If you haven't gathered by now, I think Darwinism (the unguided-by-intelligence mechanism of random variation and natural selection) is pure pseudo-science, and an intellectual joke. And, so far, the Darwinists have done nothing to disuade me of this opinion, and everything to confirm it.
Here is the piece that prompted this post:
Darwinists Want To Ban Intelligent Design From Not Just Science Classrooms, But All Classrooms
Darwin's defenders don't want intelligent design just forced out of the science classroom, they want it banned from all classrooms. I predicted some months ago that the claims of Darwinists that intelligent design should be relegated to philosophy, social studies or comparative religion courses (when was the last time you heard of a public high school with a comparative religion course??) would not stand the test of time. I knew that as soon as some school opted to play by the Darwinists' new rules those rules quickly would be changed. And here it is.
Frazier Mountain High School outside of Bakersfield, CA has decided to offer an elective philosophy course about intelligent design. You would think that the dogmatists at the ACLU or American's United for Separation of Church and State would be patting themselves on the back at this point. But no.
Instead, the school district is issued with an ultimatum according to the Bakersfield Calfiornian which reports that the districts superintendent received a nasty letter from Americans United for Separation of Church State saying in part:
“Pull the intelligent design class at Frazier Mountain High School,” was the letter’s ominous message, “or we file an injunction.”
What is it that has these United Americans all upset? Well, the school has the nerve to offer a philosophy, not science, course that encourages students to "discuss and debate existing theories" including "components of the intelligent design theory, introductory philosophy, Darwin’s theory of evolution and the origins of life according to Greek mythology." The nerve.
Darwinists have long argued that intelligent design should only be taught in social studies, history, or philosophy courses. But, now that some schools are doing exactly that they apparently think that the theory is too dangerous to be taught in any classes. This is censorship, pure and simple. If there is one lesson that the Darwinists would be smart to learn, its that the forbidden fruit always taste sweetest.
Babies. Your theory won't stand intellectual scrutiny, so you call in the Big Guns. Somehow this fails to convince me of the truth of your position. It also makes me think you have something to hide. But how irrational of me.
5 comments:
Take note of the original course description, which listed one speaker who had declined to speak in that class, and another who died in 2004. It also said the class might use videos including "Thousands... not Billions", "Grand Canyon: Monument to Catastrophe" and "Rocks of Ages or Rock of Creation?". Have you joined the Young Earth Creationist movement now?
A local paper (The Mountain Enterprise) dug up details on 23 of the 24 videos listed as possible course materials; 22 of those were produced by advocates of YEC or ID. That certainly looks like an effort to pitch religious ideas in the class to the exclusion of other ideas -- either religious or scientific.
The proposed instructor for the course is qualified to teach Geography and Health (and coaches a soccer team), but not to teach any hard science course. Ultimately, though, calling a course a philosophy course (probably to match the instructor's social science degree) simply will not fly if the content is primarily about physical or biological processes or evidences. An effort to pass it off as something it is not discredits the course and the ID movement.
As a side note, you do an excellent job of supporting the impression that ID advocates have no real argument or support, just whines about being oppressed by The [Scientific] Man. Keep up the good work!
You may be right about this one, Michael, if it is actually a junky course filled with YEC videos, and such.
Oh, and as a side note, you do an excellent job of supporting the impression that Darwinists are afraid to look at ID arguments as they actually stand (have you read Behe, Dembski, et al, yet, or is your position still, "I don't have to read them! There's nothing there!"), instead being satisfied that disagreeing with someone's blog posts settles the issue.
Michael, you do try hard, and I appreciate it, but you fail to sway me. I cannot take you seriously if all you do is throw stones and refuse to read the primary ID sources. There you'll find the "real arguments and support". But I don't really think you're interested in taking that risk.
I have not read their books because I am increasingly convinced that it would be an absolute waste of time. I have read complete articles by Behe, Dembski, Johnson, and others; transcripts of Behe's testimony at the Dover ID trial; and "information" releases from places like the Dover Institute. Even in those relatively small items, ID arguments are not consistent, make errors of fact, and make errors of logic. If they cannot distill their position into something coherent, I do not expect the full treatment to be any better.
To take a direct example, Behe's direct examination (by counsel for the defendants) during the Dover trial was very clear that ID does not require a supernatural designer, and he quotes from his book about that. You can perhaps argue that there is design without specifying a designer, but you absolutely cannot have a scientific hypothesis of design without specifying the designer (or the method of implementing the design).
His extended analogy with the Big Bang is ultimately a red herring. In the case of the Big Bang, the evidence points overwhelmingly to it happening; but the standard theory is silent as to why it happened. ID uses tendentious evidence to make a claim about purpose rather than mechanism, and because of that, it really is not science.
He also makes a great deal of the fact that scientists call parts of the cell "machines", but fails to explain why that is scientifically significant. Atmospheric cell structures have the same characteristics -- they have well-defined components and the results "depend sharply" on the arrangement and interactions of those parts -- but no one seems to think we have "Intelligent Weather".
There are none so blind as those who will not see. Did it ever occur to you that their articles, court statements, etc, might make plenty of sense in light of the fuller exposition they give in their books? Or are you satisfied to have the minimal reason to dismiss all of this without fully understanding it? Would you be satisfied with my thinking if I based all opinions on Richard Dawkins, say, by only reading small articles by him, snippets of interviews with him, what ID'ists have to say about him, etc, without having read cover to cover The Blind Watchmaker, The Selfish Gene, and so on?
Atmospheric cell structure. Gosh. I never thought of that. Why they are just like feedback-regulated nanotechnological assembly lines, proton-powered motors, rhybozomes, chaperone enzymes, etc. Why didn't I see that before?
Honestly, this is getting tiresome, Michael. Comment all you like in the future, but it is unlikely that I will be responding.
It occurred to me that some statements might be adequately supported in the full books, which is why I tried to limit my comment to errors that cannot be cured with further support.
For example, a scientific hypothesis absolutely must describe a mechanism to be accepted as science. For gravity, this is that objects are attracted to each other in proportion to the product of their masses divided by the square of the distance separating them. For evolution, this is that beneficial variations propagate by out-surviving or out-reproducing less beneficial variants. ID has proposed no such mechanism and the (so far) universal claim is that it does not have to.
Behe testified that ID is "easily falsifiable" by proposing an experiment to see whether bacteria could evolve a motive mechanism like flagella. He stated that a hundred thousand generations would be a plausible scale to test this, since it could be done in two to four years. This is in sharp contrast to his paper with Snoke on multi-point mutations, which claimed that a hundred million generations (20,000 years, according to the same generation time) are needed for a rather less drastic change. He has repeated those numbers over time -- a several-year experiment to falsify ID, but evolution of a protein folding change taking several orders of magnitude longer -- so it is more than a simple mistake. In one place or the other, he is being dishonest.
Post a Comment