Excerpts From 'Intelligent Design' Ruling

[Guest guest]

 

Excerpts from U.S. District Judge John E. Jones III's ruling that struck down a school board's decision to require biology students in Dover, Pa., to hear about the concept of "intelligent design":

 

"We find that the secular purposes claimed by the Board amount to a pretext for the Board's real purpose, which was to promote religion in the public school classroom, in violation of the Establishment Clause."

 

"Repeatedly in this trial, Plaintiffs' scientific experts testified that the theory of evolution represents good science, is overwhelmingly accepted by the scientific community, and that it in no way conflicts with, nor does it deny, the existence of a divine creator."

 

"Those who disagree with our holding will likely mark it as the product of an activist judge. If so, they will have erred as this is manifestly not an activist Court. Rather, this case came to us as the result of the activism of an ill-informed faction on a school board, aided by a national public interest law firm eager to find a constitutional test case on ID, who in combination drove the Board to adopt an imprudent and ultimately unconstitutional policy. The breathtaking inanity of the Board's decision is evident when considered against the factual backdrop which has now been fully revealed through this trial. The students, parents, and teachers of the Dover Area School District deserved better than to be dragged into this legal maelstrom, with its resulting utter waste of monetary and personal resources."

 

"Defendants' asserted secular purpose of improving science education is belied by the fact that most if not all of the Board members who voted in favor of the biology curriculum change conceded that they still do not know, nor have they ever known, precisely what ID is."

 

"The citizens of the Dover area were poorly served by the members of the Board who voted for the ID Policy. It is ironic that several of these individuals, who so staunchly and proudly touted their religious convictions in public, would time and again lie to cover their tracks and disguise the real purpose behind the ID Policy."

 

"The overwhelming evidence at trial established that ID is a religious view, a mere re-labeling of creationism, and not a scientific theory."

 

"The evidence presented in this case demonstrates that ID is not supported by any peer-reviewed research, data or publications."

 

"After a searching review of the record and applicable case law, we find that while ID arguments may be true, a proposition on which the court takes no position, ID is not science. We find that ID fails on three different levels, any one of which is sufficient to preclude a determination that ID is science. They are: (1) ID violates the centuries-old ground rules of science by invoking and permitting supernatural causation; (2) the argument of irreducible complexity, central to ID, employs the same flawed and illogical contrived dualism that doomed creation science in the 1980's; and (3) ID's negative attacks on evolution have been refuted by the scientific community."

[Guest guest]

The scientists are liars.

 

Why? They claim that evolutionism is scientifically proven. While the basic structure may be proven, they leap to claim the truth of their speculations about why all this happens. They suggest 'natural selection' or 'survival of the fittest' with nothing to back it but poetry and rhetoric.

 

That is my beef with this theory.

 

Call a theory a theory and leave it at that. The kids are being deluded into believing that the world is simply an accident, a long string of accidents with no purpose or meaning. The scientists will have their reward in their empty purposeless futile lives culminating in death forever.

 

Dr. Q. Ball's science cannot reign supreme. His basic definition of reality skews all results and experiments in favor of error. Their tower of Babel is simply babel.

 

[Guest guest]

 

Modern Science

by Dr. Q. Ball

 

Clearly action in the field of the green felt plane is always initiated by the lone white ball on the plane. The colored balls move only when impacted by the white ball.

 

These random sudden movements of the white ball are caused by the random quantum flux in the field. The white color of this ball makes it more susceptible to the chance behaviour of the quantum sub-particles in the field. Therefore the white ball is the only ball that exhibits independent initiation of motion in the field.

[Guest guest]

The Judge's conclusion (and by the way, this judge is a Bush appointee) includes the following statements:

 

<blockquote>

2) the argument of irreducible complexity, central to ID, employs the same flawed and illogical contrived dualism that doomed creation science in the 1980's;

</blockquote>

 

That is, the argument of "irreducible complexity" and other related arguments are invalid, nonsense arguments.

 

 

 

[Guest guest]

 

Scientists Admit That They Are Robots

 

Consider if you will, the paradox that makes this 'ground-rule of science' ridiculous.

 

If indeed everything is controlled by natural laws, if even the chemicals in my brain are controlled by natural laws, then since I have no control over those laws of nature .... I can have no control over my mind.

 

That is, the thoughts in the brain will occur due to the forces of nature acting on the brain, and I have no control at all. I am therefore a robot, not entirely unlike a computer or the cyborg, Data on Star Trek.

