Bush endorses Intelligent Design in the Classroom

[redhatlinux]

Bush bashers, you are all so full of SH!T, its not funny. Get your chicken sh1t asses over to IRAQ and see first hand. Remember, a terrorist bomb, at this moment is waiting to blow you and your family to pieces.

 

[Rainsford]

Originally posted by: redhatlinux
Bush bashers, you are all so full of SH!T, its not funny. Get your chicken sh1t asses over to IRAQ and see first hand. Remember, a terrorist bomb, at this moment is waiting to blow you and your family to pieces.

There is something pretty funny about combining fearmongering with calling someone a chickensh!t. "You chickensh!t, you need to be afraid and terrified and believe that only Bush can save you from the terrorists who are otherwise going to kill you and everyone you care about. AHHHHHHH!"

 

[Thump553]

The ironic thing is that those who promote this sort of stuff shake their heads in wonder when they read (or more likely, see on TV) statistics on how US students are falling behind the rest of the developed world in important educational skills.

If we waste our kids' valuable educational time, and our money, shoving pseudo-science religious claptrap down our kids throats in school we will only suffer as a nation. This is hardly Scopes Trial II as this Bush characterizes it.

 

[shira]

If the "theory" of Intelligent Design is taught in classrooms alongside Evolution, then I think that all other "theories" with empirical support equal to that if ID should also be taught.

For example, I've just come with a neat theory called, "Instantaneous Creation" ("IC"). My theory is that each individual is actually the only real thing in "its" universe, and that everything the individual thinks it "perceives" is actually merely a brain state created by the individual itself. So any gap in the evolutionary record - or any non-gap - is just a "dream", as it were. The individual can, from moment to moment, create any version of reality it wants, and is so clever that it can forget the imaginings of the previous instant in time.

What IC means is that ALL theories are completely false (except IC itself). The beauty of this theory is that it is in complete accord with the "rantings" of the imagined philosopher "Rene' Descartes". Descartes (is imagined to have) said, "I think; therefore I am". BEAUTIFUL!! By logical extension, "I think, therefore EVERYTHING is!"

I hope I've convinced "you" (yuck, yuck, yuck - I'm imagining I'm communicating with other sentient creatures by means of a device known as a "web forum") how pure IC is. It's the only theory that agrees completely with what is known (by me) to be absolutely true: my own consciousness. No assumptions, no unnecessary data, no nothing. IC rules (and should be taught to everyone).

To REALLY show the power of IC: What do you say when you truly, finally understand something? How about: "I C"? QED

 

[imported_Pedro69]

Originally posted by: redhatlinux
Bush bashers, you are all so full of SH!T, its not funny. Get your chicken sh1t asses over to IRAQ and see first hand. Remember, a terrorist bomb, at this moment is waiting to blow you and your family to pieces.

Help! Help! The evildoers are coming, or was it the communists or the Liberals? jeez so many evildoers so little time.

 

[Harvey]

Originally posted by: redhatlinux
Bush bashers, you are all so full of SH!T, its not funny.

Of course, it's not funny, but we have to try to laugh at him just to keep from crying at all the damage that sick jackoff POS has done to the country and the whole freaking world.

 

[shira]

Originally posted by: redhatlinux
Bush bashers, you are all so full of SH!T, its not funny. Get your chicken sh1t asses over to IRAQ and see first hand. Remember, a terrorist bomb, at this moment is waiting to blow you and your family to pieces.

Are you trying to prove to us that Bush has created hell-on-Earth in Iraq?

Wow. You are a very convincing debater. How could I possibly have thought that Bush was a weenie?

 

[EyeMNathan]

Originally posted by: cquark

Originally posted by: magomago
Aside from the already countless threads on this....eventually if we just start attributing things to God and say "end of discussion" we will never further scientific knowledge and begin to lag behind other countries, especially in the emerging fields of biotechnology. Plain and simple.

True. In the cases where Intelligent Design creationism focuses on an area of a biology that we don't yet understand, it is nothing more than scientific defeatism. Their argument is that since we don't understand now, we might as well give up. That attitude won't get us anywhere, and we're already lagging behind other countries like South Korea and the EU states.

