| Topic: |
Religions > Bible |
| User: |
"Richard Dawkins" |
| Date: |
02 Mar 2006 09:30:22 PM |
| Object: |
What Are They Afraid Of? |
What Are They Afraid Of?
By Dr. John Morris, Ph.D.
Creation/evolution issues have been a constant subject in the news media
recently, much of the reporting slanted and poorly-informed, all of it
negative towards creation. Nevertheless, the events are real and warrant our
attention.
A school board in Dover, Pennsylvania, a small farming community, recently
voted to allow a brief mention of Intelligent Design in biology classes. ID
was not to be "taught," nor was evolution removed, and most certainly
Biblical creation was not mandated, but evolutionists reacted with a fervor
reserved for this one issue. In an ACLU-orchestrated move, several local
parents filed a lawsuit to maintain an evolution-only perspective, inviting
the testimony of well-known evolutionists. Meanwhile, evolution-supporting
individuals and organizations poured money into the district, mounting a
successful political campaign against the "errant" school board members,
replacing them with others leaning towards evolution. ID advocates had their
champions too, leading to a media frenzy quite overshadowing the minimal
facts of the case and size of the school district.
Similarly, debate has been raging in Kansas. There the state school board
had established new state curriculum guidelines, which neither introduced
creation nor removed evolution. Rather it allowed all the data to be taught,
not just that supporting evolution. It permitted the exquisite design of
living things to be acknowledged and studied. Once again, the same aggregate
of partisans began crusading in support of evolution. Knowing the school
board's majority was behind the new guidelines evolutionists boycotted the
hearings and instead took their case to a sympathetic press, who almost
never correctly reported the facts.
The question arises then, if evolution is so solidly proven, what are
evolutionists afraid of? Why must evolution be protected from scrutiny? Why
must students be shielded from other views? Why not present all the
pertinent facts and encourage the students to think critically, as a good
scientist should? Would this not be a good educational technique? Would this
not produce better citizens and scientists?
Evolutionists purport that there is no real science supporting intelligent
design, that ID is just religion, or at least a "backdoor" to religion. But
the facts are that many secular scientists, through observation and
experimentation and based on the scientific evidence and data they've
obtained, have come to the conclusion that life has been designed, not
created by mere chance from nothing.
Science involves conducting research, using the scientific method in various
disciplines, and reporting on the data and results. There's no religion in
the facts. ICR has recently discovered groundbreaking evidence about rock
dating, carbon-14 in diamonds, excess helium within zircons, and other
geologic data supporting a young earth. ICR is adamant that this science be
available for scrutiny by critical thinkers-that students, specifically, are
able to evaluate the evidence and formulate their own beliefs If the
science points to a designer, so be it. But if the evidence suggests
otherwise, which we're sure it does not, then so be it. Let the chips fall
where they may.
Perhaps evolutionists' avoidance of these kinds of data exposes a basic
insecurity in their position. ICR has long held that evolution cannot stand
the test of science-it must avoid the light of open inquiry. Only by
limiting the debate can evolutionists hope to maintain their monopoly on
education. Yet, it serves us well to recognize that the debate involves a
deeper issue than just control of academic content. If evolutionists admit
that science does indeed support intelligent design, then they are admitting
that there is a possibility of a Creator. Perhaps what evolutionists are
truly afraid of are the implications of the presence of a higher power.
Higher power means higher authority and, ultimately, higher accountability.
--
~There are no true atheists in Christian newsgroups.~
~Science is infallible but those hiding behind it are not~
~"If the whole universe has no meaning, we should never have found out that
it has no meaning: just as, if there were no light in the universe and
therefore no creatures with eyes, we should never know it was dark. Dark
would be without meaning.~
.
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| User: "Steven J." |
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| Title: Re: What Are They Afraid Of? |
03 Mar 2006 11:58:55 PM |
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Richard Dawkins wrote:
What Are They Afraid Of?
By Dr. John Morris, Ph.D.
-- [snip]
The question arises then, if evolution is so solidly proven, what are
evolutionists afraid of? Why must evolution be protected from scrutiny? Why
must students be shielded from other views? Why not present all the
pertinent facts and encourage the students to think critically, as a good
scientist should? Would this not be a good educational technique? Would this
not produce better citizens and scientists?
One wonders (well, actually, one doesn't wonder at all) if John Morris
would be interested in encouraging "critical thinking" by allowing
proponents of evolution to present their views on the ICR website.
After all, wouldn't this encourage more critically thinking
creationists and better citizens?
Or, keeping matters focussed purely on the school curriculum, I suspect
that Morris supports "abstinence only" sex education. Assuming he
feels that the case for abstinence from nonmarital sex is "solidly
proven," then why does he not encourage students to consider "other
views?"
Okay, that was just to be provocative. There are no end of subjects to
which this argument could be applied. If we (Morris, you, and I
alike, I assume) are so sure that the Nazis murdered six million Jews
during their rule over Germany, why doesn't Morris ask that Holocaust
deniers be allowed to prevent evidence against this view, and encourage
the students to "think critically?" Then, of course, there are
geocentrist creationists; why should they not be allowed to present
the evidence against "Copernicanism" in astronomy class? We want, of
course, students to hear both sides and learn all the "pertinent
facts."
