Darwinism on trial in Kansas, KS CS BS

To All

It saddens me to have to fight this battle again after having been involved with the fight with CS BS in the early 80's. That fight went all the way to the Supreme Court before it was won and I thought the war was over. But, like Bedford Forrest after the Civil War the CS crowd just disguised themselves, came up with a different name and went right back to persicution of the same people as before, in this case my children and yours. The American Taliban is on the march in Kansas and if the scientific community does nothing they will take over our childrens education. And with George the Appointed naming hardline conservatives to the SC we cannot count on reason from that quarter.

For those who see the danger I hope this forum can be a place to exchange ideas on how to stop this leak in the levee before it floods our whole country.

I welcome your comments.

The story so far



http://www.physorg.com/news6244.html

COMMENTARY: Catching up with the 19th century on evolution

By Tom Teepen
teepencolumn@coxnews.com
Cox News Service


Only five years into the new millennium our fingertip grip on the 21st century already is slipping. We could tumble into the 18th before you can say "macroevolution." Kansas is the latest state to bend to Christian pressure to disavow evolution. Its state board of education has taken up, and apparently means to adopt this summer, a change in teaching standards for science that would fob evolution off as just part of a big fuss.

To that end, the board has been hearing testimony from witnesses, all one-sided because Kansas scientists have refused to testify, taking the sound if somewhat self-destructive position that there is nothing more to debate than there would be if the subject were gravity or plate tectonics.

The Kansas brouhaha is being pushed, as are similar contretemps in numerous smaller jurisdictions, by well-bankrolled groups hawking "intelligent design." This is the latest gimmick by religious conservatives for insinuating scripture into scholastics. When the courts disallowed biblical text as a substitute for science, the Bible literalists came up with "creationism," a pseudo-science whose own subsequent unmasking has now led to this latest wrinkle.

"Intelligent design" -- aptly dismissed by one scientist as "creationism in a cheap tuxedo" -- holds that life on Earth can be explained only by the animations of a guiding creator. That creator is carefully left unidentified. (Could it be Fred? Irving?) The game is to dodge church-state barriers, but you get the idea -- just as public-school pupils are meant to.

So Kentucky has expunged the very word "evolution" from its teaching guidelines. New Mexico came within an ace of outlawing evolution from classrooms. Ohio has fudged. A suburban Atlanta school district defaced its biology texts with a sticker pooh-poohing evolution. A rural Pennsylvania school district has ordered its schools to teach intelligent design.

This is science by mob rule, made newly possible in Kansas by the election last fall of a Republican board majority that gave the antievolution saints six votes to the demon evolutionists' four. (The Republicans are following their party's president who, asked about evolution, ducked and cited God.)

The movement hides behind, in addition to its own disingenuousness, the public's general and ordinarily admirable sympathy for fair play.

There's a sort of idiot fairness making the rounds these days. C-SPAN, in an absurd parody of balance, recently proposed to pair a Holocaust historian with a ding-a-ling who claims the Holocaust never happened. The historian sensibly refused to show. One of my local newcasts boasts of its fair and balanced reporting -- as if there were two sides to apartment fires, traffic deaths and the weather.

The "intelligent design" crowd, when it can't convince that evolution is godless hokum, appeals for mercy on the grounds that in a controversy it is only fair that both sides be represented. So, create a stink and you're in.

By the end of the 19th century, most of its denizens had come to understand and accept evolution and had worked out how to reconcile that with their religious faith. Surely it cannot be beyond us moderns to catch up with them.



Tom Teepen is a columnist for Cox Newspapers. He is based in Atlanta.



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I think you are taking this way to serious man. Why is it soooo important that everyone believe in evolution? After all evolution doesn't care.

Whoa man - last time I was in church there were some little old ladies there. Aren't you overreacting. Hey, maybe the Teleban are suppose to win - with you guys shaken at your knees over some grannies there the logical choice.

To Reality Check

I am not now nor have I ever been anti-religious but these yahoos combined with their mid-east compatriots make me wonder if further forward progress is possible for humanity if we continue to be held back and dragged down by this superstitious baggage from the first century AD. Between Osama and Eric Robert Rudolph and Timothy McVeigh I'm not sure we'll survive long enough to correct the problem. I mean if they cannot respect my right to live free of their superstitious garbage, why should I respect their right to believe anything they want to. Without scientific progress we are doomed to starve, choke or freeze to death in the not so distant future and I have this picture in my head where I come upon a female chemistry student sitting and looking at a beaker of water, I asked what she was waiting for, and she said "A miricle". Will that be man's epitaph? "Here lies mankind, they prayed for a miricle that never came"

Well enough gloom.

