Slashdot Mirror
Global Warming Only a Theory, Says School Board
BendingSpoons writes "A Seattle school board has placed a moratorium on screenings of 'An Inconvenient Truth', having found its subject matter too controversial. Echoing the language of the evolution debate, the school board found that students must be told that global warming is only a theory and presented with an opposing viewpoint. The ban was prompted by the complaints of a parent: '"Condoms don't belong in school, and neither does Al Gore. He's not a schoolteacher," said Frosty Hardison, a parent of seven who also said that he believes the Earth is 14,000 years old. "The information that's being presented is a very cockeyed view of what the truth is ... The Bible says that in the end times everything will burn up, but that perspective isn't in the DVD."'"
In other words ...
"All you have to do is be fragile and grateful. So stay the underdog." Chuck Palahniuk, Choke
Exactly. Use the DVD as a teaching tool. Teach the kids to look at it critically, find fault ( if they can ) and draw conclusions. Experiment, research the facts.
Spoonfeeding them the answer and expecting them to swallow it without thinking isn't teaching, it's brainwashing. Even if you're brainwashing with correct information, it's still brainwashing.
A resonable science class wouldn't just tell students that oxygen is necessary for a candle to burn, but would allow the students to experiment to "prove" it to themselves, to observe the conditions that drove someone else to that conclusion years ago.
If you teach that a DVD is 100% correct, and one single fact turns out to be incorrect, does it invalidate the whole DVD? No, but coming to that conclusion requires critical thinking, and critical thinking needs to be taught.
I respect your religion -- and all religions -- but I am one of those people who loathes fundamentalism and bandies about terms like "religious nuts" and "religious fascists." It is not the "religious" side of the equation which I find loathesome, but the "nut" side of it.
Religion does not belong in politics. America fought a revolution to support the idea of brotherhood and equality between humans, and rid the world of archaic notions about some humans being more worthy than other humans, such as so-called "kings" (who, it must be remembered, were thought to derive their political power from divine power).
There is so much about Christianity (and other religions) which is patently un-American, including its references to this dude who died 2,000 years ago as some kind of currently existing "Prince" or a "Lord" or "King" to be "worshipped." Attributing divinity and specialness to certain humans but not others is a slippery path which desensitizes us to tyranny and allows for the hateful mullahs and popes and all the rest of the religious rabble who claim to speak from some special tyrannical authority from on high, instead of from persuasion and reason.
All that said, again, I respect yours or anyone's personal thoughts. If you want to bow down to a green tomato in your own house and predict that one day that green tomato will come flying through the heavens and rapturize people, so be it. But I hope you can understand that in a pluralistic world, many of us have very different faiths about how spirituality and creation and all the rest work, and the most sensible course of action seems to be to respect all faiths.
Take the Moslems and their "infidel" epithet, for example. Poll after poll consistently shows that 96% of the American people believe in God. You would think reasonable people could rejoice in the things they have in common (God) than always fighting over the minutae (whose prophet is the "right" one?)
Denying global warming because your religion makes you think, through faith instead of evidence, that the world is only 14,000 years old is like standing in front of a speeding car and daring it to hit you. The philosopher David Hume tried that with a horse, got clobbered, and realized that reality is actually, in fact, real, and it hurts! Reason is not at all incompatible with faith, but a supplantation of reason by faith is ludicrous and ultimately, evil and tyrannical, leading to concepts like, "Because I believe watching soccer on TV is un-Islamic, I'm going to kill you. Never mind what YOU believe."
It's easy enough for a non-Christian Deist like me (I love God - I hate religion) to denounce guys like this fellow in Washington State. But I really think it is incumbent on the religious who are not "nuts," as you characterize yourself, to do a better job at shouting him down. If the non-tyrannical Christians, Moslems, Jews etcetera don't start stepping up and putting the nut/fascist types of religious folk down, then all that we godly albeit non-religious folk will be able to conclude is that you stand with them, too. If the world needs anything returned or supplanted, it is the replacement of religious nuts by the "normal" religious. Is there such a thing any more, in 2006? Or are you all fascists?
I think you're missing the point. The issue at hand is that EVERY SINGLE EXAMINATION of ANY TOPIC could now be banned from schools unless equal time, money, and attention is given to "it's like that because that's the way God made it".
Welcome back to the Dark Ages, America.
-----
PGP Key ID 0xCB8FF658
"only a theory"...
All science ever can be is "just" theories. Some moron will always say that something is "only" a theory and expect that means its probably wrong. Yes atomic theory is "just" a theory, therefore nuclear bombs don't exist. Medical knowledge is all just "guess'" about what people see, medicine must be the hand of god otherwise it wouldn't work. No reputable scientist will back up the last 2 claims but i used to same lines of logic that lead people to believe that global warming does not exist.
unzip; strip; touch; finger; mount; fsck; more; yes; unmount; sleep
Hey, that's almost Pascal's Wager!
how to invest, a novice's guide
I own An Inconvenient Truth (the movie not the book). And I would like to say that although some people still consider the effects that are predicted by that movie to be "a theory," they are hard to disprove.
