Shonga... on a trivial note :)

You have yet to drive a Falcon XR6 Turbo 'Typhoon'... more torque than a $380k V10 Masserati... I test drove one the other week, my GOODness... they absolutely flyyyyyyy... Not that I'm in the position to buyone.. I have a Commodore.. 96 VS. I haven't compared the Pwr/Weight Ratio with a GTHOPhaseIII or a GTS, but I know it was pretty good.

On ID.. and faith etc.. I've said all I can on that.
Cheers and best wishes to all.

I don't know what the fuss is. If you read the directive from the Kansas Education Board is says that it can mention Intelligent when teaching evolution in science class. Why is that a problem? If you are gullible enough to accept ID without any scientific proof then do so at your own peril. Stop giving ID such coverage...it is purely a fad. Like yoyos.

David please don't take it the wrong way, but, the Falcon XR6 you test drove, that fleeeeew! The GTHO PH3, is my favourite of all time because it not only flew, not that I ever owned one, but because it had a certain presence about it, as did a 350 GTS Monaro, which I was lucky enough to have a ride in 30 years ago. However the sound of a HO just idleing down the street, used to put shivers up my back, and if the car you drove last week was fast, you would have been test driving on your own, as far as I was concerned, as speed and acceleration now are things I no longer have the nerve for, but I hope you enjoyed youself mate, I have a VN commodore 91' and it is plenty fast enough for me. Oh!, by the way with the cost of petrol these days, I have installed two products, to save money on petrol costs, they are 1. Hyclone {don't know if you have heard of them} and 2. a Fitch fuel catalyst, and they pay for themselves in 12 months, the initial outlay was $600.00, and I have had mine for roughly 18 months, so if anyone is interested in spending to save, I can recomend these products from experience, all the best David.

I.D. creates a fuss because it stands apart from all other school curricula. Most modern democracies are secular, uncomfortable with recognising supernaturalism outside religious or philosophical environments. Intelligent Design has only one logical conclusion - the existence of a creator - and is antithetical to the basic scientific process. It makes no predictions, does not inform the past, is built upon premise alone and cannot be refuted.

A key argument used by proponents of I.D. is the suggestion some bodily features, such as the structure of the human eye or cell, possesses "irreducible complexity". The organ seems to have had no intermediate stage or function in the more primitive animals from which we supposedly evolved, therefore must have been designed when man was created. Q.E.D., there exists a designer. This is as far as I.D. can go. It draws a line beneath what is known and designates the remainder as of divine origin, using the same reasoning ancient civilisations used when worshipping a rain god. Teaching this in a science class is akin to astronomy students evaluating whether Capricorn and Pisces are in fact compatible.

The article discusses whether children should be able to determine the difference between faith and reaon. I'm all for it, but not in an environment where a stab in the dark even gets a guernsey, much less equal billing with a massive and coherent body of credible evidence to the contrary

Intelligent Design is inferred from empirical evidence in nature, not deduced from scripture or religious doctrines. It's not a matter of faith, but rather a logical inference based on biological evidence.

On the issue of falsifiability:

"Is intelligent design falsifiable? Is Darwinism falsifiable? Yes to the first question, no to the second. Intelligent design is eminently falsifiable. Specified complexity in general and irreducible complexity in biology are within the theory of intelligent design the key markers of intelligent agency. If it could be shown that biological systems like the bacterial flagellum that are wonderfully complex, elegant, and integrated could have been formed by a gradual Darwinian process (which by definition is non-telic), then intelligent design would be falsified on the general grounds that one doesn't invoke intelligent causes when purely natural causes will do."

http://www.leaderu.com/offices/dembski/docs/bd-testable.html

As the above article goes on to explain, Darwinian theory cannot be falsified as the old "we don't know enough yet" argument is employed in the face of fundamental gaps. Gaps which evolution is simply incapable of bridging.

To say that evolution doesn't have problems is an argument out of either ignorance or mendaciousness. The mere collapse of gradualism in the face of the fossil record indicates that not all is well. And that's without taking into account ID critiques of supposed evolutionary mechanisms (or lack thereof).

The author makes the assumption very early on that since evolutionary theory is not thorough, a Darwinian account of man's emergence is less credible than a supernatural one. He witnesses the study of an exotic organism's behavour to the limit of scientific ability, then claims the unknown for himself. Is this the measure of I.D.?

Furthermore "...we possess very little insight at this time into how such a designer acted to bring about the complex biological systems that have emerged over the course of natural history."

He describes a designer that can't be defined, effecting changes he can't say where, using a method that can't be explained.

A natural theory of evolution, gaps and all, doesn't take this road, and its adherence to the scientific method hobbles its ability to convince skeptics evolutionary theory is rational. Is it the sole genesis of our living planet? Or can we have our heads in the clouds and our roots in the trees at the same time?

Take heart, dear readers. "Let's be clear that design can accommodate all the results of Darwinism. Intelligent design does not repudiate the Darwinian mechanism. It merely assigns it a lower status than Darwinism does."