Posted on 06/07/2002 11:35:28 AM PDT by jennyp
To Seattle area residents the struggle over how evolution is taught in public high schools may seem a topic from the distant past or a distant place.
Don't bet on it. One nearby episode in the controversy has ended, but a far-reaching, Seattle-based agenda to overthrow Darwin is gaining momentum.
Roger DeHart, a high-school science teacher who was the center of an intense curriculum dispute a few years ago in Skagit County, is leaving the state. He plans to teach next year in a private Christian school in California.
The fuss over DeHart's use of "intelligent design" theory in his classes at Burlington-Edison High School was merely a tiny blip in a grand scheme by promoters of the theory.
The theory is essentially this: Life is so complex that it can only be the result of design by an intelligent being.
Who is this unnamed being? Well, God, I presume. Wouldn't you?
As unlikely as it may seem, Seattle is ground zero for the intelligent-design agenda, thanks to the Seattle-based Discovery Institute and its Center for Renewal of Science and Culture (CRSC).
Headed by one-time Seattle City councilman and former Reagan administration official Bruce Chapman, the Discovery Institute is best known locally for its savvy insights on topics ranging from regionalism, transportation, defense policy and the economy.
In the late '90s, the institute jumped into the nation's culture wars with the CRSC. It may be little known to local folks, but it has caught the attention of conservative religious organizations around the country.
It's bound to get more attention in the future. Just last month, a documentary, Icons of Evolution, premiered at Seattle Pacific University. The video is based on a book of the same name by CRSC fellow Jonathan Wells. It tells the story of DeHart, along with the standard critique of Darwinian evolution that fuels the argument for intelligent design.
The video is part of the anti-Darwin agenda. Cruise the Internet on this topic and you'll find something called the Wedge Strategy, which credits the CRSC with a five-year plan for methodically promoting intelligent design and a 20-year goal of seeing "design theory permeate our religious, cultural, moral and political life."
Last week, Chapman tried to put a little distance between his institute and the "wedge" document. He said it was a fund-raising tool used four years ago. "I don't disagree with it," he told me, "but it's not our program." (I'll let the folks who gave money based on the proposed strategy ponder what that means.)
Program or not, it is clear that the CRSC is intent on bringing down what one Center fellow calls "scientific imperialism." Surely Stephen Jay Gould already is spinning in his grave. Gould, one of America's most widely respected scientists and a prolific essayist, died just two weeks ago. Among his many fine books is one I kept by my bedside for many weeks after it was published in 1999, "Rock of Ages: Science and Religion in the Fullness of Life."
In "Rock of Ages," Gould presents an elegant case for the necessary co-existence of science and religion. Rather than conflicting, as secular humanists insist, or blending, as intelligent-design proponents would have it, science and religion exist in distinct domains, what Gould called magisteria (domains of teaching authority).
The domain of science is the empirical universe; the domain of religion is the moral, ethical and spiritual meaning of life.
Gould was called America's most prominent evolutionist, yet he too, was a critic of Darwin's theory, and the object of some controversy within the scientific community. There's a lesson in that: In the domain of science there is plenty of room for disagreement and alternative theories without bringing God into the debate.
I have no quarrel with those who believe in intelligent design. It has appeal as a way to grasp the unknowable why of our existence. But it is only a belief. When advocates push intelligent design as a legitimate scientific alternative to Darwinian explanations of evolution, it is time to push back.
That's what they continue to do in Skagit County. Last week, the Burlington-Edison School Board rejected on a 4-1 vote a proposal to "encourage" the teaching of intelligent design. Bravo.
Despite proponents' claims of scientific validity, intelligent design is little more than religion-based creationism wrapped in critiques of Darwin and all dressed up in politically correct language. All for the ultimate goal — placing a Christian God in science classrooms of America's public high schools.
Guys lie David Talbott, Ev Cochrane, Cardona, Ginenthal, Heinsohn, Sweeney et. al. don't get the fanfare or publicity which Sitchin or VonDaniken get but their scholarship is real, and the stuff they're turning up does not fit within standard paradigms. Writing these guys off as crackpots is a big mistake.
Just one question at this point: What is "4 dimensional logic"? How do you tally up the dimensions contained in a specific logical argument? (What a concept!)
Anyway, I can understand the urge to live with contradictions. One of the fundamental life lessons is when we learn that we'll never know everything - we learn to live with ignorance. But IMO, if we treat a logical contradiction as just another fact about which we are ignorant, then that's a basic thought error. Believing in something that violates logic itself is fundamentally different than believing in something when we haven't verified all the relevant facts.
To my knowledge, nobody has ever taken a straw poll of catastrophists regarding evolution. Subjectively I'd say that between 85 and 90% of catastrophists view evolution as a joke, but the ten percent includes Ev Cochrane and a couple of others. I once saw Ev start to talk about evolution in a restaurant and a lady friend of Gunnar Heinsohns and Heribert Illigs looked at him like he was insane and said "there's no evolution, Ev", much the same way you'd tell a child that the Easter rabbit wasn't really real.