A priest , a rabbi, and a Baptist preacher were standing together discussing how they decided how to split up the sunday offering.
The priest said"I draw a circle om the ground, throw the money in the air and what lands in the circle goes to the church, I keep the rest"
The Baptist preacher said he did the same thing except that what landed outside the circle went to the church.
"OY VEY" shouted the rabbi"You make it much too complicated, I throw all the money into the air and what God wants, He keeps."

Grumpy

To Reality Check

Aren't computers and the internet amazing? When I was going to WCU we had a computer, it used punch cards, a program I wrote to play tic tac toe filled a shoe box. I had to learn fortran and cobol to understand how to punch the cards so the machine, which filled a room, would hopefully do as you wished. The machine I have now is hundreds of times as powerful and I can talk to someone halfway round the world and never realize it. I've alwats wanted to visit your country ever since I saw the size of the shrimp paul Hogan was putting on the barby.

Below is an essay by Barbara Forrest and is brilliant

Overview
The Newest Evolution of Creationism
Intelligent design is about politics and religion, not science.
By Barbara Forrest
Intelligent Design (ID) proponents put most of their effort in swaying politicians and the public.
The infamous August 1999 decision by the Kansas Board of Education to delete references to evolution from Kansas science standards was heavily influenced by advocates of intelligent-design theory. Although William A. Dembski, one of the movement's leading figures, asserts that "the empirical detectability of intelligent causes renders intelligent design a fully scientific theory," its proponents invest most of their efforts in swaying politicians and the public, not the scientific community.
The leading ID organization is the Center for the Renewal of Science and Culture (CRSC).

Launched by Phillip E. Johnson's book Darwin on Trial (1991), the intelligent-design movement crystallized in 1996 as the Center for the Renewal of Science and Culture (CRSC), sponsored by the Discovery Institute, a conservative Seattle think tank. Johnson, a law professor whose religious conversion catalyzed his antievolution efforts, assembled a group of supporters who promote design theory through their writings, financed by CRSC fellowships. According to an early mission statement, the CRSC seeks "nothing less than the overthrow of materialism and its damning cultural legacies."
The CRSC calls its strategy the "Wedge," because it wants to liberate science from "atheistic naturalism."

Johnson refers to the CRSC members and their strategy as the Wedge, analogous to a wedge that splits a log -- meaning that intelligent design will liberate science from the grip of "atheistic naturalism." Ten years of Wedge history reveal its most salient features: Wedge scientists have no empirical research program and, consequently, have published no data in peer-reviewed journals (or elsewhere) to support their intelligent-design claims. But they do have an aggressive public relations program, which includes conferences that they or their supporters organize, popular books and articles, recruitment of students through university lectures sponsored by campus ministries, and cultivation of alliances with conservative Christians and influential political figures.
Philip E. Johnson: "This isn't really, and never has been, a debate about science. It's about religion and philosophy."
The Wedge aims to "renew" American culture by grounding society's major institutions, especially education, in evangelical religion. In 1996, Johnson declared: "This isn't really, and never has been, a debate about science. It's about religion and philosophy." According to Dembski, intelligent design "is just the Logos of John's Gospel restated in the idiom of information theory." Wedge strategists seek to unify Christians through a shared belief in "mere" creation, aiming -- in Dembski's words -- "at defeating naturalism and its consequences." This enables intelligent-design proponents to coexist in a big tent with other creationists who explicitly base their beliefs on a literal interpretation of Genesis.
At heart, ID proponents are not motivated to improve science but to transform it into a theistic enterprise.





"As Christians," writes Dembski, "we know naturalism is false. Nature is not self-sufficient. … Nonetheless neither theology nor philosophy can answer the evidential question whether God's interaction with the world is empirically detectable. To answer this question we must look to science." Jonathan Wells, a biologist, and Michael J. Behe, a biochemist, seem just the CRSC fellows to give intelligent design the ticket to credibility. Yet neither has actually done research to test the theory, much less produced data that challenges the massive evidence accumulated by biologists, geologists, and other evolutionary scientists. Wells, influenced in part by Unification Church leader Sun Myung Moon, earned Ph.D.'s in religious studies and biology specifically "to devote my life to destroying Darwinism." Behe sees the relevant question as whether "science can make room for religion." At heart, proponents of intelligent design are not motivated to improve science but to transform it into a theistic enterprise that supports religious faith.
The ID movement is advancing its strategy but its tactics are no substitute for real science.


Wedge supporters are at present trying to insert intelligent design into Ohio public-school science standards through state legislation. Earlier the CRSC advertised its science education site by assuring teachers that its "Web curriculum can be appropriated without textbook adoption wars" -- in effect encouraging teachers to do an end run around standard procedures. Anticipating a test case, the Wedge published in the Utah Law Review a legal strategy for winning judicial sanction. Recently the group almost succeeded in inserting into the federal No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 a "sense of the Senate" that supported the teaching of intelligent design. So the movement is advancing, but its tactics are no substitute for real science.

