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| Expelled - The Intelligent Design Movie
Posted: 3/10/2008 3:45:24 PM | The real problem with "Intelligent Design" is that fundamentally antithetical to what science is. Pure science questions. It looks for answers. It doubts. "Intelligent Design" is a dogma in search of adherents. By definition, it is NOT science.
I'm also sick of people suggesting that Einstein was some kind of religionist. To Einstein, "God" was the mystery of the universe--the unknown that we are trying to discover--the wonder, the beauty. NOT some conscious being floating around, itching to d*mn everybody. | |
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| Expelled - The Intelligent Design Movie
Posted: 3/10/2008 5:47:50 PM | What does it matter what Einstein believed, anyway? People who allow their beliefs to depend on the beliefs of others have weak beliefs.
If Einstein had been a religionist, it wouldn't change the nature of the universe.
If he wasn't a religionist, it wouldn't change the nature of the universe.
People need to talk about "facts" and not what other people believe(d). | |
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| Expelled - The Intelligent Design Movie
Posted: 3/13/2008 11:23:23 PM | There's a saying, I can't remember where I first heard it or who said it but it simply said, "Religion tries to tell us why the universe was created and science tries to tells us how it was created". I kinda liked that.
Watching the History Channel's "The Universe" one scientist had an interesting comment. He was talking about how we are all decended from stardust and he said, "We (as humans) are simply a manifestation of the universe trying to understand itself". I kinda liked that too. | |
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| Expelled - The Intelligent Design Movie
Posted: 3/13/2008 11:26:08 PM |
There's a saying, I can't remember where I first heard it or who said it but it simply said, "Religion tries to tell us why the universe was created and science tries to tells us how it was created". I kinda liked that.
It's bullshit though, why is a theologan any more qualified to tell me the "why's" of the universe than a plumber? | |
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| Expelled - The Intelligent Design Movie
Posted: 3/14/2008 5:20:49 AM | It's part of Plato's "Noble Lie" , in wide screen glory.
Make people reject science, and reinforce a belief in the words of the Bible as being literally true in every sense - as the word of God.
Once that's done, then use it to keep them ignorant, and thus have total control over them.
Then claim that you are put there by God to lead them, or that God is behind you.
Almost foolproof, as no one will challenge it without being easily labeled by you as an infidel. | |
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| Expelled - The Intelligent Design Movie
Posted: 3/14/2008 7:51:00 AM |
BUT.......ARE FACTS IN ESSENCE WHAT OTHER PEOPLE BELIEVE?
Facts should not be what people "believe," but be able to be proven by empirical evidence.
However, several hundred years ago, it was a "fact" that the earth was flat. It was a "fact" that the earth was the center of the universe. It was a "fact" that women and people of color were less intelligent than Caucasian men.
Those "facts" have all been disproven.
We tread on shaky ground when we cannot realize the difference between fact and opinion. "Truth" is individualized. Most Christians will tell you it is the "truth" that heaven and hell exist; they will even go as far as to claim that Jesus' life and ministry are a "fact" when, in reality, there is no proof.
What people call "truth" is often how they interpret facts. It is why we all take a fact and claim the reasoning behind why that fact exists. Are we all right? Are we all wrong? In my opinion, yes, we are. | |
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| Expelled - The Intelligent Design Movie
Posted: 3/14/2008 8:29:40 AM | Yes, I have seen advertisements for "The Intelligent Design Movie". My impression was the same as it is with most advertisements. They were trying to sell me on the idea of seeing the movie.
No, I haven't researched any any of the incidents.
I think this movie is much like many others. It will be a flash-in-the-pan for awhile. It will be the catalyst for conversations and debate. It will develop a cult-like following among certain impressionable groups, and it will fade away from the general public.
As an addendum, IMO, as in every period of economic or social difficulty in the U.S., there seems to be a rising tide of religious ferver. People appear to be more needy of reassurance that whatever is going on is out of their control, and some supreme being has an ultimate plan to make everything o.k.. | |
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| Expelled - The Intelligent Design Movie
Posted: 3/14/2008 8:38:11 AM | It's like the Museum of Creation, in Kentucky.
