More opinions on Wise

Florida Citizens for Science supporter Paul Cottle, who is a professor of physics at Florida State University, wrote a nice piece for the Florida Times-Union about state Senator Wise’s possible intelligent design creationism bill.

Wise’s proposal does not represent the viewpoints of all Christians.

Last year, Bishop Thomas Wenski of Orlando published an opinion column in The Orlando Sentinel endorsing the teaching of evolution.

At the same time, he rejected the notion that “evolution requires a materialistic or an atheistic understanding of the human person or of the entire universe.”

Wise’s proposal does not use the word “science” in the same way that the vast majority of scientists do.

Most scientists regard science as a way of explaining phenomena we observe in our laboratories and elsewhere in the universe using the laws of nature.

As Staff Writer Matt Soergel reported in his article, intelligent design advocates assume that “life is so complex that it couldn’t occur naturally but must have had an intelligent force working to make it happen.”

But, of course, there are unscientific opinions out there, too. Julie Braza twisted herself into a pretzel in order to try to make a point.

It is important to remember that intelligent design is not creationism, nor does it contradict evolution. If intelligent design were taught in the classroom, the teacher would not read the book of Genesis aloud and then say “end of discussion.”

The theory of intelligent design merely states that there is an intelligent force behind certain aspects and patterns of the universe, as opposed to complete randomness.

The idea could be presented to students in such a way as to say that many in the scientific community believe that evolution and natural selection are undirected processes, while others in the scientific community believe that there is an intelligent force directing or instigating these processes.

First of all, Julie, intelligent design is in fact creationism. The two concepts are one and the same. Secondly, claiming there is an intelligent force out there without scientific proof to back up that claim is in fact injecting a religious belief into a science classroom. How else could that be interpreted? Finally, intelligent design creationism does not in any way advance scientific understanding of our world. Rather, it’s a “science stopper” as biologist Ken Miller said. “If you attribute an event to the supernatural, you can by definition investigate it no further.”

The next letter down is from John Campbell, who trots out those tired old eye and fossil arguments, which show that he has no idea what he is talking about.

They want no competition of ideas in this area and certainly don’t want things like irreducible complexity or the evolution of the eye openly discussed in the classroom.

And they certainly don’t want students to ask the whereabouts of all those billions and billions of transitional species fossils that don’t exist.

Read up on eye evolution. Read up on transitional fossils. And read some more. Don’t like reading? Then take a trip to the Hall of Fossils at our own Florida Museum of Natural History.

It’s so incredibly frustrating to hear and read these long-ago discredited arguments against evolution again and again. These arguments are so off the mark that they can no longer be considered arguments at all, but rather flat out lies.