Intelligent Design Theory: Science or Religion?

I am shocked to hear that global warming has reached New York City. I hope our politicians work hard to make November days cold, rainy, and depressing again, as they are supposed to be. Please accept my condolences for the warmth and the sunshine that are rearing their ugly heads in your otherwise beautiful city.

thomas

Condolences accepted. Thankyou. Are you still holding those shares in the Aspen Ski Corp?

Isn't that a fancy species of brothel keeping?

Dumbing Down for Jesus
November 11, 2005
Dumbing Down for Jesus:
Kansas Board of Education Approves Challenges to Evolution
By Walter C. Uhler

Whenever I contemplate the evil and incompetence spewing from the administration nominally headed by President George W. Bush?-especially the evil and incompetence surrounding the decision to invade and occupy Iraq?-Jacques Barzun's unforgettable warning about "the menace of the untaught" overloads my brain. Today, however, I must blame the Kansas Board of Education for sparking another "Barzun overload." (It even beat out Pat Robertson's asinine claim that the good citizens of Dover, Pennsylvania voted God out of their town when they voted to oust the school board clowns who had slipped "intelligent design" into Dover Area High School's biology curriculum.)

But, my thoughts about the menace of the untaught weren't the result of Kansas' 6 to 4 vote to adopt new science standards that require Darwin's theory of evolution to be challenged in the classroom. [Jodi Wilgoren, The New York Times, Nov. 9, 2005] After all, nothing can claim to remain a working theory in science unless it continuously and successfully withstands repeated attempts to render it false. Like Bush, but without his shameful atmospherics, genuine scientists should say: "Bring 'em on!"

Neither did Barzun's warning come to mind simply because the supposed challengers to evolution, intelligent design propagandists and creationists, have never submitted their inchoate mumbo jumbo for similarly rigorous scientific scrutiny. Anyone who's read, Why Intelligent Design Fails, already knows, "Intelligent design, like older versions of creationism, is not practiced as a science. Its advocates act more like a political pressure group than like researchers entering an academic debate. They seem more interested in affirming their prior religious commitment than in putting real hypotheses to the test." [Matt Young and Taner Edis ed., Why Intelligent Design Fails: A Scientific Critique of the New Creationism, p. x]

In fact, "Barzun overload" didn't strike until I read that the Kansas Board redefined science itself, "so that it would not be explicitly limited to natural explanations." [Wilgorin]

Although now might be the time to decry this most recent "menace" permitting "supernatural" hocus pocus into biology classrooms, I prefer instead to suggest that the vote by the conservative ideologues of Kansas is a dangerous first step toward retarding its biology students to educational levels found in 13th century Europe.

After all, it was in 1215 that the Fourth Lateran Council officially promulgated the doctrine of transubstantiation. Consequently, untold thousands of Christians were told to accept on faith that, during the Eucharist, the whole substance of the bread and the wine literally was converted into the body of Christ, with only the external appearance of bread and wine remaining.

Presumably, today's defenders of intelligent design would have responded to the Lateran Council's transubstantiation in the same way they do to evolution: "Nature alone cannot explain life's complexity."

Unfortunately, as happens with most mass superstitions, zealots transformed this supernatural "Host" superstition into hysteria when they "began to worry that these living wafers might be subjected to all manner of mistreatment, and even physical torture, at the hands of heretics and Jews." [Sam Harris, The End of Faith: Religion, Terror and the Future of Reason, p. 99] According to Sam Harris, "Historical accounts suggest that as many as three thousand Jews were murdered in response to a single allegation of this imaginary crime" of "host desecration." [Ibid. pp. 99-100]

Today, millions of Americans still take Holy Communion and as many as 91 percent of America's Christians still believe in the Virgin Birth. Now, the good citizens of Kansas are asked to believe in supernatural science. What's next? A high school science curriculum devoted to the question "How many angels can dance on the head of a pin?"

