Intelligent Design Theory: Science or Religion?

Perhaps if you would enumerate some of these ideals we could discuss whether or not they are indeed Christian ideals.

Said as if the term Christianity had some sort of universal meaning.

rl....... Unfortunately you claim that scientific truths lie within the Scriptures, yet you feel convinced of the value of making up vast amounts of unknown information that appends scripture to some scientific point that the Bible never mentions but you feel that the point is mentioned in a few phrases, like"THere were giants in those days" or "Behemoth"... .

MAJOR CAse in point'THE FLOOD. You believe it happened cause the Bible sez so. Yet the Bible is quite or evidence light on any factual data about this event. Genesis presents a series of connected yarns about Noah and his family and wickedness and building a boat then it rains, yadda yadda. All the argumenst that you attempt to make for the FLOOD, are your own, not the Bibles, and wed really like to see the discussions of mountain building and plate tectonics and flood deposits, and how things appear in the fossil record if there really was a flood.
Whats left to you is to come up with and "fill in" vast amounts of materials that are critical to that story's veracity yet go unmentioned in the original source. Now thats just one omission.

STUFF LIKE THAT.

Then, while were still on the flood, RL claims that all the mountains were "lower" at that time (another little fact left out of the Bible)

and that the heavens could contain greater amounts of water against the pull of gravity by some jkind of "VApor Cloud".

The first open conflict between Church and Science was the Galileo scandal. I have tried to show that unless one believes in the dogma of historic inevitability--this form of fatalism in reverse gear--one must regard it as a scandal which could have been avoided; and it is not difficult to imagine the Catholic Church adopting, after a Tychonic transition, the Copernican cosmology some two hundred earlier than she eventually did. The Galileo affair was an isolated, and in fact quite untypical, episode in the history of the relations between science and religion, almost as untypical as the Dayton monkey-trial was. But its dramatic circumstances, magnified out of all proportion, created a popular belief that science stood for freedom, the Church for oppression of thought. That is only true in the limited sense for a limited period of transition. Some historians, for instance, wish to make us believe that the decline of science in Italy was due to the "terror" caused by the trial of Galileo. But the next generation saw the rise of Toricelli, Cavallieri, Borelli, whose contributions to science were more substantial than those of any generation before or during Galileo's lifetime; the shift of the centre of scientific activity to England and France and the gradual decline of Italian science, as of Italian painting, was due to different historical causes. Never since the Thirty Years War has the Church oppressed freedom of thought and expression to an extent comparable to the terror based on the "scientific" ideologies of Nazi Germany or Soviet Russia.

The contemporary divorce between faith and reason is not the result of a contest for power or for intellectual monopoly, but of a progressive estrangement without hostility or drama, and therefore all the more deadly. This becomes evident if we shift our attention from Italy to the Protestant countries of Europe, and to France. Kepler, Descartes, Barrow, Liebniz, Gilbert, Boyle and Newton himself, the generation of pioneers contemporary with and succeeding Galileo, were all deeply and genuinely religious thinkers. But their image of the Godhead had undergone a subtle and gradual change. It had been freed from its rigid scholastic frame, it had receded beyond the dualism of Plato to the mystic, Pythagorean inspiration of God the chief mathematician. The pioneers of the new cosmology, from Kepler to Newton and beyond, based their search into nature on the mystic conviction that there must exist laws behind the confusing phenomena; that the world was a completly rational, ordered, harmonic creation. In the words of a modern historian, the "aspiration to demonstrate that the universe ran like a piece of clockwork...was itself initially a religious aspiration. It was felt that there would be something defective in Creation itself--something not quite worthy of God--unless the whole system of the universe could be shown to be interlocking, so that it carried the pattern of reasonableness and orderliness. Kepler inaugurating the scientist's quest for a mechanistic universe in the seventeenth century, is significant here--his mysticism, his music of the spheres, his rational deity demand a system which has the beauty of a piece of mathematics." (H Butterfield). Instead of asking for specific miracles as proof of God's existence, Kepler discovered the supreme miracle in the harmony of the spheres.

unless one believes in the dogma of historic inevitability--this form of fatalism in reverse gear

Frustrations Give Rise to New Push for Science Literacy

"Being able to think scientifically in our modern world is tantamount to success," said Bonnie P. Mizell, the science coach at Howard Middle School in Orlando, Fla., who served on a committee that helped draft the new standards.

if Galileo had not incurred the displeasure of the Company (top rank Jesuits mainly) he could have gone on writing freely about the motion of the earth to the end of his days.

To excite in us tastes, odours, and sounds I believe that nothing is required in external bodies except shapes, numbers, and slow and rapid movements. I think that if ears, tongues, and noses were removed, shapes and numbers and motions would remain, but not odours or tastes or sounds. The latter, I believe, are nothing more than names when separated from living beings. . . .

if Galileo had not incurred the displeasure of the Company (top rank Jesuits mainly) he could have gone on writing freely about the motion of the earth to the end of his days.

To excite in us tastes, odours, and sounds I believe that nothing is required in external bodies except shapes, numbers, and slow and rapid movements. I think that if ears, tongues, and noses were removed, shapes and numbers and motions would remain, but not odours or tastes or sounds. The latter, I believe, are nothing more than names when separated from living beings. . . .

Government schools have been controlled by evolutionists for decades.

It is hilarious to hear them moan about 'scientific illiteracy'.