Elsewhere, animated figures will be used to recreate the Garden of Eden, while in another room, visitors will see a tyrannosaurus rex pursuing Adam and Eve after their fall from grace. "That's the real terror that Adam's sin unleashed," visitors will be warned.
http://www.s8int.com/creationmuseum.html
If I want to see humans and dinosaurs living together, I'll watch the Flintstones.  | |
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| Expelled - The Intelligent Design Movie
Posted: 3/14/2008 11:32:24 AM | from a post By: Montreal_Guy on 3/14/2008 8 49 AM
"It's part of Plato's "Noble Lie" , in wide screen glory.
Make people reject science, and reinforce a belief in the words of the Bible as being literally true in every sense - as the word of God.
Once that's done, then use it to keep them ignorant, and thus have total control over them.
Then claim that you are put there by God to lead them, or that God is behind you."
This, quite concisely, is the danger of allowing organized religion any real degree of power in our lives. Although there is mounting evidence supporting creation as a contemplated process; and supporting the existence of unseen dimensions occupied by intelligent beings; and supporting life after death, these wonders should not be seen as domains exclusive to any particular faith. In other words, I don't think we need to leap to the conclusion that we must all worship Christ or any other enlightened one as a result of such findings. Yet it is the Christian God of the Bible who the Intelligent Design movement perpetually seeks for us to embrace and praise to the very (bloody) letter.
People go mad in droves and come to their senses slowly and one by one. This is usually said of the stock market but we may also apply it to such things as Christian Evangelical support of the Neoconservative agenda and by extension the apparently unnecessary Iraq war.
As the Great Source of All will eventually be reached by each of us after some final incarnation, it will not be as a result of what faith we were affiliated with so much as how honourably we lived as individuals and what consideration we had for our fellowman regardless of his creed or station. | |
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| Expelled - The Intelligent Design Movie
Posted: 3/14/2008 11:46:13 AM |
As God will eventually be reached by each of us after some final incarnation, it will not be as a result of what faith we were affiliated with so much as how honourably we lived and what consideration we had for our fellowman regardless of his creed or station.
Although I am a deist (but not a theist), this statement precludes the existence of deity and that is not provable--or hasn't been provable, yet.
I would phrase that, "If god/dess exists, then she/he/it will eventually . . ."
But then, I teach English and like the exact use of words. | |
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| Expelled - The Intelligent Design Movie
Posted: 3/14/2008 12:00:16 PM | "Although I am a deist (but not a theist), this statement precludes the existence of deity and that is not provable--or hasn't been provable, yet."
You're right. A correction is in order and has been carried out... my apologies, garry | |
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| Expelled - The Intelligent Design Movie
Posted: 3/14/2008 12:20:44 PM | For right or wrong I have explained to my sons that God exists and the big bang was the moment of God's creating "all this". However I also told them to be VERY careful of religion as it its man's attempt to control God, or at the least to usurp God's power. I "believe" the DNA molecule is too complex to have "just popped" up in some soup. The big thing is no other person should ever be FORCED to believe what in my opinions. No human can speak for God including me. We all have FREE WILL to make up our own minds!
Modern cosmology proves the universe had a beginning. The questions are:
Did God make it?
Did it just happen?
I believe what I believe and you believe what you believe and in 100 years or so we'll either know or it won't matter. | |
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| Expelled - The Intelligent Design Movie
Posted: 3/14/2008 12:24:44 PM |
visitors will see a tyrannosaurus rex pursuing Adam and Eve after their fall from grace.
Had a T-Rex been in puruit of Adam and Eve - I wouldn't be writing this right now.  | |
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| Expelled - The Intelligent Design Movie
Posted: 3/14/2008 1:49:49 PM |
I've reached my own conclusion and trust others to do the same, much of what I've researched seems to point more toward ID being a socio-political tool for faith-based political reform and acquisition of power.
That unfortunately seems to be the case ... however:
I do believe the cosmology of the universe and life on earth is a result of some type of 'Intelligent Design'.
