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Science by mob rule: 18th century won't go away
by Tom Teepen
http://www.smirkingchimp.com/article.ph ... ed&order=0
Only five years into the new millennium our fingertip grip on the 21st century already is slipping. We could tumble into the 18th before you can say "macroevolution." Kansas is the latest state to bend to Christian pressure to disavow evolution. Its state board of education has taken up, and apparently means to adopt this summer, a change in teaching standards for science that would fob evolution off as just part of a big fuss.

To that end, the board has been hearing testimony from witnesses, all one-sided because Kansas scientists have refused to testify, taking the sound if somewhat self-destructive position that there is nothing more to debate than there would be if the subject were gravity or plate tectonics.



The Kansas brouhaha is being pushed, as are similar contretemps in numerous smaller jurisdictions, by well-bankrolled groups hawking "intelligent design." This is the latest gimmick by religious conservatives for insinuating scripture into scholastics. When the courts disallowed biblical text as a substitute for science, the Bible literalists came up with "creationism," a pseudo-science whose own subsequent unmasking has now led to this latest wrinkle.

"Intelligent design" -- aptly dismissed by one scientist as "creationism in a cheap tuxedo" -- holds that life on Earth can be explained only by the animations of a guiding creator. That creator is carefully left unidentified. (Could it be Fred? Irving?) The game is to dodge church-state barriers, but you get the idea -- just as public-school pupils are meant to.

So Kentucky has expunged the very word "evolution" from its teaching guidelines. New Mexico came within an ace of outlawing evolution from classrooms. Ohio has fudged. A suburban Atlanta school district defaced its biology texts with a sticker pooh-poohing evolution. A rural Pennsylvania school district has ordered its schools to teach intelligent design.

This is science by mob rule, made newly possible in Kansas by the election last fall of a Republican board majority that gave the antievolution saints six votes to the demon evolutionists' four. (The Republicans are following their party's president who, asked about evolution, ducked and cited God.)

The movement hides behind, in addition to its own disingenuousness, the public's general and ordinarily admirable sympathy for fair play.

There's a sort of idiot fairness making the rounds these days. C-SPAN, in an absurd parody of balance, recently proposed to pair a Holocaust historian with a ding-a-ling who claims the Holocaust never happened. The historian sensibly refused to show. One of my local newcasts boasts of its fair and balanced reporting -- as if there were two sides to apartment fires, traffic deaths and the weather.

The "intelligent design" crowd, when it can't convince that evolution is godless hokum, appeals for mercy on the grounds that in a controversy it is only fair that both sides be represented. So, create a stink and you're in.

By the end of the 19th century, most of its denizens had come to understand and accept evolution and had worked out how to reconcile that with their religious faith. Surely it cannot be beyond us moderns to catch up with them.

Yes, Evolution is a Theory. It's Religion and Politics that are the Problems
By Ed Buckner
http://www.livescience.com/othernews/re ... 50218.html
Students in Cobb County, Georgia, are being told by the school board that scientific material should be approached “with an open mind, studied carefully, and critically considered.” And this has irritated some so much that a lawsuit was filed, demanding that this outrage be stopped. U.S. District Court Judge Clarence Cooper ruled that the outrage should be stopped. His ruling demonstrated what the Cobb County School Board called “unnecessary judicial intrusion into local control of schools”—judicial activism run amok, according to full page ads in the local paper. The school board has voted to appeal the judge’s decision. Local writers of letters to the editor have made it abundantly clear that the ACLU and those who support the case are anti-freedom, anti-science, anti-religion, socialists, and atheist devils to boot.



This specific brouhaha began in 2002, when the Cobb school board, bowing to pressure from local fundamentalist activists, voted to paste a sticker into the front of certain science textbooks. The approved sticker did not say “Evolution should rightly be called ‘Evil-ution’ and is a communist plot” or even “Intelligent Design deserves careful consideration as an alternative to evolution.” What it did say seems remarkably innocuous and commonsensical. Ending with the language quoted above, it started, “This textbook contains material on evolution. Evolution is a theory, not a fact, regarding the origin of living things.” The board no doubt thought, “Now who could argue with that?” No mention of religion or God. No attack on science.



Of course all these loud voices insisting that the sticker is properly educational or harmless are wrong. They ignore the facts:



§ In science, unlike in common usage, a successful “theory” is an overarching explanation that accounts for all known facts, hypotheses, and observations.

