By Gawd! Six days! Blasphamy! MY God didn't need no six days! My God created the universe in half an hour! Needed his coffee first but then, Poof!
Dern heathens!
Posted on 10/07/2002 12:44:39 PM PDT by wallcrawlr
A suburban school board declares that evolution is just another theory
NEWT GINGRICH, while he was a Georgia congressman and then as speaker of the House, was known for his interest in scientific research. Some Georgians prefer a different approach. On September 26th the school board of Cobb County, in the north-western Atlanta suburbs, voted to amend existing policy to allow discussion of “disputed views of academic subjects”, specifically the idea that God created the universe in six days—Charles Darwin, Stephen Jay Gould and the rest of them be damned.
The vote came after a month of deliberation, at a meeting crowded with concerned parents. Some 2,000 of the county's residents signed a petition last spring to have the board put stickers on biology textbooks telling students that evolution is a theory, not a fact. “What they're trying to do is appease the religious right,” says Michael Manely, the lawyer representing a local parent who wanted the stickers removed.
The war between creationists and evolutionists had recently fallen quiet. In 1999, the Kansas state board of education dropped evolution from state examinations; but by 2001 the three most prominent anti-evolutionists had been voted out of office, and the decision quietly reversed. Of late, the Christian right has focused on other topics. But the anti-evolutionists' victory in Cobb County may stimulate similar-minded people elsewhere. In Ohio, the state board of education is under pressure to include “intelligent design”—the idea that the complexity of the universe proves the existence of the divine—when it issues a new science curriculum.
Cobb County's new policy argues that providing information on “disputed views” is “necessary for a balanced education” and will help to promote “acceptance of diversity of opinion”. A poll commissioned in 2000 by People for the American Way, a liberal-minded group, shows that many Americans think this way. Nearly half of the respondents believed that the theory of evolution had not yet been proved. And of those who believe in evolution—only a fifth wanted evolution taught alone—three-quarters liberally agreed that students should be presented with “all points of view” and “make up their own minds”. In this post-modern reasoning, evolution and the Book of Genesis are equally valid.
The losers have already begun worrying aloud that this will hurt Cobb County's reputation as a place where children can get a good education. Cobb's schools consistently rank above the state average, which is not saying much. But what happens if superior schools insist that previously accepted facts have become mere theory? No comment from Mr Gingrich, who now lives in Virginia.
Ahhh, I was waiting for this one. If ID is indistinguishable from nature then what direct evidence do we have for ID? The ID crowd claims that one should be able to spot design because it would stand out from nature.
If that post of g3k's sat there for weeks, what got the thread pulled? Was one of the Blues Brothers offended at last?
And I am trying to explain to you how a scientist sees your arguments - that they explain nothing and appear to be indistinguishable from any other absurd assertion (as in the giant Chicken created the cosmos and all life on earth). And that this is the common, everyday hurdle you must overcome before you will ever get any real scientific interest in your theory, or any other theory.
Your failure to understand this distinction is part of the problem with your argument. I'm not out to "prove" evolution and I'm not trying to "disprove" ID/IOT (for a great many reasons that are expounded upon here from time to time, particuarly the problem with "proofs" in the sciences). But I am, sometimes, amused to point out why your arguments hold no water with the scientific world, are inconsistent, or, are, again sometimes, outright silly.
194 posted on 10/11/02 4:12 AM Pacific by PatrickHenry
Amazing...waving the American flag for soviet ideology---on the FR too!
It was suggested to me by longshadow that the original thread, which had ACLU in the title, had been posted by God's Traveler, and when his account was nuked, all his threads got erased. Too bad about that thread, because it's where medved got banned, and so there's some good history that's been lost. I've dug deep into my self-search list, and I've reconstructed that fabled post. If you want it (I can't imagine why) I can freepmail it to you.
You've figure out a plausible scenario for that thread's disappearance. Every silver lining has a cloud.
