Slashdot Mirror
Is The U.S. Becoming Anti-Science?
smooth wombat writes "As a follow-up to a recently posted Slashdot article, Reuters UK has an article which poses the question: is the U.S. becoming hostile to science? From the article: 'Among the most significant forces is the rising tide of anti-science sentiment that seems to have its nucleus in Washington but which extends throughout the nation,' said Stanford's Philip Pizzo in a letter posted on the school Web site on October 3. Cornell acting President Hunter Rawlings, in his state of the university address last week, spoke about the challenge to science represented by intelligent design which holds that the theory of evolution accepted by the vast majority of scientists is fatally flawed. Rawlings said the dispute was widening political, social, religious and philosophical rifts in U.S. society. 'When ideological division replaces informed exchange, dogma is the result and education suffers,' he said." What is your take?
Yes. Any other stupid questions?!
If someone says he and his monkey have nothing to hide, they almost certainly do.
Supposedly Britian has a somewhat separated office of science within their government to make decisions that impact circumstances on environment, wildlife and global warming... much of these decisions take more than four years to measure for results, so they're obviously going to be ignored by any U.S. president whose voters believe otherwise. The British government appoints the person in charge of that much like we do the supreme court and federal reserve chairman, which is supposed to keep it relatively non-partisan.
I say we follow the British lead on matters like this. Of course it would have no effect on creationism/ abortion/ etc regulation, but its a start. As far as science in general, the United States is by far the leaders for scientific paper production, measured by citations. However, this number taken per capita or divided by the GDP of the country in question has always put the U.S. far behind in research, primarily to European countries. I'm not sure if this number has declined in the past few years having had a strong religious president.
Mostly, I think, the scientists just keep quiet and do their job of saving lives and advancing technology and let the naysayers bicker on the internet...
It's about the message science is bringing. Some people, for religious, political or business reasons don't want to hear what science is saying. This is initially a case of trying to silence the messenger. Not just about science, either. Tell people the economy stinks, they can see the evidence all around then, and they deny it.
Seems every couple generations people in the US have to re-learn the hard lessons of their forebearers. Silence science in this country and it'll be carried on all the more in other countries. e.g. Stem Cell Research. The State of California approved a bond for stem cell research, a few billion $ if IIRC, not much of it has been spent and it will be years before any of it is, on research, because a bunch of Right To Lifers are fighting it on many fronts in state courts.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Rather than pine away about how the US is losing the edge in technology, consider it the beginning of a new spiritual prominance that we're gaining instead - hopefully based on our newfound re-discover of Inteligent Design in the form of the FSM.
Thank You, Ramen
But do not inquire as to why. Because I said so.
Now run along and play with your HummerDinger.
It was the Flying Spaghetti Monster, then God, then Darwin, then the real first post, then your post.
There are no karma whores, only moderation johns
... Let us remember that there are multiple theories of Intelligent Design. I and many others around the world are of the strong belief that the universe was created by a Flying Spaghetti Monster. It was He who created all that we see and all that we feel. We feel strongly that the overwhelming scientific evidence pointing towards evolutionary processes is nothing but a coincidence, put in place by Him. ...
http://www.venganza.org/
This is preposterous! The US has produced a number of excellent scientific theorum in recent times, including Intelligent Design and Intelligent Falling
My 3D Texturing Skinning work (under construction)
The only interesting question is wether or not it's possible for a few enlightened city folk to turn the tide against the vast stretches of rural (and southern) faith-based ignorance.
I'm guessing the answer is 'no'. Given that's the case, is there any way to live with it? (again, I'm guessing 'no')
I am pro-science, anti-god, some people are pro-science, pro-god, some are anti-science, pro-god, and even some (particulary insane ones) are anti-science, anti-god.
America, as a whole, can be considered none of the above. There's roughly 250,000,000 people in the US. Even if 95% of them absolutely hated science, that'd leave millions left to fight for reason.
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I think it's sad that we only tend to hear the voice of extremism in the media.
I mean, I guess it makes sense, because nobody ever holds an "I'm riding the fence on this one" rally.
Still, this is making us look bad because the ones with the crazy opinions are the ones with the loudest voices sometimes.
Yes, there is a large, vocal, and frighteningly powerful group in the USA ignoring science for ideological reasons. Is there anything to learn by having a discussion on Slashdot about this?
Shouldn't we be asking Slashdot something like, "How do we stop the insanity?"
Seems like that could be more productive.
With backwards, religious zealots running the country, like DUMBya and his minions, you get the mess we are in now.
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All this "Intelligent design" crap is for the physical adults that chose to remain mental children
Just look at the banning of the nature videos at the Imax theaters recently because the films discuss evolution..
The zealots in washington would have the scientists put to death if they could get away with it for denying their precious book of fairy tales.
"God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him."
...science and engineering work is getting outsourced to Asia with little complaint, why should the US spend capital on teaching real science here?
Is the Pope catholic?
Drill baby drill - on Mars
America is more than anti-science. American culture in the broadest terms has become very anti-intellectual, which is really a super-set of being anti-science.
"You never know when some crazed rodent with cold feet might be running loose in your pants."
-Calvin
It would be nice if the anti-science stuff didn't always focus on the creationists and would occasionally also focus on the animal rights nuts who advocate killing researchers and blowing up labs. Just 'cause they don't tote Bibles (though some do), doesn't mean they're not every bit as big a problem as the creationists (besides, creationists rarely blow up biosciences labs like animal rights extremists do).
Most of the heavily religious people in the US are Christians with fairly fundamentalist, or at least evangelical, views. These people are not particularly interested in the physical world, because their religion teaches them that whatever they do here is merely preparation for an afterlife that will be much much better. If your primary concern is going to heaven when you die, why would you care about physics?
There's also the simple matter that learning about critical thinking in general and science in particular makes it hard to swallow religious dogma. Science isn't incompatible with spirituality, but it's totally in opposition to biblical literalism and other fundamentalist practices. It's very much in the interests of these kinds of religious groups to denigrate science, as doing so makes it easier to spread their beliefs. (And, for people whose faith isn't enough, easier to justify their beliefs.)
I think the public is smart enough to realize that what's being propped up and paraded around as "science" is in fact just a bunch of hogwash, much of which is politically motivated (i.e. global warming, stem cell research, etc.). As a result, there's a general lack of trust of the scientific community to begin with. Plus, our "convenience store" mentally of wanting everything now now now means we have little patience to wait 20-30 years for results.
First they came for the mathematicians, and I did not speak out--
because I did not like math;
Then they came for the theoretical economists, and I did not speak out--
because I did not understand economics;
Then they came for the engineers, and I did not speak out--
because I did not believe engineering was a true science;
Then they came for the scientists, and I did not speak out--
because I did not like my science teacher;
Then they came for me--
and there was no one left to speak out for me.
.... in an America dominated the religious right.
I wonder if there's a scientific reason for that?
This is my opinion. To make sure you don't steal it, it's covered by the DMCA.
My take is that I should learn to speak chinese.
The worlds becoming dumber so everyones "anti-science", as long and "normal people" get to work 9-5 and watch their TV they don't care any more. We've had it drilled into us so hard that we're just worthless minions who need extra money to buy worthless crap that we end up more or less beliving it. So science is something you hear about on TV, not something you're able to take part in after you leave school.
I like muppets.
They just weren't bought in highly religious areas.
Ooo man the floppy drive is broken. No wait. The computer is just upside down.
I think it goes beyond just anti-science. The way things have been going lately I'd contend that there's a general anti-education theme at play. It's not cool to be smart here, and it's definitely not high on anyone's funding list, no matter what the politicians may say. I've spoken a lot with my Father-in-law (he's Taiwanese) and we've come to the agreement that Americans in general are becoming increasingly complacent when it comes to education. Everyone's fat, happy and enjoying "Pimp my Ride" too much to care about the long-term impact of drastic education underfunding and a general lack of good teachers. I have two hopes: that the influx of educated foreigners in search of a better life here don't get completely blocked out by the xenophobes at home, and that the small percentage of Americans who are determined to get a good education are able to hold the line until people realize that education is a good long-term investment.
Derek
Don't Panic...
Scopes Monkey Trial. I know it was a long time ago, but not much progress seems to have been made in overcoming the ignorance and superstition that seems to persist in the southern states. Hell, even here in enlightened California I see people with these fish things on the back of their cars with the word 'Truth' eating the word 'Darwin.' It was here that I saw a bumber sticker informing me that a good knowledge of the Bible is better than any four-year college degree course. Anecdotal? Maybe, but if anybody in Europe drove around with such a public display of ignorance they'd be laughed off the road. Out here it seems to be commonplace.
Drill baby drill - on Mars
That's absolutely true, because so many creationists deny the validity of the theory of relativity. The real problem are those who insist on a strict interpretation of the bible, because genesis conflicts with the theory of evolution. Of course, a rational christian (no, this is not necessarily an oxymoron, at least not completely) would accept that time is just an invention to keep everything from happen at once (no matter who "invented" it) and that the things that occurred in those six days didn't necessarily happen in 24 hour periods, but instead more literally didn't happen at the same time.
Anyway, these are generally people who actually believe that god put dinosaur bones here to test us. How can you reason with people like that?
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
From the Article: Polls for many years have shown that a majority of Americans are at odds with key scientific theory. For example, as CBS poll this month found that 51 percent of respondents believed humans were created in their present form by God. A further 30 percent said their creation was guided by God. Only 15 percent thought humans evolved from less advanced life forms over millions of years.
.0000000001% different than they are, we would not have evolved in the same way- perhaps not at all.
Uh, this looks like a poll tweaked for contraversy to me. The 2nd answer presupposes the third; thus 45% of Americans think that humans evolve from less advanced life forms over millions of years, and a large portion of those believe that God wrote the rules that caused the evolution. The Big Bang itself is not only consistent with this point of view- it provides some proof of it. Something happened at planck time that changed the laws of the universe from a set of random variables effecting every particle differently, to a set of constants that all of our laws of physics are based upon. And not easy numbers either- really messy numbers that if they were even
So while our dearly stupid evangelical leaders may be going the wrong way, the American People as a whole seem to be as pro-science as ever.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
God: Nietzsche is dead
Who do you think won that debate?
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Yes and I'm scared that we're approaching a Christian induced period of "believe in what makes you feel good" instead of "believe in what is correct, true and accurate."
I'd like to become a born again SCIENTIST but I never left the fold.
If any are tough enough to do it and already have a Biology degree, pick up and read Origin of the Species. Many things were not known to Darwin and his peers at the time like genetics and plate tectonics so many of his assumptions are not entirely accurate, but they are a path on the road to the understanding that we have today. Read it for reference, not to learn new concepts since many ideas posted are superseded by what we now know. And read it so that you actually can talk on an informed manner to those who claim to know that evolution is a myth.
Religion is a panacea for those of small minds who are to lazy to learn how the world really works and feel comfortable with small and easy answers - even if they are false.
- Zav - Imagine a Beowulf cluster of insensitive clods...
If only air conditioning had not been invented. The south would not have become as populated as it is, more people would have congregated in cities to the north, and more of them would have been better educated.
Drill baby drill - on Mars
One of the actions of the US that is declared "anti-science" is the refusal to ratify Kyoto. I find that very strange since one of the lead scientists doesn't agree with kyoto. Lindzen's senate testimony is an extremely disturbing look into how politics shape science. Couple that with the bad data found in the Mann report and it's enough to make anyone doubt good science is being done.
At the end of the day, the US isn't anti-science it's a system that has been built around science in much of the developed world that doesn't promote enough skeptisism or honesty. Peer review in some circles just means you belong to the right clique, with the right point of view. Put that together with funding that often comes from political circles filled with "true believers" and you have a recipie for disaster.
Lindzen's quote "There is a certain charm when politicians are so certain of the science when the scientists are not" seems rather apt.
cluge
"Science is about ego as much as it is about discovery and truth " - I said it, so sue me.
Pro-stupid is more accurate.
Cute but the creationists have "genericized" creationism into intelligent design. That way multiple faiths can jump on the intelligent design band wagon. It's become the lobby group for religion.
Now to be fair though. I'll fight for anyones right to promote intelligent design; provided its sufficiently backed with QUANTITATIVE evidence. So far I keep hearing about more qualitative points like "How likely is it for an intelligent species like man to evolve from protoplasm?" It's not a scientific arguing point rather a philosophical one. The reality is no one can scientifically debunk points like that because there is no other ruler to measure that against!!
I know, let's seed another planet with some single strand protiens that could say come from a comet. Add water, sunlight and several million years of evolution and observe... oh wait.
*Cue twilight zone music* Maybe we're the grand experiment???
Oops, how did this get here?
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
Of course science is suffering in the U.S. In 1991, 9% of the U.S. population believed in Naturalistic Evolution. That went up to a whopping 10% in 1997 with 44% believing in creationism and 39% believing in Theistic evolution (evolution, but God-guided). Now, if you ask scientists (which pretty much includes anyone with a higher degree in science, but presumably people of intelligence and education), the percentage that believe in Naturalistic Evolution goes up to 55%, with only 5% believing in creationism and 40% in Theistic evolution. So 95% of scientists believe in Evolution in one form or another. Why? Because it's a friggin' fact!
The 44% of the US population that don't believe in evolution of any form believe there's a God who's idea of a good time is toss dinosaur bones around the world making them look millions of years older than our 4000 or 5000 year old Earth. As if his time couldn't be better spent smiting creationists or something.
But really, if you have such a large population that simply can't believe facts, then how on Earth can science advance in that kind of environment.
Whoever wrote that there dumb article/question should be hanged Texas style. yee-haw.
This issue is not US specific, I think that almost all Western nations are facing similar futures.
I think that whenever a country gets itself so bogged down in legislation and legal protectionism, that its scientific and research and development future (naturally risky endeavours) is short lived. While laws such as SOX, OSHA, and others are ostensibly for the protection of the community (i.e. protecting against the greed of the business world), the restrictions tend to mean that more time is spent complying than actually researching.
Patent and trademark law also stifles innovation, especially when IP holders exert their authority. This is one of the reasons cited for the near death of the early powered flight industry in the US (the Wright brothers were asserting their IP rights), and the location of the major Hollywood studios on the West Coast (apart from the improved climate, it was an attempt to evade the protectionism on the East Coast).
The prevailing theology would be the third leg of the stool, with significant historical injustices being carried out in the name of religion (and historical revisionism). There is no problem with science and theology / philosophy co-existing. The problem arises whenever ethical decisions are required for future research tracks, or when one tries to undermine the other (such as there is no higher being because we can't see it/them/her/him). Sometimes faith is just that, faith. It doesn't need to be rational (although it helps), and a faith in the scientific process is as valid as a faith in the intangible.
Of course, declining academic results, low birth rates, the MTV generation, the offshoring of high tech industry, the turning of tomorrow's leaders into cannon fodder, protracted conflict, government corruption, mismanagement and the proliferation of the 'short term profit at all costs' ethos all play their part as well.
InfoSec that matters, when it counts.
Nazism is just one example of capitalism going awry under stress conditions. I know that all the great American democracy apologists will tell you that "something like that would never happen in the land of the free" blah blah blah. Bullshit power resides in the hands of those with economic power here. Your opinion and your vote doesn't mean anything in the face of economic power.
So in times of deep economic crisis (like these times for example) the ruling rich gear up for confrontation with the population that is seeing their salaries, their health care, etc. deteriorating. This involves a lot of supposedly irrational attitudes. In this case, there are no people with swastikas running around the streets spreading hatred against the Jewish community. It's more like white people running around the streets with crosses and American flags spreading hatred against Arabs (is there any real difference?).
Part of this process involves a direct attack of a lot of "rational" things, including (but not limited to) science.
There is no debate that's going to stop this trend. Things don't work that way. As the crisis deepens, we are going to see more and more of this crap that can only be stopped on the streets (as opposed to the lame ballot boxes).
So, this problem did not start in Kansas, it started on Wall Street. And is not going to be solved in elections, *if* we have any chance of solving it is by direct action. That excludes blogging.
weapons development is science
Believe it or not, but there are a lot of people reading /. who are happy to defend Intelligent Design as "science".
Before you learn how to end it, you have to learn why people WANT to believe it.
Intelligent design? As far as I know, nobody has actually refuted "Darwin's Black Box" by Michael Behe. The man is not an idiot, he knows his molecular biology, and he raises some valid points. Screaming, "He's just a creationist!" doesn't make the points go away. Talking about how the consensus of scientists agree with you doesn't make the points go away. (The consensus is only right until it's wrong - but it takes quite a while for the consensus to change after it's been shown to be wrong.)
Stem cell research? There are people who believe that a fertilized egg is a human being. That's not a scientific question. But until it's answered, there's a moral problem, at least for those people, and asking them to accept that there will be scientific advances just makes them think of Dr. Mengele. Now, you can argue that it's a dogma to those people, and you'd be right. But to them, it's not a scientific issue. And until you can persuade them that stem cell research isn't a moral issue, they're going to fight you. And some of them (certainly not all) can give you some intelligent reasons why they think what they do. If you can't respond with some intelligent reasons of your own, all you have is a dogma.
Here, your own Bible says that God didn't directly create animals, but that he gave his blessing for the earth to produce life:
..."
And God said, "Let the land produce living creatues, according to their kinds
Gen 1:24
So, even if I chose to argue with the creationist point of view solely from the Bible, you can't say that God just popped a creature into existence. He let the land produce the living creatures -- can this leave room for interpretation that God said, "let life evolve?"
It would make for an interesting study whether evolution is completely random or not. Perhaps the whole tree of species is following some sort of pattern, like a literal tree growing from a single seed -- some randomness is involved, but overall, there is a meaning and order to how the growing tree develops.
This kind of science would overlap more with Gaia theory than theology.
random underscore blankspace at ya know hoo dot comedy.
Science, and rationality in general seem to be given short-shrift here and now. ... And perhaps for good reason!
From an authoritarian viewpoint, properly indoctrinated, docile "believers" are generally more convienient than thinkers! "Where it is a duty to worship the sun it is pretty sure to be a crime to examine the laws of heat." -- Christopher Morley
For that matter, few corporations hav gotten rich by encouraging rational consideration of a product's merits and utility; impulse purchasing and "I want it 'cause I want it and I want it NOW!" is much more profitable.
If anyone actually thinks there can be logical discussion about this topic on Slashdot, they should consult a doctor....or maybe just get out more.
..what's this science thing you're talking about?
"There are no facts, only interpretations." --Friedrich Nietzsche.
Religion remains strong in America on both sides of the issue. The religious beliefs most Americans hold are not incompatible with science, but all too often educators and scientists fail to realize this. Instead, they make a religion of science itself and proclaim that all views that do not idolize science are wrong. This in turn has produced a backlash amoung many Americans who subcribe to a religion other than science. This is not to say that all scientists have science as their religion. Properly viewed, science is not a religion - it is a tool and like any tool it has limits.
What has caused most of the backlash is the issue of what is taught in school. It would help a lot educators could simply acknowledge that:
1. Science cannot tell us what happened, only what is a plausible explanation for what happened, and there are always alternative explanations.
2. You don't need to believe the theory of education to pass the class, you only need to understand it and be able to explain it because whether it turns out to be correct or not, it is widely accepted enough that you need to know about it to be educated.
There is a happy middle, but of course it is the most vocal on both sides of the issue who cannot compromise and who get most of the press.
I often don't like the choices people make, but I like the fact that people make choices. That's why I'm a conservative.
And even worse than that, a very small minority of American believers are actually anti-science. Try to google for recent opinion polls, and you'll see that most Americans are actually pro-science and fairly liberal in outlook.
These religious, anti-science people are bullies, and they must be opposed. And the opposition should start in the mainstream media, which unfortunately have been neutered by political correctness, especially giving all sides of a debate equal air time, and by the incredible propaganda of the right and the far right parties.
Even moderate Republicans are now becoming afraid of the political power of the know-nothings (because being anti-science is bad for the bottom line, but that's another story).
If you take a look at history, you'll see that, historically, periods of great scientific progress have been associated with weakened -- or at the very least more tolerant -- religions. The best example of this is the islamic golden age, which saw an incredible civilization that was tolerant of science and of other religions (including christian jewish scientists) and saw marvelous art bloom. Of course, being able to control the trade routes between Asia and Europe also helped a lot. At the same time, Europe was tightly controlled by the Catholic Church and in the darkness of the Middle Ages.
As soon as the different islamic countries were overrun by the Turkish Caliphate -- which practiced a much more puritanical and intolerant brand of Islam -- and by the Spanish 'reconquista', the islamic dark ages began.
At about the same time, Europe started its Renaissance, by re-discovering the classical Roman and Greek philosophers (whose books were copied by the Moslem scientists) as well as importing many of the arabic innovations in science (the number 'zero' and the distillation of alcohol, among other things) and asserting the powers of the state vs the power of the Church.
I am afraid the USA are headed down the same path: the puritanical streak that has always been present in American society is making a strong come-back (like it does every 30 to 50 years: see McCarthy, Joseph and the term 'witch hunt'). If it is not fought vigorously, the USA will go down the path of the great islamic statelets of the past and will slowly fade in importance. Progress, after all, has usually been followed by regression many times in history.
The question is, will it take the rest of the world with it, or will americans find the strength and courage to fight obscurantism?
The right to offend is far more important than the right not to be offended. (Rowan Atkinson)
I can't quote the person directly, but I spoke with a person at the NSF who told me that the NSF has been rejecting proposals that do not contain a "balanced viewpoint", i.e. not enough content about "Intelligent Design," (which in my book still equals creationism ).
Ironically, the NSF has just informed Kansas they cannot use some NSF materials because of their approach to teaching evolution.
Science in this country is in big trouble because it has become even more politicized. Science and dogma do not mix well...
They had all the natural resources (food, wood, ore, stone, tobaccy). Guess who's be a third-world-country by now?
The problem is not limited to the US, nor is it a product the "religious right". The anti-intellectual attitude prevalent today is just a product of the vague "postmodern" philosophy unconciously accepted by virtually all of western society. Postmodern philosophy, in this sense, rejects the absolute view of truth required by science as too "rigid". Science is the embodiment of the Law of Noncontradiction, "A cannot be A and non-A". But this is too restraining, too offensive for modern thought.
This is, incedentally, also why intelligent design is even close to being taught in schools; not because Christians are becoming so powerful or influential, but because the great mass of people don't really care whether ID or evolution is actually true, so long as no one gets offended. When faced with the question of what to teach in schools, the prevailing consideration is not "Which is true?" but rather "Which won't hurt anyone's feelings?". The fact that ID and evolution are logically contradictory doesn't matter; some people are offended by ID, and others by evolution, so we'll just teach both and everyone will be happy.
Let's face it, there's always been an anti-intellectual streak in the US, and now, these Bible-thumping ignoramuses are strengthening it.
These are the people who want to bring back Old Testament style theocracy, and think that it jibes with the Constitution. Check out the Christian Reconstructionist article on Wikipedia. Ultramontanes of the highest order.
Although I live in DC, I don't worry about Islamist terrorists as much as these folks taking over. Islamist terrorists could cause nasty infrastructural and personal damage, but these people, given a chance, will do everything they can to ensure nothing that conflicts with their interpretation of the Bible gets taught, women have no reproductive rights, gay people are executed for something they can't help being, etc., etc. They'll warp the laws to a viewpoint no one's held in 2,000 years - there's been progress since then, but they don't want it.
If they had their way, the only science that would go on would be to prove absurd things, like Moses really parted the Red Sea, instead of say, forensic ethnobotany to show how people ate.
I didn't think the house band in Hell would play this badly.
I live right down the street from where matter was supposedly created that exisisted 30 microseconds after the big bang exisists. Just thinking about it makes me what to bash my head up against the wall. No one but theoretical physisists actually understands it.
Ooo man the floppy drive is broken. No wait. The computer is just upside down.
Unfortunately for promoters of science, philosophy is unavoidable. The mathematical method of studying the world itself embodies a philosophy, and a remarkably incomplete philosophy at that. Numbers can only tell us what, they can never tell us why. Numbers describe but they do not ultimately explain. Science is about nothing but numbers -- measurement is the foundation of everything it does. Because it focuses so doggedly on numbers, it has begun to insist that there is nothing beyond numbers -- there is no purpose, no intentionality, nothing beyond measurement and description. This is the theory of evolution in a nutshell. ~ Steve Kellmeyer
You see, we need science. Science is the tool that we use to understand the what questions of this world. Only an engineer will be able to tell me if this building was built well or not and if I could add another story to it without any problems. Only a Computer Science Graduate can really code at a high enough level to write most of the graphic algorithms used to draw the video games I play.
But when we try to use science to tell us about history we miss the point. Science can tell us what happened to some degree of accuracy but it cannot tell us how or why. Philosophy best explains these things. Most of what so-called scientists come up with for an explanation of the orgin of life on earth doesn't make sense and is not reproducable. Moreover it is not probable due to irreducable complexity and the probability of everything being present for the spontaneous start of life. Life has never spontanously started. That is the point of this whole Intelligent Design argument.
The problem is that people polarize over the issue. Some say that science is useless. Other say that only science is valuable. I say that both science and philosophy are valuable. We need both and both help us understand our world.
Fortunately for science, though unfortunately for America, attacking science produces negative dynamic stabiity. You can't disrupt one part of science without disrupting *ALL* parts of science. The inevitable result is that, in the long term, the societies with the best science will wind up with the biggest and best bombs, too. (Unfortunately, in the short term, you might wind up dead due to the bad science...)
Freedom = (Meaningful - Coerced) Choice != (Speech | Beer^2), and sad sock puppets' bad mods avail them naught.
just anti-education. There is a following in the right wing of the USA politics that goes to something of the effect that if it is not in the bible then it is not true and right now those nuts run the country.
The opinions expressed by the majority of the readership of slashdot itself are often very anti science.
Opposition to science occurs on both ends of the political spectrum. On the right it manifests as "Intelligent Design"... On the left it manifests in a much more insidious (and in my opinion, dangerous) way.
ovit
hard core geek-ware
this is an intriguing concept. i never understood the temperature in climatized us buildings (hot in winter, freezing in summer); but my gues is that it reflects a kind of transmogrified wild west mentality ("we conquer nature!").
... wink, wink?
but then there is this correlation between sperm viability and temperature of the gonads... and the high birth rate in the south
Any other stupid responses (besides the parent)?
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
If there is a hell, I'll see you there.
;o)
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
I figure about 25% of all Americans truly respect science and about 5% probably have a good understanding of the fundamentals. The problem is point of disassociation from the facts. Despite, cars, computers, transit systems, archetecture, nuclear weapons and all the myriad wonders of industrial, post industrial and information technology, there are people that so fundamentally don't understand their world that they can only reject things that they feel they don't have the capacity to understand. Religion is a sickness, information is the cure. But just like any vaccine there are those that don't want to take there medicine. Hence redundant crap like "bible scholars". It has been a contradiction in terms since Hegel. The Bush Administration has found a great base of support among many of these regressives. It has with pure nihilism tried to render the progress of western science moot strictly for political ends. Global Warming going to potentially make the Oil Company your on the board of have to be responsible to the environment? I know, lets dig up a quack, or make it look like scientists are uncertain because there are some that believe it has cataclysmic consequences, or some that believe they would only be devastating. Scientists are a united community but they don't want to play politics. In general, they are ethical, inquisitive, impassioned, and in age that seems to despise it, level headed and reasonable. Therefore since they aren't single minded ditto heads this government thinks they must weak, liberal, foolish and misguided. And so we see science being subverted and used as yet another political tool against a populus that has become all too weary of its governments machinations. Hopefully the world will realize that while Americans at there worst are myopic and solopsistic, those people are NOT representative of ALL of us. There are those of us in the U.S. that still believe in our potential as a nation and a people. I don't think we are going to wait to long until we shake this miasma from governmental system and replace it with something better. Its as simple as making sure that people understand a little about the world around them, and not letting them slip in this cynical, foolish, morose far right wing view of the world
Is there really any unbiased "undogmatic" information -- no matter whether it is called, "science" or not?
