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Creationist Textbook Stickers Declared Unconstitutional
An anonymous reader writes "MSNBC reports that a judge in Atlanta, GA has ruled that a sticker placed on all textbooks in Cobb County stating that 'Evolution is a theory, not a fact,' is unconstitutional, and ordered that all stickers be removed."
By that logic, you are declaring Evolution a religion...
I'm doing no such thing. You're confusing analogy with equivalence.
My point is that Christianity (specifically, Creationistic Christianity) is going outside the bounds of acceptable behaviour by trying to intrude on other disciplines. If the converse were done to them and their bibles, hopefully they could see the error in their ways.
Unlikely, though. Christianity's biggest problem, as Joseph Campbell pointed out, was that for Christians it's more important to believe the existence of Jesus, Adam and Eve, Satan, etc. than it is to understand the meaningful significance behind them.
Just look at what these brilliant scientists of tomorrow have discovered
1st Place: "My Uncle Is A Man Named Steve (Not A Monkey)"
One of my personal favorites
2nd Place: "Women Were Designed For Homemaking"
Jonathan Goode (grade 7) applied findings from many fields of science to support his conclusion that God designed women for homemaking: physics shows that women have a lower center of gravity than men, making them more suited to carrying groceries and laundry baskets; biology shows that women were designed to carry un-born babies in their wombs and to feed born babies milk, making them the natural choice for child rearing; social sciences show that the wages for women workers are lower than for normal workers, meaning that they are unable to work as well and thus earn equal pay; and exegetics shows that God created Eve as a companion for Adam, not as a co-worker.
(P.S. that site is for real)
Furthermore, evolution does not attempt to explain the origin of life, only the ways in which it has changed since it began. I have never heard a remotely plausible theory regarding the origin of life. People have not yet been able to create anything nearly as complex as a machine which can produce more of itself outside of laboratory conditions, and the idea that such machines just "happened" accidentally is far-fetched at best.
Don't get me wrong here - the notion that some all-seeing, all-knowing invisible superhero created life so that it could be fawned over is even more absurd. But just because we can't figure out how it started doesn't mean we should accept "it just happened by accident". Did VCRs also spontaneously arise out of the primordial soup? A VCR is a far far simpler device than a self-reproducing automaton...
I found this in an earlier article on slashdot (the one where they asked a grip of scientists what they believe without being able to prove).
This was spot on for me, and since we're in the smart room right now with this article, I thought I'd share. It's a wonderful explanation of why critical thinkers can still have faith.
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TOR NØRRETRANDERS
Science Writer; Consultant; Lecturer, Copenhagen; Author, The User Illusion
I believe in belief--or rather: I have faith in having faith. Yet, I am an atheist (or a "bright" as some would have it). How can that be?
It is important to have faith, but not necessarily in God. Faith is important far outside the realm of religion: having faith in other people, in oneself, in the world, in the existence of truth, justice and beauty. There is a continuum of faith, from the basic everyday trust in others to the grand devotion to divine entities.
Recent discoveries in behavioural sciences, such as experimental economics and game theory, shows that it is a common human attitude towards the world to have faith. It is vital in human interactions; and it is no coincidence that the importance of anchoring behaviour in riskful trust is stressed in worlds as far apart as Søren Kierkegaard's existentialist christianity and modern theories of bargaining behaviour in economic interactions. Both stress the importance of the inner, subjective conviction as the basis for actions, the feeling of an inner glow.
One could say that modern behavioral science is re-discovering the importance of faith that has been known to religions for a long time. And I would argue that this re-discovery shows us that the activity of having faith can be decoupled from the belief in divine entities.
So here is what I have faith in: We have a hand backing us, not as a divine foresight or control, but in the very simple and concrete sense that we are all survivors. We are all the result of a very long line of survivors who survived long enough to have offspring. Amoeba, rodents and mammals. We can therefore have confidence that we are experts in survival. We have a wisdom inside, inherited from millions of generations of animals and humans, a knowledge of how to go about life. That does not in any way imply foresight or planning ahead on our behalf. It only implies that we have a reason to trust out ability to deal with whatever challenges we meet. We have inherited such an ability.
Therefore, we can trust each other, ourselves and life itself. We have no guarantee or promises for eternal life, not at all. The enigma of death is still there, ineradicable.
But we a reason to have confidence in ourselves. The basic fact that we are still here--despite snakes, stupidity and nuclear weapons--gives us reason to have confidence in ourselves and each other, to trust others and to trust life. To have faith.