In fact, intelligent design is as bereft of hard evidence as is the myth of the Virgin Birth. And it's hardly an accident that it appeals to the same faith-based crowd. Yet, as any Bible student knows, "the earliest references to Mary (like Mark's gospel, the first to be written, or Paul's letter to the Galatians) don't mention anything unusual about the conception of Jesus." [Nicholas D. Kristof, "Believe It, or Not," The New York Times, August 15, 2003]

Second, as Paula Fredriksen explains in her study, Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews, "creative use of the Septuagint" (the Greek version of the Jewish Scriptures), "clearly shapes both synoptic birth narratives," those written by Matthew and Luke. [p 27] "The tradition that Jesus' mother was a virgin at the time of his birth, for example, draws on prophecy available only in the Greek version of Isaiah 7:14: In the original Hebrew, the word that stands behind the Septuagint's parthenos, 'virgin,' is aalmah, 'young girl.'" [Ibid]

Third, as the great Catholic theologian Hans Kung concluded, "the Virgin Birth is a 'collection of largely uncertain, mutually contradictory, strongly legendary' narratives, an echo of virgin birth myths that were widespread in many parts of the ancient world." [Kristof, "Believe It, or Not"]

Fourth, as the intellectual giant, Harold Bloom, observed: "Nobody can say for sure who wrote the four Gospels, or precisely when and where they were composed, or what source material was relied upon. None of the writers knew Jesus, or ever heard him preach." [Jesus and Yahweh, p. 22] Moreover, Bloom cannot "recall a single passage in the Synoptic Gospels that unequivocally identifies Jesus as God: such status comes to him only in John, and clearly emerges from that Gospel's battles with those it angrily called 'the Jews'".[p. 5] Finally, "There is not a sentence concerning Jesus in the entire New Testament composed by anyone who ever met the unwilling King of the Jews." [p. 19]

Nevertheless, "According to Gallup, 35 percent of American believe that the bible is the literal and inerrant word of the Creator of the universe. Another 48 percent believe that it is the 'inspired' word of the same?-still inerrant, though certain of its passages must be interpreted symbolically before the truth can be brought to light." [Harris, p. 17]

Thus, "nearly 230 million Americans believe that a book showing neither unity of style nor internal consistency was authored by an omniscient, omnipotent, and omnipresent deity." [Ibid] Now tell the truth, should thoughtful Americans pay any attention to what the faith-based crowd thinks about science? Have even one-tenth of those 230 million ever mastered even one college level biology textbook?

Scientific illiteracy aside, American Christians are quick to spot the idiocy and harm springing from other religions?-especially after 9/11. Who wasn't outraged to learn that, in 2002, "the religious police in Mecca prevented paramedics and firefighters from rescuing scores of teenage girls trapped in a burning building. Why? Because the girls were not wearing the traditional head covering that Koranic law requires." [Ibid, p. 46]

But that outrage pales when compared with the world's incomprehension and indignation over the support American Christians provided for Bush's illegal, immoral and thus evil "crusade" against Iraq. When the world learned that Bush confided to Mahmoud Abbas, "God told me to strike at Al Qaida and I struck them, and then He instructed me to strike at Saddam, which I did," it didn't simply blame America's Christian conservative President; it also indicted his fellow true-believing evangelicals?-many of whom, to this day, defend their own complicity [Dilip Hiro, Secrets and Lies, p.1].

Yet, Iraq aside, consider that "51 percent of Americans reject the theory of evolution, saying God created humans in their present form," and "38 percent… believe that creationism should be taught instead of evolution." [Glenn Collins, "An Evolutionist's Evolution," The New York Times, Nov. 7, 2005] How many of these intrepid Christians have demonstrated the courage to attempt to falsify Christianity, like scientists attempt to falsify evolution?

Moreover, what harm results from the increasing American tendency to substitute faith for fact? I suspect that such a substitution virtually guarantees that America's children will remain as ignorant as their parents.

Consider the illuminating essay recently written by Diane Ravitch, "Every State Left Behind" [The New York Times, Nov. 7, 2005]. Ravitch urged Americans to "recognize that we need national [education] standards, national tests and a national curriculum."

Why? Because, almost all states are dumbing down their tests in order to report about "incredibly large proportions of their students [who] meet high standards." How do we know? We know because their so-called high achievers invariably score much lower when they take the standardized nationwide test.

