Free Dating Site    

I think they are instructive when some people posit the absolute "science=atheism"....So far, it seems that the mantra "real scientist = Atheist" is flawed.

I think their belief in God brought them to the logical conclusion that God created order in the Universe and that that Order was such that it could be studied.

I am at a loss what to say respecting those who, when they have once erred, consistently persevere in their folly, and defend one vain thing by another;

the belief in God and God's design and logic and order gave rise to the science.

"Old" Science was built on the assumption that the Universe was designed and logical. Without that assumption many discoveries we now take for granted would not have been made.

rockondon: thanks for your trip down "count the fallacies". Any time you want an intelligent discussion, you can indicate it by being... well, "intelligent". HAND

Lying for Jesus?
by Richard Dawkins
The blogs are ringing with ridicule. Mark Mathis, duplicitous producer of the much hyped film Expelled, shot himself in the foot so spectacularly that the phrase might have been invented for him. Goals don't come more own than this. How is it possible that a man who makes his living from partisan propaganda could hand so stunning a propaganda coup to his opponents? Hand it to them on a plate, so ignominiously and so UNNECESSARILY.

In writing this for RichardDawkins.net, I have assumed that our readers will already be familiar with the facts of the case, from Pharyngula and the more than 40 other blogs that have picked up the story and are listed at
http://scienceblogs.com/gregladen/2008/03/pz_myers_expelled_gains_sainth.php
For the same reason, I shall not discuss the main message of the film -- that American creationist scientists are being victimized for their views -- except to say that it was very much NOT its main message when the film was called Crossroads, and when I, together with PZ Myers, Eugenie Scott and others, were conned into taking part.

Now, to the Good Friday Fiasco itself, Mathis' extraordinary and costly lapse of judgment. Just think about it. His entire film is devoted to the notion that American scientists are being hounded and expelled from their jobs because of opinions that they hold. The film works hard at pressing (no, belabouring with a sledgehammer) all the favourite hot buttons of free speech, freedom of thought, the right of dissent, the right to be heard, the right to discuss issues rather than suppress argument. These are the topics that the film sets out to raise, with particular reference to evolution and 'intelligent design' (wittily described by someone as creationism in a cheap tuxedo). In the course of this film, Mathis tricked a number of scientists, including PZ Myers and me, into taking prominent parts in the film, and both of us are handsomely thanked in the closing credits.

Seemingly oblivious to the irony, Mathis instructed some uniformed goon to evict Myers while he was standing in line with his family to enter the theatre, and threaten him with arrest if he didn't immediately leave the premises. Did it not occur to Mathis -- what would occur any normally polite and reasonable person -- that Myers, having played a leading role in the film, might have been welcomed as an honoured guest to watch it? Or, more cynically, did he not know that PZ is one of the country's most popular bloggers, with a notoriously caustic wit, perfectly placed to set the whole internet roaring with delighted and mocking laughter? I long ago realised that Mathis was deceitful. I didn't know he was a bungling incompetent.

Not just incompetent at public relations, incompetent in his chosen profession of film-making, for the film itself, as I discovered when I saw it on Friday (and this genuinely surprised me) is dull, artless, amateurish, too long, poorly constructed and utterly devoid of any style, wit or subtlety. It bears all the hallmarks of a film-maker who knows nothing about the craft of making films. I'll come to that in a moment.

But first, I should deal with some questions that have arisen over the Good Friday Massacre of Mark Mathis' reputation (some commentators are publicly wondering whether the film will ever be released, speculating that its financial backers will pull out for fear of being tarnished with some of the ridicule?)

