Hi marc. I see that instead of answering my post, you decided to go off on a rant.
The laughable claim that evolution and atheism don’t have a thing to do with each other is probably the most prominent philosophical claim in all of science that really gets the attention of the vast majority of people who have little or no interest in the creation-evolution controversy. It begs the question — if the scientific community lies about this, what else do they lie about?
You certainly are begging the question. You have no evidence that science and atheism are synonymous, indeed, the evidence you cite disproves it.
The reader should note here that it is not merely evolution that marc9000 wants to destroy, it is all of science and the very scientific method that supports it.
As William Dembski concisely puts it;
I hadn't seen that Dembski quote before. He appears to have completely lost his marbles.
Dembski claims proof of an intelligent designer who claims is the Christian god. He then accuses others of "projecting" religion onto his work. What an astonishing arse.
The science that was in Darwin’s Black Box clashed with that atheist theology,
The science in "Black Box" clashed with
reality.
The only thing that the intellectual elite could do was make rules for something to become science, and try to keep those rules just out of the reach of intelligent design.
You think that the philosophy of science was created in response to Behe? That is hilarious!
As Dr Colin Patterson, a senior palaeontologist at the British Museum of Natural History, puts it;
Yes, let's hear from Dr Patterson;
quote:
The specific quote you mention, from a letter to Sunderland dated 10th April 1979, is accurate as far as it goes. The passage quoted continues "... a watertight argument. The reason is that statements about ancestry and descent are not applicable in the fossil record. Is Archaeopteryx the ancestor of all birds? Perhaps yes, perhaps no: there is no way of answering the question. It is easy enough to make up stories of how one form gave rise to another, and to find reasons why the stages should be favoured by natural selection. But such stories are not part of science, for there is no way to put them to the test."
I think the continuation of the passage shows clearly that your interpretation (at the end of your letter) is correct, and the creationists' is false.
That brush with Sunderland (I had never heard of him before) was my first experience of creationists. The famous "keynote address" at the American Museum of Natural History in 1981 was nothing of the sort. It was a talk to the "Systematics Discussion Group" in the Museum, an (extremely) informal group. I had been asked to talk to them on "Evolutionism and creationism"; fired up by a paper by Ernst Mayr published in Science just the week before. I gave a fairly rumbustious talk, arguing that the theory of evolution had done more harm than good to biological systematics (classification). Unknown to me, there was a creationist in the audience with a hidden tape recorder. So much the worse for me. But my talk was addressed to professional systematists, and concerned systematics, nothing else.
I hope that by now I have learned to be more circumspect in dealing with creationists, cryptic or overt. But I still maintain that scepticism is the scientist's duty, however much the stance may expose us to ridicule.
Yours Sincerely,
[signed]
Colin Patterson
If Answers in Genesis were to close tomorrow, If the Discovery Institute were to close tomorrow, if there would never be another court case involving intelligent design, if intelligent design were to completely cease to exist tomorrow, the one thing it has accomplished will stand for generations, that is, making clear, and inspiring questions, about the fact that many of the intellectual elites in today’s atheist scientific community don’t actually have the intellectual justification to do many of the jobs they attempt to dowith tax money.
Yes that's right. If AiG and the ID con closed down tomorrow all it would leave would be a legacy of impotent anti-scientific whining. The fact remains that for as long as they promulgate untruths, AiG will be regarded as indoctrinators.
They’re in control today, but will they be tomorrow?
Yes. Definitely yes. Creationists have been sounding the death knell of evolution since before the publication of "Origin of Species". They were wrong then and you're still wrong now.
Mutate and Survive