Posted on 12/13/2007 7:06:55 PM PST by Stultis
The resignation of the [Texas] state's science curriculum director last month has signaled the beginning of what is shaping up to be a contentious and politically charged revision of the science curriculum, set to begin in earnest in January.
[snip]
Former science director Chris Comer says she resigned from the Texas Education Agency to avoid being fired after officials told her she had improperly endorsed evolution. She had forwarded an e-mail announcing a speech by a prominent scholar on evolution, which the state requires schools to teach.
[snip]
The [State Board of Education] must vote on any changes to the curriculum. Most board members, including the chairman, have said publicly they don't want to introduce intelligent design into the curriculum, and many of them also have said they want to keep the current language on evolution.
[...] Even small changes in the language could mean big changes in textbooks later on.
[snip]
Don McLeroy, a conservative board member on the losing side of the vote [adopting textbooks in '03] and a Sunday school teacher, later told a church group that he believed he could have persuaded more members to reject the books if he had challenged the assumption [of naturalism].
"How can the materialistic philosophic naturalistic base dependency of Darwinism be brought into the discussion and used for our benefit?" Dr. McLeroy asked, according to a recording of the speech. "We didn't use it. All we did was stay with evidence, and we got run over."
Dr. McLeroy is now chairman of the board. Gov. Rick Perry appointed the Bryan dentist to the post in July.
[snip]
Ten Republicans and five Democrats sit on the state board. Dr. McLeroy is part of a bloc of seven social conservatives who often vote together.
(Excerpt) Read more at dallasnews.com ...
Ignorance is curable, but the afflicted has to want to be cured.
Very accurate in your case. Most anti-theists will look at a boatload of evidence, and dismiss it, because they approach said evidence with the circular logic of their pre-existing prejudices.
I won’t give you three examples, but I’ll give you three books, written by scientists and investigative journalists (originally an atheist who had an open mind to evidence), which detail the scientific evidence pointing to a Creator.
Rare Earth
Privileged Planet
The Case for a Creator
Let’s see if the “afflicted with ignorance” wants to be cured.
Thorough and meticulous as usual.
Very nice.
A+
Neither does it change the fact that creationists have indeed employed political tactics to insinuate religion into science classrooms. See Dover. Those political tactics were the very subject matter of the supposedly offensive lecture that Comer took notice of in her e-mail.
If it is a firing offense for the Director of Science Curriculum to take public notice of a lecture addressing the topic of ongoing political activism that is expressly designed to undermine science curricula by inserting parochial religious beliefs, then there is something decidedly wrong.
You respond with three BOOKS, without specifying any arguments, page numbers or even chapters therein, and then struttingly treat this a challenge on your part or a relevant response to Ichneumon's challenge.
Of course it is neither, as you well know. An invincible counter-challenge, like yours, is no answer and no challenge at all. Since you've already said you won't give specific examples, but only whole books, whatever Ichneumon or another correspondent may pick out of one of your books, guessing as to it's relevance, you can always claim that example is not what you intended.
That is assuming, however, that one even CAN EVEN BEGIN TO GUESS at what might be relevant, in these books, to supporting your expansive but vague claim of scientific vindication.
So far, in looking at the first book you list, much of which is available online here, I'm at a complete loss.
Rare Earth argues that life, especially complex life, and even more especially intelligent and technological life, is probably exceedingly rare in the universe.
Just in general this claim does nothing to "point to" (or away from) "the existance of the Creator." A Creator might have created a universe with abundant life, or rare life, either way. In a Godless universe (or one where God creates by natural law) life might have originated naturally and evolved commonly, or rarely, either way.
But when you consider the specifics of how this book argues its case, it rapidly becomes even more mysterious as to what support you imagine to find. The main arguments center on claims and findings that earth-like conditions are rare in the universe, and therefore that life is probably rare. IOW the book presumes that life originated naturally on Earth, and that life if it exists elsewhere would also had to have originated naturally, and therefore have required similar conditions in order to do so.
Therefore the actual arguments in the book seem to point AWAY FROM "the Creator," unless you want to reverse your petulant refusal to be specific and cite the particular arguments in this book that support your case. Otherwise, your having apparently failed with the first volume you cite, I don't see any reason we should continue to play your, "my case is made somewhere in this book, but I won't tell you where," game.
placemarker
Those books are listed in order of the strength of the case that they make, building on each other.
Rare Earth DOES try to avoid the controversy of a Creator, but shows that earthlike life is not ubiquitous as the Copernican principal (used by atheists) attempts to assert.
Privileged Planet goes a step further with showing the fingerprints of the creator in our existance, the fine tuning of the universe, and the “coincidences” of habitability and discovery/measurement of our universe. There’s a lot of information in this book concerning the extremely fine balance required for our existance.
In The Case for a Creator, an atheist journalist, with a more open mind than those on this forum apparently, interviewed top scientists in cosmology, biology, and astronomy as well as the authors of the previous two books.
