May 15, 2010 — Two teams have succeeded in building little robots that work on DNA tracks.  These resemble in many respects the machines that cells use to perform its functions on DNA.  No one denies that humans engineered their nanobots on purpose, but Darwinist scientists claim natural cellular machines evolved without purpose or design. What’s the difference?

…

So if we do it, it’s intelligent design, but if nature does it, it’s blind evolution? You realize, of course, that the natural machines in cells are far ahead of us: they are not only autonomous, but attain very complex behaviors that are programmed into their molecular systems. Not only that, they belong to complexes of molecular machines, which belong to networks of signal processing systems, that boggle the mind – and they belong to entire systems that have a coded library, and can reproduce all their parts! Why should not scientists find it “inspiring to see such creativity” of “autonomous molecular systems that can execute complex actions” and ascribe it to design? Molecular biology should be filled with God-fearing, worshiping, praise-singing scientists shouting Hallelujah! What we get instead are man-fearing, fault-finding, hate-mongering ingrates shouting Pal-Ayala.

The religious aspect of science (often referred to as ‘Scientism’) is captured once again in a recent piece on the highly informative CreationSafaris website. It requires very little commentary from me at this stage, as I think the point is well made.

Can you be called scientifically literate if you deny that humans evolved from lower animals?  What if you deny the universe began with an explosion?  American students have typically scored low on those questions, leading to charges that they are scientifically illiterate compared to other countries in Europe and Asia.  But now, the National Science Board (NSB) decided to drop those hot-button questions in the 2010 edition of Science and Engineering Indicators, a biennial compilation of the state of global science, on the grounds that they don’t accurately reflect students’ knowledge of science, but rather their beliefs.  The decision set off angry protests in certain quarters. …

… Joshua Rosenau of the National Center for Science Education (NCSE) [called] it “intellectual malpractice” to discuss scientific literacy without mentioning evolution.  “It downplays the controversy,” he said. … Yudhijit Bhattacharjee said, “those struggling to keep evolution in the classroom say the omission could hurt their efforts.”

… NSB officials counter that their decision to drop the survey questions on evolution and the big bang from the 2010 edition was based on concerns about accuracy.  The questions were “flawed indicators of scientific knowledge because the responses conflated knowledge and beliefs,” says Louis Lanzerotti, an astrophysicist at the New Jersey Institute of Technology in Newark and chair of the board’s Science and Engineering Indicators (SEI) committee. …

… Bruer noted that 72% of Americans answered the question about humans evolving from earlier species correctly when the question was prefaced with the phrase, according to the theory of evolution.  This shows that the questions “reflect factors beyond unfamiliarity with basic elements of science.”  The controversy over Indicators thus boils down to the question whether a student needs to believe, rather than simply know, the facts of a theory to be considered scientifically literate. …

And here’s the point;

… If students have to believe rather than understand a scientific theory, then science has become a religion.  According to the radical Darwinists, a scientist could have a PhD, earn international honors in science, publish hundreds of papers in peer-reviewed journals, and save millions of lives, and yet, if a Darwin doubter (roster), could be judged scientifically illiterate. Do you want radicals like that influencing education policy?  Do you want them requiring recitation of a pledge of allegiance to Darwin?  Do you want them forcing science curricula to say that to understand science, you must believe that nothing banged and became everything by an unguided process?

Indeed, hasn’t this kind of expectation (this commitment to materialism and scientism) already been exposed with the treatment of scientists such as Richard Sternberg and Guillermo Gonzalez, not to mention many others?

According to a recent CreationSafaris^[1] post:

Some Cambridge scientists engineered a four-character genetic code and made some proteins with it. They guided the process at every step, but claim that they “evolved” this code. Is that a fair use of language? This strange admixture of concepts is found in today’s issue [18 March 2010] of Nature. The confusion began right in the title: “Encoding multiple unnatural amino acids via evolution of a quadruplet-decoding ribosome.” [emphasis in original]

http://creationsafaris.com/crev201003.htm#20100318a

After summarising the work as reported in the scientific journal Nature, they rightly observe the equivocation:

…everything was intelligently designed, both the natural and unnatural codes and functions. This paper was one of the best examples in recent memory of Truman’s Law: “If you can’t convince them, confuse them.” Using evolve as a synonym for design is a clever way to blow smoke using equivocation. Words mean things. This has nothing to do with evolution in the way Darwin used it, and in the way the debate rages today. It has everything to do with intelligently designing codes to synthesize things they would not naturally do (that is, without the intervention of a human mind). These human designers did not “evolve” anything, and they did not rule out intelligent design in the “natural” systems. If they really wanted to talk about evolution, they should have left the lab and let “nature” take its course. [emphasis in original]

1. CreationSafaris is highly recommended and would be in my Top5 all time websites across all genres. Their team constantly survey the main stream media and secular scientific journals and are well-equipped to point out the many equivocations, failings, misgivings and “baloney” associated with many of their claims. It is one of the best places to get your secular [materialistic] brainwash washed.