 

This paradox means that either science is not the be-all and end-all as it aspires to be or that scientists really accept that they are simply robots, and there is no free will in the world.

[Guest guest]

You said:

"If indeed everything is controlled by natural laws, if even the chemicals in my brain are controlled by natural laws, then since I have no control over those laws of nature .... I can have no control over my mind."

 

 

<hr>

This is absurd. It is like saying 1 + 1 = 4

 

This is the whole problem with the ID, creationist theories. Clueless people who don't think in a logical way invent illogical statements and think they are truths. As the judge stated:

 

"most if not all of the Board members who voted in favor of the biology curriculum change conceded that they still do not know, nor have they ever known, precisely what ID is."

 

that is, the Board members don't even understand ID, but they believe it is an alternative to valid science.

They don't understand ID, or neo-Darwinism - they believe in Noah's ark theology. They are dangerous. They are ignorant.

[Guest guest]

Can you see how to control the synapses in your brain? What forces do you use?

[Guest guest]

A completely controls B.

C has no control over A.

Therefore C cannot control B.

[Guest guest]

That syllogism leads us to ask "What is C", for surely it cannot be physical. We are not ronots.

[Gaea]

 

Why? They claim that evolutionism is scientifically proven. While the basic structure may be proven

 

 

 

which basic structure do you speak of? The basic structure of evolution is selection and survival of the fittest, but you have dismissed these in your next statement:

 

They suggest 'natural selection' or 'survival of the fittest' with nothing to back it but poetry and rhetoric

 

 

 

Not true. If you will with me to a lab i can show you evolution in a day. I can put bacteria on a petri dish and watch them grow. Then i can subject them to a selection pressure, e.g. an antibiotic. Most will die but some will survive because of mutation (survival of the fittest). By the end of the day the dish is well on the way to being full again, despite the presence of antibiotic.

 

Everyone must understand that just becasue sometimes it is referred to as "evolution theory" doesn't mean it is just a theory, it does indeed have some basis in fact (though, perhaps not ALL fact).

 

 

Call a theory a theory and leave it at that. The kids are being deluded into believing that the world is simply an accident, a long string of accidents with no purpose or meaning. The scientists will have their reward in their empty purposeless futile lives culminating in death forever.

 

 

 

i don't understand why ID and evolution are mutually exclusive. There can be an intelligent designer. a supreme controller, where evolution is merely the controllers' mechanism. I agree with you on one point in that these kids should be taught ID as well as evolution and see how they can go hand-in-hand.

[Pankaja_Dasa]

 

I read bits of it, makes you think if Science will finally bury the Scienitists. /images/graemlins/crazy.gif

 

http://www.arn.org/

 

 

This Post is By Shiva from a theead in audarya.

also

 

 

In 1997 two scientists, John Walker of the UK and Paul Boyer of the USA, won a joint Nobel Prize for the discovery of a tiny motor whirring away in every cell of all plants and animals. The motor is found in the enzyme ATP-synthase and rotates at a speed of about one hundred revolutions per second (6,000 rpm.) This tiny motor is 200,000 times smaller than a pinhead. Every cell in your body, and those of all living things, has hundreds if not thousands of these motors. A human body is estimated to contain over 10,000,000,000,000,000 of them (that's ten quadrillion.)

 

The ATP-synthase motor's job is making energy for living cells. It does so by making the molecule adenosine triphosphate (ATP) from adenosine diphosphate (ADP) and phosphoric acid, a synthesis which requires an input of energy. The ATP produced breaks down to ADP again, giving up the energy by coupling itself to another chemical process within the cell which requires the energy in order to react. Energy is directed and all the products of the process are then recycled. ATP supplies the energy for the functioning of the brain, the beating of the heart and contraction of all muscles.

Dr. Walker say, "We require our body weight in ATP every day. We are turning over that amount of ATP to keep ourselves thinking and walking around." On a lazy day we might use only half our body weight, but during hard work up to a ton of ATP could be recycled in a day. It was Dr. Walker who in 1994 provided the first detailed picture of how the motor works. He used X-rays and an electron microscope to take an ‘atomic snapshot'. In 1997, M. Yoshida attached a tiny fluorescent filament so that the motor can be seen spinning under the microscope.

