I saw this fascinating article today. Yeah! Intelligent Design. It boggles my mind to think that this type of thing is actually being litigated in the year 2005. People are certainly free to their own opinions, but must they try to force them onto completely rational, yet impressionable, kids? I guess we will only know once they rule on the case. For now I will just simply have to laugh at the absurdity of one “scholar’s” quotes:
HARRISBURG, Pa. – A biochemistry professor who is a leading advocate of “intelligent design” testified Monday that evolution alone can’t explain complex biological processes and he believes God is behind them.
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Behe, whose work includes a 1996 best-seller called “Darwin’s Black Box,” said students should be taught evolution because it’s widely used in science and that “any well-educated student should understand it.”
Behe, however, argues that evolution cannot fully explain the biological complexities of life, suggesting the work of an intelligent force.
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Behe contributed to “Of Pandas and People,” writing a section about blood-clotting. He told a federal judge Monday that in the book, he made a scientific argument that blood-clotting “is poorly explained by Darwinian processes but well explained by design.”
This is just to rich to pass up. Major props to the guy for trying to at least make it sound like he is not some anti-evolution nutjob. But doesn’t his statement about evolution come across as more of a back-handed insult to science? As if he thinks that evolution is complete crap, but we might as well let the kids learn it since all of those kooky scientists seem to base a lot of stuff on it.
My biggest beef with the whole article is in the last paragraph that I quoted, the part where it says, He told a federal judge Monday that in the book, he made a scientific argument that blood-clotting “is poorly explained by Darwinian processes but well explained by design.” Now see, in order for him to make that scientific argument, wouldn’t it be necessary to present actual facts that support Intelligent Design? Just saying that evolution doesn’t explain it therefore it was God is hardly a scientific argument. A delusional argument yes, certainly not scientific.
Also, wasn’t the whole point of Intelligent Design supposed to take God’s name out of it? Wasn’t it supposed to appease the people who were bitching about their children being taught religion in schools? If it was then he totally lost the ball when he testified that anything that Darwin couldn’t explain was therefore an act of God -to paraphrase-.
Since he brought up God, the gloves are off.
I am going to dismiss the bible outright here, for the sake of religion. The bible is a bunch of folklore that had been handed down in verbal tradition for millennia before anyone got around to putting pen to paper. Once someone did put pen to paper the next transcriber didn’t like it, thus he changed a bunch of stuff, and so on, for all of history. I do find it pretty odd that they left things in there like the story of Noah though. In order to believe that story you must believe that 1) the entire earth was flooded. 2) Someone built a boat large enough to carry two of every living animal species (they didn’t make mention of the species that reproduce asexually). Yeah, picking the bible apart is as easy as shooting fish in a barrel a slut on prom night. So I won’t do that.
What I really want to know is where this Intelligent Designer happens to live. The entity can’t reside on the earth or any other celestial body, since he created all of that. Where’s his pad? Does he have a split-level joint (nice place, has a pool and everything) in in some suburban area in the recesses of a black hole where all of the other Intelligent Designers live?
Who created the Intelligent Designer? It is stone solid fact that life can’t appear spontaneously, intelligence is not something that can be divined from natural means, else evolution would make absolute sense. Then the question would be who created the entity that created the Intelligent Designer, and this would obviously go on to infinity, I don’t have the time to type that all out. I think you will see my point.
Intelligent Designer must not have a lot of friends (perhaps he won’t let them watch the game on his Big Screen, hogs all the beer, who knows), ’cause he seems to have entirely too much free time. What a workload the guy has. In the beginning all he had to do was to set down some genetic codes and DNA for a couple of million species (that is only known species. And only on the earth. Mind you, his design covers the everything in the cosmos). Now he must have to toil away endlessly creating new DNA for every new being, making sure that no two fingerprints are ever the same, making sure that the blood clots, etc.
That was fun.
The argument for Intelligent Design only attacks evolution. They find a hole in the evolution of a species and say “where’s your proof?” They are attacking lines of beings that, when viewed side by side, look like they are slowly changing form. Yet, were you to ask someone who supports Intelligent Design what their proof is they would simply say that evolution can not explain everything. Quite an argument.
What is going to be really sad is that, in the future, we will have found enough fossilized remains to definitively link every bipedal mammal to one another, and there will still be some religious idiots claiming that they (all the bipedal mammals) were on the boat with Noah. Delusion Intelligent Design will probably never go away, but, in a strange irony, I have no doubt that it will evolve. Just as Christians used to believe that God lived in the clouds, then swiftly changed gears once we visited the clouds.