Republicans & Conservatives: Archives

Having recently been over at Dawn’s thread, I feel I must say, oh no! not again!

Merry Christmas to all! I hope you have as civil and interesting a conversation here as we did on Dawn’s thread.

Chris

You made me think. It is a kind of mulitcultural thing. We accept Native American ideas about their orgin, even though they are clearly wrong scientifically. When they found that Kennewick man Native American tribes tried to destroy the evidence and the authorities almost let them to mainatain the PC bull.

I don’t believe in ID. But we should put it in the same context as the other PC crap we have to swallow.

A while back, my son asked me if Harriet Tubman was more important than George Washington. I thought it was a stupid question, until I looked at his history book.

Science is about progressively learning to ask the right questions about the world to get true and meaningful answers from it about nature.

Unfortunately, the view commonly presented in the media is that science is a mostly complete endeavor which has all the answers sewn up. This creates the false impression amongst people that Science should be infallible, that science should have complete explanations for everything, or otherwise be regarded as at a lost for credibility.

Science’s credibility doesn’t spring from its completeness. No real branch of science can claim that. Science’s crediblity comes from its ability to discern helpful, useful theories from other theories and facts where the connections are not immediately obvious.

Many of the ideas we take for granted, that gravity is a universal force; that atoms are composed of electrons, neutrons and protons; that magnetism and electrical force are two faces of one and the same force- these are all products of science’s careful examination of our world. Needless to say, these theories have reshaped our world.

The issue with ID is that it has already reached it’s obvious conclusion without the rest of sciences help: that divine powers have intervened in natural history, and that there is a way to discern this kind of divine intervention from the natural. So what backs up the claim that the equations can determine what is divine or not? There’s the black hole at the center of ID and it sucks all the crediblity as a theory into it.

The trick with mathematics is that you can justify anything with logic, and math is logic, so you can justify near anything with math. It takes effort, discipline, and additional thought to seek out the mathematical character of the true natural laws at worse.

UM Chris Roach???????

Wasn’t there just the same post on this site less than 2 days ago, that ended with 329 posts at last count???

Creationism should not be taught as part of public education.

HERE’S THE BIG QUESTION: IF religious doctrine is brought into the caricula, Do we change SAT’s so it includes questions on Intelligent design???

Why should we pay for that WITH OUR TAX DOLLARS??? Why should my tax dollars go to pay teachers (and fund a department/school books etcetera) who are teaching NON-SCIENCE if not non-sense all together??? And non sense that isn’t even SAT required, mind you.

Teachers have a limited amount of time to teach these kids what they need to know to pass the grade. Now they have to waste more time so that the REPUBLI-TARDS can be happy that the Bible (a work of fiction) is brought back into public education??? What does this supposedly produce? More morality or something? it’s a hogwash issue. Slight of hand that produces nothing beneficial.

I wish the Republicans would evolve out of the middle ages and accept the separation of church and state as being AMERICAN.

Republicans have a hard-on to create American Wahabism, because religion being inclusive to public education is exactly what Wahabism is.

I pay a lot of taxes and there are a lot of things in the curriculum I wouldn’t voluntarily pay for. If you think Intelligent Design proponents don’t refer to “scientific” data in formulating their arguments, you haven’t been reading the prominent books in the field.

Most I.D. believers, like myself, accept every scientific finding truly supported by evidence, including other primates and ourselves having a comfortably common and close ancestry.

What we don’t accept is that the universe has been proven to be an unintended accident, that life has been proven to be an unintended accident, and that intelligent life especially developed completely by chance and accident and serves no purpose except to keep us mindlessly propagating ourselves for no reason that the rest of the universe cares a whiff about.

We not only think that all the scientism rhetoric amounting to worship of blind randomness and unintentionality in creation is flat wrong, we expect to find real, conventional scientific evidence and arguments to refute it. If you read our literature, that is what you find—pictures, diagrams, graphs, and generally informed argument about everything from feathers to entropy.

To me the Darwininan theory of evolution is about in the same position as Newton’s theory of gravitation when inconsistencies in the orbit of Mercury were discovered. Einstein came along with ideas that kept most of Newton’s mathematics, but radically altered certain critical assumptions.

In all the discussions posted so far on other threads, I have heard many tacit admissions that scientism’s strong Darwinist interpretation has trouble explaining certain things, but no real admission that maybe what Darwinian dogma needs is another Einstein to give the whole theory a radical makeover.

I believe that is exactly what the theory of evolution needs. Intelligent Design proponents may not produce a convincing new theory themselves, but I strongly suspect that our ideas and unique perspectives will prod the scientism establishment (eventually) into being more open to truly radical ideas, especially as unrelenting continuing research in the biological sciences keeps revealing astonishing new facets and insights into the miracle of life.

DOUBT, NOT TOUT

Novenge: I couldn’t agree more. This re-packaged “creationism” idea is an irrational cultural parasite, a miasma, and groundless twaddle cobbled together out of not-very-well-veiled religious opportunism.

The pro-ID idea that careful scientific pursuit is invalid because it is incomplete actually tells the tale in a nutshell.

ID’s “completeness” is only possible with the same tired assumptions at its core. This, call it: “certainty disorder” is the inescapable and childish essence of ID. To imprint this into the thinking of young people is backwards, tragic, but unfortunately typical of a lack of rational inclusive scrutiny ID needs to exist.

Irony 1:
In other words, because of the unnecessary, fundamental and dishonest blow that such teaching would create in young students, the invariably Judeo-Christian engine driving this mess renders itself provably immoral and irresponsible.

But maybe it is exercises like this that will finally draw back the curtain on such ‘religism’ driven efforts. Perhaps such things as ID are the milestones, the benchmarks of the end game that will finally lay open the fallacies rendering such practices to the archives in the human library of progress.

Irony 2:
The very certainties that ID purports and must force itself to tout, ultimately leaves only cognitive dissonance in its wake as the current legal discourse easily betrayed. On the other hand, the equally necessary doubt, constant peer review, testing, rejection, discovery, progressively reformative, ever-changing basis of careful methodical scientific inquiry: in short, the uncertainly, ultimately offers far greater understanding and as a consequence, social stability than IDism will ever muster.

It seems that most people are missing the major point in some of these court cases, of which Dover is a prime example.

1. The Dover schools were NOT teaching intelligent design. In fact, the letter sent to parents specifically stated that they wouldn’t be discussing intelligent design or “origins” in class.

2. The statement that was to be read at the beginning of the section on evolution was entirely accurate. It did not claim that intelligent design is science. It did not diminish the meaning of a scientific theory. And it did not require any students to listen to the statement.

3. The letter encouraged parents to discuss the issue with their children at home.

If one reads the judge’s decision in this case, aside from faulty logic in several areas, what it basically says is that the words “intelligent design” cannot be spoken in a science class. This case was not about teaching intelligent design. What the judge did, essentially, is CENSORSHIP. The same could be said about the stickers in Georgia.

The school policy was not a violation of the “establishment clause.” The people of Dover had non-legal recourse available if they didn’t like the policy. They used that recourse appropriately when they voted the school board out.

Jeff, the problem with the statement in Dover is that it made a special case for evolution. We should say before all science classes that what they teach are “just theories”. Evolution is no more and no less a valid scientific theory than other sciences. It is certainly younger, and will change in the future, but that should be done by scientists, not in the classroom.

Michael, you’ll remember that Einstein changed physics through science, not through politics. I have no argument with scientists who want to try to make ID into a viable scientific theory. I have a problem with the people who are trying to say that it is ready for prime time now. Even the scientists who support ID have said it is not ready for schools, and I am willing to give them the benefit of the doubt and believe it is because they realize it is still too young, and not because they realized they would lose in court.

I pay a lot of taxes and there are a lot of things in the curriculum I wouldn’t voluntarily pay for. If you think Intelligent Design proponents don’t refer to “scientific†data in formulating their arguments, you haven’t been reading the prominent books in the field.

I have to admit, no I haven’t. I’ve mostly read the writings of supporters of ID on the internet, and I would not voluntarily pay for the privledge of reading writing similar in quality and content to what I have read from that side of the debate thusfar.

Most I.D. believers, like myself, accept every scientific finding truly supported by evidence, including other primates and ourselves having a comfortably common and close ancestry.

Really? You wouldn’t know it from any debate that springs up about ID. Just look at the number of people arguing for a literal Creation of Man by God in the last thread on this subject alone. Including the idea that God literally made Adam from mud and Eve from a rib from Adam. (And let’s not even get into the logic that stems from the idea that there were a literal Adam and Eve and that Eve shared genetic material with Adam in a way that would make her both a clone of him and his daughter effectively.) You also wouldn’t know it from some of the major sites supporting ID, such as http://www.answersingenesis.org/

What we don’t accept is that the universe has been proven to be an unintended accident, that life has been proven to be an unintended accident, and that intelligent life especially developed completely by chance and accident and serves no purpose except to keep us mindlessly propagating ourselves for no reason that the rest of the universe cares a whiff about.

