Catching up with the past on evolution

[question everything]

The Daily Breeze

Wednesday, May 11, 2005

Catching up with the past on evolution

Religious intolerance and the latest phony theory, "intelligent design," is driving education back into the 18th century.
By Tom Teepen

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 "macro-evolution." 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.

(snip)

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 anti-evolution saints six votes to the demon evolutionists' four. The movement hides behind the public's general and ordinarily admirable sympathy for fair play.

(snip)

Tom Teepen is a columnist for Cox Newspapers in Atlanta. His e-mail address is [e-mail].


Find this article at:
http://www.dailybreeze.com/opinion/articles/1566937.html

[atommom]

1. Sad, but true.

[triguy46]

2. A race to the intellectual bottom

We are a nation of the self-deluded, who believe that because we are America, only good things will happen. In the rest of the world, growing smarter and richer, we are a plum waiting to be picked. The rest of the world is dominating in science and technology, grabbing every available US graduate school slot. Our debt means that our new daddys all are a different skin color than real 'murricans. So we fiddle while our empire collapses.

The corollary to the ID BS, is the growing, well funded movement, for expunging higher ed of all those intolerant chemists and mathematicians who infuse their curricula with leftie, pinko diatribes. "Freedom to learn" I believe it is called. To learn to goose step is more like it.

I cry for my children, what they will have to endure.

[ixion]

3. a plum has a juicy middle tier, of which we have none

we are a hollowed-out society: vapid, vain and devoid of intellectual curiosity collectively. We are spiritually bankrupt, ethically compromised, material-driven group of has-beens who simply haven't realized that our time as the world's golden child is now over.

That realization is going to be a painful one, when it finally hits.

[triguy46]

5. cool avatar

[ixion]

9. thanks!

:hi:

[phantom power]

4. Coming attractions

http://www.salon.com/comics/boll/2005/05/12/boll/index1.html

[PATRICK]

6. Intelligent design

is still a circular observation and flawed logic. the sense that there is something to it HAS grown exponentially with Einstein like-musings which only expands the concept beyond the imagination or intellect of man. It will always be a mystery of faith somewhat enlightened by scientific discovery but never certain even with the sheer accumulation of knowledge. In fact, a God creating a mega supra organization of "organic" universe, super structures beyond the capacity of human science to grasp
is surely no help to anti-evolutionists, but quite able to swallow both science and fantasy and spit them out for radical reconsideration at a later date, as had happened the past centuries.

Apparently, the believers have no confidence in faith itself, but instead want to possess the magic power of science, not the massive truths of a barely plumbed yet finite universe and what could lie beyond.

Taking a BIG bite out of the apple rather than evolving. That is not religious progress by the way, but old sin. It's been done over and over again as a symptom of fallen ignorance lusting for prideful absolutes and become a replacement to God. Not the open-minded scientists but the idolaters of the self are casting the stones of their own failing against truth itself. Ignorance or a lie never survives. No wonder it is feared by certain types of humans.

Being born again is spiritual evolution too as well as progress from child sacrifice to a fire god to ethical monotheism, one can persuasively argue. So why deny the model, perversely resisted by man's unique ability to knowingly usurp nature,to the workings of God's natural world?

[yellowcanine]

7. Intelligent Design a fancy name for the "God of the Gaps"

Or to put it another way, it is the flawed logic argument known as
a fallacy of distraction of the type "argument from ignorance" (because something is not known to be true, it is assumed to be false).

In the case of intelligent design - because the evolution skeptic cannot explain or imagine how something could have occured (evolved), it must not have occured (evolved). Thus an intelligent designer must have done it. (The conclusion also utilizes the false dilemma and the appeal to belief as well)

In the past, the "God of the Gaps" was used to explain anything that science (or reasoning) couldn't explain. Thus until we understood that germs cause disease, disease was attributed to a supernatural force (Gods or devils). Mental illnesses are still sometimes attributed to demons by fundamentalists.

[PATRICK]

8. Very good

and there are even some conservatives who love to misuse the laws of logic themselves. However another big one that I can't begin to grasp is the Jesuitical flexibility of fundies totally untrained for the demands of this kind of debate.

There are several big faith contradictions in trying to appropriate the misleading language. You even get the strong impression that this is thinly disguised ruse with code words whose content is for legalistic trickery only. As such it is an insult to the faith, a lie, plain stupidity and self vacating for any argument based on honest law, religion or logic- all BEFORE you get to the debate on evolution itself.

Which is an admission they can't win any debate in any of those forums but must simply ram a fallacy down society's throat against the truth of nature as it apparently is created to be, against the gifts of reason as they were created to be and against human society as it was hoped to be.

The character of this strategy is pride of self, sneakiness, lying, glory in force and inflicting of tyranny and punishment- which of course the core and unfiltered preponderance of Scripture and Christian tenets are utterly and uncompromisingly against. The argument in effect is also fatally weakened by the resort to devilish tactics and lies. They cannot even face their doubt when they twist like snakes in this manner.

Hey, other Christian uprights have been here before. Nothing good comes from this cute flexing of raw political muscle and muscle-headed fantasy presuming greatly upon the invoked Deity and dependent wholly on His seemingly unending reserve of non-interference and patience with human folly. Seemingly.