Posted on 03/14/2002 8:21:56 AM PST by Dallas
Stakes were high Monday at a meeting of an Ohio Board of Education panel. Up for discussion: whether high school biology students should be told about potential problems with Darwinism and evidence that life on Earth was planned.
About 1,500 parents, teachers and students showed up for the meeting -- which was moved to an auditorium to accommodate the crowd. They listened to the pros and cons of a concept known as intelligent design, which says there's evidence that some form of intelligence purposely designed nature.
The board must revamp the state science curriculum by December, and some Ohioans want it to include intelligent design, or ID, alongside Darwin's theory of evolution in curriculum guidelines for statewide testing.
Stephen Meyer of Seattle's Discovery Institute, the leading ID think tank, told the board that rather than making ID part of the curriculum it should merely encourage teachers to cover the disagreements about Darwinism.
"We just want the discussion opened up, because we feel the evidence is running strongly in our favor," Meyer said after the hearing.
Whatever the board decides, the Ohio discussion has brought new attention to the fledgling ID movement, a small academic faction but one that flexes considerable brainpower.
Proponents say evolution is typically taught to mean life emerged on Earth spontaneously, and that only undirected natural selection produced the varied life forms. But, they contend, the best evidence indicates that scenario is fantastically unlikely.
Intelligent design arguments touch on everything from the fine-tuned structure of the universe described by modern physics to the information encoded in DNA to make their point.
But "intelligent design isn't science," the board was told by Lawrence Krauss, physics chairman at Case Western Reserve University.
Another opponent, Eugenie Scott of the National Center for Science Education, warns ID would bring religion into biology classes, even though advocates scrupulously avoid naming the intelligence they see behind the universe.
"Look, it's God, not a little green man," Scott says. "We know that."
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press signaled ID's growing importance in January, issuing an 805-page anthology titled "Intelligent Design Creationism and Its Critics."
That book title depicts ID as a variant of creationism, which reads Genesis literally and says the Earth was formed thousands of years ago -- rather than billions -- all species appeared immediately and a flood engulfed the globe.
Yet ID actually insists on none of that. And while creationists are mostly conservative Protestants, ID theorists come from a wider range of faiths and some are nonreligious.
The U.S. Supreme Court has ruled creationism is too biblical for public schools, and ID proponents sought to distinguish themselves from that label in a long Utah Law Journal article arguing that ID is fit for public schools.
University of Wisconsin historian Ronald L. Numbers, an ID opponent and author of "The Creationists," agrees the creationist label is inaccurate when it comes to the ID movement. But, he adds, its "the easiest way to discredit intelligent design."
Most ID thinkers cluster around the Discovery Institute's Center for the Renewal of Science and Culture, founded in 1996, and the Access Research Network, established at Colorado Springs, Colo., in 1990.
But similar ideas came as early as 1983 from eminent British physicist Sir Fred Hoyle, who was not conventionally religious.
Hoyle wrote that a blindfolded person working the Rubik's Cube puzzle at one move per second would need 1,350 billion years to align the 54 squares. He calculated similar odds that even one protein formed on Earth through blind chance.
Since that's hundreds of times the age of the planet, he said, the odds against this happening with all the proteins in nature are "almost unimaginably vast."
That sort of argument is escalated by mathematician-philosopher William A. Dembski of Baylor University, a Roman Catholic turned Protestant, who began doubting Darwinism in the late 1980s.
His January book "No Free Lunch" (Rowman & Littlefield) employs ample doses of symbolic logic to argue that intelligent design is legitimate science, because biologists can reliably detect the effects of design and distinguish these from random results, just as archeologists or crime scene investigators do.
The book is too new for scholarly critiques, but Wesley Elsberry of Texas A&M University says Dembski's previous work has failed to rule out Darwin's natural selection as the cause behind what might appear to be design.
Another leading ID theorist is Lehigh University microbiologist Michael J. Behe. His "Darwin's Black Box: The Biochemical Challenge to Evolution" (1996) examines intricate processes such as blood clotting and the motion of the bacterial flagellum.
Darwinism cannot explain such things, he argues, because interrelated parts that are useless by themselves must appear and function together. He calls this "irreducible complexity."
ID differs not only from creationism but a third option, theistic evolution, which says God employed the Darwinian process. Behe says that concept is "no threat to Christian beliefs" and he once agreed with it, but it isn't supported by the biological evidence.
