The Pseudoscience of Intelligent Design
Mime Narrator writes "An article over at Kuro5hin discusses the controvery over the Intelligent Design movement. The Dover, Pennsylvania school board recently adopted a policy requiring that high school science teachers teaching evolution tell their students that evolutionary theory, a theory that has been shown to explain the origins of life time and time again, is flawed, and that intelligent design is a valid alternative. The ACLU, along with the AUSCS (Americans United for the Separation of Church and State), and 11 parents, are suing the school board, accusing the board of violating the separation of church and state. "
Wrong. People love to think that evolution is the complete explanation of life as we know it, and want to teach that as "science" and as fact. However, we still have so little true understanding about the origins of life. Assumptions are made about the first instant of life, but it cannot be recreated in a lab.
Fact is, we will probably never know for sure. However, true science is the scrutiny of all possibilities of that which we do not know. Dismissing Intelligent Design as not being science is the same as dismissing theories of a round world revolving around the sun as heresy. It's base, uninformed, and - wait for it - close minded.
Excuse my speling.
Making The Bar Project
Fossils came from the catastrophic, world wide flood described in Genesis 7:17 through 7:24. (Reference) And if you study fossilization, I believe that you would find that the catastrophic answer makes more sense (I am not a Geologist or Palentologist, however.)
Two, ID is a broad and varied ideology. Some ID proponents do claim exactly what you claim.
I find it interesting that you can draw some fairly accurate parallels between Galileo and some modern day ID proponents. Science's foundation is the questioning of established ideas, not the dogmatic defense of them. C'mon, people, take your evolutionary blinders off for a moment, and examine the two theories critically, instead of spasmodically twitching whenever anyone mentions ID.
I hate to bring up a sore topic, there are also other religions participating in American society, what about the Jews, Hindus, Muslims, Jains, Bhuddists and many other religions that are not based on the Bible? What do these groups have to say and why don't they stand up against the topic of evolution ? The reason the intelligent design ( ID ) took place was because it showed lower recruitments in the church after these people graduated High School and thus these wackos thought to teach these kids this sort of mumbo-jumbo. It is pretty messed up to teach kids religious beliefs in school, what happens there was another person in that school that was not of the same religion? Now it gets kind of sticky. Long story cut short, a theory is a theory so is ID and so is God and so is religion and if you start giving different weights to them then you are really screwing the balance of education. Also they don't teach this sort of crap in other countries, no wonder the whole world thinks of us as red-necks and gun carrying freaks that shoot dark african males.
Richard Dawkins has falsified research and not followed the scientific method, and has been basied and let his Atheism show in his works. Evolution, has turned into an Atheist basied story. Science has become the New Atheism. If there is to be a seperation of church and state, why is the Atheist church/religion allowed to teach their religion in public schools in the form of Evolution? I mean Evolution supports and promotes Atheism by saying "God does not exist". This makes Atheists hypocrits.
Remember, Slashdot does not have a -1 disagree moderation, and no, troll, flamebait, and overrated are not substitutes.
Evolution and Creation are BOTH THEORIES.
Christ haven't any of you even tried to discover how to get from a simple amino acid to DNA? That's a whole hell of a lot further leap than some stupid missing link between a fish and a cammel.
Go and read the work by Michael Behe about the problem of Irreducible Complexity. If you are smart enough to prove him wrong, publish a paper on it.
I'm sick to death of people claiming that it's just the right wing christians who want fairness to our kids. Some people think aliens made us. Some people believe in God. Hell some people believe that the anthropomorphic principle is responsible for the creation of man (the more we think about ourselves, the more we create ourselves.)
I don't fit into any camp or ride on any bandwagons but the THEORY of evolution has a whole lot of gaps, has never been PROVEN and as such is a fucking THEORY. Only a tiny percentage of mankind even believes in evolution if you include everyone in the world instead of just a few "learned" men in the US and the European nations.
Stop making this a fucking issue of religion and thereby insulting those of us who refuse to be bullied into believing a half-finished theory.
My $0.02 will always be worth more than your â0.02, so
Why don't you all just say it:
You hate religious people, especially Christians.
Even though you'll allow them to vote (for now) and pay taxes, you don't want them to have any say in the education those taxes buy.
Is the truth so hard to say?
Holy mineral replacement, Batman! What's with all of the anger monkeys here?
I'm a bit annoyed by the stupid moderation on subjects like this, which amounts to a bunch of "YES MAN". Someone thinks evolution is great? +5 Insightful! Someone else says that people who think ID is cool are a bunch of retards? +5 Insightful! Someone who thinks ID offers an alternative viewpoint to something that cannot be observed? -5 Troll!
Seriously, this place needs a rectal craniotomy. All of you left-wing and right-wing nutjobs need to give your dogmas a rest and have some civilised discussion.
Oh, wait. I forgot where I'm posting this to.
A wise person makes his own decisions, a weak one obeys public opinion. -- Chinese proverb
Which is fine. That's what ID does. But what ID does not do is require the tremendous leap of faith needed to believe in punctuated equalibrium or the unbelievable randomness required for evolution to have gotten from particles to people.
The best, strongest evidence of evolution is equally strong evidence of ID.
Name one prediction that has been born out that could not be equated to natural selection?
Why don't you tell us about how the fossil records failure to demonstrate the Darwinian concept of evolution has resulted in the new punctuated equalibriam theory of the day meant to shore up all of the academics who staked their livelyhood to the perpetuation of evolution?
...and I might be ready to consider your assertion that "Scientists have clear evidence of the evolutionary process throughout history via these fossils".
Leaving aside the fresh, stretchy, squishy organics within Mary's "68 million year old" fossilised T Rex leg bone for a moment, what the fossil record does actually show us - viewed from a Noturalist or Materialist perspective, of course - is stasis and isolation, plus in the case of the Cambrian Explosion, masses of body plans happening in a timescale instant.
Entombment for fossilisation must also happen very, very rapidly before scavengers can eat or scatter the remains (at every scale from micro to macro). This tends to point not at mild and moderate ID, but way past it to Creationism.
"Modern" birds have been found in stratigraphically older layers that dinosaurs, did you know that? Phut goes the dinos-to-birds theory you had in mind only a few seconds ago. Lucy was widely hailed as a missing link between ape and man, then more quietly un-hailed as being more different from either apes or humans than they were from each other. Such is the fate of all of the homonids so far, other than the frauds and the many which have been reclaissified as either fully human or fully ape. And the harder you look at these things, the worse it gets.
Another point (if I had the time I could post hundreds of kilobytes on this alone) is that it's not limited to the fundies. Consider leading Atheist Antony Flew, who after careful examination of the evidence now rejects evolution.
There's so much you have to not know in order to remain an evolutionist - so many observations that have to be either discarded or at best accorded the whackiest justifications - and yet somehow the idea is supposed to have an unquestioned monopoly in science teaching? Why? Could iot be for religious reasons?
One of the scariest aspects of the origins debate is that outside ID, much of the organised opposition includes people like industrialists who take the view that since God's going to burn it all down in the end anyway, there's no particular point in taking care of nature! D'oh?
Again, there's reams and reams of stuff that you have to not know (about the Bible, in this case) to be able to hold that view.
The wilful ignorance is terrifying, and doubly terrifying because it's typical on both ends of the spectrum.
Hello? Is this thing on?
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
No, it's not. It's NS + mutation. Where did you come from?