The short answer, of course, is that many of the things ID proponents
want taught are pertinent, but not facts. In the Dover trial, for
example, it was noted that a text students were encouraged to read
stated that evolutionary theory predicts that frogs will be genetically
closer to trout than, say, horses are, but this is not in fact an
implication of evolutionary theory (horses and frogs share a more
recent common ancestor with each other than either shares with trout,
and so should be approximately equidistant genetically from trout).
Other ideas ID proponents want students exposed are logical errors:
e.g. the false dichotomy, "either known natural causes acting in known
ways explain something, or intelligent design acting in unknowable ways
does," ignoring the possibilities of known causes acting in unkown
ways, or unknown causes, or, for that matter, designers who can
actually be studied scientifically.
Evolutionists purport that there is no real science supporting intelligent
design, that ID is just religion, or at least a "backdoor" to religion. But
the facts are that many secular scientists, through observation and
experimentation and based on the scientific evidence and data they've
obtained, have come to the conclusion that life has been designed, not
created by mere chance from nothing.
This is a Dagwood sandwich of untruths. First of all, no one has
proposed that life "has been ... created by mere chance from nothing."
Second, there is no scientist who has been led to suspect intelligent
design from the evidence alone; every scientist, and virtually every
nonscientist, who embraces ID has started from a religious conviction
that there must be room for the supernatural in science, and then set
out to find a gap big enough to stuff God into.
Science involves conducting research, using the scientific method in various
disciplines, and reporting on the data and results. There's no religion in
the facts. ICR has recently discovered groundbreaking evidence about rock
dating, carbon-14 in diamonds, excess helium within zircons, and other
geologic data supporting a young earth. ICR is adamant that this science be
available for scrutiny by critical thinkers-that students, specifically, are
able to evaluate the evidence and formulate their own beliefs If the
science points to a designer, so be it. But if the evidence suggests
otherwise, which we're sure it does not, then so be it. Let the chips fall
where they may.
The ICR has not convinced anyone except other creationists that there
is "excess" helium in those zircons, or that its scraps of problems for
conventional dating count for anything against the consilience of many
different lines of evidence for an ancient Earth and universe. Even
the ID proponents at the Discovery Institute don't want to be tied to
the ICR's young-earth nonsense.
Perhaps evolutionists' avoidance of these kinds of data exposes a basic
insecurity in their position. ICR has long held that evolution cannot stand
the test of science-it must avoid the light of open inquiry. Only by
limiting the debate can evolutionists hope to maintain their monopoly on
education. Yet, it serves us well to recognize that the debate involves a
deeper issue than just control of academic content. If evolutionists admit
that science does indeed support intelligent design, then they are admitting
that there is a possibility of a Creator. Perhaps what evolutionists are
truly afraid of are the implications of the presence of a higher power.
Higher power means higher authority and, ultimately, higher accountability.
First of all, the "debate" is not conducted in classrooms. What
honest, reasonable person would wish it to be? We don't trust high
school students to decide for themselves whether or not to smoke or
drink, although the evidence on these matters is simpler to study and
evaluate than the detailed evidence on the age of the Earth and common
descent.
Students are taught established, mainstream scientific theories, not
fringe theories that might, in the future, prove their worth (or
pseudoscientific apologetics posing as theories). Neither the
hard-core creationists have bothered to produce (much less submit to
laboratory testing) any sort of theory of creation, predicting the
results we would expect from creation. "Something, somewhere, somehow
is wrong with evolutionary theory" is not, itself, a theory, and "there
are gaps in the evidence for evolution" is not, by itself, any evidence
for creation.
Indeed, the most striking feature of ID (and often of creationism) is
their refusal to provide any sort of testable predictions about the
methods and design philosophy of the Designer/Creator. There is
nothing, after all, in the idea of Creation or Design that implies that
the Creator/Designer is any more interested in our moral, physical, or
spiritual welfare than we would be in those of a petri dish of
genetically engineered bacteria. One wonders if they fear that even
the discovery of a Higher Power might *not* imply a Higher Authority or
higher accountability -- or at least, that it isn't the Higher
Authority they want it to be.
Of course, there are many Christians (the ICR complains about them
occasionally) who accept evolution. They don't seem to have got the
message that evolutioinary theory is an attempt to dodge their
responsibillity to God. But neither do they claim that gaps in current
scientific theories provide evidence for (or against) their theological
views.
-- [snip]
-- Steven J.
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| User: "VoiceOfReason" |
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| Title: Re: What Are They Afraid Of? |
03 Mar 2006 09:13:26 AM |
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Richard Dawkins wrote:
What Are They Afraid Of?
By Dr. John Morris, Ph.D.
Creation/evolution issues have been a constant subject in the news media
recently, much of the reporting slanted and poorly-informed, all of it
negative towards creation. Nevertheless, the events are real and warrant our
attention.