Because we are here, we have reason for having faith in having faith.
There's nothing Intelligent about Intelligent Design.
Cut and paste to avoid slashdot effect.
Page titled "Evolution is a Fact and a Theory":m l
http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/evolution-fact.ht
Hence, saying that for sure evolution "is not a fact" at best cannot be proven, at at worst is downright false.
Want more ? http://www.talkorigins.org/indexcc/list.html
Quote:Scientists have, however, managed to zap at contained vats of chemicals that could be similar to the soup that was Earth's conditions before life and managed to get some very basic 'things' that could be the precursors to life as we know it. Unfortunately, they don't have millennia to continue to monitor and experiment on these vats of organic chemicals to see what actually happens to them.
I think that it's very plausible that amino acids and proteins, combined with a whole slew of other compounds came together and started to have different chemical reactions that built upon themselves leading to "life". Also, small, simple systems are easily mutated chemically at such a stage, so new variants would crop up in the process of dividing or chemically reacting, continuing the diversification. Over time pieces combine or split and grow in complexity, eventually joining into simple multicellular organisms, then further.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
I believe that the official Roman Catholic view is that evolution took place as scientists believe. They add the claim that at the point at which humans became human, God infused them with souls. This isn't really inconsistent with biological theory since biology doesn't have anything to say about souls. Effectively, the official view is biology + infusion of the soul.
I agree that those Christians who believe in evolution would not agree that life evolved purely as a result of cosmic chance, but evolution in and of itself doesn't require that. A purely materialist scientist sees no need to appeal to anything other than chance, but one can hold a perfectly orthodox view of evolution and at the same time believe that a Supreme Being set the whole thing in motion.
if the bibles in Cobb county have stickers advising people to consider other belief systems?
I'll be the one screaming "medic!" at the top of my lungs. Modern medicine may just be a theory but I reckon it's statistically a better bet than relying on His strength.
And you'd be absolutely right. In the current conflict in Iraq, the death rate from battle wounds is only 1.6%, whereas in vietnam it was 3.68%, more than twice as high. The army, at least, attributes this huge increase in survivability to modern medical technology and improved practice.
looked at as a ratio of wounded (but survived) to killed, the current ratio is 7.6:1. Going backwards in time, counting only U.S. soldiers:
Vietnam: 2.6:1
WWII: 1.7:1
WWI: 1.8:1
US Civil War: 0.74:1
In other words, a trend consistently shows more people surviving war wounds as time goes on.
Meanwhile, the evidence is not that there has been a massive (factor of twenty) increase in religiosity in the United States since the Civil war. Certainly, available data show that people self-identifying as Christian have decreased significantly between 1990 and 2004.
So the evidence would seem to indicate, unless God has consistently increased his tendency to save the lives of wounded soldiers despite no significant increase in their faith, that improvements in medical technology are in fact a good bet for saving your life when you're lying bleeding on the battlefield.
Good call, mike260.
I stole this sig from someone cleverer than me.
Take that probability and then combine it with the fact that the Earth is 4.5 billion years old. In all that time don't you think it would be possible for the right series of events to happen that would create life? In that time frame the Earth managed to create a working nuclear fission reactor at Oklo. Isn't it just as probable that life could also be created in that same time frame? The weaker life creations die out and the stronger survive, over and over and over and over again until 4.5billion years later we write about it on Slashdot. It's not that unlikely at all IMHO.
Err, thats not particularly usefull. Better to say:
Dear Creationists,
We'll put these stickers on our science textbooks when you put "God's existance is an untestable hypothesis that can never rise to the level of validity of a theory. Belief that 'God' created the universe is as demonstratable and testable as 'invisible pink elephants' created the universe."
Realities just a bunch of bits.
Perhaps I'm in the minority, but I came to my faith, not early on in my childhood, but much later in adulthood. Being agnostic most of my life and growing up with science in school, I was (and still am) very interested in things like astronomy and cosmology. Frankly, I see the beauty of God's work in the heavens every time I set up my telescope.
However, perhaps unlike many baptised-at-birth Christians who knew about the teachings of Jesus their whole life, I came to faith through my own search for answers to bigger questions. To me, it simply seems to impossible to think that the universe and all that's in it, including us, is the result of some random roll of the cosmic dice.
On the other hand, I see a certain parity between science and religion. I don't think they necessarily have to be mutually exclusive. Just like science can't explain the pre-big bang universe, it also can't explain the "Why am I here question?". If you can accept that science, when pursued in a truly unbiased way, helps to explain the physical universe and the phenomenon that we see in it, then it seems natural to me to think that religion is the way to explain the "Why am I here question?".