Nor should you. Because that’s not what Science in any form says, and is certainly not what is taught in our public schools. (I’m probably a more recent graduate of those schools than most here, I graduated highschool in 1999, and I know I was never taught anything even remotely resembling that despite taking both regular and AP biology.) It seems to me that this is a common misconception of what Science is really saying with regard to Evolution. And I think I’m starting to understand where the disconnect in communication is.

“Unintended”, “accident”, “chance”, “accident”, “no purpose”, “no reason”… you’re not asking science for a description of what happened, with words like these, you’re asking science to give it meaning. To give it significance, or a rationale. Science can’t answer those questions at our current level of development, and may never be able to. Even using the classic Creationist/ID example of the existance of a watch implying a watchmaker, finding the watch could never tell you the intention of the watchmaker in making it. Maybe he was fooling around and experimenting and seeing what he could make. Maybe he had a grand plan. Maybe he was just doing his job and wanted to get paid. Observing the watch and how it works just doesn’t tell you that much about the watchmaker. Bringing it back to evolution and cosmology, observing the universe doesn’t tell us a thing about whether what we percieve as accidents were intended by a higher power or not, and certainly not why that power might have intended them if such a power exists. The idea of “chance” itself begs the question of whether or not things are truly random or if they just seem random to us. Is each flip of the coin called before it lands, predestined, or is it just a matter of playing the odds? Science, working from a limited perspective, can only observe that there are patterns (odds) to such things… they really can’t answer the question of whether the individual outcomes that form those patterns were predetermined, however.

But let’s say, just for a minute, that there was no greater reason for us to be here. That there was no great cosmic plan, and that everything was just an accident, just random chance. Why exactly can’t you accept that? Is it logic, or faith? Because it seems to me that the proponents of ID have, by and large, reached that position through faith and then go back and try to find a way to logically argue it, rather than letting logic lead them to an answer in the first place.

Besides, if life has no inherent meaning, then it seems to me that what meaning it ultimately has is the meaning we give it ourselves, through our own lives and actions.

We not only think that all the scientism rhetoric amounting to worship of blind randomness and unintentionality in creation is flat wrong, we expect to find real, conventional scientific evidence and arguments to refute it.

Well, first of all I think the accusation that science worships randomness and unintentionality is a bit over the top, and contributes greatly to why we have a tendency to ignore ID arguments. Nobody (except possibly followers of Eris, and then only sometimes) worships randomness. We observe randomness. We observe that a coin flipped in the air will have a certain probability of coming down one way or another. We observe that, barring mutation, crossbreeding beings with certain dominant and certain recessive genes will have a certain probability of having only the dominant gene, only the recessive gene, or one of each. We do not worship unintentionality, but neither can we assume intention without real evidence of it. And so far there isn’t any. Which brings me to my second point. You said in the beginning of this post that ID proponents refer to scientific data in their arguments. But here you’ve admitted, point blank, that ID *expects* to find evidence to refute randomness and unintentionality. They haven’t been found yet. And a mere expectation of data does not rise to the level necessary to turn a hypothesis into a theory using the scientific method. This is exactly why it is not appropriate to teach ID in schools alongside evolution.

If you read our literature, that is what you find—pictures, diagrams, graphs, and generally informed argument about everything from feathers to entropy.

Actually, generally I find what literature I’ve seen from ID proponents online to be full of weak analogies and misunderstandings of science. http://www.arn.org/idfaq/How%20can%20you%20tell%20if%20something%20is%20designed.htm
http://www.origins.org/articles/ross_sulfurcore.html

The second one is so bad that I can easily refute it myself: it presumes that the Earth was designed for the life that would exist upon it, or else merely had an incredibly lucky series of “accidents”, both of which reverse cause and effect rather dramatically. The truth is that life is more likely to form in conditions that are favorable to it, so the fact that the earth had these “accidents” is what made life likely to form here in the first place, not the other way around.

This is the general quality of the ID literature that I have seen.

To me the Darwininan theory of evolution is about in the same position as Newton’s theory of gravitation when inconsistencies in the orbit of Mercury were discovered. Einstein came along with ideas that kept most of Newton’s mathematics, but radically altered certain critical assumptions.

Problem is, most of what ID proponents are calling inconsistencies in evolutionary theory really aren’t. They’re the result of the ID proponents misunderstanding evolution. See the previous thread on this subject for ready-made examples.

In all the discussions posted so far on other threads, I have heard many tacit admissions that scientism’s strong Darwinist interpretation has trouble explaining certain things, but no real admission that maybe what Darwinian dogma needs is another Einstein to give the whole theory a radical makeover.

Maybe it does, but ID has shown no signs of being up to that task. Quite the opposite, it has shown itself to barely understand science let alone evolution. It explictly wants us to accept the existence of an unseen, unknown, but “intelligent” designer working through unknown means to design life, the universe, or whatever ID claims is too complex and specified to occur by chance (even though they admit there IS a chance of it happening randomly, it’s just extremely unlikely). It also has not escaped the notice of most people that this intelligent designer is always posited to be a single being that made both life here and the universe at large. Polythetistic or even merely pagan concepts of creation seem not to be considered at all in the Intelligent Designer paradigm, and even the idea that the designer could be extraterrestrial rather than divine is usually said with a nod and a wink. This generally fuels the belief that ID is merely a new brand name for Creation Science.

I believe that is exactly what the theory of evolution needs. Intelligent Design proponents may not produce a convincing new theory themselves, but I strongly suspect that our ideas and unique perspectives will prod the scientism establishment (eventually) into being more open to truly radical ideas, especially as unrelenting continuing research in the biological sciences keeps revealing astonishing new facets and insights into the miracle of life.

Again, you admit that ID has not yet produced a convincing theory, but you act as if it is science that is the problem still, that we’re simply not open enough to new “radical” ideas. This is exactly why we say that proponents of ID do not understand science.

Chris,

Could there be a formula for a peaceful resolution?

Yes, privatise all public schools. ‘Separation of Church and State’ issue solved.

I bring this up because it is a fact that state monopoly of education creates this religious tension.

The separation of Church and State was meant to keep the State out of the indoctrination business. Instead, what we have today is the state taking it over and then using the term ‘separation of church and state’ to justify it’s newfound right to indoctrinate.

Why do we have public schools? There are two basic reasons: 1) to provide education for the poor, and 2) to provide the ‘right’ kind of ‘equal’ education for all American children.

I don’t have a problem so much with #1. But there are better ways of accomplishing it than a monopoly. It is #2 which is inherently unconstitutional.

Also, I agree with your statements about science 100%. I certainly have no quarrel with science and would never want evolution banned from any classroom.

However, I have two points, one about science education and one about evolution in particular. Science education in public schools is… well it sucks generally. This is a symptom rather than the disease however, because I think that education itself is not well served by our present system which at best shoots for mediocrity and at worst teaches social theories rather than how to learn.

Secondly, I think evolution is generally bad science. Maybe this is a result of the educational system or of the many science shows devoted to evolution I have watched over the years, but if evolution is in fact a fact it is not taught very well at all.

Are there transitional forms from one species to another for instance? When I was in school there were numerous ‘missing links’ that were widely touted but then later discarded— but never very loudly!

Watch a science show on discovery about any subject and they will talk about the why’s and whatfor’s getting into the nitty gritty of why they believe something in astronomy for instance. Watch a show on evolution and what you get is a guy (now it’s digital) in a half-man half-ape costume with narration talking about it as THE evidence. When all they are doing is extrapolating from a fragment of a bone.

Evolution itself has taken on the nature of a religion for many. There’s a great deal of faith going on in order to accept it.

Chris Roach, except for your conclusions, a very good article. My objections:

Science is not concerned with truth. Science is concerned with predictability and verifiability. Truth on the other hand is very dependent upon the perceptual constraints and choices of the individual seeking it.

Is it true that the physical universe exists outside the perceptutal processes of a human being? Science cannot answer that question. Religion, requiring no empirical evidence to support its claims, can answer that and many have in postulating that God created the Universe and THEN created human beings. It is true for those who choose to believe it, and not true for those who choose not to.

I have yet to hear respected scientists say the big bang theory is the truth. But, I often hear Christians speak of their god as the only god as the truth.

My daughter attends Texas Public schools. She just turned 15 and in the 9th grade. She is taking chemistry and physics. Her texts and instruction have instructed her that the laws of the universe are laws only due to their long-standing verifiability and predictability. To the extent that such laws fail to predict, as in sub-atomic particle physics what happens in the macro phsical universe, those laws are not immutable. She has grasped this concept fairly well.