That's yet another thing AndrewC has wrong, BTW. He's running around telling people it was the evos's behavior that got the thread pulled. If you're right:
It was within that thread, following medved's banning, that certain creos were jamming the abuse button furiously and doing whatever they could to kill the thread. I had suggested that they were deliberately trying to get it pulled so they could fabricate a legend about what happened to medved (contrary to the truth, that he was threatening litigation, posting spam about which he had been warned, and then re-posted a pulled post and thus got himself banned).
It was only then that g3k posted that famous attack upon me -- after first quoting my suspicions about what was happening.
I previously pointed out to you why groundless assertions are ignored. Read it again.
I had to stop reading this "rebuttal" you mentioned when it came time to rebutt argument 9. Once again, the creationists who wrote this don't understand the fundamental nature of the Second Law of Thermodynamics. An increase in entropy doesn't always mean an increase in disorder, ask any physicist that. And increase in entropy is an increase in the amount of energy lost as heat, or, more precicely, an increase in the amount of useless energy, in a system. This is why, as the SA article states, snowflakes can form and minerals can crystalize. If it were simply a measure of the disorder of a system, as humans define disorder, then obviously we couldn't have snowflakes or mineral crystals. Those two points are never acknowledged by the author of this "rebuttal", that's because he doesn't have an answer for it.
To put it in evolutionary terms, clearly what has happened with life all throughout the history of the world is that the excess energy of the sun has powered chemical reactions that, at that time in earth's history, were thermodynamically favorable. In other words, without the excess energy of the sun, they would not have proceeded in the direction they did. The author of this rebutal piece is flat out wrong when he says reactions only go in one direction. All reactions have an equillibrium constant associated with them. It's just the majority of reactions (chemical) have an equilibrium constant that is so FAVORABLE to one side in comparison to the other, that it seems to proceed in "only one direction". But, under the right conditions, ANY chemical reaction can be made to go in the opposite direction.
Just like it's thermodynamically favorable, under the right conditions, to form snowflakes and mineral crystals, there are certain circumstances, certain chemical reactions, that can and DO go from "less" complex forms to "more" complex forms. In other words, it's all relative; the creationists are using subjective, human opinion (i.e., the arbitrary, subjective definition of "complex") to negate evolution.
The fact is, the the Second Law has nothing really to do with the "complexity" of a situation; it only deals with the increase in entropy, which is again not a statement of how "disordered" something is.
Stalin rejected Darwin, accepted Lysenko, and starved millions. He also sent Darwinians to the Gulag.
You aren't making any sense. To prove evolution, all you have to do is prove the existence of selection and variation. The rest is mathematics. Unless you are denying the existence of selection function or variation in populations, you don't have a leg to stand on. Note that this only proves the validity of evolution as a theory, it does not prove that evolution is responsible for speciation or anything else. Your fixation with "design" muddies the water because it is utterly meaningless in the context of demonstrating the validity of the concept of evolution in real systems. We can prove the validity of evolution in real systems, but we can't prove that evolution is responsible for speciation (it might not be for all we know). Questioning the validity of evolution is stupid because it is equivalent to questioning the validity of mathematics. Assume that evolution is a valid concept; making this assumption doesn't prove that evolution had anything to do with speciation, but it does give you more credibility since you aren't denying the validity of mathematics.
This kind of sloppy thinking is why ID gains no traction.
By Gawd! Six days! Blasphamy! MY God didn't need no six days! My God created the universe in half an hour! Needed his coffee first but then, Poof!
Dern heathens!
Now we have the 3rd way...religion/science---control!
Absolute allegiance---MONOPOLY/mind control!
Even the FR evo-pc police!
But ID/IOT has no "place" here to be "replaced" - it is simply not in the vocabulary of working scientists. Your entire thesis is thus nonsensical to anyone not a Creationist, stealth or overt.
And its way too hard to keep up with 2 threads!!
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