@JEccles - I think it is reasonable to talk about it. It is a major alternative theory (no matter how much we may oppose this) and until we can disprove it must be considered.
Things like this are places where we have to say that the theory isn't actually testable: there is no experiment we could do that would disprove ID. Also, as has been noted, its a good basis for discussing scientific theory - the concepts behind HOW an idea becomes scientific cannon, and critical reasoning.

"I also find it hard to understand why you're all so sure the 7000 year claim is false? Personally I don't believe it, but think of it this way: If you have a God capable of creating an entire universe, why wouldn't he be able to do so in such a way that it looked older than it is?"

Why would "he" want to.

@ figlesquidge - to be considered a scientific theory you need to actually provide empirical evidence for the theory you're proposing, and it needs to demonstrate some kind of predictive power. ID does neither.

Evolution is a scientific theory with substantial objective evidence. If your religious beliefs are dependent on every verse of the Book of Genesis being literally true I'm afraid you're in trouble. As it stands the Christian Religion isn't dependent on Earth being 7000 years old or the Book. of Genesis being literally true. Evolution is a question of Reason, and it being proven as true doesn't invalidate the Christian Religion.

@kreilly: lots of Christians don't believe genesis to be literal, it is actually written in poetic form and language in hebrew and should be viewed as such. most Christians just get looped in and stereotyped as literalists because that's what everyone wants them to be, which simply isn't the case. I know some strong Christians that are very good scientists, and neither of those fields conflict with one another, so I don't see why the world thinks that they have to.

@Santa - Bit of a laugh? If he's capable of creating a universe and intelligent life, then sounds reasonable enough he might want to test/tease/play with them. I'm not saying I support the idea (I'm unsure) but this really doesn't seem a sticking point to me.

@Mafia - Fair enough, sounds reasonable to me. Must admit the definition in my mind has been swayed by my mathematics, which is clearly much purer and as such, if its not false, it might be true. Your point is that whilst I'm right there, unless a hypothesis can be used to predict future behaviour, its useless as a theory (even if true). Think I understood you, will have a look back in a few days - best get some sleep for now

@figle

I'm not sure I understand your first post. Are you asking me why ID is not science?

Jeccles: The problem with handwaving away something as "poetic" and not literal is that you're getting into that territory of a la carte religion... which isn't religion. If you yourself can pick and choose which parts you take seriously, and which parts you don't... the Bible(or any holy book) ceases to have any authority... if it ever did.

It's not me picking and choosing, it's the literal translation of the hebrew language. Just as we have english poetry, hebrew people have poetry as well, and a special way of writing it in historical context. when you go back to the original manuscripts of genesis, the creation story was written in the poetic form, much like what a stanza would be for us today, with the poetic language of the day that it was written. it's a common misconception that christians are picking and choosing what is literal and poetic when it comes to what they believe as such, but the reality is that each chapter, and even down to each verse and sentence in the Bible is unique, and some are written poetically and some are written historically, and yet others are prophetic. So you have to look at how it is written in the original hebrew text with a viewpoint as a hebrew person culturally in the day it was written, not how we would view it today. I hate saying the Bible is cultural, but when reading it from the original text you have to put yourself in the shoes of the hebrew people writing it and the culture that they were in, and at that point and the language and writing style that was used then it was deemed as being more poetic than literal.

and it's not a matter of taking it seriously or not, I take Hemingway just as seriously as I do a non-fiction historian today. It's just how you read the 2 different types of writing and interpret it that you have to do differently, but you take the 2 types of writing just as seriously as the other because it's how the person conveys the message.

interesting thread.
I'll throw in a contribution by the particle physicist Victor Stenger that I found particularly intriguing (though I am not a physicist and am not qualified to intelligently respond to his thought)... basically he pointed out in an essay that the entropy argument became outdated about 100 years ago, when we discovered that the universe is expanding... he stated, in part:

"This actually was a legitimate question a hundred years ago, when we thought that the Universe was a firmament, but now we know that the Universe is expanding. An expanding universe leaves increasingly more space for order to form.