I personally do not see any version of abiogenesis without intelligent input of some sort being workable. The closest thing any catastrophists have ever produced to something like a final vision of Velikovskian abiogenesis is in "Solaria Binaria" which you can get (on the quantavolution CD) from Al DeGrazia's web site at www.grazian-archive.com.
Evolutionists work at keeping evolution and abiogenesis separate and I would also have to keep my own theories about genetic engineering separate from the question of how life got here in the first place.
The genetic engineering which used to go on on this planet, as I see it, was being done by the creatures themselves, i.e. no genetic engineering overlord was involved. The precise mechanisms being used I don't have much of an answer for other than the articles you read about gene transport, such as the one I noted above.
The other kind of question is where did the intelligence and/or compute power for that sort of thing come from in the antique world. That I believe I do have an answer for.
As to the question of where did the genetic engineers go, the answer is that the capability of using the human mind (or the minds of other higher animals) in the manner which was involved in those kinds of phenomena has been ground out of the races as described in the linked article, and no longer exists.
The other starting point for that kind of thing is Julian Jaynes "Origins of Consciousness" which I believe everybody on the planet should have a copy of.
The authority AND the intonation! That settles it for me!
Moreover, amongst the few borrowed words, there are a sizable number of what are called "reversals". In other words, when IndoEuropean, Semitic, and other peoples met in the Mediterranean basin, since some of them wrote from right to left and others wrote from left to right and since vowel sounds were not written at first, when one nation borrowed a word from another, the order of consonents frequently got reversed.In a word, "no." If that's not enough words, "No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no!"
In times before literacy was common, when people borrowed words as a result of foreign contact, they borrowed the sounds, not the written forms. It's absurd that anyone would get the sound wrong because the writing is "backwards." In the times you describe, the typical person couldn't read or write his own spoken language, much less any other. Script differences would not cause the confusion you attribute to them.
12 posted on 6/7/02 12:24 PM Pacific by jennyp
"anarchistic, evolutionary Capitalism"...pure reverse---anti-logic(lies)!
I never met a boustrophedian and don't really have any opinions wrt them and Chinese live pretty far from the med basin. The Chinese writing system is pure antediluvian. In a world in which the primary mode of communication is telepathy, the idea of a phoenetic alphabet would not occur to anybody...
That's perfectly logical. Unfortunately, evolutionists are pretty much immune to logic at this point; logic basically just bounces off them sort of like water off a duck. This thing is ultimately going to have to be settled in courtrooms and at ballot boxes. It's a pure political issue; science has nothing to do with it.
And what about those gravity gaps? You realize, that the entire evidentiary base for the law of gravity is a mere splinter in the side of the places in the universe, like the intergalactic vacuum between here and Andromeda, where there are absolutely no reading whatsoever to support the law of gravity.
Obviously, there is a hidden political agenda behind the acceptance of the law of gravity while ignoring all these gaping gravity gaps.
Uh huh. And the weakness in the arguments leading from "where I am coming from" would be what?
A tiny, limited sample, as compared to the available sample space, (combined with inspired attempts to locate counter-examples that disprove the thesis) is all that supports ANY scientific argument in the natural sciences.
What is the size of the sample space of our galaxy and the andromdeda galazy compared to the gap in between? I'll give you a hint--it dwarfs, by several orders of magnetude, the gaps between families on the Tree of Life.
For creationism or ID to get off the ground, you need counter-examples, not missing evidence. Counter-examples are how you provide a genuine disproof. Missing information is just missing--it dis-proves nothing.
Oh really. I make out that Mars, Europa and Ganymede are candidates for colonization with just a mild amount of twiddling. Not a bad batting average out of a few hundred-odd potential candidates.
Your demonstration has little to do with the proposition to hand. The fact that we stock our larder through trust and reciprocity better, and more farsightedly than other species is only a difference in degree, not a difference in kind.
Forget about reversals. Of the anomalies I note on the page in question, the biggest is really the non-relationship between the IndoEuropean and Semitic language families. The two groups are racially the same and could not have split up more than a few thousand years ago and the languages should be strongly related given anything like standard theories.
In fact, The divide between English and Russian is three or four thousand years back and you can still recognize a lot of Russian words as basic kinds of IE roots.
Plamiya and flame are the same word, ogon and ignite (agni/fire) are the same word, loeffel/lozhke/ladle (spoon) the same word, p/f words, fall/pal etc., pronouns are nearly the same, basic numbers nearly the same, family members the same, words for things like milk, wine, water the same, simple conceptions like work (arbeit/rabota/labor) the same (other than for the reversed consonents...)
By all rights that kind of stuff ought to be there going from IE to semitic languages as well, but it ain't...
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