In a desperate effort to scrape some of the egg off their faces, the creationist wingnuts are spinning the story to make it look as though PZ and I were 'gatecrashers'. The ill-named 'Discovery' Institute heads its web article, "Richard Dawkins, World Famous Darwinist, Stoops to Gate-crashing Expelled." The article says that I "apparently acknowledged that I was not invited". Mark Mathis himself said something similar about PZ in the Q & A after the showing, when I publicly challenged him to explain why he had expelled him, claiming that this performance was by invitation only, and PZ had not been invited. But, as many commentators have pointed out, this was most certainly not an invitation-only affair. The way to get into this showing of the film was simply to go on the Internet and apply. This was exactly what PZ did. He went on the Web and put his name down for a place at the showing, just like everybody else, including several others from the American Atheists annual conference in Minneapolis. Not a man to hide behind a false name or false beard, PZ openly sported his own. Like many other people, including his daughter and Kristine Harley (see her Amused Muse website), PZ took advantage of the generous offer to let him book guests in as well, and then kindly invited me to be one of them. There was no request to give the names of guests, and no machinery to do so, which was why my name did not appear on the list.

Many people have wondered why, if PZ was expelled, I managed to get in. This has been adduced as further evidence of Mathis' bungling incompetence, but I think that is unfair. It was easy for Mathis to spot PZ Myers' name on the list of those registering in advance. Like all guests, my name was not on any list, and therefore Mathis didn't spot me. So I think he can be absolved of stupidity in not spotting me. But convicted of extreme stupidity in expelling PZ when he spotted him. What was he afraid of? What did he think PZ would do, open fire with a Kalashnikov? Now that I think about it, that would have been all-of-a-piece with the overblown paranoia displayed throughout the film itself.

The whole tone of the film is whiny, paranoid -- pathetic really. The narrator is somebody called Ben Stein. I had not heard of him, but apparently he is well known to Americans, for it is hard to see why else he would have been chosen to front the film. He certainly can't have been chosen for his knowledge of science, nor his powers of logical reasoning, nor his box office appeal (heavens, no), and his speaking voice is an irritating, nasal drawl, innocent of charm and of consonants. I suppose that makes it a good voice for conveying the whingeing paranoia that I referred to, so maybe that was qualification enough.

Now, to the film itself. What a shoddy, second-rate piece of work. A favourite joke among the film-making community is the 'Lord Privy Seal'. Amateurs and novices in the making of documentaries can't resist illustrating every significant word in the commentary by cutting to a picture of it. The Lord Privy Seal is an antiquated title in Britain's heraldic tradition. The joke imagines a low-grade film director who illustrates it by cutting to a picture of a Lord, then a privy, and then a seal. Mathis' film is positively barking with Lord Privy Seals. We get an otherwise pointless cut to Nikita Krushchev hammering the table (to illustrate something like 'emotional outburst'). There are similarly clunking and artless cuts to a guillotine, fist fights, and above all to the Berlin wall and Nazi gas chambers and concentration camps.

The alleged association between Darwinism and Nazism is harped on for what seems like hours, and it is quite simply an outrage. We are supposed to believe that Hitler was influenced by Darwin. Hitler was ignorant and bonkers enough for his hideous mind to have imbibed some sort of garbled misunderstanding of Darwin (along with his very ungarbled understanding of the anti-semitism of Martin Luther, and of his own never-renounced Roman Catholic religion) but it is hardly Darwin's fault if he did. My own view, frequently expressed (for example in the The Selfish Gene and especially in the title chapter of A Devil's Chaplain) is that there are two reasons why we need to take Darwinian natural selection seriously. Firstly, it is the most important element in the explanation for our own existence and that of all life. Secondly, natural selection is a good object lesson in how NOT to organize a society. As I have often said before, as a scientist I am a passionate Darwinian. But as a citizen and a human being, I want to construct a society which is about as un-Darwinian as we can make it. I approve of looking after the poor (very un-Darwinian). I approve of universal medical care (very un-Darwinian). It is one of the classic philosophical fallacies to derive an 'ought' from an 'is'. Stein (or whoever wrote his script for him) is implying that Hitler committed that fallacy with respect to Darwinism. If we look at more recent history, the closest representatives you'll find to Darwinian politics are uncompassionate conservatives like Margaret Thatcher, George W Bush, or Ben Stein's own hero, Richard Nixon. Maybe all these people, along with the Social Darwinists from Herbert Spencer to John D Rockefeller, committed the is/ought fallacy and justified their unpleasant social views by invoking garbled Darwinism. Anyone who thinks that has any bearing whatsoever on the truth or falsity of Darwin's theory of evolution is either an unreasoning fool or a cynical manipulator of unreasoning fools. I will not speculate as to which category includes Ben Stein and Mark Mathis.

