"Duane Bozarth"
Fletis Humplebacker
Duane Bozarth

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.



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.


By letting in the possibility of a designer? That's an overreaction?


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.


No, there's no removal of anything that I know of.


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!


Again, you seem to be stuck on the either/or dichotomy. I believe in God
and the big bang, like millions of others.


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.


If someone believes in ID they have no use for scientic endevours?


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.


The cosmos self starting violates the principle too, doesn't it?


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.


You remind me of the atheist I once debated that accused me of believing
in fairy tales while he believed in facts that weren't discovered yet.


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


Your assertion that IDers are overreacting to science is a lame
attempt at trying to make your belief look better. IDers have no
problem with science, just those who would misrepresent it.


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.


I've mentioned a number of times that the scientific realm is much
larger than that. Many theories and ideas are discussed that we
can't begin to prove.


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


As long as you don't close your mind...