 

Every cell contains power packs known as mitochondria (chloroplasts in plant cells). Embedded in the membrane of each mitochondrion are the rotating disks of the ATP-synthase enzymes. The disk (think of it as the armature of the motor) consists of so-called C protein sub-units, the exact atomic structure of which are yet to be resolved - this may take another decade of research. Projecting from the armature or disk and rotating with it is a bent shaft called the gamma protein sub-unit. The free end of the shaft engages with a "hat" - a ring of six protein sub-units - three alpha and three beta units, which do not rotate but are attached to the membrane. The motor disk is driven by the flow of hydrogen ions through the membrane of the mitochondrion.

 

An ADP molecule and a phosphate ion enter each of the beta sub-units of the ‘hat' (which is shaped to facilitate the combination.) The bent axle turns eccentrically, squeezing each beta sub-unit in turn, expelling the newly formed ATP molecules. Three ATP molecules are formed with each revolution of the motor. At about 100 revolutions per second these motors recycle roughly ones body weight daily, however as demand for energy increases, the flow of hydrogen ions through the mitochondrial membrane increases the speed of the motor to meet the demand for more energy. All this to keep our bodies and brains functioning, thus making life possible - no wonder ATP-synthase is called ‘the motor of life'. As Dr. Walker comments, "It is incredible to think of these motors of life spinning around in our bodies!" Of course, the same amazing, ultra-miniature motors are spinning away in all living things, including plants, fungi and bacteria.

 

Did this motor evolve? The fact that the enzyme is the same in single-celled bacteria and in man, as well as all other forms of life, indicates that it was in perfect working order from the beginning of life on Earth. The ATP-synthase motor is very complex. Could natural selection have perfected this enzyme in the first ‘proto-cells', as evolutionists must believe? Either the motor works or it doesn't work. (Its malfunction is the cause of one form of heart disease, where the motor runs in reverse and breaks down ATP.) If the motor does not work, ATP is not made, and there is no source of energy for the cell.

 

The motor could not have gradually grown. It is composed of many proteins that are precisely shaped and with chemically active sites exactly where they have to be. Take away just one protein and the motor is useless, it had to be perfect from the outset. The membrane of the mitochondrion that holds the motors had to as well be perfectly formed to house the motors, otherwise the cell could not live.

 

So who designed this motor? Chance processes stumbling along making billions of little motors that failed repeatedly along the path of blind natural selection, or an intelligent being? Information Theory tells us that information is corrupted by chance processes. Information only derives from an intelligent source. The plan for this irreducibly complex motor is coded for by information on genes. The genetic information is translated and the motor is manufactured and assembled by a series of mechanisms which are, in total, even more irreducibly complex than the motor itself.

 

-----------------------

 

some christian scientists, interesting science

 

http://evolution-facts.org/Cruncher%20TOC.htm

 

-----------------

 

another good book is

 

http://www.geraldschroeder.com/new.html

 

this guy writes great books,

although his bang bang theory

is outdated, his other stuff is great.

 

Gerald Schroeder earned his BSc, MSc and PhD at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His doctorate is in the Earth Sciences and Nuclear Physics. Dr. Schroeder's yeshiva studies were guided by Rabbi Chaim Brovender at ITRI, and before that by the late Rabbi Herman Pollack. He is the author of Genesis and the Big Bang, the Discovery of Harmony between Modern Science and the Torah, published by Bantam Doubleday (now in six languages). His second book, The Science of G-d, published by Free Press of Simon & Schuster, was on the Barnes & Noble bestseller list for three months. He lives in Jerusalem with his wife (the author Barbara Sofer) and their five children. Professor Schroeder served in the IDF, as do his two sons, who are officers.

--------------------------

 

here is a sample on the topic of this thread

 

Evolution: Rationality vs. Randomness

 

At the basis of the theory of neo-Darwinian evolution lie two basic assumptions: That changes in morphologies are induced by random mutations on the genome; and, that these changes in the morphology of plant or animal make the life form either more or less successful in the competition to survive. It is by the aspect of nature's selection that evolutionists claim to remove the theory of evolution from that of a random process. The selection is in no way random. It is a function of the environment. The randomness however remains as the basic driving force that produces the varied morphologies behind the selection.

Can random mutations produce the evolution of life? That is the question addressed herein.

