ContraCostaTimes.com | 01/29/2006 | Intelligent design has local roots — I was wondering how the Pennsylvania Intelligent design controversy disappeared so quickly and now the whole movement backtracked and is regrouping. This fascinating story in the small California paper explains it completely. Apparently the constant assertions that Intelligent Design is about science and has nothing whatsoever to do with Creationism turned out to be a pack of lies! I guess being truthful wasn’t in the arsenal of these phonies.
The center’s work on a case in Dover, Pa., that drew national attention helped lead a judge to conclude that intelligent design was essentially creationism in disguise.
The case stemmed from a school district’s requirement that teachers read a statement in biology class about gaps in evolutionary theory and point students to the pro-intelligent design text, “Of Pandas and People.”
So lawyers subpoenaed early drafts of the book. The first version was called “Creation Biology,” and drafts up until 1987 were full of references to creationism. But the wording changed after the U.S. Supreme Court in 1987 struck down a Louisiana law banning the teaching of evolution. References to creationism in the Pandas drafts after 1987 had been almost entirely replaced by intelligent design.
“Once we figured that out, it was really a slam dunk,” Matzke said. “How much clearer could the evidence be?”
Jeez, maybe one of you people (on both sides) should actually look for something on the science of this instead of blathering back and forth on generalities. Here’s what my less than one minute of searching got from Wikipedia. Not the most authoritative source, but I’m sure you can find better ones if you actually put some effort in.
The answer is: they’re working on it. There’s plausible theories on how a number of cell structures like RNA can come into existance, and experiments to prove it on some of them. They’re working on how this can translate into a living cell.
Some points I want to make in no particular order, since I’m late to this argument:
- I’d like to underscore post #5. “A key part of the scientific method is to critically review and rethink hypothesis in view of new or differing facts. Thus to use Doug’s example, steady state theory of the Universe was refuted when new data from radio telescopes was presented.” This is why I have “faith” in science. There is no unquestionable dogma. They can be wrong, but it will eventually be rooted out. Theories are supported by evidence, not belief, and even the biggest and most widely accepted ones can be overturned given enough evidence. Relativity overthrew Newtonian Mechanics, and others like String Theory are attempting to overthrow that because it doesn’t mesh with Quantum Mechanics. Evolution has an enormous body of evidence behind it, and all that has been shown is that there may be some gaps in our understanding for particular pieces, not that the theory itself is incorrect. Also, criticisms made by talking heads on TV don’t count. Publish an article in a respected peer reviewed journal. You know, so the actual experts can evaluate it and pick it apart on the merits instead of trying to convince the average Joe with arguments about tornadoes in junkyards that sound good but have no scientific weight.
- Evolution and faith are not mutually exclusive. I went through 12 years of Catholic school: two different grammar schools and a high school. I was taught by priests, deacons, and nuns in addition to laypeople. What was I taught? Evolution. That Genesis specifically WASN’T literal, that a “day” could be billions of years in reality. That’s why I’m also very proud of the Catholic bishops who publicly attacked Intelligent Design, saying it wasn’t science and that it was “a dangerous form of fundamentalism” to look for science in the Bible which was not meant to be taken as such.
Ultimately a lot of the peolpe who are upset I think view this type of science as an attack on their faith, but it’s not. Maybe it’s an attack on a simplistic version of one facet, but it’s not an attack on faith itself, nor on the concept of God, nor on the concept that God created everything. He just may have done it through evolution and the big bang. Many scientists are religious. Search for Einstein quotes and you’ll see references to God.
- People have no idea the scales on which the universe works. It can swallow any odds you throw at it. If the conditions supportive to life arising by chance seem unlikely, what would you peg them at? What are the odds any given star would have a planet with these conditions? One in a million? One in a billion? That seems conservative enough for me. Well, the Milky Way has billions of stars. And there are billions of galaxies with billions of stars. Even incredibly remote odds can be swallowed by the immensity of the universe without flinching.
The same thing goes for time. If things can evolve even a little bit in ways that are observable to us (and they have) then why can’t these things add up over millions of years? Once again, our brains don’t fathom the immensity of just how long that is because it just becomes an abstraction at that point. We can’t relate to it on a visceral level.