§ It is a fact, supported by millions of observations over at least 150 years that life has evolved on this planet. This fact of evolution did not have a scientifically satisfactory overarching explanation—a theory—until Charles Darwin developed his complex ideas. His explanation rapidly convinced the scientific minds of his own age and of every generation since then.

§ No scientifically supported theory of why life on this planet evolved rivals basic Darwinian theory. If there was a legitimate alternative, scientists would go to great lengths to win prestige by testing and developing the alternative.

§ The surest evidence that the Cobb School Board was using the sticker to mollify a religious minority in the county, rather than to improve science education or to encourage critical thinking, is the much better sticker they rejected. While no sticker at all is needed, the board was presented with one that encouraged students to reflect critically and thoughtfully on all scientific theories in all fields, and that acknowledged that, while most scientists realize that Darwinian theory is well supported, some people do not. The board rejected that broader and more accurate advice to students.

§ Evolutionary theory is not the only part of science subject to religious dispute and controversy. The germ theory of disease, while overwhelmingly supported by scientists--as is evolution theory--is not accepted by Christian Scientists or by some other religious groups. The board did not put a sticker in high school health texts about this, for good reason.

§ Tempting as the solution presented by a local letter writer may seem to some, avoiding all the controversy by not teaching about evolution at all, or only in elective courses, would seriously cheat students. Almost everything in modern biology and much of astronomy, geology, chemistry, and other scientific disciplines cannot be well understood except in light of evolutionary theory. Young people would suffer greatly in colleges and universities, including in most religious schools, if their education was so inadequate. Their understanding of life itself would be severely hampered.

§ Science classes and textbooks should be restricted to scientific inquiry. There is much that evolutionary theory cannot explain, and the compatibility or conflict of science and religion, while controversial, cannot be determined by science.

§ The case is not part of “the ongoing controversy between atheists and Christians.” Many scientists, including the Cobb high school science department chair and the textbook author who both testified eloquently against the sticker, describe themselves as deeply religious. Some Christians may be threatened by science, but most are not.



The court held that the sticker is unconstitutional because it “conveys an impermissible message of endorsement and tells some citizens that they are political outsiders while telling others that they are political insiders” and because it violates the Georgia constitutional provision regarding “Separation of Church and State” (yes those words are in the Georgia Constitution).



The full-page newspaper ads cited above that supported the school board and attacked the sticker decision also attacked the separation of church and state—and the ads were sponsored by a local Christian church. This supports a key claim of the plaintiffs in the stickers case; this is a controversy about religion, not about science

Ed Buckner is Southern Director for the Council for Secular Humanism; Buckner co-edited, with his son Michael E. Buckner, Quotations That Support the Separation of Church and State (1995).

The work of the 19th-century English naturalist shocked society and revolutionized science. How well has it withstood the test of time?
Get a taste of what awaits you in print from this compelling excerpt.

Evolution by natural selection, the central concept of the life's work of Charles Darwin, is a theory. It's a theory about the origin of adaptation, complexity, and diversity among Earth's living creatures. If you are skeptical by nature, unfamiliar with the terminology of science, and unaware of the overwhelming evidence, you might even be tempted to say that it's "just" a theory. In the same sense, relativity as described by Albert Einstein is "just" a theory. The notion that Earth orbits around the sun rather than vice versa, offered by Copernicus in 1543, is a theory. Continental drift is a theory. The existence, structure, and dynamics of atoms? Atomic theory. Even electricity is a theoretical construct, involving electrons, which are tiny units of charged mass that no one has ever seen. Each of these theories is an explanation that has been confirmed to such a degree, by observation and experiment, that knowledgeable experts accept it as fact. That's what scientists mean when they talk about a theory: not a dreamy and unreliable speculation, but an explanatory statement that fits the evidence. They embrace such an explanation confidently but provisionally—taking it as their best available view of reality, at least until some severely conflicting data or some better explanation might come along.

The rest of us generally agree. We plug our televisions into little wall sockets, measure a year by the length of Earth's orbit, and in many other ways live our lives based on the trusted reality of those theories.

