Posted on 11/01/2005 6:27:26 PM PST by Tailgunner Joe
A president who consults religious lunatics about who should be on the Supreme Court... Judges who want prayer in school and the "ten commandments" in the courtroom… Born-Again fanatics who bomb abortion clinics… bible thumpers who condemn homosexuality as "sin"... and all the other Christian fascists who want a U.S. theocracy….
This is the force behind the assault on evolution going on right now in a courtroom in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania.
Last year, the Dover city school board instituted a policy that requires high school biology teachers to read a statement to students that says Darwin's theory of evolution is "not a fact" and then notes that intelligent design offers an alternative theory for the origin and evolution of life--namely, that life in all of its complexity could not have arisen without the help of an "intelligent hand." Some teachers refused to read the statement, citing the Pennsylvania teacher code of ethics, which says, "I will never knowingly present false information to a student." Eleven parents who brought this case to court contend that the directive amounted to an attempt to inject religion into the curriculum in violation of the First Amendment. Their case has been joined by the American Civil Liberties Union and Americans United for Separation of Church and State.
The school board is being defended pro bono by the Thomas More Law Center, a Christian law firm in Ann Arbor, Mich. The case is being heard without a jury in Harrisburg by U.S. District Judge John Jones III, whom George W. Bush appointed to the bench in 2002.
In 1987, the Supreme Court ruled that public schools could not teach the biblical account of creation instead of evolution, because doing so would violate the constitutional ban on establishment of an official religion. Since then Intelligent Design has been promoted by Christian fundamentalists as the way to get the Bible and creationism into the schools.
"This clever tactical repackaging of creationism does not merit consideration," Witold Walczak, legal director of the Pennsylvania American Civil Liberties Union and a lawyer for the parents, told U.S. District Judge John E. Jones in opening arguments. "Intelligent design admits that it is not science unless science is redefined to include the supernatural." This is, he added, "a 21st-century version of creationism."
This is the first time a federal court has been asked to rule on the question of whether Intelligent Design is religion or science. Eugenie Scott, executive director of the National Center for Science Education, which opposes challenges to the standard model of teaching evolution in the schools, said the Pennsylvania case "is probably the most important legal situation of creation and evolution in the last 18 years," and that "it will have quite a significant impact on what happens in American public school education."
Proponents of Intelligent Design don’t say in the courtroom that they want to replace science with religion. But their strategy papers, speeches, and discussions with each other make it clear this is their agenda.
Intelligent Design (ID) is basically a re-packaged version of creationism--the view that the world can be explained, not by science, but by a strict, literal reading of the Bible. ID doesn’t bring up ridiculous biblical claims like the earth is only a few thousand years old or that the world was created in seven days. Instead it claims to be scientific--it acknowledges the complexity and diversity of life, but then says this all comes from some "intelligent" force. ID advocates don’t always openly argue this "intelligent force" is GOD--they even say it could be some alien from outer space! But Christian fundamentalists are the driving force behind the whole Intelligent Design movement and it’s clear… these people aren’t praying every night to little green men from another planet.
Phillip Johnson, considered the father and guiding light behind Intelligent Design, is the architect of the "wedge strategy" which focuses on attacking evolution and promoting intelligent design to ultimately, as Johnson says, "affirm the reality of God." Johnson has made it clear that the whole point of "shifting the debate from creationism vs. evolution to the existence of God vs. the non-existence of God" is to get people "introduced to the truth of the Bible," then "the question of sin" and finally "introduced to Jesus."
Intelligent Design and its theocratic program has been openly endorsed by George W. Bush. Earlier this year W stated that Intelligent Design should be taught in the schools. When he was governor of Texas, Bush said students should be exposed to both creationism and evolution. And he has made the incredibly unscientific, untrue statement that "the jury is still out" on evolution.
For the Christian fascists, the fight around evolution and teaching Intelligent Design is part of a whole agenda that encompasses reconfiguring all kinds of cultural, social, and political "norms" in society. This is a movement that is fueled by a religious vision which varies among its members but is predicated on the shared conviction that the United States is in need of drastic changes--which can only be accomplished by instituting religion as its cultural foundation.
The Christian fascists really do want--and are working for--a society where everything is run according to the Bible. They have been working for decades to infiltrate school boards to be in a position to mandate things like school prayer. Now, in the schools, they might not be able to impose a literal reading of the Bible’s explanation for how the universe was created. But Intelligent Design, thinly disguised as some kind of "science," is getting a lot more than just a foot in the door.
The strategy for promoting intelligent design includes an aggressive and systematic agenda of promoting the whole religious worldview that is the basis for ID. And this assault on evolution is linked up with other questions in how society should be run.
