ID supporters don't disagree that evolution occurs on a small scale. They only disagree with evolution on a large scale, meaning they don't think evolution explains the creation of life. One ID theory I have read even uses some evolutionary theories (although in reverse). This theory states that a certain 'perfect' set of species were created, and all currently existing species as decendents of these orginals, but they have diversified over the eons making them less perfect but very different.
I think the pro-evolution crowd here had better be careful, because while they are screaming about the ID'ers being ignorant they are demonstrating that it is the evolutionists that are ignorant. The ID'ers at least have read and somewhat understand both sides of the argument, most of the evolutionists really don't have a clue what the creationist are arguing other than 'God created everything'.
Since the Pharma industry is based heavily on biology and bio-chemistry and in turn on theories of evolution, maybe we could start a campaign to equate medical drug use with support of evolution. Hit the zealots where they live (literally) by accusing them of supporting, by act, the theory of evolution if they take any medical drugs. Suggest if they really do not support evolution, they should forgo their medicine.
By this same logic, the non religious should not accept anything from any of the religious charities. For example, the next time a say hurricane hits a major US city, anyone of you that are fanatically opposed to religious should accept anything from the Salvation Army or the Southern Babtists.
Sit back and watch the fallout. All of those non believers will starve to death or die from dehydration. Either way, they are less likely to be a problem.
I say, hit them were they live, their public image.
I can't believe my ears (eyes). Why shouldn't we try to protect our kids from violence. It happens at the movie theater. How are video games (or DVD rentals) any different. It isn't so much the 8-12 year olds that are of a concern. They generally will have a parent with them before purchasing or renting rated M games. Kids older than this start to get a lot of independance, and they do things without their parents direct involvement. These are the kids that we as parents need help protecting. This may not be the same issue as exposure to alcohol or cigs, but it sure is the same thing as exposure to porn.
The video game industry is doing a good job of doing their own ratings, we don't need to government to do that. However, those ratings are meaningless unless there is some way to enforce them.
I may be wrong, but I'm willing to bet those that are complaining here either don't have kids, or are kids themselves.
Heck, what should I expect from this crowd. The majority of you (based on previous topics) don't have much in the way of morals or a sense of right and wrong. The commom mentality seems to be almost equivalent to "conspiracy theorists" and the like. Stick it too the man! Children are not adults, and they should not have the same rights and privilages as adults, and in today's society it is nearly impossible for parents to do it all.
I beg to differ. Much of science is completely a democratic process. I have a bunch of facts about something that I can't possibly observe, and I am going to generate a theory to explain the facts I have discovered. My theory only gets resonable credit if the scientific community accepts it. There are a lot of off the wall theories out in the wild, that science doesn't give any consideration to, despite the fact that they are only doing the same thing as other "proven" scientic theories are.
How do you think scientist get funding. They come up with a resonable theory, that they have to convince a bunch of other people needs more research.
Math is a fact. Most of science is anything but fact.
You can have all of the material critial of evolution you want in any biology class anywhere in the United States.
But this is what we are not doing. We are teaching evolution, and all the other parts of science as fact. The way we teach science is no different than how we teach math, as fact. That is what the kids walk away with as well. K-12 science doesn't teach to look at things critically and question the theories, mostly because they present the science they are teaching as a fact. Just because something is believed the majority of the "experts" doesn't make it fact. If this where true noone on this list could argue anything against creationism, because the majority of the population of the US believe that God created everything (in some fashion or another).
My opinion on this topic isn't well recieved here, and you will never see it on the main list because of this. So by more or less sensoring it, you are all just as responsible for propogating this false teaching of science as the education system is.
Yes, the obserbable parts of science are generally fact. The remainder is only what is the commonly agreed upon hypothosys that tries to explain something that we have no other way to explain. This is why the more controversial theories have always had a difficult time getting any attention by the science community.
Evolution is not a fact! It is what is the most commonly accepted explanation for how life started and turned into what it is today. For all we know something may turn up in the fossil record tommorow that will difinitively prove that evolution is impossible, and I'm willing to bet no matter how good the evidence most of the scientific community will take a very long time to stop believing in evolution.
I say teaching philosophy and controversy as part of the science classes is essential for our kids to grow up to be critical thinkers and not take every theory as fact, just because everyone else says it is. Talk about peer pressure...
I would like to ask the Kansas Board of Education one question: who created their designer? Another designer? Is it turtles all the way down?