Evolutionary theory, though, is a bit different. It's such a dangerously wonderful and far-reaching view of life that some people find it unacceptable, despite the vast body of supporting evidence. As applied to our own species, Homo sapiens, it can seem more threatening still. Many fundamentalist Christians and ultra-orthodox Jews take alarm at the thought that human descent from earlier primates contradicts a strict reading of the Book of Genesis. Their discomfort is paralleled by Islamic creationists such as Harun Yahya, author of a recent volume titled The Evolution Deceit, who points to the six-day creation story in the Koran as literal truth and calls the theory of evolution "nothing but a deception imposed on us by the dominators of the world system." The late Srila Prabhupada, of the Hare Krishna movement, explained that God created "the 8,400,000 species of life from the very beginning," in order to establish multiple tiers of reincarnation for rising souls. Although souls ascend, the species themselves don't change, he insisted, dismissing "Darwin's nonsensical theory."

Other people too, not just scriptural literalists, remain unpersuaded about evolution. According to a Gallup poll drawn from more than a thousand telephone interviews conducted in February 2001, no less than 45 percent of responding U.S. adults agreed that "God created human beings pretty much in their present form at one time within the last 10,000 years or so." Evolution, by their lights, played no role in shaping us.

Only 37 percent of the polled Americans were satisfied with allowing room for both God and Darwin—that is, divine initiative to get things started, evolution as the creative means. (This view, according to more than one papal pronouncement, is compatible with Roman Catholic dogma.) Still fewer Americans, only 12 percent, believed that humans evolved from other life-forms without any involvement of a god.

The most startling thing about these poll numbers is not that so many Americans reject evolution, but that the statistical breakdown hasn't changed much in two decades. Gallup interviewers posed exactly the same choices in 1982, 1993, 1997, and 1999. The creationist conviction—that God alone, and not evolution, produced humans—has never drawn less than 44 percent. In other words, nearly half the American populace prefers to believe that Charles Darwin was wrong where it mattered most.

Get the whole story in the pages of National Geographic magazine.

:arrow: Evolution?: Monkey business!!.......We didn't come from any lower life form; no species has EVER evolved into another....(we started as humans in God's Eden)...it would be impossible for a lower order of creature [fauna] to evolve into a romantic & imaginative soul!
Even though they share common colours, you might as well ask a plant [flora] to evolve into a rainbow !
http://excoboard.com/exco/index.php?boardid=1979 8)

Ignorance is bliss...

Another victory, however small, for America.
Judge rules against 'intelligent design' in science class
From Delia Gallagher and Phil Hirschkorn, CNN
Tuesday, December 20, 2005 Posted: 1740 GMT (0140 HKT)
http://edition.cnn.com/2005/LAW/12/20/i ... index.html
HARRISBURG, Pennsylvania (CNN) -- A Pennsylvania school district cannot teach in science classes a concept that says some aspects of science were created by a supernatural being, a federal judge has ruled.

In an opinion issued Tuesday, U.S. District Judge John Jones ruled that teaching "intelligent design" would violate the Constitutional separation of church and state.

"We have concluded that it is not [science], and moreover that ID cannot uncouple itself from its creationist, and thus religious, antecedents," Jones writes in his 139-page opinion posted on the court's Web site. (Opinion, pdf)

"To be sure, Darwin's theory of evolution is imperfect. However, the fact that a scientific theory cannot yet render an explanation on every point should not be used as a pretext to thrust an untestable alternative hypothesis grounded in religion into the science classroom or to misrepresent well-established scientific propositions," Jones writes.

Intelligent design claims the complexity of some systems of nature cannot be explained by evolution but must be attributed to a designer or supernatural being.

The Dover Area School District, about 25 miles from the state capital, sought to become the first in the nation to require high school science teachers to teach the concept of intelligent design as an alternative to Darwin's theory of evolution.

"Because Darwin's Theory is a theory, it continues to be tested as new evidence is discovered. The theory is not a fact," said the statement that the old school board approved in a 6-3 vote in October 2004. "With respect to any theory, students are encouraged to keep an open mind."

That school board mandated the teaching for ninth-grade biology classes and directed school libraries to purchase an alternative textbook, "Of Pandas and People," which advocated the concept. The town has since voted out eight of nine board members.

A lawsuit challenging the policy was brought in December 2004 by 11 parents in conjunction with the American Civil Liberties Union and Americans United for the Separation of Church and State last December.

Jones presided over a six-week trial that ended last month. His decision applies only to the Pennsylvania school district.