I say fairly well, because, she is 15, and her experience with the world, and her new introduction to the world of science is that of a novice, lacking the sophistication of better educated adults on questions like whether the tree falling in the woods actually makes a noise if no one is there to hear it. For her at this point, the tree does make a sound because as she said, the deer and squirrels are in the woods and they hear it.

And this is the crux of the issue regarding religion and science in schools. Proponents of both seek to grasp these malleable minds and train them to think in a particular fashion.

Some relgious proponents (by no means all) seek to train those minds to accept certain premises and conclusions without empirical evidence, and without question, the concept of a creator for example, and intelligence which precedes that of humans and the universe itself, which is separate and distinct from the universe as creation.

Science proponents seek to train those minds to question authority, which is the very heart of scientific inquiry. As anyone trained in science knows, when it comes to explaining the unknown, finding explanations often begins with discarding notions that no longer work to explain in light of new information. And therefore, what is required is a rejection of previous authorities on the subject to advance the cause of understanding and deriving new hypotheses which can be tested to find more comprehensive explanations.

And that is the rub. Science has no problem discarding authority when it fails, and in fact encourages it. Religion however, is at its core, authoritarian, God being the ultimate author. This is an unverifiable assumption proponents require to be accepted unquestioningly if one is to be brought into the fold of believers.

This is where the Fundamentalist Right Evangelical Christians (FREC’s) lose the majority of support for their actions in our public schools. It is plain as the nose on one’s face, that for FREC’s to increase their numbers, they must oppose the questioning and anti-authoritarian paradigm of thinking required of young people learning science. For if young people seek verifiable evidence for their beliefs, FREC’s believe they will lose these young as converts.

And why are converts so important? Converts are power. Especially in democracies. Converts mean money in the donation plates, pay the salaries of FREC leaders, converts mean political power in lobbying and organization, converts mean greater power to halt or modify the training of young potential converts in scientific inquiry and questioning of authority.

As you very poignantly observe, sciencific explanation demands subsequent generations to retest and reverify the results of the previous generation. This is anathema to relgion, which seeks to establish unquestioning acceptance and identification with their relgion through tradition, habits, and ritual. The only aspect of the word “NEW” which FREC’s embrace is in methodology of persuasion. Otherwise, new, is a concept which is anti-religious. “Give me that old-time religion” the song goes.

If it were not for FREC’s grab for power and goal of increasing their converts in future generations, as well as their fear of losing traditions, rituals, and habits, there would be no conflict between religion and science. Science does not seek, nor can it seek, to prove or disprove the existence of god, and as scientists are learning today, they cannot even prove or disprove whether the universe ever had a beginning (see string theory).

Jarandehl, the quality of the I.D. books is quite a bit higher than most postings and you can check them out from the library, you don’t have to buy them.

Let’s suppose, in a dreamy, theoretical kind of way, that it really, actually is the case that there are hurdles in bio-chemistry that the evolution of life just can not get over without positing a kind of “life force” that is not so much monotheistic in origin as it is pantheistic, say along the lines of the Gaia hypothesis (Gaia was proposed by a pretty good chemist you may recall.)

Let us suppose that some bright young minds realize that there are problems with Darwinian dogma that can’t be economically addressed without positing some new type of influence at work. I said “economically” because, in a certain sense, Occam’s Razor compels us to seek an economy of concept.

Let’s say a particular bright young genius’s attention is caught by the problem of explaining the immense difficulty of creating life in a test tube to the level of a simple prokaryotic cell. She is particularly caught by the fact that first life on Earth did not require “billions and billions” of years to work out all the complex chemical events, but appeared almost immediately after the Earth cooled and water arrived via interplanetary Federal Express.

She apprehends a problem with this, because if a prokaryotic cell can appear quickly in some type of primordial, pre-biotic soup, the (1) why don’t we see the process happening again occasionally in the last four billion years, producing new lines of life quite distinct from the rather idiosyncratic chemical way life evolved and has rigorously adhered to,

and (2) if the incubator conditions for life are so extremely special that they never have existed on this planet after the first few hundred million years, then maybe the panspermia idea must be taken seriously. Maybe life just came to our virgin planet as a spore on a space rock. But an objection looms to that inviting idea—why don’t we see more space rocks with extra-terrestial spores coming down? In fact, we find ancient meteors all the time, with no sign of spores, so it appears that if this was the route, the fortuitous spore-bearing rock came along with exquisite timing, as soon as the Earth was ready to be impregnated with life.

Both the concept of life spontaneously generating from a local warm pond of some very weird type and the concept of spore-rocks from space have this puzzle of their unique timing. Whichever it was, it is hard to explain why the process at work just quit and disappeared.

In fact, it is puzzling why we don’t see evidence of BOTH avenues to life on Earth, because if life can spontaneously generate from any type of a soup, the sheer vastness of the universe suggests that it would be happening a lot out there somewhere. Anything that can happen will happen a lot in the vastness. I have been using the outmoded idea of a soup in the sense of the warm pond or series of ponds originally proposed by first-life theorists. I should point out that both water and warmth are murder on the chemical chains that make proteins or RNA.

Our bright young genius has noticed something else that is curious about evolution—it mostly seems to consist of long periods of a dynamic stasis in which existing species work out new features in relatively minor ways in the midst of a gradual and general extinction trend.

Every now and then, however, a period of punctuation happens. Suddenly certain promising species brachiate like crazy. They seem to try everything, and for a long time everything they try co-exists until gradually the equilibrium returns and we get back to relentless extinction thinning the ranks.

She thinks to herself, hmmm, the mechanism of mutation is high-energy interstellar particles zinging down from outer space and ballistically modifying DNA. These mutations then get tested and affirmed or nixed by natural selection. But we know now that the cosmic rays responsible come from the outer edges of the universe, which means they originated billions of years ago, the time frame for when life kicked off on Earth.

Maybe, she thinks, whatever force once created life and causes these fortuitous punctuations is hard to find because it is so long ago and far away. She puts on an astronomer hat and voila, she cobs together some numbers that seem to indicate that all life-changing cosmic rays come from a single quasar, which she dubs Eden.

Ok, it’s a wacky theory. Special relativity sounded real wacky when first announced. Quantum mechanics is still wacky. The point I wish to make is that our young researcher will never announce her theory. Why? Because it smacks too much of the kind of thing that the Intelligent Design people prattle about. She knows that, if she publishes, Darwin’s dogmatists will send her career hopes up in seering flames of outrage.

My feeling is that some bold and wacky revisions of the theory of evolution are long, long overdue. They just aren’t going to happen in the present scientism climate.

esimonson, an all private education system would itself become an oligopoly, if not a monopoly. Also, private education is inherently more expensive than public education. So, let’s say you refund ALL property taxes for schools back to residents and tell them to find a private school in their area that teaches secular eduation. Since private school education is more expense, two things happen.

First, unlike the public education system, a private system would simply deny education to children whose parents for whatever reasons, many legitimate, can’t afford to send their kids to school this year. Is that good for America? I don’t think so. In the public education system, every child goes to school. Period.

Second, because private education is more expensive, and because an all private educational system would be stratified by cost and quality, poor families would be left with poor eduacation, and wealthy familes would receive outstanding educations K-12. This would create more problems in our society than it would solve.

The public education system for all its faults, is a great equalizer. Based on merit and determination, even very poor students get access to the same quality of educational materials, teachers, and environment as upper middle class students in the same school district, by and large. An all private educational system would negate this great equalizing effect.

Yes, in America there are some very underperforming public education districts. But, they are the exceptions not the rule. In an all private system, family income would make inferior education for the poor the rule, instead of the exception.

A Grand Experiment in The Art of Consuming.

Why the Left and Right can not come to terms with the reasons The Founding Fathers did what they did is because of their Realm of Thinking on the subject. Although Creation and Evolution make up good stories from “The Ancient and Old World’s,†can any American even imagine Our Founding Fathers after winning a war against the most powerful Nation on Earth settling this issue over how “We the People†should govern ourselves?

No, they were enlightened by what they saw when the group studied Humanity’s Civilization and the History of Nature as a whole unit. Although not ever taught by Eastern or Western Scholars, they saw that in Nature as in Human History everything must consume or be consumed by Space and Time. The only constant to this fact is that Life as we know it begins and ends at that point. Consume and live, don’t and perish to The Sands of Time. Strange, but true is this fundamental fact that drives science quest for knowledge.

Societies of Law, for all of their pitfalls, are also designed on this very ideology because that is the duty and responsibility of our elected officials. How best can we function to meet the Needs of all of our citizens while building and maintaining a Free Society so that a few can “Have it All.†First it was the High Priest that demanded that they be allowed to “Have it All“ than came along Kings and Emperors to stake claim to the land in order to make it profitable so that they could allow their people to consume in peace. Fast forward to the 21st Century and the President policies, are they not designed so that a few Americans can make a profit and thus be entitled to “Having it All?†Is not your daily life filled with the “Temptations of Consuming?†No, this is not a random act of mere “Non-Manipulation,†but a clever and intelligent way of working within a “Limited Resource Environment†so that someday the Human Race can and will live up to their full unalienable Rights as Humans to consume all they need and want within the Righteousness of the Law in a Society. And with that there is a Light of Hope imposed upon The Law of Man.

