anthem wrote:i wanted to respond to that line about intelligent design being a thinly disguised method of teaching religion in schools. i don't buy that argument for a couple of reasons. my first thought was that it's not a disguise at all.
It is. Its proponents claim (in public, at least) that it's not a religion. They are careful not to state
who the "intelligent designer" is.
the majority of the planet believes that this world was created by some sort of higher being.
Indeed, and the great majority of them also believe that that higher being used evolution, without any need to tinker with his creation once it was under way. To asert that he had to make changes, intervening with the process, is to belittle his creation and deny his omnipotence.
the name and nature of that being vary so greatly that for schools the idea was to simply wrap it all into one group of thought and leave it at that.
No, that's not the case. The textbook that the Dover school boar dpromoted had originally been written to promote "scientific creationism" - the attempt to shoehorn Judeao-Christian YEC-ism into science.
Every reference to "god" had been changed to "intelligent designer" and "creation" to "design." Those wer evirtually the only changes form the early drafts to the published volume. And those changes were made because YEC had been banned from state school classes on account of the constitutional prohibition of any state-sponsored religion.
it's certainly not the business of american public schools to get into which religion might be the correct one.
Right. And that's why ID is not allowed. If state schools were allowed to teach religion(s), ID might have a place in religion classes, but it still isn't a science so it has no place there.
but i also remember reading a news story about an old guy last year (i wish i could remember his name) who has been a pillar, both in the scientific community and in the atheist community for many years. he had just stunned all his atheirst friends by announcing in an interview that after so much study into dna he could no longer accept the logic of something so complex having simply evolved by chance.
Anthony Flew. He's a philosopher, and not a scientist by any means.
Somehow, he got suckered by a simplistic argument from incredulity, on the issue of abiogenesis.
logic would dictate that if you're going to teach any hotly debated topic, both sides of the debate need to be presented. otherwise, an informed decision cannot be taken. how can it be an informed decision without information?
Well, quite, but there is
no scientific debate on whether evolution is true. ID is all about PR, there's no science going on in the Discovery Institute.
They're more interested in public opinion than scientific opinion because they know who's easier to persuade.
again, without presenting all sides it's just indoctrination, rather than education. that's oppresion, and it's nothing to celebrate.
I don't see how the teaching of science constitutes oppression. Even if non-science is deliberately excluded from science classes, how does that constitute oppression?
before the trip and unlike LSD-25, mescaline (the active ingredient in peyote) is not in the tryptamine family (like DMT, 5-MEO-AMT, LSA, psilocybin, LSD-25 etc.) but some other something or another chemical group.