John McCain Supports Teaching Intelligent Design
| February 8, 2008 | Posted by Dave S. under Intelligent Design |
A commenter on my previous article asked whether John McCain supports intelligent design or not. After a quick google I can happily say the answer is yes.
McCain sounds like presidential hopeful
By C.J. Karamargin
ARIZONA DAILY STAR
Tucson, Arizona | Published: 08.24.2005
As the Gallup Poll noted, McCain has a generally consistent conservative voting record but forged a national reputation after a series of notable breaks with fellow Republicans.
On Tuesday, though, he sided with the president on two issues that have made headlines recently: teaching intelligent design in schools and Cindy Sheehan, the grieving mother who has come to personify the anti-war movement.
McCain told the Star that, like Bush, he believes “all points of view” should be available to students studying the origins of mankind.
I wonder what Barack Hussein Obama has to say about Intelligent Design. Anyone? Bueller? Anyone?
93 Responses to John McCain Supports Teaching Intelligent Design
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jerry, just to get the necessaries out of the way, I view Ambulocetus, Tiktaalik, Archaeopteryx, Australopithecus, and Platypus, among others, as being transitional or intermediate.
larrynormanfan,
You are making the same mistake every other person who has made the same claims. Common descent says nothing about mechanism.
Darwin included common descent as part of his theory but it is independent of his other two concepts which were gradualism and variation. All three are independent of each other and just because you have evidence of one does not mean the others are working. So you can never argue that common descent implies gradualism. It is a logical fallacy.
Each part of Darwin’s theory has to be judged independently of the other. So what you are doing is begging the question again by assuming a conclusion and not proving it.
To prove gradualism, you must provide evidence of gradual changes to form complexity. None exist and you can not fall back on common descent to make your case. It must be done without appealing to common descent.
None of the fossils you have mentioned is evidence of gradualism. They may be evidence of similarity of some elements but in no way do they support gradualism. They may also be evidence of somewhat similar morphology but again this does not support gradualism. What would support gradualism is a plethora of fossils small differences apart that led to more complex life forms or more complex life capabilities. None exist in the fossil record even though the fossil record is well sampled. None exists in the world today. There are no examples of species moving in any upward direction in the world today. All are moving downward if they are moving at all.
This is the wrong direction to support Darwin’s ideas. What Darwin saw on his trip on the Beagle is downward evolution not upward. He saw varieties of larger gene pools not species gradually becoming more complex or novel. His wishful thinking turned this downward evolution into upward evolution for which there is zero evidence.
You also have to define what you mean by common descent. Darwin used it in the sense that we are all descended from a single celled organism through his processes of variation and natural selection. That is quite different than saying we are descended from apes or that the whale descended from a forrest animal.
There is no evidence for universal common descent and many evolutionary biologist dispute it. The main evidence used is that all life uses the same DNA/micro biological processes to exist. But to assume that this implies universal common descent is again begging the question by assuming what has to be proven.
You would like your language analogy to be true but there are major differences that override any similarities. It is another example of wishful thinking.
The Great Vowel Shift took place over 200 years from the early 1400′s to the mid 1600′s and there is no evidence to suggest why. There is evidence it didn’t take place in local dialects but mainly in the standard language which was being used in the courts and universities as educated people from all over the land came to meet. There are some examples where it did not take place and still exist in the language. For example, the word beat would have been pronounced like bate in old English so the shift took place for this word. But break and great retain their old English pronunciation even though we have other words that are identical in sound such as brake and grate. It was a mystery but the effect of it was to make English different from every other language as far as pronunciation.
Keep chugging away. Maybe you will come up with something that hasn’t been thought of before.
Larrynormanfan — I know you meant mmm (non-word that it is) literally. And with design.
You took a sound made by people, unintentionally, as a placeholder for thoughts and purposely used it to communicate an idea giving it meaning it did not have.
When people say mmm, uh, ah because they are at a loss for words they are not creating words. When you use letters that attempt to mimic those sounds to describe someone at a loss for words you are starting the process of creating — note creating — new words.