Religions and their March to Righteousness. Attempts to teach their followers how, what, and why one should consume properly and unfortunately judge others on they consumption habits. This natural Human Fear of not knowing is offset by the possibility that we are correct in our calculated assumptions. Thus faith in a Higher form of Thought and Existence must exist. And with that Ideology there is Life giving Energy that someday The Human Race will come to understand what has to be done in order to govern themselves properly in their consumption.

Up till now, this so called Higher Power has been seen as a myth in our Societal Thinking. And while a part of me wants to keep it a myth, the Larger side of me must bring to the Public Pulpit the fact that “Society’s Learned†and “Laypersons†are being taught to live in a different Realm of Thought other than Reality. Build a cube in the “Real World with only six sides and I’ll bet you it can not be done scientifically. Tell me poverty as we know it can not be solved and I’ll prove you wrong. However, tell me something does not exist because science can not explain it and you lose the natural trust of a child. So what is this so called “Higher Power†in our Society of Tramps and Thieves? The Righteousness & Truth found in this “Great Experiment in the Art of Consumption.†Only by facing our fears to met the requirements established by “The Riddle of a Righteous Nation†can Americans learn to govern ourselves so that All Consumers can become Self-Sufficient in the Art of Consuming as prescribed to by the Laws of Nature and “God’s Nature.†To that Ideology, the Founding Fathers anchored 4 of the eight points of a pyramid firmly on these Cornerstones as: “….four men distrustful of politics and yet operating in an increasingly democratic world. Jefferson sought to recast the political along the lines of friendship, while Hamilton hoped that honor would provide a secure foundation for self and country. Adams struggled to create a nation virtuous enough to sustain a republican government, and Madison worked to establish a government based on justice.†source

Now, my Conservative and Liberal Friends just how do we deal with the fact that “We are no longer controlled by “A Limited Resource World†and that it is our actions and words over the next 25-40 years that will determine how every Human on Earth will live and be able to consume a 100 years from now.

David, I guess I take exception with this, “This is anathema to relgion, which seeks to establish unquestioning acceptance and identification with their relgion through tradition, habits, and ritual.”

Why does religion need to be “unquestioning?” Why does every invocation of some notion of authority and tradition require mindless obedience.

I come from the Catholic tradition which, going back to St. Jerome, St. Thomas, St. Augustine, has long tried to reconcile reason and faith, scripture and tradition, the explainable and the unexplainable.

Contrary to popular understanding, there is actually something proufoundly revolutionary and unsable in modern-day fundamentalist Christians. The fundamentalist viewpoint has a deep conflict with the notion of authority, that some types of decisions should be reserved to properly trained and appointed experts, whether those experts are scientists, priests, theologians, judges, or whoever.

The essence of authority is the view that individual human reason must be guided and restrained both by established tradition and trained leadership. Both fundamentalists and tradition-based belief systems, of course, rely on authority and leadership. The difference with true conservatives (and Catholics) is that their concept of authority is defended openly and explicitly. Pace the fundamentalists, in our view not everything is simple and self evident, and we are willing to defer certain types of decisionmaking to those appointed in the field, whether by God, by tradition, by law, etc.

This is not blind obedience. The Catholic faith and its rich literature of philosophy, theology, etc. addresses these issues in a way appropriate to certain kinds of intellectuals. Of course, David and others should recognize that most people everywhere will not be scientists, will not come to their beliefs through careful reflection or testing of evidence. In such a world, the world we always live in that is, we should just hope that most people are indoctrineated in basic social morality lest we become a nation of highwaymen.

The Blind Obedience Myth by Michael Novak

Above is a good article on the myth of blind obedience.

It’s obvious in this and the other thread that the opponents of ID are not committed scientists, nor particularly knowledgeable about science in general and evolutionary biology in particular. Look at the venom and blind irrationality of Novenger, for example. (I mean what kind of person that cared about education would allow the SAT to dictate the HS curriculum or dismiss the Bible merely as a “work of fictinon.”) Lord knows the left would turn on biology if it began to reveal uncomfortable things that counter important liberal shibolleths on any subject—such as racial equality or fetal pain. Look at the cartwheels done in response to the fact that maternal mitochondrial DNA shows that the various “races” in fact have been distinct for some time and those differences express themselves in various measurable ways, e.g., intelligence, bone density, fecundity, etc. Here’s a good summary article on the divergence between scientific discovery and our public discussions of race, including the continued dishonest invocation of the incantation that “there is no such thing as race.”

Novenge and others show that they view this fight as a chace to promote an un-American ideal with no foundation in our Constitution to influence local public schools: the French Englightenment concept of “separation of Church and State.” That is not an American concept. We have a lack of established Church, but we’ve long had public, governmental, and widespread acknowledgment of core, Christian (mostly Protestant) values in our public life. That is, we are a Christian nation without an established Church. Today, for instance, is a public holiday.

To deny this reality is, in part, to redefine our identity as a people. That’s why this seemingly esoteric debate on a HS curriculum occasions such strong emotions. On one side are those that are wanting to preserve American culture and allow other idioms to exist alongside the utilitarian, scientific, and incomplete foundation of much of modernity. On the other are those that want to redefine America according to an ahistorical myth of the Founding and the Founders—a myth that they were mostly liberal-leaning atheists who denied other idiomatic ways of knowing, such as philosophy, poetry, theology, etc.

M. Stanton Evans eviscerated that nonsense in his book “The Theme is Freedom.” Of course, the myth will persist in spite of any evidence to the controversy.

The culture war goes on; this is just one more front. My hope of some resolution is, of course, entirely quixotic. Let’s face it, until Christianity is relegated to the same status as fairy tales in our public life, the left will not be happy.

Roach, regards “fundamentalist” disrespect for authority, to the extent that it is true it traces back to Martin Luther proclaiming that we peons did not have to take the priest’s word for everything, we could read the Bible for ourselves. After Guttenberg that was true and the urge to read the Bible for oneself sparked a literacy movement long before it really became an economic necessity.

I belong to a church that many outsiders would regard as “fundamentalist” simply because we believe in the Jesus story, including the resurrection. I was rather shocked in adult Sunday School when we took a poll and everyone agreed with the statement “I think the Bible is all true and some of it really happened!”

Most of my co-religionists accept the fossil record and other primates being our nearest relatives. We are adament, however, about the existence of God, because very, very often the Darwinist position comes across as
IT HAS BEEN PROVEN THAT THE UNIVERSE IS AN ACCIDENT AND THAT NO SUPERNATURAL POWER PLAYED A PART IN EVOLUTION.

If there is a God, indeed, if any supernatural, paranormal, or mystical occurences take place, then one has to suspect that mystical influences may be everywhere. There are no partially mystical worlds.

1. The Dover schools were NOT teaching intelligent design. In fact, the letter sent to parents specifically stated that they wouldn’t be discussing intelligent design or “origins” in class.

No, but it gave an official stamp of approval to “Of Pandas and People,” which teaches CreationID.

2. The statement that was to be read at the beginning of the section on evolution was entirely accurate. It did not claim that intelligent design is science. It did not diminish the meaning of a scientific theory. And it did not require any students to listen to the statement.

Let’s look at the statement:

The Pennsylvania Academic Standards require students to learn about Darwin’s Theory of Evolution and eventually to take a standardized test of which evolution is a part. Because Darwin’s Theory is a theory, it continues to be tested as new evidence is discovered. The Theory is not a fact. Gaps in the Theory exist for which there is no evidence. A theory is defined as a well-tested explanation that unifies a broad range of observations. Intelligent Design is an explanation of the origin of life that differs from Darwin’s view. The reference book, Of Pandas and People, is available for students who might be interested in gaining an understanding of what Intelligent Design actually involves. With respect to any theory, students are encouraged to keep an open mind. The school leaves the discussion of the Origins of Life to individual students and their families. As a Standards-driven district, class instruction focuses upon preparing students to achieve proficiency on Standards-based assessments.

It is not accurate because it is misleading. I singles out Evolution as a Theory to be questioned when Evolution is no more in doubt than Gravity, Plate Tectonics, or the Atom.

You are right that it did not use the words “Intelligent Design is science.” However, by introducing Intelligent Design as an approved alternative within science class, it give ID an authority within science. So, it indirectly but very much implies that ID is science.

It also forces every student to hear it in that it forces every teacher to say it. Implying that it doesn’t have an effect of giving an official stamp to ID because students could ignore it doesn’t make any sense.