His decision would block the school district's plan "requiring teachers to denigrate or disparage the scientific theory of evolution, and from requiring teachers to refer to a religious, alternative theory known as ID."

Jones says in his ruling that he did not doubt that intelligent design advocates "have bona fide and deeply held beliefs which drive their scholarly endeavors," but he also said scientific experts testified that Darwin's theory "in no way conflicts with, nor does it deny, the existence of a divine creator."

Jones -- an appointee of President Bush, who backs the teaching of Intelligent Design -- defended his decision in personal terms.

"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," Jones writes.

"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 intelligent design, who in combination drove the board to adopt an imprudent and ultimately unconstitutional policy," he said.

Barry Lynn, executive director of Americans United for Separation of Church and State, said, "Children in public schools deserve top quality science education and freedom from religious indoctrination and today they were granted both."

In 1987, the Supreme Court ruled that Louisiana could not teach creationism because it would "restructure the science curriculum to conform with a particular religious viewpoint."

Discovery Institute tries to “swift-boat” Judge Jones
by Kevin Padian and Nick Matzke
http://www.ncseweb.org/resources/articl ... 4_2006.asp
As predictable as sunup, the Discovery Institute reacted to their drubbing in Federal Court (Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School Board, 20 December 2005) without the least introspection. One would have thought that after six weeks of testimony by both sides in the public debate (there is, of course, no scientific debate) about evolution and intelligent design, both sides would say, “Okay, we gave it our best shot,” and at least have the common decency to read the Court’s decision before spinmeistering.

Instead, the DI immediately tried to “swift-boat” the judge.

Before the electrons on the pdf of the judge’s decision were even cool, the DI released the following salvo:

The Dover decision is an attempt by an activist federal judge to stop the spread of a scientific idea and even to prevent criticism of Darwinian evolution through government-imposed censorship rather than open debate, and it won't work," said Dr. John West, Associate Director of the Center for Science and Culture at Discovery Institute, the nation's leading think tank researching the scientific theory known as intelligent design.
In the DI’s lexicon, “activist” means someone who says or does things you don’t like: the ACLU, the NCSE, Americans United, and … oh. A Republican judge from central Pennsylvania.

Of course, the DI folks aren’t activists. They just sit in their think-tank, performing first-class research for the best scientific journals, waiting for the awards and accolades from the scientific and educational communities to come in. (So far, they’re still waiting for the awards, and we’re still waiting for the research.) Apparently it’s not “activist” for the Discovery Institute to send their own “Icons of Evolution” video to the Dover Area School Board (a video that DASB member William Buckingham apparently bullied teachers to watch – twice – and was clearly an inspiration to Buckingham in his various efforts to squelch the teaching of evolution in Dover. Apparently it’s not “activist” to send DI staff to Dover to counsel the school board on how to promote ID in science classes.

Now, wait. The DI staunchly maintains that it never said that ID should be taught as science. But it should be mentioned in science classrooms, apparently, as a stealth “alternative” to evolution. This is the sneaky approach. Don’t bother to establish ID as science in the scientific community; don’t bother to tell anyone you’re teaching a sectarian religious view; just slide it in on the QT. ID really is, as one observer noted, “the faith that dare not speak its name.” That’s now a finding of fact in Federal Court.

To Teach ID, or Not to Teach ID?

On the other hand, there is often a difference between what the DI does and what it says it does. Take, for instance, this passage from Intelligent Design in Public School Science Curricula: A Legal Guidebook, by DI associates David K. DeWolf and Mark E. DeForrest, and the Director of the DI’s Center for Science and Culture, Stephen C. Meyer: “school boards have the authority to permit, and even encourage, teaching about design theory as an alternative to Darwinian evolution -- and this includes the use of textbooks such as Of Pandas and People that present evidence for the theory of intelligent design.”

Hard to see where you’d fit that in, except in a science class.

