Posted on 05/30/2002 7:40:53 AM PDT by Gladwin
Edited on 09/03/2002 4:50:34 AM PDT by Jim Robinson. [history]
Two House Republicans are citing landmark education reform legislation in pressing for the adoption of a school science curriculum in their home state of Ohio that includes the teaching of an alternative to evolution.
In what both sides of the debate say is the first attempt of its kind, Reps. John A. Boehner and Steve Chabot have urged the Ohio Board of Education to consider the language in a conference report that accompanied the major education law enacted earlier this year.....
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtonpost.com ...
Merlin, if he ever existed at all, lived within the Christian era; the kind of thing I am talking about appears to have died out altogether about 2500 years ago and was in its heyday before the flood, 3500 - 4000 years ago.
That's no more weird than believing, for instance, that the Earth once orbitted Saturn...
Your conclusion does not follow from your premise. If "a" is false, that does not mean "b" is science. We are talking about the science curriculum here, aren't we?
In any case, it has yet to be proven that evolution is false. Or did I miss the Nobel Prize ceremony for the guy who disproved one of the most basic scientific theories of the last couple of centuries?
You also appear to be conflating evolution with the creation of the universe, an event the theory of evolution does not pretend to address.
Typical of most empiricists, you stack the deck in your favor.
Ad hom. I could add that this sort of argument is typical of politicians. Would that be ad hom or merely an observation? (If it were an observation, it would merely be empirical, so it probably won't matter). Do you really think it's unreasonable to expect what's taught in science class to be scientific?
But the larger problem with this part of your answer, or rather, non-answer, is that falsifiability is basic to science. That's why I used the astrology in my analogy previously. If a theory isn't falsifiable it isn't science, period. If it's not science, it doesn't belong in science class.
God is outside of the physical world and therefore unprovable in mere scientific terms and therefore asking for God to come out and show you how he did it is not being fair to the Design View.
If, as you assert, God is outside of the physical world, why are you trying to shoe-horn Him into science class?
You also seem to assert here that God has something to do with ID. This appears to be at variance with what several FR posters have assured us about ID. It might be useful to have a working definition of ID here, so we can all agree on what we're disagreeing on.
Furthermore, if ID cannot be examined in a rational fashion ("asking for God to come out and show you how he did it is not being fair to the Design View."), how can it possibly be part of science? Why is this and only this theory exempt from the rules of science?
However, even the scientific evidence admitted by scientist(sic) points to "someone" having designed the universe and life here on earth.
It's a matter of interpretation ... for scientists. Why are you trying to legislate science? Why not legislate math, too, so it's not so hard?
The(sic) DNA is a good example of how life has a blueprint and therefore indicates that it has a designer.
That's your opinion. Don't legislate it into science.
I've seen a pretty good case made right here that the ad-hoc design of most living things indicates a creator who wasn't quite up to the job. Not the sort of thing I'd care to believe about God.
So what did this force/power/agent consist of? I have seen/read about some expirements with UV depravation resulting in much larger (giant-man species explanation was the purpose if I remember) and robust animals. But I've never seen anything scientific related to what you are putting out here. Got any data for me to look at?
EBUCK
The problem is that the funnelweb's poison seems to be specific to humans and monkeys, far from the biggest problem in Australia. Humans naturally avoid big spiders and I'd guess monkeys do. You'd figure if the thing were trying to "evolve" a way to keep from getting stepped on or hopped on by larger animals, the venom would be specific to kangaroos...
You're claiming that the stuff beyond the range of your telescope doesn't exist because you can't see it??
Near as I can tell, the idea of a finite universe only works if the big bang works, and the big bang is basically dead as we speak.
You are extremely blatant but I will not be goaded into "playing" your "game". I repeat, I did not bring up Wells, you did. It is obvious you did that because of the poverty of your position. You may not be able to read English but most people on these threads can. They know what Therefore, the common occurrence of oxide-type BIFs suggests the atmosphere-ocean system has been oxygenated since ~3.8 Ga. means. As for Uraninite and Pyrite you brought them up, you tell us how they come about.
