Intelligent Design Theory: Science or Religion?

Currently my sister is working on her physics exercise problems and she asked me how to do it.
I learn these before but forget the formulas since graduated.

Creature's picture irks Board of Ed member
(BY ICESS FERNANDEZ, The Wichita Eagle, April 13, 2006)

State Board of Education member Connie Morris took exception Wednesday to a picture of a made-up creature that satirizes the state's new science standards hanging on a Stucky Middle School teacher's door.

Fellow board member Sue Gamble told The Eagle that Morris asked for the picture to be removed.

The creature, called the Flying Spaghetti Monster, is the creation of Bobby Henderson of Corvallis, Ore. It looks like a clump of spaghetti with two eyes sticking out of the top and two meatballs flanking the eyes. Henderson created the entity and an accompanying mythology on the origin of mankind to make fun of Kansas' recent debate over the teaching of criticisms of evolution, including intelligent design.

In November, the board voted 6-4 to allow criticisms of evolution to be taught in Kansas schools.

Morris, who voted for the new science standards, saw the picture during the tour. She did not return phone calls for this report.

Gamble, who voted against the new standards and was also on the tour, said that Morris asked principal Kenneth Jantz to have the picture taken down.

Board members toured Stucky before finishing two days of meetings in Wichita on Wednesday.

Gamble said that when she saw the picture during the tour, she knew that some board members wouldn't approve of it.

"When we went into that classroom, students were looking at rock formations," Gamble said. "Connie stopped to talk to a teacher and I moved on. That was when I was aware of the flyer. I thought 'she's probably going to say something to the teacher.' "

Gamble said that when Morris saw the picture, she asked the principal, who was on the tour, to take it down. Jantz did not comment for this report.

Gamble said she didn't see Morris talk to Randy Mousley, the teacher, or to the principal, but that she later went up to Mousley and asked if Morris said anything to him about the picture.

That's when Gamble learned that Morris had asked the principal to take it down.

The monster's picture has hung on the door since September or October and was put up there as a joke, Mousley said.

"It's a parody," he said. "It's just making fun of anti-evolution."

Mousley said he doesn't teach students about the Flying Spaghetti Monster. Also on the door is a Doonesbury comic strip about science, said board member Carol Rupe, who represents Wichita. She also voted against the new standards.

"It was two little pieces of paper on the door," she said. "It was poking good fun."

Gamble said she told the principal that it was his decision whether the monster could stick around.

"I advised the principal that Morris has no authority," she said. "I told him to deal with his staff as he saw fit, not by what a state board member says."

Board chairman Steve Abrams, who voted for the new standards, didn't see the picture but said he thinks that the Flying Spaghetti Monster is silly. "Personally, I think it's juvenile," he said.

The picture was still on the door at the end of the school day Wednesday.

Personally, I think it's juvenile," he said.

I'm beginning to see why my posts are not understood. If the professional writers of Witchita can get away with that the average American reader must be bamboozled by me. Any irony present is very well camouflaged.

welcome back ci. Where ya been now?

Kansas makes pitch to attract life science jobs
(By Chris Green, Harris News Service, April 14, 2006)

TOPEKA - Backers hoping to bring more high-paying life science jobs to Kansas sought to boost the state's profile at an international conference in Chicago this past week.

Promoting the state with an elaborate, two-tiered pavilion, state and industry officials brought word of a $580 million funding plan designed to stimulate growth in the state's biosciences industry.

Angela Kreps, president of a group representing the state's bioscience community, said she thinks Kansas - tagged by some critics as being anti-science just months earlier - made a strong impression at the conference.

The event, sponsored by the Biotechnology Industry Organization, allowed a delegation of more than 130 people to promote efforts within the state and network with some 20,000 attendees from more than 60 countries.

"We made a splash landing," said Kreps, president of the Kansas Bioscience Organization. "People know about Kansas now. There was a lot of conversation regarding our presence."

The convention - called BIO 2006 - started about five months after the State Board of Education made international headlines for its decision that would allow criticisms of evolutionary theory in public school curriculums.

The evolution change drew barbs from those who accused the state of being unfriendly to science. Some suggested the state would be considered a laughingstock because of the board's decision. Board members who supported it said the change promoted fair discussion on the issue.

