Intelligent Design Theory: Science or Religion?

Today, in his syndicated column, George F. Will uses what happened in Dover as a warning for conservatives:

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The storm-tossed and rudderless Republican Party should particularly ponder the vote in Dover, Pa., where all eight members of the school board seeking re-election were defeated. This expressed the community's wholesome exasperation with the board's campaign to insinuate religion, in the guise of "intelligent design" theory, into high school biology classes, beginning with a required proclamation that evolution "is not a fact."
But it is. President Bush's straddle on that subject probably was inflammatory, emboldening social conservatives. Dover's insurrection occurred as Kansas' Board of Education, controlled by the kind of conservatives who make conservatism repulsive to temperate people, voted 6-4 to redefine science. The board, opening the way for teaching the supernatural, deleted from the definition of science these words: "a search for natural explanations of observable phenomena."
"It does me no injury," said Thomas Jefferson, "for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods, or no god. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg." But it is injurious when zealots try to compel public education to infuse theism into scientific education. The conservative coalition, which is coming unglued for many reasons, will disintegrate if limited-government conservatives become convinced social conservatives are unwilling to concentrate their character-building and soul-saving energies on the private institutions that mediate between individuals and government and instead try to conscript government into sectarian crusades.

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spendius

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It matters not what the book was.I was simply using the thing to make a more general point which,I'm afraid,does not seem to have been understood.

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AS many of us here have already told you spendi. If your points are missed in communication then perhaps you should try to beef upyour own communications skills.You always end your misunderstood sentences and prolix phrases with an assertion that, somehow, its because we arent "bright enough" to catch your drift.
Believe me, Its never a dishonor to talk simply and be understood. Many of us would love to hear strait-on language and well turned phrases. Sometimes your phrases are so well turned that they meet-up with themselves.
Just a thought. Of course Im hardly the one to callnames, Im a terrible writer, but Im working on it.

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wandel. I think George Will oughta shut his yap and let the Conservative Christians keep it up. They are the best thing going since Dr Woodmorappe.

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Sometimes your phrases are so well turned that they meet-up with themselves.

That's a pretty sentence.

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Either that, or a petty one . . . but whatever, i enjoyed it . . .

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farmerman,
Do you think Kansas represents a change in creationist tactics (from ID to "teach the controversy")?

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Well-here is the piece-

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The money goes round ad round and it is simply a matter of choosing which routes it takes.To go for an oversimplified absurdity if all the school money went to buildings low class bars would prosper and if it all went to legal firms golf clubs and pedicurists and costume jewelry retailers would prosper.If you start there you can make the refinement into an art known roughly as keeping everybody happy or equally disgruntled.

Assuming legal mechanics are superior persons to builders,plumbers etc one can raise the tone of an area and with it property prices.

I find that almost as simple as simple gets.I do not see any way that it turns and meets itself.It argues that there are things going on behind the scenes which are well intentioned and that you would benefit from trying to understand them.

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spendius wrote:

Bernie wrote-

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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 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.

spendius,
This is the one I was talking about. Bernie later explained that the book in the lawsuit was a work of fiction. You needn't have been concerned that the fictional characters capitalized on the lawsuit.

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Come on wande-

I fancy myself as a bit of a poet.I'm not a journalist.

Okay-I hadn't realised.It didn't matter to me.It could have been just like a foot could have had six toes.It could have been a real life story or it could have been fiction.What's the difference?Can you tell the difference.How could anybody write fiction without telling their real life story and nobody can tell their real life story without it turning into fiction.

The point is that the money goes round and round and we elect people to choose which routes it takes.
$2m into a legal set up chooses routes that women like and £2m into new buildings chooses routes that guys like.But not black and white.More a slowly shifting frontier.A bar closes down here and there and the knickerless can-can gets shut off in some hick town that had the nerve to try it.And the President walks across the lawn holding his wife's hand on the main news and we have to hold our wives' hand.A shift in priorities.Like tectonic plates grinding away.

It's just an English gentleman's way of saying "Us guys is gettin' screwed".That's okay in the pub.It's not very poetic though.

I bet you could follow that money if you thought about it right back to where it came from.It's totally ridiculous that its the people in that dump off of Vancouver's money.That's how they got it.

Ya dig?Look out kid,they keep it all hid.How old is that?40 years is how old.

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Hey Bernie-

I seen Masked And Anonymous tonight.

Gee man-that's great.American music eh?There ain't never been nuthin' like it in the history of the world.I just can't imagine that evolving.

Have you seen it?See it again.

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spendie

Not yet, but tonite might be a fine time for a temporary bachelor to watch the thing. I'll pay attention to the soundtrack and get back to you.

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Concentrate!Listen to the words and crank up the volctrl for the music.

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Concentrate?! I did far far too much acid to have such a demand land comfortably over here. I'm now limited to grokking.

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"teaching the controversy" has always been on the sidelines as a valid yet not quite so threatening approach of teaching anti-evolution. It had been the original proposal in the PA education board fights of 2001. The proponents of Creationism initially presented as their approach, The "teaching of a great controversy that is raging among scientists and threatening to tear the guts out of science education". They abandoned the approach after Eugenie SCott gave her own spin on the "5 classes of Creationists" It was an enlightening and rather funny way to bring the point home that scientists , like cats, have unusual ways of socializing and playing. We savage each other and then go out drinking. The controversy in mechanisms like Punctuated equilibrium v Darwinian gradualism has left the Creationists with an oportunity (to their ways of thinking) to show how debates proceed.