 

Because evolution is primarily a study of the history of life, statistical analyses of evolution are plagued by having to assume the many conditions that were extant during those long gone eras. Rates of mutations, the contents of the "original DNA, " the environmental conditions, all effect the rate and direction of the changes in morphology and are all unknowns. One must never ask what the likelihood is that a specific set of mutations will occur to produce a specific animal. This would imply a direction to evolution and basic to all Darwinian theories of evolution is the assumption that evolution has no direction. The induced changes, and hence the new morphologies, are totally random, regardless of the challenges presented by the environment.

 

With this background, let's look at the process of evolution. Life is in essence a symbiotic combination of proteins (and other structures, but here I'll discuss only the proteins). The history of life teaches us that not all combinations of proteins are viable. At the Cambrian explosion of animal life, 530 million years ago, some 50 phyla (basic body plans) appeared suddenly in the fossil record. Only 30 to 34 survived. The rest perished. Since then no new phyla have evolved. It is no wonder that Scientific American asked whether the mechanism of evolution has changed in a way that prohibits all other body phyla. It is not that the mechanism of evolution has changed. It is our understanding of how evolution functions that must change, change to fit the data presented by the fossil record. To use the word of Harvard professor Stephen Jay Gould, it appears that the flow of life is "channeled" along these 34 basic directions.

 

Let's look at this channeling and decide whether or not it can be the result of random processes.

 

Humans and all mammals have some 50,000 genes. That implies we have, as an order of magnitude estimate, some 50,000 proteins. It is estimated that there are some 30 million species of animal life on Earth. If the genomes of all animals produced 50,000 proteins, and no proteins were common among any of the species (a fact we know to be false, but an assumption that makes our calculations favor the random evolutionary assumption), there would be (30 million x 50,000) 1.5 trillion (1.5 x10 to power of 12) proteins in all life. (The actual number is vastly lower). Now let's consider the likelihood of these viable combinations of proteins forming by chance, recalling that, as the events following the Cambrian explosion taught us, not all combinations of proteins are viable.

 

Proteins are coils of several hundred amino acids. Take a typical protein to be a chain of 300 amino acids. There are 20 commonly occurring amino acids in life. This means that the number of possible combinations of the amino acids in our model protein is 20 to the power of 300 (that is 20 multiplied by itself 300 times) or in the more usual ten-based system of numbers, 10 to the power of 390 ( Ten multipled by itself 390 times or more simply said a one with 390 zeroes after it!!!!!) . Nature has the option of choosing among the possible 10 to the power of 390 proteins, the the 1.5 x (10 to power of 12) proteins of which all viable life is composed. Can this have happened by random mutations of the genome? Not if our understanding of statistics is correct. It would be as if nature reached into a grab bag containing a billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion proteins and pulled out the one that worked and then repeated this trick a million million times.

 

But this impossibility of randomness producing order is not different from the attempt to produce Shakespeare or any meaningful string of letters more than a few words in length by a random letter generator. Gibberish is always the result. This is simply because the number of meaningless letter combinations vastly exceeds the number of meaningful combinations. With life it was and is lethal gibberish.

 

Nature, molecular biology and the Cambrian explosion of animal life have given us the opportunity to study rigorously the potential for randomness as a source of development in evolution. If the fossil record is an accurate description of the flow of life, then the34 basic body plans that burst into being at the Cambrian, 530 million years ago, comprise all of animal life till today. The tree of life which envisioned a gradual progression of phyla from simple forms such as sponges, on to more complex life such as worms and then on to shelled creatures such as mollusks has been replaced by the bush of life in which sponges and worms and mollusks and all the other of the 34 phyla appeared simultaneously. Each of these bush lines then developed (evolved) a myriad of variations, but the variations always remained within the basic body plan.

 

Among the structures that appeared in the Cambrian were limbs, claws, eyes with optically perfect lenses, intestines. These exploded into being with no underlying hint in the fossil record that they were coming. Below them in the rock strata (i.e., older than them) are fossils of one-celled bacteria, algae, protozoans, and clumps known as the essentially structureless Ediacaran fossils of uncertain identity. How such complexities could form suddenly by random processes is an unanswered question. It is no wonder that Darwin himself, at seven locations in The Origin of Species, urged the reader to ignore the fossil record if he or she wanted to believe his theory. Abrupt morphological changes are contrary to Darwin's oft repeated statement that nature does not make jumps. Darwin based his theory on animal husbandry rather than fossils. If in a few generations of selective breeding a farmer could produce a robust sheep from a skinny one, then, Darwin reasoned, in a few million or billion generations a sponge might evolve into an ape. The fossil record did not then nor does it now support this theory.

