Design has been so highly talked about that the debate was also featured last month as a cover story for Time Magazine. In the feature article, Southern Baptist Theological Seminary (SBTS) President Albert Mohler, Jr., tackled the controversy with three other scholars in a forum addressing the question “Can You Believe in God and Evolution?” Behe was also among those whose views were addressed in the article.
Well, what do you expect? Look at where the article's from.
If you really want ID in the science classroom, what you will get is religion being subjected to the methods of science.
***Nothing wrong with that. I found a ton of useful information when I realized there were a lot of archaeological discoveries that related to 1st century Palestine and what happened there. Besides, I don't care much about religion.
Everything is science is up for grabs. If you can't see it or devise a test for it, it goes.
***Great. Once we start coming up with scientific tests for the assertions of the haps side of evo/abio, then I noticed that science kinda moved on from that pursuit, coming up with alternative theories of external abiogenesis from comets because the probabilities of abiogenesis origins seemed too small.
Is this what you want for religious beliefs, testing by the standards of methodological materialism?
***I dunno. Those are kinda high falutin' terms you just put together, and I don't know what yer askin'. What's so wrong with testing religious beliefs? Do earthquakes get caused by elephants jumping up & down like the baghavad gita says? The problem I have is with the haps side of evo/abio creeping into every other philosophy on campus in such a manner that even english teachers use it as a backdrop for their soulless philosophies. We should empower students to be able to say, "shut up and teach" english or women's studies or humanities or whatever. Origins belongs in an origins class. If someone happens to hold a different viewpoint than the prevailing scientific priesthood, it shouldn't matter.
Ya beat me to it.
Intelligent Design is trying to prove a negative (that certain features COULD NOT evolve naturally). That, in itself, disqualifies it. How does one test for this? You cannot. It is therefore not a science.
You assume I believe in ID. I already stated I don't think ID is a good theory. Just saying that organisms are too complex to have evolved is not a good argument.
What's "the haps side" mean?
I don't expect dishonesty from Christians.
I try not to, at least...
Go look at the pro-evo blogs and the relish with which they're looking forward to the Dover trial. It's not as if our side doesn't have a strong case on its merits alone, but the missteps by the defense (paying $100,000 to Dembski as an expert witness and then deciding not to use him, and the overt admissions by members of the School Borad that the policy is religiously motivated) have most of us believing this case is a slam-dunk, and will be a major defeat for the IDers.
No. It is really boiling over in school board meetings around the country. That's it.
Not a thing, as long as you don't mind every religion "falsified".
Sure there's some archaeological evidence that's interesting to several religions in the middle east. But I'm sure there's archaeological evidence that Jim Jones used Koolaid too. It does nothing to verify the existence of any deity.
Quite a bit more evidence of Roman "gods" than anything relating to Christianity.
At least the Jews have the wailing wall and other archaeological evidence that there was an old faith (and nothing that proves a deity). Christians have just about zip.
When you get science to invent a machine to tell you that God is present, and which "god" he is, then let me know.
Not true! Yellow journalism at it's finest!
If you aren't interested in religion, you will have no problem with ID being required to show som actual research, and being required to put forward some theory about the motives, objectives and limitations of the designer. Something that can be tested.
Another day, more of the same.
In 1904, Walter S. Sutton, an American cytologist, decided there might be some connection between Gregor Mendel's 1860s research and the newly discovered chromosomes with their genes. A major breakthrough came in 1906, when Thomas Hunt Morgan, a Columbia University zoologist, conceived the idea of using fruit flies (Drosophila melanogaster) for genetic research. This was due to the fact that they breed so very rapidly, require little food, have scores of easily observed characteristics and only a few chromosomes per cell.
According to evolution, man has lived on the earth for a little over a million years. Yet experiments on fruit flies have already exceeded the equivalent of a million years of people living on earth. Here is a clear statement of the problem: "The fruit fly has long been the favorite object of mutational experiments because of its fast gestation period [twelve days]. X rays have been used to increase the mutation rate in the fruit fly by 15,000 percent. All in all, scientists have been able to "catalyze the fruit fly evolutionary process, such that what has been seen to occur in Drosophila is the equivalent of the many millions of years of normal mutations and evolution."
"Even with this tremendous speedup of mutations, scientists have not been able to come up with anything other than another fruit fly. Most important, what all these experiments demonstrate is that the fruit fly can vary within certain upper and lower limits but will never go beyond them. For example, Ernst Mayr reported on two experiments performed on the fruit fly back in 1948....
Experts on the case include biochemist Michael Behe of Lehigh University in Pennsylvania, who is proponent of intelligent design. He holds that the concept of “irreducible complexity” shows that there is an intelligent creator
Can even remotely be called a scientific theory. At most, it's a poor hypothesis that fails testing by any scientific criteria.
(We can't post stuff from the New Yorker, but this is just a very cool 'Queer Eye for the Omnipotent Guy' thing, super! )
Ancient history.
The fact that more scientists admit there is validity to ID means that at some point people are going to have to come up with something better than character assassination to rebut it (though I doubt most are capable of it). The fact that it arouses such a reaction in its detractors (and given the personalities of such detractors) has me interested in it - bribing museums and attempts to censor through the courts doesn't indicate to me a very good foundation in scientific truth (unless filing a lawsuit was recently added to the scientific method). American Spectator had a good article about ID several months ago, and now I see Time is covering it.
"The fact that more scientists admit there is validity to ID..."
This is not true. More scientists are not advocating ID.
"The fact that it arouses such a reaction in its detractors..."
Is because we are concerned about the scientific education of this country. ID (as stated by it's main proponents) is crap.
It has no place in a science classroom.
More? More than what?
You need to Google "Project Steve" and look at the Discovery Institute web site. There's been about 400 "scientists" who've signed a very generic statement from DI that basically says they have some problems with evolution (not saying that evolution is false, only that they have a problem somehow with it). Many scientists have requested that their names be removed from that list.
The Project Steve list implies a number of about 50,000 scientists that support evolution.
That means about 99+% of scientists disagree with you.
I hate to use the argument from authority method, but that's where the IDers have led us.
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