Roach:

We have a lack of established Church, but we’ve long had public, governmental, and widespread acknowledgment of core, Christian (mostly Protestant) values in our public life. That is, we are a Christian nation without an established Church.

To that, sir, I can only respond with the following:

“As the Government of the United States of America is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion; as it has in itself no character of enmity against the laws, religion, or tranquillity, of Mussulmen; and, as the said States never entered into any war, or act of hostility against any Mahometan nation, it is declared by the parties, that no pretext arising from religious opinions, shall ever produce an interruption of the harmony existing between the two countries.” Article 11, US Treaty with Tripoli, 1796. The introduction to the online version of this treaty reads: “Authored by American diplomat Joel Barlow in 1796, the following treaty was sent to the floor of the Senate, June 7, 1797, where it was read aloud in its entirety and unanimously approved. John Adams, having seen the treaty, signed it and proudly proclaimed it to the Nation.”
http://www.stephenjaygould.org/ctrl/treaty_tripoli.html

Eric,

Are there transitional forms from one species to another for instance?

Yes

When I was in school there were numerous ‘missing links’ that were widely touted but then later discarded— but never very loudly!

You’re right that a few of the earlier specimens that were touted as intermediary forms to humans were found later to have been fake. However, they are no longer used as examples in Evolutionary theory, and our understanding of the descent of man does not depend on them at all.

Pointing to the tiny percentage of intermediary forms that were frauds as evidence that no “missing link” has been found is illogical; there are hundreds of other valid finds that we use instead. It makes about as little sense as saying that all Liberals are evil because you don’t like the actions of a couple Democrats.

Oh, wait…

It’s obvious in this and the other thread that the opponents of ID are not committed scientists, nor particularly knowledgeable about science in general and evolutionary biology in particular.

Roach, that’s just plainly inaccurate. Sure, Novenge was aggressive, but to say that all of the rest of us who are trying to show the meaning of science are not committed scientists is just an insult.

If you think we’re wrong, tell us. However, just ridiculing those who support the mainstream understanding of science and biology as being unknowledgeable about science and biology is ridiculous.

Just because you disagree with us doesn’t mean that we don’t know or understand science.

“Why should my tax dollars go to pay teachers (and fund a department/school books etcetera) who are teaching NON-SCIENCE if not non-sense all together??? And non sense that isn’t even SAT required, mind you.”

Interesting point, except many subjects that are taught in high schools are not required for the SAT or ACT. I’m not sure about the SAT, but the ACT math section goes up to Algebra II. Does that mean teachers shouldn’t teach pre-calc, or calculus? Does that mean you won’t want your tax dollars to go towards higher-math education for students who are exceptionally bright? Until ID has been completely disproven (to my knowledge it hasn’t been yet, but correct me if I’m wrong), I don’t see why it can’t be at least mentioned in schools.

Roach asked: “Why does religion need to be “unquestioning?”

Duh! Because, religion has a couple names for folks who do question whether there is a god, agnostics and atheists. Some religious people, and many FREC’s use these terms with derision. To be religious is to accept on faith the basic underlying assumption which has no proof, that God exists. If one questions this assumption, one is not religious, one is at best an agnostic.

Until ID has been completely disproven (to my knowledge it hasn’t been yet, but correct me if I’m wrong), I don’t see why it can’t be at least mentioned in schools.

Because science classes have a higher bar of entry than simply not being disproven. If you’re going to do that, you’ll need to also devote equal time to:

• Flying Spaghetti Monsterism [venganza.org]
  
• The Church of last Thursdayism of Queen Maeve [wikipedia.org]
  
• The Church Of The Subgenius [subgenius.com]
  
• etc…

The bar for Science classes is that an idea has to be useful for understanding the world, predictive about new discoveries, and verified with experimental data. Evolution meets those standards. ID, like the Flying Spaghetti Monster, doesn’t despite not being disprovable.

Person A - believes that GOD created the heaven and earth and, of couse man. He or she would likely concede that the Bible (for all else it may be) is an historical account of the beginnings of Christianity. This person believes that Jesus Christ was born of the virgin Mary and is the son of GOD. After a period of time on earth Jesus generated a following of believers, disciples, etc. and, it was accepted by some that he was the King of the Jews. There were of course dissenters to this belief and ultimately Jesus was crucified. The believers agree that his death on the cross was to forgive our sins and whomsover believeth in HIM would have
everlasting life.
Person A and fellow Christians believe all of this on faith because by true definition, there are no facts in the Bible. To individuals of extreme faith however, the biblical accounts of the Creation and subsequent birth, life and death of Jesus Christ as the Son of GOD are facts.

David, it’s obvious you’re not familiar with the logical proof of God’s existence revealed in Aristotle, Aquinas, and Jerome.

Is this “empirical” proof. No. It’s a logical proof. What proof is there that empirical findings are in fact accurate representations of the world? Oops, it turns out science too depends on a kind of faith.

OOPS, I pressed the button before I finished my previous post.

Sorry.

Person B believes that life evolved in a different fashion. A theory which I believe was offered by Charles Darwin. According to the believers in this theory there are scientific facts to support the theory.

Person B and those like thinkers believe that science offers proof of their belief. While it is known that even science is not without flaw and also has some faith based foundations, this theory explains away the possibility of Creation. I have no problem with people who support this method.

While I believe wholeheartedly that there should be a separation of church and state Evolution can be taught in public schools but Religion/Christianity cannot.

I know, that’s what churches are for. That’s where Christians go to learn that the Theory of Evolution is false. I think this is just as well because IMO students will listen to a “Person of the Cloth and a Parent, long before they will listen to a teacher.

Hi Chris,

“For all of the cultural elite’s pretensions about creationism and intelligent design, their view of science, while it may make its adherents feel good, has little to do with what science actually can and cannot say.”

By “cultural elite” you mean “people who have a clue about what science is.”

The debate has everything to do with what science can actually say and cannot say. ID isn’t a scientific theory. God may have created the universe but that’s not a scientific theory.

“the scientific method finds its cultural origins in the Christian worldview, a view that depends upon the foundational axiom that there is an orderly universe governed by laws promulgated for our benefit by God.”

You don’t have a clue about what the scientific method is. It certainly isn’t based on religion as you assert.

“The present-day Manichaean struggle between advocates of an atheistic science and some acknowledgement of a divine role is based on mutual confusion”

You’re attacking all science for being “atheistic”. Your views are primative and extremely uninformed.

The argument whether ID should be taught in schools is more about keeping religion out of public schools than the reliability of ID. Frankly that is simply the result of liberal activist judges and liberal Democrats who have twisted the First Amendment Disestablishment clause. They have falsely interpreted “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof” as “Separation of Church and State.” There is no place the term Separation or Wall of Separation is employed in the First Amendmendment.

Darwin’s theory, though popular among scientist, is still a theory. Parents should have the right to have an alternative theory taught to their children even if it smacks of religion. ID is that theory.

Pertaining to Darwinism here is an interesting quote:

“Critics of intelligent design often claim that design advocates don’t publish their work in appropriate scientific literature. For example, Barbara Forrest, a philosophy professor at Southeastern Louisiana University, was quoted in USA Today (March 25, 2005) that design theorists “aren’t published because they don’t have scientific data.â€

Other critics have made the more specific claim that design advocates do not publish their works in peer-reviewed scientific journals—as if such journals represented the only avenue of legitimate scientific publication. In fact, scientists routinely publish their work in peer-reviewed scientific journals, in peer-reviewed scientific books, in scientific anthologies and conference proceedings (edited by their scientific peers), and in trade presses. Some of the most important and groundbreaking work in the history of science was first published not in scientific journal articles but in scientific books—including Copernicus’ De Revolutionibus, Newton’s Principia, and Darwin’s Origin of Species (the latter of which was published in a prominent British trade press and was not peer-reviewed in the modern sense of the term). In any case, the scientists who advocate the theory of intelligent design have published their work in a variety of appropriate technical venues, including peer-reviewed scientific journals, peer-reviewed scientific books (some in mainstream university presses), trade presses, peer-edited scientific anthologies, peer-edited scientific conference proceedings and peer-reviewed philosophy of science journals and books. We provide below an annotated bibliography of technical publications of various kinds that support, develop or apply the theory of intelligent design.”

Here is the Link: http://www.discovery.org/scripts/viewDB/index.php?command=view&id=2640&program=News&callingPage=discoMainPage.

Hi Chris,

“It’s obvious in this and the other thread that the opponents of ID are not committed scientists, nor particularly knowledgeable about science in general and evolutionary biology in particular.”

In point of fact the ID opponents blew the doors off the ID proponents on the other thread.

ID isn’t a scientific theory. Evolution is a scientific theory. Teaching ID as if it’s a scientific theory involves lying about what science is.

“the French Englightenment concept of “separation of Church and State.†That is not an American concept.”

Thomas Jefferson said that the Constitution built “a wall of seperation between Church and State.