 

The abrupt appearance in the fossil record of new species is so common that the journal Science, the bastion of pure scientific thinking, featured the title, "Did Darwin get it all right?" And answered the question: no. The appearance of wings is a classic example. There is no hint in the fossil record that wings are about to come into existence. And they do, fully formed. We may have to change our concept of evolution to accommodate a reality that the development of life has within it something exotic at work, some process totally unexpected that produces these sudden developments. The change in paradigm would be similar to the era in physics when classical logical Newtonian physics was modified by the totally illogical (illogical by human standards of logic) phenomena observed in quantum physics, including the quantized, stepwise changes in the emission of radiation by a body even as the temperature of the body increases smoothly.

 

With the advent of molecular biology's ability to discern the structure of proteins and genes, statistical comparison of the similarity of these structures among animals has become possible. The gene that controls the development of the eye is the same in all mammals. That is not surprising. The fossil record implies a common branch for all mammals. But what is surprising, even astounding, is the similarity of the mammal gene the gene that controls the development of eyes in mollusks and the visual systems in worms. The same can be said for the gene that controls the expression of limbs in insects and in humans. In fact so similar is this gene, that pieces of the mammalian gene, when spliced into a fruit fly, will cause a wing to appear on the fly. This would make sense if life's development were described as a tree. But the bush of life means that just above the level of one-celled life, insects and mammals and worms and mollusks separated.

 

The eye gene has 130 sites. That means there are 20 to the power of 130 possible combinations of amino acids along those 130 sites. Somehow nature has selected the same combination of amino acids for all visual systems in all animals. That fidelity could not have happened by chance. It must have been pre-programmed in lower forms of life. But those lower forms of life, one-celled, did not have eyes. These data have confounded the classic theory of random, independent evolution producing these convergent structures. So totally unsuspected by classical theories of evolution is this similarity that the most prestigious peer-reviewed scientific journal in the Untied States, Science, reported: "The hypothesis that the eye of the cephalopod [mollusk] has evolved by convergence with vertebrate [human] eye is challenged by our recent findings of the Pax-6 [gene] ... The concept that the eyes of invertebrates have evolved completely independently from the vertebrate eye has to be reexamined."

 

The significance of this statement must not be lost. We are being asked to reexamine the idea that evolution is a free agent. The convergence, the similarity of these genes, is so great that it could not, it did not, happen by chance random reactions.

 

The British Natural History Museum in London has an entire wing devoted to the evolution of species. And what evolution do they demonstrate? Pink daisies evolving into blue daisies; small dogs evolving into big dogs; a few species of cichlid fish evolving in a mere few thousand years into a dozen species of cichlid fish. Very impressive. Until you realize that the daisies remained daisies, the dogs remained dogs and the cichlid fish remained cichlid. It is called micro-evolution. This magnificent museum, with all its resources, could not produce a single example of one phylum evolving into another. It is the mechanisms of macro-evolution, the change of one phylum or class of animal into another that has been called into question by these data.

 

The reality of this explosion of life was discovered long before it was revealed. In 1909, Charles D. Walcott, while searching for fossils in the Canadian Rocky Mountains, came upon a strata of shale near the Burgess Pass, rich in that for which he had been seeking., fossils from the era known as the Cambrian. Over the following four years Walcott collected between 60,000 and 80,000 fossils from the Burgess Shale. These fossils contained representatives from every phylum except one of the phyla that exist today. Walcott recorded his findings meticulously in his notebooks. No new phyla ever evolved after the Cambrian explosion. These fossils could have changed the entire concept of evolution from a tree of life to a bush of life. And they did, but not in 1909. Walcott knew he had discovered something very important. That is why he collected the vast number of samples. But he could not believe that evolution could have occurred in such a burst of life forms, "simultaneously" to use the words of Scientific American. This was totally against the theory of Darwin in which he and his colleagues were steeped. And so Walcott reburied the fossils, all 60,000 of them, this time in the drawers of his laboratory. Walcott was the director of the Smithsonian Institute in Washington D.C. It was not until 1985 that they were rediscovered (in the draws of the Smithsonian). Had Walcott wanted, he could have hired a phalanx of graduate students to work on the fossils. But he chose not to rock the boat of evolution. Today fossil representatives of the Cambrian era have been found in China, Africa, the British Isles, Sweden, Greenland. The explosion was worldwide. But before it became proper to discuss the extraordinary nature of the explosion, the data were simply not reported. It is a classic example of cognitive dissonance, but an example for which we have all paid a severe price.