It is also worth looking at what the Discovery Institute was telling its donors in 1999, based on the now-infamous “Wedge Strategy” document.
Once our research and writing have had time to mature, and the public prepared for the reception of design theory, we will move toward direct confrontation with the advocates of materialist science through challenge conferences in significant academic settings. We will also pursue possible legal assistance in response to resistance to the integration of design theory into public school science curricula.
And yet, when this event finally occurred – in Dover, Pennsylvania, in 2004, exactly five years after the 1999 Wedge Strategy – the Discovery Institute claimed that they did not support putting ID into science curricula, and furthermore they had never suggested such a thing.
“Activist” Judge John Jones III
Although the DI uses the same public relations firm as the “Swift Boat Veterans” did, they picked the wrong guy to keelhaul. Judge John E. Jones III is a churchgoer, a lifelong Republican, appointed to his Federal position by President George W. Bush. As a New York Times piece recently noted:
His supporters include Senators Arlen Specter and Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania, and his mentor is Tom Ridge, the former governor of Pennsylvania and homeland security secretary.
Arlen Specter, Tom Ridge, and Rick Santorum. Not exactly your typical liberal coalition. Wait a minute! Isn’t Santorum the one who tried to introduce Intelligent Design into the “No Child Left Behind” Act? Doesn’t the DI pull his strings when it comes to pronouncements on science and education? These are heavy hitters, well connected to the current Administration. From the outset, an impartial observer might have expected that Judge Jones would be predisposed toward the Bush-endorsed concept if ID. Let’s see what else the Times found out.
But Judge Jones is praised by people on both sides of the aisle as a man of integrity and intellect who takes seriously his charge to be above partisanship. He appears to define himself less by his party affiliation than by his connection to the Pennsylvania coal town where he still lives, and to a family that grabbed education as a rope to climb out of the anthracite mines, and never let go. Clifford A. Rieders, a lawyer in Williamsport who is past president of the Pennsylvania Trial Lawyers Association, said he had found Judge Jones to be "moderate, thoughtful" and "universally well regarded."

"I think that his connections are not so politicized, nor is he so ambitious that he would be influenced in any way by those kinds of considerations," said Mr. Rieders, a Democrat.

Mr. Ridge called him a "renaissance man" and "the right kind of person to be presiding over a trial of such emotional and historic importance." He added, "I don't think he goes in with a point of view based on anything prior. I really don't. I think he loves the challenge."
And all this testimony came in before the decision was rendered.

The Judge saw ID collapse before him

The DI’s Dr. West went on to say of the Judge, “He has conflated Discovery Institute’s position with that of the Dover school board, and he totally misrepresents intelligent design and the motivations of the scientists who research it.” Not so. The DI was not on trial here; the Judge was merely repeating statements of the defense’s own witnesses, including Drs. Behe and Minnich, who are fellows of the DI. They acknowledged under oath that ID cannot qualify as science unless the definition of science is completely changed to admit the supernatural. Behe acknowledged that under his definition, astrology would equally qualify as science. They admitted that ID is more plausible to those that believe in God – a rather peculiar feature of an allegedly scientific theory. They insisted that the “Designer” does not have to be supernatural, but were unable to come up with any credible account or hypothesis of what such a “natural Designer” would be, or how to test for its existence.
And this is after over a decade of research by the self-described “nation's leading think tank researching the scientific theory known as intelligent design.”

Not a single peer reviewed paper proposes any concrete test or advances any solid testable evidence regarding a Designer. Every major scientific organization in the nation has come out against ID, saying that it has no business masquerading as science. This week, Science magazine, the premier journal of American science, named Evolution as the Scientific Breakthrough of 2005, and specifically lambasted ID as non-scientific.
Dr. Donald Kennedy, editor of Science, said in an interview with Reuters,
I think what arouses the ire of scientists (about intelligent design) is ... the notion that it belongs in the same universe as scientific analysis. -- 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. That's just not possible with a notion that's as much a belief in spirituality as intelligent design is.
For over a decade, the DI has claimed that their notion of ID deserves pride of place alongside conventional evolutionary theory. But they have refused to publish the peer-reviewed papers, to present their “research” at scientific conferences, to be held accountable in the scientific community on any terms whatsoever. This week they were held accountable in federal court. The results weren’t pretty for ID supporters. It’s hard to find a single sentence in the Judge’s 139-page decision that offers succor to the DI crowd. It’s even harder to find a place where his judgment erred with respect to the facts. Unless, of course, the defense’s scientific experts were not representing ID accurately.

Throughout the trial, Judge Jones let the attorneys on both sides draw out the testimony they wanted from their witnesses. He seldom intervened in the questioning, and did not sustain objections from either side unless they were rooted in correct procedural law. He frequently said, “well, this is a bench trial, so I’ll allow it” to let both sides present the fullest possible explication of their views. Both sides had the chance to put everything on the table. They chose their own witnesses; none were peremptorily excluded (though the defense fought ferociously to keep Barbara Forrest off the witness stand, knowing the damage she would do by revealing the religious origins of ID).