Marc Looy of the creationist group Answers in Genesis has said that evolution being taught in the schools,
"creates a sense of purposelessness and hopelessness, which I think leads to things like pain, murder, and suicide."
Ken Cumming, dean of the Institute for Creation Research's (ICR) graduate school, who believes the earth is only thousands of years old, attacked a PBS special seven-part series on evolution, suggesting that the series had "much in common" with the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks against the United States. He said,
"[W]hile the public now understands from President Bush that 'we're at war' with religious fanatics around the world, they don't have a clue that America is being attacked from within through its public schools by a militant religious movement called Darwinists...."
After the 1999 school shooting in Littleton, Colorado, Tom DeLay, Christian fascist representative from Texas, gave a speech on the floor of the House of Representatives, blaming the incident in part on the teaching of evolution. He said,
"Our school systems teach the children that they are nothing but glorified apes who are evolutionized out of some primordial soup of mud."
The ID movement attacks the very notion of science itself and the philosophical concept of materialism--the very idea that there is a material world that human beings can examine, learn about, and change.
Johnson says in his "The Wedge Strategy" paper,
"The social consequences of materialism have been devastating…we are convinced that in order to defeat materialism, we must cut it off at its source. Design theory promises to reverse the stifling dominance of the materialist world view, and to replace it with a science consonant with Christian and theistic convictions."
Dr. Eugenie C. Scott, the Executive Director of the National Center for Science Education, points out:
"Evolution is a concept that applies to all sciences, from astronomy to chemistry to geology to biology to anthropology. Attacking evolution means attacking much of what we know of the natural world, that we have amassed through the application of scientific principles and methods. Second, creationist attacks on evolution are attacks on science itself, because the creationist approach does violence to how we conduct science: science as a way of knowing."
The Center for the Renewal of Science and Culture (another Christian think tank) says that it "seeks nothing less than the overthrow of materialism and its cultural legacies."
Teaching Intelligent Design in the schools is part of a whole Christian Fascist movement in the United States that has power and prominence in the government, from the Bush regime on down. And if anyone isn’t clear about what "cultural legacies" the Center for the Renewal of Science and Culture wants to overthrow--take a look at the larger Christian fascist agenda that the intelligent design movement is part of: asserting patriarchy in the home, condemning homosexuality, taking away the right to abortion, banning sex education, enforcing the death penalty with the biblical vengeance of an "eye for an eye," and launching a war because "God told me [Bush] to invade Iraq."
"Evolution" is an assault on science.
Excellent, AG. The scientific method itself is not derived from science but from logic and metaphysics. As a matter of intellectual history, the Judeo/Christian world view produced the scientific method. All other world views preclude linear, cause and effect thought, absolutely critical components of the scientific method. The scientific method is impossible under any other world view including random - whatever.
That makes science the handmaiden of God. Get over it, you guys. You have lost before you started.
I think this is the gist of the matter. The worship of science creates the illusion that its practitioners are able to discern the essence of truth all by themselves. As if apes could posit quarks.
Thank you so much for your excellent post!
The "intelligent cause" in the intelligent design hypothesis is not stipulated just like the "origin of life" is not stipulated in the theory of evolution.
It is not a matter of expanding definitions, it is a matter of not permitting the opponent to make a stipulation which does not exist in the hypothesis.
The similar point is often made in reverse as many who oppose evolution try to assert that the theory of evolution stipulates abiogenesis. It does not. We do not allow that stipulation either - for the same reason.
Not to speak of the fact Colleges as we know them were invented by christians.. Not to speak of philanthropy.. Almost all the first colleges in this country were Christian colleges... as was the concept of educating everybody to be able to read.. i.e. the bible..
I join with you in prayer, lifting Right Wing Professor and his loved ones up for God's blessings and guidance.
And yet they have and they do.
Oh! and hospitals..
you: Disallows the idea of chaos in real world problems.
As an example, you could extract numbers which came from the extension of pi without realizing their origin and conclude that they are random. But you would be wrong, because as an extension of pi those numbers are highly determined. Nevertheless, the numbers might be useful to you.
you: Requires the idea of chaos to be real. Because the part above said there is no actual chaos. Therefore all systems are equally ordered, therefore your assertion that order cannot arrise out of chaos is irrelevant. All systems are ordered in your view. Order comes from order. That's just as scientifically vaccuous as designed things were designed.
Secondly, I’ve never impugned your motives overtly or by veiled comments.
Thirdly, you have not proven me wrong except in your own eyes.
Fourthly and as my final comment to you on this thread: I choose not to engage correspondents who cannot refrain from personal attacks. They are against forum rules and I will be no party to such conduct nor will I provoke the same by responding to you any further.
me: As if apes could posit quarks.
you: And yet they have and they do.
me: Not without intelligence they don't.