No. "Things fall down" is a fact - an observed phenomenon. "Things fall down because there's a force called gravity that causes an attractive force between any two masses" is a theory.
As for the sticker, "evolution" means "species change over time". This has been observed, so it is a fact. "Theory of Evolution", on the other hand, says that "All species on Earth were born from a common ancestor through evolution", which may be true, partially true ("some, but not all, species developed from a common ancestor through evolution") or completely false. Therefore, it is not a fact.
It should also be noted that one of the reasons that the Theory of Evolution gained so much support was simply a counterreaction to the centuries of oppression by religion and the then-fashionable atheism; scientists, being humans, aren't any more immune to letting fashion influence their thinking than anyone else. It was fashionable to deny the existence of God, and the authority of church, so any theory that would allow people to do so seemed inherently better than it's merits might have allowed.
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
that this pathetic attempt by religous fundamentaists to impose a creationist curriculum makes the critique of evolution and the critique of modern science even more difficult.
Science is not about truth. The measurement appropriate to science is the measurement of correctness. It is not about truth because it is personally irrelevant-ie. it has nothing to do directly with you or your actions and values-unless you are a scientist engaged in scientific activities. But the dogma of school science is about truth and pupils are by and large incapable of NOT drawing personal conclusions, conclusions about there own being, life and meaning based on what they are taught about science.
And it is indeed questionable if such is having a detrimental effect on our society. That so many adults are turning to fundamentalist christian beliefs is a an ultra hardcore indictment of our public school instruction about science. The void of personal meaning present in that which is being taught is real and tangible. It's not as if these adults were not subject to evolution in their schools curriculum....
Being against the fundamentalist doctrine of creationism does not mean that by default one endorses the theory of evolution. But this kind of situation, where the state acts to prevent an endorsement of religion in the public school curriculum, forces the issue-rendering things black and white.
The whole argument of science vs religion overlooks that there is practically little difference, in terms of conviction, between religion and science. Science is the religion of many modern day earth dwellers. It is accepted with the same kind of passitivity as is the case in most modern christians. Only a tiny percentage of people are actually scientists yet their theories, facts, and findings, translated into language which the non-initiated can understand, form the basis for much of our public schools curriculum.
Much of the religious nature of modern science is due not to science itself but due to the science (pedagogic) which has evolved to enlighten our childrens minds by teaching them about science.
Now one can argue about whether the material being taught is really science. And in the process overlook the fact that the indoctrination of scientific values and assumptions in our pupils impressionable minds is anything but scientific. To the extent to which 'science' and 'evolution' have become doctrines administered to our youth in the public school system the issues of what rightly constitutes science is no longer a decision of 'scientists'.
Evolution, an incredibly broad and overgeneral term for multiple conflicting and competing theories has become the basis of biology and the whole slew of neo-scientific adventures which have sprung up in the past 40 years (socio-biology, pyscho-biology and what not). In these scientific field there exists a degree of consensus about what evolution implies. This consensus around 'evolution'-or rather the raster of interelated theories which form 'evolution' has become so central, so pivotal that such neo-scientific adventures would vanish in a puff of logic if the non-verifiable ultimate hypothesis implied in 'evolution' where sufficiently debunked.
'Evolution' is in the first place a working tool which aids in organizing, categorizing the abundance of material gathered and explicitly casting these findings in terms of teleological causes.
As a tool 'evolution' is usefull for these scientific pursuits. As is the case with all tools- this tool will be surplanted in time by newer and more appropriate tools-as the sitution requires. 'Evolution'(eg. Maturana and Varela and the concept of autopoesis, natural drift) of today has remarkably little to do with Charles Darwins "Origins of Species".
The problem with 'evolution' in specific and 'science' in general is not that they are based on theories. Aside from the fact that everything which is not a theory is either (fantasy, mythology, mystery, fiction) or the unmittigated
If you read the decision, the court spends most of the time explaining why the sticker *is* constitutional. However, the sticker still failed the test. Here's one reason why:
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In this case, the Court beleives that an informed, reasonable observer would interpret the Sticker to convey a message of endorsement of religion. That is, the Sticker sends a message to those who oppose evolution for religious reasons that they are favored members of the political community, while the Sticker sends a message to those who beleive in evolution that they are political outsiders. This is particularly so in a case such as this one involving impressionable public school students who are likely to view the message on the Sticker as a union of church and state
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