Going by your “logic” Christianity isn’t an American concept.

Our Constitution is based on the principles of the French Enlightenment to a large extent. It is you that is being un-American.

“That is, we are a Christian nation without an established Church.”

Our Constitution is based on secular humanist philosophy. Our constitution is based on the idea that man can rule himself fairly which is secular humanist philosophy.

You are engaging in historical revisionism in an attempt to have really bad science taught in schools.

Hi Theway,

“Darwin’s theory, though popular among scientist, is still a theory.”

You’re saying that atomic theory (atoms combine to form molecules in certain fixed proportions) shouldn’t be taught as dognma?

You’re asserting that teaching that water is H20 should only be a guideline rather than a fact?

“Parents should have the right to have an alternative theory taught to their children even if it smacks of religion. ID is that theory.”

ID isn’t a scientific theory. Parents don’t have the right to have students lied to about what science is.

Hi xxreadytorun,

“Until ID has been completely disproven (to my knowledge it hasn’t been yet, but correct me if I’m wrong), I don’t see why it can’t be at least mentioned in schools.”

Just because something hasn’t been disproven doesn’t make it science. If that were the case then astrology would be science.

As for the birth of the scientific method, Louis, go read Descartes’ Meditations. I took a whole class on it at the University of Chicago.

The problem with the opponents of ID is that they classify certain knowledge as “science” and classify all other species of knwoledge dealing with the same subject matter as both non-science and therefore irrelevant from a science class on the subject. I disagree with this view that would separate knowledge into neat lanes that do not interfere. Take something like history; philosophy, economics, political science, etc. all relate to the same subjects.

When science purports to define wehre life and species come from and how they change, and when it purports in general to make certain kinds of truthful observations about the world, then it is depending on and implicating different aspects of philosophy, in particular philosohpy of science, metaphysics, and notions of causation. It can suppress these premises and axioms, but they are there nonetheless.

As for American history, Louis skips over a few things. Jefferson did not write the Constitution and was not a delegate at the convention. The Constitution represents a conservative reaction to the excesses of post-independence America, in particular Shay’s rebellion. While some proponents of the Constitution were certainly secular humanists—Paine, Jefferson—many were not, and they made up the bulk of delegates to the state and federal convention, e.g., John Dickinson, Edmund Randolph, etc.

There’s some good books on this including Mel Bradford’s Original Intentions, Kirk’s America’s British Culture, and the M. Stanton Evans book I cited above. I doubt you’ve read them, while I’ve read Gordon Wood and the Radicalism of the Ameriacn Revolution, and other secondary sources that make the pedestrian, predictable, and easily discredited myth you aim to peddle Louis.

Hi Roach,

The scientific method doesn’t presuppose a universe ordered by God.

“As for American history, Louis skips over a few things. Jefferson did not write the Constitution and was not a delegate at the convention.”

I didn’t say that Jefferson wrote the Constitution. His views on it are American views though are they not?

“that make the pedestrian, predictable, and easily discredited myth you aim to peddle Louis.”

If what I said is easily discredited you should do so.

The fact is that the Constitution is based on the idea that man can rule himself fairly. The fact is that the idea that man can rule himself fairly is secular humanist philosophy.

You claim that you can prove me wrong on this and I’d like to see you back that up.

Let’s suppose, in a dreamy, theoretical kind of way, that it really, actually is the case that there are hurdles in bio-chemistry that the evolution of life just can not get over without positing a kind of “life force†that is not so much monotheistic in origin as it is pantheistic, say along the lines of the Gaia hypothesis (Gaia was proposed by a pretty good chemist you may recall.)

Well, for starters, anyone positing such a life force explanation would need to come up with a better explanation than that; such as specifically what this “life force” is, HOW it bridges the gaps in bio-chemistry, and why thusfar we have been unable to detect it. Oh yes, a reliable method of detecting it would probably also go a long way towards indicating the validity of this theory.

Let us suppose that some bright young minds realize that there are problems with Darwinian dogma that can’t be economically addressed without positing some new type of influence at work. I said “economically†because, in a certain sense, Occam’s Razor compels us to seek an economy of concept.

It’s interesting that you apply Occams Razor here when ID patently denies Occams Razor. In ID, when something merely becomes extremely unlikely, rather than positing that unlikely things can and do still happen by chance, they invoke the concept of an intelligent creator.

Let’s say a particular bright young genius’s attention is caught by the problem of explaining the immense difficulty of creating life in a test tube to the level of a simple prokaryotic cell.

How about even easier: a virus? We’ve already made that from scratch. And research is currently underway on making more complex organisms from scratch. http://www.sciencenewsblog.com/cgi-bin/snblog.pl?snblog=822051

She is particularly caught by the fact that first life on Earth did not require “billions and billions†of years to work out all the complex chemical events, but appeared almost immediately after the Earth cooled and water arrived via interplanetary Federal Express.

“almost immediately” is very relative in geologic time. We’re talking a few hundred million years, rather than billions. It’s still a very long time compared to a human lifetime, with a VAST amount of chemical interactions that can take place, with the conditions existing nearly planetwide. If researchers had the same scale to work on, perhaps they would have made synthetic life already.

She apprehends a problem with this, because if a prokaryotic cell can appear quickly in some type of primordial, pre-biotic soup, the (1) why don’t we see the process happening again occasionally in the last four billion years, producing new lines of life quite distinct from the rather idiosyncratic chemical way life evolved and has rigorously adhered to,

Well, just two little problems with that. First, it requires that any new life that forms be sufficiently distinct from preexisting life for us to be able to recognize it. Second, no “secondary line” would ever again have the same conditions that the original had in which to naturally develop; it would, immediately, have to compete with microorganisms which have had far, far longer to evolve. This would either force it to rapidly adapt, if it were able, or more likely to die out almost immediately after it came into existence. And by almost immediately, I mean days or even hours at best, not a few million years.

and (2) if the incubator conditions for life are so extremely special that they never have existed on this planet after the first few hundred million years, then maybe the panspermia idea must be taken seriously. Maybe life just came to our virgin planet as a spore on a space rock.

I fail to see how the one implies the other. Many conditions that existed on our planet during the first few hundred million years have never existed on them again. The conditions that created our moon, for instance.

But an objection looms to that inviting idea—why don’t we see more space rocks with extra-terrestial spores coming down? In fact, we find ancient meteors all the time, with no sign of spores, so it appears that if this was the route, the fortuitous spore-bearing rock came along with exquisite timing, as soon as the Earth was ready to be impregnated with life.

Actually, we’ve found quite a few meteors that show signs of life. http://www.utexas.edu/opa/news/99newsreleases/nr_199910/nr_meteor991001.html

Both the concept of life spontaneously generating from a local warm pond of some very weird type and the concept of spore-rocks from space have this puzzle of their unique timing. Whichever it was, it is hard to explain why the process at work just quit and disappeared.

Not really, we’re talking about a period of time when the earth was experiencing forces it would never again experience during its history. The moon was much closer, which had to influence the magnetic field of the earth, the atmosphere was different…

In fact, it is puzzling why we don’t see evidence of BOTH avenues to life on Earth, because if life can spontaneously generate from any type of a soup, the sheer vastness of the universe suggests that it would be happening a lot out there somewhere. Anything that can happen will happen a lot in the vastness. I have been using the outmoded idea of a soup in the sense of the warm pond or series of ponds originally proposed by first-life theorists. I should point out that both water and warmth are murder on the chemical chains that make proteins or RNA.

As I’ve said, we already have found evidence of panspermia, though this in no way indicates life did not also independently evolve on Earth. And I should point out that current evolutionary theory indicates RNA may have once served the purpose currently served by DNA, and that nothing precludes the existence of another mechanism, now defunct, that may have once served that purpose that would not be adversely affected by water and/or heat.

Our bright young genius has noticed something else that is curious about evolution—it mostly seems to consist of long periods of a dynamic stasis in which existing species work out new features in relatively minor ways in the midst of a gradual and general extinction trend.

Your genius doesn’t sound like much of a genius, since there’s nothing at all curious about that. Evolution is driven by environmental pressures… while those pressures remain the same, there is stability. When those pressures significantly change, species are forced to adapt or die out. That is entirely in line with evolutionary theory.

Every now and then, however, a period of punctuation happens. Suddenly certain promising species brachiate like crazy. They seem to try everything, and for a long time everything they try co-exists until gradually the equilibrium returns and we get back to relentless extinction thinning the ranks.

Again, see above. During periods of changing environmental pressures, brachiation naturally occurs as you see multiple RANDOM adaptations to the environment competing. Eventually one or more win out, adapting to a particular niche in the changed environment, and we return to stasis. There is nothing unusual about that, it is how evolution is EXPECTED to work.

She thinks to herself, hmmm, the mechanism of mutation is high-energy interstellar particles zinging down from outer space and ballistically modifying DNA.