So we have our body of knowledge on what happens to life over time, well supported by the fossil record, and we have our body of knowledge on what happens to our universe over time, supported by our knowledge of physics. Just because it gets a little murkier as we trace backwards ever farther does not mean it’s invalid, it means we don’t know . . . yet. We have no reason to believe we’re on the wrong path because the parts leading up to it are well supported.
Jeez, I think I’ll stop before I end up writing a book!
Sorry guys…
Circular Argument!
Posit: Creationist claim the bible to be “the LITERAL word of god”, and “god created the universe,etc…”
Ok, where in there does it say “and god created evolution”?
Doesn’t!
You say, “god created the perfection of man”, have you REALLY looked at the useless and non-functional parts of the human body?
We use (in most cases) what, 30 % of the brain?
Don’t have the eye-sight of a partially blind bat. Hells-bells boys, if a god created our eyes, wouldn’t the almost always work as well as an eagle? Instead, we have cataracts, near/far-sightedness, coloe-blindness, etc. Pretty good record for a god, don’t ya think?
Anyway, to the circular part…
god created the universe.
it must have been created, how else did it get here.
And, since it was created, god must have created it. ad nauseam.
Personally, I have trouble believing ANY of those myths…
wether christian, protestant, mormon, greek, roman, viking, or any other…
they’re all equally valid, and equally useless, in my eyes.
As Robert A. Heinlein once wrote (Notebooks of Lazurus Long)
“What are the FACTS?
Get the FACTS.
All else is OPINION” (Emphasis added)
Good luck trying to unscrew the inscrutable…..
This is the problem with creationists thinking. They can simply say things like “God created evolution..” to cop out of any reasonable argument about this subject.
Someone on here gave the hint that God (or some intelligent being) started everything off on Earth, and evolution took over afterwards. That sounds reasonable, but who’s to say that whomever this intelligent entity was made the choice to create life on this planet?
Why did he wait billions of years to create man, when other animals existed before us? So much for us being created in God’s image when there’s been so many other creatures who lived long before we had.
You know it could also be that some alien being billions of years ago took a pit stop on this planet, took big shit on a rock, left smelly heaping pile of DNA, and left. Fast-forward several billion orbits around the sun later, and here we are.
Creation Scientists, Intelligent Design is all the same thing. It’s simply ancient religious ideas disguised as a ‘new’ science. What I don’t understand is why they have to pretend to be a science to prove them selves to scientists. It’s faith based, they don’t need to be factual, tangible, nor logical.
But what IS insulting is the fact they don’t follow the scientific method, and pretend to be scientists over a SINGLE subject that isn’t scientific in the first place. Like posers trying to fit into a group of people they CLEARLY don’t belong in.
The theory of evolution is, um… a THEORY. We know that micro-evolution (variation among species, or horizonal transition) has and does occur, however, there is NO SCIENTIFIC EVIDENCE for macro-evolution. Yet a large percentage of teachers preach that vertical evolution is a verified fact, and as evidenced by this forum, they have won many converts.
IS there an Intelligent designer? Look around, open your eyes. The alternative is laughable (a dumb, non-designer?) This world is too incredible to be a product of chance.
Two more thoughts:
The “Big Bang”? When was the last time you saw ANYTHING get made from an explosion. Explosions destroy things.
God is your creator. Whether or not you believe in Him does not change that fact. You might reply, “Show me your God!” There are many things that you have not seen and yet you believe in them ((evolution for one)). But I am quite sure that one day you WILL see God.
Pat,
You’ve contradicted yourself. How can the big bang be demonstrated to have happened when, as you’ve stated, we have no idea what was going on billions of years ago
What was not sufficient in the original post?
…Science does not know exactly as a fact what happened 13 billion years ago. Or even 10,000 years ago. By using analysis of records though we have a pretty good idea.
Through hypothesis and experimentation it has been demonstrated that the universe began with the Big Bang. I am not an astrophysicist so I will not attempt to explain it.
***
I do know that using the Hubble Telescope and radio telescopes have enables scientists to gather the evidence to reconstruct the universe up to milliseconds before the Big Bang. It is with reasoning that they have come up with the evidence backed theory of the Big Bang even if they were not present to witness the event. And that is one heck of a lot more evidence then any creationist argument has presented. As I pointed out above, I am not an astrophysicist, nor an astronomer or cosmologist so I can only give the basics of what I understand.