American scientists and engineers didn't say we couldn't get to the Moon because no one had ever done it before. They worked long hours, figured out hard problems that nobody had ever solved before, and they sent a man to the moon. That's the type of approach that biological researchers all over the nation apply on a daily basis.

What has Intelligent Design ever done for us, despite millions of dollars spent over the last 15 years? It's established no scientific results, provided no experiments to enhance our understanding of biology, and has developed no new technologies. Instead, it says we should give up in an era where our knowledge of biology is expanding exponentially. I don't have space to list all the accomplishments of biology in the last 15 years, but certainly all of you have heard of the Human Genome Project for one.

ID Creationism is religious fundamentalists preaching scientific defeatism, so they can get their dogmas in American schools, nothing more.

Very very well said.

 

[Deudalus]

What has Intelligent Design ever done for us, despite millions of dollars spent over the last 15 years? It's established no scientific results, provided no experiments to enhance our understanding of biology, and has developed no new technologies. Instead, it says we should give up in an era where our knowledge of biology is expanding exponentially. I don't have space to list all the accomplishments of biology in the last 15 years, but certainly all of you have heard of the Human Genome Project for one.

ID Creationism is religious fundamentalists preaching scientific defeatism, so they can get their dogmas in American schools, nothing more.

Actually, that's not entirely true. I suppose I'll play the devil's advocate.

Disclaimer: Intelligent Design does not equal Christianity. I am not a Christian but I do beileve in Intelligent Design. Furthermore, Intelligent Design and Darwin's theory of Evolution are not at odds with one another unless you choose to put them at odds. I personally believe in both.


The fact is, there are many scientists that believe in Intelligent Design (note: I didn't say Christian Creationism I said Intelligent Design) and there are some well known atheists that have recently changed their minds on the subject as well. Furthermore, there are alot of scientists who disagree with Intelligent Design but they feel that Intelligent Design proponents are asking key questions that are vital to the furthering of science in general:

Link

Also found this interesting on the topic:

By Jonathan Witt

Special to The Times

British philosopher Antony Flew has been called the world's most influential philosophical atheist. As far back as his debates with Christian apologist C.S. Lewis in 1950, he argued that there simply wasn't enough evidence for a creator.

Now Flew has changed his mind.

Those who admired his intellect when he was an atheist should listen carefully to his reasoning now ? for if a man suddenly becomes persona non grata for changing his mind, then the possibility of reasoned civil discourse withers.

That's a tough warning to heed, however, because Flew takes issue with the bedrock of modern materialism: pre-biotic evolution.

In a recent interview (www.biola.edu/antonyflew), Flew points out that even if Charles Darwin's theory of random variation and natural selection can explain how organisms evolved, the theory does not explain one crucial question: Where did a living, self-reproducing organism come from in the first place?

Flew insists that the scientific establishment has simply failed to answer this question persuasively, and he singles out Richard Dawkins, another influential British atheist and leading proponent of Darwinism:

"Richard Dawkins constantly overlooks the fact that Darwin himself, in the 14th chapter of 'The Origin of Species,' pointed out that his whole argument began with a being which already possessed reproductive powers."

Those eager to expunge God's fingerprints from nature weren't concerned by this shortcoming in Darwin's material explanation for life, because Darwin and his contemporaries thought a single cell was a simple blob of protoplasm. How hard could it be for nature to randomly produce something so simple?

In those days the cell was a black box, a mystery. But in the 20th century, scientists were able to open that black box and peek inside. There they found not a simple blob, but a world of complex circuits, miniaturized motors and digital code.

We now know that even the simplest functional cell is almost unfathomably complex, containing at least 250 genes and their corresponding proteins.

Explains New Zealand geneticist Michael Denton, each cell "is in effect a veritable micro-miniaturized factory containing thousands of exquisitely designed pieces of intricate molecular machinery, made up altogether of one hundred thousand million atoms."

The odds of a primordial soup randomly burping up even one protein strand of moderate length are dramatically less than one chance in 10 to the 150th power.

It's hard to grasp how long these odds are ? one followed by 150 zeros. We know that a lot of strange things can happen in a place as big and old as our universe, but as mathematician and philosopher William Dembski explains in the Cambridge University Press book "The Design Inference," the universe isn't remotely big enough, old enough, or fast enough to generate that much complexity.