Like Behe, Brown University biologist Kenneth R. Miller is a churchgoing Roman Catholic who believes in "a reality that transcends the material."
But Miller, who testified Monday, also is a Darwinist who calls Behe's approach "factually wrong" because supposedly useless "bits and pieces" of biology can have other uses. ID is a collection of "half-truths that don't amount to a coherent theory," Miller says.
Miller also raises a theological objection. If God purposely designed 30 horse species that later disappeared, he asserts, then God's primary attribute is incompetence. "He can't make it right the first time. I don't think the Almighty works that way."
Though opponents like Scott contend that ID is too inherently religious for science classes, Alvin Plantinga, a noted Protestant philosopher at the University of Notre Dame, turns the tables. Plantinga says evolution is presented with built-in godless assumptions so it's unfair for public schools "to teach one set of religious beliefs as opposed to another."
Behe says "the problem is not religious people trying to push design, but scientific people pushing their heads into the sand to avoid design because it has religious implications."
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On the Net:
Access Research Network: http://www.arn.org
Center for the Renewal of Science and Culture: http://www.discovery.org/crsc
National Center for Science Education: http://www.natcenscied.org
Copyright © 2002, The Associated Press
It seems that that battle is going to be left until another day.
Still, where are they going to draw the line? Are they going to take the "Darwin's Black Box" line i.e. cells and complex biochemical structures and processes look designed, but allow that some evolution did occur? Will such proposals satisfy the fundamentalists? Or will astrophysics (12-13 billion year old universe)and geology (4.6 billion year old earth and plate tectonics) be next on the hitlist? Will they address the unimagineably long period of time it took this omnipotent, omniscient designer to finetune the universe and the earth for man's entry? Is this designer still actively manipulating the biosphere? Where is the line between designer intervention and natural processes going to be placed?
Who knows that might even include spelling!
A. Cricket
"By way of conclusion: a natural way to understand such notions as rationality and irrationality is in terms of the proper functioning of the relevant cognitive equipment. Seen from this perspective, the question whether it is rational to believe in God without the evidential support of other propositions is really a metaphysical or theological dispute. The theist has an easy time explaining the notion of our cognitive equipment's functioning properly: our cognitive equipment functions properly when it functions in the way God designed it to function. The atheist evidential objector, however, owes us an account of this notion. What does he mean when he complains that the theist without evidence displays a cognitive defect of some sort? How does he... understand---the notion of cognitive malfunction?"
1. Intelligent design is actually not a scientific theory. It's merely a complex of re-hashed (and refuted) arguments against naturalistic evolution. It doesn't itself provide any positive theory about the origins or complexity of life. How is this so?
2. It cannot answer, even in principle, any of the 'design questions'. Namely:
a. How was the design accomplished? No mechanism, no causal explanation whatsoever is provided for how this intelligent designer (or designers--why assume there was just one?) did his/her/its/their work. Naturalistic science provides an answer to this question. I.D. "theory" does not.
b. When did it happen? NO evidence is forthcoming and no theoretical reason is provided for making any claims about this. Did it happen just once? A billion times? Was it one act and then several minor modifications? What evidence (remember, we're dealing with science here, not faith) could one point to in order to conceivably answer any of these questions?
c. Who did it? We know that the I.D.'ers likely assume that capital G "God" is the intelligent designer. But again, where is the evidence for this? Assuming I.D. is true for the sake of argument, since we don't have any direct evidence for the nature of this designer, then it seems reasonable to suppose that any of the following are equally logical candidates: super-advanced aliens, machine intelligence, a million different permutations of "God", a group of gods, etc.
d. What actually happened? Did this designer merely structure matter in such a way at the Big Bang such that we'd see "apparent design" later? Did this designer begin a single molecular process, or were there multiple interventions? Any event in any chemical process could be the site of a designer's intervention. What method do the I.D'ers have to sort this out? Even conceded naturalistic processes could be the result of this designer's actions but were meant to appear to be natural. How can you tell if this were the case?
3. It's a logical fallacy to assume I.D.
a. God of the gaps: Just becuase natural science can't explain 'X' now does not mean it won't be able to in the future. Positing I.D. in its place risks making I.D. a laughing stock if it, as have supernatural explanations so many times in the past, turns out to be not needed when natural science once again explains something that seemed like it couldn't yesterday.
b. Non sequitur: Even if we assume evolution as we currently know it is false, it does not logically follow that I.D. must then be true. There could be other explanations other than I.D. And even if all other alternatives were ruled out I.D. would still need positive confirming evidence to demonstrate its truth--which it currently doesn't have and even conceivably can't get. Merely finding fault with a theory does not automatically make another alternative the default winner.