For example: "Idaho claims that 90 percent of its fourth-grade students are proficient in mathematics, but on the federal test only 41 percent of Idaho's students reached the Education Department's standard of proficiency" [Ravitch, The New York Times]. In New York, the numbers are 85 percent proficient in the state test, but only 36 percent on the national test. In North Carolina it's 92/40. And for fourth grade reading proficiency, it's 87/26 in Georgia and 83/22 in Alabama.

State data for eighth grade readers is equally bogus. "Texas reports that 83 percent met the state standard, but the federal test finds that only 26 percent are proficient" [Ravitch, The New York Times]. In Tennessee the disparity is 88/26 and in North Carolina it's 88/27.

Why do Americans allow themselves to be duped by such faith-based state scores? According to Ravitch, it's because, "the states function in a political environment. Educational leaders and elected officials want to assure the public that the schools are doing their jobs and making progress. The federal testing program, administered for the past 15 years by an independent, bipartisan governing board, has never been cowed by the demands of parents, school officials and taxpayers for good news"?-or a religiously inspired agenda.

Who politicized the Kansas Board of Education and the recently ousted board members at Dover Area High School in Pennsylvania? Conservative zealots; some of whom have even admitted to not understanding intelligent design?-and who certainly do not understand what constitutes genuine science. America needs to establish national education standards, national tests and a national curriculum, if only to prevent the piecemeal hijacking (one school district or state after another) of genuine science by the inerrant Bible crowd or closet creationists. It's a matter of America's national security.

Finally, as Olivia Judson (evolutionary biologist at Imperial College, London) recently demonstrated, the substitution of "ideologies born of wishful thinking"?-such as intelligent design and creationism?-can have disastrous consequences for both the faith-based and fact-based communities. Speaking about the dreaded avian flu, Judson notes, "a few mutations to a bird virus could?-in the absence of a vaccine?-mean the difference between 60 people dead and several million." ["Evolution Is in the Air," The New York Times, Nov. 6, 2005]

"But the most important point is this: viruses and other pathogens evolve in ways that we can understand and, to some extent, predict. Whether it's preventing a flu pandemic or tackling malaria, we can use our knowledge of evolutionary processes in powerful and practical ways, potentially saving the lives of tens of millions of people." [Ibid]

Then again, perhaps not. Especially if the 51 percent of Americans who reject the theory of evolution?-or the Kansas Board of Education?-have their way.

Jacques Barsun quotes
Jacques Barsun quotes:

Art distills sensation and embodies it with enhanced meaning in a memorable form - or else it is not art.
Jacques Barzun

Great cultural changes begin in affectation and end in routine.
Jacques Barzun

Idealism springs from deep feelings, but feelings are nothing without the formulated idea that keeps them whole.
Jacques Barzun

In any assembly the simplest way to stop transacting business and split the ranks is to appeal to a principal.
Jacques Barzun

In producers, loafing is productive; and no creator, of whatever magnitude, has ever been able to skip that stage, any more than a mother can skip gestation.
Jacques Barzun

In teaching you cannot see the fruit of a day's work. It is invisible and remains so, maybe for twenty years.
Jacques Barzun

It seems a long time since the morning mail could be called correspondence.
Jacques Barzun

Music is intended and designed for sentient beings that have hopes and purposes and emotions.
Jacques Barzun

Not even the visionary or mystical experience ever lasts very long. It is for art to capture that experience, to offer it to, in the case of literature, its readers; to be, for a secular, materialist culture, some sort of replacement for what the love of god offers in the world of faith.
Jacques Barzun

Only a great mind that is overthrown yields tragedy.
Jacques Barzun

Teaching is not a lost art, but the regard for it is a lost tradition.
Jacques Barzun

The piano is the social instrument par excellence... drawing-room furniture, a sign of bourgeois prosperity, the most massive of the devices by which the young are tortured in the name of education and the grown-up in the name of entertainment.
Jacques Barzun

The test and the use of man's education is that he finds pleasure in the exercise of his mind.
Jacques Barzun

Whoever wants to know the heart and mind of America had better learn baseball, the rules and realities of the game - and do it by watching first some high school or small-town teams.
Jacques Barzun
-----------------------------------------------
Jacques Barzun
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

