Latest Challenges to the Teaching of Evolution

DArwins reference to Creation were merely using a word familiar in Victorian parlance. His use of it no more recognizes or dismisses a CREATOR. Scientists often use terms that have tried and true meanings to set a point , if you wish to add some genuflection to its use by Darwin , feel free. You have no evidence to back it up.

Creation is addressed as "a process he knows not what." Putting one's own fantasy interpretation on Darwin is what is wrong with the workings of their mind, twisting everything into a theological question. Just imagine that Charles Martel lost the battle during the Moorish invasion of Europe. We could then very well be addressing the creator as Allah.

That's not an adequate response to the point effemm. If you know it you are being disingenuous and if you don't I'll allow you might not have understood it.

Your failure to engage with the severities of materialism is understandable. There can be no praise or blame attached to any actions in a system of meaningless and random accidents. Thus no jails and no Oscars or medals.

It means you're half-baked as I said 5 years ago.

I take Darwin's use of language seriously if you don't and it meant he was not prepared to dismiss intelligent design as you lot do. He had plenty of time to think about it. And reason for doing.

No evidence is an odd thing to say by someone who provided it.

One might thus argue that atheists are equally disqualified from teaching evolution as fundies are.

Im so sorry that you seem to have lost your memory. As you may recall, several years ago it was a topic of conversation that you joined . If you recall, there were several quotes from DArwin that clearly showed that he was critical of "Intelligent Designing".
I can now understand why you must be always be insulting at the drop of a statement, you apparently have a very short memory and you are easily frustrated whenever several of us dont take time in answering those questions important to you. I have a legalistic response = asked and answered several years ago. I suggest you use the "custom search " feature and try to recall.

What does "critical of Intelligent Designing " mean? Darwin never to my knowledge dismissed it. He was agnostic. Like Frank Apisa whose arguments you couldn't answer.

We all join topics of conversation. wande started the thread and you joined it too. So did everybody else.

I know why you don't answer any of the questions effemm. You can't even define the words you use for the others to make sense of what you say. I specifically requested you to do so and you haven't.

What you've said about me having a short memory and being insulting and easily frustrated is a load of shite and even if they were all true they don't provide an excuse for your failures to answer requests for you to define your terms. Do you really think people on here are that stupid. You'll be saying you needn't answer questions because I'm whatever you want to assert I am next.

We want to know about mind control/ incomplete mind control/ no mind control. And education, the 1%, gnosticism and the Council of Nicaea. (Either one will do). We need to know what you anti-IDers mean by those things before we can make any sense out of the sentences in which they appear.

And now Darwin is said to have used "Creation" in some sloppy colloquial manner in a scientific tome, which he pondered for years, just to get you off the materialist hook you swallowed.

And when it comes to insulting--man you have some room to talk.

And since when, in discussions, are you not supposed to answer question put to you by others in the discussion simply by saying the sort of things there. That's a sneaky form of Ignore.

Show the other viewers what Darwin said if you're so sure.

You're floundering and it shows. Wiz is babbling to himself in the corner.

Jeez, you dont even remember the quote where he did dismiss it?

Ill bet he will be frantically searching Desmond and Moore for this. HINT: it aint in Desmond and Moore.

Why should I be doing that when I can rely on you providing the evidence?

I hope you are not going to keep it to yourself. That's not your style effemm. Except for the taffrail maybe.

Youre the one making an assertion that Darwin never dismissed Intelligent Design. Why should I go to any additional trouble ?.

Darwin does refer to a "Creator" of one or two basic primordial organisms in Origins, completely contrary to the idea of Adam and Eve and, obviously, the incest that had to occur in order to begin the human race. He does not refer to an intellect or a design, the two important elements to the "Theory of ID."

It's not amazing to me that escapees from Yahoo Chat who are doing their homework come onto A2K to ask questions that are easily searched with Google or any search engine. They don't have to have a private library or, at least, a set of out-of-date encyclopedias. It's also pretty cheap to subscribe to the online Encyclopedia Britannica. Asking for details on the Council of Nicaea and expecting a full explanation is just as ridiculous as a teenager coming onto this forum and asking someone to do their homework.

If you disagree with a statement, it's your responsibility to come up with the documentation to disprove it, not ask more stupid questions.

I'm saying he never dismissed a Creator. That was my take after reading all the stuff I've read about the matter. If I got it wrong show me the evidence and I will change my mind.

You should go to the trouble because you have said that he did dismiss a Creator, which pins him as an atheist, and because you are in a discussion in which you were challenged on the matter and it is a crucial matter.

You can't expect to win an argument simply because I'm not going to read all through that lot again. You made the statement. You prove it.

You made out that mind control was an evil thing but you really meant mind control you didn't approve of and not mind control as a concept. As if mind control was something your side was going to eschew if ever it comes to power. Which it won't.

Despite this being addressed to effemm I will answer it.

It is not as ridiculous as a teenager coming on here to get his homework done. That is a very sensible thing to do in my opinion.

What is ridiculous is coming on here rabbiting about gnosticism and Church councils as if you are familiar with those matters when in actual fact you know nothing about either apart from the labels and you were simply posing aggressively.

The last two sentences of Origins.

Note the "having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one". Random accidents of molecules don't "breathe".

Adam and Eve have nothing to do with it.

I know what you said. However, in a past discussion in which you participated, we had several quotes from Darwins communications where he DID dismiss an Intelligent Designer. You were part of the conversations as I recall (unless you were under one of your eventide "conditions").
It appears that Lightwizard believes like you, that I should provide the evidence to counter your assertion or shut up. Ill just shut up, secure in the knowledge that you can find the quote yourself.