Stein has no talent for comedy, as he demonstrates in a weird joke about scratching his back, which falls completely flat. But his attempt to do tragedy is even worse. He visits Dachau and, when informed by the guide that lots of Jews had been killed there, he buries his face in his hands as though this is the first time he has heard of it. Obviously it was not his intention, but I thought his rotten acting was an insult to the memory of the victims.

More sinister than the artless Lord Privy Seals, and the self-indulgent and wholly illicit playing of the Nazi trump card, the film goes shamelessly for cheap laughs at the expense of scientists and scholars who are making honest attempts to explain difficult points. Cheap laughs that could only be raised in an audience of scientific ignoramuses (and here Mathis' propaganda instincts cannot be faulted: he certainly knows his target audience). One example is the treatment of the philosopher Michael Ruse: a decent man, bluff, bearded, articulate, and with a genuine and sincere desire to explain difficult ideas clearly. Stein asked Ruse how life originated. Ruse's immediate impulse (as mine would have been) was to launch into an honest effort to explain a difficult scientific idea. He began by saying that he doesn't know how life originated, and nor does anybody else. At this point in his interview, Ruse probably had no notion that his interlocuter had a completely different agenda to promote, with no hint of sincerity to balance his own. Ruse patiently explained that the origin of life (nothing to do with the Darwinian theory itself but the necessary precursor of Darwinian evolution) is an interesting and unsolved mystery, one that scientists are actively working on. By way of example, Ruse could have chosen any of a number of current theories. He chose just one (it would have taken too long to explain them all) purely as an illustration of the kind of properties such a theory must have. He happened to choose the theory proposed by the Scottish chemist Graham Cairns-Smith, that organic life was preceded by a strange and intriguing world of replicating patterns on the surfaces of crystals in inorganic clays. At no time did Ruse say he believed the Cairns-Smith theory, only that it was the KIND of theory that scientists are actively examining, as a CANDIDATE for the origin of evolution. Stein just loved it. Mud! MUD! The sarcasm in his grating, nasal voice was palpable. Maybe this was when Ruse realised that he had been had. Certainly it was at this point that he started to show signs of exasperation, although he may still have thought that Stein was merely stupid, rather than pursuing a malevolent and clandestine agenda. Stein kept returning, throughout the film, to the phrase "on the backs of crystals", and the sycophantic audience in the Minneapolis cinema dutifully tittered every time.

Another example. Toward the end of his interview with me, Stein asked whether I could think of any circumstances whatsoever under which intelligent design might have occurred. It's the kind of challenge I relish, and I set myself the task of imagining the most plausible scenario I could. I wanted to give ID its best shot, however poor that best shot might be. I must have been feeling magnanimous that day, because I was aware that the leading advocates of Intelligent Design are very fond of protesting that they are not talking about God as the designer, but about some unnamed and unspecified intelligence, which might even be an alien from another planet. Indeed, this is the only way they differentiate themselves from fundamentalist creationists, and they do it only when they need to, in order to weasel their way around church/state separation laws. So, bending over backwards to accommodate the IDiots ("oh NOOOOO, of course we aren't talking about God, this is SCIENCE") and bending over backwards to make the best case I could for intelligent design, I constructed a science fiction scenario. Like Michael Ruse (as I surmise) I still hadn't rumbled Stein, and I was charitable enough to think he was an honestly stupid man, sincerely seeking enlightenment from a scientist. I patiently explained to him that life could conceivably have been seeded on Earth by an alien intelligence from another planet (Francis Crick and Leslie Orgel suggested something similar -- semi tongue-in-cheek). The conclusion I was heading towards was that, even in the highly unlikely event that some such 'Directed Panspermia' was responsible for designing life on this planet, the alien beings would THEMSELVES have to have evolved, if not by Darwinian selection, by some equivalent 'crane' (to quote Dan Dennett). My point here was that design can never be an ULTIMATE explanation for organized complexity. Even if life on Earth was seeded by intelligent designers on another planet, and even if the alien life form was itself seeded four billion years earlier, the regress must ultimately be terminated (and we have only some 13 billion years to play with because of the finite age of the universe). Organized complexity cannot just spontaneously happen. That, for goodness sake, is the creationists' whole point, when they bang on about eyes and bacterial flagella! Evolution by natural selection is the only known process whereby organized complexity can ultimately come into being. Organized complexity -- and that includes everything capable of designing anything intelligently -- comes LATE into the universe. It cannot exist at the beginning, as I have explained again and again in my writings.