However, Kreps said the state's evolution debate wasn't an issue at the conference because a presentation from a talented group of Olathe high school students at the program showed that great things were happening at the state's schools when it comes to science.

She said the entire conference was an opportunity for Kansas to reinforce that the state wants to nurture and grow business opportunities in the life sciences. Those endeavors could include everything from developing ethanol plants to manufacturing pharmaceuticals.

Lawmakers created a state authority to fund and develop those sorts of opportunities in the industry two years ago.

"The opportunity for Kansas was to deliver a message about the bioscience work that's happening in Kansas that was maybe to the contrary of what people might have expected," Kreps said.

Intelligent design belongs outside science class
(Donald Clegg, The Spokesman-Review, April 15, 2006)

Intelligent design is on my mind. According to the National Center for Science Education, 10 states promoted anti-evolution legislation last year, and Oklahoma added its name to the list just last month.

House Bill 2107 passed by a 77-10 vote, with Republican Tad Jones offering the immortal words, "Do you think you come from a monkeyman? ... Did we come from slimy algae 4.5 billion years ago or are we a unique creation of God? I think it's going to be exciting for students to discuss these issues."


If so, they'll be discussing an old, thoroughly debunked doctrine, dressed up anew and trotted out by folks who seem determined to turn America into the new Iraq - that is, a fundamentalist theocracy.

I have no problem with its teaching, but it properly belongs in a comparative religions class, or Philosophy 101. It most assuredly does not belong in a science class.

Let's figure out why not. Intelligent design is a repackaging of the old "argument from design." It states that if such-and-such a physical fact weren't so, there would be no life; ergo, the existence of conditions so perfectly suited to us proves that they were designed, and God was the designer.

The number of facts used (appropriately or not) to support this assertion can appear daunting: the existence and nature of carbon or oxygen or hydrogen; the earth's distance from the sun; the amount of oxygen in the air or the temperature at which it burns, etc.

It all sounds pretty compelling until you realize that it's simply another way of placing us at the center of the universe. But types of life relying on something other than a carbon-based system might well exist elsewhere. The "many worlds" interpretation of quantum physics, for instance, suggests that there are other universes besides our own, with their own laws and tolerances for life.

In any case, design implies purpose, and purpose implies that the creator made things just so, just for us, or at least in accommodation of us. Further, if the universe had to be made a certain way in order for us to exist, and you claim that God made it, then you have to conclude that God has no free will and isn't all-powerful, to boot.

An all-powerful God wouldn't be constrained by certain physical laws that had to be obeyed. On the other hand, if the universe could be made in some other, more random fashion, then why postulate that God created it? (This is not to argue whether God exists, but rather to examine whether intelligent design does an adequate job of making the argument.)

Here's a nice quote from the philosopher Keith Ward: "The old dilemma - either God's acts are necessary and therefore not free (could not be otherwise), or they are free and therefore arbitrary (nothing determines what they shall be) - has been sufficient to impale the vast majority of Christian philosophers down the ages."

In short, if you argue for intelligent design, you're arguing against an all-knowing, all-powerful God.

Will Rogers, as pithy a philosopher as ever there was, once said: "It ain't what you don't know that counts. It's what you know that ain't so."

And if intelligent design is so, then the image of God held by most of its proponents ain't. God could, of course, be constrained by certain physical laws, then free to work within them, but that makes God, well, an awfully lot like us, doesn't it?

Science doesn't answer everything, and makes no claim to do so, but what it does do is bring a rigorous methodology to the study of the observable. Its methods - hypothesis, experimentation, verification and duplication by a jury of peers - have supported the process of evolution to the point that to attempt to place intelligent design alongside it as a legitimate theory should just be a bad joke.

This has absolutely nothing to do with one's belief or lack thereof in a God, or with spirituality in general. Intelligent design just doesn't belong in the science classroom. It's bad philosophy and bears no relation to science whatsoever.

The doctrine of intelligent design simply isn't very smart.

I have no problem with its teaching, but it properly belongs in a comparative religions class, or Philosophy 101. It most assuredly does not belong in a science class.