Nor have attempts to explain this complexity as the natural outworking of the laws of nature proven successful. The best explanation? Intelligent design.

Most contemporary biologists will have none of this. Harvard geneticist Richard Lewontin is refreshingly open about their reason. He admits their prior commitment to see only material causes forces them to "produce material explanations, no matter how counterintuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated. Moreover, that Materialism is absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door."

Lewontin's approach isn't science. It's dogma. Flew's method is more objective. He has decided to follow the evidence wherever it leads. "It now seems to me," he says, "that the findings of more than 50 years of DNA research have provided materials for a new and enormously powerful argument to design."

Such evidence has drawn Flew from atheism to a non-specific theism. He isn't ready to accept the God of a particular religion, nor does he believe in an afterlife. The change is, nevertheless, significant. He no longer inhabits a worldview where the miraculous and the irrational are synonymous.

The amazing complexity of even the simplest cell; the information-bearing properties of DNA; the exquisite fine-tuning of the laws and constants of physics that make organic life possible; the Big Bang of the cosmos out of nothing ? these signs of intelligence do not compel our belief in a God who thundered from Mount Sinai, lay in a manger or hung from a cross. But the evidence does have metaphysical implications, drawing us to a still place of wonder where such notions can be reasonably entertained.

Jonathan Witt is senior fellow and writer in residence at Discovery Institute's Center for Science & Culture in Seattle.

Personally I say:

Its tough to allow Intelligent Design because it opens the door for church to be taught in public schools which is a bad thing IMO.

However, its tough to say that Intelligent Design so flawed that it can't be taught while evoultion and the big bang theory are equally flawed, yet they are taught on a daily basis.

 

[dmcowen674]

Originally posted by: cquark
Topic Title: Bush endorses Intelligent Design in the Classroom

Topic Summary: American science continues its decline.

American and science, two words that do not exist here anymore

 

[Jhhnn]

Evolution makes no attempt whatsoever to explain the origins of life, but rather to explain its diversity and the how and why of its changes occurring over geological time. And does a good job of it.

Ambiogenesis, concerning the origins of life, is another subject entirely. There is very limited evidence wrt ambiogenesis- according to plate tectonic theory, the earth's molten core and solid continents are continuously reforming the earth over millions of years, leaving few traces older than the late precambrian, about 350M years BCE. According to that same theory and also astrophysical estimates, the earth itself is ~ ten times older, at least 3.5B years... A few fossils have been found older than an estimated 2.5B years old, very simple fossils...

Well, unless you're a believer in ID, which is merely justification for christian dogma- within that theory, the earth is only ~8000 years old, and all the geological, astrometric and radioactive decay evidence was just an elaborate ruse by the Diety to convince us otherwise...

Bush's endorsement just proves that Marx was right about one thing, Religion is the opiate of the masses, and the current admin is all in favor of everybody dummying down on Jesus...

edit-typo

 

[Deudalus]

Well, unless you're a believer in ID, which is merely justification for christian dogma- within that theory, the earth is only ~8000 years old, and all the geological, astrometric and radioactive decay evidence was just an elaborate ruse by the Diety to convince us otherwise...

You couldn't be further from the truth. Did you even read the link I posted?

"Lewontin's approach isn't science. It's dogma. Flew's method is more objective. He has decided to follow the evidence wherever it leads. "It now seems to me," he says, "that the findings of more than 50 years of DNA research have provided materials for a new and enormously powerful argument to design."

Such evidence has drawn Flew from atheism to a non-specific theism. He isn't ready to accept the God of a particular religion, nor does he believe in an afterlife."

ID doesn't say Jesus, Christ, or the Holy Ghost created the Universe and Earth. It simply says that I believe this wasn't an accident.

Furthermore, I'm not saying that there is a higher power for sure. All I am saying is that it can't be ruled out either. If we are forced to rule out everything that we cannot totally explain then that throws Evolution and the Big Bang Theory out of the window and we are back at square one.

 

[chrisms]

Originally posted by: Todd33

Originally posted by: chrisms
Trying to teach students how we got here, however scientific, is trying to teach something none of us knows.

So what do we "know"?

Do you "know" how gravity works and where is comes from?
The strong nuclear force?
Weak nuclear force?

