@wandeljw,
It must please Mr Behe that his title has been extended to 2 1/2 lines. Taking a tip from giraffes I suppose.
It doesn't look like a challenge to teaching evolution to me wande. It looks more like a discussion, an endless one being the objective for obvious reasons, about how evolution should be taught. An acceptance of teaching evolution in other words. Hence off topic. Gratuitously posted and thus trolling.
The DI seems to me intent on losing the argument.
There are 3 obvious arguments against the teaching of evolution.
1-It introduces into schools teachers who are likely to be militant evolutionists. Politicised even.
2-Samuel Butler's argument that Darwin banished mind from the world and thus showed that planning the future, the basic Christian/Faustian project, is futile. And that there is a moral abyss in determinism.
Does Natural Selection depend on luck (Darwin) or cunning (Butler). It's a pretty subject for a series of never ending gigs at $5 a head in the boonies. The provincial tour. Or how to getaway from the wife and kids for a weekend.
Darwin would say that it is a great piece of luck to have evolved cunning. Lamarck and Butler would reply that the critter must have had cunning to turn his luck to account and keep building on it. Luck provides more than average good fortune in the absence of more than average ability. Luck can only be luck independently of cunning. They can't be synonyms.
A pure semantic dispute arises and the "last word" is all important in those.
Blimey!! Darwinianism is anti-American. It says your cunning was worthless and it was pure luck. Your number just came up. Even the appearance in the world of the Christian religion was luck and thus unavoidable and, as such, something to be accepted whether regretted or not. Arguing against it is like arguing against yesterday's horserace results. You lot have your heads up your arses goodstyle.
Butler can admit that luck plays a part but not a sufficient part as an explanation of the phenomena we observe. Organisms that have the luck to be cunning make further luck for themselves by the exercise of cunning and thus "design" is in the frame. A sort of bit-by-bit design. A
solvitur ambulando design or "suck it and see" science which, when self-conscious and intelligent, replaces natural selection by functional modification. Intelligent design.
God is brought in to take the credit because if the winning design, us, the kids in the schools included, takes the credit a superior race is defined and that idea is fundamentally politically incorrect. Or to take the blame if we go tits up and the Kalahari bushman turns out to be a more perfected human being.
3- Last but not least, the forces unleashed by those who find that their personal circumstances are suited by the strengths of evolution and not the weaknesses. The strong. The lookers. Who the DI must have on Ignore to approve of them getting a chance of learning the best arguments for their case when they hear the strengths presented. They can Ignore the weaknesses as it seems to be standard practice for anti-IDers.
What do you think lads and lassies? Very pretty eh?
