Hi, here's a thread for evolution vs. intelligent design discussion

My point is not personal but is because I feel the creationalists have a dangerous adjenda, they want our children to be ignorant and not have the facts that have been accumulated over many years by people who studied the nature of this planet.

Perhaps evolution is wrong, but the issue, for me, is how the creationalists want to legislate the teaching of creationism over evolution. That will make society weak and will not cure disease.

It makes me sad to think that there are people who want to trash science when science has made us live longer and in better health. It is cruel to children and women to try and turn back the clock to a time when all we had was the bible for guidance, we have grown up, learned and made the world better without leaving religion behind. No one is arguing that God didn't invent evolution himself are they?

Why is it so hard to believe that God created us then we evolved? It doesn't say in the bible that Adam wasn't a caveman.

More supposition for you:

Supposing you were a being who was quite bright but not quite omnipotent and omniscient. You've got in your possession a big ball of mud and ambitions to create life. How would you go about it?

Giving lifeforms the ability to learn and evolve and try out new methods of survival is actually a very elegant and robust solution. It builds in self-correction, ever-higher levels of efficiency at making use of the available resources, and even provides you the opportunity to be surprised at the beauty or cleverness of your creation.

Maybe I should have added this to the "This I Believe" thread.

Another way to put it: Consider populating your planet instead with robotic creatures and artforms that are capable of replication, but not of self-repair or of modifying their own programming. No matter how beautiful or balanced your initial set-up is, how long is your garden really going to survive?

that makes God sound like an artist! *dances*

My basic issue is that teaching creationism, or in the PC parlance "Intelligent design" in public schools is a violation of the establishment clause of the constitution. Creationism contemplates that the christian god made the world in 7 days. I am a follower of a religion that has no god perse, and does not have a creation myth as one of its core teachings. Under the constitution the state should not prefer christianity to zen buddhism, but this theory of intelligent design puts my buddhism squarely in the religious back seat.

This is not allowed under the constitution. I can agree or disagree with evolution on a non-religious basis. I cannot do the same with "intelligent design." Ig you want to teach your kids faith, that is fine, do so at home, or at church. If you want your kids to know the extensive scientific evidence supporting creationism, and don't want to teach them yourself, then send them to a PRIVATE school that does.

f you want to debate the merits in this forum, then your are free to do so, this is a place of discussion, and advocating your position. But lets not pretend intelligent design is a valid scientific theory-its an act of faith. This doesn't make it less important or influential in your day to day life. I conceed that the christians might be right about creationism, and science might be a cosmic joke. But the notion of expplaining god through science, to me completely belittles faith and makes the whole of religion seem like silly superstition.

My issue is how Jsecure Hanks is a mad escaped lunatic rapist!

How can you just make all this stuff up? "Creationists" ? Isn't that anyone that believes wholly or in part that the universe was created? That's like saying "Americans are gay". You can't know the motives and desires of a whole swathe of the worlds' population. Each and every one is a single person, with their own motiviations and goals.

Personally I have said over and over, I want people to have access to both the theory of creation and the theory of Evolution. I'm not on some mad mission to "make society weak and not cure disease".

I'm going to call you what you are. You're a bigot. You are actually judging a whole group of people in prejudice based on a subsection of their religeous beliefs. It beggars belief how you make it through life.

EDIT:

That post I quoted was SO bad, I had to come and frame some of the worst instances of prejudice I've ever encountered:

* "the creationalists have a dangerous adjenda"
* "they want our children to be ignorant"
* "It makes me sad to think that there are people ('creationists') who want to trash science"

I took a course in mythology in high school. We learned about a dozen different creation stories there. I think it would be perfectly appropriate to include Genesis there, as we covered Hindu and Chinese stories that are still part of extant religions. How about that?

*the first part was tweak enough*

Actually, that would be easier to deal with.

I didn't know I knew you.

Include in that class the weak theory of evolution and we are in agreement

If you think the theory of evolution is weak with the many thousands of studies and mountains of evidence that support it, you must have a really low opinion of Creationist "theory" since there's not a shred of evidence to support it.

Weak.

Why, it only works as the grand unifying theory of biology (indeed, without evolution modern biology is little more than stamp-collecting) and discoveries at every turn seem to confirm it, but yes, it's weak because some guys wrote about a big creator in the sky thousands of years ago!

(Un)fortunately for us on the web, anything can be found to prove a point... While I don't necessarily agree that 'ID' should be taught in school, I do have a problem with the fact that I was taught in school that evolution is a known fact. Not that it was a well understood fact, but that it was absolute fact. I actually had a science teacher in grade school try to put me down infront of the class for questioning her when she told us the moon did not rotate on its own axis. It was just 'a fact' to me that geometry poved that it MUST rotate or we on Earth would see all sides of the moon. She did begrudgingly admit that she was wrong only after we went to the gym class and got 2 kick balls to do a simulation. This type of teaching is all too common, no matter what those who deny it say.

I DO believe in ID, but I think that it should be taught in the HOME, not public school if our society is not made up of Christians (which, contrary to many media reports, most of the USA is not from those that I have met). Why try to force others into your personal beliefs? Course, that could be an argument against evloution as well...

http://www.answersingenesis.org/creation/v16/i1/bird.asp

This site will be 'debunked' by non-believers as 'talk of origins' will be debunked by believers. Scientist on both sides of the isle will argue scientific points, both real and fantisized, to make their vision seem valid. But until you can point to something that can be readily duplicated and witnessed by our own eyes, it is still a theory, not an absolute fact.

Eienstien's special theory of relativity has been scientifically proven wrong ( http://www.wbabin.net/sokolov/sokolov.htm ). Does this mean all science is wrong? No, it means that the 'facts' that much of our understanding of the way our universe works was wrong to some degree.

But, if you know much about the way construction was undertaken for years, if the corner stone is set incorrectly, or the measurements from the cornerstone are incorrect, the final structure will generally be structurally unsound...

Here it is again




From The Washington Post