Science is just providing the best guess at the time, based on observation and experimentation and it's peer reviewed by countless educated people.

What exactly does presenting biblical stories in a science class do for anyone? It's just spreading children's fables and possibly damaging our long term competitiveness in science.

I have a better use of Federal effort, how about killing all the tax exemptions of the churches that preach politics?

The issue with teaching evolution is that many people (educated or not) believe these "children's fables" to be true and have a strong interest in passing these beliefs on to their kids. To make school attendence compulsory and then to teach a theory contradictory to a religion the child has been raised with all his/her life is a problem that needs to be fixed. If Bush is suggesting we throw in Intelligent Design theory as an aside to the scientific facts which have been found, then I do not think that is too extreme.

 

[miketheidiot]

If we are going to teach 'creation science' as an alternative to evolution, then we should also teach the stork theory as an alternative to biological reproduction.

Several thousand years ago, a small tribe of ignorant near-savages wrote various collections of myths, wild tales, lies, and gibberish. Over the centuries, these stories were embroidered, garbled, mutilated, and torn into small pieces that were then repeatedly shuffled. Finally, this material was badly translated into several languages successively. The resultant text, creationists feel, is the best guide to this complex and technical subject.

"Geology shows that fossils are of different ages. Paleontology shows a fossil sequence, the list of species represented changes through time. Taxonomy shows biological relationships among species. Evolution is the explanation that threads it all together. Creationism is the practice of squeezing one's eyes shut and wailing 'does not!'"

 

[miketheidiot]

Originally posted by: chrisms

Originally posted by: Todd33

Originally posted by: chrisms
Trying to teach students how we got here, however scientific, is trying to teach something none of us knows.

So what do we "know"?

Do you "know" how gravity works and where is comes from?
The strong nuclear force?
Weak nuclear force?

Science is just providing the best guess at the time, based on observation and experimentation and it's peer reviewed by countless educated people.

What exactly does presenting biblical stories in a science class do for anyone? It's just spreading children's fables and possibly damaging our long term competitiveness in science.

I have a better use of Federal effort, how about killing all the tax exemptions of the churches that preach politics?

The issue with teaching evolution is that many people (educated or not) believe these "children's fables" to be true and have a strong interest in passing these beliefs on to their kids. To make school attendence compulsory and then to teach a theory contradictory to a religion the child has been raised with all his/her life is a problem that needs to be fixed. If Bush is suggesting we throw in Intelligent Design theory as an aside to the scientific facts which have been found, then I do not think that is too extreme.

i think that people should be shown their garbage beliefs for what they are.

 

[Todd33]

Great rant on ID:

http://www.balloon-juice.com/?p=5130

 

[mect]

Originally posted by: Thump553
The ironic thing is that those who promote this sort of stuff shake their heads in wonder when they read (or more likely, see on TV) statistics on how US students are falling behind the rest of the developed world in important educational skills.

If we waste our kids' valuable educational time, and our money, shoving pseudo-science religious claptrap down our kids throats in school we will only suffer as a nation. This is hardly Scopes Trial II as this Bush characterizes it.

Actually, with the amount of time typically wasted in the K-12 classrooms, there's all kinds of filler time for whatever they want to teach. Looking back, I could have skipped every other day in high school and still done fine. Whether or not ID should be taught in the classroom should be dependant on its acceptance in the scientific community. As of right now, I don't beleive it has anywhere near enough acceptance.

 

[cquark]

Originally posted by: Deudalus

What has Intelligent Design ever done for us, despite millions of dollars spent over the last 15 years? It's established no scientific results, provided no experiments to enhance our understanding of biology, and has developed no new technologies. Instead, it says we should give up in an era where our knowledge of biology is expanding exponentially. I don't have space to list all the accomplishments of biology in the last 15 years, but certainly all of you have heard of the Human Genome Project for one.

ID Creationism is religious fundamentalists preaching scientific defeatism, so they can get their dogmas in American schools, nothing more.

Actually, that's not entirely true. I suppose I'll play the devil's advocate.

Disclaimer: Intelligent Design does not equal Christianity.