:-)
More or less biased maybe, more or less dogmatic, perhaps, but unbiased, or undogmatic at all, probably not.
At the very best, science is a process that admits to uncertainty, as in being more or less certain about things to the best of our knowledge right now, but we may still be very wrong. And any scientist, doing science as a human enterprise taking place often in a bureaucratic context must admit to all the human pressures any one calling themselves a scientist must face -- in particular, keeping the ration units (money) flowing in at the rate needed to explore interestign questions -- and how those pressures can cause conflicts-of-interest.
Similarly, any conventionally rational person (including any scientist) must admit logically that it is possible the fossil record is there as a test of dogmatic faith, but where even dogmatic people go wrong is then not asking the next questions of what would that mean about a duplicitous god, and is it really productive to think that way, plus a whole host of other follow on questions?
Likewise, any conventionally rational person must admit it is possible the universe is a simulation that has only been running for 6000 Earth years and started from some hand tooled initial conditions (made by a God-like programmer or team). Again, the questions is, does that really get you anywhere on a day-to-day basis? You're still stuck in the simulation as it is.
It is in the spirit of questioning that the spirit of science is most alive -- not in the spirit of saying science has the absolute truth right now. What we must accept above all else, if we are rational, is the great mystery of it all, where we come from, where we go to, what it all means, and whether any of that is ever answerable. Generally, when someone says otherwise, they are trying to sell you something, whether a timeshare or an opportunity to annually tithe and hang out in a church. Still, timeshares and hangout joints aren't necessarily all bad.
Still, when you really explore these issues, you discover that even "rationality" is based on a host of assumptions, including assumptions about what are valid reasoning tools, what are valid experiences, what constitutes valid evidence or valid communications, and so on. People, including conventionally religious ones, may legitimately disagree about those. So, you really can't escape from making assumptions or having some sort of values coming from outside of rationality, at least at the start.
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
Fact is, they learned to play the game of politics better than their counterparts. Dubya's election is a symptom of this, not the root cause.
Good news is that we fought the "silent majority" into the shadows once before, we can do it again.
insert inflammatory anti-microsoft comment here
"We can't decide whether to teach intelligent design or evolution in schools! It must be the fault of those right-wing Christian extremists! Soon scientific discovery will grind to a halt!"
The prevalent notion that teaching intelligent design in schools will halt all scientific progress is ridiculous. The intelligent will continue with scientific discovery, regardless of what goes on in the public school system. Contrary to popular belief, religion and science are not mutually exclusive.
Let's put it this way: how many of you have developed your own opinion that is contrary to what you were taught in school? Yes, I thought so. People are smart enough to come up with their own opinions given the evidence for and against an argument.
So can we stop with the religion vs. science debates? (I'm Catholic and I believe in evolution. ("What?!" I hear you say, "You can't believe in God AND science!")
Normally, laws about things which must actually work (aviation safety regulations, etc.) are based on science, because science is about ideas with can be independantly observed, tested and falsified as to whether they actually work in practice, and people want the airlines they fly on to work (as in not crash).
However, much of what people do is about what they think are right right, good or just plain fun, which may or may not have anything to do with that which "works", or is in some sense "true". Democracy works (to a sufficient degree compared to the tested alternatives). Scientific oligarchy hasn't been well tested.
Sometimes it appears that most corporate code is based on Intelligent Design. Developers that don't know how to do it the right way just string it together based on hunches and assumptions. If it compiles then it's God's will!
Depends on what kind of science. Physical Anthropology/Biology is definitely being limited in the United States.
I can't really speak with much authority (I have none), but I teach young kids science afterschool. Whenever I ask how something is created (extinct, living, inanimate), there's usually always a kid who will give God as the answer to all these questions.
On one hand it's none of my business to talk about religion with kids and on the other it's a disservice to let adults plant such an easy solution into their the minds. Instead of thinking, wondering and questioning, kids can always just blame or thank a god for it all. It's just magic.
As for other sciences, I think America is doing fine. We may not be leading edge in many fields where we used to be on top, but that's not so much of a problem rather than a realization that there's a lot of smart people in the world and many of them don't live in the US. It's not that simple, but it's also not something I'd panic over.
We can count on Americans to lead in high-tech weaponry, at least.
it's not anti-science, it's pro-stupid.
To say "becoming" is to use the wrong tense. Try "have become" or "became"...
What does ID have to do with Darwin or Science? - Fine ID folks are trying to push some anti-Darwin thing. But the concept of ID doesn't dispute Darwin's theory, it simply suggests a possible actuator. Big bangs are a result of something... Most importantly irreducible complexity only points to an order. Order then is a result of rules, and what/who/other? Implemented the very precise order of the Universe is a matter of Religion or Philosophy not science. I believe that often some scientists feel some obligation to weigh in on Philosophy within these matters. Should any text book state that humans evolved from single celled creatures through means of random mutation? There is evidence to support that, however there is no proof, and until the actual process is observed occurring we will never have proof. This means that the subject of origins is Theory not fact. Suggestions of potentials and probable's are philosophical and do not belong in a science class. If a conclusion cannot be drawn then leave the evidence on the table.
Cornell, huh? I'm surprised that Mr. Rawlings has taken such a public and high-profile position.
our written thoughts are gifts to our future selves
It's so refreshing to read all of these oh so witty responses from all of you open minded Slashdot folks. not.
Were happy to take Oregon along too, so long as they stop getting all uppity when they see a California license plate.
Washington? Alaska?, Hawaii? You guys up for this too?
You Easties should do the same, we can start a cool alliance and all laugh at what's left of the country as all the "smart people" head to the one coast or the other for a taste of the 21st century.
For all the rest of you, you get rid of all of us, you get probably 75% of the country, and lots of like minded individuals, and you can get your school vouchers and send all yer kids to bible camp to learn about how the world was inteligently designed 5000 years ago!
Hmm, more people should be inteligently designed.
Eschew Obfuscation
I think there should be a definate emphasis here that the US isn't in a dabate now over science in general, it's a debate about teaching controversial science in the classroom. Teachers in the US couldn't care less about teaching physics, chemistry, physiology, etc. The fight is over issues in science that are controversial, and whether or not they should be taught along side equally (if not more) controversial religious ideas.
Ooo man the floppy drive is broken. No wait. The computer is just upside down.
If some "designer" spent time "designing" the "designed" parts of us
If the designer didn't need a designer, then why do we?Again, he doesn't have any testable points. It's pure religion.
Religion cannot be tested. Religion is not science.
"Intelligent Design" is religion. "Intelligent Design" cannot be tested. "Intelligent Design" is not science.
Those who believe that it is just demonstrate how poor our science education has become.
but rather, multi-logical. =)
Its a whole world phoneomena that started in the bible belt but spread throughout the us. Canada is next on the right wing agenda with the 700club and focus on the family opening up canadian offices and bribing err supporting the conservative party of Canada.
Also the UK will likely be next on the right agenda to transform the world to be more corporate friendly while relying on the religious folks to supply the votes to elect the leaders into office.
Scary indeed and its not just an American thing anymore. The lobbying is already influencing the EU>
http://saveie6.com/
Even if the administration is anti-science, that's not going to translate through the entire country. Americans are not sheep, because there's no money in it. There is money in technology, and technology is built on science, and science advances everyday (read a newspaper). Our knowledge of the world and of ourselves increases exponentially, and we're nearing the knee of that curve. Soon, the Luddites wont have anything to say because we'll be thinking too fast to comprehend them.
That's the whole point.
The people pushing "Intelligent Design" are claiming that it is "science" and should be offered as an alternative TAUGHT IN SCIENCE CLASSES to "Darwinism".
If it were just a religion, no one would care. No one is trying to get transubstantiation taught in physics class as an alternative to "Newtonionism".
There's a nice video summary of the project. I have the book lying around and look forward to reading it. It will have to wait till after my dissertation though. Sigh.
Against the grain
"They had all the natural resources (food, wood, ore, stone, tobaccy). Guess who's be a third-world-country by now?" True, but your economic theory is a little weak - it seems the North had most of the technology to process and transport those resources. The South had... a bunch of enslaved minorities. Sorry, but that puts the North higher on the economic food chain. Raw materials and cheap labor lose out every time over the ability to transport and process finished goods. Study your global economics.
This should be obvious to anyone that isn't a heathen.
> Also I'd say that because of the stance taken, science was forced to develop
> the method that utilized skin cells (slashdot covered that). Something that
> wouldn't have happen in the "let's take the easy way out" science advocated
> by atheists.
Right... Because only God fearing men and women can possibly have any morals, right ?
I think you'll find I, and many others, are far more moral, fair, and all round 'nicer' than many regular church goers
Sig out of date
Correct me if I'm wrong, but it seems the only major science/politics debates concern the following:
1) Creationism taught alongside evolution in biology or philosphy in a few public schools.
2) The federal government doesn't actively fund embryonic stem cell research beyond very limited lines.
Is there any other ways in which science is degrading in this country besides the above two examples? It just seems to me that all these Slashdot stories are just making mountains out of molehills. I simply cannot see where these large dents in science are coming from. I know people are paranoid that Southern conservatives will take over the country and ban all science classes, but the reality is, we're not seeing it. Sure there are some anti-science blips, but overall, the above two aren't really affecting the numbers of students seeking science careers or America's abiltiy to lead the world in science.
So again, how is science being degraded in this country? Is it funding? Various science budgets go down, while others go up (for example, NASA has been given sizeable funding increases for the past few years now.) If it's not funding, then it is just a general trend of Americans to seek different jobs that don't require science? Or is it that we need better salaries to attract better science teachers? Do core requirements for science need to be raised? Help me out here, is American really becoming more anti-science, or is this just some passing media fad, similar to the fads of the summer of shark attacks and the flesh eating bacteria craze?
There are plenty of European/Western scientists, that most would consider some of the greatest scientists in the world, believed in a Christian view of God. The two are not mutually exclusive. It seems to me that people that believe as you do are as ignorant as you believe Christians are. That is pretty sad.
Here is an article about a
chemical engineer/scientist that happened to be a Christian. Do you think he would have been more accomplished if he took on an atheistic view of the world? If so, why?
This is nothing but a stupid pissing contest between one group with strong religious beliefs, namely athiests, and another group with equally strong yet contradictory religous beliefs, namely christians. Being a christian does not make someone "anti-science" any more than being an athiest makes someone "pro-science." Both sides are playing word games. The christians say "intelligent design" when they're really arguing for the existence of God, and the athiests say "evolution" when they really mean athiesm. The reason why neither side is being honest when presenting their position is because they know that no one else gives a damn. The entire argument is pointless to anyone with half a brain since anyone with half a brain knows that the question of whether God exists or not quite simply cannot be answered conclusively at this point and may never be answered.
So this is a war of bullshit. Both sides are desperate to convince everyone else that their own bullshit isn't bullshit, and that the bullshit of the other side is even bigger bullshit than it already is. Its just really sad that anyone takes either side seriously. This is like two crazy people arguing about the conversations each has with the voices in their head. There is no right side to take in that kind of a debate. The proper response is to tell both nutjobs to get the hell away from you and leave you alone. Sooner or later that is what the American public will do as well.
Lee
Muslim community leaders warn of backlash from tomorrow morning's terrorist attack.
I am genuinely interested to find out what it was like in the US about 25 years ago...
I have only been there a few times and never for longer than a couple of months, but this is exactly the impression I got.
Younger people there were not just anti-science, but generally anti-intellect. Being intellectual must carry some sort of stigma there as a child and people respond to this by being anti-science it seems.
My parents are American, though I grew up here in the UK, and I can not find any single instance of such behaviour in this country that did not have a single specific event triggering it.
I simply can not imagine how this kind of thing happens on such a large scale.
Can someone who grew up there enlighten me on how this kind of environment developed? What, if anything, triggered and fed this development?
LL
The U.S. is not becoming anti-science. It only appears that way because our administration (sorry if this seems like flamebait.. it is, but its clearly the truth) prioritizes their political success, fiscal policy, and religeon over the recommendations of science.
I hate Bush as much as the next scientist, but the anti-science draft is not blowing from the White House. Did you RTFA? If so, you must have missed the following:
Note the use of "for many years" and polling of non-administration Americans. This is a very widespread problem and it's a rare case where it's not 100% Bush's fault. We have a growing problem and it's dangerous to assume that all will go well once Bush is out of office. The scientific community needs to combat this.
I confess that I don't have the solution. Would a new documentary TV series in the vein of Carl Sagan's Cosmos do the trick? I don't know. Would better and more conservative reporting of scientific achievements in the media (and less hyping every radical article appearing in the New England Journal of Medicine as some sort of scientific consensus) help? Beats me. Would having articulate and engrossing scientists discussing their work publically foster an appreciation for scientists and they work they do? Stop asking me these tough questions, okay? :)
I don't know what the answer is. This board will be filled with various strategies and ideas. But we need to start thinking of how to correct this dangerous trend. Yeah, Bush's administration certainly isn't helping, but saying that "the U.S. is not becoming anti-science. It only appears that way because our administration..." is wishful thinking.
GMD
watch this
Intelligent design does not hold that the theory of evolution is fatally flawed. Instead, it holds that there are some situations in evolutionary history that seem more likely when considered as an act of creation. It doesn't say that evolution didn't happen, but rather that it's pretty unlikely that it could have. Popular examples include the cilium, the flagellum, the Cambrian Explosion, the first living organism, and so on.
As a personal proponent of ID, it's my opinion that although it's possible these things could have evolved, it seems more sensible to attribute them elsewhere as they bear attributes that are better explained by an act of creation rather than an act of chance. Furthermore, it is dependent on evolutionary theory to give it structure and allow for sensible interpretation. Twisting ID to imply that evolution is bunk is complete nonsense. ID depends on evolutionary theory.
The modern evangelical church, however, has picked up the concept and twisted it beyond all belief. I have a great dislike of the modern evangelical church. I don't believe in proselytizing, much less attempting to force my beliefs on others, and the Church seems much too inclined to do both.
In other words, don't blame Intelligent Design because some Christians are utter morons and twist it to imply something it does not.
As well, ID is a means of bolstering one's faith. It's not something you can use to convince other people that God exists. You can only show that God exists through your actions.
I spent 1 class period in all of High School even touching on Evolution... I spent 4 drawing unit circles with chalk on the school sidewalk I spent 5 enlarging cartoon images to learn more about grid coordinates I spent 2 explaining to the Vice Principal that Smashing Pumpkins != Columbine I spent 6+ in assemblies to work on "student self esteem" I spent around 12 working on a kite for a math class I corrected my math teachers about 10 times I spent another 4 weeks learning how to use power-point to make a presentation that was about myself, I think that was a science course I've learned that contrary to what my science teacher spent a unit on, effects similiar to wind-chill are a researched part of thermodynamics and are present on all warm bodies, not just humans alone -Oh- I spent an entire course in grade school dealing with "feelings" including handing out Warm Fuzzies But that 15 minutes of that Evolution class might destroy my entire science education... Or could it be that as soon as people forget about that potential ID class they have to start wondering who is currently teaching science and what people are really taking with them out of their classes... Maybe we get the idea of schools as instituting social change through having all students graduate on the same plane with the same abilities as all others and start fingering our future scientists and giving them electronics/math/science courses that will create a science economy.
Duh?
google.slashdot
What other theories?
Keep in mind that a theory is a framework of reasoning and thought that fits with all known evidence and which can make predictions as well as be falsified by possible discoveries.
Theory != Guess
- jon
Ganymede, a GPL'ed metadirectory for UNIX
Only philosophers who ever really got it right are now long dead. Shame, that.
Gott ist tot.
Just because some of us won't deny our observation that the Universe is too wonderful to have happened by accident in favor of pack of theories with enormous holes doesn't mean we're anti-science.
Believing that evolution completly explains our existence requires just as large a leap of faith in the unknown as believing in other alternatives. So now we're in a discussion over faith versus faith, not science versus faith.
You can mod me down, but you cannot call me a coward.
so said Dr. Kant. Kant threw causality out the window, while Hume proceeded to consign the very concept of philosophy to his flames, thus was born socialism, naturalism, and the 19th and 20th centuries have seen a rising hatred of the intellectual and the individual ever since.
I for one, do not accept our new ignorant, philosophically bankrupt, parasitical overlords.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
It's bound to happen in any country that lets religion drive policy to any degree. Religion is about making sure things don't change so control can be kept. Science is about change, and having a solid understanding of why things are the way they are. With greater understanding comes questioning about religious beliefs. On this basis alone, science is an enemy of religion.
BeauHD. Worst editor since kdawson.
...all the folks who adhere to intelligent design as dogma (and try to make everyone else do so to) drown out the people who support intelligent design because they think it's right and can make a good argument in its favor.
No, really -- they exist.
One fellow I'm privileged to know is a doctor who graduated from medical school at the top of his class. He's a completely brilliant guy, as are his kids -- one time when I was over for dinner he asked me to explain to his primary-school-age (but home-schooled) daughters how the Internet worked; in less than 20 minutes they had gone from zero knowledge on the subject to asking me about whether routers could listen in on ongoing connections. He's a strong proponent of intelligent design, with the provisio that he may well be wrong if all possible universes exist.
Within that framework, he makes a helluva argument -- drawing heavily on statistics and biology (the latter being something he knows a thing or two about, given his background and profession) -- but also acknowledges the places where that argument ends.
Now, I'm not saying whether I think he's right or not -- but I think it's completely asinine that the people who make stupid, ill-informed arguments are the ones who get the airtime.
The thing is, Intelligent Design is like Holocaust Denial. It's based on something other than the evidence, and seeks to ignore, not to grapple with, the known evidence.
So far, Intelligent Design has presented no challenge to the biological sciences, if by that we mean that they have proposed answers that better fit the observed evidence than evolutionary biology. Intelligent Design has made no predictions, has come up with no test which a) would prove modern neo-darwinian evolutionary theory false if failed, and b) has been demonstrated to fail.
The sum total of peer-reviewed publications making an defensible Intelligent Design argument can be counted on the fingers of one hand, if that hand has had a run-in with a high powered shredding machine.
This, as opposed to tens of thousands of papers exploring and refining evolutionary biology.
Literally no contest.
- jon
Ganymede, a GPL'ed metadirectory for UNIX
When there's even a thought of teaching Creatio^H^H^H^H^H^H^H Intelligent Design in schools, you're pretty much there already.
What'chu lookin' at Willis?
The USA can only exist by the strength of it's economy.
It's economy can only exist if it's industry can continue to be profitable.
But every industry the USA develops is eventually understood well enough by other societies with lower wage costs - so to preserve it's high cost of living, outsourcing is inevitable.
The only way to survive waves of outsourcing is to develop new industries that are not yet accessible to low-wage countries. This is a never ending cycle - invent, exploit, outsource, abandon.
New Industries are driven by new technology.
New Technology is driven by new science.
And new science is driven by high standards of education coupled to the kinds of blue-sky research that pretty much only comes from government and university programmes.
Pull away the rug at the bottom - and the whole edifice comes tumbling down within maybe one or two human generations.
www.sjbaker.org
People will pass up steak once a week, for crap every day.
The Economist reported awhile back that a majority of Americans believe in angels.
Imagine if the U.S. fractured into three separate nations: Washington, Oregon, and California make one country, the northeast (including New York) make another, and the rest make up the third. Which would be the first to collapse into a backwards Third World theocracy?
There needs to be more discussion of the possibility that natural selection is not the only driving factor in evolution.
What if some fundamental principle of life is guiding evolution? Much like how a tree grows from a seed, perhaps the entire tree of species adheres to a pattern as well. It can be partially random, but it also follows a "path of least resistance", like a ripple in water.
random underscore blankspace at ya know hoo dot comedy.
This whole argument stems from the difference between science and faith.
Science is not the truth. Science is the search for truth. Anything that is proven to happen that goes agaisnt science doesnt discount science, it changes science.
If someone has faith that God created the earth, fine. The fact is that we don't know. Science suggests evolution, but evolution (as the origin of species) is not proven.
More discovery to follow. In 100 years, do a google search. You will see that the theory of evolution has been either altered or thrown out.
There is only one dumb segment of the population: the one that cannot backup their "facts".
That segment happens to cross both the Evolutionary Biology and the Intelligent Design crowds.
Nearly every fact of evolution has been debunked, and the intelligent design crowd seems to be grasping at straws.
Let's see some PROOF here people. Isn't that what science is about? Just use your handy-dandy Beginning-of-Time Quantum Video Recorder and show us how it all got started!
Yes, we are becoming anti-science. Or more accurately we are becoming anti-rational and pro-magical thinking. Something I call the Scooby-do Effect. Back in the day, every time Scooby and the gang would solve the mystery, it would be some rational (all be it physically impossible) explanation. It was Old Man McFadden using glow-in-the-dark (using radium no doubt) paint, slide projector, and fog machine or something. Flash forward to now and the gang thinks it's Old Man McFadden, only to find it's an actual ghost all along. This sort of reflects popular culture's rejection of the rational in favor of the mystical. There's probably a thesis paper in here somewhere.
Just as you CANNOT "prove" that God did not create dinosaur fossils to fool evolutionists.
Just as you CANNOT "prove" that God did not create the Earth yesterday, and all of your memories of any time prior.
When you are dealing with a "Designer", what evidence can you provide to falsify the Designer's work?
Nietzsche - he actually existed.
Eloi are stupid, throw morlocks at them!
I find it humorous that ID has gotten so much attention lately. I imagine its advocates appreciate the publicity. However, I think it's a fairly small part of any problems the US is having staying at the forefront of scientific study. Even as a biologist, believing strict evolution or ID isn't going to greatly affect your current research, and in any other field, the impact will be nil.
A greater problem is the shortsighted policies toward research in the US. In the past, the National Science Foundation has focused on foundational research while DARPA, NASA, and various other agencies have funded practical, shorter term applications. For some reason after 9/11, it was decided that NSF grants should only go to projects that had a short timeframe for "useful" results. Suddenly, the engine that drives all the discoveries that aren't just applications of previous work has dried up.
Another huge problem started 25 years ago. Since the early 80s when educational institutions were given full rights to market their discoveries, we've seen huge profits to Universities, and an equally perverse incentive to keep research secret. It also gave a big incentive for researchers to study quick, economically valuable problems, regardless of long-term benefits. Who cares if you could find a cure for malaria? Only the third world countries would need it, and they don't have enough money to make the researcher and her university rich.
It's easy to scapegoat religious fundamentalists for the problem, but it goes far deeper. The problem of a lack of foundational research will affect the US for a generation, if not corrected.
If I am not mistaken, and I am assuredly not, the first universities in the US were created out of religious concern (e.g. Puritans wanted their children to be able to read the Bible, psalters, etc). It seems very ironic that those who founded the most elite of US educational institutions are now trying to tear it all apart. Then again, no one ever said that religion had to make sense anyways. It will be interesting to see what happens when Kansas students try to get into non-religious affiliated universities later on. Then again, if their educational system works then those students would not want to go to a silly secular school anyways, right?
Is that the theory which says god intelligently designed the monkeys so they could evolve into humans and then into Jesus?
Why does no one ever attempt to explain that God created man using evolution as a tool?
Pope John Paul II did accept that "God" made man using evolution. Here's his Magisterium Is Concerned with Question of Evolution For It Involves Conception of Man. He delivered the Message to Pontifical Academy of Sciences on October 22, 1996. Of course other Christians don't have a good opinion of Catholism or the Pope, some even believing they're devil worshippers.
FalconShould there be a Law?
That must be the dumbest application of the lazy copy-and-paste-with-words-substituted argument that I've ever seen. The horrible thing is, it's not funny enough to be a joke.
...and I just don't believe in it.
And we have found fossils of transitional forms.
http://www.origins.tv/darwin/landtosea.htm
It's about the message science is bringing. Some people, for religious, political or business reasons don't want to hear what science is saying. This is initially a case of trying to silence the messenger.
I'd like to propose a question that has been on my mind for nearly two decades. Would the public at large be interested in science for its own sake without any tie to contemporary issues? I wonder if the attempts by scientists to make their work 'relevant' to the public by linking it to political issues ends up backfiring. That is, the public gets too focused on the message and not on the process. Suppose a pro-business conservative listens watches a documentary on the science of climatology on TV. If the focus of the documentary is on the growing body of evidence that humans have caused global warming and catastrophe awaits, I can see where this guy would change the channel. Now my question is if the documentary simply focused on methods used in climatology and the pure science, would that guy be interested enough to watch the entire show? He wouldn't be offended like before, but could you make a "pure science" show interesting?
My concern is that politics has become a football game in the US. By and large, people will just not listen to viewpoints different from those that contradict the political party that they feel affliation for. It's like they are routing for the home team and can't bare the idea of losing a game. My question is whether attempts to make science relevant to the daily lives of ordinary people ends up doing more harm than good. Or is it an acceptable cost? Do we really need to link science to public issues -- accepting that the conclusions drawn will drive a good chunk of the audience away -- in order to keep them interested enough to learn what science is really all about?
GMD
watch this
The rating of the above post answers the question in the OP. It's sad that Americans, especially after the Bush administration came to power and the 9/11 attacks increasingly lives in a reality bubble of their own. Behe not refuted? Try Google. Actual scientists generally don't waste their time on lame arguments such as "irreducible complexity" because it's not a real issue, it's layman stuff, like all of ID. They are busy with actual scientific problems that need solving.
Many of these posts exhibit the biggest problem with the "pro-science" movement in the US - it's condecending, rude, and fails to have any understanding of the opposing point of view. Please note that the same problems exist on the "anti-science" side as well, but that is no excuse and it will not help get your point across.
Calling people idiots, backwards, rednecks, etc. for their beliefs WILL NOT HELP YOU WIN THE ARGUMENT OR THE WAR. Neither will calling their beliefs "fairy tales", calling their leaders names, or mocking them in any other way. What does this do? It galvanizes this group, it does not marginalize it. It's made it grow and become more daring rather than made it shrink and become docile. DON'T DO IT. How often do these same people say that Bush is doing the same thing with Iraqi insurgents or the Muslim world in general? Can't you see that it won't help in this either?
I'll be open - I'm religious myself. But I believe in evolution. I see no contradiction between my religion and evolutionism, much as I use other gifts of modern science such as, well... computers, medicine, and others. I still hold strong beliefs on abortion, I'm ambivalent about embryonic stem cell research (entirely undecided, but leaning towards an "I don't really care" or "yes"). I think there's room for open classroom discussion in public schools on this and other controversial issues - let's avoid the censorship, it's OK to solicit student opinions on the matter - but the science teacher should ultimately teach what is widely accepted scientific theory - evolution exists. It is a science class after all.
I hope I'm not alone in these beliefs, and I hope those who are pro-science oriented will at least try to be polite to those they disagree with. If you're polite with them, the problem will likely subside and they will be marginalized. If you continue to treat them rudely and deride their opinions, it will come back to haunt you.
For example, Michael Moore isn't winning any votes for the Democratic party. He's just preaching to the choir and getting rich off of it while angering his opponents and, ultimately, contributing to failures for the Democrats at the ballot box. Don't do the same thing.
Cranks have always existed, people selling snake oil, etc. What amazes me is that currently many forms of religious intolerance and fanatism are present, not only christian fundamentalism. We see UFO believers, people seeking the enlightened masters of the east, reincarnation, psychics, crystals to protect your aura, chakra healing courses, etc.
The traditional idea of a christian God who puts order in the universe is now considered obsolete. People seek quick solutions to their problems, and because they don't find them in the material world, they start seeking answers which will satisfy them: Someone must have cursed you, you are suffering from Karma due to evil actions on your past lives, the stars are misaligned... etc.
And these stupid answers satisfy people. People are too lazy to see how things work, because they see no immediate gain.