There are plenty of responses to this argument. This is the worst anti-creation argument, and it is the most overused, with perhaps the execption of "ID cannot be falsified and it makes no predictions".
I'm not the original poster but let me take a stab at your first question about the fossil record not always supporting evolution.
If evolution is taken as a fact then we should see many examples (or at least some) that lead up to the formation of a new phyla. These examples should be slowly developed more many tens of millions of year. If you look at the beginning of the Cambrian era, there are from around 20-30 new phyla introduced. For this to fit in with evolutionary theory there would need to be some earlier forms of these phyla, but in fact there is none. In a short timespan (about 3 million years) these new phyla "suddenly" appear in the fossil record. We have soft bodied fossils that predate this, even fossils of very small and simple organisms. However there is nothing in the fossil record that could explain the transition from these simple organisms to the new phyla that appear at this time.
There are other examples, such as the turtle and the whale. There are no intermediate species of these animals that explain how they evolved from lizards to their current form. With both of these examples this is especially troublesome because they both leave very distict fossil records.
To address another point of contention you have with the original post reguarding this quote:
There's an unaccountably low amount of vestigal processes, especially in processes that would have no competitive advantage
I think the poster is talking about irreducibly complex structures, meaning there is a certain point in molecular biology where some cellular functions cannot possibly have been created through natural selection. If these cell's were to missing any one component, then the entire cell would no longer function at all. There are many examples of this, but I know main stream science has rejected this because the author comes to the design conclusion. I fully believe that if he had not included design as the cause for these things, that this theory would be accepted by a much larger portion of the scientific community.
You really should check your facts before spouting about something you don't know about. Most all fundamental Christians do not complain about the Lord of the Rings. They actually view it as an allegory to some of the Biblical stories; Tolkien denied this was the case. Tolkien was however a devoute Christian, along with his friend CS Lewis.
Harry Potter has been criticized by some of the very extreme fundamentalist, but most Christians accept it for what it is -- a great tool to get kids to read.
I do however give you credit for admiting that your religion is naturalism. Most scientists deny that this can be viewed as a religion despite the fact that it is the framework for an entire world view and directly biases their work just as Christian scientist are biased by their belief in God and creation.
We are nearly living in a theocracy already. We are being force fed by the media and schools a naturalist theology. Which is exactly what not teaching both sides of this argument. We are telling our kids that science has the answers, life is nothing more than meaningless random events, and we are here because of random chance alone. By not showing them that there is a controversy we are telling them that these things are absolutes and there is no room for discussion. You just cannot separate science from philosophy and ethics. It would be irresponsable to do so, just as it is irresponsable to not teach about the controversy surrounding evolution.
Another thing the The National Academies' National Research Council and the National Science Teachers Association don't give our kids enough credit. They think that this would confuse them, but they are sadly mistaken. Highschool age kids would trive on the controversy, and what better way for them to learn critical thinking. Use this as an opportunity to teach the process of looking at the evidence and refuting or validating the evidence.
First off I am a Christian. I am fairly well educated. I've studied science, history, philosophy (although I am an awful speller...). I don't pretend to have any answers, or know the right answers. Was it God that created everything - no evolution, did God just set the wheels in motion, or maybe God didn't do any of it, although I hope this isn't the case. I don't think I am different than the majority of people in the US.
I just want to pose a couple of questions to chew on.
Why is it bad that Christians want ID/Creationism in schools?
The Bible, the New Testiment especially, contains stories about events that the others witnessed and we are asked to believe because we were not their to witness them. There is some reasonable amount of historical and archeological evidence to support many parts of these stories.
Science, for a vast number of people that don't have the education or facilities to understand the math, biology, etc behind it is asking us to do the same thing. There are a handful of people, by far the minority, that truely understand the science behind microbiological theory, astrophysics, etc. What we are learning in school, is that there is no controversy to accepted scientific theories. Which isn't true. Evolution has some pretty big gaps that don't explain things like the Pre-Cambrian explosion. The Big-Bang theory doesn't explain how the actual moment of the big bang happened. The explanations require the other accepted laws of physics to be broken, just to account for that singularity that started it all. And I can be sure that some of the accept "facts" of science today in 50 years will have been proven just plain wrong by new discoveries and observations (dinosaurs evolve into birds, bring that up 50 years ago and it likely would have ruined your paleology career).
There are plenty of measurable facts in science, otherwise we couldn't have things like computers. It is unlikely that these types of facts will ever change. But, the rest of it is made up of conjecture based on the measurable facts filled in with an accepted hypothosis that seems to explain the observations and is able to somewhat accuratly make predictions.
