Posted on 10/14/2002 4:59:49 PM PDT by RCW2001
| The Associated Press
|
| COLUMBUS, Ohio Oct. 14 — A state school board panel Monday recommended that Ohio science classes emphasize both evolution and the debate over its validity.
The committee left it up to individual school districts to decide whether to include in the debate the concept of "intelligent design," which holds that the universe is guided by a higher intelligence. The guidelines for the science curriculum simply put into writing what many school districts already do. The current guidelines do not even mention evolution. "What we're essentially saying here is evolution is a very strong theory, and students can learn from it by analyzing evidence as it is accumulated over time," said Tom McClain, a board member and co-chairman of the Ohio Board of Education's academic standards committee. Conservative groups, some of which had tried and failed to get biblical creation taught in the public schools, had argued that students should learn about intelligent design. But critics of intelligent design said it is creationism in disguise. On Monday, the committee unanimously forwarded a final draft without the concept in it to the full 19-member board. Board member Michael Cochran, who had pushed for intelligent design in the standards, said, "The amendment allows teachers and students in Ohio to understand that evolution really is a theory and that there are competing views and different interpretations. This allows them to be discussed." The Ohio school board will decide Tuesday whether to adopt the new standards or order that they be revised.
On the Net: Ohio Department of Education: http://www.ode.state.oh.us/ |
That's not what is considered peer review in the scientific world.
Your attempt to represent ID as scientific is disingenuous. As evidence I submit the Table of Contents of Dembski's own latest opus:
"Intelligent Design. The bridge between science and theology." by William Dembski.
1999
InterVarsity Press.
312 pages.
Table of contents:
Foreword by Michael J. Behe
my note: the usual suspects...
Preface
Part 1 Historical Backdrop
1 Recognizing the Divine Finger 25
2 The Critique of Miracles 49
3 The Demise of British Natural Theology 70
Part 2 A Theory of Design
4 Naturalism & Its Cure 97
5 Reinstating Design Within Science 122
6 Intelligent Design as a Theory of Information 153
Part 3 Bridging Science & Theology
7 Science & Theology in Mutual Support 187
8 The Act of Creation 211
Appendix: Objections to Design 237
Notes 280
Index 303
It appears Dembski is far franker about his agenda than some of his supporters.
Not that you will every admit this.
Well, I did read this:
For instance, design theorists recognize that the nature, moral character and purposes of this intelligence lie beyond the remit of science.
So why is it called Intelligent Design? I would like to see the evidence for the designer though. So far the only evidence has been "evolution is wrong".
Anarchy is a prelude to THE POLICE STATE...liberalism/EVOLUTION perpetuates it!
In my lab, I have a crystal of rock-salt, weighing about an ounce. I've done some X-ray diffraction on it, and it appears to have a perfect ordered arrangement. In the lattice, along not just one dimension (like a puny DNA molecule) but three dimensions, every sodium ion is followed by a chloride ion, in exact order. If we call a sodium ion 1 and a chloride ion 0, then in any single dimension the crystal can be represented by an exactly ordered series of bits, 1010101010101010....
I've calculated the probability of this arising by chance. The total number of ions in the crystal is about 10^23, so the probability of chance occurence of an exact sequence of bits is 1 in 2^(10^23), which is about one chance in 1 followed by 10^22 zeros (I'll let you divide this by eight to allow for the fact that we could start each dimension with either sort of ion). This is far, far more unlikely than the chance occurence of the human genome (ask your pal Dembski to check the math, if you like).
This is far, far more unlikely than the probability of the chance occurence of the human genome. And while I was under the impression my crystal grew by a natural process of slow evaporation over a period of months, Dembski has shown me this is impossible. I therefore conclude some Designer, or more likely an entire team of Designers, has been sneaking into my lab. at night and arranging the ions with a pair of molecular tweezers.
Think CSI will fund my further research?
Ever hopefully
Gerry Harbison
aka Right Wing Professor
Intelligent design holds to three tenets:My, my! ID is the un-science. It seeks to undiscover by bad models and selective data what we have already learned or may ever learn about unguided evolution and anything else unguided.1. Specified complexity is well-defined and empirically detectable.[2.] Undirected natural causes are incapable of explaining specified complexity.
3. Intelligent causation best explains specified complexity.
... By contrast, intelligent design nowhere attempts to to identify the intelligent cause responsible for the design in nature ...Gee! It also openly promises to erect nothing in evolutinon's place. (But of course that's where the creationists hope to come in.)
These differences between intelligent design and scientific creationism has significant legal implications for the advancement of intelligent design in the public square ...I'm sure Dembski means that the differences have implications. And how convenient that the science of "We Know Nothing Except That Something Intelligent Designed It" is not a religion and avoids language aimed at creationism!
It's almost like a cynically-crafted "Wedge Strategy."
Intelligent design is compatible with both a single origin of life (ie., common descent or monophyly) and multiple origins of life (ie. polyphyly).
"In fact, we can make it as vague as we need so anyone can imagine he's hearing exactly what he likes."
Each of these scientists opposes the sufficiency of the mutation-selection mechanism on scientific grounds.
For an absolute fact, Dembski mischaracterizes Gould with this generalization, probably also Prigogene who is often misquoted by creationists. I don't know Kaufmann or Eigen.
Consequently it is mistaken and unfair to confuse intellgent design with scientific creationism. Intelligent design is a strictly scientific theory devoid of religious commitments. Whereas the Creator underlying scientific creationism conforms to a strict, literalist intepretation of the Bible, the designer underlying intelligent design is compatible with a much broader playing field. To be sure, the designer is also compatible with the Creator-God of the world's major monotheistic religions like Judaism, Christianity and Islam. But the designer is also compatible with the watchmaker-God of the deists, the demiurge of Plato's Timaeus and the divine reason (ie., logos spermatikos) of the ancient Stoics. One can even take an agnostic view about the designer, treating specified complexity as a brute unexplainable fact. Unlike scientific creationism, intelligent design does not prejudge such questions as 'Who is the designer?' or 'How does the designer go about designing and building things?'
ID is so agnostic on the question of who or what the Designer is, there's no there there. For example, what does ID have to say about the Multiple Designer Theory (MDT)? How would you detect whether there were multiple Designers vs. a single Designer? And is any ID theorist willing to put forth a hypothesis regarding when or how often the Designer(s) stepped in to tweak things?
IOW, are we ever going to see an ID research program??? And without a research program, what the heck is there to teach high school students?
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Do these same ‘strict’ binary natural laws govern our own DNA? Is the chemical bonding exactly the same?
No problem. Although I've read several articles about ID which have been posted here over the past three years (about eyes, flagella, etc.), and I've seen such arguments torn to shreds -- to my satisfaction at least, I freely admit that I haven't read an entire ID book. I also admit that I haven't read any books about astrology, pyramid power, the Bermuda triangle, ESP, UFOs, haunted houses, or Afro-centric history.
When ID achieves some degree of mainstream scientific respect, by making reasonably conclusive demonstrations that various biological structures are truly impossible to evolve, then I shall look into it. Until then, the mere declarations of evolutionary impossibility by the advocates of ID don't impress me any more than the ancients' claim that lightning bolts, being inexplicable to them, had to be the work of the gods.
If Liberalism be evolution Then its a backwards track in time we take when freedom and liberty a spike in the eye of a king and a sting to aristocrats and monarchs once again we must beat back those red diaper doper babies who would bind us in chains and call it Evolution when its actually Tyranny
After considerable reflection, I believe it's intuitively obvious that the good designer made all the living organisms, the bad designer made all the organisms that there are fossils of. So there are 2 designers.
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