Intelligent Design Theory: Science or Religion?

It's also to be hoped that they will include the religiose hypothesis of the original native Indians... after all they were there before all the bigoted Christians arrived.. plus that it is not presented at the exclusion of other hypothesis of origin of life. of all other reliouse hypothesis of all the other beliefs that should - could be included....addendum
is not presented at the exclusion of other hypothesis of origin of life.

Double posted. I'm trying to economise on bandwidth

It's also to be hoped that they will include the religiose theories of the original native Indians... after all they were there before all the bigoted Christians arrived.. plus that it is not presented at the exclusion of other theories of origin of life. of all other reliouse theories of all the other beliefs that should - could be included....addendum
is not presented at the exclusion of other theories of origin of life.

rap- seeing as you are an expert-

How long would a perfectly straight sewer pipe of 6 ft. diameter, not one that has yet being officially opened by Mrs Clinton, have to be before a photon detector at one end only had a 95% probability of detecting a hit in a lunar year from light entering at the other end on a bright frosty early spring morning.

Is Ben Stein the new face of Creationism?
(Roger Moore, Orlando Sentinel, Feb 1, 2008)

How do you re-package that tried, untested and untestable faith-without-facts warhorse, "Creationism" after its nearly-annual beat-down by an increasingly exasperated scientific community?

After you've tried renaming it "Intelligent Design," I mean.

With comedy. Mock your "Darwinist" foes the way comics, thinkers, scientists and educated people everywhere have been mocking creationism since Scopes took that monkey off our back.

Tuck into them the way Michael Moore would, with a documentary hosted by a funny Don Quixote willing to tilt at science the way MM has gone after the gun culture, corporate cold-heartedness, George W. Bush and Big Health Care.

Get droll funnyman and ex-Nixon speech writer Ben Stein to host it, to be the on-camera jester-interviewer.

And re-cast this argument about what people chose to believe vs. what others can prove as fact as a fight for "Freedom."

That's the mnemonic device Stein came back to, time and again, last night in an Orlando screening of his new documentary, Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed. It's a rabble-rouser of a doc that uses all manner of loaded images, loaded rhetoric, few if any facts and mockery of hand-picked "weirdo" scientists to attack the those who, Stein claims, are stifling the Religious Right's efforts to inject intelligent design into science courses, science curricula and the national debate.

He was showing the movie to what he and the producers hoped would be a friendly, receptive audience of conservative Christian ministers at a conference at the Northland mega-church next to the dog track up in Longwood. They're marking this movie, which they had said, earlier, they'd open in Feb. (now April) the same way they pitched The Passion of the Christ and The Chronicles of Narnia, said Paul Lauer of Motive Entertainment, who introduced Stein.

In other words, a stealth campaign, out of the public eye, preaching to the choir to get the word out about the movie without anyone who isn't a true believer passing a discouraging judgment on it.

They postered the Orlando Sentinel with email invitations, then tried to withdraw the one they sent to me. No dice. They also passed out non-disclosure "statement of confidentiality" agreements for people to sign. I didn't.

What are they hiding from you? Straight propaganda, to be sure. But again, if Michael Moore or Robert Greenwald can do it, why not Ben Stein?

It's a movie that uses animation, archival documentary footage, interviews with outraged people of science who want ID on the table, and "atheists" who see that as a step backward to make its case.

It just isn't particularly funny. Or the least bit convincing.

I lost track of the number of times Stalin's image hit the screen, and in the ways the movie equated science with Darwinism with atheism with Hitler or Stalin. Subtle, it's not.

Stein (he co-wrote it) builds his movie on classic Big Tobacco Tactics. Create just a sliver of doubt about evolution by pitching this argument in terms of academic freedom. "Legitimate" learned scientists are being silenced by the Darwinian cabal of thought police. Says Stein.

He uses anecdotes from a few Fox-over-publicized cases of people who claim to have lost tenure/their jobs/their position in the scientific world for daring to suggest the hand of a supernatural being in the creation of life.

He hasn't a scintilla of proof of, well, anything. Then he has the audacity to whine, "Where's the data" when questioning cellular biologists and other real scientists who build their lives around doubt, and finding testable, legitimate answers to those doubts. Where's YOUR data, Ben?

He uses "straw man" tactics to attack, mainly The Origin of the Species, as Darwin wrote it in 1859. That's like a music critic reviewing "the latest" by only referring to Edison's wax cylinders. He sets up false theses that "the other side" must hold (classic Limbaugh) and knocks those straw men down. Citing scientific research as recent as 1953, he can't understand why no peer-reviewed scientist thinks his "fairytale" version of the emergence of life is worth his or her time. No, not having a definitive answer about the moment life began...YET...is damning enough for Ben.