This 'Ultimate 747' argument, as I called it in The God Delusion, may or may not persuade you. That is not my concern here. My concern here is that my science fiction thought experiment -- however implausible -- was designed to illustrate intelligent design's closest approach to being plausible. I was most emphaticaly NOT saying that I believed the thought experiment. Quite the contrary. I do not believe it (and I don't think Francis Crick believed it either). I was bending over backwards to make the best case I could for a form of intelligent design. And my clear implication was that the best case I could make was a very implausible case indeed. In other words, I was using the thought experiment as a way of demonstrating strong opposition to all theories of intelligent design.

Well, you will have guessed how Mathis/Stein handled this. I won't get the exact words right (we were forbidden to bring in recording devices on pain of a $250,000 fine, chillingly announced by some unnamed Gauleiter before the film began), but Stein said something like this. "What? Richard Dawkins BELIEVES IN INTELLIGENT DESIGN." "Richard Dawkins BELIEVES IN ALIENS FROM OUTER SPACE." I can't remember whether this was the moment in the film where we were regaled with another Lord Privy Seal cut to an old science fiction movie with some kind of android figure – that may have been used in the service of trying to ridicule Francis Crick (again, dutiful titters from the partisan audience).

Enough on the film itself. Quite apart from anything else, it is drearily boring, the tedium exacerbated by the grating monotony of Stein's voice. At the end, Mathis came on the stage to answer questions. He had of course taken the precaution of removing the one individual whom he apparently saw as a likely source of knowledgeable questions, Professor Myers. He must have been surprised when I stood up and asked him to explain why he had expelled PZ, given that the film was an attack on such expulsions, and given that the film's acknowledgments had thanked PZ for his role in the film. Mathis trotted out the lie that Myers had been excluded because he was not invited. This seemed to satisfy the loyal audience, even though they presumably knew perfectly well that they hadn't been invited either, and that they, like PZ, had simply booked their seats on the Internet. I pursued the matter until the audience's hostile demeanour persuaded me that there was no point in continuing. The point was made to all whose minds were not completely blinded by religious zeal.

The New York Times picked up the story, and caught Mathis in the act of perpetrating yet another piece of dubious spin-doctoring.


Mark Mathis, a producer of the film who attended the screening, said that "of course" he had recognized Dr. Dawkins, but allowed him to attend because "he has handled himself fairly honorably, he is a guest in our country and I had to presume he had flown a long way to see the film."


As I said before, Mathis almost certainly detected Myers' name on the list of those who signed up on the Internet. Since my name was not on that list, it is highly likely that Mathis didn't spot me until the moment I stood up in the Question session, when it was too late to expel me. So all that stuff about allowing me to attend because I have handled myself fairly honourably is almost certainly dishonourable spinning. As for the implication that I might have flown all the way from England to see his disreputable film, the very idea is as ludicrous as the film itself. Like PZ Myers, I was in Minneapolis for the conference of the American Atheists.

