Fletis Humplebacker wrote:

Duane Bozarth wrote:
Fletis Humplebacker wrote:

"Duane Bozarth"

Fletis Humplebacker wrote:

"John Emmons"


...

As for your "fairness" statement, there is nothing fair about the so called
"intelligent design" campaign. It is religious fundamentalism and evangelism
trying to force it's way into the arena of public education.

No, it's an attempt to balance secular fundamentalism for the sake
of a fair education.

"Fair" is in the eye of the beholder.

Fair 'nuff.


Science, like life, isn't a sport
w/ rules of "fair play" in the sense you're implying here.

I was talking about the education of science, not science itself.


It's based
on the best available knowledge at the time and as well as the subject
under discussion evolves w/ time. A fair amount of the physics my HS
instructor was teaching wasn't even conceived of when he was doing his
undergraduate training just as in biology the knowledge of DNA and gene
mapping is something new within our lifetimes. The problem is, what
you're advocating just doesn't make it on the scene as actual science
despite the protestations of vocal advocates, hence the fallback to
claims of deserving "fairness".

Then you misinterpreted the viewpoint. When you teach that we
crawled out of the mud it isn't science either. Many people want
their tax monies spent with some consideration to them instead
of just a biased secular view. That would be fair to the unbiased mind.

What is taught is the best _scientific_ understanding of how things
happened.

That's not true. Many errors are found in school textbooks,
especially in the science field. Students often learn what the teacher
learned.

http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles...e.asp?ID=17966
A study commissioned by the David and Lucile Packard Foundation in 2001
found 500 pages of scientific error in 12 middle-school textbooks used by 85
percent of the students in the country.

You're again letting your theology get in the way of the
issue. If you want a theological being or basis for the non-scientific
portion, that's fine. The point is, that is theology and/or philosophy,
not science.

It isn't quite that simple. If you teach kids that there must be some kind
of natural answer to life and the universe, we just don't know it yet,
you are tilting the table, offering skewed reasoning and doing them a
disservice. The matter of origins will and does naturally come up in
science classes, saying that many leading scientists see evidence
of intelligent design and many don't isn't preaching theology.

It was relevent to John's comment about evolutionists knocking
on church doors.


Not really. The point was only on actions, not numbers.

Yes, really. The assumption he made was a common error in
that one either believes in science (whatever that means) or
they embrace religion but they can't do both.

Science is the study. To exclude ID (unfairly) when many scientists
do see evidence of it isn't science either. But as you may well know
science isn't limited to what has been proven categorically.

Back to this specious "fair" argument again...we dealt w/ that already.


No, you tried to dismiss it.

The point is that once you bring in this extra-terristrial, there is no
science left--it's now magic.

There doesn't need to be a conflict between an intelligent designer
and science. I think secularists are overreacting.

And, of course, they think the ID'ers and creationists are overreacting
in the other direction.

The problem is the IDers are trying to force the removal of best
practice current science from the educational system in favor of
pseudo-science.

The thing I always think of is "what if when they all get to their final
reward they discover it all did come from "the Big Bang" and that is how
it was chosen to do Creation?" What a waste of effort on something that
didn't really matter while they could have been doing something useful
and perhaps even important! OTOH, if the other side turns out wrong, so
what? They'll have a pretty useful description of how it all worked
that will have produced some useful insights into biological processes
that will have indirectly, at the very least, influenced medicine, etc.

Maybe in the end, science will admit
defeat in understanding (I doubt it, but it's possible, I suppose) and
the only rational explanation will turn out to be the supernatural. If
so, it bodes ill for our ability to progress much further in the
biological sciences as everything we think we understand will have been
shown to have been just a fluke of the point in time and point of
reference which can change at any time when this external power decides
to change the ground rules. As you see, that doesn't make any sense,
but it is the logical conclusion of demanding something other than
natural processes as what science deals with.

I don't see any logic in that statement. Scientists do change prevailing
views from time to time as more is learned. How that excludes an
external power or suggests that it will change ground rules or how it has
anything to do with the external power escapes me.

That's a problem then...if one is forced to resort to some supernatural
being as intervening to explain any physical process, then there is by
definition of the word "supernatural" a complete loss of
predictibility. Ergo, one now no longer has a science since the
cosmological principle has been violated.

How it suggests "that it will change ground rules or how it has
anything to do with the external power" lies in the presumption of the paragraph--being forced to admit defeat in understanding implies that one reaches a point in which scientific exploration has reached a complete and utter impasse which would imply that at a very fundamental level one has come to a point at which there would be results which are not consistent w/ nature and those points are impossible to be resolved. In that case, one has a conundrum that leads to the inability to predict anything for sure since the very basis has been shown to be to be "violatable" in some instance.

That there are areas in which we still lack complete understanding is a
totally different concept than the concept of throwing up one's hands
and saying "we don't know" in the sense that it is unknowable and that
some all powerful force unrestricted to using "natural" forces caused an
event.

The references the "why" as opposed to "how" questions are rightly left
to some explanation beyond the physical sciences and, in my reading of
Einstein, Hawking, et al., it is in that context alone that they invoke
the concept of a Deity.

In the end, it's a question of whether your side can ever manage to get
over the overreacting to what science says and means and quit feeling
threatened in ones' position in the world on the basis of some
theoretical explanation that is our best effort to understand the "how"
of how the universe "ticks".

If you can ever generate a coherent and complete explanation that stands
up to peer review on details, then you may even contribute something to
the argument, but as already noted, as long as there is a reliance on
the supernatural for intervention after the initial event, then you've
left the scientific realm.

It's been at least a rational discourse, but needs to come to an end in
r.w so I'll close w/ this.