Immediate satisfaction, that's what's driving the world today. You see it in porn, diet pills, the Iraq Invasion (where's Osama? Who cares, George W fought those evil terrorists!), etc. And since people are getting accustomed to quick solutions, their mentality has no longer appreciation for science or history.
But this is a more complex problem, it can't be oversimplified. Many factors come into play. The corrupted governments, the dissolution of moral teachings, etc.
But if you want a one-word answer, i'd say it's "neglect". On all levels. Family, government, politics, school... people just didn't care for anyone but themselves. Obviously this ended up affecting their children and their children's children, resulting in the society that we see today.
In the 1980s, the United States accounted for about 40 percent of the science papers published in the world. The European Union accounted for 32.3 percent, and the Asia Pacific region 13 percent.
However, by 2004, the EU accounted for 38 percent of the total number of papers; the United States 33.3 percent; and the Asia Pacific region 25.3 percent, according to a study published in Science Watch, the newsletter of Thomson Scientific.
http://www.physorg.com/news5531.html
Plays violent online games as: Nerfherder76
"This is the behavior not of scientists but of true believers."
t Num=113836
http://www.libertypost.org/cgi-bin/readart.cgi?Ar
The ID debate is a complete non-issue in scientific circles and is completely blown out of proportion by the media. It has almost no impact whatsoever on anyone's choice as to be a scientist or the education of 99.9% of children.
Yes, Americans are scientifically illiterate, but so are people from every other nation. The article completely misses this point. We do worse on some international tests but this is not limited to science, making it an indictment of our education system in general, not a specific evidence of the US being anti-science.
The number of students going into science and engineering is dropping, but that is completely driven by low wages and job security, not the howling of a few marginal partisan freaks.
Few people anywhere can explain such things. The US is hardly exceptional in this matter.
Science is the very best tool ever devised for answering the HOW of things, bar none, but it too has its limitations. Ask a scientist of any stripe WHY an event or action happened and they are as in the dark as the next man. Those questions are answered (if at all) by Religion or Philosophy - Why are we here? Why do bad things happen to good people? etc, etc, etc. The Scientific Method cannot, by definition, explain any case determined by belief ...
True enough, but what we are getting as science is starting to look more like ideology rather than "informed exchange." The Theory of Evolution has flaws, gaps if you will, and those are being addressed among scientists ('Punctuated Equilibrium' vice steady-path-of-change, for example) - but all we see in the press is the dogmatic refusal to even discuss the opposing "theory" of intelligent design and the assumption that only idiots would disagree with Almighty Evolution. Attitudes like that drive people away from science, not towards itI believe in the ToE, myself - it seems the most reasonable solution to the problem. I am finding, however, that some of the cheerleaders for the Theory are as simpleminded in their belief as those they deride and despise.
Hmmm. Your ideas are intriguing to me and I wish to subscribe to your newsletter.
One of the problems I see with the "Intelligent Design" craziness is that the scientific community rolled over too easily on the name. In the infamous debate between pro-life vs pro-choice, neither side is so stupid as to let the other decide the name. Each faction chooses a name that reflects the detail that they think is most important. I suggest using a similar strategy against ID. The following names are suggestions but please contribute your own.
There have been other mistakes - such as allowing the Creationists to convince the public that there is a valid debate between two equally acceptable sides, and using scientific gobbledygook when the public lacks the education to distinguish factual gobbledygook from Creationist gobbledygook - but I think letting the Creationists choose the name was the most significant mistake.
. . . and more anti science comes from the Post-Modern left. When Harvard University President, Larry Summers, suggested that innate differences between men and women might have something to do with the underrepresentation of women in the hard sciences, he was reprimanded for expressing a politically incorrect opinion--science be damned. Some scientific perspective on the kerfuffle can be had here.
Anti-science, anti-intellectualism, anti-etc. all stem from people's inability to cope with the rapidly increasing rate of change. Those of us reading /. are those who to some degree have managed to accept change as an ordinary part of daily existence. For the vast majority of humanity, this state of constant uncertainty is scary as all hell. When you've lost your footing because your set of assumptions about the world turn out not to work in daily life anymore, there's nothing like sticking your head in the sand and resting upon the bedrock of ignorance to make you feel safe and secure.
The administration isn't "anti-science" it is simply a bunch of demagogues playing to the masses who are scared to hell of the future. If your world is only 5000 years old, it is easy to imagine things have always been this way. And if there's an all-bearded guy up in the sky who's got your back, you don't have to worry about that beared guy who's cooking up a batch of mutant atomic powered death robots somewhere in the SF Bay Area.
I say fuckiit, let's bring back the inquisition. I'll go scream it from the tallest peak once I finish my chantings and take this toad out of my mouth...
year over year NSF funding goes UP not down. Now you could argue a 1% increase is'nt much, but if the U.S. were so anti-science there would'nt be an NSF.
http://www.nsf.gov/about/congress/
I am a young scientist, as are many of my friends. Many of us are fed up with the profession. It has precisely ZERO to do with ID, political ideology, or any other BS of that nature.
It has everything to do with the fact that our other friends who became doctors, lawyers, MBAs, etc are making more money, at younger ages, than we will.
This isn't rocket science.
Btw, you can't teach someone to think. Quit trying.
are not scientific. They are economic. This is an entirely different field.
Well, the United States is not and has never been one thing or the other. It's a very heterogeneous country, with many strong and often conflicting trends.
Among these, yes, there's a long and robust history of anti-intellectual populist amateurism, a feeling that any man's opinion is just as good as a trained expert (maybe better), and that any one of us, just by sitting down and thinking hard about the matter, can give an authoritative opinion on any subject whatsoever.
Um, does this remind anyone of any community in particular? Say, an on-line discussion group? No? Well, let's move on...
As a direct consequence of this robust amateurism, Americans have always tended to distrust the voice of authority when it conflicts with their own "instincts" and "common sense." People who think the authority of religion is why folks reject evolution or global warming, et cetera, are utterly misunderstanding Americans. These things are rejected not because Joe Sixpack trusts authority A (the pastor) over authority B (the professor), but because he trusts his own instincts more than either.
Now, it turns out neither evolution nor global warming are plain as the nose on your face obvious. (After all, even clever scientists took centuries to clue in to them.) It takes a fair amount of education and sifting of subtle data to really understand the arguments for and against, and to accept that these theories are much better explanations for the facts than anything else.
Not surprisingly, for someone who lacks both data and education, it's going to seem hard to believe that (for example) a change of carbon dioxide content from 0.033% of the atmosphere to 0.034%, which raises the average temperature of the Earth by 2.0 degrees, or maybe only 1.5, is going to result in an onslaught of massive hurricanes, massive species extinction, desertification of big swathes of the Midwest, the cessation of ocean currents that will turn England into Greenland, buried in ice 8000 feet thick, and other miscellaneous global catastrophes. Joe Average, confronted with such a bald statement, can perhaps be forgiven for initially responding: what the hell are you smoking?
I wouldn't believe it myself, except I have studied the data and I do understand the physics.
Of course, experts are unanimous that these theories are correct. And if Americans were more in the habit of trusting experts, they would just take their word for it. "Oooookay, global warming of 1 degree causing massive climate change seems plain nuts to me, but Professor Foo here says it's so, and he's a smart guy with all the data, so I guess it must be so."
But many of us don't think like that. Hell, none of us thinks like that. How many here are willing to make a similar statement about (say) the President's judgment with respect to WMDs and the war in Iraq? "Well, it seems nuts to me, but he says it's so and he has all the data..." Ho ho. Plain fact is, we all think we're just as smart as the "smart guys" and are entitled to question their conclusions if they don't make obvious sense to us.
So, big chunks of the population remain skeptical of anything nonobvious in science. Fact of American life, mostly.
If I had to put my finger on any reason why this fact might be a smidge more prevalent than it ever was, I'd put it square on the pernicious spread of relativism over the last 40 years. We are trained for years, in school and sometime in the workplace (sensitivity training, anybody? TQM?) in the basic principles that (1) all viewpoints are equally valid, (2) truth is not an objective thing, but a subjective opinion that legitimately varies with your viewpoint, (3) explanations of events that reduce social friction and validate everyone's worth are to be preferred, even if you must doubt the evidence of your own eyes to accept them, and (4) there are often "higher truths" than the plain ordinary truth. That is, statements can
I see a lot of comments here blaiming Washington DC, Bush, etc. And that has a lot to do with it. But let's not forget the rest of the people who live here, too. This is a country where every science related expence is examined with a microscope and disected, but we think nothing of paying athletes millions of dollars. And don't even get me started on how much we spend on those with absolutely no talent, like Paris Hilton. Washington will not change until the people want change...and quite frankly, I don't see that happening any time soon.
And local issues are just as bad. In my own area (Bartholomew County, Indiana, USA), if the schools need money for something like computers or science equipment, no one can help. Same goes when we run short of money for teachers. But when one of the local highschools wants to raise $400,000 US to replace the grass in their football field with astroturf, people run over each other trying to get to their checkbooks so they can donate.
Washington will not change until the people want change...and quite frankly, I don't see that happening any time soon.
I want a new quote. One that won't spill. One that don't cost too much. Or come in a pill.
Sure a girl can resist but she will both have to face ridicule from the cool boys, from the nerdy boys who usually can't stand a girl to be smarter then them, from the other girls who resent a girl who dares to be different, from her parent for not dating.
/. is mostly composed of true geeks. Sure some of us may claim that we broke the stereo-type but lets be honest, if you were a cool guy with a knack for tech you still wouldn't be posting on slashdot on a friday evening, you would be having crazy hot sex.
For most of us that however is not an option but what if your a normal person faced with the choice of thinking for yourselve setting yourselve apart from the group or getting laid. Newsflash but 99% of humans would choose the sex. I would but as a geek I do not have that choice.
Dumb people who go with the flow do and they have sex and they get the kids. You see as nerds we better hope the ID people are right because if evolution is true then we are going to go back to swinging from trees. Dumb people have more kids in shorter generations. An intelligent women may have 1-2 kids after 30. A dumb girl will already be granny a dozen times at that age.
On a more serious note I think there is no real news story here. The whole debate vs Creationism vs Darwinism is nothing new. People have been discussing the subject even before darwin came up with his theorie. the whole bit about the earth being the center of the earth until some guy said, no it isn't, is at its heart the same discussion. Is the world a magical creation by a superbeing vs, is the world just a whole lot of natural laws with us just a side product?
Most people do not truly think about this deeply, why should you? It gets in the way of having sex and any survey done to ask peoples opinion could probably easily be swayed by how the questions are asked. See, Yes prime minister episode 1 for how this is done.
Might it be true that in the 1990's tv stations wanted to report the rise of the amount of people that believed in evolution while now they think they can score better headlines with the rise of ID believers?
How many of the evolution defenders here can on their own come up with the argument to break the human eye argument of the ID supporters? That their all the stages of evolution of the eye plus numerous alternative versions are available all around us? Eyes that are just primitive light sentive cells to eyes that see a sharper faster vision or in a different spectrum. No lense, multie lense, single lense? Black and white or color. Good for motion or good for still images?
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
I'm pretty sure that this scientist, as well as most all others, take offense at your claim that science is "The easy way out."
It's not advocated by atheists, it's advocated by scientists.
In fact, I'm pretty sure that "The easy way out" would be to believe a story in a book while ignoring overwhelming evidence to the contrary.
1) The Evolution/Inteligent Design debate isn't really going to impact anybody materially, so who cares.
2) Embryonic Stem Cell Research, regardless of your position, involves ethical questions. Calling these concerns an "attack on science" is overreaching.
3) Global Warming has been mired in politics for so long its hard to pick out the science from the spin.
All evidence that science doesn't exist in a vacuum, no matter what our ideals are about its unfettered practice.
The real concern is that we are not teaching enought math and hard science to prepare the next generation of applied scientists and engineers.
There is too much zero-sum thinking here. People are not worried that we are going to lose our scientific edge to secular Europe or Russia. We are worried about China and India because they have more people and graduate more scientists. Science is collaborative and advancement in science determined not by relative attitudes but by the absolute amount of scientists and research. Some pro-life and anti-environment policies may appear to be anti-science, but more children and more prosperity lead to more people, more scientists, and more money to fund more research in the future.
People's perceptions toward science are determined by education. That more people believe in creation than evolution is likely an effect of Sunday-school teaching religion better than public schools teaching science. Many people also pay good money to send their children to religious schools to learn science and everything else even when there are free public schools. It is ignorant to blame religion for our schools doing a poor job of teaching science. School reform, not silencing religion, is needed to improve science education.
Religious America rose from lowly colony to global superpower, science leader, and the model for most of the rest of the world. Religion has been a large net positive on science in America.
Evolution is nothing but changes in allele frequency in a population over time, so its not like modern scientists or Darwin were ever expecting to see a transitional form that wasn't itself a functioning, living species. Its not like the transitionals are going to be half-melted blobs melting from human into porcupines, like some frozen outtake from Species the movie.
Oh, and How many missing links do you want? How many more well-referenced testable and falsifiable evidences for macroevolution can scientists put together while we all wait for IDers to put together one? How many times will creationists in this Slashdot thread say that scientist are ignoring a creationist claim when in fact its been answered so many times they made a FAQ (or sometimes Slashdotters'll use something from the list of claims that a major creationist group asks people to stop using)? It'll be interesting to watch this thread and see the last question being answered.
I think I know what part of the answer is.
When some people claim that the US is anti-science, what they seem to mean in many cases is that people in the US feel a gut-level skepticism about a particular understanding of science. They fail to appreciate the fact that what science is and what it gives us are far from obvious, in spite of what they have always assumed. In other words, this is mostly a philosophical issue, not a scientific one.
So, part of the answer is, not just better science education, but education about the philosophy of science. Currently, this is entirely absent, even from university level science education.
Hopefully, debates would be far less shrill and better informed. I'm not of the naive opinion that all disagreement would cease, but I think it would be extremely helpful for participants on all sides to understand how assumptions in this area shape beliefs, and also that no set of assumptions is obviously correct.
My explanation needs to go into detail. People join and pray in a church. That makes them feel good and gives them a sense of togetherness. People feel happy that they believe what their community believes, that they belong and that the group also believes in what they believe. It gives a sense of completeness.
Even if the message is completely incorrect, people feel good because of the factors mentioned above. In the end, serious answers are not made but people feel satisfied with their complete small picture. Even if it is completely incorrect, they feel good in having an answer that their group also believes in. This is the phenomenon.
The message is irrelevant to the phenomenon detailed above.
Now science is the result of investigation, and verification - of hundreds of thousands of trained individuals over centuries.
In fact biology is based on science and medicine is based on biology. Evolution and natural selection are basic tenants of biology. To deny their importance in our daily lives is to be frighteningly ignorant of these facts.
Religion is based on what that can be proven, tested and validated?
- Zav - Imagine a Beowulf cluster of insensitive clods...
http://www.newscientist.com/channel/life/gm-food/d n7729
Researchers at the Centre for Ecology and Hydrology in Dorset, UK, tested the herbicide glufosinate ammonium on plants in fields previously sowed with oilseed rape modified to carry a gene conferring resistance to the herbicide. But a single charlock plant carried on growing happily, raising fears that the gene for herbicide resistance had crossed over to the charlock and created a herbicide-resistant strain.
For a theory to be "scientific," it must provide the basis for testable hypotheses.
Here are two sides of this particular debate:
1) "There is no superweed and there never has been," echoes Brian Johnson, ecological geneticist at English Nature, the nature advisers to the British government. "It's more likely that herbicide resistance in charlock has evolved naturally."
or
2) But according to some media reports, genetic testing of the purported hybrid showed that it carries the same gene as the GM crop.
Why would anyone want to close their eyes and cover their ears and say "I can't hear you - there is only evolution - there is no intelligent design - I'm not listening to you"? When actual real scientists are creating organisms which other scientists cannot distinguish from similar species found in nature?
in UFOs, can't tell the difference between fact and fiction, and the president believes his own lies, what can you expect?
Rationalism, the philosophy of Voltaire's bastards, is as dead in this country as my job hopes.
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
Since we have become so litgeous as of late, most anything else has been stifled.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
There is a lot that can be done about ignorance. The opposite of ignorance is attentiveness: start by caring about the things that ignorance tries to cover up.
There are essential facts of life that no ignoramus can successfully ignore. For example: death--their own personal death. Even if they wave their hands and cite some dogma to cover up the issue, you will be able to see the reality of anxiety over death in their eyes.
Questions: ask questions of an ignoramus. Don't ask rehearsed questions, just genuine down-to-earth questions that point right at the heart of the issue whenever there is an immediate practical opportunity to do it.
Understand your interests and the interests of others (even the ignoramii). First, do no harm, but do what you know you have to. The reality of your situation might supercede any of the principles or dogmas that you may normally rely upon. Make authentic judgements in the present, and you will consistently find yourself in eminently superior position to people who program themselves with dogmas.
--- Nothing clever here: move along now...
How many of you believe in science and free will?
To me, they seem mutually exclusive.
The article is misrepresenting scientific theories. They aren't something to be believed in or denied. They are just a tool to help us predict other things about the limited system they make a statement on. If we find contradictory observations we modify the theory, or explain how those observations fit into the theory.
It doesn't really matter if Joe Shmoe on the street thinks that green fairys made the universe 10 minutes ago and implanted all the memories we have. If it serves him in making predictions on the nature of the universe, good for him. You can't prove him wrong, it's useless to try.
The big bang isn't even a theory of the origin of the universe. It's a theory about how things happened after the universe originated. It doesn't say anything about how or why the universe may have formed. I guess the person that wrote the article would fail a science literacy test too.
This media strawman science is really damaging to real science.
I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
Most Americans are anti-intellectual because most intellectuals are anti-American.
Sunlit World Scheme. Weird and different.
The study of science suffered greatly under the domination of the Catholic church (nobody expects the Inquisition). Those in power (the church) dictated what was a proper fact, and what was absurd, improper, and heretical.
While science is now free from domination by the church, it is now under an almost equally difficult master... the scientific community itself.
Consider the following examples...
Anyone who proposes alternate theories to any of the 'accepted' foundations of todays community, will suffer persecution in the form of inability to receive funding to explore alterative explanations, not to mention professional ridicule (heretics).
While the examples above provide the best theories regarding our current scientific observations, none of them have been proven conclusively to be true. If we are so sure we are right about everything, then science has limited its ability to advance because we refuse to explore the unknown.
As an example, lets look at a few examples that the best minds in the world have insisted were facts:
FWIW: Why is Pioneer strangely accelerating as it leaves our solar system? Scientists claim it must be a slow gas leak, since we are certain the universe could not possibly have unknown properties to explain this better...
----- "If I am the wisest man, it is because I alone know that I know nothing." --Socrates[[NOTE: I post anonymously, as a coward, for fear of persecution by my peers]]
ID is less than molehill. It is absolutely a non-issue for anyone considering a career in science.
What matters are salaries, funding, lack of good science teachers (because we try to pay them the same as everyone else, while the market does not).
Most of these people howling "the US is anti-science" have probably not been overseas long enough to realize it is the same everywhere else.
jerking off is murder as is every period a woman has before menopause.
If EVERY opportunity to make life was taken seriouly, we'd be as populous as clams. (If every clam bred to adulthood, in a few generations we'd be up to our butts in clams. Seriously.)
Behind every religious ideology is somebody who just didn't understand the issue.
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
Thing is, none of us were there- the evidence we gather is secondhand at best and EXTREMELY open to interpretation. It's disheartening so few of us are willing to admit that.
"Sometimes it takes more than an axe and a busload of strangers to work through your anger." -Rikk Estoban
My wife and I are Christians but we see the recent "anti science" movement as a cultural reaction not a spiritual - dare I say - objective response. The author poses a great view that the cultural war drags people into dogmatic positions. The US hold an individual's culture - in what ever fashion it has been formed - as sacrosanct. I think the ultra conservative response is a result of a "we were picked by Jesus" attitude. If you believe that you are the choosen people of the world's Savior, what would you think?
I personally believe this thinking is correct. We were picked by Jesus. The kick butt, in your face Jesus. The one going through the temple markets hollering in disgust at the merchants selling goods in a holy place. The Jesus who asked that we dream big, holy, god like. The Jesus saying make the life of your fellow human better but hold God holy. This is hard. Why because at times they are two opposing ideas.
My belief is the Evangelical right is fighting a cultural war. The reason, other people are asking "what does it mean to be in the US"? I will give them credit for answering first, but I will also be the first to critize them for being the first. The problem with being the first to react not respond.
For those who believe Science is the a sprirtual quest, they are correct. Please don't forget to answer the original question - what was God thinking when he did xyz? How great of a world we live where the death of 20+ people across any part of the world makes the local news. It was not long ago when it would take a couple thousand or million deaths to make the local news. We have this rich experiencen because of the scientiest - those who dare link all humans - and the believer - those who feel all humans should be linked - that we can understand and relate to such events.
For slashdot folks, the freedom of speech battle - at the most fundamental level - is the spiritual quest. Here were are battling over if software - the tool for modern day expression - should be completly free or proprietary / goverened. It is because we can ask these questions, we are able to push our limits.
In the end keep both views as relevant. We are both choosen to govern this world and yet we must understand God's will.
And this is the point that many creationists don't get or don't like: science starts with the latest research and works backwards. No book or article gets to be the authoritative foundation of a field for all times, even if that book started a science or an article's researcher got the Nobel prize.
A well-corroborated world can be a bothersome world- as you say, it doesn't let you just believe what feels good. In the corroborated world you have to give kids the scientific method, you can't just give them a list of facts to memorize. Theories can be falisified: while scientists can be annoyed if their particular theory is bettered, the fact that they can themselves do better on someone else's theory makes it worthwhile (aka if they couldn't discover new things they wouldn't have jobs, would they.)
"If someone has an idea that flows against the scientific norm, it does NOT mean that it's wrong."
No, it means they'd better have something called evidence. No scientist will tell you otherwise.
"Science is a continually shifting 'truth.' Historically speaking, putting total trust in current scientific theory is stupid, and upholding it as the exclusive truth is shortsighted."
Actually, historically, ignoring science for the "truth" of the theocrats has proved stunningly shortsighted. And frankly, believing something in the face of all evidence is what I call stupid.
"The earth is the center of the universe, the earth is flat, ether...all outdated ideas that we no longer beleive because people dared to challenge 'modern' science."
Really. Perhaps you were asleep in history class. What people challenged was theocratic BS - not science. The "pseudo-science" that was a symptom of that disease should never be confused with science - as you just have. The earth has been proved round multiple times - each time to be qaushed, and ignored by theocratic pseudo-scientists.
Get a clue about what science is. It is constantly and relentlessly self-challenging or it's not science. No scientist will ever tell you otherwise.
I am in my post-doc (chemistry) phase at the moment, and agree with you 100%. Salaries are low, jobs are hard to find, and I will probably be 32 years old the first time my total gross income exceeds $30,000 in a single year. In the meantime, my friends who went to law school after graduation from my old college have been making $80k for five years now. They have houses, nice cars, husbands/wives, babies, etc.
I specifically chose a post-doc overseas where the work expectations are lower. The difference between working 50h/week and 70h/week is amazing. I had almost forgotten the pleasures of "weekends", "travel" and "dating" as I slogged through graduate school.
I can't believe I wasted over five years of my life for a degree which leads to a mediocre job that is likely to be exported to China next week anyway.
I myself believe in God, but I don't follow any organised religion. For me God is a feeling of peace inside one. But that's just me. I know that that statement will make some of the more religious crowd shout "sacrilege" and "you'll burn in hell" bla bla bla, and the other side will laugh because I believe in a "feeling". But who are Christians anyway to tell me how to feel? And how on earth do they even know what hell is and why I personally will burn there because I don't believe the same thing as they do. And what is the difference between a Christian wanting me to believe as he does (why, fuckhead? do you feel lonely or what?) and some Islamic nutcase frothing at the mouth about Allah and Infidels and heathens etc?
Who is right? The Christians, the Jews, the Moslems, the Buddhists, the Hindus etc? Who? Every religion claims to know "The Truth". Explain that to me enlightened Christians who claim to know everything but got it from an old book that has as much of interest in it as Hemmingway's The Old Man and The See.
I don't know if there IS a God. I certainly don't believe a church or any religion that routinely slaughtered people in the name of a God that has strange problems about sex or eating funny foods, especially on Fridays.
I think that anyone who actively tries to convince others that his religion is the only right one is a fucking moron who's afraid of people who think for themselves.
I personally don't hold much stake in atheism either, since my feelings tell me there is more to life than just a collection of chemicals, but I may be wrong.
I think it would be wonderful if people would think for themselves and come to their own conclusions, but that is terribly out of fashion today.
A "theory", as used in science, is a collection of facts strung together with a set of guiding principals that explains how those facts are related. This is a *completely* different definition of the word 'theory' than is typically used by the general public. I'm appalled by the number of people who think they have an understanding of the Theory of Evolution, yet clearly don't even know what the word theory means in this context or even bother to look it up.
In fact, just looking in my email programs dictionary shows the different definitions.
For example, it is "fact" that gravity exists and causes apples to fall from trees to the ground. Newton's "Theory of Gravity" did a pretty reasonable job of explaining this, but was after all, "just a theory". Along came Einstein and replaced Newton's theory with "General Relativity", another "theory".
The "fact" that gravity exists and causes apples to fall from trees is "true".
Newton's theory of gravity can be regarded as being "true" in the sense that it does a reasonable job of explaining what gravity is and seems to be right most of the time.
Einstein's theory of gravity is even more "true" because not only does it explain everything Newton's theory did, but explains even more.
When scientists call something a theory, is the highest honor it can be given. People don't seem to doubt "Electromagnetic theory" or the "Theory of Gravity" -- the fact that they doubt the theory of evolution is curious indeed.
Die Menschen verhoehnen was sie nicht verstehen. -- Goethe.
America is the new Old World
Moe: "Science? What's science ever done for us? TV off." [TV shuts off.]
It's funny, but it's also very true.
First off how can the United States be anti-science when everyone has a cellphone, computer, car, xbox, television, ipod and some other technological gadget? I think being anti-science would mean banning these types of devices and labeling them as witchcraft. What is happening is more people are simply not accepting scientific theories as 'ultimate' truth. Which I find nothing wrong with. Just because you do not believe in evolution does not stop the physical mechanism of evolution. Or make evolution ceast to exist. Also I think the set of scientific theories under question is rather small. No one questions electromagnetism or general relativity. They just question the life sciences. Which can you really blame them? Biology can not answer some fundamental questions such as the place of consciousness in the universe and how does inanimate matter become life? In this void people grasp onto religion. But this doesn't make the US anti-science. If anything this should encourage scientists to try to answer these questions.
Also we must be reminded that science is not the end-all of knowledge.
The best education consists in immunizing people against systematic attempts at education. - Paul Feyerabend
The first thing that occurred to me was the "only in america" things we hear.
like "only in america can an ordinary man go apeshit and kill his entire family, and then say GOD TOLD ME TO DO IT"
have to say from a non USA viewpoint you gotta question which is better?
a/ raghead crazed islamic fundamentalist
b/ redneck crazed xtian fundamentalist
I have a feeling the crazed islamic fundamentalist of probably slightly more honest and open about his beliefs 12 months before he makes the 6 o clock news.
http://slashdot.org/~GuyFawkes/journal
Small?
Stats: 80% plus of americans (including our current elected leader) hold one (or more) superstitions as the basis for the formation (and often more) of the world and universe. 50% (more, actually, because there are many at the center of the curve) of Americans have an IQ of 100 or under. They wouldn't know science from sophist nonsense if you gave them a roadmap, a GPS, and a seeing-eye dog. They don't know what theory is, what it means, or what it implies. This is not their fault, at least in my view; it is the fault of the educational and political system, mainly. In a system that does not protect its citizens, why would we not expect them to turn their eyes to Zeus or the constellations?
Religionists (and some cosmologists, sad to say) are constantly self-reinforcing the proposition(s) that things happen(ed) by what amounts to magic, and that science is merely the bastard stepchild of some supernatural entity's imagination, a descriptive convenience, no more.