Perhaps creationism/ID should not be taught in science class, but it seems to me that it is completely acceptable to teach as part of the humanities (history, philosophy, etc), especially since a significant part of the population believes in God. I know for a fact that in my childrens school they learned about Hannika (I told you I was a bad speller) and some African tribal beliefs. Why then, can't they give equal time to Christian beliefs?
Yes I admit it I believe in God, and that Jesus Christ is my personal savior. I not alone and I am not crazy a lunitic uneducated, or any of the other things so many of you have called Christians.
Gary Gygax is back with Wotc/TSR as of about a year ago. He is working on the 3rd edition. I think WotC has done a great job bringing AD&D back from the dead. Their products have become more focused and of higher quality. Dragon Mag. is better than it has been in years. I think the D20 system and bringing Gygax prove that they are really out to make AD&D the quality game that it once was. If you gave up on AD&D years ago and haven't looked at it in a while, I would give it a second look now (or maybe in the near future when 3rd edition comes).
Actually Gary Gygax is working for Wizards of the Coast and is one of the primary designers for the 3rd edition. They hired him back a year or so ago. If you still read Dragon Magazine, he even has articles published in there on occasion.
You guys are crazy. WordPerfect has had plenty of improvements since 6, hell 6 pretty much sucked anyway. Not to put down WP, but anything was better than 6. The latest versions 8 & 9 (ie 2000) are both very robust programs. 9 includes all kinds of enhancements for publishing your documents to XML and HTML formats, among other things. Why do you need to change your file format to have improvements? Their improvements are in areas that don't need that kind of change. I'm not really knocking Word, it is OK too, but there certainly isn't anything wrong with WordPerfect. Besides, if you are using word that just makes life a whole lot more complicated because you introduce yourself to the wonderful world of Word macro viruses (which make up around 90% of all new PC viruses). And, there is no Linux version of Word!!!
Slashdot Mirror
What about spy hunter... Its older than all of them.
ID supporters don't disagree that evolution occurs on a small scale. They only disagree with evolution on a large scale, meaning they don't think evolution explains the creation of life. One ID theory I have read even uses some evolutionary theories (although in reverse). This theory states that a certain 'perfect' set of species were created, and all currently existing species as decendents of these orginals, but they have diversified over the eons making them less perfect but very different.
I think the pro-evolution crowd here had better be careful, because while they are screaming about the ID'ers being ignorant they are demonstrating that it is the evolutionists that are ignorant. The ID'ers at least have read and somewhat understand both sides of the argument, most of the evolutionists really don't have a clue what the creationist are arguing other than 'God created everything'.
Get your facts straight!
Google finally released Google Earth for OS X! So there is hope for Mac users at least...
One must bear in mind that the Vatican doesn't even think that "Intellegent Design" has any place in a science classroom.
h tml
Check your facts. On Nov 9. the Pope said otherwise:
http://www.beliefnet.com/story/178/story_17875_1.
Since the Pharma industry is based heavily on biology and bio-chemistry and in turn on theories of evolution, maybe we could start a campaign to equate medical drug use with support of evolution. Hit the zealots where they live (literally) by accusing them of supporting, by act, the theory of evolution if they take any medical drugs. Suggest if they really do not support evolution, they should forgo their medicine.
By this same logic, the non religious should not accept anything from any of the religious charities. For example, the next time a say hurricane hits a major US city, anyone of you that are fanatically opposed to religious should accept anything from the Salvation Army or the Southern Babtists.
Sit back and watch the fallout. All of those non believers will starve to death or die from dehydration. Either way, they are less likely to be a problem.
I say, hit them were they live, their public image.
I can't believe my ears (eyes). Why shouldn't we try to protect our kids from violence. It happens at the movie theater. How are video games (or DVD rentals) any different. It isn't so much the 8-12 year olds that are of a concern. They generally will have a parent with them before purchasing or renting rated M games. Kids older than this start to get a lot of independance, and they do things without their parents direct involvement. These are the kids that we as parents need help protecting. This may not be the same issue as exposure to alcohol or cigs, but it sure is the same thing as exposure to porn.
The video game industry is doing a good job of doing their own ratings, we don't need to government to do that. However, those ratings are meaningless unless there is some way to enforce them.
I may be wrong, but I'm willing to bet those that are complaining here either don't have kids, or are kids themselves.