Josh Timonen and Kristine Harley took up the cudgels. Josh drew attention to the digraceful victimization of scientists espousing the Stork Theory of reproduction, by hardline members of the 'Sex Theory' establishment. And Kristine asked Mathis to explain what had become of a film called Crossroads which had mysteriously morphed itself into Expelled. The import of her question was the widely known fact, which I have already mentioned, that PZ and I had been tricked into participating in Crossroads without ever being told that the true purpose of the film was the one conveyed by the later title Expelled -- the alleged expulsion of creationists from universities. Mathis said that it was common practice for films under production to have working titles, which later change in the final version. That is indeed true. However, yet again, Mathis shows himself up as a wilfull deceiver. As Kristine herself said on her blog (http://amused-muse.blogspot.com/):


It would appear that Expelled's producer Mark Mathis was not being truthful when he told me tonight that Crossroads was a 'working title' for the film Expelled. As Wesley Elsberry points out, the domain for Expelled was purchased before most, if not all, of the interviews were conducted -- and yet Richard Dawkins, Eugenie Scott, PZ Myers, and others were told they were being interviewed for a film called Crossroads.

Mr. Mark Mathis, do you want to come here and explain yourself?


Could Mathis have been sincere when he originally told PZ and me the film was an honest attempt to examine evolution and intelligent design? The evidence that they had already purchased the Expelled domain name argues against this. Certainly Mathis' friendly demeanour disarmed me into cooperating with him -- indeed, I went out of my way to HELP him on his visit to Britain -- in a way that I never would have if I had had the slightest suspicion that his outfit was in fact a creationist front. I may have misremembered the details of our exchanges, by eMail and by telephone, but I vividly remember his reassuring me, over the telephone, that he was on the side of science, and he made no attempt to distance himself from my sarcastic jokes about 'Intelligent Design'. I am reluctantly driven to wonder whether he is an inveterate liar, as well as a dreadful film-maker. Yet another example of Lying for Jesus?

AncientMuse said: but it's also duly noted by the rest of us that we too can cherry pick some quotes from the exact same scientists that you mention that bend to our favour.

I said: I'm not sure what you're trying to prove here. That Newton, Galileo, Copernicus, Kepler, Kelvin, Boyle, Ray, Pasteur, etc. were Atheists? I think I'd like to see those quotes. they would be most instructive. And the best way to refute the obvious conclusion to be drawn from the quotes that Kyro produced. So far, it seems that the mantra "real scientist = Atheist" is flawed. I'm eager to see if that is the case or not.

AncientMuse said: RO, you're not trying to put words in my mouth are you ? Point out where I said science = atheism. Point out where I said I can prove these men were atheists.

E.kyro's attempt to prove that these guys were religious is totally futile anyways. It doesn't friggin matter if they were religious or not ! Their science fields were still actual science fields and had absolutely nothing to do with whether or not they were religious !

His god should be ashamed of him.

I didn't say you said "science=atheism". It is an often enough repeated general claim made by posters in this forum that I thought it appropriate to point it out.

[Dog Did Not Eat Cake is not a valid scientific theory. An alternative needs to be provided. And supported.

RO said : Anyway, you said you could produce quotes that would give a certain result. I'm asking for them. The first four will do.

Newton :

“To me there has never been a higher source of honor or distinction than that connected with advances in science.”

"We are to admit no more causes of natural things than such as are both true and sufficient to explain their appearances."


Galileo :

“I think that in the discussion of natural problems we ought to begin not with the Scriptures, but with experiments and demonstrations.”

“It vexes me when they would constrain science by the authority of the Scriptures, and yet do not consider themselves bound to answer reason and experiment.”


Copernicus :

"Therefore alongside the ancient hypotheses, which are no more probable, let us permit these new hypotheses also to become known, especially since they are more admirable as well as simple and bring with them a huge treasure of very skillful observations. So far as hypotheses are concerned, let no one expect anything certain from astronomy which cannot furnish it, lest he accept as the truth ideas conceived for another purpose, and depart from this study a greater fool than when he entered it.”


Kepler :

“I much prefer the sharpest criticism of a single intelligent man to the thoughtless approval of the masses.”