When fervent assertions that entirely lack evidence in the form of objective fact form an important, or the important, part of your thinking, how are you going to be able to discern the difference between convincing reality and this conviction without any reality at all?
Yes, there might be one person doing the main attacking; but mark my words, there are hundreds of mute, average or below average folks standing quietly in the wings behind that person, urging them on, funding them, and so forth.
As science knowledge expands, the cracks between the known parts get thinner and thinner. These are the dark places where religion and superstition live. But people cherish those thoughts; we have to expect that as those superstitious ideas are squeezed into the light (which generally speaking, kills them) the holders of those ideas are going to react.
This is where "intelligent design" came from. it is purest sophist nonsense with no objective fact backing up the assertions is makes, trying to hide the idea of a god under a cloak that they cry as loudly as possible "is science" when in fact it is not. Nothing testable is put forth. It's just more hand-waving. I expect the light will kill it shortly.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
The U.S. survived a pretty terrible depression (indeed, people even call it the Great Depression) without resorting to fascism as Germany and Italy did. What exactly makes you think the economic situation today is so unbearably terrible? Not to mention that the root of much of the backlash against the rationalism of the Enlightenment was a result of the horrors of World War I. I think you're just being sensationalist. The pendulum swings back and forth, but not always the same distance.
English is easier said than done.
See also The Republican War on Science by Chris Mooney.
You cannot provide any evidence that a mystical "Designer" didn't design the flies to lay those eggs.Yeah, but that doesn't say much for your logic.
Again, because of the mystical "Designer", ANY experiment can be shown as "proof" that the Designer intelligently Designed the world to behave in that fashion.Thanks for illustrating what this entire discussion has been about. You are a prime example of the flaws in our society.
There
Is
No
Scientific
Explanation
For
"Irreducible Complexity".
A group of people beginning to question their faith in tools developed over
thousands of years to better understand the mechanics of life, leave them aside
in favour for a hodge-podge of ambiguous ideas and directions.
Arash Partow
Arash Partow's Philosophy: Be a person who knows what they don't know, and not a person who doesn't know.
Why does nobody seem to understand that we know very little about the universe. Chances are much of what people think is scientifically sound now will be laughable as little as 100 years from now. It's foolish not to consider that all our best theories could be wrong.
----
All of whose base are belong to the what-now?
I think we have way too many Cliff Clavens writing press stories, standing in front of cameras and speaking into microphones. And the reason we do is because others use them to play into whatever agendas they are trying to sell. This is in part businesses who see more profit in ignorant people paying thier monthly DRM fees snd replace thier old TVs with HDTV, or those who fear that thier corner on the market is threatened by alternative new methods or technology, or those who wish to have people doing something to maximize thier benefit.
All of this at its root is too many people only looking at life as "what's in it for me" and trying to get 'thier cut' of fame, money, or ego at the expense of pretty much anyone else. We have lost (or are not as much aware) of a sense of community and helping everyone, making the decision to do what is right and making sure that our fellow people are doing likewise.
Some of that stuff that we may need to do isn't all that popular (diet, not play so much games, work harder, give up comfort, take time and effort without much reward to show for it, etc.) and that's the hard sell.
Part of that is the freedom of speech thing, (which is important, don't get me wrong). But not where people are all out there all all trying to push the envelope with bad logic being thought as true and twisted views on what is right, there needs to be a check and balance of responsibility somewhere which we are missing. In general the solution just isn't easy.
"Enjoy what you're doing! If it becomes drudgery, you're doing it wrong!" - Jim Butterfield
Frankly, I could care less if kids in Asscrack, KS have to deal with a sticker on their textbooks warning them of potentially contentious science within. The smart ones will see through the nonsense (possibly with the help of smart family members) and the stupid ones will stay stupid. No great loss either way. Complex societies benefit from stupid kids growing up to be stupid adults - someone's gotta do the cleaning, the gas pumping, the infantry duty, and it certainly shouldn't be smart people. Education isn't the problem.
The REAL danger is that, by changing the public perception of the value of real science, it makes it that much easier for fake science to take its place. We're seeing this happen on a regular basis, as the heads of important "scientific" advisory bodies are actually just pulled directly from industry, PhDs in unrelated fields wielded mightily to reinforce non-existant credentials.
Want less regulation on pollution? Appoint EPA "scientists" who are actually just businessmen.
Want limits on reproductive freedom? Get testimonials from "scientists" who are actually just clergymen.
I'm American and those religious nuts scare me! If you ask me, the only real threat to our rights and freedoms is the religious right. Sure the terrorists can kill a few of us, but the religious right can take everything we have away.
They complain about countries which have Islamic law, but do you really think "Christian law" will be any better? These people are a threat to us sane and secular Americans.
I have nothing against religion, until of course they try to run my life and the lives of all other Americans.
Remember Orwell's animal farm? The people you have to target for education are the characters of Boxer and Clover (while some aspects of the current administration could represent Moses the Raven). Hard working individuals who really don't have time to come home from a hard days work and read Dawkins or Chomsky. They'd rather chill out in front of the TV, look after their kids or sleep. It's not a matter of them being stupid, it's that they really don't have the time or inclination to work towards knowledge. How will we change this? I don't have all the answers. To me one thing that might help is being truthful. An ethical underpinning in every facet is probably the most important thing in politics. Another thing that might work is encouraging truth and education in media. However, history would say otherwise (perhaps I have shades of Benjamin the Donkey here). Even though that sounds cynical we still cannot talk down to our fellow man. There is a reason why Bush gives off the illusion (read: propaganda) of the common man with cowboy hat and texas drawl - it's cause appearing like the masses works in political power. The progressive left have to take that into account. We too can become like that but by being truthful, less elitist and that starts with not talking down the common man.
Let me also add (before I get modded down, which unusually always happens with different views to the mainstream here on /.) that the right have a huge problem at the moment. As was attested in the story. I'm not arguing for or against either side, it's just there is more factors involved here than is talked about.
There's a strong streak of anti-intellectualism in American culture today, but it wasn't always that way.
There were a lot of eggheads among your founding fathers.
I was in Boston a few years ago. I visited a lot of the normal tourist, including the Boston Public Library. It's a huge and elaborate building. There's a huge inscription on the outside saying something like "a well-educated citizenry is essential for a strong nation".
So when did the US culture change, and decide intellectuals were undesirable?
Soon the Ignorant(religious) will battle the Enlightened(scientific) with the victor either copying 1979 Iran or 1776 America; New Civil War either way is rapidly coming.
Can you vote intelligently this time to avoid that? Or will you continue to support liars, murderers, and corrupt thieves because you are too stupid to know one of the historical factual reasons America was founded? Or will you blindly support somebody because they promise to be a bigot and subjugate fellow human beings to second or sub class citizens exclusively due to their sexual preferences? Is your personal crusade to take away liberties and freedoms and force your religion/beleifs upon everybody more important than the essence of what America was founded on?
Stem Cells - Brink of wholesale cures of disease and paralysis [RELIGIOUS BAN]
Cloning Organs - Save lives and eliminate the need for donor lists and years of suffering. [RELIGIOUS BAN]
Parental Failures - Parents are not held responsible for failing to be parents, instead movies, video games and anything but the person(s) responsible are blamed and liberties and freedoms removed. [RELIGIOUS PROPAGANDA]
Forced prayer - In violation the Founding Father's wishes, christianity is pushed as it was inserted into the Pledge and money in 1954 under the guise of the cold war then pushed as the long time "nation was founded on christianity" pure lie. [RELIGIOUS PERSECUTION/PROPAGANDA]
Blind to American/World matters - Americans vote as to what their clergy tell them, instead of researching the issue themselves to see how it will impact them and the world which in turn impacts everybody's children. [RELIGIOUS ARROGANCE/PERSECUTION]
The list goes on and on.
In the meantime, China has no issues like this and steams ahead in science and math posed to overtake the US within a decade or maybe two all across the board in all areas. We no longer see ourselves as Americans, we see ourselves labelled by our imaginary friend and the book of ancient fairy tales we think is as airtight as a time honored and prooven mathematical formula. That is what we focus our time, energy and money on because that is what is obviously important to most people who live in America and think they are American. Well if you mix religion and politics and seek to take away liberty and freedoms because of your personal beliefs then you are no American rather you are Un-American like Mohammed Atta (9/11 hijacker) yet worse as you keep pushing your agenda rather than doing us real Americans a favor and dying. Personal beliefs belong to yourself personally and in your place of worship, no place else.
Americans for Americans, Math & Science for our future and survival.
http://www.lp.org/
P.S.
Know your enemy - I thought it was gambling and not selling that started the temper tantrum?
Tell that to all the creationists that are pushing for intelligent design to be taught
alongside evolution, without also requiring the rigors of scientific review.
You know there are lots of people living outside the US on this website...might be related to the fact that not-in-the-US is much bigger than in-the-US.
Linux is not Windows
> Part of their hypocrisy is that they do not attack all science, but only certain parts that they disagree with.
hmmm...
use the part of the bible that says homosexuality is bad, ignore the part that says wearing two different types of cloth is bad
use the part of the bible that says witchcraft is bad, ignore the part that says not to eat shellfish
etc, etc, etc
genetic modification.
The left is just as anti-science as the right, whenever the data conflicts with their agenda.
Dogma is what religions produce, the static belief that X must be true because the
powers that be tell you it is true.
People are not starting to question it, the purpose of science has been to question
it all along. And so far, it has stood up to scientific analysis, which is why
it is considered valid enough to be true.
"evolution as the reson we are here is not proven"
Evolution has nothing to do with questioning the reason we are here,
it is asking the much simpler question: "How did we get here". It attempts
to answer that question by looking are where we (animals) came from, and where
they are now.
I used to be very pro-science, but not so much anymore. I still like and support science, however what I no longer do, is I no longer let science define my worldview for me.
The problem for me was that science was teaching me that I was just a bag of meat, and not really a person. Since I am just a bio-robot, there is nothing in me that's any better than, say a chicken, or a clod of earth. If I have an issue, instead of thinking my problem through, I could theoretically swallow just the right kind of pill and my issue would go away, since pretty much any negative life perceptions these days are considered brain imbalance. Depressed? Brain imbalance. Unhappy? Brain imbalance. Solution -- "happy pill".
NO! I said, no, that's not what I am, and I refuse to seek solely physical means to solve every problem in my life. I am not a bio-robot. I am not a meat machine.
I am not telling you the whole story here. It's not that I just didn't like how science made me feel and rejected it based on some sentimental reason. Not at all. My feelings caused me to examine the issues seriously and I came to realize that the hinging point is the issue of identity and the nature of cognition. Essentially science and maths take identity as an axiom, but it's not an axiom. If examined, one can see how and why it doesn't make any sense. But this can be difficult to explain because most people are not used to questioning axiomatic beliefs, and so react negatively and aggressively to such ideas (thus no useful discussion can take place).
Briefly put, science is dehumanising. If scientists could somehow address that, I feel that science would experience a revival. However, I am affraid that it's not going to happen, because scientists pretty much refuse to challenge the "everything is matter and energy and mind is just an illusion" view of materialism.
(yes I am accusing the scientific community of being aggressive and hateful toward any non-materialists, with the possible exception of quantum mechanics people who are a bit more open minded usually, since they are not as stuck on the classic ideas of identity, matter and energy)
Why is Intelligent Design always portrayed as anti-science? I have heard numerous comments like this. Just because you reject a portion of science doesn't mean that you reject the entire discipline. You can have a successful scientific career while believing in ID(though maybe not in fields dominated by evolutionary thought). This issue would be moot if the evidence for "macro" evolution was so conclusive that the ID-believing scientists gave up the cause. The article rightly points out that ID proponents do not call themselves anti-science, in fact, I think that is controversy is in the best interest of science. Out of the ashes of this conflict one of these theories will rise victorious. And science will not be set back, even if IDists win. In any case, ID has little to do with the lack of science students in the US. I think the problem lies with our cultural disinterest.
Science rarely "proves" anything nontrivial. You are correct in your assertion that science cannot determine "The Truth". By studying the history of the application of the scientific method one can see that the scientific view of the world has changed drastically, especially in the last several hundred years. Religion doesn't have to worry about observations, so determining "The Truth" is possible. Or whatever "The Truth" was 2000 years ago anyway.
However I question your assertion regarding anti-anything-else. Let us take the example of evolution "vs." ID (intelligent design). The two theories do not necessarily conflict. Science has nothing to say about the origin of evolution. And only a fundamentalist interprets the Bible literally, which means that there is room in ID for evolution as a mechanism of implementation. However the proponents of ID have taken the fundamentalist view of things by insisting that ID is an alternative explanation, rather than a supplemental one. This is a directly confrontational stance.
I don't have any hard fact to back this up (not that it's required on slashdot), but I'm pretty sure funding for physics research was pretty non-existant before WW-I and almost all money went into agriculture research. After the war, military arms races in the period between WW-I and WW-II really drove the interest in public spending for research in military areas (such as radar, munitions, ...) culminating in the ultimate physics experiment, the A-bomb.
In the aftermath of WW-II, public policy makers in all countries, worried about yet another war and seeing the real-world impact of esoteric physics experiments rushed to advance funding in for all sorts of physics research.
Funding of physics was never about finding a breakthrough that would impact people's lives, it is mostly about figuring things out before your enemies figured things out and gained an advantage. With the end of the cold war, the pressure is off to beat our enemies with esoteric physics so in a way we should be somewhat thankful that nobody is really pushing pushing esoteric physics anymore from a policy level. This is sadly, for you, the byproduct of the "peace-dividend".
The peace dividend factor is, however, probably only 1/2 the story.
Personally, one of the reasons I lost the desire to support the "big-sciences" is that recently, academia has decided that they aren't about "dicovery" anymore, but it all seems to be about how to "monetize" their research.
Now I'm not the type of person to deny a person the bucks that they earn, but lending money to people to buy lottery tickets and then charging me a fee for the privledge isn't my thing either.
If "big-science" wants to take public money and feed the research to the public, that's great. If a few of the researchers decided they want to leave academia to try to capitalize on their research by joining companies, that's great too. But more often these days, academic institutions have decided to "licence" their research back to companies which means they want to pick the winners and the losers. Of course nobody wants to be the loser, right, so the companies woo the people that are making the decisions and that costs money. Once the winner pays for the "license", they want to recoup their investment (who wouldn't) and indirectly we (the public) end up paying again.
That to me just sucks!
I'll gladly pay a little (in the form of taxes) and take the risk nothing comes of certain research, but when the research pays off, I really resent paying again in the form of monopoly taxes to the "winner" chosen by the academic institution.
Everytime I hear people talk about academics lamenting the fact that they have to go to get private money (e.g., corporate financing) for their projects instead of getting public money, I think to myself that there is a good case to be made that academia broke the previous contract and now are just crying over spilled milk. Academia chose their path, they have to live with the consequences.
If we were in the music business, we would call this "selling-out-to-the-man"...
You might argue that physics isn't the same as genetics or computer-science, but unfortunatly, from the generally uninformed public point of view, there's not much of a difference and the baby gets thrown out with the bath water. Just look at how research money is spent these days: "overhead" is one of the bigger ticket items in most grants. Nobody seems to want to isolate the spending on a project, but everyone wants overhead to go into a generic university "slush-fund" which gets intermingled with all that private money too. It's too hard to draw the line in most univeristy budgets on what is public and what is private (it's all just their money to spend however they want). If people thought Enron was bad, I'm not sure they'd be too pleased at the typical university accounting procedures...
If research wants to be monetized, then the money should pay for the research, right? Sadly there's not much money in physics research at the moment...
Of many motivations, there are greed and fear. These are the drivers. After 9/11, the US was scared. We had to find the culprit. It turned out to be, according to somewhat reliable evidence, a largely obscure group called Al Qaeda. They were hiding in Afghanistan, sheilded by some religious zealots, the Taliban. So, if you'll remember, we wiped the floor with Taliban in the quest to wipe them out. It wasn't a battle as the Taliban was the terribly weak governance of a huge country full of tribes and warlords, as it is today. Then, trumped up evidence was found to invade Iraq, and smite that awful murderer, Saddam Hussein. Yes, he was a stinker, no doubt, but the US went it alone, still full of retribution over having the WTC and Pentagon so easily and embarrassingly nailed.
What a jolly good idea for a war it was. It was also based on false connections on each driving point, points that didn't wait for the UN or a consensus of countries to act upon. Instead, we acted with the UK, Spain (who withdrew early), Denmark, Italy, Poland, and some others to dethrone Hussein.
And now, we're living in an era where every shread of evidence for invading Iraq (save the ostensible truth that Hussein was a murderer, and certainly not the only one in either the mid-east, Asia, or Africa for that matter) has been proven incorrect or dubious at best. That leaves the actual motivation: fear of the rise of Islam. A show of strength that has also shown our weakness and fear. A small minority of radical Islam was amplified symbolically as the Islamic version of the Crusaders, those bent on the destruction of what they believe US Christians and Jews stand for. Both sides are driven, ostensibly, by the power of God. This is not science. This is anti-science.
The Bush administration and the Congress has tried to turn over prior ecological gains (including ignoring Kyoto), denying any palpable cause for global warming, re-writing scientific analysis to suit its own aims, while driving debt that will take generations to pay off.
It's denial in the name of reality, based upon a belief that God will take care of everything, and that (H)his/(H)her time is coming soon. So, don't worry about the earth, it'll end. We'll all be in heaven, or if you're heathen (you abortionist or gay person you) in hell. The end-time Christian soldiers are in charge now. God help us.
It's fear. Greed. Not the science once used. It's like watching Kinsey or Copernicus being scoffed at. The deity-based belief systems compel denial at the evidence in front of our faces. The confrontation between what was taught as truth versus what we now know about the world around us has caused enormous calamity. And it'll continue.
---- Teach Peace. It's Cheaper Than War.
you seem kind of confused. the controversy comes from the fact that science has disproved many claims and suppositions about the universe (including claims about the word of god himself) that have historically been peddled by religious doctrineers. for example: that demons cause sickness, that sin causes sickness, that the world is a few thousand years old, that the sun revolves around the earth, that this or that woman is a witch.
science has helped us understand the world without using ghost stories, even though there's a lot we don't know. it exposes zealous claims about "the word of god" for the frauds that they are.
as you said, "science" doesn't "disprove god." it disproves various PROPOSITIONS about the world that god-fearing people have historically repeated over the years. science is a METHOD for investigating reality in a sensible way, not a collection of claims. if you oppose it, you're an ostrich with your head in the sand. you can oppose some of the claims that a scientist might make, and then make a counterargument. that's great. but opposing rational inquiry itself is something else entirely.
the "strident atheist" is a straw man. you can't test, prove, or falsify claims made about an omnipotent, omnipresent, omniscient entity. so theology doesn't belong in a science classroom. the only "strident" thing that fundamentalists are opposing is the TRUTH itself, and the acknowledgment of certain facts about the world, which is why their current goal is to dumb down the science curriculum in school. you should have noticed by now that the provocateurs DON'T go around saying "Hey, everyone, science does NOT actually disprove the existence of a god. let's be careful when we talk about theology." which would be theologically sound, and possibly even appreciated by many people. but instead of saying that, they say "Evolution? I don't believe it. We gotta stop teaching it, or, at least, it's just a THEORY, and it's mostly wrong". the whole controversy is nothing but a repeat of the persecution of Galileo.
and in due time, everyone will be so familiar with the basic facts of biology that the campaign against teaching evolution will be nothing but a historical absurdity, just like with astronomy in the case of Galileo. you can only keep people in the dark so long.
the truth comes home to roost. and it ruffles a lot of feathers.
Look, as computer scientists we know that people (i.e. designers) write viruses, they don't just "evolve". So clearly, the existence of viruses proves that God, the Original Intelligent Designer, must exist ;)
I mean really, does it even matter? The thing is flawed, yes. This means that really, people should believe whatever they do and shouldnt attack other people's beliefs until they can back it up with real evidence that isnt flawed. Until then, except by faith in any belief, no one can prove anything, and since no one can technically prove their own faith's validacy, maybe they should look for facts before they discount another.
people in this discussion seem to be concentrating on creationism, intelligent design and the damage that stuff is doing to science. That's certainly true - but there is another perhaps more insidious threat to science: the well-funded corporate campaigns intended to discredit particular areas of science that threaten profits. The most obvious examples are tobacco companies attacking medical evidence of the dangers of smoking, and oil companies attacking those who study global warming. These campaigns have also damaged science immensely, and slowed down progress in vital areas of research and public policy in a way that I think is downright criminal...
Human genome = 3 billion base pairs = 6 GBit. Windows + Office = 20 Gbit. Which is more impressive?
If you notice the Catholic folk hasn't spoke out against science in a LONG LONG time.
Actually the Catholic Church, in the person of Pope John Paul II, has said "God" used evolution to create life on earth. Magisterium Is Concerned with Question of Evolution For It Involves Conception of Man.
FalconShould there be a Law?
LOL! and i thought only /. got shit for being 10 years late in noticing a story! Now Reuters is behind the curve [waaaaay behind]. I suppose in fairness /. isn't that far behind, since i don't think /.'s been around long enough at any rate
While I agree that R&D gets not the attention it deserves, that is to be expected - everywhere, isn't it? Education is another matter, but I don't think that the US is going to go away from science without a good fight from within, as a recent presentation to the US Senate shows.
I suspect that what is being perceived as anti-science is a direct result of the '70's "every opinion is equally valid" self-esteem building approach to education. If every opinion is equally valid, then so are the "facts" and beliefs that those opinions are founded upon. Likewise any questioning of those beliefs directly assaults the self-esteem of the belief holder.
Take this to its logical conclusion and you get a subset of Christians who are overly defensive along with Public Radio stations poking fun at said Christians while hosting hour long homeopathic medicine seminars (I'm talking about you WYSO).
So yeah, pesudo-science is on the rise in the media and in those focused upon by the media. That said, the vast majority of Americans that I know are well grounded, both in their faith (Christian, Jewish, Islamic, Buddhist, pretty rocks, nothing, whatever) and in their understanding of science. They want to be productive members of their community, raise some decent kids, live a decent lifestyle, and be part of a society that facilitates those goals.
I'm not too worried. The right-wing nuts keep the left-wing nuts occupied, and vice-versa, leaving the rest of us to get along with our lives. America has survived worse.
Vuja De: That sinking feeling that this is going to happen again. Often occurs in meetings with Product Managers.
The bigger problem is there are not enough science jobs to go around.
Wansu, th' chinese sailor
Anyone heard that Greenday song "American Idiot"? This is what it's fucking talking about! Don't listen to this shit. Bush may be a radical, but he's like the stupidest man ever. He's from Texas, where not going to death row is like a high-school diploma. (Imagine if he wrote the declaration of independence: "King George (hehe, that's my name, too), we really hate ya, and we're gonna kick your ass preemptively!") The real problem is that small factions run the country. From the radical right to the radical left to the radical special interests to the radical media. The real "moderates" aren't given a chance to step up. Oligarchy sadly has taken over America. Now the various factions war with each other. Media calls the right names. The left and the media team up. The right, left, and special interests have a three-way. The Media feels left out and bashes all three. This is insanity, like trying to balance a CD thorugh its central hole. Anyone who claims to be Christian should know that the Gospel Matthew clearly states that one is to "Love the LORD [his or her] God with all [his or her] heart, mind, and soul." Basically, don't check your brain at the door (of course, Texans weren't very well endowed in tha respect). This ignorance is insanity. In times of the bible, this was known as blasphemy or false-prophesy. Today we are more gracious, and so I am hopeful that these people will recant their wicked ways and their terror tactics. Christianity is perhaps one of the most positive and most elightening lifestyles, yet a few loud Jesus-freaks give it a bad name. Quite a shame, really.
But do you know why this is? Because in the last couple of decades, "intellectual" has come to mean someone so out of touch with the vast majority that the label is distrusted.
Computer geeks, software designers, and engineers are at the furthest extreme of this, and while this set of people don't generally "= some snotty guy at Harvard telling you middle America peons that you're, well, peons, and that everything would be better if you just listened to volvo-driving people like himself. " the mistrust of the computer crowd is even more intense because of society's dependence upon computer infrastructure, and the fact that this crowd and their lower ranks of computer literate "netizens" are the only ones who know how to manipulate it. Computer literacy and hackers today are the new witchcraft.. just like the effective medicine and plagues of yesteryear.
As such, you see a lot of legislators out there trying to exert legal control. (FCC, Calea, DMCA)
The overall point which drives anti-intellectualism is the fact that intellectual's knowledge gives them power which only comes from understanding, and people despise when others may have power over their lives. They have a deep evolutionary imperative to do whatever they can to neutralize that power, this means making a society which punishes people for being curious and intellectual.
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Please don't argue out of ignorance.
I'm certainly not going to tell you that I think there are easy answers to the fundamental questions of our existence, but if you think you have found the "aha!" verse which undermines major Christian theology, your sorely mistaken. Speaking as someone who is all too familiar with modern christian thought, I can tell you that many, many people have been reading and re-reading every verse in the Bible for thousands of years, and your not going to spot something they missed. Modern Christian theology is extremely thorough, despite what those unfamiliar with it may think.
Perhaps you should peruse the rest of the Bible before claiming that God is presented as a creator who just "kicks off" the process.
Good question...
The keyboard that you typed that question on is a product of science.
The screen that displays your question, my reply, and the comments of
thousands of other people... is a product of science.
The Internet connection... the servers that Slashdot runs on, the
HTML formatting... etc, etc. all come from various scientific
discoveries or developments based on an understandig of science.
Just an immediate example of the relationship you have with science.
It may not be as personal as your relationship with God, but
the relationship is very much there in ways you seem to take for granted.
Your position is not Anti-Science, but the determination of some people
to have God smite ideas they are personally not comfortable with is.
Unfortunately my observations indicate that scientific minded people tend not to breed or do so later in life, so I suspect that we may be stuck with the problem unless some other less superstitous culture knocks us down.
Of course a nice holy war does wonders for the growth of ideas as well, witness the crusades and what they did for the european cultures that had been mostly stagnant up until then.
So, "Yes, but no worries!"
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
What dialect? Mandrine is the official language however Cantonese is the most widely spoken, and there are others as well. When you get into written Chinese, there are the ideograms which are the same in each dialect though they're spoken compleatly differently, and there are different styles written Chinese is romanitized, Yale and Pinyin being the most popular. However Mainland China is now using Simplified Chinese ideograms, they are easier to write and there aren't as many of them, there are more than 66,000 ideograms. The average Chinese can get by with a vocabulary of 3000 though.
FalconShould there be a Law?
The left have the elitist attitude?
The right spews that accusation to divert the public's outrage from the real cause of trouble.
I don't see the left adopting the "for your own good" elitist mindset the right does. The right is the side which legislates morality because "their" moral codes are apparently better than mine, gives huge cash and power grabs to the corporate elite, starts wars to wrest control of resources from their indigenous populations for the sake of corporate greed, and declares war on the middle class, taking away the working poor's "boostraps" (basic welfare and medical provisions) and robbing them of that tiny piece of mind necessary to let them focus on bettering their condition, all because they believe in this pseudo-economic fallacy that the standard of living will be made better if the rich somehow become "rich enough".