If she thinks that, then she’s really no genius. Our atmosphere is VERY effective at blocking radiation.

These mutations then get tested and affirmed or nixed by natural selection. But we know now that the cosmic rays responsible come from the outer edges of the universe, which means they originated billions of years ago, the time frame for when life kicked off on Earth.

Even if this was true, it does not imply the existence of a designer of any sort. Cosmic rays of the normal variety are caused by our own sun. High energy cosmic rays are theorized to be caused by either supernova, colliding galaxies, or black holes. None of this requires the influence of intelligence.

Maybe, she thinks, whatever force once created life and causes these fortuitous punctuations is hard to find because it is so long ago and far away. She puts on an astronomer hat and voila, she cobs together some numbers that seem to indicate that all life-changing cosmic rays come from a single quasar, which she dubs Eden.

Whoah, that’s a huge leap. How on earth would she narrow things down to a single star, when no astronomer on earth has found a single point of origin for high energy Cosmic Rays? You’re delving a bit far into science fiction rather than science fact here.

Ok, it’s a wacky theory. Special relativity sounded real wacky when first announced. Quantum mechanics is still wacky. The point I wish to make is that our young researcher will never announce her theory. Why? Because it smacks too much of the kind of thing that the Intelligent Design people prattle about. She knows that, if she publishes, Darwin’s dogmatists will send her career hopes up in seering flames of outrage.

Actually, it has nothing in common with intelligent design. Even assuming that evolution was caused by a particular type of radiation, and even assuming that radiation had a single source, NOTHING in your genius’s hypothesis suggests the influence of intelligence in this process. In fact, quite the opposite, since under this model it would be almost a certainty that life would also *evolve* elsewhere under the right conditions because QUASARS DO NOT EMIT RADIATION IN A SINGLE DIRECTION LIKE LASERS. They’re omnidirectional. A quasar influencing the development of life is no more a sign of intelligent design than the sun influencing the development of life is, they’re both just environmental conditions.

My feeling is that some bold and wacky revisions of the theory of evolution are long, long overdue. They just aren’t going to happen in the present scientism climate.

But again, this all comes down to a feeling that such revolutions are “due” and that they’re “going” to happen. Feelings are not evidence. They’re not logical arguments. And they’re certainly not scientific theories that should be taught in a science classroom.

Hi Roach,

“Oops, it turns out science too depends on a kind of faith.”

Science is experimentally verifiable. Religion isn’t. You’re clouding the issue here.

We know that E=mc^2 because we know that nuclear/thermonuclear weapons explode with force beyond what chemical expolsives do.

Louis:

Don’t worry about Roach, he’s already beaten on the subject of American history but doesn’t want to admit it and tries to cloud the issue by asserting Jefferson wasn’t involved in the writing of the Constitution and that others who were happened to be Christian. In addition to the fact that nowhere in the Constitution is God or Christianity mentioned, and the fact that Jefferson did influence the Amendments including the Bill of Rights, note his complete lack of response to my direct quotation of the text of the treaty of Tripoli from 1796, unanamously approved by the senate after being read in its entirety with NO DEBATE, which states that the United States is in no sense founded on the Christian religion.

The elephant in the room:
The whole idea of religion is supposed to be based upon FAITH. And by definition, faith is believing in something without needing any of the requirements of tangible proof. Science, on the other hand is all about the discovery and study of tangible proofs.
This is precisely why science can never logically be equated with religion. Since it’s entire purpose is to meet requirements of proof, it must take NOTHING on faith. Indeed, the scientists who’ve made the greatest strides forward, are those who are able to question everything and who fearlessly venture beyond pre-conceived patterns of thought and beliefs.

ID proponents, in their attempt to somehow “scientifically” prove that God was the beginning of, and the creator of Everything are in actuality displaying that they are people without faith, otherwise they wouldn’t be searching for proof.
This is how we know that ID is about politics and control, rather than religious faith.

Hi Jarandhel,

I’ve had several people tell me I’m wrong when I state that the Constitution is based on secular humanism. Nobody has been able to show that I’m wrong though.

The Preable to the Constitution makes it quite clear that the Constitution is based on the philosophy of secular humanism.

“We, the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquillity, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.”

Hi Adrienne,

“The whole idea of religion is supposed to be based upon FAITH.”

That’s a good point.

There are many who I refer to as “idiots” arguing that science is religion (evolution based on faith) and religion is science (the Bible is a scientific theory).

Those who argue that science is religion and religion is science are stupid, desperate, or both.

The argument whether ID should be taught in schools is more about keeping religion out of public schools than the reliability of ID.

Maybe for some people, but not for me. My arguments and motivations are about keeping science curricula focused on science instead of being diluted with non-scientific principles.

On one side are those that are wanting to preserve American culture and allow other idioms to exist alongside the utilitarian, scientific, and incomplete foundation of much of modernity. On the other are those that want to redefine America according to an ahistorical myth of the Founding and the Founders—a myth that they were mostly liberal-leaning atheists who denied other idiomatic ways of knowing, such as philosophy, poetry, theology, etc.

Do you really believe this? If so, no wonder that we’re never going to find common ground. You’re assuming that the people who want to keep Science focused on Science have a hidden liberal atheistic agenda to destroy the country. I’m sure that’s a shock to the great number of Conservatives and Christians who reject ID on the entirely logical grounds that it is bad science.

I’m sure that Judge Jones, appointed by our current President and well-known as a committed Conservative, would be disappointed to hear that his legal and scientific reasoning is discarded because you simply don’t find it convenient.

Then again, he wouldn’t be surprised:

Those who disagree with our holding will likely mark it as the product of an activist judge. If so, they will have erred as this is manifestly not an activist Court. Rather, this case came to us as the result of the activism of an ill-informed faction on a school board, aided by a national public interest law firm eager to find a constitutional test case on ID, who in combination drove the Board to adopt an imprudent and ultimately unconstitutional policy. The breathtaking inanity of the Board’s decision is evident when considered against the factual backdrop which has now been fully revealed through this trial. The students, parents, and teachers of the Dover Area School District deserved better than to be dragged into this legal maelstrom, with its resulting utter waste of monetary and personal resources.

Roach, you may pat yourself on the back with your beliefs that you’re trying to save America from the evil liberals, but it’s just not true. You don’t get to redefined Science and call us unscientific for not liking your new definition, and you don’t get to pretend that you’re acting in anything other than self-interest.

Perhaps a starting point for this discussion would be the frank acknowledgement that the scientific method finds its cultural origins in the Christian worldview, a view that depends upon the foundational axiom that there is an orderly universe governed by laws promulgated for our benefit by God.

Roach,

No, the Scientific Method is much older than that. The primary elements of the Scientific method were in place in Ancient Greece: Plato mentions the teaching of arithmetic, astronomy and geometry in schools. Aristotle provided yet another of the ingredients of scientific tradition: empiricism. In his enunciation of a ‘method’ in the 13th century Roger Bacon, under the tuition of Robert Grosseteste, was inspired by the writings of Arab alchemists who had preserved and built upon Aristotle’s portrait of induction.

Yes, Descartes played a part, but to say that the Scientific Method is a Christian construct ignores the history of the Greek and Muslim influences.

And even if you were right, it wouldn’t mean that it is beholden to any particular interpretation of the Bible that some Christians hold true.

Perhaps a starting point for this discussion would be the frank acknowledgement that the scientific method finds its cultural origins in the Christian worldview, a view that depends upon the foundational axiom that there is an orderly universe governed by laws promulgated for our benefit by God.

Umm… “Christians” (as a whole apparently?) believe there is an orderly universe governed by laws? … are these the same Christians that believe there was a literal Adam and Eve and that Adam was literally sculpted from Mud and Eve was sculpted from one of Adam’s ribs? Doesn’t sound like they believe in orderly laws giving rise to the universe as we know it, it sounds like they believe in magical explanations, as long as the explanation for that magic is “God Did It”.

Roach,
Religion must seek and hold fast to that which is Right just like the Laws of the Land are held to be right by the best abilty of the Courts in America. Or does “The Culture War” want to include into the debate reasoning that our laws do not have to make sense or be right?

Two quick points.

First, Aristotelian and pre-modern science did not take off, in part, because the religious and philosophical views of the ancient world did not recognize an orderly, predictable, and beneficient universe.

Second, while it’s true some Christians veer into complete obscurantism, it does not have anything to do with the actual history of science. Modern science emerged in the Christian West for a reason, and, historically, the Christian West of that time period—15-1700—acknowledged the kind of universe I have discussed. It was, in other words, a cultural and metaphysical precondition of modern science to have the kinds of views of nature that only Christianity provided in contrast to the earlier paganism of Europe or the nihilistic or arbitrary views of nature growing from the Hindu and Buddhist cultures of the East.