From the Latin for "sewer", you know - chauvinist pig Romans. But, busted sewers are a major headache....
So why did the Intelligent Designer run them through a recreational area?
So what did this force/power/agent consist of? I have seen/read about some expirements with UV depravation resulting in much larger (giant-man species explanation was the purpose if I remember) and robust animals. But I've never seen anything scientific related to what you are putting out here. Got any data for me to look at?
EBUCK
Merlin, if he ever lived at all and if he was in fact trying to practice the kind of things attributed to him, was beating a dead horse. The kinds of things I'm talking about died out much earlier than that.
In computer science, one of the first things which became feasible after LANs became common, was the idea of using a jobjar approach to constructing poor-mans supercomputers; I've programmed things like that myself so it obviously doesn't take an overwhelming amount of magic or talent.
That provided the compute power for the kinds of changes we observe in the fossil record. The precise mechaniam by which such changes were effected is not as obvious, nonetheless there is at least one instance in which the astonishingly short time spans involved has been fairly well described.
Gunnar Heinsohn of the Univ. of Bremen is one of the brightest lights in European academia and a key player in the revision of med basin chronologies which is going on at present. I once asked him about the antiquity of the white race on this planet in relation to the question of whether or not caucasians had actually been around long enough to possibly account for the dispersion of their language groups. His reply:
Heinsohn comments:
Mueller-Karpe, the first name in continental paleoanthropology, wrote thirty years ago on the two strata of homo erectus at Swanscombe/England: "A difference between the tools in the upper and in the lower stratum is not recognizable. (From a geological point of view it is uncertain if between the two strata there passed decades, centuries or millennia.)" (Handbuch der Vorgeschichte, Vol I, Munich 1966, p. 293).
The outstanding scholar never returned to this hint that in reality there may have passed ten years where the textbooks enlist one thousand years. Yet, I tried to follow this thread. I went to the stratigraphies of the Old Stone Age which usually look as follows
modern man (homo sapiens sapiens)
Neanderthal man (homo sapiens neanderthalensis)
Homo erectus (invents fire and is considered the first intelligent man).
In my book "Wie alt ist das Menschengeschlecht?" [How Ancient is Man?], 1996, 2nd edition, I focused for Neanderthal man on his best preserved stratigraphy: Combe Grenal in France. Within 4 m of debris it exhibited 55 strata dated conventionally between -90,000 and -30,000. Roughly one millennium was thus assigned to some 7 cm of debris per stratum. Close scrutiny had revealed that most strata were only used in the summer. Thus, ca. one thousand summers were assigned to each stratum. If, however, the site lay idle in winter and spring one would have expected substratification. Ideally, one would look for one thousand substrata for the one thousand summers. Yet, not even two substrata were discovered in any of the strata. They themselves were the substrata in the 4 m stratigraphy. They, thus, were not good for 60,000 but only for 55 years.
I tested this assumption with the tool count. According to the Binfords' research--done on North American Indians--each tibal adult has at least five tool kits with some eight tools in each of them. At every time 800 tools existed in a band of 20 adults. Assuming that each tool lasted an entire generation (15 female years), Combe Grenals 4,000 generations in 60,000 years should have produced some 3.2 million tools. By going closer to the actual life time of flint tools tens of millions of tools would have to be expected for Combe Grenal. Ony 19,000 (nineteen thousand) remains of tools, however, were found by the excavators.
There seems to be no way out but to cut down the age of Neanderthal man at Combe Grenal from some 60,000 to some 60 years.
I applied the stratigraphical approach to the best caves in Europe for the entire time from Erectus to the Iron Age and reached at the following tentative chronology for intelligent man:
-600 onwards Iron Age
-900 onwards Bronze Age
-1400 beginning of modern man (homo sapiens sapiens)
-1500 beginning of Neanderthal man
between -2000 and -1600 beginning of Erectus.