Jacques BarzunJacques Martin Barzun (born November 30, 1907) continues to be a leading voice in the fields of literature, education, and cultural history. A native of France, he moved to the United States of America in 1920 and was a graduate of Columbia University in 1927 (B.A.) and 1932 (Ph.D.), where he was a prize-winning member of the Philolexian Society. Barzun became one of the founders of the discipline of cultural history during his long tenure as Seth Low Professor of History at Columbia from 1928 until 1955. From 1955 to 1958 he served as dean of the graduate school at Columbia, and then as dean of faculties and provost until 1968. He also famously co-taught Columbia's Great Books course with literary critic and fellow faculty member Lionel Trilling.

His most influential works include Darwin, Marx, and Wagner (1941), Teacher in America (1945), The House of Intellect (1959), Classic, Romantic, and Modern (1961), and Science: The Glorious Entertainment (1964). He has continued to write on education and cultural history since his retirement from Columbia, and his most recent work, From Dawn to Decadence: 500 Years of Western Cultural Life, 1500 to the Present (2000), was a New York Times bestseller, lauded by historians, literary critics, and popular reviewers alike as a sweeping and powerful survey of the recent history of Western culture. In addition to these works, he has published many other books (30 to date), articles, and reviews, and is considered one of the world's leading experts on the work of Hector Berlioz.

Barzun is recognized by the American Philosophical Society with The Jacques Barzun Prize in Cultural History, an award presented to cultural historians in honor of newly published work since 1993. Barzun retired to San Antonio, Texas, where he continues to write.

Barzun was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2003. He also received the Gold Medal for Criticism from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, of which he was twice president.

BBB-

We've done all that.



What do you suggest to deal with that?

If Mr Bush's actions are "illegal" as you say how is it he hasn't been arrested?Surely if you know most police officers will do as well.

The Forgotten Conditions of Teaching and Learning
The Forgotten Conditions of Teaching and Learning
Jacques Barzun -1991

Forget EDUCATION. Education is a result, a slow growth, and hard to judge. Let us talk rather about Teaching and Learning, a joint activity that can be provided for, though as a nation we have lost the knack of it. The blame falls on the public schools, of course, but they deserve only half the blame. The other half belongs to the people at large, us, -- our attitudes, our choices, our thought-cliches.

Take one familiar fact: everybody keeps calling for Excellence -- excellence not just in schooling, throughout society. But as soon as somebody or something stands out as Excellent, the other shout goes up: "Elitism!" And whatever produced that thing, whoever praises that result, is promptly put down. "Standing out" is undemocratic.

CONTINUE TO COMPREHENSIVE QUOTES BY JACQUES BARZUN
http://www.angelfire.com/scifi/dreamweaver/quotes/qtwriters3.html

That's just moaning.And very poorly composed too.
Modern knowledge is elitist.

What is to be done about the "menace of the untaught"?

And if nothing can be done had we not better come to terms with it.?Maybe we can abolish the public schools or the people even or maybe we can employ preachers to control it and direct it's undoubted energies in socially useful directions.

Let's repeat a very signifcant quote cited by BumbleBeeBoogie above:

'as Olivia Judson (evolutionary biologist at Imperial College, London) recently demonstrated, the substitution of "ideologies born of wishful thinking"?-such as intelligent design and creationism?-can have disastrous consequences for both the faith-based and fact-based communities. Speaking about the dreaded avian flu, Judson notes, "a few mutations to a bird virus could?-in the absence of a vaccine?-mean the difference between 60 people dead and several million." ["Evolution Is in the Air," The New York Times, Nov. 6, 2005]


"But the most important point is this: viruses and other pathogens evolve in ways that we can understand and, to some extent, predict. Whether it's preventing a flu pandemic or tackling malaria, we can use our knowledge of evolutionary processes in powerful and practical ways, potentially saving the lives of tens of millions of people." [Ibid] '


That's what scientific theory does. After it's been throughly tested and proven against the empirical evidence, as evolution has, it is both predictive and generative--it enables you to predict how phenomena you haven't yet encountered will behave, and it gives you a famework to use for creating new hypotheses to test and apply.