“I demonstrate by means of philosophy that the earth is round, and is inhabited on all sides; that it is insignificantly small, and is borne through the stars.”

You said you could provide quotes from the exact same scientists to bend in your favour. Because the original post presented the quotes in an apparent attempt to prove they were theists

I don't expect anyone - especially an intelligent person - to believe exactly the same thing they do today as they did 20 years ago. I expect them to believe differently and to have changed some things for others.

Especially in light of the assumption that's often made (again, not saying by you) that a person cannot be Religious/Theist and Scientist.

Posted by themadfiddler
The suggestion that Albert Einstein believed in a personal god of any type is just the kind of "quote mining" performed by Ben Stein in his film Expelled and which E. Kyro has rather shamelessly engaged in his last few posts.

Posted by CharlesEdm
You can't be a succesful astronomer if you believe in the heliocentric model of the universe.

The majority of those scientists once again predate evolutionary theory. Kepler died in 1630 Darwin was born in 1809

As for obsessiveness, my suggestion would be not to quit your day job if you're considering becoming a psychologist. Just because I have some knowledge in a field you obviously are willfully ignorant of, doesn't make me obsessive, far from it.

So one can believe in a god, if they believe that evolution through natural selection is the means by which life changed and evolved, they're not an IDer.

I challenge you to find anyone who thinks that the current theory of evolution has not changed in any manner since the 1800's especially considering the fact that genes and mollecules weren't even understood to exist at that point.

Glad to see you're getting your sources from such an unbiased source. Tell me what are the statistics on research scientists in the genetics field on their views on evolution? Layman opinion doesn't indicate truth, if you had any education in the scientific fields at all you'd know that appealing to popular opinion doesn't reflect well on your position at all.

Clarence Clutterbuck
I couldn't resist some kind of response to this. You seem to be saying that what people are taught should come down to some kind of popularity contest, and that if 85% of the nation believe in some utterly spurious nonsense with no scientific basis, that it should be adopted as an accepted educational standard. That is a STUPID argument. Beyond stupid in fact. Perverted would be a better description. A perversion of reason.

I have enjoyed your contribution to the debate E Kyro, if only because your flawed and twisted reasoning has elicited some thoroughly well thought out, entertaining and argument winning responses from many of the other posters.

Posted by Whitegold765

Also, would it be inappropriate to point out that if the Creationist churches that push this bogus agenda are so concerned about taxpayer's money maybe they should consider... paying tax?

Posted by Chelloveck
You seem to give the impression that the the Teleological argument for the existence of god...a philosophical speculation dating from ancient times is the same thing as the corpus of contemporary Intelligent Design literature and doctrine which has only been extant since the 1980's, and also giving the impression that many of the quoted science founding fathers/nobel laureates considered Intelligent Design (as a body of theory) to be a fact.

The most that you can argue is that some of Science's "founding fathers" favoured a teleologicaly speculative view of the world....none could have asserted ID as it is now touted, as a fact.... I say this simply by virtue of the fact that most of the scientists listed were dead before the genesis of the present pseudo scientific ID movement, and could not have made any comment on the movement's claims of "scientific" legitimacy.

Posted by saintgasoline
ID is a term that refers to criticisms of evolutionary theory and posits God as necessary for driving biological change. Someone who believes God created the universe and set the evolutionary process in motion (but didn't interfere with it) is not a supporter of ID.

Posted by rockondon
Belief in God usually brings people to the conclusions of 'goddidit' and 'the bible says it, that settles it' and cognitive thought tends to stop right there. Geocentrism anyone?

Posted by AncientMuse
Isn't cherry-picking fun ? Someone who didn't do their homework could easily fall for my examples of how these individuals could be thought of as possible agnostics. Even though the rest of us who've done our homework know differently. Thus I think my point has been made.

Posted by rockondon
ah yes this discussion about all these great minds that believed in [this] or didn't believe in [that] may be of some historical interest, but they do little to support someone's argument. In my opinion, stating the beliefs of a given person is fitting in general conversation, but if you are arguing and trying to support your position, attempting to do so by saying believed as you do does not support you.

