Tuesday, September 27, 2005

'Intelligent design' debate back in court.

'Intelligent design' debate back in court.

I've covered this stuff in the past, but this is an interesting article on CNN that covers a lot of the relevant topics.

3 comments:

JStressman said...

I've thouroughly debunked this crap before. I don't feel like rehashing it now.

if you want to believe it, that's fine... you're being ignorant and wrong, but that's your choice in what to believe. however, you don't have the right to essentially break the law and force kids to learn religious crap in school under the PAINFULLY false pretense of it being actual science.

Intelligent Design is religious belief, NOT science. trying to force it to be considered as such, or as anything other than ignorant religious nonsense for that matter, is BULLSHIT.

clear enough? go talk about it in philosophy class or something.

JStressman said...

I'm not trying to start a fight. :-)

I'm speaking more in general, to people who actually believe that Intelligent Design has any scientific merit rather than simply being a matter of religious belief.

And honestly, as far as relevance goes, that's a good point. If you wanted to believe the sky was green, you'd be wrong and it would be very easy to prove as much... but it wouldn't change your belief, because at that point you're obviously choosing personal belief over scientific provable fact, in contrast to evidence to the contrary.

blah blah.

Moreover, "fact" doesn't mean "absolute certainty"; there ain't no such animal in an exciting and complex world. The final proofs of logic and mathematics flow deductively from stated premises and achieve certainty only because they are not about the empirical world. [...] In science "fact" can only mean "confirmed to such a degree that it would be perverse to withhold provisional consent." I suppose that apples might start to rise tomorrow, but the possibility does not merit equal time in physics classrooms.
- Stephen J. Gould, "Evolution as Fact and Theory (http://www.stephenjaygould.org/library/gould_fact-and-theory.html)"; Discover, May 1981

See if you can pick the point out of that. ;-)

JStressman said...

pretty much. someone needs to talk some sense. :-)