As far as the current debate.. How do you prove something that happen way in the past? Because one beleives science says one thing does not mean it is correct… I remember a book a number of years ago, about a number of science fact with were proven… Well it turned out all of the science
facts proven were disproven later…

Life cannot have possibly evolved; the resulting life that has been created is just too dumb and poorly designed. I mean, look at the penguins – talk about unintelligent design – why would anyone build penguins out of bird DNA? It would be much easier and intelligent to make something like that out of mammal DNA. After all they can’t fly, so why are they a type of bird? Duh. So all life must have been created by a designer, but that designer was a bit … slow. I mean, I just dare you to take a look at a wombat and look me in the eye and tell me that whoever built that goofy thing was intelligent. And don’t even get me started on the human appendix. What is that thing for? Not only is it useless, it also tends to EXPLODE at random intervals, killing the organism. Smooth move, designer. Nice one. And those woolly mammoths you made, what was the point of that? They’re all dead, Mr. Designer. Why design something that was doomed to die before any of us could appreciate them? So much wasted design effort. In fact, most living species were designed with major flaws that have caused them to go extinct. These are obvious, amateurish design mistakes that are, frankly, dumb. So we can only surmise that life was designed by a dimwitted being of some kind. Who created freaking mosquitoes for us to enjoy. And blind cave crayfishes. And frogs that can only lay their eggs on one weird species of plant that lives up in the tops of tall rainforest trees. And billions of stars that have absolutely no purpose at all. Creating all those stars couldn’t have been easy, why not just make them all smaller and closer to us if they were needed to light up the sky, rather than going through the trouble of making them so huge and spreading them all over the universe like you did. That was a lot of needless work on your part. C’mon, designer, you’ve got to think about this stuff. Here’s a clue: maybe if hadn’t been flitting all over the universe stupidly creating useless galaxies and stuff, you could’ve spent a wee bit more time figuring out what to do with our appendixes. LIKE HAVING THEM EXCRETE MOSQUITO REPELLANT!

New Scientist Article http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn7915

and i think that most politicians will try to sound “open” to many ideas, because it makes them sound reasonable, without any specifics (i.e. direct support or condemnation of i.d.), because specifics nail them down to a viewpoint that people can disagree with. they respond in this manner on most every OTHER issue, why should this one be any different?

My reaction was the opposite. Chopra appears to be a lot less loony than I thought he was.

So, the outcome of the mutation process IS random, i.e. unpredictable, but the selection pressures that act on the population containing that mutation are not.

Wow, Deepak Chopra is a loon.

A little bit on the quote from Bush by Michael Shermer. I think it is pertinent to McCains quote.

Even if they are, the fact that a process has random elements does not guarantee a random outcome. Ask any casino owner. The term “convergent evolution” recognizes this–many similar features (e.g. eyes) have clearly evolved multiple times, with different pathways and mutations leading to a similar outcome.

The primary objection many religiously inclined scientists have to Creationism/ID is that a God who has to micromanage the creation of individual species seems kind of…well…stupid.

The passage that you refer to is correct as far as I can tell, it says that cretionism does not necessarily come in conflict with scientific data if the act of the creation of the universe is discussed (maybe because there’s no such scientific data)

My Ancient History teacher told our class that she got a complaint from two parents. They claimed that their daughter had left home because of her alleged religious indoctrination. It seemed that this girl had been raised in a very strict religious community that did not allow the introduction of heretical thought.

All this teacher had done was teach her the basic tenets of major world religions other than her own… this alone was enough for her to question her basic assumptions about the universe, causing her to split with her family.

Sometimes, I wonder what the arguments were like between the girl and her parents when she broke from her faith. I would have loved to have been there… to see her stand up to authority and assert her independence… That young girl did more to create her own freedom than any government or authority could ever do for her.

If ID – or any other religious beliefs are taught in school through the Social Sciences, we will be empowering people to change their lives for the better.

Of course, some people will see this as useless, as it is just substituting one religion for another, but if religions are free (or are forced) to contradict one another, the contradictions will become more apparent – to believers.

There’s another young girl out there ready to question everything she has ever assumed… and she doesn’t know it yet.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creationism

1. I disagree with your use of “Creationist� in that sense, though I understand what you’re saying. In my mind, there is a big enough philosophical difference between theistic evolutionism and creationism in all other forms that it merits making the distinction in the terminology. Your focus seems to be that the fundamental aspect of creationism is the act of creation, i.e. influence of a deity. In that sense, a religious evolutionist is a “creationist�, it’s just creation for him is evolution. Given that “Creationism� itself is being used as a label for the alternative to evolution, that makes evolutionary creationism an oxymoron. It also makes communication on this topic more confusing than it needs to be.