Well you call it a popularity contest wheras I call it an aspect of the democratic process. It is a perversion of democracy that the minority should hold sway over the wishes of the majority.

I don't personally think that proponents of Intelligence Design OVER evolution should be "discriminated against" as citizens, but that doesn't mean that they have some sort of inalienable right to be considered scientists.

Straw man Fiddler. I never made any mention of a "personal" God for any of the listed scientists.

Imo when a poster clearly indicates that these great minds believed in [this] or [that] as proof that what they believed in has been believed for a long time rather than as an appeal to authority and yet the poster continues to be accused of such an appeal then the faulty reasoning is obvioulsly resonating in the minds of his ill-informed opponents, but anyone with any measure of sophistication would see this reliance on a charge of the appeal to authority fallacy, as a cry for help. Its like a flashing sign saying "My position has no ground to stand on," and they are attempting to win their points through a circumstantial ad Hominem.

Until Darwin, ID was the ONLY scientific legitimacy. That there is now another theory of the origin of the species does not make the previous one a "psuedo-science".

Dawkins for example, who admits that a logically valid scenerio for ID is if life on this planet was seeded by aliens.

It is a perversion of democracy that the minority should hold sway over the wishes of the majority.

I do not believe in a personal god and I have never denied this but have expressed it clearly. If something is in me which can be called religious then it is the unbounded admiration for the structure of the world so far as our science can reveal it.
~Albert Einstein.

I think Darwin was still alive at the time he invented the theory of Evolution, so he didn't really predate it.

If an Intelligent Designer created life forms in the genesis event which gave that life the ability to adapt to varying environments through a process of natuaral selection, then they would still believe in intelligently designed genises event. Since you don't deal with abiogenesis as an evolutionist, you cannot refute that scenerio except by offering a biased opinion based on your worldview.

The mechanics of evolution have not changed since it was hypothesized by Darwin. Genes and molecules were around long before the theory was invented and will be around long after its demise and as such have no bearing on the theory itself other than further proof or disproof.

You seem to subscribe to the popular opinion of the scientists and yet believe that it reflects well on your position. Has it not occured to you that Darwin was a layman in biology? So in reality, layman opinion is followed by the scientists and you follow the scientists and therefore indirectly the opinion of a layman.

Well you call it a popularity contest wheras I call it an aspect of the democratic process. It is a perversion of democracy that the minority should hold sway over the wishes of the majority.

Until Darwin, ID was the ONLY scientific legitimacy. That there is now another theory of the origin of the species does not make the previous one a "psuedo-science".

PLEASE, DON'T FEED THE TROLLS

You can't be a succesful astronomer if you believe in the heliocentric model of the universe.

I couldn't resist some kind of response to this. You seem to be saying that what people are taught should come down to some kind of popularity contest, and that if 85% of the nation believe in some utterly spurious nonsense with no scientific basis, that it should be adopted as an accepted educational standard. That is a STUPID argument. Beyond stupid in fact. Perverted would be a better description. A perversion of reason.

Well you call it a popularity contest whereas I call it an aspect of the democratic process. It is a perversion of democracy that the minority should hold sway over the wishes of the majority.

Thus I think my point has been made.

I think it's only fair to concede that it WAS considered legitimate during the middle ages and well into the early-modern period to argue for "proof" of God's existence through a "logical" (but NOT empirical) process--nature itself was "proof" of God's existence, and this WAS orthodoxy. Basically, Thomas Aquinas "proved" that God exists using the same approach relied upon by present proponents of ID.

But THAT "natural science" wasn't what WE call Science--there was no "scientific method" as we undertand it. And the real stickler is that the most important thing common to both current ID advocates rejecting evolution and thirteenth century theologians like Aquinas is the use of logic to prove a pre-existing premise: the truth of scripture. Aquinas began with Christian doctrine, using logic to prove its veracity. Proponents of ID do the same: they prove an idea that they believe in PRIOR to employing the logical process ....thus proving it.