4. I.D. is incoherent in some of its forms. If we assume theism is true, which is what Philip Johnson, Behe, and others do, then it's difficult to see why we should take I.D. seriously at all for the following reasons. On one definition of theism, God is described as being an immaterial being. How does an immaterial being interact with matter and energy? Any theories for this, I.D.'ers? What sense can be made of the notion of a disembodied mind anyway? The fact that these elementary points of definitional clarity are ignored in I.D. literature speaks volumes about the lack of seriousness of the "theory".
Thoughtful replies welcome.
What no creationist can accept is that evolution is taught as a scientific FACT instead of a scientific THEORY. Evolution is a long way from being proven, but it's taught in school as if it were a settled fact.
It would be fair if students were told that scientist don't really know for sure where life came from, but one scientific theory that has a lot of support amoung scientists is the theory of evolution.
That would be a fair (and accurate) statement, but you never hear it. Instead the theory of evolution is taught as though it was as proven as the law of gravity.
Yes. Evolution certainly does happen, and that's an observed fact. The theory, first proposed by Darwin, described a natural mechanism which is a cause of the observed fact of evolution. Ditto for gravity. Things fall; that's a fact. Newton's theory (since superseded by Einstein's) is a more elaborate description of the observed facts.
Science is not mathematics - it does not PROVE theories. Theories can always be disproven. A long history of successful prediction and explanatory power, coupled with continual validation secures a theory's place in science, but even the most well-established theory could be disproved tomorrow if observations are not reconcilable with it.
Instead the theory of evolution is taught as though it was as proven as the law of gravity.
That's because it is. It is as well supported as the "Theory of Gravity." And gravity is as precarious as evolution.
Main Entry: sci·ence
Pronunciation: 'sI-&n(t)s
Function: noun
Etymology: Middle English, from Middle French, from Latin scientia, from scient-, sciens having knowledge, from present participle of scire to know; probably akin to Sanskrit chyati he cuts off, Latin scindere to split -- more at SHED
Date: 14th century
1 : the state of knowing : knowledge as distinguished from ignorance or misunderstanding
2 a : a department of systematized knowledge as an object of study b : something (as a sport or technique) that may be studied or learned like systematized knowledge
3 a : knowledge or a system of knowledge covering general truths or the operation of general laws especially as obtained and tested through scientific method b : such knowledge or such a system of knowledge concerned with the physical world and its phenomena : NATURAL SCIENCE
4 : a system or method reconciling practical ends with scientific laws
Science---"to cut--peal"...means to expose fraud(evolution) and reveal Truth--objectivity!
Evolution is a superstition---19th century hoax religion---debunked!
Drop a rock. Create a new species.
The problem is, that if you wish to teach a religion alongside evolution on an equal footing with evolution, you need to ensure that the religion you choose is the RIGHT one, i.e. you need a religion which operates on an intellectual basis comparable to that of evolution, and the only two candidates are voodoo, and Rastifari.
Rastifari in fact would actually lend itself to certain kinds of team-teaching situations; a bio teacher looking for a way to put a group of 30 teenagers into the proper frame of mine to be indoctrinated into something as stupid as evolution, could walk across the hall tothe Rasta class for a box of spliffs.
For heaven's sake, how long do you evolutionists need to prove your theory? You have had 150 years since you first said evolution was proven and you still can not prove it. You are still saying that sometime, somewhere, you will find the proof.
Hate to say it, but Weley's an idiot. Natural selection is a destructive and not a contstructive process which weeds out anything an iota to the left or right of center for a species. Claiming that natural selection somehow 'designs' new species is like claiming to be in the business of constructing new buildings with a wrecking ball. Natural selection is the basic driving force of the stasis we observe in the fossil record.
Really? I live in a mainly Catholic country. Recent poles revealed that 95% of the people believe there’s a God. At the same time evolution is widely taught and accepted, some Protestant biblical literalists aside. Pope John Paul II, very influential in this country, accepted evolution was more than just a theory. If evolution is atheism, why isn’t the Pope instructing his priests to denounce it from the altar every Sunday?
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