"An example I like to give on this, is, suppose that you have a very small yard, and every day you take your rubbish and you dump the rubbish into the yard. Eventually it's going to cover up those petunias that you plotted over there in your garden, and your yard is going to become very disordered. How can you, then, get some more petunias growing? Well, what you can do is buy the land around your yard. Then you have more space and you can plant some petunias. As time goes on, of course, you keep dumping the rubbish and it fill up the space, you've got to keep buying more and more land. But, in principle, you can do it that way; you can always have some space left over. As long as the Universe continue to expand, in other words, there's always room for more order to form."
---

Perhaps it is important to remember that the universe is not expanding quite like we usually picture - like an explosion - but more like a rubber band - where everything is stretching - where the expansion is more than a simple expression of projectile motion but more of a elemental and continuing change (most dramatic in the early universe, but still continuing) where space itself expands (more than in 3 dimensions, I imagine)... I am at my limits as far as conceiving how particle physicists view this expansion, but apparently it is an on-going creation of potential energy or something like that (???). Anyway... I definitely do not think we need some explanation like this to deal with krellin's entropy question... I agree with the others that the current Big Bang theory as we commonly conceive it has no problem dealing with the question without getting into Dr. Stenger's model. But on the other hand, maybe this is the way physicists normally look at it and us non-physicists regularly get it wrong (way-over-simplified and overly Newtonian).

Also, I forget who is this thread was positing that Genesis did not contradict the evidence... but here you go... According to Genesis I: Day 3 sees creation of seed bearing plants and trees that bear fruit with seed, whereas Day 4 sees the creation of the Sun, Moon and Stars and Day 5 sees the creation of sea creatures... evidence clearly contradicts this order. Should be: stars first, then Sun and Moon, then sea creatures, then seed bearing plants and trees that bear fruit with seed. Day 5 also sees the creation of birds and Day 6 sees the creation of creatures that move along the ground and "wild animals"... granted I'm not looking at the original Hebrew, but this appears messed up as well. Evidence supports this order: creatures that move along the ground then wild animals (assuming that means things like reptiles, mammal-like reptiles" (Pelycosaurs and Therapsidas), dinosaurs, and mammals). Day 6 then suggests, in the order that the creations are listed, that Livestock is created before creatures that move along the ground and wild animals *and* before humans (who we know are responsible for domesticating livestock). Definitely a screwed up chronology - no matter how you define the word "days" or how squishy the original Hebrew is on the matter.

I agree there are issues with the order, but livestock and humans are in the correct order. We domesticated existing wild animals. Case in point, horses. Human beings captured and broke wild horses, thereby domesticating them. But the horse is an older species than homo sapiens sapiens.

What about self domesticating species like cats, and semi-self domesticating species like dogs?

Tried walking up to a lion or a dingo and petting it lately? :-)

@semck 83

This is an excellent post, has it been responded to?

****Regarding Putin's response to my query:

"The laws of physics literally come from nothing. The laws of physics are not really laws. The universe and the laws of physics arose from a highly unstable and symmetric void. The universe is nothing more than rearranged nothing.

Anyway this question has been answered by physics. It is myth concocted by theologians and philosophers that it can't in principle be answered."

First, I think you should probably settle on one of these answers. Either this is a non-question and the laws of physics don't exist, or physics has explained where they came from.****

The reason there are symmetries is because if there weren't we wouldn't be here wondering why there are symmetries.

@dexter morgan:
Stenger's claim is legitimate, an expanding universe constantly raises the bar of maximum entropy possible. However, if proton decay will take place, you end up with an extremely low-energy level universe with huge timescales for any action (it takes some while for a lone particle and anti-particle to meet in a huge universe). Without proton decay, all the matter will still turn to black holes, either by being gobbled up by them or through quantum tunelling. We may not be reaching heat death asymptotically, but the ratio of entropy to maximum entropy will continue to grow for some time in the future.

Still the evolution as pictured by krellin is merely a speck in all of these events and all its effects on the entropy is only local and limited in time. Evolution is not in contradiction to second law of thermodynamics.

manganese, I think that's only a satisfactory answer if one assumes the existence of a multiverse. And I think that assuming the existence of a multiverse just to make it a satisfactory answer may be on shaky ground. See, e.g.,
philosophy.fas.nyu.edu/docs/IO/1180/ftmu.pdf

for a stimulating discussion of that issue, and John Leslie generally for a discussion of the first claim.