So the public policy question becomes a little dicey ... in relegating alternative theories that argue for ID as merely junk science and camoflagued attempts at social political manuevers to teach Biblical Creationism.
One thing I have witnessed is that challenging the orthyodoxy of evolution as the basis for biodiversity is generally met with mere ridicule, and that to me is suspect. For the one thing we certainly do know is that science itself is an evolutionary process. Meaning that commonly once-held scientific beliefs change or are discarded as new data emerge ... but that process is rarely welcomed by the present orthydoxy itself.
The new data emerging in the bio-chemical knowledgebase seems to challenge the evolutionary model of serendipitous mutation as a sole explanation for biodiversity. Please note that I am not saying individual species do not adapt and 'evolve' through time, just that I have hard time believing that the incredible diversity we witness is the sole result of such adaptation.
Lastly, one complaint I hear often is that ID can not be considered as science because it cannot be tested, as it is not subjected to the scientific method of experimentation and observation. If that is the case however, how does the evolutionary model get around that hurdle? Seriously, I'd like to know.
Caw | |
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| Expelled - The Intelligent Design Movie
Posted: 3/14/2008 2:44:59 PM | I'll take up that challenge:
Recent work in genetics has found that much of our genetic code is actually made up of various viruses we have encountered through the ages. Now evolution theory would indicate that we would share more of these critters in our code with those we share a closer evolutionary history with, like apes, than with, say, birds.
You know what? It turns out we do. Pretty much identical to chimps. Now Darwin described evolution before we knew anything about genetics, but the more we learn the more it fits into the evolution model. | |
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| Expelled - The Intelligent Design Movie
Posted: 3/14/2008 3:12:51 PM | Interesting thread. Many opinions. Very thought-provoking. 
Finally, the actual questions up for discussion: Have you seen or read any of the material advertising this new movie*****, and what impressions did you get? I didn't until I saw this thread. I got the impression that the premise of the movie is that the scientific community is repressing even the discussion of Intelligent Design as a hypothesis, and that such repression indicates that science itself is no longer purely a search for truth, but is also a political machine, and that science can now be said to be "written by the winners", just like historians have often said about history.
Have you seen, read or researched any of the incidents alluded to in the trailers, and again, what did you think? Nothing new there. Science and academia has been full of politics for decades. Anyone who is in it, and hates politics can tell you this.
Heck, I almost got thrown out of my university because of it. I was called into my head of department's office at the end of my first term. I was told that the lecturers were all happy with my work, and that in the 60s, I would have been accepted. However, this was the 90s, and quotas had to be met, and I had to do the PC stuff or the department had to throw me out, because if it didn't, it could lose its grants. However, the head of my department made it very clear that such an attitude was NOT the wish of the university but it was forced on them by the government.
In my final year, I was looking at post-grad courses. I'm a purist and my degree was in Maths, so I looked for Pure Maths post-grad courses. Out of over 80 courses, nearly all were in Statistics, Operational Research and Numerical Analysis, which were all being used a lot in business at the time, and only 3 were in other subjects. But Statistics, Operational Research and Numerical Analysis represent a tiny part of Maths. This showed me that post-grad courses were being determined by business, not by research.
Since then, I've been told by teachers that teachers in general get bullied by other teachers, and that Education is full of politics. Speaking as someone who hates both, it really put me off.
I've also had discussions on evolution vs creationism and explained to people that they are 2 separate issues, and had evolutionists tell me that evolution means atheism must be true, as if that makes sense.
My experiences on POF is that I have found much intolerance towards anything that questions currently popular scientific theory, and that is even when my questions had nothing to do with religion whatsoever, but just to understand some theories. I see that the least agressive threads in the science/philosophy forum seem to be those that discuss things like ion propulsion, or something that avoids anything to do with anything discussed in religion whatsoever. However, there has been much opposition to the idea that science is in conflict with religion from the scientific camp.
As you can see, I have little faith in what someone says because they have a Ph.D after their name. It's what people say that matters to me, not how much other people look up to them, or how angrily they shout.