(this voodoo economics comes from a theoretical situation in which moral hazard does not exist.. in that case decreasing expenses to the suppliers results in greater public good as they pass that savings on to their customers as higher wages and lower prices.. but moral hazard DOES exist, and the right completely ignores that fact because we peeon economists just don't know as much as their elite selves apparently)
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evolution has never been tested or proven, therefore it's not scientific fact. yes, it is an argumentum ad numerum, having garnered the support of a wide scientific community, and created a paradigm of modern naturalistic thought, but it is not a fact, nor is it a science. evolution is as much dogma as the bible, with only scientific inuendo that suggests it is true, and glaring discrepencies that suggest it is false. the fact is that evolution is inarguably not a complete, full, a proven scientific model. what is anti-science, is that idea that any aspect of science is exempt from peer review, and public discussion. to observe a dataset, and draw a hypothesis based on your conclusions is not science, but in fact is exactly what darwin did. evolution has then been hung out there, and as aspects of it are diminshed or destroyed, the theory is 'fine tuned' leaving opponents with continually disproving an infinate number of possibilities, while the ability of the theory to be applied and tested and proven positive is ignored. You don't fix facts to meet your conclusion... you don't find fossils to meet your assumptions. that is not science, in fact, it is considered by modern scientifc standards of testing to be anti-science. is there a problem in the United States with intelligent design? perhaps, but it is a philosophical problem, not a scientific one.
Any fool can criticise, condemn, and complain, and most fools do. - Benjamin Franklin
Why does no one view god as the collected set of mechanics that the universe runs under? That certainly fits the bill for omnicient, omnipresent, and omnipotent.
i'm getting flashbacks of the anime title "ah my goddess (tv)" in which a guy crashes god =P
G.O.D. Grandeose Ominfunctional Device! ; )
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The difference in predation or competition and genocide is very clear. While animals engage in territorial squabbles as you mention, ants do not go out LOOKING for other ants to exterminate. Conflicts arise only out of expansion into neighboring territories--they only engage in warfare when their populations but up against one another. This sort of competition occurs throughout nature and is different than what humans practice, which often constitutes a concerted hunting and elimination of humans or other animals that has nothing to do with sustenance, and often nothing to do with competition, and everything to do with imposing our brand of order on the world. I do agree that a lot of human conflict arises out of contention for limited resources, but you have to also acknowledge that much of it does not. When we invaded Vietnam, for instance, there we no resources in contention that lead to that conflict: rather, it arose out of our will to test out some military toys and impose our order somewhere.
When the wolves hunt the elk, it is a negative feedback system that regulates itself. If the wolves eliminate too many elk, the wolves do not have enough food to survive, and thus the wolf population diminishes. Similarly, if the elk destroy their food supply, they die and rot in the ground, becoming feritlizer for more grasses to grow.
When humans deliberately eliminate species or groups of other humans, it is arbitrary and has nothing to do with this balance: it has only to do with a positive feedback system in which one group of people seeks unlimited growth. This is hugely different from anything else that happens in nature, and our ability to reason (and therefore, to be murderous and insane) is what facilitates this. Our ability to produce arbitrary amounts of food and to store this food facilitates unlimited growth, and it also has the side effect of making us exterminate other people and species in other to convert as much of the world as possible into food for us. This is unprecedented in the animal kingdom.
I don't need to go into torture, because while animals might occasionally play with their prey, they also play with one another. I see no reason to look upon these actions differently: I see both of the as being training and exercise of a sort. To put malice on those activities is to anthropomorphize animals with minds that are IMO too simple to derive pleasure from the pain of another being.
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> How about the simple fact that the theory of evolution is taught as fact in many
m l
evolution is a fact: http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/evolution-fact.ht
a scientific theory is an explanatory model to account for some law or observation. it isn't the same as "theory" in every day speech, like "a hunch". furthermore, a fact is not "mathematical proof", otherwise we couldn't say that it's a fact that adolf hitler lived. it is confirmed to such a degree of certainty that there is not a reasonable doubt about it.
the general idea that all life on earth arose through a progression of self-replicating chemical systems due to the preservation of random mutations over billions of years, is most certainly a fact.
explain why it is that when someone just mentions "intelligent design", they are immediately labeled as a radical, or anti-science, or with some other derogatory label.
"intelligent design" advocates are labeled as utter lunatics, because they don't have any support for their beliefs. they might as well be teaching kids about santa claus and leprechauns. the only intelligent designers we know of are humans, and i think we can all agree that humans didn't make ourselves and all other life on the planet. until creationists ("intelligent design" people included) can demonstrate the existence of some intelligence that is consistent with the creation of life as we know it, there is no argument to be made for intelligent design.
natural selection is one part of evolution. evolution is "a change in the frequency of alleles within a population". it is comprised both of mutation and natural selection. so it's not really incorrect to say that natural selection is evolution. it's an enormous part of it.
The same conservative democracy-of-the-dead that sustains red-state religiosity also binds those places to American political tradition. On the other hand, progressive blue-states have been, are, and will be more susceptible to change---including the institution of theocracy.
At least, this reasoning suggests that your question is not so merely rhetorical as you seem to believe.
First off I am a Christian. I am fairly well educated. I've studied science, history, philosophy (although I am an awful speller...). I don't pretend to have any answers, or know the right answers. Was it God that created everything - no evolution, did God just set the wheels in motion, or maybe God didn't do any of it, although I hope this isn't the case. I don't think I am different than the majority of people in the US.
I just want to pose a couple of questions to chew on.
Why is it bad that Christians want ID/Creationism in schools?
The Bible, the New Testiment especially, contains stories about events that the others witnessed and we are asked to believe because we were not their to witness them. There is some reasonable amount of historical and archeological evidence to support many parts of these stories.
Science, for a vast number of people that don't have the education or facilities to understand the math, biology, etc behind it is asking us to do the same thing. There are a handful of people, by far the minority, that truely understand the science behind microbiological theory, astrophysics, etc. What we are learning in school, is that there is no controversy to accepted scientific theories. Which isn't true. Evolution has some pretty big gaps that don't explain things like the Pre-Cambrian explosion. The Big-Bang theory doesn't explain how the actual moment of the big bang happened. The explanations require the other accepted laws of physics to be broken, just to account for that singularity that started it all. And I can be sure that some of the accept "facts" of science today in 50 years will have been proven just plain wrong by new discoveries and observations (dinosaurs evolve into birds, bring that up 50 years ago and it likely would have ruined your paleology career).
There are plenty of measurable facts in science, otherwise we couldn't have things like computers. It is unlikely that these types of facts will ever change. But, the rest of it is made up of conjecture based on the measurable facts filled in with an accepted hypothosis that seems to explain the observations and is able to somewhat accuratly make predictions.
Perhaps creationism/ID should not be taught in science class, but it seems to me that it is completely acceptable to teach as part of the humanities (history, philosophy, etc), especially since a significant part of the population believes in God. I know for a fact that in my childrens school they learned about Hannika (I told you I was a bad speller) and some African tribal beliefs. Why then, can't they give equal time to Christian beliefs?
Yes I admit it I believe in God, and that Jesus Christ is my personal savior. I not alone and I am not crazy a lunitic uneducated, or any of the other things so many of you have called Christians.
http://www.antievolution.org/features/wedge.html
The Discovery Institute holds that all natural science, not just evolution, is fundamentally contrary to the Christain faith and therefore must be wiped out. They believe that ever since the scientific revolution, faith has suffered as more and more natural explanations are discovered for phenomena that used to be attributed to God (for instance, diseases are caused by microbes and not God's wrath).
The so-called Wedge Strategy is to use the issue of evolution (chosen because it is already poorly understood by the general public) to build public distrust of scientists. After intelligent design becomes mainstream, they plan to plow over the remainder of science, i.e. everything that we have learned in the past 400 years.
So yeah, the US looks to be headed in the anti-science direction.
Some of those causes, like sexual selection, have survived the test of time
sexual selection is natural selection. it is selection by a natural phenomenon: another self-replicating chemical system.
Alright, I think some people may have a very narrow view of science. Let's do some time travel, perhaps. Was Newton studying science per se since he happened to believe that God created the world? No, apparently, science began once Darwin came along. I've heard current philosophers/scientists bash pre-Darwinian science and what it accomplished, but with some of the technical shortcomings, political problems, and religious wars, it's really quite amazing to see what people came up with in an era where (surprise) most people believed in a Creator God.
;) Conversely, how many of you can coherently explain and refute some of Dembski's arguments?
I'd like to mention that I'm quite intellectual and yet I could be correctly labeled an evangelical Christian. I'm not sure how many posters above have met bona fide evangelical Christians who are also intellectuals - I hope we have a reputation for being selfless and considerate while at the same time zealous to learn. If anything, understanding that life has purpose and that universe is ordered makes it an amazing logical puzzle that challenges me to solve it...unlocking genetic codes and transfering them into genetic algorithms, discovering the amazing beauty and order in our human bodies, and so much more.
I've been fortunate to have had a mentor who's a genius in CS (Princeton grad, worked at Goldman Sachs, etc.), has a brilliant logical mind, and has a totally rational basis for his Christian faith. He's very down-to-earth, selfless, and a pleasure to be around and now sacrifices the $$ he could be making to teach in my old high school. I guess my love for learning came from his influence although my entire family has a love for education. I have a BS and MS degree in CS as well as a philosophy minor (and four siblings currently in college). However, I can promise you that my philosophy classes with this Christian philosopher/high-school teacher were better than all the other classes combined for my Philosophy minor by so-called experts in Philosophy. I've wondered why sometimes...
{Thinking aloud...}maybe it's the problem with the presupposition that "Science and dogma don't mix very well at all." Yeah, it sounds good because maybe your professor or mentor told you that (or you've said it enough times), but could you actually argue that Science and Postmodernist relativism mix better? I've seen a Postmo professor laud science, but sometimes I wonder why he can even assume that MUST be true when after all, how can we really know anything for sure? I find David Hume to be a very interesting philosopher, but for some reason, I don't see him as a cutting-edge scientist. I'd see an absolutist being a scientist much more readily than a relativist...even if only for the motivation to continue through all that painstaking effort if you know that the truth is indeed out there!
However, I'm not happy, when evangelicals (or naturalists for that matter) stop valuing learning and education and develop an escapist attitude. So, yeah, I can quote most of the recent evolutionary theories of how life originated (I hear it's down to a science now, but so far it's not been reproducable ).
Now, I know I will probably get modded down...because I actually don't bash evangelicals. But maybe you might wish to hear from one for a change...
This sig donated to Pater. Long live
Some people might recall that tobacco companies bought a lot of favorable research. There are many other examples of companies and organizations that saw fit to ignore or edit scientific studies in order to reach predefined conclusions. Nor do I see any strong incentive for the abuse of science to stop. A perverse problem of science is that a lot of the desire to control scientific progress springs from the successes of science. Science is a rival authority figure. This makes it a target for corruption.
My take is that unless there is a real penalty for misusing science (whether it be open ridicule or penalties for hiding evidence), people will continue to blatantly and frequently misuse science (or at least something which resembles it) to confirm whatever fantasy they wish confirmed.
God told Me That This Article Is A Bunch Of Rubbish.
God Told Me That Science Is One of His Favorite Subjects and He is American.
God Also Told Me That He Is A Huge Star Wars Fan.
God Wears Glasses And Carries an IPod.
God And I Just Burned A Big Fatty.
God Says Happy Halloween Everyone.
... is that you got modded Funny for this. I'm guessing someone actually didn't know that the Khmer Rouge really did that. Managed to send their whole damned civilization back to the stone age, pretty much. Not very hilarious for the folks who lived through it.
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
... but you might come off as a bit of a cackling white-coated elitist. Just a bit.
But I don't think you have to appeal to "they're all morons!"---I really do think that if you explain some basic principles to people, they can understand them. The basic tenets of science are not that complicated. Falsifiability isn't that hard. I'm sure Gould or Dawkins or Sagan must have explained it in a simple, accessible way. Right?
Hell, I'm convinced I could explain the basic tenets of science to someone without schooling in that area.
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
...and they're asking if the US is anti-science? Pshaw...
Read C.S. Lewis. try "A Grief Observed". C.S. Lewis was a atheist, and great intellectual, who eventually became a Christian [...]
Thanks. That appeal to authority was very scientific. I think you've made his point.
I understand the GP was being inflammatory and possibly over-zealous. Incidentally s/he refuted your argument before you even made it: "Just because an individual is smarter than you in one field doesn't mean they're any more or less immune to the mental compartmentalization process required to become [more or less] religious than you."
If your C.S. Lewis-theory-of-finding-Christianity was sound science then anyone could repeat the journey and life-experience of C.S. Lewis and reach the same conclusion --in the same joyless way-- every time. No rational* person would believe this experiment to be possible, let alone irrefutable. (Additionally, to claim that merely reading about said journey is sufficient is more dubious.)
I'll grant that I could just be stupidly missing your point (C.S. Lewis explains how smart people can find faith? that religion can be joyless?). Cheers.
(*) pardon the generalization, rhetorical device.
Read Heinlein's 1953 Revolt in 2100, now more than ever.
A quarter of Americans didn't know the Earth revolves around the Sun, but apparently one third of Europeans didn't know that either.
Source: American's Love Science, but Don't Know Much About It [PDF]
United States
Scientifically Literate: 12%
Partial: 25%
Not: 63%
European Union
Scientifically Literate: 5%
Partial: 22%
Not: 73%
"In previous estimates of civic scientific literacy, Miller has used a threshold level of 67 or more, reflecting the ability of a respondent to get two-thirds of the possible points on the construct vocabulary index. When this standard is applied to the 1995 U.S. data, 27.2 percent of Americans score at or above the 67 point level, compared to 20.2 percent of Europeans. This result suggests that approximately three of four adults in Europe and the United States would be unable to read and understand news or other information that utilized basic scientific constructs such as DNA, molecule, or radiation."
Source: Miller, Jon D. 1998. The measurement of civic scientific literacy. Public Understanding of Science 7 (3):203-223. See here.
When it comes to Scientific literacy, the United States is actually in the lead.
Isn't it fun to see how people can manipulate selective statistics to prove a point? The fact is, for the past decade or so, evolution has had roughly 45% support (give or take depending on the study--also please learn about margins of error before chiming in). There haven't been any studies showing any significant increase, so to conclude that it's becoming MORE hostile is ludicrous. In fact, if you had polls from 50 years ago, I'd be you'd reveal that support back then for evolution would probably be a very small minority. Republicans/conservatives have always been pro-life, so how is that an "increase"? The fact that we have Roe v. Wade now, compared to abortion being illegal the hundred of years before only shows an increase in udnerstand of science. The congressional measures for Terri Schiavo had VERY LITTLE public support, why is that even used as an arguing point? They're just pulling random examples out of their ass that refute their own point.
Sure, the current administration tries to limit it, but that is a temporary slump. So, where are the polls on stem cell research? Did the author even bother looking those up? Of course not, because then they'd realize that the majority (60%) of Americans support stem cell research and that their sensationalist peice of claptrap is completely bogus!
Sensationalism aside, to those who exercise critical thought and do research, this conclusion is completely UNSCIENTIFIC and wrong. CONCLUSION: The journalist who wrote this article is an anti-scientific thinker and all who agree with him aren't capable of critical thought and are thusly hypocrites that should be lumped in with the anti-scientific thinkers they criticize.
Such a theory as you describe could, in fact, be a false theory that has not yet been experimentally falsified.
The parent appears to suffer from a lack of knowledge of what Christianity really dictates...
That's okay. So do most Christians.
Microsoft is to software what Budweiser is to beer.
We're already within the first one of those two generations. Our overseas labor pools will become our economic masters in 30 years. America is about to descend, and the entire rest of the world is absolutely gunning for it to happen.
Free Hans!
. . . and more anti science comes from the Post-Modern left.
Cause nothing shows "more" like a single anecdote. PC activists, while sometimes overzealous in trying to rectify a known problem with discrimination in our culture, can hardly be called "anti-science".
Of course, some people from every group fear or distrust science, but the religious right is the most vocal group trying to ban science from the schools and museums. (Yes, they are.) Many of them also believe that global warming, evolution, most astronomy, historical geology, and so much more areas of modern science.. are conspiracies invented primarily to discredit Christianity. Read the popular Christian books and magazines if you don't believe me. Gosh, the last time I flipped past the 700 Club on TV, they were using those same terms.. specifically that the movie "The Day After Tomorrow" was leftist propoganda for global warming!
What other large group in America is so damned paranoid about science!?
Everyone is entitled to his own opinions, but not his own facts.
The U.S., and pretty much every country, has always been like this. I've never met anyone who can honestly claim that an overwhelming majority of their country/culture is scientifically literate.
The difference is, Bush and his cronies are trying to pass laws to enforce this belief.
We have just as many people in Canada who believe the Adam and Eve story, or any of a hundred creation myths, but no one in power is trying to force us to have Christian mythology in our courts, schools, money, etc. The only ones who even think about this are the extreme fundamentalist "right-wing" (damn, that term is meaningless these days) parties, and they haven't held power in a LONG time. Pretty much since any of their members started spouting this nonsense, coincidentally.
It's a side benefit of mass immigration from every region of the globe, one I'm VERY happy for.
Politicians in the U.S. get CHEERED by the masses if they push their religion onto others. In Canada, they lose every election they run in. Yeah, the people are ultimately responsible, but there's a hell of a lot more willingness to push personal agendas in the U.S.
Endless arguments over trivial contradictions in books written by ignorant savages to explain thunder in the dark.
No matter how anti-science you argue the US is, it is far more Anti-Economics!
How many people actually get a real basic understanding of economics, compared with a basic understanding of science? How many years of study of each in school?
Your first paragraph doesn't follow from anything that's been said so far. No one disputes that Newton (for example) was a Christian.
Paragraphs 2 and 3 say nothing about science. You're talking philosophy, and make a valid point about intellectual Christians, but you really aren't talking about science.
Paragraph 4: maybe it's the problem with the presupposition that "Science and dogma don't mix very well at all." Yeah, it sounds good because maybe your professor or mentor told you that (or you've said it enough times), but could you actually argue that Science and Postmodernist relativism mix better?
That's really hard to address because "dogma" isn't a philosophy (comparing dogma to postmodernism, or some form of relativism). Science is a philosophy (or set of philosophies that share a common metaphysics and epistemology). Dogma is a form of epistemology, and it's a form that the philosophy of science cannot accept. All science (in fact, all knowledge of any sort) requires some things to be accepted as "given" (axioms). Science works feverishly to minimize the number of axioms, and to place them as far away as possible. Dogma, on the other hand, is an axiom smack in the middle where it doesn't belong.
The battle between ID and Evolution is not one of philosophy. The philosophy (science) has already been chosen. It's a battle within the realm of science. ID is *not* science. The onus is not on me to refute Dembski (or any other ID proponent), but for them to frame an actual scientific theory, and to promote it through the proper means. I promise you very much that a scientifically valid ID theory would be given due consideration by the scientific community, and if it's actually a more fit theory, it will even prevail over (or be incorporated into) the theory of evolution.
I appreciate the fact that you are an intellectual, a Christian, and a philosopher, but no one has said such a combination is not possible.
The problem I have with this entire ID vs. evolution thing, speaking as a computational neuroscientist and a biologist, is that the entire framing of the argument is arrogant and flawed because it presupposes a definition of "intelligence" that is invalid at the level of basic neuroscience. Nobody can define intelligence adequately, but it's obviously something that (basically by definition) is a property of the human brain. The human brain is a dynamical system with a huge number of degrees of freedom and strong nonlinearities, but that's it. There isn't any magic, and there aren't any souls (and yes, I would argue that there IS scientific evidence against the existence of souls, and there has been since Galen's groundbreaking work in ~200 AD), there's just swirling masses of atoms inside peoples' heads. If you accept that "intelligence" is simply a property of the dynamics of a certain nonlinear system (e.g. the brain), then there's nothing to prevent other complex systems from displaying "intelligent" behavior. Like evolution, for example.
What bothers me the most is not that ID is fundamentally religious, but that it's based on a fundamentally anthropomorphic definition of "intelligence" that is impossible to define, and even proponents of evolution fall into supporting this false dichotomy. Instead of saying "No, evolution is not intelligent!" they should be pointing out that intelligence itself is not intelligent. There's atoms, they move around, and that's it. If there's even a shred of evidence to suggest otherwise, please point it out, because I've never seen it, and I've been looking for a long time.
...just something they ignored.
People still believe in the literal 6 days of creation, when you only have to go back 3 translations from NIV to Latin to find a version that describes them as "periods" or "eras" instead of days. This, to me, is powerful evidence that creation was believed to have been something that happened on a "godly" scale of time as opposed to a human one.
Yet the number one reason Christians discount this when I talk to them is that they believe no version of the Bible before KJV is accurate. In other words, they choose, in their wealth of wisdom, to ignore it. Now, maybe it's not important in the grand scheme of things. But that's the sort of philosophical question that splits sects - not that I really believe that any Christian church should be fighting about Genesis when the whole point of the religion is the message of Christ's life and death, but that's just me.
In any case, it isn't about undermining or supporting your theology - it's about the truth. Do you mind?
Hell, I was disappointed that I was well into college before I learned things like, "under the U.S. Constitution, the government does not dole out rights; you have rights, and the government is there to secure them". What the crap did they teach in U.S. History while I was there?
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
Pfft. Clearly you're confusing real piety with the gospel of Supply Side Jesus.
(And it's "Reagan". Once is a typo; the second time, I gotta whip out my inverted-lowercase e adhesive badge.)
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
The NSF does studies on scientific literacy. It's pretty bad, but the Europeans aren't much different.
Some examples: More than half of Americans think that humans and dinosaurs existed at the same time, that lasers work by focusing sound waves, or that electrons are larger than atoms. (These were posed as true-false questions. The American people would have done better if they'd flipped coins.)
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
The problem is that those people are being pandered to. Instead of belittling or even trying to educate people who believe in stupid shit the right wing media is re-inforcing their beliefs while talking about the evil nature of the "educated elite" and waging war on university professors.
evil is as evil does
In addition to sibling (http://ask.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=166715&ci d=13902186)...
:-D
Not to mention... most free countries having this debate also have public libraries. Public Libraries may even subscribe to both Science and Nature.
Hm... maybe I can get back on-topic by mentioning that some evidence for "The U.S. Becoming Anti-Science" would be the general public apathy towards funding of public libraries. Just ask a librarian about it, you'll get your ear talked off.
Read Heinlein's 1953 Revolt in 2100, now more than ever.
So, part of the answer is, not just better science education, but education about the philosophy of science.
That would definitely constitute better science education, in my book.
There are serious drawbacks to this approach: many fewer students would pass a science class with a significant philosophical bent. Hell, most of them wouldn't even be able to spell "epistemology," let alone know what it is or how it relates to science.
It's much easier to train a bunch of uninterested students in facts and figures, rather than try to interest them in learning the significance of those facts and figures. It'd be an uphill battle.
But, I agree. Teach logic, then teach the philosophy of science. That'd be a damned good start.
Microsoft is to software what Budweiser is to beer.
Our aim is not to collect theories that meet the standards of scientists, but to come up with new true theories and eliminate old false theories. If science cannot meet this challenge then it is clearly of little practical value and students would be better off doing something else.
A rational human being would not claim to have "disproved God", because the burden of proof is on whomever is asserting something is truep> In other words, I cannot tell you that "an invisible creature called Bagachoo created the world - if you disagree with me, prove that Bagachoo doesn't exist".
That cleaim that Bagachoo exists is arbitrary, and if YOU can't prove that Bagachoo exists, then I have no reason to even consider your claim.
Even if half the country closes their eyes and wishes for it to be true - reality is still independent of what people think.
Wishing, dreaming, or hoping cannot make something real, and in fact, it is MUCH worse than that. Someone who claims the existence of something non-existent (e.g. god), is essentially declaring war on reality as such. Now they have to live in reality while attempting to rewire their mind around something that is not even true. This fundamental attack on reality as such is why the world has not embraced reason, and why it may eventually dissolve into horror. The fight for reality IS a righteous fight - not an arbitrary, super-being decreed righteousness - but a righteousness based on the fact that reality has a specific nature, including us humans, and if we are ever to discover a philosophy for living here on earth, people need to embrace reason as man's only means of attaining knowledge.
Mine is Good
The overall point which drives anti-intellectualism is the fact that intellectual's knowledge gives them power which only comes from understanding, and people despise when others may have power over their lives.
In part, yes. But there's also a part of the anti-intellectualism that actually is somewhat rational... the part that is essentially rebellion against the ivory tower mindset.
Here's an example. I just read a small book called "A Mathematician's Apology", by G. H. Hardy. If you're a mathematician, you've heard of him. If not, well, he was one of the foremost mathematicians of the 20th century, an extremely intelligent man even among his peers in Cambridge. The book (an essay, actually) attempts to explain what mathematicians do and why they do it. As someone who loves mathematics and has done a little myself, I thought it would be fascinating.
I was disappointed.
Not because his discussion of mathematics was disappointing (though it was a little more elementary than I expected... my mistake, the book was for laypeople) but because of what else came through. Hardy wrote that essay near the end of his life, at the age of 53. I would have thought that a brilliant mathematician and thinker of that age, who had spent his life surrounded by brilliant thinkers of various types, would have some valuable insights.
What I found was that he was terribly naive in many, many ways. He understood so little of life and of people, even by the time he died. It made me sad.
In retrospect, though, I should have expected it. This was a man who entered Trinity College at Cambridge at the age of 18 (IIRC) and basically stayed there his whole life. Other than an occasional taxi ride to visit someone or an occasional trip for a conference, he lived his life, 24x7 within a few square blocks, surrounded by a few similarly cloistered people. How could he not be naive? When and where could he possible have learned anything about the world?
Anti-intellectualism is a huge problem, and it's very damaging to our society, but intellectuals have to accept some of the blame. When you have a great deal of education in a narrow field, and are constantly reminded of your own brilliance, it's easy to presume that you know how others should live their lives, even though you really have no idea.
Actually, I think intellectual society *has* tried to cope with this issue over the last few decades. Among intellectuals it has become improper to express any intolerance toward any sort of lifestyle, or behavior. The problem is that that, too, has been taken too far in typical, extremist, ivory tower fashion, and those extreme ideas are now being pushed on the rest of society, again because "we're smart and we know best". The commonsensical reaction to total moral relativism is rejection, which simply heightens anti-intellectual sentiment.
Anyway, I've rambled enough for now, so I'll stop here.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
Science is the driving force of industry, technology, and every existing economic market. It is unassailable except by paradigms that provide better benefits, and religion does not provide better benefits, or really even the same set of benefits. Religion is the old guard's paradigm, and science has largely replaced it as a dominant force driving humanity. Also, they aren't mutually exclusive, depite attempts by organized religion and idiot mass media to make you think that they are. One can be a scientist and a follower of any religion. The only aspects of religion that 'science' can be construed as attacking are the fanatical fringe elements of many religions who insist on a literal interpretation that science can clearly demonstrate is not consistent with reality.
Even if, by some unimaginable feat of brainwashing, the majority of americans do become 'anti-science', it won't matter in the long run. Those who have the better science and technology are the dominant forces in the world, and have always been, and always will be. If America falls from that top spot, some other nation will take over, and progress will continue. America is not nearly as important in the grand scheme of things as people would have you believe. It's just another country. It's not even that... it's just one small government that can be replaced effortlessly by its citizens if they decide to do so. By any measure of history, this is precisely what America's fate will be, and probably not too far off in the future.
So, now that we've cleared up science's role in the world, let's talk about the real issue here.
Look at church attendance. Look at the numbers of young people who 'believe' in the bible, or whatever other religion is on the table. You'll find that by any measure, the number of young people who are active in religious circles is declining. Perhaps I should say more like dropping off of a cliff. This is not to say that they don't have religious views; what I mean is that they don't actively preach, attend church or religious functions as often, and are generally less visible as active 'bible thumpers'. They are also more likely to donate to humanitarian causes and charity instutitions than they are to religious agencies. This is, in one sense, a crisis of funding.
This drastic decline in young clergy and churchgoers in recent years has scared the hell out of the remaining religious powerbase. They can see that they are literally 'dying off' and the world is becoming less and less interested in them or their beliefs. They were once the premiere force in the world, for thousands of years, and they are not taking modern marginalization of their beliefs, traditions, and opinions lightly. They've known this was coming for centuries; all scientists in the middle ages were required to work for the church, where they could be controlled and supervised.