For example, though, If one doesn't buy a multiverse, then that's a peculiarly anthropocentric response, which dodges any discussion of the nature or cause (if any, or non-cause, if not) of an objective fact that is outside the human race and obviously much broader in scope. I might just as well explain the existence of America saying that if it didn't exist, I wouldn't either (which is very likely true, taking the butterfly effect even weakly into account). True or not, it's not exactly on point.
And, of course, either answer again rushes more blatantly even than science usually to Hume's precipice. Of course, a philosopher of science might point out that we're always there anyway, this kind of answer to things just makes it much more psychologically clear that we're there.

@semck83. Actually, the only real answer we have at the moment to the question "why is there something rather than nothing" is "why not?" or "we don't know, yet".

The answer "goddidit" is just silly.

As for multiverses, although I don't particuklarly care for them, even they are more plausible than gods.

@manganese, it seems we agree, then, in any case, that the anthropic answer given above is not in any ultimate sense an answer.
As for "God did it" being a _silly_ answer, I suspect you have _too_ little respect for the arguments in that line. Whether you find them convincing, of course, is another issue. You apparently don't.
Certainly I have no idea why multiverses are more plausible than deities. If you truly find deities silly, I would have to imagine that the reason is a supposed lack of empriical evidence. Is this less true of multiverses?

Yes, we know of at least one empirically observable universe. Gods, not so.

@Draugnar, certainly the wild species that were the basis for domesticated animals pre-existed humans (that is well established)... but the fact that the bible distinguishes specifically between wild animals and livestock seems to suggest that they believed that these "livestock" animals came pre-domesticated (before the appearance of humans)... otherwise they would simply be grouped as wild animals, no?

@ulytau, agreed (to the extent that I understand... of course).

@dexter - Of course, I did say that there were obvious issues with the other orders any how. But considering the previously pointed out poetic writing of Genesis Chapter 1 (amongst other OT writings) I don't take even a little of it literally. Not even the 6 phases of work and resting on the 7th. That was inserted to fit in with the fact that humans need to take an occasional break from the grind to recuperate.

@Draugnar, seen poetically, I have no problem with the text... and certainly there are still poets even in this scientific age who at times take even greater license from reality to describe something in their poetic way. I only object to the concept (that someone here posited) that the Genesis account does not contradict the evidence of evolution - which it clearly does. Indeed, even Genesis I and Genesis II contradict each other, but that's neither here nor there.

to address the original article - and the text of the actual law...
It (the law) clearly takes the position of "teach the controversy", no matter how much it sugars it up as if it's being reasonable or educational. Consider in particular that it conflates that fact that certain "scientific subjects, including, but not limited to, biological evolution, the chemical origins of life, global warming, and human cloning, can cause controversy" (i.e. social/philosophical controversy) with actual scientific controversy (which there effectively is none). It requires all levels of the education system to "create an environment" and "assist" teachers in their endeavors to teach the controversy and it insulates teachers wishing to teach the controversy from any restriction from above. So - it is sow doubt and a false equivalence between scientific theories and religious theories and make teachers who do that immune from any correction. This is rather vile. ...and, as is typical, it is a standard written by the legislators rather than a guidance written by the professionals themselves. Teachers are treated like simple labor rather than as professionals. No one tells the medical establishment: its ok if you doctors decide that germ theory is questionable and that scrubbing before surgery is unnecessary - we support and protect your right to disagree with established science and instead perform quackery if you want to. No one does that to the medical profession... why does the government feel that its okay to do that to teachers?

@dexter - But the irony is, as has been pointed out here, that the teachers this is applying to (well most, not the grade school teachers) are typically members of the science teachers federation and pro evolution, so it is giving them the chance to dispute the fundamentalist preachers' teachings by giving them carte blanche as well. I really think this will back fire and the politicians will be scrambling to rewrite it, take that *too* far, and have the whole mess struck down by the supremem court in the end anyhow. This is basically Scopes Round II waiting to happen, but this time the USSC will not over turn anything on a technicality. They'll lay it out once and for all (I hope).

Oh, and the why is because teachers don't have peoples lives in their hands and the teachers in question here are primary and secondary through grade 8, so usually only have bachelors anyhow. It's not like a doctor who has gone through 4 years undergrad plus med school plus potentially more plus internship plus residency... Sorry, but equating a 5th grade teacher to a doctor is truly a bad comparison.

Especially since teachers kill much fewer people.