Witnesses for both sides had to speak under oath about their side of the case. The judge did not impugn the testimony of any expert witness, although he did have some choice words for the prevarications of some former members of the Dover School Board.

The DI cannot claim that ID didn’t have a fair opportunity to be represented on an equal footing with science in a public arena. It had its fair chance, but for mysterious reasons, most of the DI’s “expert witnesses” were withdrawn. Apparently there are too few ID supporters with expertise in the appropriate areas, because no one was offered by the defense to replace the no-shows.

Judge Jones was clearly as unimpressed as the scientific community is by the representations of the Discovery Institute’s witnesses for the defense. Michael Behe’s remonstrations about the scientific validity of ID were characterized as “mere assertions,” with no empirical evidence. The plaintiffs showed that Behe, who was on the stand for three days, was unaware of published, peer-reviewed evidence that demolished his favorite “irreducibly complex” notions such as the bacterial flagellum and the blood clotting proteins. In fact, presented with a mountain of published work to the contrary, he merely sniffed that it was inadequate, though there was no evidence that he had even read it. The plaintiffs’ testimony about macroevolution, exaptation, natural selection, the fossil record, classification, and homology went completely unrebutted. Moreover, the Judge added (opinion, page 84), “the Court has been presented with no evidence” that either Defendants’ testifying experts or any other ID proponents have any expertise in these areas. Which we knew all along.

Based on all of this, Judge Jones ruled bluntly and clearly that ID is not science. ID proponents’ most common complaint is that Jones dared to rule on this larger scientific issue, rather than restricting himself to the religious purposes of the school board. They claim that it is not a judge’s role to interpret science. But judges make these kinds of decisions every day, when presented with expert testimony to work from. They do it every time they have to decide a case involving criminal forensics, medical malpractice, DNA fingerprinting or paternity tests, product liability, environmental issues, or a host of other issues that arise in a modern technological society. When the scientific evidence and the consensus of the scientific community are as clear as they were in this case, why should the judge refrain from ruling on the scientific status of ID?

In fact, Judge Jones really had no choice but to rule on whether or not ID was science. The plaintiffs asked him to rule on exactly this, and so did the defense. The Thomas More Legal Center’s chief counsel for the defense, Richard Thompson, acknowledged that like the attorneys for the plaintiffs, the defense had asked the judge to rule on the question of whether ID was science. They staked their whole case on the notion that ID was legitimate science, and that therefore teaching it had a legitimate secular purpose and secular effect, and this outweighed any religious goals that individual board members might have had. ID advocates can’t complain now, after the fact, that the judge exceeded his charge. He did exactly what both sides asked him to do. If the ID supporters didn’t take that brief more seriously, they should have.

The Party’s Over for the Discovery Institute

So where does Judge Jones’s decision leave ID? Rejected by the scientific community, rejected by organizations of science educators, and now rejected in Federal Court. What does the DI’s William Dembski say about that?

"I think the big lesson is, let's go to work and really develop this theory and not try to win this in the court of public opinion," Dembski said in a New York Times interview. "The burden is on us to produce."

Indeed. That’s what the scientists have been saying all along. And in the same Times article, Richard Thompson appeared to agree. "A thousand opinions by a court that a particular scientific theory is invalid will not make that scientific theory invalid. -- It is going to be up to the scientists who are going to continue to do research in their labs that will ultimately determine that."

He’s right. And one of these days, there may even be some research that convinces the scientific community that ID is testable and not purely religious. Until then, it cannot claim status as a scientific theory, and it does not belong in the science classroom – as Judge Jones and the scientific community both recognized.

The fact is, the Discovery Institute took a terrible beating in this trial. “Intelligent Design,” their main industry, which they have peddled relentlessly for over a decade as the Next Great Idea in science, was revealed as religion, not science at all. The DI’s “wedge strategy” was exposed and established as a crypto-fundamentalist Christian ideology of politics and social change. Their alleged “experts” withdrew, leaving the defense in confusion. Their amicus briefs were ignored by the Judge, and their attempt to append the “expert witness report” of Stephen Meyer, who had canceled his testimony, was angrily rebuffed. And after the trial, the DI’s Washington office head, Mark Ryland, publicly squabbled with the TMLC’s Richard Thompson, who claimed that the DI had promised support and then cut and run.