“I’ve been asking all day and the best you can come up with is that it’s your own personal subjective belief and perception. … Mere opinion.”
Do you believe that there is life on other planets or in galaxies other than our own? You must, since you would say there is a definite probability that earth is not unique in posessing life. Would you be able to provide proof of this life, or would we be forced to rely on your opinion and assumptions?
What seems reasonable or plausible to me is not necessarily the same to anybody else. It helps breed skepticism, which I hope you will agree, is a good thing.
“There is this thing called Google. Do a search and you’ll find numerous articles about life created without God.”
It is not my responsibility to do your research when debating a topic. Like I said, post a link and I’ll be more than happy to look at it.
“Merely mocking someone’s asinine “lack” of a belief system to get a laugh is NOT using an ad hominem attack.”
“… I was just imagining someone like Mike driving a car. He’d be mystified by the complexity of maps, and would assume that the unknown course of action would be the best way of reaching his destination. Obviously the unknown route would be more plausible than the known route. He’d throw the map out the window as he started driving across some old guy’s lawn.”
“You’ll also learn other fun facts you should have learned in high school, e.g., the earth revolves around the sun and man really went to the moon.”
Implying I am a fool, therefore my belief or argument must be equally foolish is exactly what an ad hominem is. And yes, your posts do have a hysterical tone to them. You seem to be taking this topic much more seriously than I am… perhaps it’s some hidden need of yours that you have to prove all people who believe differently than you wrong. I chould give a shit less if you believe what I do, but that won’t stop me from posting it.
calm down… go drink some beer.
“Why did he wait billions of years to create man, when other animals existed before us? So much for us being created in God’s image when there’s been so many other creatures who lived long before we had.”
FARTaLOT,
You are confusing religious dogma for the general idea that an intelligent being created the universe we know. They are not necessarily the same.
Ok Pat, explain to me how you can demonstrate the occurance of an event when you don’t even know the conditions under which it supposedly occured.
If we say that you can see as far back in time as it take light to travel to you from another point in space. And we also say that light travels faster than the physical matter that makes up the earth. How then, could it ever be possible to look through a telescope and see the moment just before the big bang, while we are sitting on a piece of that matter, billions of years after it supposedly happened?
note: I do not claim to be an astrophysicist either.
The theory of evolution is, um… a THEORY.
It is a scientific theory, which is different than the common meaning of the word theory. It is the best supported theory by far based on the evidence we have, which is quite substantial.
We know that micro-evolution (variation among species, or horizonal transition) has and does occur, however, there is NO SCIENTIFIC EVIDENCE for macro-evolution.
You say no scientific evidence with such certainty. Ignoring or dismissing evidence you don’t like doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist or isn’t vald.
Micro-evolution over long periods of time IS macro-evolution. If animals can change a little over a hundred years, can’t they change more over a thousand? Can’t they change a lot over tens or hundreds of thousands of years? To the point where they are no longer genetically compatible i.e. can’t interbreed i.e. are now independent species?
And there is plenty of evidence of macro-evolution. It wouldn’t be presented as a near certainty if it wasn’t. Science, unlike religion, is a pure meritocracy. There is no dogma. If there are errors they will be shaken out over time. Evolution has it’s current stature because of the large body of evidence behind it.
IS there an Intelligent designer? Look around, open your eyes. The alternative is laughable (a dumb, non-designer?) This world is too incredible to be a product of chance.
That’s the tornado in a junkyard argument, a “common sense” argument that sounds good to people who are already skeptical, but which carries no scientific weight. It does nothing to refute any evidence science puts forward, it just reinforces what people want to believe. Science carries more weight than rhetoric and spin.
The “Big Bang”? When was the last time you saw ANYTHING get made from an explosion. Explosions destroy things.
Tornado in a junkyard. The Big Bang theory didn’t appear out of thin air. It was one of many competing theories about the origins of the universe and it survived on its merits. It may still be replaced at some point but it still agrees with a good deal of our current scientific knowledge.
God is your creator. Whether or not you believe in Him does not change that fact.
Whether you believe in evolution or not will not change it’s validity. And belief in evolution is not mutually exclusive with belief in God.
I realize there wasn’t much point in putting together a serious response to that post, but I did it anyway.