 

At this point we must ask the question, what has produced the wonders of life that surround us? The answer may be implied by those very surroundings. In that case the medium would be the message!

[Guest guest]

I think science can answer the 'how' questions, but it always conceitfully tries to answer the 'why' questions. Accepting the Vedic view one can see readily that the 'why' is determined by the needs of the souls and their respective karma. If we don't need the body of a pterodactyl now, then one won't be produced.

 

Science has dug up many bones and fossils that seem to show that life forms have evolved from simple to complex creatures through the eons. This is what I referred to as the basic structure - species, DNA and all that good stuff.

 

However when they try to speculate about why these changes have occurred, then they leave the realm of science and choose poetic romantic unprovable explanations. They find a couple of examples which show a one-to-one correspondence in a little dish and then assume that is the answer. If one examines a small piece of the circumference of a large circle it will appear like a straight line. But to then deduce that the line is indeed straight is hasty induction.

 

Based on the little dish, we are to assume that each of an entire species became inept at survival and that only the offspring would survive whose DNA had flip-flopped enough due to quantum flux chance in such a way as to produce a different creature that actually had the ability to survive the environment in which the parent could not. Yes, very romantic and exciting, but can I really accept it?

 

I can't, of course; firstly because I am a Vedantist, and secondly because it just doesn't sit well. You might say the species changed because of the antibiotic - yet I would ask why is there antibiotic there? Your honor, I didn't kill her, the bullet killed her.

 

The 'why' is just not within the domain of science. Isvara parama Krsna. Science clearly defines itself to be outside the domain of causality. It is time we made real men of science - of complete science.

[Pankaja_Dasa]

 

 

Basically what this is saying is, there is some proteins that each person has, all different. And Animals have it also. And we are made of these, but animals have different ones to humans. So for the protein cell to evolve it needs somehow to evolve to human. It's not so simple it says, it need the exact match, from: containing a billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion proteins and pulled out the one that worked and then repeated this trick a million million times.

 

[Guest guest]

Even Vegas gives better odds than that!

[Pankaja_Dasa]

 

Scientists are gambling with speculations.

 

Those odds don't look so good to me. Evolution- from Worms to Humans. I wonder if we become Worms again.?

 

Then it all starts again. Evolution I mean. But since evoluion doesm't have an intelligent desinger in next phase you might have a donkeys head and a camels [i'm not even gonna say it]

[Gaea]

 

 

Based on the little dish, we are to assume that each of an entire species became inept at survival and that only the offspring would survive whose DNA had flip-flopped enough due to quantum flux chance in such a way as to produce a different creature that actually had the ability to survive the environment in which the parent could not. Yes, very romantic and exciting, but can I really accept it?

 

I can't, of course; firstly because I am a Vedantist, and secondly because it just doesn't sit well. You might say the species changed because of the antibiotic - yet I would ask why is there antibiotic there? Your honor, I didn't kill her, the bullet killed her.

 

The 'why' is just not within the domain of science. Isvara parama Krsna. Science clearly defines itself to be outside the domain of causality. It is time we made real men of science - of complete science.

 

[Gaea]

these numbers aren't quite right. There's actually just less than a trillion (1,000,000,000,000) cells in the body, most of which are actually clones (i.e. they have identical proteins because they're all cloned from the original embryo). I haven't read the article you posted but yes - the odds are sometimes stupifying.

[Pankaja_Dasa]

 

 

It's talking about protein cells, just imagine, in a million years when humans turn into uber-humans. We will be able to fly in the sky.

[Guest guest]

Gaea,

 

Of course. This is the answer. The evolutionist really sees himself as a body, end of story. Their basic premises are flawed.

 

ID is the true scenario, but I doubt the flavor of ID that will be flogged by academia will have much relation to things as they are. After all, they too are simlply bags of mucus, blood and stool.

 

My hope is that ID and general interest in the topic of creation will spark a world-wide interest in the topics of the Vedas, and that truth will finally flow out of academia onto the masses.

 

Sitting in Chapters bookstore in front of the 'Eastern Religion" section I realized our main problem. There were four 'Hindu' books among over two hundred Buddhist books.