Gould was always a favorite to provide "Creation friendly "quotations . The Creationists would mine Gould out of context and leave us with authoritative proof from a great evolution scientist that science was in this turmoil and evolution was a dying beast.
That was all bullshit.

So the ICR and the Morris "Creationist Museum" tried their level best in Pa, after "teaching the controversy", they came up with "providing an alternative theory to the origins and development of life on earth", . This one was even more obscure in its approach cause nobody on the Creationist side could provide any evidence and testable means by the scientific method (including falsifiability) and they were were defeated by the good sense of the ed board (unlike their bretheren and sistern in Kansas).
Remember, if Kansas goes this way, can ALabama be far behind?

The issue of Poppers falsifiability was discussed at length and the ed board, more scholarly in their demands than the Creationists were able to provide, wanted to know how it was that Popper specifically included evolution as a "body of conclusions" in which the underlying science disciplines were completely falsifiable. (The creationists probably never read Popper or Darwin) They didnt realize that the biology, or fossil evidence, geophysics, geochem, molecular bio etc. were "component sciences, whose contributions were indeed falsifiable.
I was in the chambers during most of that frey and I was quite proud of the secretary and her well informed staff.
The cReationists came in loaded for pheasant and the ed board was loaded for elephant. Elephant squishes pheasant

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Ginril, ain't Alabama the state that recently declared the value of pi to be three?

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pi are 3?, pi are 3.141 (somethin). those decimals will mess up your furniture measurements

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At the least, i always used 3.1416 . . . but the legislature can't be wrong, can they?

No man's life or property are safe while the legislature is in session.

-- Samuel Langhorne Clemens

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"But it is injurious when zealots try to compel public education to infuse theism into scientific education."

-- George Will

This is the one thing that should make all Americans mad as hell. Like Thomas Jefferson said, it matters little what my neighbor believes or does as long as he leaves me and mine alone. But when they insist on imposing their beliefs upon others they cross many lines. This religious shell game involving "Creation Science" and now the insidious effort to sneak religion into the American classroom known as "Intelligent Design" is a mere Ponzi scheme that tries to cloak itself within the mantle of "Science" the former supposed using scientific tools up to a point but when serious auditing of performance is employed the Science, like Ponzi investor returns, vaporizes. ID doesn't even try to prove anything, its main thrust is an end run around scientific explanation by asserting that anything that seems complex cannot possibly be explained at all, so it must have just appeared as the result of some arbitrary decision made by an Intelligent Designer. This latter explanation reaches its logical dead end when one searches for the Designer of the afore mentioned Intelligent Designer, who is, in turn, complex by definition.

At this point some would argue for the right of proponents of specific religions to proselytize and I would support that argument. But this is not what IDers are doing. Their actions are far from that of the Jehovah's Witnesses' found on your doorstep. In that case one can politely listen and discuss or merely say "no thank you, not interested" and gently close the door. ID wants to rush into your home, rummage thru your most intimate thoughts, and even reset the TV and radio to bring in only those channels that meet their approval. In addition their actions speak to disallow your control over your children's moral upbringing and future access to universities by muddying up their primary and secondary education with the "balanced" teaching of science juxtaposed with pseudo-science. Make no mistake, these types have no use for a so called "balance of educational views" that teach "both sides". If possible they would use the wedge of Creation Science/ID to eliminate any teaching that would ultimately allow the process of analytical thinking and problem solving to come to a conclusion not to their liking.

The ID or Creation camp feels they are right and that they have a duty to save all souls and that is fine up to the point of their demonstrated intolerance of others beliefs and educational goals. This at best smacks of a "Just Trust Us" attitude. This should be rejected whether regarding our science education standards or coming from U.S. administrations regarding reasons for war, leaks regarding CIA operatives, or stem cell research.

JM

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So who do we trust?

Do we trust the ones who have brought us thus far into this corncopia of goodies or do we trust those who wish to throw the helmsman overboard just because it looks easy steering in a straight line.Evolution has no helmsman.It's deterministic.It goes where it goes.Total anarchic chemistry.

And what about the word "godforsaken".

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So who do we trust?

Hi spendius,

We trust in ourselves and our ability to ask questions the answers from which supply us only with data to be used in our own analysis which is then used to come to a final conclusion which, in turn is still subject to more questions and further analysis. Rarely is there a final "right" answer to our questions that holds true for all eternity, especially in science. Those that hold that certain truths or theories or theocracies are decided and have entered into the realm of certainty have already given up on the search for knowledge.

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"Evolution has no helmsman.It's deterministic.It goes where it goes.Total anarchic chemistry."

You are 50 percent right. Evolution has no Designer and it goes where it goes guided only by biologic changes capable of being "saved" on the hard drive of DNA and the environment that surrounds that DNA. However, I see no determinism but lots of well regulated chemistry ruled by the laws of Physics.

However, the value of this particular statement is that is sums up the fears of those who longingly search for guidance in our universe. This is the crux of the fear surrounding "Darwin's Dangerous Idea" the slippery slope that describes a mechanism or algorithm for the "Blind Watchmaker" (chemistry) to build upon ever increasing complexity to the temporary end result of intelligent life. The comforting "just so" story of religion may be true but is unnecessary to explain the appearance of such life. But, evolution has never been about disproving the existence of Deities. Its original intent was the rational explanation of the origin of species and its validity stemmed from careful examination of worldly data. But even Darwin did not vocalize what he and others (who did) saw in its predictive powers, those powers working to see ,not only the future but that of the past, the power that could reach back to explain the origins of life itself from not so "anarchic chemistry."

JM

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Intelligent Design Theory: Science or Religion?

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