Well if there’s one thing I AM certain of, it’s that the Origin-of-the-Universe question will be setttled once and for all right here, on the Dvorak blog.
First of all, we have to remember that the Bible, as well as all other holy books encompasing all religions of the world, our world, were written by humans and is therefore false unless they were written by God him/her/itself. Some may argue that Jesus came close, but even he did not write the Bible. Second of all, we know so little about the beginning of the Universe that some intelligent “God” (intelligence used loosely because “it” would obviously encompase entirelly different dimensions of senses and “thought”) created the BANG is as “plausible” (sorry Steven but i had to) the Universe beginning “inside a sphere smaller than this period.” Man was obviously not created in the image of God because the Bible was written by man, nor was the Universe was created for man to live in, but what can’t immediately be proven false is some intelligent force beginning the BIG BANG merely because science hasn’t even come close to proving their theory(s), whateven they are. No, “God” most likely did not create life, which out of billions of billions of stars can probabily occur not only once but many times, nor did “it” create evolution or Earth, but we cannot just completely ridicule the idea that some force (because that is what “God” is, an “intelligent” force) started the ball rolling for the Universe. Yes, life could have began in a tube of chemicals, but who’s to say that the tube of chemicals which came from a BANG did not begin with an “intelligent force”. There is no evidence for this theory, which is not Creationism or Intelligent Design, like the Big Bang because the Bang could be proven to have occured but not the force behind the Bang.
Good Blog. Although I to use the translation of google to read
Does this ever end??
The classic philosophical end of the question hasn’t changed in decades. I mention the infinite resolution of material reality.
Something always comes from something. Something never comes from nothing. If you examine the theoretical universe [to include believers], matter and extensions of matter [which includes energy], there has never been an instance of something ever coming from nothing.
The basic premise of religion is that something came from nothing.
I know that’s too easy for people who talk to burning vegetation.
Briefly? No. You opened up a can of worms
Even the Pope, most bishops, and many many leading religious figures have said “evolution is compatible with a belief in God.” However there are always nut-jobs out there that claim otherwise, and poorly.
There is also no reason why science is incompatible with it either – what it is incompatible with is blind faith. That is what most of the people attacking it are trying to defend – their blind faith. Their perception of how the world works (often not the same as their religeons officall view either).
You can’t destroy faith, as Marx said – it’s the opiate of the masses. Just like junkies they will defend their fix, because the concept isn’t what they are trying to defend. It’s their perception of it.
Which is probably why stoners think weed = world peace.
re: 43.
Yeah, too many people take the Big Bang theory as: “First there was nothing, then it exploded.”
Really it’s more “first there was everything, and it was really small. For some (as yet unknown) reason.. it didn’t stay that way”
Science wants to find out that unknown reason. Religious people think they already know. Maybe they are right, science doesn’t care, but what it does car about is knowing if they are right or wrong.
I believe the real issue is people who want religion taught as science in the class room. Its not. Thats why its called religion. People who teach science as religion in the class room are just as irritating and just as wrong.
When schools taught as oppose to baby sit, there was a place for such a conversation. It was called philosophy class. A philosophy class would be a great and appropriate venue for this discussion in a school room context.
Blogs are a great venue as well.
Is God willing to to prevent evil, but not able? Then he is not omnipotent.
Is he able, but not willing? Then he is malevolent.
Is he both able and willing? Then whence cometh evil?
Is he neither able nor willing? Then why call him God?
- Epicurus
Re: #42
Does this ever end??
Comment by site admin — 1/31/2006 @ 12:09 am
No, actually it doesn’t.
P.S.
Fix the page for Safari.
I’m typing blind, I CAN’t see the bottom(won’t scroll).
Sounds
The problem with teaching religion in a philosophy class is it must not be a one sided subject. If the debate about creationism were to center around one view, say the Bible’s, as happened in California lately, then I have a problem. If the discussion concerned different views of how the world religions believe it all started with equal insight to all, then no problem.
The issue of religion is that it should not cloud the subject as truth. Because all religions are based on faith instead of objectivity they should only be discussed in the abstract. If they can’t be discussed in the abstract then they run a risk of being discussed as fact.
I am not sure I understand what you meant by teaching science as a religion. Could you explain that a little for me? Or am I misreading it? Thanks.