Well said, Amos! Thank you!
Scientists do this all the time. We are forever being told about studies in which it has been determined that one or another animal demonstrates thought.
It is not a leap of faith to infer that thought is a natural function of biological systems. Unless, of course, the evos wish to content that intellectual activity somehow exists outside the parameter's of biology. That would be curious.
You're easily pleased. It certainly seems to me an extremely trivial observation that "inference" is necessarily involved in scientific reasoning!
I would disagree, however, with your exact wording, that "inference" constitutes a scientific "method". It's subsidiary to method. For instance you have the "hypothetical-deductive method," where you first develop an hypothesis (by whatever means) then deduce it's consequences, then make experiments or observations to determine whether deductions from the hypothesis bear out or are contradicted.
Deduction, or any sort of "inference," is not a "method" in itself. You can make "inferences" all day and all night, but they don't bear any significance unless they're attached to some hypothesis, model, theory, etc, that engages the real world, and their significance is in relation to how much -- how deeply, on how many points, how crucially -- your theory engages the world, and how many different kinds of data sets are implicated in testing your inferences, and so on.
Again my problem with ID is that it only infers. It doesn't do anything crucial with those inferences. It does try to make inference itself a method. And it even limits this because it refuses to "infer" about matters of HOW, WHEN, WHERE and so on. It only infers (or claims to infer) THAT design is present, and then comes to a self-imposed screeching halt.
I can't give you names off the top of my head, but I've seen several frevos say that they support a libertarian (i.e. nongovernmental) approach to education. I do in any case.
In fact they support using the apparatus of the state to forcefully prevent schools from teaching ID on grounds of separation of church and state, thus it is no coincidence that they stand with the ACLU.
Yeah, so long as you do have public (government) schools they are limited in teaching religion by the 1st Amendment as extended to the states by the 14th Amendment.
They want to decide for everyone else what "our" children will learn.
You've got it backwards. In this case we're talking about something that should NOT be taught. (Unless and until it may achieve a place in the curricula in the normal manner, by succeeding on merit in the market place of scientific ideas.)
There are innumerable things that should not be taught: transcental meditation, astrology, ideological environmentalism (as opposed to scientific ecology), identify group oriented revisionist history, and on and on.
If you're taking the position that it inherently illegitimate to say, "this doesn't measure up, it doesn't meet the academic standards we should expect, it's junk, don't teach it," then that's hardly conservative. It's wishy-washy relativism.
Psyche: Interdisciplinary Journal
ISCID: Consciousness and Complexity
Mathematicians and physicists deal with non-corporeals all the time – geometries, mathematical structures, information, emergence, universals expressed as variables in formulae, physical laws and constants, etc.
However, among those scientists who view “all that there is” as “matter in all its motions” – microscope to telescope – even emergent properties are hard to accept because (in their view) they can only be epiphenomenons, secondary phenomenons which can cause nothing to happen. Noncorporeals are excluded per se in the "matter in all its motions" ideology.
Notwithstanding the resistance, I expect the mathematicians/physicists to prevail. The information theorists (a branch of mathematics) have already proven their worth in cancer research and pharmaceuticals.
The bottom line is that once intelligence is widely accepted as a primary phenomenon which causes things to happen, then the intelligent design hypothesis is vindicated even if the investigators themselves deplore the entire intelligent design movement.
It is very difficult to find anyone – even those who adore Pinker – who do not readily agree that intelligence is a primary phenomenon which can cause things to happen. They are aware of their own free will. When they press a key on the keyboard, they do not accept that it was the physical brain which did it and their mind was merely an illusion.
Yet, at bottom, the only defense that I can see against the intelligent design hypothesis as it is worded is to establish that the mind is merely an epiphenomenon of the physical brain.
There are laboratory experiments which refute the epiphenomenon concept such as decisions made at the cellular level in the above link. Cells do not have brains. And there are the McConnell experiments on flatworms where the regenerated flatworms both remembered the stimulus although only one of the two regenerated from the part which contained the physical brain.
There is also the philosophical point which cannot be refuted by laboratory experiments, that if the brain is acting as a transceiver/host for the mind/consciousness/soul/spirit there would be no behavioral difference vis-à-vis the mind being an epiphenomenon of the physical brain. IOW, chopping off part of the brain would have the same effect.
Joe, you ain't gonna believe this, but noneother than Jimmuh Carter is on the ID team. He says,"I believe that God created the universe and used evolution as a mechanism. STUDY EVOLUTION IN SCIENCE CLASS...ETC ETC, STUDY BELIEF IN RELIGION CLASS.
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