All of the thunder once posessed by religion has been stolen by science. Feats of science that people can touch and see in the real world are far greater these days than anything accomplished in the bible, and they are tangible, so more and more people place their 'faith' or at least their thoughts and minds into scientific activities. Moses parted the red sea, big fucking deal, we've moved oceans and put men on the moon with science. Given enough time we'll be capable of working miracles reserved for Jesus on a daily basis: curing paralysis (done), curing blindness (getting close), resurrecting the dead (only on animals so far, but we've done it).
Science is the new power in the world, and religion is attacking it as a kind of last-ditch attempt to cling to what they once were and hope to become again. I find it amusing that in order to attack science, they had to assume its form with intelligent design. Using your enemy's methods is an admission of defeat. The battle is lost, but they will still try to fight it.
Religion as a personal or small community affair is not threatened by science in the least, mind you. Organized religion, the kind that
Hell is being intelligent in a world full of idiots.
OMG, you have a UID bait right in your sig! How could I resist. Now you'll have to "Be sure you are truly worthy to reply to someone with such a low user ID" just to quip back at me. :-D
Sorry, just bored.
Read Heinlein's 1953 Revolt in 2100, now more than ever.
I'd say we are, but I wouldn't blame ID. I *WOULD* blame Evolutionists who seem to totally ignore any other options. Many believers in ID believe in it for scientific reasons, and many believe in evolution for quasi-religious reasons.
/.ers wants to limit some people's speech.
The problem is, Evolutionists are quick to point the finger at Creationists as irrational, religiously fanatics souly base on the fact that it has religious roots. But the fact is, neither can be proved, no one was there and it cannot be reproduced, thus *ANY* ideas about the start of everything are essentially "religious beliefs".
The sad thing is, "science" (or so its called) today is based more on "prove the anomalies wrong" rather than "adjust your hypothesis for the anomalies". Granted there are religious fanatics who hang on to Creationism on purely religious grounds, but we're in America, freedom of speech... rather amazing at how much
Evolutionists feel they are so smart because they are empirical *ss-holes, Creationists think they have God's backing. Both groups are f*cked up and need fixing. We'll only reach a solution when sides want to talk, and neither side will, so both are guilty of being unscientific and religiously fanatic for avoiding the scientific method in exchange for gripping to a small belief that in reality has no bearing on living well or as a human being. Which personally.. I think its better to live as a human being that define one... but if you can do the last one then you can easily do the first.
fin.
</philosophical rant>
any government that spends so much on science can never really be said to be "anti-science"
the US spends more on scientific research than anyone else. By far. By so much in fact, that it is a bit hard to imagine. I don't remember off the top of my head, but the US spends something like double its GDP on scientific research compared to canada. That's amazing when you consider then difference in GDP. The US is the best place in the world to do post-graduate studies, postdocs, etc.
How do you expect the masses to be educated when you call them morons?
/., after all. Focusing on our faults will lead us into some strange and eventually off-topic debate concerning the exact nature of "fault," and which of our traits express that nature.
Well, they can be educated whether I call them sweet, sweet turnips or not; I can't see how calling them morons is much different with respect to their education.
As Holden Caulfield so eloquently put it, "All morons hate it when you call them morons." So if you want to piss a moron off so they won't vote for you, call them a moron.
Is that what you mean?
What are we going to do about it? Complaining about them does nothing, but focusing on our own faults might change things.
What are we going to do? Sit around and bitch. This is
On of the problems with being smarter than a large portion of the rest of the population is this: being yourself is being elitist. People don't like to be reminded they are not smart (just as stated in Catcher in the Rye). Our very discussions, mannerisms, and ability to use the English language (for those of us here in the States, and in countries likewise disposed to the English language, or variations thereof) with something more than crude approximation-- all these facets of ourselves, our very nature, provoke this anti-elitist response.
Now, we could get into a long discussion about how most people are actualy fairly smart, and we just manifest our intelligence in our ability to speak with greater-than-average skill and vocabulary; but that avoids the main point: intelligence is treated with disdain and distrust. All'a us'n's with our high-fallutin' words, and our multisyllabic (whatever that means) vocabulary, we're to be watched with more than a mite bit of skepticism.
Anyway. My only point is this: the perception of above-average intelligence often results in an almost immediate judgement of elitism, with all that supposedly entails: ignorance of "the real world," ulterior motives and hidden agendas, a lack of morality, a desire to convert children to (I'm not making this up) Satanism, or other bizarre prejudisms like that.
(BTW: the Satanism thingee comes from an discussion I had with some very polite, very nice, very earnest young men who assured me that homosexuals, democrats, and the liberal education system were in league with Satan in an attempt to steal away the souls of children. I have heard this same sentiment, though usually not so baldly stated, from other fundamentalist Christians. It's one of the reasons a lot of home-schooled kids are from fundamentalist Christian families, I think.)
Microsoft is to software what Budweiser is to beer.
I think it's possible to explain religion using evolution... our more complex brain that has the great advantage of being able to devise horrific weaponry has some need to explain the unknown. Yet the advantages outweigh the disadvantages, and thus we are evolutionarily favorable.
What I really wonder is: do any non-human animals create art? I am unaware of any, at least to the scale that humans do, but elephants have grave yards I hear... Humans create art, historical monuments, religious shrines, and all sorts of "useless" things.
The lessons of history teach us - if they teach us anything - that nobody learns the lessons that history teaches us.
The debate is over science in general. For it to be about controversial scientific theories, then both competing ideas would have to be scientific in the first place. ID is not scientific; in fact, the essential presumption of it is that the scientific method is invalid.
Evolution is just a convenient way to make emotional appeals (e.g. "Evolution says that you're a damn dirty ape! You don't want to be a damn dirty ape, do you?!") to the unwashed masses, so that they'll support the argument. The argument itself is about accepting things "on faith" (i.e. on the church's authority) vs. using the scientific method (i.e. independent thought). At its root, "intelligent design" is not about science, or even about Truth. It is about perpetuating the power of the church, and discouraging rational thought so that our children can be indoctrinated and controlled more easily.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
Well, I guess it's already been decided that creationists can't be scientists. I wonder where science would be without these creationists: http://www.answersingenesis.org/home/area/bios/def ault.asp
You don't have to choose if you put the wife next to the computer. You can have both. Better yet, be sure she brings a hot meal with her. She can also, uh, comb your hair or pop pimples or something. Let's see, that's four hands total. You need one to type and one to eat. This will work: sex, eating, popping zits (her two hands), and posting to slashdot. (warning: do not spill coffee)
...was that no form of logic can derive a true law of nature from true observations.
A quarter of Americans? A third of Europeans? Is anyone else feeling suicidal right now?
Darwinian evolution obviously isn't perfect. I don't doubt that someday we'll have better theories about the nature of life, although I think it's likely that they'll mostly be refined versions of Darwinian evolution. But if you're honestly suggesting that any kind of real scientific research is going to disprove Darwinism in favor of Intelligent Design, you're an idiot.
To those who doubt evolution and think the Earth might be less than 10000 years old: you aren't THINKING! Thousands of scientists have tested and retested the age of the Earth in hundreds of different ways, and the numbers always come up at over 4 billion years. Do you really think all of the scientists are so dumb they can't explain, or test if necessary, every alternative the Creationists have proposed? They have. The alternative explanations are all easily shown to be incorrect. One such is the idea that the rates at which natrual phenomena occur differed in the past. Like, the speed of light was much lower in the past, and so stellar phenomena appear to be much further away and therefore older than they actually are, while at the same time the decay of radioactive elements used to occur much more rapidly. A change in the speed of light didn't happen, and that's easy to demonstrate: check the redshift on objects whose distance can be determined in other ways, such as "standard candles". For the change in the rate of radioactive decay hypothesis, we only need observe the spectra of supernovae that occurred millions of light years away (and therefore millions of years ago), to see that they are exactly as expected if there has been no change in the rate at which radioactive decay occurs. Now, if you are convinced that there exists at least a few competent scientists, how about the idea that every one of these scientists could be in on a big conspiracy to lie about the age of the Earth? Do you really believe there isn't a single scientist willing to come forward with good evidence to the contrary, if he or she had any? Quite the opposite-- they'd want to publish for the credit they'd get! But that's a logical consequence of doubts about evolution-- the only way evolution could be wholly wrong is if thousands of scientists, who have millions of bits of evidence in support of evolution, are incompetent or deceitful, or both. On the other side, can't you see that these young earth creationist scientists are dishonest? How they use bogus arguments to support their points? How they are not satisifed to have faith in God but must instead "scientifically" prove that God exists? Science applies only to nature, and cannot be used to prove or disprove the existence of the supernatural. But these creationist scientists try to do exactly that. Can't you see what a misuse of both science and religion that is? How can they not know that, and claim to be scientists? Answer: they're trying to befuddle people with credentials, They aren't scientists; they are liars.
But it's no good trying to debate a creationist. I've tried. It's like playing chess with a sore loser kid-- the moment he sees he is losing, he cheats. He tries to change the position or just plain upsets the board, screaming that you didn't beat him because you didn't checkmate him.
Intellectual Property is a monopolistic, selfish, and defective concept. It is "tyranny over the mind of man"
Excuse me, but since when does challenging the current popular theory become a challenge to Science itself? Science has gone through numerous upheavals over the years, with universally-accepted theories being abolished and replaced with new ones. Galileo and Copernicus had theories that went totally against the science of the times, and upon closer investigation they turned out to be right. The problem was the the existing scientists (and the people they trained) were so emotionally invested in the current theory that they refused to take a close look at a new idea. Eventually people realized the new theory had fewer holes than the old one and the world moved on.
The theory of evolution has gained such wide acceptance that when it is inevitably challenged (as all theories are) its proponents act as if it is the foundation of science itself it is being threatened. Evolution is not the foundation of science--we had science long before Darwin came on the scene.
Anti-evolution != anti-science.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized!
Every culture... ever... has been anti-science. Every time a society starts to open up in the other direction, it's (usually violently) smacked back the other way by the religious nuts. This is nothing new. Thanks for pointing it out.
Game... blouses.
ID. So far, that science has little evidence to back up its theories that certain biological structures are too complex to have formed by random chance. However, this IS a scientific argument.
There is no reason that it should be taught as science in schools until it has a considerable body of evidence to back it up. At this time, it has virtually nothing.
It wouldn't make a difference if you found a new monkey species that was busy building a superior civilization. This isn't about superiority. This is simple: humans are special because they are the same species as me. Every other critter is food, a pest, a toy, etc.
Why is Intelligent Design always portrayed as anti-science?
*sigh*
ID is portrayed as anti-science because it is unscience dressed up and presented as science.
The epistemology of science is quite well defined. It is not just, "observe stuff, then make up an explaination." That doesn't cut it.
Basically, it boils down to this: one of the keys of scientific reasoning is the ability to disprove. An explaination can only be an hypothesis if you can come up with a way to disprove it. So, you might say, "Humans cannot live for extended periods under water unaided." How can you disprove that? Well, the easiest way is to hold someone under water for half-an-hour or so. If they survive, your hypothesis is disproven.
We now have an hypothesis, and a test for that hypothesis. We perform that test once, and our hypothesis holds. Then, once we are out of prison, we attempt our test again. Again, our hypothesis holds. Others also perform our experiment, and in every case, the hypothesis holds. Those of us performing the experiments write our papers from the psych ward, and our hypothesis, now validated, is raised to the status of theory.
At this point, there are two ways to invalidate our theory: either someone can survive unaided underwater for an extended period of time, or someone can come up with another valid test and disprove our theory. (I'm too lazy to think up a second test.)
As it happens, there have been cases in which people have survived unaided under very cold water for extended periods (meaning, tens of minutes). Darn. Back to the drawing board.
Okay, so our new hypothesis states that humans cannot survive for more than an hour under water unaided.
And the process starts over.
This is how science works. Well, not entirely; there's a lot more to it than that. But, if I were to write a children's book that talked about science, that's how I'd introduce it, complete with pictures of drowned test subjects. Causing childhood trauma is fun.
Now, here's the problem with ID:
ID basically says that evolution couldn't've happened, so God must have done it. Can you spot at least two unscientific parts? I can.
To test this hypothesis and elevate it to the rank of theory, you must find a test that can disprove it. Any test. Now, the part that stands out as the most unscientific is the God bit. So, if we could come up with a test that might disprove the existence of God, we could *prove* that God exists, and that part of the hypothesis would be validated.
Any test. Any little old test you can think of.
No?
The second part is the assumption that something is wrong with evolution. A lot of posts state that there are *obvious* problems, but the problems they present (if they bother to try to shore up their arguments at all) have either been 1) discredited, or 2) are unresolved issues.
What's that? Scientists don't know everything? Hah! That proves they know nothing!
Really, it doesn't. But that's one of the unscientific aspects of the ID argument. It appeals to the fact that we are, in fact, ignorant about some aspects of evolution. In fact, we are ignorant about many aspects of evolution. But that does not invalidate the theory of evolution; it just means we have a long way to go.
It's good that people are searching for simpler, easier-to-understand alternative theories to evolution. The problem is, appealing to God is neither simpler, nor easier to understand. It creates a void were non existed before. It is the lynchpin to the entire ID argument, and it is fundamentally nonprovable. God knows, people have been trying to prove His (or Her, or Its) existence for centuries, at least.
So. That makes ID non-science. What makes it anti-science?
ID exists because the phrase "creationism" was so vehemently rejected in educational circles. It's dressed up with pseudo-science (as described above, and in much greater detail elsewhere), but at its heart,
Microsoft is to software what Budweiser is to beer.
I know because of the ignorance here that I will get negative comments on this post. Anyways, disregarding evolution is NOT an attack on science. It amazes me that when people start criticizing evolution, the scientific world cries wolf and starts vehemently claiming that this is the latest attack on science as an ideal. In truth this quality of questioning science should be hailed as something that makes America great. Evolution is in fact a complete contradiction of science. Are there ANY fossils found that are half one animal and half another? Are there any animals living today that are half one and half another? How could the animal live?!
Other contradictions exist. The INCREDIBLY unscientific Big Bang Theory contradicts the law of conservation of mass among others. The universe has to start somewhere but according to the laws of today this would not be possible without supernatural supervision. The Law of Entropy states that everything goes naturally to disorder. How can the order that is life(on a molecular level that is), especially human life, by chance materialize out of nothing or out of a few base elements. According to the scientific laws of today, nothing would stay nothing and those elements would decay.
To say that attacking the THEORY of evolution is an attack on science is absurd. Look at the facts people and remain intelligent in disregarding this theory. It is a theory of last resort for those clinging to antiquated ways of thinking. Actually, it takes more faith to believe in evolution than it takes to believe in a Creator.
I didn't say all Christians did.
So I watched this show "In God They Trust"... a documentary about Evangelical Christianity and America by Tom Brokaw.
It was presented as this fair view, and in a sense it was. But I don't think Tom really challenged the evangelicals. At one point the issue of "activist judges" came up. Now first of all, the term "activist judge" is extremely patronizing and presumptuous, I think. It presumes that you know the law better than this particular judge does. But let's accept the term. At one point, Tom asks a black evangelical (Leon Lowman) "Where do you think the civil rights movement would have been without activist judges?" A very interesting point that Lowman struggles with initially, but ends up completely avoiding the question only claiming that the civil rights movement was only brought about by christians. YEECHCH!!!! Tom unfortunataely just lets him off the hook with that. He had him in a corner of hypocrisy, but didn't push it.
But, getting to the point of the thought, here's a quote:
"Pastor Ted Haggard believes that bringing faith to bear on politics is simply democracy at work.
Haggard: We should not be discouraged because of lively debate. And we should not be discouraged or fearful with religious infusion of ideas into that debate. Because that's the way it should work so that we overall come out with the best idea."
My point is that... hello! We're talking about religion!! Religion brings nothing to any debate at all. It all depends on faith which we know should never be pushed by anyone onto anybody else. The ONLY.... ONLY, ONLY, ONLY information that should be allowed in any debate (of which we assume should be tied to logic). The only information presented should be clear, substatiated facts, not hearsay or "faith." It is the logical presentation of facts that brings any substance to any debate. Once you allow religion into the debate, it becomes a matter of opinion. Opinion is just opinion and doesn't establish anything. It doesn't prove anything, and it doesn't bring anything worthwhile to any debate (except maybe a debate over religions).
Since Tom didn't press him on that either, it really bothered me. Tom just didn't push back, he didn't really assert the concerns that the secular community brings.
When somebody can make a self contradicting argument like the parent posting's you know that we live in troubled times.
And these are the clever people.....
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
...And religion answers questions that science can't answer. Religion, in addition to things already mentioned, speaks to purpose, value, and meaning. Throughout history a great number of people on this planet - smart or dumb, rich or poor - look at themself at some point in their life and want to know "Why?" "What is my part in this huge machine?" "Do I have value to anyone but myself?" "Does it matter what I do?" There is something within us that is not satisfied by physics and biology, no matter how complex, logical, or defined. There must be some reason I should push through one more day - there must be a reason I should care. It's a focus on what I believe is the more important part of TRUTH.
There just has to be more to life than living and dieing.
Science can not prove that there is no God, science can likewise not prove that there are no blue swans with yellow spots or a Tooth Fairy. You can't prove the non-existance of something.
When you give finite bounds to your system, you can prove things do not exist. For example, if we consider the Universe to be a large thermodynamic system, science has proven that there cannot exist a refrigerator that doesn't consume energy or produce heat.
It's more accurate that science can't disprove the existence of something outside of its framework. Someday, we'll prove that a God cannot exist inside our universe. But science could never determine if a God existed outside the Universe.
The opposite is true as well. Neither science nor religion could ever prove the existence of something outside the system.
Melissa
"Screw Sun, cross-platform will never work. Let's move on and steal the Java language." - Visual J++ Product Manager
I hear that a large objection to Evolution is that it is "just a theory". Unforturnately, the people making that objection do not seem to know just what the scientific definition of Theory really is. In science, if you make a guess regarding something-or-other, the official terminology of "guess" is "Hypothesis". A hypothesis is always supposed to include ways of testing it, to determine its accuracy. So tests are made and evidence is gathered, and IF the hypothesis holds up as proven accurate, then it graduates to "Theory" status. Evolution is a Theory because we have an overwhelming amount of supporting evidence for it. Creationism, by comparison, is still only a mere Hypothesis. In all scientific truth, Isaac Newton's "Laws" of Motion and Gravitation are actually ALSO "only Theories" --but extremely well supported by evidence (and, nevertheless, superceded by the MORE ACCURATE Theories of Special Relativity and General Relativity, as it happens). The lack of supporting evidence for Creationism is its ultimate downfall, as far as the scientific community is concerned.
Here are two specific examples in which Evolution explains what Creationism cannot. First, consider Vitamin C. Lack of this in the diet causes the deficiency-disease known as "scurvy". All primates (monkeys, apes, humans) require Vitamin C in their diets. But various "lesser" animals, such as rats, can manufacture Vitamin C within their bodies, and so don't need any in their diet. The Evolutionary explanation is that as ancestors of the primates took to the trees and gradually became the primates, they found plentiful supplies of fruits rich in Vitamin C. Animals with defective genes (or missing genes) for making Vitamin C did not suffer scurvy and die; they survived and passed the inability to make Vitamin C onto their descendants. In terms of "biological energy", an organism that can save a little by using environmental availability instead of of internal manufacturing, has a slight evolutionary advantage -- as long as the environment maintains the availability of the nutrient, of course. In the tropics, where primates evolved, fruits with Vitamin C are available year-round. And so, over millions of years, primates became utterly dependent on Vitamin C in their diets -- and humans, of course, when described as evolved primates, continue the tradition. (Possibly to be FIXED, once Genetic Engineering gains wide acceptance, heh!) OK, NOW, The Creationism explanation, for why a loving God blessed us with the potential for scurvy instead of the dietary independence that rats have, is what, exactly?
Second example: Eyes have evolved in different ways among different branches of the animal kingdom. In the fish/amphibian/reptile/mammal line of evolution, the human eyeball has various superior traits to many precursor animals. Color vision, for example. Nevertheless, the human eye, like those of its precursors, share certain particular overall architectural features, which are: The back wall of the eyeball is covered with retinal cells. The nerves that transmit retinal signals are between the iris and the retina (the nerves are pretty transparent, but do reduce impinging light a little). At one place on the back of the eyball, all the nerve-strands bundle together to plunge through the eyeball, to connect to the brain. There are no retinal cells in this part of the eyeball, so every amphibian/reptile/mammal has a "blind spot" in the vision. You can prove it to yourself; just print this out and follow the instructions: http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/mindh...ter/hack16. pdf One of the other branches of the animal kingdom, the molluscs, includes clams, snails, slugs, cuttlefish, octopi, and squid. They branched off from the other evolutionary lines so far back that the development of the eyeball (most well-known in the octopus, which also has color vision) took a different route. In this architectural design, the nerve-signal cells are behind the retinal cells,
Check for the brain, once it is fully formed you can be considered human, otherwise you are not capable of any humanity at all and can't be considered anything but a primitive organism. Derive an statistical measure of that to make it practical and define abortion limits based on that. Before a fetus becomming fully human a mother should be guranted pretty much whatever she wants in reagrds to the fetus. Once the fetus gets a fully formed brain and nervous system then it should enjoy msany of the rights all humans have, but remembering that the mother should have precedence since at the end she is a fully formed human been.
And lets use the correct terms, as long as a forming organism is not born it is not called baby, it is called fetus. Part of the problem dealing with people opposed to a real scientific discussion is the hijacking of terms using emotionally charged words.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
I'll start with a couple of disclaimers:
1- I am not American.
2- I am a Christian, and hold a Christian world view.
Having said that, it is really disheartening to see so many anti-Christian views being expressed because a "they don't believe in Evolution".
It is this kind of attitude that makes all things america look silly to an outsider. Science is not Evolution. Science is much much more than that. There's chemistry, physics, engineering, mathematics, astrophysics, you name it. Biology is just one part of quite a large field.
A statement that says: America is becoming less scientifically inclined, means that they are no longer interested in engineering, mathematics, physics etc etc.
Is this the case?
To blame christians for this percieved lack of interest is naive and misinformed. It also harbours an agenda. It's like saying the problems with the western world are all related to TV. Is this a valid statement?
The US dismantled, rightly, the Taliban regime, because they were harboring people that have just orchestrated a vile attack in US soil.
Had the Taliban cooperated with the US in catching Bin Laden and dimsantling terrorist training camps, they would still hold power and be free to execute women in football fields.
Fortunately for people in Afghanistan rabing megalomaniac murderers are so narrow ideologically that the seed of their own destruction are in the nonsense they spouse: the Taliban could never handle bin Laden to the US because he was a fellow "Muslim" (which none of them is btw, they break so many teachings of Islma that it is just ridiculous), and Muslims ares suppossed to protect each other.
Stop drinking the kool-aid of US moral authority. If th US was acting based on moral considerations it would be aiming its obscene military complex elsewhere, at least in Iraq we had a secular country that was more lse contained and in general terms peaceful.
Now we have a country that may go into civil war, braking apart which would immediately involve the niehgbours (Turkey and Iran).
What a fine mess....
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
I agree completely with what you said. But let us not forget that the poster you're replying to said "Science doesn't prove or disprove God. Good scientists and good theists know that."
I am agnostic-atheist myself, but the "strident atheist" is not a straw man. I know first-hand lots of people like that and I can tell you they all went 'radical' by reflex, counteracting the strong religious pressure in society. They do exist, and unfortunately they're the most 'vocal' ones.
What I see happening in the United States has no parallel in all of human history. The thing that comes closest to it is the European Dark Ages, but even at that time, Europe still hung on to some modicum of civilization. The United States is heading straight for barbarianism. Unlike the Roman Empire, we won't need to be sacked by invading gypsies; the United States will devolve into it's own angry mob. Even cannibalism is not too much to expect in another generation. Anarchy? That is without question. The US never DID actually lead the world in science, anyway. We borrowed a bunch of talent from Europe while we fought Hitler, one of our few shining moments. Science? Thank you, citizens of other countries, for keeping that torch lit.
The Uhg-mer-cains who will be flaming this post are a perfect example. People of other nations, when was the last time you had an intelligent debate with an American citizen? Like a pack animal, it's brain is hard-wired to snap at any desecration of what it believes to be it's territory, though it's peed there so much that it's spoiled the ground for anyone else, anyway. It calls this "patriotism". It has a psychopathic hatred, manifesting itself in continued savage acts of violence against all living creatures, which it justifies with the delusion that there is an invisible being in the sky who hates everyone as much as it does. It calls this "religion". It's sole other emotion - if it can be said, at all, to emote - is greed, which causes it to continue to be barely industrious enough to operate a cash register, push a button, or sponge off a relative - whichever is easiest - in order to obey the directive blasted out of every media source at it: "Consume! Consume! Consume!" The majority of them will not be able to make out this level of writing. My foreign friends, what does it say when you yourself, even if you come from a non-English-based nation, have a better command of English than Americans do? Before you point at me and say, "Well, you're an example that disproves the rule, aren't you?" - I'm a first generation immigrant. And my family and I are saving up and coordinating plans to immigrate right back out again. The US gave us the best fifty years of it's life, but it's over.
You see? That is exactly the problem with religious people involved in science.
Science is banging loudly in anybody prepared to listen's head how the world, heck, the Universe, is really working, but here you are, letting your dogma cloud the issues.
Darwinian mechanisms are machinistic, unpredictable and purposeless. And it is precislely this what scared first Darwin, that was a devout Christian but saw clearly the implications of his discoveries, and later the Churches, that immediatley realized that Darwinian theory had the potential to leave the jobless. Darwin died a very troubled man, and for very good reasons.
The differences are irreconciliable, there are things that are logically unattainable, one of them is reconciling religious dogma (any dogma) with rationality.
if you are religious your dogmas will eventually hinder the rational understanding of reality around you. There is no way around that fact.
If you are a rational person and you obtain irrefutable proof that there are willful forces guiding or designing the reality that sorrounds us, then you will accept that reality.
This difference in my opinion shows clearly which people are valuable for progress and which ones are a potential hindrance.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
You guys did not brake up your wacky religions in two (or now who knows how many more sects) out of a minor misunderstanding :-P
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
Current scientific knowledge is not always right, but since is is open to scrutiny it can be refined and corrected.
Try that with religious dogma.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
... accept that humans were created in their current form.
That is false.
This falsehood is propagated mostly by religious minded people.
etc, etc, etc.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
Do you realize that we have the genome of only a handful of complex animals? And that we have not even started to use that knowledge.
Affordable space exploration is completely untested.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
Yes. Swastikas are nicer than crosses (though I despise both). The swastika was merely a representation of a productive tool - the axe - arranged in a wheeled construction to suggest tireless work. The cross symbolizes an instrument of executing human beings in the most torturous fashion possible. If I see a swastika and a cross coming after me at the same time, I'll take my chances with the swastika.
..... then their reply to such answers should be "I don't know", not to cowtoe nonsense that gives people with their own agenda, political power.
Preachers and other similar types can be as arrognat as they want in the good old US of A. Heck, they can call for assasination of foreing heads of state and get just an slap in the wrist.
But as soon as a rational person is equaly defiant on his beliefs (which are based on facts, at least on intent) then the labels are produced faster than George Bush appointing a cronnie to a position of power.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
Where have been recent advances in cloning?
UK and South Korea.
Two of the most irreligious countries in the world.
Regimes that once looked indestructible have in their dogmas the seeds of their own destruction.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
When you bring things out to that level of abstraction, you really need to begin considering what all of those words mean. It seems that people, assuming I'm not imagining them in the first place, ascribe meaning to the world around them. That is to say that meaning is something we create, and the universe doesn't give meaning to itself.
When you describe "swirling masses of atoms inside peoples' heads" you are merely trying to assign meaning things that you've experienced. If some one else, when observing the same phenomena, see "intelligence", "souls", or "magic", is isn't wrong, it's just different. The important question is which meaning will allow us to make the predictions that will ultimately result in interaction with our environment in a way that is most beneficial to us.