I feel quite angry about this, because when I was a kid, I grew up learning that science was a good thing, and that scientists were tolerant people. It was something I aspired to. These days, I read the stuff that no-one else reads, because I believe that I have more chance of finding the truth, because it is less likely to be used as political propaganda.
Utimately, considering the state of religion and politics in the US, do you think this high profile and controversial movie will have an impact, and how? It looks a lot like the Zeitgeist movie. I think it will have a similar impact. It will probably make more people aware of the political decisions involved in science, and will make people question if science has been affected by politics and by people's personal beliefs. I doubt that anything will change right away, but I imagine that it will mean that people will be more and more sceptical in the future to things reported by scientists as being absolute fact just because a scientist said it, and that scientists will have to demonstrate the proof of their statements in an unquestionable fashion, by actually explaining their experiments and their findings, and how they came to their conclusions. This will in turn lead to a closer examination of the basis of scientific claims, and will lead to the exposure of any scientific claims that are based on conclusions that cannot be drawn from their experiments.
That will fundamentally change the way people see science, and will force scientists to make a choice: either police their own people and get rid of ANY shoddy work, or people will stop trusting science.
This will have a massive effect on things like war, because the UK was brought into the Iraq war on the basis of a report that was supposed to be as truthful as a scientific paper, and this report turned out to have no basis at all. In the future, either all scientific papers will be required to be only of the highest quality, forcing such reports to be of the same quality, or that no-one will trust such reports at all. We still might go to war with countries such as Iraq. But not because of reports that were full of lies.
It will also force the same quality of accuracy on educators. You won't be allowed to be an educator and believe in lies. You could believe in something unproven, like religion. But you couldn't believe in lies. Or, no-one will ever listen to a teacher again, because you couldn't trust them.
But this may not happen for years. | |
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| Expelled - The Intelligent Design Movie
Posted: 3/14/2008 9:55:42 PM |
It's bullshit though, why is a theologan any more qualified to tell me the "why's" of the universe than a plumber?
Not the point. As soon as the plumber talks about the "whys" of the universe, he's not talking about science anymore. "Why" isn't answered by science.
Are there or has there been any intelligent design classes? Christian Universities with this? I'm curious how that would be structured, I wanna see the syllabus. I haven't really read up what "intelligent design" is all about...before I start trashing it.
If it's Kirk Cameron holding up a banana and saying, " See how this fits perfectly in my hand? That's proof of "intelligent design".....ummmmmm, I'll have to pass. (insert joke here...)
I went K - 12 catholic school in Nevada. We had our science/biology classes all the way through - (well, maybe not kindergarten! There wasn't this fighting and conflict between the two at all. Science was science and religion was religion, there was no competition between the two. I guess I'm still surprised at the animosity between some of the "camps".
My senior year the religion teacher was also our science teacher. Her belief was that through science we would not disprove God but find him. That last year we also studied different religions past and present, which I enjoyed.
I'm not religious at all but I don't have this absolute contempt for it that I see so many people seem to have. | |
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| Expelled - The Intelligent Design Movie
Posted: 3/14/2008 10:32:22 PM |
I'm not religious at all but I don't have this absolute contempt for it that I see so many people seem to have.
Your past experience shows why you feel that way.
I went to school in a Protestant school system, and religion was not directly taught there. We studied the world's religions, but there was no indoctrination in any particular one.
Science was science, like in your case.
I don't see a problem resolving God and science either. As I said, it's actually a pretty elegant combination. It kind of fits into the diest model of God creating the universe and then stepping out of the picture directly.
Think of it as the ultimate pool break, where every ball is sunk.
The contempt that we see , I believe, is because religion has broke through it's traditional walls and permeated the society in negative ways. When people try to push things on you, you push back.
If left to it's traditional role, that of a personal choice for you and your family, it's no longer such a negative.
What we see here in the intelligent design camp is this need to redo history, and refute science, and in fact to demonize it while confusing people. If you build a false reality for people, then you are not doing them a service.