Heck, what should I expect from this crowd. The majority of you (based on previous topics) don't have much in the way of morals or a sense of right and wrong. The commom mentality seems to be almost equivalent to "conspiracy theorists" and the like. Stick it too the man! Children are not adults, and they should not have the same rights and privilages as adults, and in today's society it is nearly impossible for parents to do it all.
SCIENCE IS NOT A DEMOCRATIC PROCESS
I beg to differ. Much of science is completely a democratic process. I have a bunch of facts about something that I can't possibly observe, and I am going to generate a theory to explain the facts I have discovered. My theory only gets resonable credit if the scientific community accepts it. There are a lot of off the wall theories out in the wild, that science doesn't give any consideration to, despite the fact that they are only doing the same thing as other "proven" scientic theories are.
How do you think scientist get funding. They come up with a resonable theory, that they have to convince a bunch of other people needs more research.
Math is a fact. Most of science is anything but fact.
You can have all of the material critial of evolution you want in any biology class anywhere in the United States.
But this is what we are not doing. We are teaching evolution, and all the other parts of science as fact. The way we teach science is no different than how we teach math, as fact. That is what the kids walk away with as well. K-12 science doesn't teach to look at things critically and question the theories, mostly because they present the science they are teaching as a fact. Just because something is believed the majority of the "experts" doesn't make it fact. If this where true noone on this list could argue anything against creationism, because the majority of the population of the US believe that God created everything (in some fashion or another).
My opinion on this topic isn't well recieved here, and you will never see it on the main list because of this. So by more or less sensoring it, you are all just as responsible for propogating this false teaching of science as the education system is.
Yes, the obserbable parts of science are generally fact. The remainder is only what is the commonly agreed upon hypothosys that tries to explain something that we have no other way to explain. This is why the more controversial theories have always had a difficult time getting any attention by the science community.
Evolution is not a fact! It is what is the most commonly accepted explanation for how life started and turned into what it is today. For all we know something may turn up in the fossil record tommorow that will difinitively prove that evolution is impossible, and I'm willing to bet no matter how good the evidence most of the scientific community will take a very long time to stop believing in evolution.
I say teaching philosophy and controversy as part of the science classes is essential for our kids to grow up to be critical thinkers and not take every theory as fact, just because everyone else says it is. Talk about peer pressure...
I would like to ask the Kansas Board of Education one question: who created their designer? Another designer? Is it turtles all the way down?
o rm/104-1239660-1137541
There are plenty of responses to this argument. This is the worst anti-creation argument, and it is the most overused, with perhaps the execption of "ID cannot be falsified and it makes no predictions".
Look here for some answers to this question:
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/search-handle-f
I'm not the original poster but let me take a stab at your first question about the fossil record not always supporting evolution.
If evolution is taken as a fact then we should see many examples (or at least some) that lead up to the formation of a new phyla. These examples should be slowly developed more many tens of millions of year. If you look at the beginning of the Cambrian era, there are from around 20-30 new phyla introduced. For this to fit in with evolutionary theory there would need to be some earlier forms of these phyla, but in fact there is none. In a short timespan (about 3 million years) these new phyla "suddenly" appear in the fossil record. We have soft bodied fossils that predate this, even fossils of very small and simple organisms. However there is nothing in the fossil record that could explain the transition from these simple organisms to the new phyla that appear at this time.
There are other examples, such as the turtle and the whale. There are no intermediate species of these animals that explain how they evolved from lizards to their current form. With both of these examples this is especially troublesome because they both leave very distict fossil records.
To address another point of contention you have with the original post reguarding this quote:
There's an unaccountably low amount of vestigal processes, especially in processes that would have no competitive advantage
I think the poster is talking about irreducibly complex structures, meaning there is a certain point in molecular biology where some cellular functions cannot possibly have been created through natural selection. If these cell's were to missing any one component, then the entire cell would no longer function at all. There are many examples of this, but I know main stream science has rejected this because the author comes to the design conclusion. I fully believe that if he had not included design as the cause for these things, that this theory would be accepted by a much larger portion of the scientific community.
You really should check your facts before spouting about something you don't know about. Most all fundamental Christians do not complain about the Lord of the Rings. They actually view it as an allegory to some of the Biblical stories; Tolkien denied this was the case. Tolkien was however a devoute Christian, along with his friend CS Lewis.
Harry Potter has been criticized by some of the very extreme fundamentalist, but most Christians accept it for what it is -- a great tool to get kids to read.