So, as a neuroscientist, it may be the most beneficial for you to you to understand the brain as you do. That doesn't necessary mean that it is best for other people to view it that way. Indeed, a lot of what you've said wouldn't have meaning for someone outside the sciences. On the other hand, the idea of "intelligence" is pretty easy to understand. Basically, intelligence is just the process by which an object (something to which we have ascribed meaning) promotes a specific goal or set of goals. I'm not trying to say that this is a universal definition, but it works well for me. So in the case of evolution, one could see a particular class of organisms as the object, and survival as the goal being promoted. It's easy to see why people would ascribe intelligence to a number of "natural" processes. We are simply projecting aspects of ourselves onto the world around us so that we may better understand it.
The problem with the view you espouse (and, hopefully, you can tell from comment that I don't really disagree with you) is that people are gregarious. We are horribly afraid of being alone, and like to believe that there something fundamental connecting us to the rest of the universe. For this reason, people like the believe that the intelligence they've ascribed to other people, and to the rest of the universe, is real (whatever that means). I don't know if there's anything wrong with that interpretation. Indeed, if the natural processes going on inside your body (assuming the processes and your body are real) have given rise to your own (real) intelligence (such as you understand it) there's no reason to believe that the intelligence you assign to other people and objects is any less real.
Seriously...
I've lost track of how many lame Science vs. Religion / Evolution vs. ID / Modernism vs. Irrationalism pseudo-debates have popped up on my usual boards. It's the same thing over and over and over and over and over...
It's been done. For the love of all things holy, please stop posting stories like this and move on to something new. Just don't do another, "The RIAA & MPAA are hatching a plan to slaughter us in our beds" story...
. --- If you're looking for free e-mail you won't find it here! http://www.noemailhere.com
I think you must be talking about consciousness, not intelligence. Intelligence (what the psychometricians call g, the general ability to solve problems) is perfectly measureable, but it is also clearly a property of anything above the level of a cockroach. Mice and crows and humans are all intelligent, but humans are a lot smarter than crows or mice. Few people doubt that a general-purpose responsive computer program will be written someday that can be assigned an intelligence, although it might be not much smarter than a frog.
Consciousness is the real trick, huh? People draw a lot of mystical meaning from that one deep gut "feeling" we have and can't or won't explain.
A very religious Person could argue : "God made the CPU, because he is the creator of everything"
Is a discussion about these differences growing anything good, except the fact, we are learning more about the other sides position?
Ok, I know you weren't serious, and now half your replies are about learning Chinese.
I made these flash cards to help me learn to read & write common words:
Speaking is a lost cause, most Chinese don't travel much and their accents are thick.
Uh... so I don't get modded off topic. I am strongly in favour of science.
My list of multiplayer
Now, lets assume we both are "educated people" with me being the "slightly less educated" one.
Then I have a question:
Why exactly we want rights for people who do not have "basic knowledge"?
hany
It's much easier to train a bunch of uninterested students in facts and figures, ...
Sounds like you think people have to be dragged kicking and screaming into science and/or engineering.
Some people say that "knowledge is power". I think some of them mean "political", "military" or other such power but IMO most of them by "power" mean "being able to do" (maybe even "to do good").
Now why someone do not want do be knowledgeable? Why we have to try to force him to be knowledgeable?
Meybe it has something to do with how the schools (prinary, secondary, ...) are working? Maybe it has something to do with teachers? Maybe it has even something to do with how the life is going (when not the "right" and "educated" people rule but some bunch of "greedy politicians", "unethical businessmen", ...)?
IMO it correlates with freedom. Few years or centuries ago most peole were not free nor had education. Some realized that is a big disadvantage and fighted for freedom and knowledge. After some time in some places they succeeded.
But later, their descendands took the fruits of their fight and thanks to that they have full bellies. And with full bellies they do not care about learning something nor do they care about their freedom being taken away.
So I thing we're heading "backwards" into some "new medieval ages". Good thing? IMO after that comes new reneasance and democracy. But of course after some big fights and loses.
hany
..you're forgetting that ID 'is science'
This comment does not represent the views or opinions of the user.
That was really funny. Thanks for the link. Lots of laughs.
Thanks,
Jarek
What I found was that he was terribly naive in many, many ways. He understood so little of life and of people, even by the time he died. It made me sad.
In retrospect, though, I should have expected it ... he lived his life, 24x7 within a few square blocks, surrounded by a few similarly cloistered people. How could he not be naive?
I think the problem is just ignorance on both sides. I doubt that the average middle-class American understands life and people so much more than "intellectuals". From my own experience, I've known plenty of middle-class people who were brilliant in their insights, and plenty that were total morons in this area. Also, many middle-class people live in their home area for their entire life, so they develop similar "symptoms" as Mr. Hardy here.
The problem is that there are more "average" people than "intellectuals", so the hate gets turned up on those who have fewer numbers.
Creationists can be scientists. But their unscientific ideas remain unscientific.
The U.S. survived a pretty terrible depression (indeed, people even call it the Great Depression) without resorting to fascism as Germany and Italy did.
The conditions for the economic turmoil in Germany were caused directly by extremely punitive conditions laid down by the allied powers after world war one in the treaty of Versailles, and indirectly from the damage caused by that war. America suffered neither of these conditions, and had no real enemy to rally against, unlike the German people. So lets save the holier than thou for another situation eh?
What he can't kill, he has sex on. Trent.
You can't prove the non-existance of something.
You can prove the non-existence of something if you show the logical impossibility of its existence. In mathematics you often prove the non-existence of something by assuming its existence and then deriving a logical contradiction (a and non-a).
For example, if you assume an omniscient and omnopotent being, you can show that such a being could never win a chicken-style game against you. (Since you know that your opponent is omniscient, you can simply risk your own destruction. Your opponent would then have to give in to not be destroyed herself.) Hence that being would not be omnipotent, meaning it would be omnipotent and not omnipotent. That's logically impossible, hence an omniscient and omnipotent being can not exist.
Of course, you can go so far as to deny that the laws of logic are universal. Or you can simply leave your definition of "God" so unclear that it becomes undebatable. In that sense you could then also not prove its non-existence.
you have Intelligent Design. I mean really why try to cure cancer, go to mars, do any sort of research. If you don't know how it was made, it must be 'intelligently designed' and that's the end of that. That big hole left in your thesis, yup, intelligent design.
/. posts, my bad spelling and grammar are a result of intelligent design, who am I to question the superbeings infinate wisdom.
Science is based on finding new things, figuring out how they work, and generally in the process finding more new things to figure out, the search for knowledge is part of human nature. How could anyone just write things off as being 'intelligently designed' and not question why it's there and what it does.
I mean, why bother spellchecking my
Im.
"Americans and British faught to stop this 'new' thinking"
There was no America when Galileo was thrown in prison by Papal authorities (or it is more correct to say that Europeans hadn't discovered the Americas quite yet).
Plus, it is doubtful England cared about this at the time, since Henry VIII had broken away from Rome in 1534, while Galileo wasn't even born until 30 years later.
Incidentally, the theory you're talking about was put together by Copernicus, not Galileo.
You were mistaken. Which is odd, since memory shouldn't be a problem for you
They would know that a kind and loving god is punishing unbelievers by killing them.
Because, that's the best way to make believers, by killing unbelievers.
HA! Sounds like natural selection. Applying the environmental pressure of the kind and loving God killing nonbelievers, then over generations you get some really strong believers. So you are correct: "the best way to make believers is to kill the unbelievers." And the more they unbelieve, the more you kill them. (uh,...yeah).
Unfortunately, in speaking of the design of the human eye you don't actually understand how it works, any nore than the people you got this idea from. It is indeed true that the nerves go across the front of the retina, and the blood vessels are behind. If it were reversed, the huge blood supply needed to keep the eye operating at peak efficiency would block light to the receptors, whereas the nerves are almost transparent. The blind spot is 15 degrees off the focal point, which means that it has no practical effect on our vision. All design is a compromise between different objectives, and the design of the eye is similarly constrained, but it is as close to perfection as can be achieved.
Here is an interviews with Dr George Marshall, Sir Jules Thorn Lecturer in Ophthalmic Science at the University of Strathclyde, demolishing this particular anti-design idea and here is another by a retired consultant opthalmologist. Both these, incidentally, demonstrate that there are top-class scientists who do not accept Darwinism. They also demonstrate that creationists tend to produce facts whereas evolutionists tend to produce rhetoric.
Arguments about the perfection of design are irrelevant to the Intelligent Design theory, which does not attempt to identify the designer. The fact that something is designed does not necessitate that the design is perfect. If you tried to do it, the result would be a lot worse, wouldn't it? Nevertheless, what you produced would still be designed.
For a Christian, the imperfections in the world are the result of the curse that is on the whole creation as a result of sin. So again, problems in nature are not evidence of bad design but of the curse.
As for vitamin C, we are designed to eat fruit (Gen 1:29) and our present omnivorous diet is a later change (Gen 9). Still, no one suffers scurvy unless for some reason they are deprived of greens, either by misfortune or by poor diet, which is usually the result of ignorance or oppression. So this problem is a result of the curse combined with human actions or misfortune.
Finally, there is a huge amount of supporting evidence for creationism. It is just the same data that evolutionists use to support evolution. However, since your world view excludes God you cannot interpret it correctly. There is no profitable argument between world views; all that can be done is to compare them fully and then decide which makes better sense. That is the reason for presenting both sides of the debate in school and elsewhere.
Acts 10:13 '[God said] "Rise, Peter; kill and eat."'
He didn't eat, but he was told he could by God.
God declared that the Gentiles could now be clean and receive the gospel. He did this by telling Peter to eat food that was formerly unclean. Therefore the laws about unclean food are images of the idea that people were unclean before God.
What is inconsistent?
What did Christians not escape? Disease? to be honest, I'm not sure I'm following your argument here, or its relevance.
What about it?
Well, for starters, the Depression was a lot worse in Germany due to the post-WWI problems. Furthermore, many parts of the US _did_ resort to facism. Case in point: discrimination against Negroes skyrocketed, with the Klu Klux Klan getting a degree of respectability.
"Software is too expensive to build cheaply"
Aren't you embarrassed going out of the house with ideas like that?
The Farewell Tour II
This thread is just about dead, but I thought I'd put in one last word.
First, you don't advance your cause by calling the majority of American's stupid. It so happens that the majority of Americans are in control of the Federal dollars you so-called intellectual types clamor for every year...and they are also the ones who pay the taxes.
Second, attacking religion as some kind of voodoo, myth, or whatever is as stupid as you seem to think everyone else is. If you are ignorant of the role that religion plays in the world today, for better or worse, the degree to which some people rely on religion for moral guidance and direction, and the importance of religion in the past, then you truly are as stupid (and a great deal more) than those you accuse.
If you want your side to prevail, you cannot do it acting like pompous Asses and calling those you seek to convert morons.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
Yep. God is perfect, so He couldn't possibly create a system that has flaws. He did allow us poor, limited humans to fuck up His perfect creation, though, and I've always wondered why He thought that was such a good plan...
You forgot:
Group D: Whose population ranges from around 3,500,000,000 to 4,000,000,000 people who are heartily sick of Groups A, B and C and wish they would just litigate, bomb and preach each other into oblivion so that the rest of us can get on with living our lives in some kind of rationality.
May the Maths Be with you!
The opposition is not to science. It is to fact. It really doesn't matter what fact. I have been a life long Reagan Republican. I supported the party when it was the party of innovation and happy progress. Unfortunately the Republican Party has become the home of men like Karl Rove and Lewis Libby. These men used the most sophisticate psyops warfare technology to destroy any opposition. The Democratic Party under Bill Clinton developed into much the same sort of machine.
The results in the Republican Party is that any person who stuck his head up to talk about real issues found his character assassinated. I would assume that some may have suffered real assassination had they not succumbed to the more subtle forms. For any Republican thinking I am being a Troll (Shut up please and listen) I am not. The results are plain to be seen. The Republican party should be auditioning a wide crop of Presidential and other leaders to agressively deal with our national issues. There is no farm club because of the Bush team. It's politically dead. As a result of this the Bush team has become the only game in town. They are retiring shortly by US Constitution and probably Hillary Clinton will take the White House. The reason isn't because of any quality on her part. It is because of the complete lack of any Republican quality. This is the result of Karl Rove and Mr. Libby. It should terrify any Republican that this is the case.
If you are a Democrat the situation should equally terrify you. That party has become so effective at this process that it too has no real roots in America and no farm club to replace the Clintons when they die. As a result the party is dying in public support.
The sad reality here is that in this environment any belief in fact, no matter what it applies to is dangerous. Fact is the enemy of this condition. It matters not if you are Democrat or Republican, this war againt the truth has reached so deep that it has gutted your party. The leaders are so terrified you will understand this that they are on an open war against any means of learning or expanding understanding. Ignorant masses are easily ruled. Wise and learned people cannot be ruled except by their consent. This is the issue whole.
This was written out of concern for the survival of freedom. It is not against anyone.
Never Politically Correct ~ I prefer the facts If you don't like what I say, get a life, or comment yourself.
Forgive me as I was typing from memory. The correct title of the book is not "Origin of the Species" but "Origin of Species".
If we're going to talk about it, we should at least have the correct name of what we're talking about.
- Zav - Imagine a Beowulf cluster of insensitive clods...
Finally, there is a huge amount of supporting evidence for creationism.
Such as?
There is an excellant book The Republican War on Science by Chris Mooney that explains how this began in the mid nineties with Newt Gingrich and his Contract for America. He and his ilk destroyed the Office of Technology Assessment and began the use of the term junk science to describe anything the Republican big business interests (Tobacco, Oil, etc.) disagreed with. Also in this months Skeptic magezine, there is a great article debunking the psuedoscince in ID. I recommend both the book and article to anyone who is interested in this topic. BTW. Bill Maer on HBO last night said that only 16% of Americans believe in evolution. Is that even close?
but have you ever considered that our notion of right and wrong, which in turn allows us to cooperate, build societies and advance ourselves together (say, like a herd of buffalo) is just another form of evolution?
It doesn't really matter if Joe Shmoe on the street thinks that green fairys made the universe 10 minutes ago and implanted all the memories we have.
It DOES matter because these shmoes vote and affect both school curriculums and public science funding.
If things like this go unchecked, we could end up in a sort of downward spiral. You need to see this for what it is:
A battle between religious fundamentalism and reason.
This media strawman science is really damaging to real science.
The media aren't the ones putting stickers in textbooks and forcing teachers to teach intelligent design as an alternative "theory" to evoulution.
Life is too short to proofread.
in some people, the blind spot is at the focal point. I understand it's a very frusterating disorder. And research into mantis shrimp sometime. They see in like 23 different colors (either way you look at it, they're really cool!).
But anyway, before we go arguing about whether that's karma or demonic affliction, I think we're getting off the subject here. The big thing I hear from IDers is that the eye is too complex to have evolved by chance, and 'what good is half an eye,' or wing, etc.
Well, to address the latter, when I've been out herping in the foothills with my biologist friend, we've found some little lizards who skitter away like mad and are very dexterous at leaping between logs. If they had rutamentary feathers and little flaps of skin that didn't allow them to fly, but made them extra swift at getting away from predators in just such a tall-grass, thick underbush environment.
Secondly, an eye really isn't too complex to have evolved gradually, and half an eye is really nice if your enemy is blind. An organism evolves light-sensitive cells on its skin. This is good, because it can kind of sense when a bigger animal gets near it and moves out of the way. Then, those EM-sensitive cells evolve into a pit. Example: Pit vipers (true evidence that I am under the sway of the serpent!). Once you have a pit, you get not only a sense, but a vector. From there, it's not that hard to imagine a membrane forming over the top to protect it from infection as that pit gets deeper and deeper. Add a lens and you can focus the light to be sharpest at a particular distance, forming an image. Finally, you detach the parts a bit from one another so the whole apparatus can swivel, then you can look at different things without turning your head. Each variation has an advantage and a purpose.
This is the part where I get rambly. Forgive me for not structuring things better.
But I don't seriously think that I'm going to convince anybody who believes otherwise. What pisses me and other nerds off is the idea that our children might go to a school where our kids don't get Sex Ed or a proper education in biology, but they do get ID rammed down their throats whether they like it or not. Believe me, I know a lot about the subject, and I fully intend to educate my children on it. But not everybody is as fortunate.
If you want a world without sexual education, look at most of the poor, primarily black/latino schools in Oakland, CA. My girlfriend did some work as part of her education minor with some 14-17 young women from West Oakland, (arguably) the worst part. They knew nothing. They were having sex, but they had such absurd ideas as birth control pills preventing HIV transmission, etc. They had sex without condoms all the time. One was 8 months pregnant. If you taught these kids 'abstinence only' education, they'd ignore it, partly because their educational system has failed them in other regards, but mostly because they want to have sex, just like everybody else in the history of humanity. Sex is not an invention of the 1960s, mind you: read Shakespeare and Chaucer, sometimes it's downright raunchy. Read the Song of Solomon if you want to (yeah yeah metaphor for God's love, you're a twisted, blind son of a bitch if you think it's about anything but erotic love). HOWEVER, if you just went over the basics of condoms, diseases and the like with them, they might not get pregant, and have a choice between ruining
It would be ignorant of me to state that Science answers everything. Science can not answer meaning.
But when many points in our religions conflict with that which science has factually proven, are you going to deny the facts?
You state that Religion speaks to purpose and value and meaning. That implies that there has to be a meaning. We are looking from our perspective for a meaning in our life and find it VERY hard to see how selfish and potentially that is. The universe is a huge place and why do we think that we rank high enough to have a meaning for our lives within respect to this universe? What if there IS no meaning given to us and our individual existence? What if the meaning of our lives is dictated by what we accomplish while here and who we positively affect?
What if our meaning is that which we, ourselves create?
Several religious folks have stated the point of TRUTH today to me in their writings. I have commonly rebutted by stating "There are many religions in this world, each with their own TRUTHs. I propose that at least one of them is wrong." What is there is no absolute TRUTH? What if we make our own meaning as we go throughout this world. To me, that is truly challenging, difficult and rewarding.
You have the part in this whole machine that you make for yourself. You have the value to others as a result of how you affect their lives. It matters what you do but only within your sphere of influence and you are subject to the implications of those actions, be they good or bad.
I know this is severe but it strikes me that if you must look to religion for meaning, then maybe you need to accomplish more in your life. I sure as hell feel like I need to and I'm trying to learn the patience to do just that.
"There just has to be more to life than living and dying."
Do you think we are so important that we transcend life itself? Reality is much harsher than most expect. If this is all there is, then we'd ought to make more of an effort to accomplish while we are here. And this is the point where I proceed to accomplish procuring some smoked salmon.
- Zav - Imagine a Beowulf cluster of insensitive clods...
Shouldn't we be asking Slashdot something like, "How do we stop the insanity?"
OK, I'll bite.
One of the major problems here is that Science, and in particular the Theory Of Evolution, is not getting the credit it deserves. And while many may engage in anti-evolution rhetoric, they are still using products directly tied to that theory (antibiotics, crops, flu vaccines, etc.) This may seem hypocritical, but really, how is an anti-evolutionist to know what those products are? More than one evolutionist has griped that anti-evolutionists should be denied access to these technologies, but that is an even more difficult task, not to mention unethical.
There is, however, a simpler voluntary solution - a Theory of Evolution label. Like the circle-K kosher symbol, or the dolphin-safe stamp on tuna, a TOE label (I would suggest a stylized "EVO" in a circle) would mark products that are the product of the theory of evolution. The label would be backed up by a registry, in which products using the label state the exact reasons for using it (an optional number under the label would direct inquiries to the correct entry). Holders of basic patents derived from TOE could even mandate that any products using those patents include the label (also preventing manufacturers from weaseling out of admitting their product's underpinnings). In this way, the true impact of the TOE could be made apparent to the general public. Support for the theory could be measured as a matter of consumption. Anti-evolutionists would also be free to avoid those products in favor of less sound alternatives, or use them in the full knowledge that they are the technology is at odds with their ideology and that their purchase will be evident in the numbers.
Other ideologically beleaguered theories could also use similar labels - quantum theory (circle-QT), for instance.
---If you can't trust a nerd, who can you trust?
Why does no one view god as the collected set of mechanics that the universe runs under?
"The word for universe in Sanskrit is 'Brahmanda', which is made by joining of words 'Brahma' and 'Anda'. Brahma is derived from root 'Briha' meaning to expand and 'Anda' means egg. Thus 'Brahmanda' means expanding egg."
I believe Brahma, Vishnu and Shiva are sometimes seen as an allegory of the universe doing its thing. In fact, Hinduism has a lot of interesting and surprisingly accurate scientifical ideas. It's worth to note that hinduism (as with most religions) has evolved through out time (and it has gotten increasingly complex as they appended and tweaked rather than replacing). Sadly, much of the old knowledge and culture was destroyed by religious zealots and other ignorant people.
The Chair Corp. comic(*00-12)
I had a discussion with a housemate on the words atheism and agnosticism: The word, "atheism" comes from the Greek roots for "no/negation/away from" (the "a") and "deity, god or goddess" (the "the" as in "theos"). If one wanted to claim that one didn't know, the word "agnostic" would seem to be more correct.
;-) )? Just as an example. Seems to be lining up more with findings of physics of everything (all matter) being luminous creations of light against a tapestry of black. I don't see those types of view as excluding evolution or "intelligent design". Maybe it depends on what one defines as "intelligence"? Does an amoeba have "intelligence" in a drive to reproduce and live? One can find one is disagreeing in the minutia of word semantics.
In the word, "agnostic", we have the Greek prefix, "a" again ("no/negation/away from"), in front of "gnostic" or one who "gno"s (knows) -- Greek word for knowledge. An "agnostic" claims not to know, one way or another.
It didn't follow that belief in "no-god" was somehow "better" for an educated scientist than simply claiming "I don't know". Other that in this society, "I don't know, is given little weight". It seems much more "vogue" to assert
the negative than admit "I don't know".
My housemate seemed to believe that "0", "black", "no" or "a" was the natural state of things, and thus didn't need to prove any belief structure which adopted the negative stance by default. I see that view as her belief system. In the same way I can't help but see "atheism" as "just another belief structure" that is equally proven correct as the other "faith based" belief systems.
It doesn't appear to be provably logical to believe in "atheism" anymore than some "theism". Instead, "agnosticism" seems more accurate description of what we seem to be able to "prove" (scientifically).
Is there a way of proving we don't exist in a matrix, ala Tibetan Buddhism and pop-adaptation of the movie of the same name (note prequel, "Tron"...et al
-l
My point isn't that the U.S. was better; you're right in asserting that conditions in Germany were far, far worse than in the U.S. My point was the U.S. today doesn't have conditions comparable to Weimar Germany, or even to the Depression U.S., so saying that we are headed for fascism based on the economy today is pretty sketchy.
English is easier said than done.
Indeed it was far worse in Germany, and had it been as bad in America I do not doubt there is a good chance we would have taken the same path. However, I don't see how a private racist terror group has anything to do with fascism taking hold. Besides, the KKK was revitalized after The Birth of a Nation, long before the Depression.
English is easier said than done.
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my parents still believe that one, and my mother thinks that demons are responsible for minor mental disorders based on whether or not theyre trying to live for christ (whatever that means).
examples: shes certain my father may have OCD (if she knew better, shed realize what his personality is, is closer to OCPD, which is rather different) and some mild form of ADD. she believes medication could help him with both problems.
on the other hand, a woman who is currently my wife used to live in oklahoma (Ive always lived in north carolina) and when she moved here and we met, she had recently been going throug *alot* of problems with her family: her mother could almost certainly be defined as manic-depressive the way i understand it. Anyway, were married now, and when we met, my wife got *very* stressed out and had some awful mood swings. My mother was certain it was the work of demons and that counseling and medication would never help, but that prayer and deliverance would.
im certain my mother is slightly nuts. probably more than slightly, but shes generally harmless and always narrow-minded so i dont bother her too much.
By and large, language is a tool for concealing the truth. -- George Carlin
It lacks any predictive power what so ever
That is not entirely true. For example, if we found an encrypted message "Kilroy was here" in million-year-old DNA, that would be evidence.
Also, multiple universes of the Anthropic principle and perhaps String Theory are difficult and perhaps impossible to fully test. Yet, they are still considered "scientific ideas".
Being difficult to test does not by itself make an idea non-scientific.
Table-ized A.I.
"Why We Should Teach About Creationism in Science Classes" http://homepage.mac.com/cygnusx1/philosophy/whywes hould.html
Apparently he was unaware that the Catholic Church is one the two original Christian denominations, and traces its founding to Peter. (The other being the Greek Orthodox, which traces itself back to Paul.)
I had the opinion there was a third, the Coptics, but the word Copt is derived from the Greek word Aigyptos. However because the Coptic Church is based on the teachings of St Mark who brought it to Egypt I'm not sure if it could be considered Greek or not.
Little did he know I was Catholic. I should put a statue of Mary on my monitor after that.
In the sense that my mom was, I'm Catholic myself, however when growing up I studied different religions and considered myself Bhuddist. Later it was books, statues, and paintings of angels I had, had some of Bhudda too though. Now I'm agnostic, "a" without and "gnosys" knowledge, I and without knowledge and have no faith. I lost the beliefs I had after an accident, and I'm jealous of those with faith.
FalconShould there be a Law?
Umm... how about that the KKK was facist? And they surged forth even more during the depression, not least because of the concerns of "niggers taking our jobs"?
"Software is too expensive to build cheaply"
nature is "everything in extistence", so there's no such thing as supernatural. but of course, that's not the issue. the issue is whether life was created by an intelligent entity.
first of all, i'm not here to debate movies. evolution stands up to rigorous scientific scrutiny on its own, regardless of what transpired in some trial.
i've read several richard dawkins books, and your statement that his "major claims" are wrong is utter nonsense. name one, and i'll happy to engage you. but that site you referred me to says the following:
this statement is a typically absurd creationist argument. we don't know the details of how the earliest self-reproducing system came to be. but the only explanation so far available is that it was caused by random, unintelligent, chemical processes in nature. creationists keep talking about creators, but so far they haven't observed any. when you do observe a creator that has a propensity for creating self-replicators, or even fully fledged cells, drop the scientific community a line and let them know about this exciting discovery. until then, quit pretending there's a case for creation.
by the way, your reference to "out of order" fossils is another one of the most tired and frequently parroted creationist claims. read this.
For a disturbingly close coverage of this phenonmenon, pick up an old copy of "Sixth Column", also released as "The Day After Tomorrow" by Robert A. Heinlein, (c) 1941 by Street and Smith. Used SF booksellers everywhere.
It's a beautiful story about an America in the hands of the fundamentalest theocrats being thwarted by a few scientists in hiding. A good potboiler, but poignant in light of the Intelligent Design "debate".
Heavy sigh -- Why did they have to corrupt the word Intelligent for this? Terrible use of a good adjective.
Do not mock my vision of impractical footwear
Phrenology is the understanding of human behavior, morals and attitudes by the study of the shape of the human skull, it follows therefore that retro-phrenology is the alteration of human behavior, morals and attitudes by the application of a 2X4 to the human skull. now as is self evident the latter works, therefore the former must be true also. (note believers in Creationism will be unable to see the flaw in this argument)
with apologies to Terry Prachett for the use of retro-phrenology
...for the linked references alone!
But, in all seriousness, your argument just doesn't hold up. Have you ever actually read Gen 1:29? It doesn't even mention fruit. Actually, it says that any product of a seed-producing plant can be eaten by humans. Ooooo... Look at those pretty red berries. [munch...munch...munch]
Once you have finished with (Gen 1:29), perhaps you should continue and read (Gen 1:30). I sincerely hope you are a vegetarian.
The bible is not a good starting point for an argument (Exodus 20:4). Neither are links to questionable websites showing pictures of IBM engineers accompanied with a bunch of invented fluff dialog (Numbers 8).