I am not simply making up this point about the history of ideas that I thought would be uncontroversial. That said, I don’t expect I’ll be able to “prove” this any more than I can prove America is a “Christian nation” with a government without an established Church. The kind of proof that is arbitrararily demanded in thse subject areas is not available and never can be, any more than one could “prove” WWI was caused by alliances and nationalism.

“if life has no inherent meaning…”
Posted by Jarandhel at December 25, 2005 03:08 AM

then what is the big deal? Nothing matters.

There is no better means of demonstrating ones ignorance of facts and of logical thought processes than a discussion of religion and science.

Hi Roach,

“any more than I can prove America is a “Christian nation†with a government without an established Church.”

I hope that doesn’t mean you won’t be able to support your statement: “the pedestrian, predictable, and easily discredited myth you aim to peddle Louis.”

You had indicated that it’s easy to discredit what I said about the constitution being based on secular humanist philosophy.

Given that you used the words “easily discredited” I’m expecting you to back up your attack.

I cited sources. I’d just be repeating their theses if I were to try to prove it. Let’s face it, some meta-question of US history will not be proven to anyone’s satisfaction here. So I pointed to my sources. You can read them or not as you wish.

It was, in other words, a cultural and metaphysical precondition of modern science to have the kinds of views of nature that only Christianity provided in contrast to the earlier paganism of Europe or the nihilistic or arbitrary views of nature growing from the Hindu and Buddhist cultures of the East.

Actually, it took a significant change in Christianity for this to happen. Christianity had to accept that the human intellectual process could determine truths independent of the Bible and clerical authority. Unfortunately, much of current Islam has yet to accept that. Also unfortunately, the arguments you are making for ID are part of the attempt to reverse the intellectual advance that made scientific advancement possible in the Christian world.

Hi Roach,

You’re saying I need to read several books in order for you to discredit what I said?

You are wrong Roach.

Fact: The Constitution is based on the philosophy that man can rule himself fairly.

Fact: The philsophy that man can rule himself fairly is secular humanist philosophy.

Therefore the Constitution is based on the philsophy of secular humanism.

You can’t refute that at all let alone discredit it right Roach?

Roach, it is truly heartening to see you dodging and avoiding all the holes in your argument put forth above by myself, Lawnboy, and others. Kinda feels like a carnival watching the dodging target trying to avoid being hit.

If you want credibility on this issue, acknowledge and respond to the Tripoli treaty comment which directly and incontrovertibly contradicts you assertion that this nation was founded as a Christian nation.

And if you can’t tell the difference between logical proof which needs no empirical evidence or testing and empirically scientific proofs, well, its fun to watch you weave and dodge and avoid.

No apology if anyone here has said anything which might have shaken your faith, but, then that’s the thing about faith isn’t it? By definition it can’t be altered by reality or experience, for by definition, it is adoption without reality bound evidence or replicatable experience. ID belongs in Sunday School, and The Texas Freedom Network made of Texas Religious peoples is making damn sure my daughter doesn’t have to hear it in her school. Thank Buddha!

Where to begin.

First, I disagree with this unproven premise, “The philsophy that man can rule himself fairly is secular humanist philosophy.” Since when? Christians have had self-rule of one kind or another since the earliest Church conclaves, the Pilgrims, etc. No one thought it required secularism until the French Revolution and its progeny; some, but by no means all, of the founders agreed with this sentiment, but that is only some evidence of the character of the Early American nation, it’s not defintive.

I disagree that scientific and other forms of knowledge are neatly separable in any curriculum at any level, and I think for any science to be “knowledge” it depends on a variety of nonscientific philosophical premises. I think any education worth its name does not pretend that one or another idiomatic way of “knowing” is final or independent of the other means, whether those are history, or philosohpy, or metaphysics, or whatever.

I am truly ambivalent about ID and am willing to be persuaded either way. I am also open to the argument that it’s too uncertain to be taught now in schools; that is, that the hard empirical work remains to be done and schools should err on the side of a bland consensus. I reject, however, the view that evolution is the final word because science as it has evolved historically does not allow such a final word. That is, there may be consensus on evolution, but no theory of evolution or anything else in science can be final, immune from revision, or independent of its own “weakest link” in the philosophy of science and the reliability of any empirical knowledge—itself something of a controversy, as one knows from reading Descartes.

Finally, as for the Tripoli thing, well, let’s say that one might say lots of things to avoid Muslims kidnapping one’s sailors. That is, it’s a statemetn under duress. Further, there have always been competing traditions within America, the tradition of the Great Awakening existed alongside the Jacobin clubs.

There are of course dozens of quotes by the founders acknowleding the Christian character of the American nation, viz., John Jay, the very first Supreme Court justice said, “Americans should select and prefer Christians as their rulers.” Patrick Henry said, “It cannot be emphasized too strongly or too often that this great nation was founded not by religionists but by Christians, not on religions but on the Gospel of Jesus Christ.” Further, since most government in early America was at the state and local level, it’s silly to look to the lack of an established Church at the federal level and ignore the numerous established Churches and Oath requirements of states and localities.

There is a distinction between nation and state that is completely ignored by my critics on this score; one has to do with the fundamental character of a people and one has to do solely with its political institutions. Of course, they influence one another, but America and its culture clearly were Christian at the time of the Founding.

While we’re on the subject of ‘arguments dropped,’ a few of mine have been completely ignored by critics, even though they aim at the foundations of their criticism.

1) The theory of evolution is not scientific in the same way as other parts of science because it is purely an inductive, imaginitive description of discrete facts and does not depend on any real experimentation involving falsifiable hypotheses.

2) Evolution as taught is not presented in the contingent and falsifiable fashion as all other scientific knowledge, but is instead presented as dogma, reaching final questions of causatino outside the realm of scientific expertise… and

3) (raised in comments, I think) that courts have no business decided curricular decisions about an arcane scientific debate, even if one side in that debate is religiously motivated.

If quasars are indeed “directing” the evolution of life at a distance, and if they have other targets than Earth, then we would expect that possibly the same coded plan is being sent to all. The code would probably only work on Earth-like planets and the same type of fossil record would be produced.

If we discover intelligent life and it turns out to be as human-appearing as Star Trek’s Spock or the Romulans,the coded radiation hypothesis would have some support.

To me, this does seem to be Intelligent Design at work, although it may only be evidence of an ancient intelligent race that has found a unique way to propagate itself across the universe. For the scheme to work, however, they would have had to send adequate spores or signals to Earth to get life going with genomes that their later signals could modify in a non-random way, possibly causing punctuated equilibruim.

I am still waiting for science to disprove God.Untill then i will stick with God.

I am also open to the argument that it’s too uncertain to be taught now in schools; that is, that the hard empirical work remains to be done and schools should err on the side of a bland consensus.

I’m not sure about “bland consensus”, but I believe this position is reasonable and generally accurate.

I reject, however, the view that evolution is the final word because science as it has evolved historically does not allow such a final word.

Fortunately, that’s not the claim by scientists. Any honest, educated Evolutionist will acknowledge that it’s not final and complete. Gaps remain unanswered; currently well-understood ideas will be turned upside-down by new experimental evidence. In fact, I will guarantee you that something currently understood about Evolution is wrong, but don’t ask me what.

Perhaps Evolution will be completely replaced someday by another Theory. It’s extremely unlikely, but it could happen. More likely is that the current theory will change in bits here and there as more information is discovered.

And ID is nowhere near ready to replace Evolution.

The theory of evolution is not scientific in the same way as other parts of science because it is purely an inductive, imaginitive description of discrete facts and does not depend on any real experimentation involving falsifiable hypotheses.

It depends what you mean by Evolution here. If you mean the idea that species change over generations, both within the species and into other species, then you are incorrect. The fact that change happens as evolution predicts has been observed. If, however, you mean the understanding about the exact steps that occured from the first single-celled organisms to you and me, you’re right; it’s inductive.

Evolution as taught is not presented in the contingent and falsifiable fashion as all other scientific knowledge, but is instead presented as dogma, reaching final questions of causatino outside the realm of scientific expertise

At the level of high school education, all science is taught this way, really. No one tells high school juniors that Plate Tectonics is a Theory that could potentially be disproved. The only reason Evolution comes across as more dogmatic is that it alone is attacked dogmatically; the other theories no longer need such a defense (too late for Galileo).

that courts have no business decided curricular decisions about an arcane scientific debate, even if one side in that debate is religiously motivated.

If you don’t think the courts have the right, then who does? Do you think school board members who intentionally ignore the advice of the science faculty of the district should be making such decisions in an arcane scientific debate?

I think it should be jointly done between scientific and educational experts. And it would have been, but the ID folk decided they didn’t like the results of the Scientific method and took it to the political process.

I am still waiting for science to disprove God.Untill then i will stick with God.

Feel free. No one’s telling you not to. Science can neither prove nor disprove God. This has nothing to do with curricular debates and ID, though.