I do however give you credit for admiting that your religion is naturalism. Most scientists deny that this can be viewed as a religion despite the fact that it is the framework for an entire world view and directly biases their work just as Christian scientist are biased by their belief in God and creation.
We are nearly living in a theocracy already. We are being force fed by the media and schools a naturalist theology. Which is exactly what not teaching both sides of this argument. We are telling our kids that science has the answers, life is nothing more than meaningless random events, and we are here because of random chance alone. By not showing them that there is a controversy we are telling them that these things are absolutes and there is no room for discussion. You just cannot separate science from philosophy and ethics. It would be irresponsable to do so, just as it is irresponsable to not teach about the controversy surrounding evolution.
Another thing the The National Academies' National Research Council and the National Science Teachers Association don't give our kids enough credit. They think that this would confuse them, but they are sadly mistaken. Highschool age kids would trive on the controversy, and what better way for them to learn critical thinking. Use this as an opportunity to teach the process of looking at the evidence and refuting or validating the evidence.
First off I am a Christian. I am fairly well educated. I've studied science, history, philosophy (although I am an awful speller...). I don't pretend to have any answers, or know the right answers. Was it God that created everything - no evolution, did God just set the wheels in motion, or maybe God didn't do any of it, although I hope this isn't the case. I don't think I am different than the majority of people in the US.
I just want to pose a couple of questions to chew on.
Why is it bad that Christians want ID/Creationism in schools?
The Bible, the New Testiment especially, contains stories about events that the others witnessed and we are asked to believe because we were not their to witness them. There is some reasonable amount of historical and archeological evidence to support many parts of these stories.
Science, for a vast number of people that don't have the education or facilities to understand the math, biology, etc behind it is asking us to do the same thing. There are a handful of people, by far the minority, that truely understand the science behind microbiological theory, astrophysics, etc. What we are learning in school, is that there is no controversy to accepted scientific theories. Which isn't true. Evolution has some pretty big gaps that don't explain things like the Pre-Cambrian explosion. The Big-Bang theory doesn't explain how the actual moment of the big bang happened. The explanations require the other accepted laws of physics to be broken, just to account for that singularity that started it all. And I can be sure that some of the accept "facts" of science today in 50 years will have been proven just plain wrong by new discoveries and observations (dinosaurs evolve into birds, bring that up 50 years ago and it likely would have ruined your paleology career).
There are plenty of measurable facts in science, otherwise we couldn't have things like computers. It is unlikely that these types of facts will ever change. But, the rest of it is made up of conjecture based on the measurable facts filled in with an accepted hypothosis that seems to explain the observations and is able to somewhat accuratly make predictions.
Perhaps creationism/ID should not be taught in science class, but it seems to me that it is completely acceptable to teach as part of the humanities (history, philosophy, etc), especially since a significant part of the population believes in God. I know for a fact that in my childrens school they learned about Hannika (I told you I was a bad speller) and some African tribal beliefs. Why then, can't they give equal time to Christian beliefs?
Yes I admit it I believe in God, and that Jesus Christ is my personal savior. I not alone and I am not crazy a lunitic uneducated, or any of the other things so many of you have called Christians.
Gary Gygax is back with Wotc/TSR as of about a year ago. He is working on the 3rd edition. I think WotC has done a great job bringing AD&D back from the dead. Their products have become more focused and of higher quality. Dragon Mag. is better than it has been in years. I think the D20 system and bringing Gygax prove that they are really out to make AD&D the quality game that it once was. If you gave up on AD&D years ago and haven't looked at it in a while, I would give it a second look now (or maybe in the near future when 3rd edition comes).
Actually Gary Gygax is working for Wizards of the Coast and is one of the primary designers for the 3rd edition. They hired him back a year or so ago. If you still read Dragon Magazine, he even has articles published in there on occasion.
You guys are crazy. WordPerfect has had plenty of improvements since 6, hell 6 pretty much sucked anyway. Not to put down WP, but anything was better than 6. The latest versions 8 & 9 (ie 2000) are both very robust programs. 9 includes all kinds of enhancements for publishing your documents to XML and HTML formats, among other things. Why do you need to change your file format to have improvements? Their improvements are in areas that don't need that kind of change. I'm not really knocking Word, it is OK too, but there certainly isn't anything wrong with WordPerfect. Besides, if you are using word that just makes life a whole lot more complicated because you introduce yourself to the wonderful world of Word macro viruses (which make up around 90% of all new PC viruses). And, there is no Linux version of Word!!!