You need to look at the history of the ID creationism movement, which is outlined in their Wedge document, where the founders outline their multi-pronged legal and public relations strategy to put creationism in the public sphere by removing obvious references to religion. They explicitly spell out their religious agenda in the Wedge document, in individual writings of the founders, and even in early versions of the Discovery Institute web site, though they've scrubbed the current version clean of any Christian references.

I am not a Christian but I do beileve in Intelligent Design. Furthermore, Intelligent Design and Darwin's theory of Evolution are not at odds with one another unless you choose to put them at odds. I personally believe in both.

Then you don't understand one or both ideas.

However, its tough to say that Intelligent Design so flawed that it can't be taught while evoultion and the big bang theory are equally flawed, yet they are taught on a daily basis.

It's quite easy, because ID creationism is not a scientific theory: it makes no testable predictions and has no observational or experimental support.

 

[cquark]

Originally posted by: Deudalus
ID doesn't say Jesus, Christ, or the Holy Ghost created the Universe and Earth. It simply says that I believe this wasn't an accident.

While ID creationists are careful never to name their Designer, their founding document and other works make it completely clear who they think it is. ID creationism also makes considerably stronger claims than I believe this wasn't an accident. By the way, evolution certainly doesn't say that life evolved by accident. There's a reason that many evolutionary theories have the word selection in them--they're describing processes that aren't accidental or random.

 

[cquark]

Originally posted by: Deudalus
Did you even read the link I posted?

I read it. Your article contains a lot of common non-sequitors and ID creationist fallacies, but nothing I haven't seen many times over. As others have pointed out, abiogenesis is a separate and active area of study from evolution and evolution does not depend on any particular hypothesis about abiogenesis.

Explains New Zealand geneticist Michael Denton, each cell "is in effect a veritable micro-miniaturized factory containing thousands of exquisitely designed pieces of intricate molecular machinery, made up altogether of one hundred thousand million atoms."

It's a mistake to attempt to draw analogies like this if you want to understand biology, as cells really don't work much like our factories with their specialized machinery. Even physics is considerably different at such scales. At our scale, the only attractive force we notice is the Earth's gravity. At the molecular scale, every object has noticeable secondary electromagnetic attractions to each other. A cell's "molecular machinery" is a lot more like long chains of pop beads than anything we build.

The odds of a primordial soup randomly burping up even one protein strand of moderate length are dramatically less than one chance in 10 to the 150th power.

Those odds are completely irrelevant, because evolution isn't a random process. Evolution works much more like Scrabble, where useful pieces are accumulated over many iterations, than the one time lottery that this calculation is based on. When you do a computer simulation of the iterative model, you find that you can get such a sequence in thousands of generations, so it's virtually certain and not improbable at all.

Furthermore, I'm not saying that there is a higher power for sure. All I am saying is that it can't be ruled out either.

Evolution, and for that matter all of science, implies nothing about the existence or nonexistence of God. It does show that certain fundamentalist interpretations of Genesis are incorrect, but God is not a well-defined entity whose existence can be scientifically tested.

 

[Hayabusa Rider]

I have no problem with Bush believing it should be taught. I would have a problem if he uses his office to make it so.

 

[Tab]

Originally posted by: Deudalus

Well, unless you're a believer in ID, which is merely justification for christian dogma- within that theory, the earth is only ~8000 years old, and all the geological, astrometric and radioactive decay evidence was just an elaborate ruse by the Diety to convince us otherwise...

ID doesn't say Jesus, Christ, or the Holy Ghost created the Universe and Earth. It simply says that I believe this wasn't an accident.

What does Intelligent design say exactly? I wonder who designed it? :roll: I gurantee you any group backing ID is fundie Christian one.

How is it a accident? What plan did what deviate from?

Nobody cares if you teach your kids if you think god plopped us here, people care when you start teaching kids your own personal beilefs.

 

[dannybin1742]

I have a better use of Federal effort, how about killing all the tax exemptions of the churches that preach politics?

i agree the thing is that the bush clan pushes their "patriot pastor" BS, how sick is that

 

[dannybin1742]

i'm surprised rip hasn't posted with his useless questions that are repeated and refuted every time in every one of these threads

 

[Tab]

Originally posted by: dannybin1742
i'm surprised rip hasn't posted with his useless questions that are repeated and refuted every time in every one of these threads

He's on permanent vacation