First, there was plain and simple creationism, a Christian idea that, in an ideal Christian world, would be taught as part of any science dealing with the past, including biology (evolution), geology, and presumably history.
But the constitution stood in the way of implementing basic Christian teachings in public schools in the United States, though that battle took decades. Just as creationists were being driven off he landscape, a sort of Battle of the Bulge occurred, in the form of Intelligent Design.
Intelligent Design is a scientific-looking theory which is really just more creationism, and while, as with the actual Battle of the Bulge, creationism expanded briefly, it was again beaten back by legal recourse to the Constitution.
There is now another battle being fought, which is sort of a re-worked version of the “teach the controversy” gambit, which makes use (or, really abuse) of the concept of “academic freedom” to force, once again, Christian ideology down the throats of our unsuspecting youth, in public school.
Joshua Rosenau has been there for much of the latter part of this history, in his role with the National Center for Science Education and as a blogger, consultant, speaker, and writer. And, most recently, he has written a law review article on the role of Dover, and the situation pre, with, and post the Dover decision, in which Intelligent Design was deemed by a federal court to be yet another form of creationism.
Josh wrote up a brief description of his law review article here, and on that blog post you can access a PDF file of the whole thing, which is close to 70 pages long.
Excellent bedtime reading for anyone interested in the topic!
Rosenau, Joshua (2010). Leap of Faith: Intelligent Design’s Trajectory after Dover UNIV. OF ST. THOMAS JOURNAL OF LAW & PUBLIC POLICY, IV
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One can handle the whole issue by saying for the purposes of our class we assume there are no supernatural interventions in the world. (See Lyell et.al.) Then by assumption intelligent design is assumed out of the picture. You say you are free to build whatever world model you like, but we will use this one.
If one takes the other view that supernatural intervention anything goes because you then have specify what kind of supernatural intervention happened and when.
It is fundamentally an assumption about intervention because it can not be proven, since one can postulate hidden interventions that leave no trace etc.
Isn’t that what the indeterminacy principle in quantum
mechanics states is that one can have hidden interventions
that leave no trace?
No, William, it doesn’t.
Perhaps we have a different understanding of indeterminacy
and uncertainty and what &x&t > h means.
I think it’s more likely that you’re confusing words that have a very specific meaning in quantum physics for those same words with different meanings outside of quantum physics. Pretty much every claim made for what quantum physics tells us about the world we live in relies on those confusions. And confusions of scale.
I close the discussion other than to note that I meant &x &p,
not &x &t.
Well, I’m certainly glad that we had this little discussion.
Greg. It was obvious that I was arguing with someone who
if something supernatural happened in front of him the person
would decide it was a hallucination.
And he’d probably be right that is was a hallucination.
William, you’re only willing to argue your idea with the already credulous? What’s the point?
And what does my credulity or lack thereof have to do with your understanding of quantum physics?
I normally do not remark on my SAT and MCAT scores but when
someone who made three 800’s on his SAT’s is accused on not
grasping the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle [and a 795/800
on his SCIENCE MCAT] it is a little bit irritating.
By the way – I have no questions about the theory of
evolution. It is simply that I am an existentialist and
not an atheist [I know it is politically correct among many
scientists to be atheist].