Most despicably, Stein, a Jew, invokes the Holocaust, making the Hitler-was-a-Darwinist argument, this AFTER he's used the Holocaust denier's favorite trick, probabilities, "math," to show how remote the chances are that life was created by natural, not supernatural processes. There were plenty of reasons eugenics caught on as an idea among certain nationalist-conservative and even scientific circles in the early 20th century, and most of them have nothing to do with Darwin. It reminded me of the phony slump Michael Moore showed walking away from ambushing crusty old Charlton Heston in Bowling for Columbine.

Animation, similar to that used in Columbine, makes its mock points about how science comes to conclusions and how the culture is structured to accept them. Snippets of The Wizard of Oz, Inherit the Wind and other films (if this polished, credited, scored film is indeed "unfinished," it may be from unresolved rights-clearance issues) to make his points funny. Not really. The Stalin and Soviet and Nazi clips are used in a not-quite-subliminal seduction way to demonize the people who might hold a contrary view.

Buit all the creative editing in the world only appears to let Stein hold his own with noted British scientist and atheist Richard Dawkins, whose words can be twisted to suggest that "aliens" seeded life on Earth, or at least that's more likely than anything in the Bible being literally true about creation. That's still a more rational explanation than any Stein, being a veteran Republican persuader/operator, offers. Does he really believe the blather he tosses out here? Introducing the movie, he had to trot out some nonsense about living in Malibu but not among "the stars. The REAL stars are fighting and dying for our freedom in Iraq and Afghanistan."

Ok. Know your audience, if you're a speech-writer. Pander, baby, pander.

I remember stumbling across, at a bookstore, one of the more shrill and lunatic "Bill Clinton had people KILLED in Arkansas" books that came out during the 90s. I open it at the B. Dalton, and lo and behold, there's Ben Stein writing the foreward. I had no idea...

Before that, he was just the guy giving away money on Comedy Central, the ever-droning teacher of TV shows and movies ("Beuller. Beuller.").

The PBS NOVA series did a terrific piece on the court battle over intelligent design as fought in the courts in Pennsylvania, a lacerating film of finely honed facts and dagger-sharp arguments that should be shown in every school district with intel. design-dreamers running for the school board.

ID is "creation science" is "creationism" is "God dun it." Teaching that as something provable beyond faith in a science curriculum is a big reason future Nobel winners willcome from China and India, and not Kansas.

That's the reason the world's scientists (he found a Pole and the infamous Discovery Institute to back up his attacks, even though they offer no counter theories that they can back up).

Expelled makes good points about academic freedom and the ways unpopular ideas are shouted down in academia, the press and the culture. But not offering evidence to back your side, where the burden of proof lies, makes the movie every bit as meaningful and silly as that transcendental metaphysical hooey of a couple of years back, What the Bleep Do We Know?

In Stein's case, you really do wonder what he knows, or what he's willing to claim he believes just to make a buck off the Scopes deniers.

Oh, and keeping your movie from the public because you're afraid of ridicule is just gutless. Put it out there, let people have time to chew on your arguments. Your fans will buy tickets. And plenty of folks will emerge to tear it apart. Even Michael Moore has the courage to do that.

Maybe he will be the new face of creationism. The new face of cynicism is more like it, but as Nixon must've reminded him, there's a sucker born every minute. And a lot of them vote.

ID is "creation science" is "creationism" is "God dun it." Teaching that as something provable beyond faith in a science curriculum is a big reason future Nobel winners willcome from China and India, and not Kansas.

ID is "creation science" is "creationism" is "God dun it."

You'll be running on the spot again either with a self satisfied air or the vein in the side of your head pulsing with indignation.

You could be learning something not having your hair combed and your tie straightened.

The clause itself was seen as a reaction to the Church of England, established as the official church of England and some of the colonies, during the colonial era.

Does the EC effectively rule out the introduction of the voucher system into US education? Thus leaving the educational bureaucracy with a monopoly [/QUOTE

Theestablishment Clause is silent on vouchers. The Courts have ruled that vouchers are distributed on a case by case/student by student way to
insure that the kids get an equal educational opportunity and,

The kids perform at a minimum standard in standard tests.

We have a growth industry in Charter SChools that slip the bounds of the establishment clause while still affirming the minimum standards policy.

[quote]Thus leaving the educational bureaucracy with a monopoly and we all know what that means. Ossification.

Europe has no Jonestown, no Koresh, no Billy Graham to name but three. We don't do mesmeric charismatics with a new gimmick

Quote:
Thus leaving the educational bureaucracy with a monopoly and we all know what that means. Ossification.


respectfully speaking, you have no idea of what you speak.

When you bring up Koresh and Jim JOnes, remember, they were RELIGIONS that sought to become governments.