You are correct -- Pope Pitiful Splendious XXX is again trying to master bait. The problem is he can't find anything large enough to grab hold of. He's made no assertion except a desperate attempt to apply revisionism to Darwin's use of the word "breathe." This is out of context to the many times Darwin states he is not sure how and when those first organisms originated, and stayed completely clear of why. This would be Frank Apisa's attitude -- to not be sure. Obviously, PPS XXX wants to selectively use Frank's train of thought. Anytime he is given a link or anything is copy and pasted that is disagreeable, he uses the, "I can't be bothered reading that." If he were every in a university class and that's what he told the professor, he might as well kiss that grade goodbye. He wants you to do the work so he can sit on his fat ass and drink pints of ale.

Darwin's views evolved. the more he studied what was then called natural history, the more he learned, the more ramifications he found for evolution, the less he thought there could have been a creator involved. It appears that, after forty years or so of work on the subject, he didn't think there was any intelligent design involved.

From his autobiography:

"Although I did not think much about the existence of a personal God until a considerably later period of my life, I will here give the vague conclusions to which I have been driven. The old argument of design in nature, as given by Paley, which formerly seemed to me so conclusive, fails, now that the law of natural selection has been discovered. We can no longer argue that, for instance, the beautiful hinge of a bivalve shell must have been made by an intelligent being, like the hinge of a door by man. There seems to be no more design in the variability of organic beings and in the action of natural selection, than in the course the wind blows. Everything in nature is the result of fixed laws. But I have discussed this subject at the end of my book on the Variation of Domestic Animals and Plants[3], and the argument there given has never, as far as I can see, been answered. "

There's more. You can read it for yourself:
http://www.update.uu.se/~fbendz/library/cd_relig.htm

Did Darwin believe in a version of intelligent design? No, it looks like he repudiated the concept. Does what he may or may not have believed make a difference? Nope. Darwin was the first word, not the last. No one today is a Darwinist, in spite of what the creationists simplistically think. He didn't write a sacred canon. He got a surprising amount right, considering what was known at the time, but not everything, and we;ve discovered a hell of a lot more in the century and a half since. It doesn't look like he felt the need for some ID as an explanation. And biology today doesn't need it either.

Too bloody right mate!! Good enough for ya.

And why does he not say "there is no design". Who knows whether the wind blows pointlessly or not? Once the assumption is made that there's no design to the winds and thus that there's no design in the productions of the weavers of the winds it is simple to say that there's no design, or seems to be no design. Any self respecting designer who could design a shagged out old has been like me sat at a computer pointlessly typing out this pointless bullshit whilst turning my lunch into a conveniently shaped turd (phew--thank God for that you should say to yourselves next time your sat on the dunny tub being grateful for it not being inconveniently shaped), and rushing the post because I'm being moidered to go to the bank and to undergo other essential but pointless tasks, could easy make winds blow any which way He fancied. Including the wind out of your arseholes. There seems to be no more design in the variability of organic beings and in the action of natural selection, than in the course the wind blows.

The statement is logically flawed.

as is this one--



Mrs Jolly looks like The Queen of Heaven on Sat night after a few pints but you see her on Tues morning donkey-stoning the front step.



Hey--I'm a Darwinist.

Now there's the problem, Spendius. You haven't learned a thing in a century and a half.

In fact, once you assume no design to the winds as a fact, the seems is a wasted word and don't we all know that wasted words prove to warn that he not busy being born is busy dying.

And once you assume there's no design and everything has been "fitted" for its purpose it is difficult to look at a human female besporting in the pub with the sort of eyes one has been fitted with to look at such sights and to stop oneself wondering what factors in the environment designed to such attenuated perfection this creature whose delightful image is everywhere. It is a difficult task to put such considerations on Ignore once the seed of such notions has been planted and which lead one to see oneself in a whole other light.

Better to put the sting on God for that.

When you start claiming that Titanic, the movie, or even Titantic itself, was a pointless random happening some people might see the sense of Adam and Eve no matter how many taboos they didn't know about. As a myth from out of the great unknown. One of many myths humankind has concocted. But it's our myth and we're playing golf on the moon. And the shops are so bulging with goods that our betters are trying to find out how to get us the money to buy them up so they can be replaced without causing another blip like the recent one which I think put them in wobble mode and in need of the British Government to steady the ship.

I didn't know he was also a vampire -- is he really at the pub sucking of True Blood?

Anyway, since dumb-dumb criticizes other for a knowledge of history without any of his own, other than searching for quotations from Gibbons (does he have the entire volumes in his libarary?), et al, here' a simple paragraph regarding the Gnostic Gospels and the Council:

It was The Council of Nicea in 325, which decreed that Jesus was "one with the Father", in other words, "God." Bishop Arius rejected this argument because scriptures described Jesus as have been begotten by the Father, therefore, there was a time when Jesus did not exist, and therefor, could not be God (who always existed.) Yes, one can get a headache from all this, but the point is, that this Council changed the beliefs of Christians from that day forward. Arian Christianity did not go along with this and became a minor sect, even being described as heretics today (NewAdvent).

Gnostics faced a similar fate; their writings were burned by the orthodox Christians from the first century onward. Gnosticism was considered heretical and Gnostics heretics. So, until the find of Nag Hammadi in 1945 little was known of Gnosticism and the Gnostics except from the writings of their adversaries. - The River Styx site, italics are mine.

Now turn in your little paper to the real Pope and get your butt kicked out of the Vatican.