2. There appears to be a typo in the article, second paragraph:
“while others maintain the scientific data is compatible with creationism� should be “incompatible�.

There’s one element of Evolution as it is often presented that I think makes theistic evolutionists uncomfortable, which is what makes them give ID an ideological foothold. I quote from the Discovery Institute website:

>>Is intelligent design theory incompatible with evolution?
It depends on what one means by the word “evolution.â€? If one simply means “change over time,â€? or even that living things are related by common ancestry, then there is no inherent conflict between evolutionary theory and intelligent design theory. However, the dominant theory of evolution today is neo-Darwinism, which contends that evolution is driven by natural selection acting on random mutations, a purposeless process that “has no specific direction or goal, including survival of a species.â€? (National Association of Biology Teachers’ Statement on Teaching Evolution). The theory of intelligent design specifically challenges this neo-Darwinist claim.

http://www.discovery.org/scripts/viewDB/index.php?command=view&id=2190

The characterization of natural selection and random mutations as a purposeless process with no specific direction or goal is the underlying feature for attention. From a theistic position, god is using evolution as his method for generating the diversity of life. Thus there is a need for god to somehow be guiding the process – god has some intent and some means for influencing the random mutations and natural selection so that he can achieve his goals. But if evolution is directionless and goalless, then that makes in difficult to argue that god is the provider of that direction and the guider to the goal.

What does that statement about evolution being directionless and goalless really mean? Within the mechanisms of Evolution (as they have been identified to date) there does not appear to be any mechanism for determining some goal and then changing to reach that goal. Random mutation is just that – random, unguided changes. Natural selection is a process of weeding where individuals with the most advantageous traits statistically survive longer and reproduce more than those with less advantageous traits. Advantageous is determined by the ecology and circumstances, including circumstances that are affected by the individuals in question. For instance, sexual selection is a process where animals determine their mating partners, thus affecting the reproductive success value of traits. So even when species affect their environments, that effect is not necessarily conscious on the species’ part. An example would be early Native Americans killing off the larger mammalian species in North America, thus affecting their ability to continue living off those species. Or cyanobacteria (blue-green “algaeâ€?) generating oxygen through photosynthesis and thereby changing the atmosphere. There is no structure determining what the environment is going to be, then shaping exiting life forms to meet the coming environment. Changes to species occur in response to changes in the environment, not prior to the environment changing, even if the species itself is causing the environmental change.

Notice the underlying assumption – “random” mutation, “natural” selection. These processes are defined in such a way to preclude their being a guiding force behind them. How do we prove that the mutations are random, and not subtly influenced? How do we disprove some guiding hand intervening in natural selection every once and a while? The religious would hold that these features are not quite so random.

Well, we don’t see this “hand of God� in action. We don’t see changes occurring toward specific goals that we can project from the changes themselves. We don’t witness a non-random sequence of mutations. And without direct evidence, science cannot presume it exists and is present. So science looks at processes as uncontrolled and evaluates them for their ability to achieve the results that we see. And when we do this, we find that it seems to work out.

Now ID proponents would have us believe they don’t work out, that the naturalistic laws for biology (evolution) somehow don’t quite add up, and there is a gap that can’t be reconciled. This “gap� is the opening for “Design�. What are their indicators of this gap? Irreducible Complexity (IC) and Specified Complexity (SC) are the current proposals. But these two “indicators� are only the justification of the premise that there is a gap. The problem is they presuppose the gap, then generate indicators for this gap based upon assuming it exists. Even so, when these two justifications are examined scientifically, they fail on the merits. They are based on assumptions that aren’t valid, they’re flawed in premise, or they use statistics in invalid ways. Thus the “evidence� for the gaps is shown to be faulty.

What does this mean for the religious believer who wants to accept evolution while retaining god? I submit that there’s still a hint of room in the “random mutation� and “natural selection� angles for some Divine influence, though that influence must be subtle.

I used the term “creationism” to (loosely) refer to someone that believes that the universe was created by someone, rather than springing into existence by itself or whatever other way of coming about without divine interference.

You can check this article:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creationism

http://www.theocracywatch.org/audio-video.htm

Sticks – in my experience, “Humanities”, by the early ’80s, was a collection of several subjects, each of which had a good historical basis for being taught in schools in England. These were things like history, geography and, yes, religious education. At the time I thought it was just an umbrella term for those topics I didn’t like very much (no equations, no chemical symbols, no rules), but with the benefit of hindsight it does seem to be an appropriate term.

Anyway, back onto the BA’s post…

Phil, you do know, don’t you, that the Great Green Arkelseizure theory has never been widely accepted outside Viltvodel VI? Who, apart from a Jatravartid, could handle living in perpetual fear of The Coming Of The Great White Handkerchief??