Again, we only see this type of movement in fundamentalist groups. Almost everywhere else in the world , it's not present. Any attempt to even attempt to introduce it gets met with scorn and derision. | |
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| Expelled - The Intelligent Design Movie
Posted: 3/15/2008 12:30:56 AM |
I don't see a problem resolving God and science either. As I said, it's actually a pretty elegant combination. It kind of fits into the diest model of God creating the universe and then stepping out of the picture directly.
Ah, but that is not the Christian god. The Christian god intervenes, which is why science and modern monotheism are incompatible. | |
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| Expelled - The Intelligent Design Movie
Posted: 3/15/2008 12:41:30 AM |
Not the point. As soon as the plumber talks about the "whys" of the universe, he's not talking about science anymore. "Why" isn't answered by science.
I think you missed my point, what I'm saying is that when people talk about theology explaining the why, they're lending it a level of knowledge it doesn't have.
Reading and studying the bible may help you understand biblical theology, or even ancient cultures, it certainly doesn't aid in understanding the "Why's" of we're here.
If it's Kirk Cameron holding up a banana and saying, " See how this fits perfectly in my hand? That's proof of "intelligent design".....ummmmmm, I'll have to pass
The most amusing thing about Kirk and his lame ass proof is that human beings bred Bananas just so it was like that. The organism it was bred from doesn't look much like a modern banana. | |
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| Expelled - The Intelligent Design Movie
Posted: 3/15/2008 12:44:01 AM |
Ah, but that is not the Christian god.
Well, the Deist Christian God did exactly that.
Critical and constructive deism
The concept of deism covers a wide variety of positions on a wide variety of religious issues. Following Sir Leslie Stephen's English Thought in the Eighteenth Century, most commentators agree that two features constituted the core of deism:
The rejection of revealed religion — this was the critical aspect of deism.
The belief that reason, not faith, leads us to certain basic religious truths — this was the positive or constructive aspect of deism.
Deist authors advocated a combination of both critical and constructive elements in proportions and emphases that varied from author to author.
Critical elements of deist thought included:
Rejection of all religions based on books that claim to contain the revealed word of God.
Rejection of reports of miracles, prophecies and religious "mysteries".
Rejection of the Genesis account of creation and the doctrine of original sin, along with all similar beliefs.
Rejection of Judaism, Christianity, Islam and other religious beliefs.
Constructive elements of deist thought included:
God exists and created the universe.
God wants human beings to behave morally.
Human beings have souls that survive death; that is, there is an afterlife
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deism
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There's a reason why these concepts gained power in "The Age Of Reason/ Age Of Enlightenment" period - when science was advancing at a quick pace.
This is the Christianity of the Founding Fathers. | |
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| Expelled - The Intelligent Design Movie
Posted: 3/15/2008 5:43:33 AM |
"Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed", a film that, from what I can tell, purports to expose a conspiracy in the scientific community to shut out Intelligent Design as a viable scientific theory.
Not a conspiracy.
Pretty simple.
One is based on science while the other is based on faith.
As pointed out earlier I think they can co-exist as personal beliefs. But you can't teach something that is based purely on faith in a science classroom. | |
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| Expelled - The Intelligent Design Movie
Posted: 3/15/2008 6:47:00 AM | In a literature class, the Bible and other religious writings are looked upon as literature, not the infallible word of god
Gwendolen....I feel your pain!!!! I teach honors World Lit and British Lit to high school seniors, and of course we sample everything from Ancient Greek to Buddhism to Zoroastrianism to Existentialism...along with the Judeo-Christian tradition. It's very hard to expand or enrich perspectives in the Bible belt. I have complaints when I play "Sympathy for the Devil" as prep for teaching Paradise Lost. I receive some very impassioned essays about the sin of presenting Lucifer as tragic HERO....and some irate students walk out when I show the Monty Python "Every Sperm is Sacred" clip as a parallel to A Modest Proposal.
I enjoy the challenge of exposing kids to perspectives...but the "box" is a tiny one, and getting them to look outside it is a struggle. Unfortunately most people who profess a flavor of "faith" really have only accepted the putative traditions of it and have NOT examined the texts, the precepts or the needs of the culture that engendered it.
Appreciatively,
Weasel | |
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