Since Erectus only left the two poor strata like at Swanscombe or El-Castillo/Spain, he should actually not have lasted longer than Neanderthal-may be one average life expectancy. I will now not go into the mechanism of mutation. All I want to remind you of is the undisputed sequence of interstratification and monostratification in the master stratigraphies. This allows for one solution only: Parents of the former developmental stage of man lived together with their own offspring in the same cave stratum until they died out. They were not massacred as textbooks have it:
monostrat.: only modern man's tools
interstrat.: Neanderthal man's and modern man's tools side by side
monostrat.: only Neanderthal man's tools
interstrat.: Neanderthal man's and Erectus' tools side by side
monotstrat.: only Erectus tools (deepest stratum for intelligent man)
The year figures certainly sound bewildering. Yet, so far nobody came up with any stratigraphy justifiably demanding more time than I tentatively assigned to the age of intelligent man. I always remind my critiques that one millennium is an enormous time span--more than from William the Conqueror to today's Anglo-World. To add a millenium to human history should always go together with sufficient material remains to show for it. I will not even mention the easiness with which scholars add a million years to the history of man until they made Lucy 4 million years old. The time-span-madness is the last residue of Darwinism. This "most misleading Englishman" (Velikovsky) needed millions of years to let invisibly small alterations do the big visible changes. It is quite funny to observe catastrophism combined with darwinizing time spans. Yet, I see it all over neo-Catastrophism.
Lawyer: Early Man must have had Laws so that they didn't kill each other off.
Doctor: There must have been a doctor around for Adam and Eve to deliver their children.
Architect: God must have been an architect to bring the Universe out of the Chaos.
Communist: And who do you think was responsible for the Chaos?
What I'm saying is that science -- scientists, actually -- have simply defined God out of the problem. This assumption explicitly precludes the development of such a test as you're demanding, rejecting a hypothesis before it can even be proposed.
The question is whether there's any real justification for making such an assumption.
The situation reminds me in a lot of ways of Einstein's explanation of how he went about developing his theory of relativity. Among other things, he went back to the governing assumptions in the then-prevailing Newtonian physics, including the assumption that time passed at the same rate for all observers. Einstein's great leap was in questioning that assumption, with the result that the definition of "nature" had to change. (Yes, I'm oversimplifying.)
Newtonian physics is still extremely useful, of course, because most of what we deal with is systems where the velocities and accelerations have negligible relativistic implications. In most everyday cases, the relativistic component is tiny -- but nevertheless there. In some cases, however, relativity is a major factor, and cannot be ignored.
The scientific method is based primarily on the assumptions that effects have causes, and that physical phenomena are constant over time. These are powerful concepts. But why things are that way can as easily result from the fact that God is consistent, as if they are true because of some necessary and sufficient condition that governs an atheistic universe.
In most cases, as with Newtonian physics, the scientific method can operate without having to address those root causes. It would work in either case. In some cases, however, there may be a need to address the underlying assumptions, and to reassess the boundaries of what is "natural".
The origin of DNA-based life is potentially one such area, given that the probabilities of it randomly occurring are so very small. The prevailing scientific theory of "nature" -- the atheistic universe -- doesn't seem adequate to the task of explaining the development of life through random combinations of atoms. Those interested in Intelligent Design are able to answer some of the difficulties by pushing on the definition of "nature," and positing that it is the handiwork of some creative intelligence.
Just as relativistic systems are evidence of time dilation, DNA-based life could well be evidence of the actions of an intelligent agent -- God, if you will -- and therefore the sort of repeatable scientific evidence you're looking for.
This approach obviously introduces some metaphysical problems of its own, even as it solves various other "origin" problems.
But you are simply rejecting the idea out of hand, because it doesn't fit your definition of what's "natural." God cannot have a role, because you've already assumed that God cannot have a role. This is why I call it an ideological position: you've already decided on your answer, because your assumptions are not to be questioned.
You know, I've already had to admonish AndrewC about these straight lines just begging for replies.
bwa-ha-ha-ha!!!
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