 

Ram Ram

[Guest guest]

Gaea,

 

The Vedantist sees the fossil record as proof of the evolution of the soul. That is, the soul transmigrates through 8,000,000 species of life forms before attaining one of the 400,000 human forms available.

 

These forms are clearly defined; and there are not billions of intermediary mutant forms (one-eyed cyclops, three-legged deers, etc.). While mutants may appear depending on their karma, it is not necessary that strings of successive mutations are required to leap to the next species in the DNA configuration. The soul simply leaps to the next species, much like the set of prime numbers leaps, passing so many non-primes, up to the next viable DNA configuration.

 

So natural selection and survival of the fittest hypothesis are meaningless conjecture.

 

If one were to speculate about the Vedic transmigration of the soul, one might realize that the desires and state of being at death dictate the soul's next form. The little bacteria may be attached to his warm cozy petri dish but really wishes he could tolerate that antibiotic garbage the lab assistant just dumped on him. As he dies he does indeed get a new body to match his desires: in the same petri dish but a body capable of existing in the antibiotic poison.

 

"If only I could fly I'd be safe - wow, now I'm a bird just like I wished". I'm sure it's not so simplistic, but it's good enough for me.

 

I'm sure the truth will be even more frightening to the Garden of Eden crowd than Darwin ever was.

 

Ram Ram Hare Hare

[Gaea]

 

he Vedantist sees the fossil record as proof of the evolution of the soul. That is, the soul transmigrates through 8,000,000 species of life forms before attaining one of the 400,000 human forms available. These forms are clearly defined; and there are not billions of intermediary mutant forms (one-eyed cyclops, three-legged deers, etc.). While mutants may appear depending on their karma, it is not necessary that strings of successive mutations are required to leap to the next species in the DNA configuration. The soul simply leaps to the next species, much like the set of prime numbers leaps, passing so many non-primes, up to the next viable DNA configuration.

 

 

 

I don't see what evolution has to do with migration of soul amongst the species.

 

 

So natural selection and survival of the fittest hypothesis are meaningless conjecture.

 

 

 

Due to my last comment, i don't see how this conclusion can be made.

 

 

If one were to speculate about the Vedic transmigration of the soul, one might realize that the desires and state of being at death dictate the soul's next form. The little bacteria may be attached to his warm cozy petri dish but really wishes he could tolerate that antibiotic garbage the lab assistant just dumped on him. As he dies he does indeed get a new body to match his desires: in the same petri dish but a body capable of existing in the antibiotic poison.

 

 

Yes, this is ok - but it does not exclude the existance of evolution.

 

Sorry, guest, i'm lacking the capacity to unerstand your reasoning - probably because i'm hungry /images/graemlins/smile.gif anyway, i'll have to leave it at that because i don't have internet access. So, folks, have a very merry Christmas and happy new year to all!!

 

[Guest guest]

The Dover verdict was especially damaging for leading Intelligent Design advocate Michael Behe of Lehigh University. The ruling observed: “[O]n cross-examination, Professor Behe was questioned concerning his 1996 claim that science would never find an evolutionary explanation for the immune system. He was presented with fifty-eight peer-reviewed publications, nine books, and several immunology textbook chapters about the evolution of the immune system; however, he simply insisted that this was still not sufficient evidence of evolution, and that it was not ‘good enough.’”

 

Michael Behe, whose Dover testimony was criticised by Judge Jones, argues that “structures with many complicated, interacting parts” cannot have arisen through evolution because all of the parts of a complex structure (for example the bacterial flagella) had to arise all at once.

 

However his “irreducible complexity” contention has failed to convince scientists and mathematicians on their own ground, and also finds no favour with established theological specialists like Ian Barbour (Professor Emeritus of Science, Technology and Society at Carleton College in Northfield, Minnesota), because it presupposes a false dichotomy between natural causation and divine presence.

 

Instead Barbour offers “a theology of nature in which one asks how nature as understood by science is related to the divine as understood from the religious experience of a historical community.”

 

What one must not do, he says, is to ignore or twist scientific evidence to fit an existing philosophical prejudice about the nature of God – or argue for a ‘god’ to fill holes in present knowledge.

 

Similar approaches are taken by Arthur Peacocke (winner of Le Conte Du Nouy Prize) and John Polkinghorne (former Professor of Mathematical Physics at Cambridge University, and a Fellow of The Royal Society), who are respectively seen as liberal and conservative theological thinkers with established scientific pedigrees.