A school board in Dover, Pennsylvania, a small farming community, recently
voted to allow a brief mention of Intelligent Design in biology classes. ID
was not to be "taught,"
Talking about ID in a *classroom* means that teaching it was mandated.
nor was evolution removed, and most certainly
Biblical creation was not mandated,
News flash: ID *is* Creationism, as its history clearly shows.
but evolutionists reacted with a fervor
reserved for this one issue.
American citizens tend to get upset when fringe groups try to violate
their constitutional rights. People want to teach their children their
religion in their own way, not have some fringe group force everyone's
kids to sit through a minority's religious diatribe.
In an ACLU-orchestrated move,
As opposed to the DI-orchestrated move that started the whole mess?
Notice how quickly the DI ran away when things got serious.
several local
parents filed a lawsuit to maintain an evolution-only perspective,
The parents wanted only science to be taught in science class. Imagine
that.
inviting
the testimony of well-known evolutionists.
In a court case concerning what is and is not science, the testimony of
scientists is appropriate, is it not? ID is not science, as was
clearly demonstrated in court.
Meanwhile, evolution-supporting
individuals and organizations poured money into the district, mounting a
successful political campaign against the "errant" school board members,
replacing them with others leaning towards evolution.
In other words the local citizens canned the lying incompetents who got
the district involved in this mess in the first place. Do you have a
problem with democracy?
ID advocates had their
champions too, leading to a media frenzy quite overshadowing the minimal
facts of the case and size of the school district.
So you suggest that violating someone else's constitutional rights
"just a little bit" is okay, or that violating "only a few people's"
constitutional rights is okay? Such is the first step to oppression.
Ask not for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.
Similarly, debate has been raging in Kansas. There the state school board
had established new state curriculum guidelines, which neither introduced
creation nor removed evolution. Rather it allowed all the data to be taught,
not just that supporting evolution. It permitted the exquisite design of
living things to be acknowledged and studied. Once again, the same aggregate
of partisans began crusading in support of evolution. Knowing the school
board's majority was behind the new guidelines evolutionists boycotted the
hearings and instead took their case to a sympathetic press, who almost
never correctly reported the facts.
Kansas citizens got fed up with their local wackos too. Good for them.
The question arises then, if evolution is so solidly proven, what are
evolutionists afraid of? Why must evolution be protected from scrutiny? Why
must students be shielded from other views? Why not present all the
pertinent facts and encourage the students to think critically, as a good
scientist should? Would this not be a good educational technique? Would this
not produce better citizens and scientists?
Allowing some fringe group to sneak its religious beliefs into a public
school science classroom does not enhance children's science education.
Evolutionists purport that there is no real science supporting intelligent
design, that ID is just religion, or at least a "backdoor" to religion. But
the facts are that many secular scientists, through observation and
experimentation and based on the scientific evidence and data they've
obtained, have come to the conclusion that life has been designed, not
created by mere chance from nothing.
While this claim is made frequently by Creationists, it's significant
that we never see a list of the names of these "many secular
scientists."
Science involves conducting research, using the scientific method in various
disciplines, and reporting on the data and results. There's no religion in
the facts. ICR has recently discovered
"There's no religion in the facts," followed by material from the
Institute for *Creation* Research? Do you have any clue how inane that
is?
Perhaps evolutionists' avoidance of these kinds of data exposes a basic
insecurity in their position. ICR has long held that evolution cannot stand
the test of science-it must avoid the light of open inquiry.
Of course. ICR has long held that evolution is wrong, regardless of
the preponderance of evidence. They are hardly a source of
objectivity.
Only by
limiting the debate can evolutionists hope to maintain their monopoly on
education.
You should review the material from the only public debates that matter
- the ones in the courts. When allowed to state their case on an equal
footing, the Creationists lose every time. Only by manipulating the
political process does Creationism get noticed at all.
Yet, it serves us well to recognize that the debate involves a
deeper issue than just control of academic content. If evolutionists admit
that science does indeed support intelligent design, then they are admitting
that there is a possibility of a Creator. Perhaps what evolutionists are
truly afraid of are the implications of the presence of a higher power.
Higher power means higher authority and, ultimately, higher accountability.
Ah, finally the Big Lie that science is incompatible with belief in
God. Here's an example of 10,000+ clergy who prove that claim is
wrong:
http://www.uwosh.edu/colleges/cols/religion_science_collaboration.htm
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| User: "_AnonCoward" |
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| Title: Re: What Are They Afraid Of? |
03 Mar 2006 10:16:40 AM |
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"VoiceOfReason" <papa_fox@cybertown.com> wrote in message
news:1141398806.736796.282960@j33g2000cwa.googlegroups.com...
<piggybacking>
It would seem that RD is late to this party.
Here is a link to a previous discussion: http://tinyurl.com/e5x5o
And my reply in particular: http://tinyurl.com/gqhqr
<snip>
Ralf
--
AA# 2250
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* ^~^ ^~^ *
* _ {~ ~} {~ ~} _ *
* /_``>*< >*<''_\ *
* (\--_)++) (++(_--/) *
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We must at all times stand in opposition to the entanglement
of religious authority with political power. The outcome is
invariably an abomination.
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