It’s over for the Discovery Institute. Turn out the lights. The fat lady has sung. The emperor of ID has no clothes. The bluff is over. Oh sure, they’ll continue to pump out the blather. They’ll find more funding, at least for a while, from some committed ideologue or another. But no one with any objectivity will take them seriously any longer as scientists. They had their fair chance, and they blew it.

And in the end, they couldn’t have done anything else. Because there is no science to ID; it’s just polemics. And now that’s been settled in Federal Court.

I have been trying to post at World football but it lgs me off. Is there a problem or is it me??

palo

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And Happy Easter

That there are mutations is a fact I hope everyone is aware of, that´s proven in many ways, and the mutations is just something that in my opinion prooves the evolution. To be honest I don´t understand how anyone today actually can beleive that some god said "be light" and then it was light, and just suddenly it was walking humans on the earth!

Every major religion today requires believing in some set of miracles, which appear too extraordinary in our material world to stand up to scientific scrutiny. One needs a large amount of unconditional faith to believe these stories.

http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nati ... 2273.story

VATICAN KEEPS EYE TO THE HEAVENS
Jesuits staff Arizona mountain observatory

By Kirsten Scharnberg
Tribune national correspondent

August 7, 2006

ATOP MT. GRAHAM, Ariz. -- It was starting to seem that the goal of the church outing was to literally ascend to the heavens.

Mile after slow, winding mile, a line of vans steadily advanced up the side of the rugged mountain. When the bumpy, rudimentary road dead-ended at a closed gate, a priest jumped out of the lead vehicle, unlocked it and waved the caravan through.

There, more than 10,000 feet above the vast Arizona desert, appeared an unlikely sight: one of the most advanced telescopes on Earth, a piece of equipment containing a mirror so fragile that some had joked it would require divine intervention to haul the mirror to the peak of Mt. Graham without damaging it.

Even more unlikely was the small plaque indicating the telescope's primary owner--the Vatican, an institution known for its focus on an ancient religion, not cutting-edge science.

Though few Americans know it, the Vatican has for more than 100 years funded and staffed world-class observatories, first in Italy and, since the early 1980s, in Arizona, where the height of Mt. Graham and the dark desert nights are ideal for telescope use. Assigned to the observatories--technically as the pope's personal astronomers--are men who not only hold advanced astronomy and mathematics degrees but who are Jesuit priests. Their scientific findings are formally presented to church officials in Rome once a year.

"Our work is to be good scientists as well as good Catholics," said Rev. Christopher Corbally, the vice director of the Vatican Observatory Research Group, who was giving a Catholic church group a tour of the Vatican Advanced Technology Telescope one morning earlier this summer.

The Vatican, which still fights its image as the institution that tried Galileo during the Inquisition for endorsing the idea that Earth was not the center of the universe, has said the observatory's mission is to serve as a bridge between religion and science.

"Many see the disciplines of science and theology as mutually exclusive," said Rev. Bill Stoeger, one of the Vatican astronomers.



Biblical interpretations

In fact, the claims of the pope's astronomers have been the sort that may make Christians who advocate a literal interpretation of the Bible squirm. One Vatican astronomer announced several years ago that the star of Bethlehem probably never existed. And virtually all of the pope's astronomers have come to the conclusion that God could not have created the universe in just six days about 10,000 years ago, as some literal interpreters of the Bible believe.

"People often ask me: `Do you believe in the Big Bang or in creation by God?'" Stoeger said, "and my answer is, `Yes.'"

Stoeger's position is illustrative of the complex relationship between faith and science. Though Catholics are not typically fundamentalists in their reading of the Bible, the hot-button issue of evolution has recently touched off the kind of debate inside the Vatican that has been going on inside Protestant denominations for years.

If there is a ground zero in the intersection of faith and science for the Roman Catholic Church, it is at the peak of Mt. Graham, which is about 150 miles northeast of Tucson.

Corbally, the priest-astronomer leading the recent tour, was not the slightest bit daunted or stuffy as he explained how the complicated telescope works and why the church cares about his work and how science can deepen religious faith and understanding. He even made a few pope jokes, pointing to a balcony that allows astronomers access to the outside of the telescope and saying, "Hey, when you're in a business where the pope might drop by, you've got to have a balcony."