ID does neither. About the only thing ID and creationism can suggest you do about bird flu is pray. That's proved notably ineffective against disease in the past.

How do you "demonstrate" that something "can" have certain consequences.Doesn't that "can" allow other "cans"?

Why would bird flu,or any other illness,kill only "some"?Is it to do with immune systems.And wouldn't a scientific design not be in favour of the destruction of weak immune systems?Isn't evolution the survival of the fittest.And suppose that praying improved immune systems?And,again,"could" is used.

Isn't the reason why we mitigate nature's methods in ourselves because we think of man as having a divine spark.This may well be foolish but we do it.
Where in nature would a group of any species donate an element of its resources to help far away members of the species after an earthquake or a flood.

In this-


What does "ineffective" mean?We are here.

Suppose our war on viruses eventually causes them to evolve beyond our understanding and control and they wipe us all out.Science would then turn out to be ineffective.And science may turn out to be ineffective in other ways too.Materialism,the comfort of the non-believer,coupled with weapons systems of unimaginable ferocity may do for us all.

There is a tangled ball of assertions in the "very significant quote" interlarded with a few qualifiers.

My guess is that Ms Judson is fishing for a government grant and some media exposure.But it's only a guess.That's the best one can do with the ladies.

In Surrey, British Columbia, an outlying suburban area about 45 minutes from Vancouver, the evangelical majority on the school board has spent almost two million dollars in legal fees to have a book removed from one teacher's reading list because it portrayed a family with two same sex parents.

And you took offence when I once referred to "simple colonials" shortly after I hatched.

That coming from a memebr of a nation that has a pet mouse pedigree and lineage certification program.

As usual, the real winners in any of these idiotic forays of the reactionaries are the lawyers . . .

Spendius : "may"? "suppose"? In other words, you're proposing something with absolutely no evidence it will ever happen. I can "Suppose" you "may" be able to fly if you flap your arms really really hard. Doesn't mean you'll ever get off the ground.

And re the efficacy of prayer in plagues. The Black Death killed a third of Europe (just the first time around). They prayed with a fervor that puts the 700 Club to shame. One death in three doesn't impress me with the power of prayer. And the plague kept coming back.

They prayed when smallpox swept America beofre and during the Revolution. George Washington inoculated his troops (not the same as vaccination, but the best they had then). The survival rate was much higher.

Smallpox was wiped out as a naturally occurring threat by science, not by prayer.

If I were given a choice in a new epidemic between a prayer and a vaccine, I'd go with the vaccine. That's what I mean by "effective"versus "ineffective". If you would prefer to rely on prayer instead, feel free to do so.

Thanks UN.That's very gracious of you.

Do you usually expend effort,i.e.energy from food which you have had to pay for,misinterpreting what other people say.

I can easily suppose that if I flapped my arms fast enough to fly I would impress the ladies much more than if I went round misinterpreting what people say in order to get my half-witted ideas off the ground.

It is just as easy to suppose that the Black Death would have killed two thirds of Europe had not praying been a socially accepted way of attempting to gratify one's wishes.

And the facility to suppose that the smallpox virus is lurking in it's lair,with its tail between its legs and gnashing its teeth and dreaming up a way to gobble you all up that you haven't thought of is a piece of cake.

And how do you know whether the third who it knocked down prayed or not.The assertion that "they" prayed with the "fervour that puts the 700 club to shame" is hardly evidence especially when we don't even know why the 700 club prayed so fervently as you claim.Suppose it was God's way of elimating those who didn't pray who were a third of the population.Have you any evidence to the contrary.

Bernie wrote-



And pray,what happened to the $2m?Was that spent as well.Golf clubs,restaurants,gas,ornaments.Dare one say costume jewelry.I wonder if the two same sex parents got any of it.

I'll bet the Gov't got a cut every time it shifted position.

Spendius, again you "suppose"--the point being that you have absolutely NO evidence for such a supposition. You can "suppose" any kind of counterfactual you want--some evidence of its plausibility would be nice. You have none. That is hardly misinterpreting what you say. And I have in fact read accounts of what went on surrounding the Black Death. Have you? They prayed. They died.