 

They talk of God not as a deus ex machina who assembled the parts of the universe supernaturally according to a preconceived design, but as transcendent love generating the world in such a way that it generates itself.

 

To this Anglican view, and in a more guarded way to the position adopted some years ago by the Roman Catholic Church, the accepted theory of evolution is not a threat to theological understanding but a way of enriching it.

 

A positive evolutionary view is also taken by Anabaptist scholars like Nancey Murphy (‘Reconciling Theology and Science: A Radical Reformation Perspective’), and Calvinists such as Howard van Till.

 

Indeed, while the religious right has embraced ID as the last bastion of creationism, a number of mainstream US evangelicals, who were initially excited about it, now say they find its arguments unconvincing, having been persuaded by scientists at their own institutions and elsewhere.

 

Adds Jonathan Neal of Purdue University, Indiana, in a recent article: “The ID movement has tried to frame this debate as Religion versus Science. It is not. The ID debate is between an ID theology that is anti-science and competing theologies that are capable of incorporating scientific knowledge into their theological framework.”

 

Asks Dr Neal: “Do we really want to introduce a controversial, anti-science religious [ideology] into our public schools disguised as ‘science?’”

 

The ruling from Pennsylvania, which seeks to maintain the required separation of church and state, gives a resounding ‘no’ to that question.

 

[Guest guest]

Idea Not Based on Religion

BY: JOHN G. WEST

 

 

 

Dec 22, SEATTLE (SUN) —

 

 

Pyrrhic victory.

 

 

It's a phrase proponents of Darwin's theory might do well to ponder as they crow over the decision by a federal judge in Pennsylvania "permanently enjoining" the Dover school district from mentioning the theory of intelligent design in science classes.

 

 

Contrary to Judge John Jones' assertions, intelligent design is not a religious-based idea, but instead an evidence-based scientific theory that holds there are certain features of living systems and the universe that are best explained by an intelligent cause. No legal decree can remove the digitally coded information from DNA, nor molecular machines from cells. The facts of biology cannot be overruled by a federal judge. Research on intelligent design will continue to go forward, and the scientific evidence will win out in the end.

 

 

Still, Darwinists clearly won this latest skirmish in the evolution wars. But at what cost? Evolutionists used to style themselves the champions of free speech and academic freedom against unthinking dogmatism. But increasingly, they have become the new dogmatists, demanding judicially-imposed censorship of dissent.

 

 

Now, Darwinists are trying to silence debate through persecution. At Ohio State University, a graduate student's dissertation is in limbo because he was openly critical of Darwin's theory. At George Mason University, a biology professor lost her job after she mentioned intelligent design in class. At the Smithsonian, an evolutionary biologist was harassed and vilified for permitting an article favoring intelligent design to be published in a peer-reviewed biology journal.

 

 

Those who think they can stop the growing interest in intelligent design through court orders or intimidation are deluding themselves. Americans don't like being told there are some ideas they aren't permitted to investigate. Try to ban an idea, and you will generate even more interest in it.

 

 

Efforts to mandate intelligent design are misguided, but efforts to shut down discussion of a scientific idea through harassment and judicial decrees hurt democratic pluralism. The more Darwinists resort to censorship and persecution, the clearer it will become that they are championing dogmatism, not science.

 

 

John G. West is associate director of Discovery Institute's Center for Science & Culture, andassociate professor of political science at Seattle Pacific University.

 

[shvu]

 

About ID...

 

"I think what arouses the ire of scientists (about intelligent design) is ... the notion that it belongs in the same universe as scientific analysis," Kennedy said in a telephone interview.

 

"It's a hypothesis that's not testable, and one of the important recognition factors for science and scientific ideas is the notion of testability, that you can go out and do an experiment and learn from it and change your idea," said Kennedy. "That's just not possible with a notion that's as much a belief in spirituality as intelligent design is."

 

Cheers

 

[Guest guest]

It is just that what a material scxientist calls verification is so deeply limited to his material sense perception including his conditioned mind and he is unwilling to consider any other field of experiementation. Like on himself for instance.

 

God is Self revealing to the self that He chooses to allow that vision.

 

God cannot be proven to the scientist if the scientist doesnot wish to understand God. Krsna teaches that He is the source of both knowledge and forgetfullness. If the scientist wishes to forget God, Krishna will arrange it and no preacher can overrule that. If the scientist wants to understand God then the whole universe itself becomes a book of scripture from which the Lord may make His presence known.