From the land of Carolina Blue skies
Grumpy

ID is just ANOTHER power grab by a minority elite wanting to gain power over masses. 'Course they're certainly not the ONLY one.

To Reality Check

Yes to both. I live in Cary, North Carolina and the sky is so blue here that they call it Carolina Blue+ that is the color of The University of NC at Chapel Hill.

I hope we can keep this thread clear of acrimony and share info on the topic at hand. I recieved an Email from Cactus Critter today and I have invited him to drop in. If you run across anyone you think may contribute ask them to join in. I don't mean to say that CS or ID adherants are not welcome but arguement is not the goal, other threads are available for that. If someone runs across an article or essay or other form that you feel is relavent please feel free.

It is now midnight here, my brain is fried so goodnight all

Grunpy

I don't know about you guys, but creationism gives me a sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach, like my intellect is trying to grasp a puff of smoke, as it falls into total and comical absurdity.

One of the ledges I am sure I would hit on the way down would be "If all this were created, there is a good chance our creators were super-biologists who designed us and our eco-system for some apiary-like task like mining metals or creating nuclear energy repositories." Intelligent-design sans divinity is much more likely than divine creation, in my reckoning.

But closer to a point worth talking about, I suppose, is the observation that when it comes to politically hot topics, science has a very low batting average. Look at science v. tobacco, science v. big business in the Global Warming League, etc.

What is the problem with wimpy old science? I think it is motive. Truth is rarely a hot issue, while greed, hunger, fear ...need I say more?

In the next hundred years, culture is going to be making some very serious life and death choices. We usually let wars make these choices for us, and we will probably do so again, but in the unlikely case that these decisions are made "deliberately", we are going to need moral justification to back those decisions. In other words, religion is likely to be "cranked up" in the next few decades, because religion is the only cultural instrument that can justify deliberate life-death choices.

Religion is culture at blood-level. There is no use trying to sic science on the heels of religion, any more than you could stop a heart by citing a mathematical equation.

Science has its opportunities to create conditions that pacify religion temporarily. When these intervals end, and the dragon awakes, science might as well suck lemons...

nsstone

To all

her is a letter being circulated to pastor, rabbis and others. Over 7500 signatures so far

Not all believers are part of the problem
Grumpy

The second paragraph should have been

We the undersigned, Christian clergy from many different traditions, believe that the timeless truths of the Bible and the discoveries of modern science may comfortably coexist. We believe that the theory of evolution is a foundational scientific truth, one that has stood up to rigorous scrutiny and upon which much of human knowledge and achievement rests. To reject this truth or to treat it as “one theory among others” is to deliberately embrace scientific ignorance and transmit such ignorance to our children. We believe that among God’s good gifts are human minds capable of critical thought and that the failure to fully employ this gift is a rejection of the will of our Creator. To argue that God’s loving plan of salvation for humanity precludes the full employment of the God-given faculty of reason is to attempt to limit God, an act of hubris. We urge school board members to preserve the integrity of the science curriculum by affirming the teaching of the theory of evolution as a core component of human knowledge. We ask that science remain science and that religion remain religion, two very different, but complementary, forms of truth.

Hi folks - nice thread. Nothing to add to some fine points, particularly like the one regarding our "purpose" if created.
Hope you are safe in NC this week, not been to US but can recommend NSW to anyone. Have a friend in Newcastle and Sydney just the greatest city.
cheers

Let me sum up this discussion:

Mathematicians cannot explain numbers. Physicists are unsure about matter and the forces of nature. And chemists don’t really understand chemical bonds. But when it comes to life, the most mysterious topic of all, evolutionists know it all. And everyone who disagrees with them for whatever reason is a bad person with a mental problem.

I think it is time to get real: Life is an open question and people should be able to have informed opinions without being called names.

I take it you have been "speed reading" the posts.

Evolutionary theory does not claim to "know" everything about life.

It is a theory that says:

Given man, then the fossil record should contain hominids that are less advanced than man but more advanced than apes. And it does.

Given whales, then the fossil record should contain transitional species that lived on land and in a semi-aquatic environment. And it does.

Given flowering plants, then the fossil record should contain plants that reproduced without flowers. And it does.

And so on and so on .....

Now Evolutionary theory does not say we should ever be able to find fossils for every transitional specie, nor does it claim that the current version of the "tree of life" is 100% accurate or complete, just that the branches will occur in a logical pattern of increasing complexity and that the steps in the accumulated complexity within every branch are small ones. This "tree of life" has held up remarkably well and new discoveries generally fit quite nicely within the existing structure. Occassionally a new find makes us alter where a branch starts or add a new branch that then fits where a "gap" had previously existed. But no discovery has caused the essential structure or logical order of the tree to change. Another prediction one can make based on the Theory of Evolution.

Arthur