The people taking the tour--members of a local church group for which Corbally acts as the spiritual leader--listened transfixed as he explained the history of the Vatican Observatory. The church, he said, in the late 1500s ordered Jesuit scientists to reform the Julian calendar, which was too long and thus threw off the dates of religious holidays. With new astronomical data, the Gregorian calendar, still used today, was born.

"That's why the church chose this science, not something like medicine, originally," Corbally said. "But the commitment to it over the years has endured because of a desire to create a bridge between good science and good religion."

The Vatican's initial observatories were in Rome and then in the Italian countryside, but both were essentially rendered obsolete when the bright lights of Italy's largest city made night observing virtually impossible. In 1993, the Vatican Observatory, in collaboration with the University of Arizona's Steward Observatory, completed the telescope on Mt. Graham. (The arrangement gives the Vatican 75 percent ownership and responsibility for the telescope, and the university 25 percent.)

Corbally spoke to the tour group as an expert with a doctorate in astronomy. At other times he spoke as a committed clergyman, saying that the more he unravels the complexities of the universe, the more he sees the brilliance of its creator.

"Our knowledge only increases our understanding of God," said Corbally's colleague Stoeger, who has made it one of his missions to explain how the spiritually minded also can be scientifically minded. He went on to explain that many Catholic theologians view the creation account found in Genesis as a story that reveals not a literal historical fact but the essential truth that God created everything, including all the mechanisms that allow for evolution.

Opinion polls indicate Americans might not be predisposed to consolidate the scientific view of evolution with their own church-influenced views. According to a November 2004 Gallup Poll, almost half of the U.S. population believes that human beings did not evolve but were created by God, as stated in the Bible, essentially in their current form about 10,000 years ago. That dovetails with a 2005 Pew Research poll indicating that 42 percent of Americans believe "life on Earth has existed in its present form since the beginning of time."

Such viewpoints are causing the evolution debate to play out not just inside churches but in schools, where creationism advocates are demanding that alternative theories of origin be taught.

"The truth is that a lot of our findings don't translate that well to people on the street," Stoeger said.

But religious and scientific scholars such as Stoeger say the Catholic Church has long included believers who remain deeply religious even while breaking new scientific ground.



Priest's Big Bang theory in '33

Angelo Secchi, a Jesuit priest, essentially started the discipline of astrophysics in the 19th Century, and Georges Lemaitre, another priest, proposed the Big Bang theory in 1933.

"I think we bridge the gap between science and religion simply by doing good science while at the same time being deeply devoted to the church and to Christ," Stoeger said. "Through that we can bear witness to the fact that there is no contradiction between the two, that good theology and good science actually reinforce and enrich each other."

At the Mt. Graham observatory, as Corbally discussed the origins of the universe, one of his parishioners was asked whether it troubled her that her spiritual adviser did not believe that God created the universe in six days and then rested on the seventh, as told in poetic detail in the Bible.

"I have to believe that none of it is contradictory. It's just that we aren't entirely capable of understanding it," said Carol Habra. "After all, who's to say that one day to God isn't 2 billion years to us? I'm going to ask him about that when I get there."

As the church group members wrapped up their tour, they filed past the small plaque dedicating the powerful telescope. Its words inadvertently framed the current argument over whether life's biggest questions are best pursued through science or through the divine: "May whoever searches here day and night the far reaches of space do it joyfully with the help of God."

High on Mt. Graham, with a stunning vista of Arizona desert spread out below, the evolution debate couldn't have seemed farther away. In fact, it all seemed quite simple: The parishioners touring the observatory looked to their priest for answers and insight. He looked toward the heavens for his.

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Looking to the heavens

- The Vatican Observatory, one of the oldest astronomical institutes in the world, has an annual budget of about $1 million.

- The Vatican Advanced Technology Telescope on Mt. Graham uses a mostly hollow, honeycombed glass primary mirror cast at the Steward Observatory Mirror Lab, beneath the University of Arizona football stadium.

- Roger Angel, founder of the mirror lab, developed a new spin-casting technique to create the Mt. Graham telescope's mirror. Vatican astronomers love to point out that they use an "Angel" mirror in their work.

- The Vatican has one of the most important meteorite collections in the world. It has more than 1,200 meteorite pieces representing some 484 different meteorite falls.

-- Kirsten Scharnberg

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kscharnberg@tribune.com

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