One example: of all the ranges of values possible for the universal forces, the chances of these being what they are (and where they are is EXACTLY necessary for our existance) are impossible to write down because the number of zeros would total more than the known number of particles in our universe. This is referred to as the “fine tuning” of the physical laws, not only implying, but requiring an intelligence to set them just so.
Denying a designer, once you are no longer ignorant of the cases presented, would be like attempting to argue that the fingerprint on an item doesn’t place the suspect at the scene, but only occurred due to random chemical assemblage on the item.
My case is made THROUGHOUT these books and I have no intention of rewriting them here, but, the authors also mention those that are so thoroughly invested in the non-existance of a creator that no amount of logic or evidence would be accepted.
Or -- life just adapted to the existing conditions.
Give up on the public schools. Forget trying to change them.
See, that’s an example of the ignorance - no offense, that these folks above are arguing from.
Yeah, “life adapted to the rules as they are” -
no, if the laws of the universe weren’t fine tuned as they are, there would BE NO STARS, NO PLANETS, NO MOLECULES, NO HEAVIER ELEMENTS THAN He. How would life adapt to that universe?
That’s why I say, you have to read the books instead of arguing from ignorance.
That's Dr. Ignorant, if you please.
Big Government Public schools a big reason that Hillary Clinton has more than ten or twelve supporters and Richard Dawkins is not an even bigger laughing stock than he already is.
Very well said, ME, but gird thy loins for the inevitable onslaught from the FRevolution Brigade.
I used to jump into these debates all the time but simply grew weary of the laughable antics of the evolutionaries.
Here’s a guarantee: God is on the throne. On some future day, every evolutionist will drop to his knees and proclaim that Jesus Christ is king. That’s it.
MM (in TX)
God is on the throne. On some future day, every evolutionist will drop to his knees and proclaim that Jesus Christ is king.
And here I thought everyone had to go before the Judgement Throne. But apparently it's only (or in some odd sense especially) for the evilutionists.
You learn something new in CREVOtheology every day!
I'd always thought salvation was based exclusively on accepting Jesus' substitutionary atonement (the Cross) and that your views about the origin of species, or politics, or what-have-you, had nothing to do with it. I mean after all everybody's wrong about something, and invariably a great many somethings, so you can't base salvation on getting biology, or any other such merely material fact, right.
But maybe that's wrong too? Maybe salvation comes not through Jesus Christ but through Henry Morris, Duane Gish, Ken Ham or George McCready Price?
Your obtuse response, laced with sarcasm, is disingenuous at best. Common sense implies that my underlying meaning was that evolutionists will kneel before Christ just like the rest of us. I think you knew that already, though.
MM (in TX)
http://www.stat.yale.edu/%7Ejtc5/papers/CommonAncestors/NatureCommonAncestors-Article.pdf
I’m not saying my argument for creationism rests on it either, I’m just saying every time something like this comes up you have to stretch and modify an already preposterous collection of theories to allow for it in your model for how we got here sans any God performing the supernatural things necessary for us and all the stuff around us to exist in any material sense.
Most leading evolutionists will admit that sometime around the “Big Bang” or prior there needs to be a deviation from the current laws of science to go from nothing to something. There are those who will say that it is possible to get to where we are without a supernatural “event”, but those who say this don’t have the answers and don’t know that the “authorities” they go to for their “scientific theory” have long ago quietly conceded that their model also must have at least a supernatural “singularity”.
http://www.stat.yale.edu/%7Ejtc5/papers/CommonAncestors/NatureCommonAncestors-Article.pdf
I’m not saying my argument for creationism rests on it either, I’m just saying every time something like this comes up you have to stretch and modify an already preposterous collection of theories to allow for it in your model for how we got here sans any God performing the supernatural things necessary for us and all the stuff around us to exist in any material sense.
Neither this article, nor the overwhelming mass of scientific evidence, does anything to support young earth creationism. This article is a theoretical model of how far back into the past you would need to go to find a most recent common ancestor. This MRCA has nothing to do with how long people have been here.
We see the same thing with mtDNA, where an individual called the mitochondrial Eve is the common ancestor to all females. Given the nature of mtDNA descent, that does not mean that the mitochondrial Eve was the first person, but rather that her lineage subsumed all other lineages.
You can do the same type of analysis of male DNA and come up with a different answer.
Finally, the theory of evolution is not "an already preposterous collection of theories" to anyone but folks who, for religious reasons, are opposed to the tenets of those theories. The fact that parts of the theory are added to, or sometimes corrected, just means that the overall theory is becoming more accurate.
The constant testing of theories is a central part of science, and all theories are so tested. That is a strength, not a weakness.
Evidence which appears to contradict how the theory I believe once was and fits well with an opposing view only makes me more certain that my newly revised theory is now most certainly true.
Evidence which appears to contradict how the theory I believe once was and fits well with an opposing view only makes me more certain that my newly revised theory is now most certainly true.
Is it OK if I paraphrase the response of fundamentalists as:
I don't care what the evidence is. I believe otherwise and no amount of scientific evidence will change that.
Don’t teach ID and don’t teach evolution. This is the only acceptable solution to this problem.
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