Forgive me, for I am replying, again, to you.
But when many points in our religions conflict with that which science has factually proven, are you going to deny the facts?
Perhaps you could name the specific points and explain just how these specific points contradict observations? Evolution vs Creationism is the first one you probably thought of, but as many would be quick to point out, we weren't there. We don't know what happened. Evolution is merely our best guess. Evolution doesn't rule out God. Even if evolution is absolutely correct it still doesn't rule out God. It differs somewhat from a literal interpretation of the christian bible, but if the story of creation in their bible were taken less literally, it very easily could match up.
You state that Religion speaks to purpose and value and meaning. That implies that there has to be a meaning. We are looking from our perspective for a meaning in our life and find it VERY hard to see how selfish and potentially that is. The universe is a huge place and why do we think that we rank high enough to have a meaning for our lives within respect to this universe? What if there IS no meaning given to us and our individual existence? What if the meaning of our lives is dictated by what we accomplish while here and who we positively affect?
What if our meaning is that which we, ourselves create?
Any meaning created by a human has, by default, no greater authority or validity than any other meaning created by any other human. Why? Because human authority is meaningless if anyone is unwilling to follow. If you would differ from this, then I declare that I have the authority to require that all computers are illegal and must immediately be destroyed. Essentially, that view requires that everything we do for ourselves is without a meaning other than self-gratification.
Several religious folks have stated the point of TRUTH today to me in their writings. I have commonly rebutted by stating "There are many religions in this world, each with their own TRUTHs. I propose that at least one of them is wrong." What is there is no absolute TRUTH? What if we make our own meaning as we go throughout this world. To me, that is truly challenging, difficult and rewarding.
To this, I responded elsewhere, but I shall do so, again. The quoted statement is entirely illogical. You require that, just because one, or many, are incorrect, they all are. What if only one was absolutely correct? You will never know because you refuse to examine any of the various religions for accuracy according to their real doctrine and assume they are incorrect merely from what you remember of them.
I know this is severe but it strikes me that if you must look to religion for meaning, then maybe you need to accomplish more in your life. I sure as hell feel like I need to and I'm trying to learn the patience to do just that.
I'm sure this will throw you off, but I agree with this, mostly. If one's only meaning comes from being part of a religion, their meaning is futile. It accomplishes nothing. In Christianity, which I specifically chose as a focus earlier, a person who merely believes gains nothing. Jesus claimed he would say to them, "I never knew you." In Christianity, at least, according to the writings of James, in specific, it is precisely because they believe, and because they obey, and because of what they do for others that they gain anything at all from God.
Do you think we are so important that we transcend life itself? Reality is much harsher than most expect. If this is all there is, then we'd ought to make more of an effort to accomplish while we are here. And this is the point where I proceed to accomplish procuring some smoked salmon.
Mmm Salmon. Salmon of Doubt?
I'm sorry. That was off topic. The statement quoted is entirely correct, though of limited scope, even taken in the context of Christianity. The question preceding the statement is entirely fair, and agre
Ah, the beauty of original sin. What did the poor dog do not to be able to see in color? Which translation of the bible are you using? The King James version, which seems to be the most popular among creationists, some would say was to attempt to gain forgiveness for his taste in young boys. Evolution is the acknowledgement that the world changes. And in doing effects every living thing, they must adapt or die. Darwin was a well known and respected Christian and that is why he is buried in some of the most sacred ground in England. So it ironic how you think to believe in evolution is to ignore a god. He proposed the idea of Natural Selection not evolution. Everyone before him could see that animals evolved just they were looking for the mechanism. To believe in Intelligent Design to believe in an angry god. One who doesn't care about individuals as it slowly destroys life everywhere.
I agree with alot of the posters here, that it is a small group that is playing the system, the real truth about most americans is that they dont care what happens as long as they have 3 meals a day, and plenty of iPods to go around. Honestly, im atheist but that doesnt mean that I can PROVE that im right, but then again neither can religious people, its all written down in a book that was written by man. Its kind of like saying "I jumped 10 feet high last night" and somebody says "no you didnt" and so you say "you cant prove it" which is totally true, but if one uses their mind logically, they can see whats real and whats not most of the time, the problem with people in all honesty is that were all taught to be followers, and robots, and good boys and girls. Free thinkers are discouraged in many ways ie: "you're wierd", or "Do what your told". Also people are ingrained with religion from birth. So its only natural to assume that if you drill an "ideal" into a child that they are probably going to believe it. I think that if people were taught to use their mind logically and be true, free thinkers, that this world would be a better place, and none of this "Behind the scenes" shit with politics would be allowed to happen. I ramble, but, i hope i made some kind of point
Wow, I don't know where to start except at the beginning. This is going to take some time that I don't currently have but it's an awesome discussion.
Oh and I agree that Evolution does not rule out God. Science can not prove or disprove anything that may exist outside that which is detectable. It's the folks who say that Evolution can't exist because of various biblical reasons who have an invalid argument.
If the universe were created by a god who exists in other um, realms, (for lack of a better word) then, by definition, science can not measure god since it is outside that which is measureable. However this also implies that by this scenario there is no way to prove a god exists unless it comes into the detectable realms and some thing actually detects it.
I like your comment on my observation on Truths. I do not imply that they all are false though I see how you could see otherwise. What brings up doubt is with all the potential truths, how can I be sure to pick the one right one - if there is one. Well, I can't. I don't know how. The most reliable mechanism I do know is through scientific observation and I do get the most return on investment (my time) by that which is validated through this method. I'm also not a scholar in world religions so I'm not qualified to pick the one that might contain the correct Truth. Also, what if there is a one Truth that is not explained by any of these religions? The only Truths I can be sure of are the ones I can measure.
If you wish, you can email me at zavpublic AT mac.com and we can continue the discussion. It would be cool to explore these points over a smoked salmon of deliciousness and post our results when we have the proper time to spend on it that this topic deserves.
Thanks for the good dialog.
In the name of the holy and delicious Salmon who died for my taste buds, I shall depart.
- Zav - Imagine a Beowulf cluster of insensitive clods...
But there is no evidence in the fossils or now of any creature with half an eye. Every creature found is perfectly adapted for its niche.
Secondly, an eye really isn't too complex to have evolved gradually...An organism evolves light-sensitive cells on its skin.
How? Its (highly complex) reproductive mechanism is designed to replicate DNA without errors. Even the simplest light-sensitive cell has got to have a gene-specified mechanism (again highly complex and coordinated) for making a light-sensitive protein. (DNA is like computer language; but no programmer ever saw a program improved by random changes.) At the same time as the organism develops a light-sensitive cell, it also has to develop a nervous system to transmit the light stimulus to the brain and also a neural mechanism for interpreting and acting on stimuli received. Finally it has to transmit all these changes to the next generation, which implies that they are carried in a dominant gene or that its mate has somehow produced the same alteration at just the same time. If all these things do not happen at once, there is nothing for natural selection to work on.
It is not enough to make up stories. You have also to describe, in detail, a credible mechanism. This evolutionists have never done.
This is good, because it can kind of sense when a bigger animal gets near it and moves out of the way. Then, those EM-sensitive cells evolve into a pit. Example: Pit vipers (true evidence that I am under the sway of the serpent!). Once you have a pit, you get not only a sense, but a vector. From there, it's not that hard to imagine a membrane forming over the top to protect it from infection as that pit gets deeper and deeper. Add a lens and you can focus the light to be sharpest at a particular distance, forming an image. Finally, you detach the parts a bit from one another so the whole apparatus can swivel, then you can look at different things without turning your head. Each variation has an advantage and a purpose.
This is all just story-telling. I emphasised it's not that hard to imagine because that is how evolutionism works. Make up a semi-plausible story and skate over all the inconvenient details.
The horror of it!.
What did the poor dog do not to be able to see in color?
Poor? Dogs weren't designed for colour vision, but instead seem to have a greater sensitivity in darkness (judging by their reflective retinas). Their eyes serve their designed purpose, and my dogs at least seem very happy with what they have got.
Which translation of the bible are you using?
Several different ones.
The King James version, which seems to be the most popular among creationists, some would say was to attempt to gain forgiveness for his taste in young boys.
There are many serious faults in that translation, of which the worst is that the King imposed the use of traditional language (such as "bishop") which were not a good translation of the original languages, but supported his desire to have a regulated hierarchy in religion. (That, incidentally, is what your First Amendment was really about; it is an invention of activist judges to have the state interfere in religious affairs to enforce atheism.)
The main advatage of the KJV is that it is so widely known and that there are so many tools (concordances, etc.) built on it. But it is unwise to use it as your sole source. It is best to read the Hebrew and Greek, if you can.
Evolution is the acknowledgement that the world changes. And in doing effects every living thing, they must adapt or die.
Of course no one disputes that. The problem is that evolution is a word that is often used in different ways in the same text. It is used to mean the normal observed variation within a kind - variation that can be quite wide in the case of bacteria. It is also used for the postulated but unobserved development of one kind of animal from another. Unfortunately, evolutionists use the word with both meanings at once; this is called equivocation.
Darwin was a well known and respected Christian and that is why he is buried in some of the most sacred ground in England. So it ironic how you think to believe in evolution is to ignore a god.
He lost his faith after the death of his daughter. It would seem that he never had a very great understanding of Christianity.
He proposed the idea of Natural Selection not evolution. Everyone before him could see that animals evolved just they were looking for the mechanism.
It wasn't his idea; he merely developed it into a story that attempted to account for the existence of life without creation.
To believe in Intelligent Design to believe in an angry god. One who doesn't care about individuals as it slowly destroys life everywhere.
The ID movement do not attempt to identify the creator; they limit their efforts to identifying design. Creationists think that this is a mistaken approach, since only a full understanding of the biblical record gives a firm foundation.
God is indeed angry at sin, but that is a far greater (and more terrifying) emotion than the peevishness that you imply. He created a perfect world - man rejected him and tried to make himself God. He became so grieved at the evil that men were continually doing that he devastated the entire planet and saved only one family out of it - within two generations men were back to their old ways. He himself suffered death for all of us, so as to provide a way for us to be reconciled to him and to receive a new nature from him, but most men reject him. He is soon going to return and his return will be preceded by a judgement of disasters that will wipe out more than two thirds of the world's population, but even in the midst of those disasters, most men will refuse to abandon their evil ways. And finally, when Jesus has restored his perfect creation and ruled it himself for a thousand years with perfect justice, men will rebel again, preferring to believe the lies of the devil rather than God.
Jesus, who is love, warned of hell more than any other person in the bible. When love is rejected, only wrath and judgment remain.
Prepare For The Dark Ages, Part II
Exactly right!!
It would be much easier if people started realizing that "Intelligent Design" is simply creationism; the same old shit served in new bottles with a happy new sticker! It's a spin people! I hate that word, but that's what it is nonetheless.
These people should be fought, or we shall surely revert to the dark ages. As we speak this mind virus has spread to Europe and is actually being debated in my home country (Denmark). It is is truly disturbing prospect, though the Danish Minister Of Education has rejected any such proposal by priests and whatnot, the fact that it's even being debated on this level here is disturning in itself. "Intelligent Design" should have been laughed out immediately, but alas.
zWhat would an EWOULDBLOCK block, if an EWOULDBLOCK could block would? -- me
He glossed over defining 100 IQ because he assumed that everyone knows 100 is by definition average. Seemingly, he didn't bank on morons like you getting your panties in a twist for no apparent reason whatsoever. lol, you moron.
I can't give any creedence to any theory that decides that rather than follow the path of analysis back as far as possible, instead we'll just say "God did it". At least science is always trying to answer all the questions. Even if electrons seem as unbelievable as a divine being, at least scientists never disregard the possiblity that electrons might not exist, and actually we got it all wrong.
ID is in fact the rebadging of the Teleological Argument for the existence of God. An old and venerable (and flawed) philosophical argument. This has always been a core component of Creationist ideas, and oft refuted (as in Dawkins' "The Blink Watchmaker"). It belongs in a philosophy class -- under its original name.
Bitter and proud of it.
you seem to forget, rookie, that i've been doing this my whole life. now watch as i slice and dice your absurd arguments to shreds.
you're going to regret posting this first quote, because colin patterson himself has explained that the quote was taken out of context, and misunderstood by creationists. here's his letter in response to an inquiry about the quote. read this well my creationist friend, because this is a great example of how creationists lie and distort the facts to make their arguments seem plausible.
what he's explaining here is that any transitional fossil could be either a direct ancestor of modern day species, or it could be the descendant of one of those ancestors, and there's rarely any way to be completely sure. this in no way invalidates the fossils, because obviously they had to have ancestors. and if you don't believe in evolution, those ancestors would have been the same species, meaning that his entire point is invalid to a creationist anyway. sorry, i'm probably talking over your head. further, every fossil is a transitional fossil. every single organism that has ever lived was a transitional state between it's ancestors and descendants. there is documentation of a huge number of "obvious" transitional fossils here, in which the gradual evolution over eons is well documented. the evolution of cetaceans is an especially clear example, where we see an aquatic animal evolving to live on land, and then evolving to live in water again.
we also see many examples of vestigial featur
Some day in the future when we hear the laughter from other nations as they surpass us in technology, and we have nothing economically to offer the world. We might wake up from this regression into the new dark ages these religidiot neocons are sinking us into and take charge of our country back.
Sounds like you think people have to be dragged kicking and screaming into science and/or engineering.
Not at all. I enthusiastically embraced physics as my major.
I believe the US' primary and secondary education system is ill-equiped to identify and train those students who *are* interested in science. As a result, the introductory science classes are often filled with surly, bored students who wouldn't know a theorem from an axiom. This kinda puts a damper on the enthusiasm of all but the most dedicated would-be scientists.
So I thing we're heading "backwards" into some "new medieval ages". Good thing? IMO after that comes new reneasance and democracy. But of course after some big fights and loses.
You may be right, my friend. I hope we can avoid much of the "backwards;" but if we can't, we will hopefully come through the other side of darkness much enlightened.
Microsoft is to software what Budweiser is to beer.
It's just more visible in the U.S. because many of these yahoos have been streaming into public office lately, thanks to the Republican Party's recent unholy alliance with hillbilly Protestants.
-Eric
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
The church of England is more about tea and biscuits than about God
Erm...not so much.
C of E is another name for the Anglican Church--which, in America, is called the Episcopal Church. Not exactly tea and biscuits--but from all I've seen, one of the more inclusive religions in the world.
And yes, I say this as one who was raised in the American Episcopal Church, though one who no longer quite believes what it (or any other organized religion) teaches.
Dan Aris
Fun. Free. Online. RPG. BattleMaster.
My guess is he didn't have a good mirror.
Well I've wrestled with reality for thirty five years doctor, and I'm happy to say I finally won out over it.
Well, religion is part of the world around you, and theology is the study of religion, so technically theology can't go against science because it is a science. Maybe certain religions - or certain parts of religion - can contradict certain things in the other sciences, but it can't contradict all sciences.
Really, science isn't that different from religion. Someone studies something, comes up with a theory, and then either it's accepted or it isn't. Same with religion - someone a long time ago said "Jesus is one with God" and others accepted it - and those who didn't agree were excommunicated.
The thing is, though, if you're a scientist and you don't believe in, say, string theory, you're still a scientist. But if you're part of a certain religion and you don't believe in part of it, they just kinda shut you down, say "no, you're wrong because of this theory we have" and then you're no longer part of the group if you don't agree. I don't really agree with that - I don't think it's good to just say "the official belief is this, and if you don't believe it you're not one of us".
www.linuxpenguin.net
Order comes from disorder is many different ways. There have been hundreds of experiments to show that this is the case. Go read a book about chaos theory...no not that one, a good in-depth one. Go ahead, I'll wait...
Okay, done? Good, now that we see that disorder can self-organize into order, we're half way there. Now we have to get you away from the idea that sometime improbable is impossible, because it isn't. Yes, if you do something that has a very small chance of producing an imporobable result a *lot* of times (say, on the order of the universe), it could happen. The probability is non-zero even if infintessimal.
We say that God did what he says he did; no more than that. That is as far back as it is possible to go.
Either the universe was created or it was not. To refuse to consider the possibility because it limits what you can inquire into is illogicality founded in blind pride. True science enquires into both possibilities and evaluates the evidence in the light of each.
At least science is always trying to answer all the questions. Even if electrons seem as unbelievable as a divine being, at least scientists never disregard the possiblity that electrons might not exist, and actually we got it all wrong.
In general scientists don't question their axioms. Atheism is an axiom of evolutionary science, and its basis is actually religious; just see how indignant evolutionists get when their beliefs are questioned.
Why does no one ever attempt to explain that God created man using evolution as a tool? Whatever happened to the divine clockwinder theory?
You really should read the Science of Discworld 3 by Terry Pratchett, its basicly his take on Darwins life and what would have happened if he had never written 'that' book and talks quite in depth about the divine watchmaker theory and why its not a good example for intelligent design to us.
Kingdom of Loathing (www.kingdomofloathing.com) Addicted is me
To keep the record straight I should say I don't believe much that's written in the bible either. I'm no Christian or Jew.
Yes, I'm totally open to the idea that a god, or even the Christian God created the earth/universe. I just can't have much respect for a theory (intelligent design) that doesn't seem to be interested in proof. The bible will not constitute proof for most people until there is some evidence that the stories really do describe our history.
Atheism is not an axiom of evolutionary science. All that is required is that you disbelieve genesis and other select sections of the bible. Surely you accept this?
However, I agree most scientists are morons. I should add I almost became a research scientist myself and have a masters in Chemistry. However when not pressurised by an "opposite-camp" I'd say most scientists inevitably question the axioms that exist in their field.
I may be a rare case in that I am scientifically educated but I consider science to require faith. My field was quantum mechanics, and it eventually led me to think that our current model for the atom and electrons is probably a gross simplification, and possibly very misleading to the general public.
However as is typical of science, it doesn't matter because the atomic model does work at the levels we need it, ie, the manufacture of pharmaceuticals. In science as long as the theory/hypothesis works for the general case, it can be used to do new science and that's the main objective. Nothing in science is ever cosidered concrete. At least by good scientists.
Many scientists are happy to have a religion, usually just with a few modifications. What's wrong with a god that set a few key physical constants and pushed a big green "GO" button? That's generally how I think of things.
I'm not sure you've succeeded any better now. The idea of a creator who is not an intelligent designer is a bit out of this world!
To keep the record straight I should say I don't believe much that's written in the bible either. I'm no Christian or Jew.
On what basis do you not believe it? What parts have you actually found to be untrue yourself as opposed to their being mocked or denied by materialists? Are you familiar with the 19th century European controversies? The biblical creation story was universally accepted until the so-called Enlightenment, which exalted human reason without recognising the limitations of human weakness and sin. In the 18th century deists were very common, who asserted that God created the world and then left it to itself. In the 18th and 19th centuries, Hutton and Lyell founded uniformitarian geology by constant denial of the biblical record. However they had no facts to base this on. Their uniformitarian theories are plainly inadequate to account for the geological data; neither did they disprove the biblical account, including the Flood - they merely denied it. However they spoke to a generation who sought an excuse for abandoning belief in God and therefore found an audience. The reason is that God holds men accountable to himself for their actions. Men who wish to ignore him feel more comfortable with some kind of excuse. Hutton, Lyell and their fellows provided that, however poor it may actually be.
Yes, I'm totally open to the idea that a god, or even the Christian God created the earth/universe. I just can't have much respect for a theory (intelligent design) that doesn't seem to be interested in proof.
I don't understand what basis you have for saying that. As far as I understand ID theory, it asserts that design can be detected by methods that are familiar to us in normal life and also by the presence of "irreducible complexity". It also has respect for the laws of thermodynamics and of probability, with which evolutionism plays fast and loose. It seems to me to have more integrity than evolutionism, which, alone among the physical sciences, seems to think that hand-waving ("could have", "probably", "we can imagine") is an acceptable substitute for detailed explanations.
The bible will not constitute proof for most people until there is some evidence that the stories really do describe our history.
The usual approach to history is to accept the sources and try to reconcile them. In the event of difficulties, you may need to amend or reject one. When it comes to the bible, however, historians have been in the habit of rejecting everything unless it is confirmed by other sources. This is not an even-handed approach. In fact, it is a thoroughly mistaken one, and the more research is done, the more wrong it is shown to be.
The proper approach to the bible is to accept what it says unless it can be disproved. Only the adoption of materialist axioms, or adherence to some other religion which denies the bible (and materialism is, in fact, such a religion) can explain why the bible is not treated like that.
Atheism is not an axiom of evolutionary science. All that is required is that you disbelieve genesis and other select sections of the bible. Surely you accept this?
It is an axiom of materialism and most scientists are materialists, at least as far as their research goes. Therefore they are atheists for all practical purposes, never mind what they claim to believe. There is a proverb: actions speak louder than words.
However, I agree most scientists are morons. I should add I almost became a research scientist myself and have a masters in Chemistry. However when not pressurised by an "opposite-camp" I'd say most scientists inevitably question the axioms that exist in their field.
I know its late, but generally I agree with you on the problem. I wouldn't agree on the assessment of Ronald Reagan but well... what do we expect 100% agreement? The anti-science crowd can be seen pretty clearly to be a political manipulation adjenda. It is easier to manipulate the stupid than lead the educated and wise. In doing so you also intimidate the intelligent wise segment of society.
Never Politically Correct ~ I prefer the facts If you don't like what I say, get a life, or comment yourself.
I think a great many people confuse a theory with a hypothesis. They see theory as a word that means, "It might be right, and here is what I think, but we have not proved it and cannot".
A theory is something that is a model that we can generally prove as working. The alchemy of turning other items into Gold was a hypothesis. It didn't work.
Things like number theory, music theory, and scientific theories work. While artistic interpetation might be otherwise, i know that if i play a d minor, G major, and then a C major chord, that it will have a pleasing sound that is not dissonant. Theories work.
Tibbon
tibbon.com
No, the simple fact of the matter is that religion is based on faith, not science. An individual's beleif (or lack of beleif) in god should not play any role in scientific research or observation. In reality, there is no legitimate (i.e. testable, repeatable and falsafiable) evidence supporting the existence of god or creationism and the very fact it is impossible to prove (or disprove) god's existence shows that creationism is not science and can't be treated as such.
If you don't agree I encourage you try to come up with an verifiable and repeatable experiment which could prove (or disprove) either the existence of god or the biblical account of creation.
There is no debate! There is no scientific evidence for creationism and no legitimate scientists treats creationism as science. One needs only to look at the parent post to notice that the only sources of "evidence" for creation cited are Answers in Genesis and True Origins which are political preasure groups founded with the express purpose of trying to get creationism into public schools and funded by religious groups and are not legitimate or scientific institutions. If there is so much debate and evidence for creationism how come it appears only in political and religious publications and never in peer-reviewed scientific journals.
There is far more evidence that the universe as we know it self-organized than there is that it was created by some designer. If you want to read books about these topics, I suggest:
e rse
Self-Organization: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-organization, especially the bibliography.
For how the raw materials came to be, you should read up on the big bang and cosmology in general.
Start here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_Univ
Then read about how the heavier elements got created, but I don't have any good sources right now.
This is itself a religious statement. You make a moral statement ("should not") that is founded on atheistic humanism. You are using your atheistic worldview to condemn my Christian one. You can hardly expect me to be impressed by such double standards.
In reality, there is no legitimate (i.e. testable, repeatable and falsafiable) evidence supporting the existence of god or creationism and the very fact it is impossible to prove (or disprove) god's existence shows that creationism is not science and can't be treated as such.
There is no testable, repeatable evidence of macro-evolution. (Micro-evolution -- that is variation within a kind -- and natural selection are not in dispute.) All you have are many inferences which are needed to support your atheistic worldview and in turn depend upon it. There is no way to test them, because no one has the length of life necessary. There is certainly no way to repeat macro-evolution.
As for falsifiability, one would have thought that the insane violence done to probability by the evolutionary hypotheses would be sufficient, but since evolution is actually a religious dogma, that turns out not to be the case.
On the other hand, ID is founded on the practice of many branches of science, such as archaeology, cryptography, information theory, criminology, and inded the SETI project. All of these assert that it is possible to distinguish the action of intelligence from random events. Why should biology and cosmology be exceptions?
If you don't agree I encourage you try to come up with an verifiable and repeatable experiment which could prove (or disprove) either the existence of god...
The existence of God is the first axiom of the Christian worldview. You do not prove your axioms. By that token, I should require you to prove the truth of atheism. However I can offer a sure way of verifying God's existence. Rethink your life and surrender to him; put your trust in Jesus and you will know him and receive the Holy Spirit from him. That will be all the verification you could desire.
There can be no repeatable experiment to prove an historical event. The debate between creation and evolution is between two historical accounts. All that one can do is to examine the visible evidence in the light of each and see which better fits the data. Our contention is that the data matches the creation account much better than it does the evolutionary one.
There is no debate! There is no scientific evidence for creationism and no legitimate scientists treats creationism as science.
Since you define science to exclude the possibility of creation, that is true -- on your terms. However, that is a stupid way to define science, since it means that one half of the possibilities are excluded from your enquiry. If the right answer lies in the half you have excluded, you will never find it.
One needs only to look at the parent post to notice that the only sources of "evidence" for creation cited are Answers in Genesis and True Origins which are political preasure groups founded with the express purpose of trying to get creationism into public schools and funded by religious groups and are not legitimate or scientific institutions.
True Origins is a personal website. This is explicitly stated in the FAQ, so I must presume you are speaking out of ignorant prejudice or actual malice here. AiG is an avowedly Christian organisation. However, AiG has a strong staff of scientists, qualified in a number of different fields and therefore able to provide informed criticsm of the suppos
catholic church attempts to co-exist with science. i wonder how long before american catholics denounce the vatican for its attempts at being progressive.
in this age of communication i'm just not getting through
i guess this thread is over and done with, but i'll respond anyway (i came back to check my post and figure out why i gotted modded up):
science when done properly is "stridently atheist" in the following sense: it doggedly seeks to explain and understand natural phenomena WITHOUT making reference to an omnipresent/omnipotent/omniscienct god or creator.
i didn't mean that there is no such thing as a strident atheist anywhere on the planet. i meant that in the specific context of the evolution-in-science-class controversy, the "strident atheist" is a straw man. it's not like high school teachers get up in front of class and start denigrating and degrading peoples religion. on the contrary, they mostly present or "teach" some of the results of scientific investigation undertaken over the last few centuries. and like the original person said, even if there are crackpot science teachers who say "SCIENCE DISPROVES GOD!", they can simply be asked to present the proof. and at that point, it's a theological non-starter.
the opponents of traditional science class are NOT TARGETING the fallacy of thinking that science disproves god. instead, their ill-conceived objective is to discredit evolution by relabelling it in textbooks as "just a theory" and present a bunch of ghost stories alongside it as if these stories have any place whatsoever in a science class. some of the claims of science are a threat to their doctrinal authority (and to their fragile egos), and they cannot reconcile with any rational means of inquiry, because that very inquiry has exposed so much of their narrative as fraudulent. and now they're simply trying to brute-force their ideology onto equal footing with "science", not with any investigative argumentation, but by cooking the books.
here are the things to really pity: most of their lack of education. the harm they may do to the education of future generations. the fact that they haven't, and don't want to, elevate the level of the discourse by accepting naturalistic inquiry into the universe and taking the opportunity to maybe pamphleteer about the reasons why science can't actually "disprove" the existence of god. their unwillingness (or lack of vision?) for reconciling with the facts of evolution by attributing the biological/chemical fundamentals of the universe to an original creator.
it's sad. they hear the word "science" and they think "bunch of wrong stuff! attack on my faith!". they do not actually grasp what science is, let alone evolution, so they are unable to sincerely propose something as simple as "maybe a god engineered evolution from the start..."
and i don't think i've ever seen a science textbook that DIDN'T cover creationist geology in a very informative manner, interestingly.