Dude, when you're arguing with someone that thinks the Earth is 14,000 years old, they're completely oblivious to anything called evidence. Your evidence is wrong, because the Holy Book says I'm right. QED. Then they'll throw in your basic FUD about the unenlightened mind, not seeing the truth and so you can quote scientific evidence by the metric ton, and it will not make any difference at all.
People can hear all the evidence they want, but without religion their life would be emptier. There's noone to watch over you, there's no higher purpose, there's no afterlife, humans are just a slightly more advanced animal, there's noone to pray to, there's noone to right injustices, noone to thank or beg for help - it's all rolls of a dice and you stand alone. Religion is adults' version of an imaginary friend.
Let me play along, and assume ex facto that there is a god (as in any, Jesus' dad, Allah, Jahve, Jehova etc.) That still means at least 2/3rd of the world's population are worshipping a false god (depending on who's right). Let's also assume he's very tolerant of other religions, none of that "you shall have no other gods before me" but clearly worshipping the wrong god shouldn't "work". Then how come every religion seems to "work" for their worshippers? Because they create it themselves, their imaginary friend. Either that, or you have those who claim they're all the same by which I can only conclude that god is schizophrenic, given the number of conflicting teachings.
I think all evidence suggest religious people are wrong, particularly when they try to contradict science like this. And even if one creation myth is right, most of them have to be wrong. However, clearly it is everyone else that is wrong...
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Wrong, and your statement itself is ad hominem. Go read the definition, please. Example, from wikipedia:
"An ad hominem argument, also known as argumentum ad hominem (Latin: "argument to the person", "argument against the man") is a logical fallacy consisting of replying to an argument by attacking or appealing to the person making the argument, rather than by addressing the substance of the argument."
Any time your retort's subject matter is your opponent in the debate, that is ad hominem.
Ahhh, but in this case, it wasn't the person that was being attacked. It was a filter that that person had chosen to apply to their perception with demonstrable effects on his ability to draw logical conclusions *in certain situations* which was being attacked.
His stated belief that the earth is 14,000 years old demonstrates this filter applied to his ability to deal with many sciences such as geology, paleontology, etc.
Therefore, his chosen belief system does have a bearing "on his own ability to objectively evaluate the evidence concerning global warming," as the OP said, since that evidence is science-based as well.
That's a perfectly valid argument.
So, he's against teaching kids about safe sex, and quite obviously doesn't use it himself. He's also obviously some kind of literalist Christian. I mean, no self-respecting science journal would EVER claim the Earth was 14,000 years old. We Humans have been around a lot longer than that (despite being no more than a mere blip on the time line of the Earth), and we have skeletal remains, carbon dating, sedimentary layers, etc. etc. etc. to back it up. Unless just about every form of archeology is ridiculously wrong in every conceivable way (or you go with that "God put that there to trick us" logic, which is a whole other can of worms), there is no way in Hell that can be right.
So, why is it that a man who is obviously not very well versed in the realms of science trying to have so much say in what takes place in a science class?
Falsifiability is the measure of a sound theory.
But this probably needs to be looked at in the right context.
The point of a theory is to allow you to predict future results, based first on the current state of the universe, and future actions.
Falsifiability is what makes a sound theory; what this means is that you can predict something using it, and then measure the results of an experiment based on that prediction, and decide categorically, based on the outcome of the experiment, whether the theory is true or false. If it's false, then it's no longer a theory, and we throw it away -- or, if it still gives useful approximations, like Newtonian mechanisc, then we keep it around, but constrain the circumstances in which it should be used as a tool.
Any theory that's not falsifiable is not a theory - it's a hypothesis at best, and at worst, it's a conjecture.
So, for example, creationism isn't a sound theory, and it's not even a reasonable hypothesis, since it's not falsifiable. To falsify it, you would have to be able to come up with a repeatable laboratory experiment that could prove, one way or the other, whether or not there is a creator. Since the conjecture that there's a creator is a tautology, it's impossible to do this. So the next best thing is Occam's Razor, which, to paraphrase into plain English, states that "All things being equal, the simplest solution tends to be the best one".
-
Global warming, at this point, is a theory (based on observation, without contradiction), but it's not a very good one. It's falsifiable, but not in our lifetimes, and not under laboratory conditions.
Human activity being the root cause of the currently observed global warming is, at this point, a hypothesis.
And the movies idea of what will happen if human activity continues in the current direction is merely conjecture.
-
So to get back to your question: the more ways, and the easier, and the more controlled the conditions under which you can falsify a theory, the higher the quality of the theory.
As to soundness of a particular thory, the more ways that can (and have been attempted to) falsify it, and failed to do so, the more sound the theory.
-- Terry