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Texas Science Director Forced To Resign Over ID Statements
jeffporcaro writes "Texas' Director of Science Curriculum was 'forced to step down' for favoring evolution over intelligent design (ID). She apparently circulated an e-mail that was critical of ID — although state regulations require her not to have any opinion 'on a subject on which the agency must remain neutral.' 'The agency documents say that officials recommended firing Ms. Comer for repeated acts of misconduct and insubordination. The officials said forwarding the e-mail message conflicted with her job responsibilities and violated a directive that she not communicate with anyone outside the agency regarding a pending science curriculum review.'"
Since ID is not science, it is not an issue she should have remained neutral on, because it has nothing to do with the board.
It takes a man to suffer ignorance and smile
Be yourself no matter what they say
I think this is another huge signpost that even in our modern era, ultra-powerful empires fall prey to their own delusional spin and slowly disintegrate into a drooling heap of superstition. This is the dying of the US as a superpower..
Heroes die once, cowards live longer.
Thanks for proving the OPs point: ID supporters don't understand what science is, and they don't understand why ID isn't one.
Cliff notes: you can't have a "science" that studies "the design" without first positing that there is a designer. That's where ID becomes a religion, and non-scientific. This should not be a complex subject for anyone who was awake during High School science.
It doesn't require any faith at all, nobody asks for faith that biology or the rules it follows is constant. That's why we run actual experiments and take actual measurements, to see if they are constant or not. For several thousand years biology has proven remarkably consistent, but if you were to come up with evidence tomorrow that showed biology was different at some point in the past, you'd win the Nobel Prize. No faith required.
Recursive: Adj. See Recursive.
Can somebody please explain what the heck is going on? I do NOT mean to offend any Americans, far from it (and if I offend someone, I offer my sincere apologies), but something lite this could only happen in the US, or some other country where religious fundamentalism is prevalent . It would be nice if the human species could mature enough to finally cast away superstition and belief and embrace empirical proof and verifiable knowledge. We are not little children. We are grown-ups who have functional and rational brains. And we are naturally tolerant. At least most of us. "Intelligent Design" is a belief, or a rejection of the legitimacy of logical thought, not a science, and not verifiable in any way. In my opinion it should therefore NOT be sponsored by any government body or public institution or policy.
Beauty is in the beholder of the eye.
There's a scientific method - you can apply it to religion - if it doesn't work you get to call religion 'bunk'
ID may be a hypothesis - it's allowed to be that - but the people who put it up need to come up with some experiments to prove their hypothesis if they want respect of other scientists and if they want their hypothesis to be taught as 'science' - otherwise it's just an idea that hasn't been proven
The problem of course is that approaching religion like this upsets a lot of religious people - largely I think because this sort of approach has tended to upset apple carts over the centuries - doesn't mean you should stop doing it though
Science does not work that way. Science begins with an observation, then the creation of a hypothesis, an experiment, and ends with an affirmation, denial, or refinement of the hypothesis.
Intelligent design begins with an affirmation: The universe is complex, therefore, it must have been designed by a sort of intelligent being. You just can't jump to assumptions like that. That is a debasement of all that science is. Just because we don't understand something doesn't mean it cannot be understood with more research. Just because we can't explain something through modern scientific theories does not mean that later theories cannot explain them. And most of all, just because we do not KNOW the answer to a question does not mean the answer defaults to "God."
We do not know for certain what created the universe. We theorize the Big Bang, but as to what lead to that, we don't know. This does NOT mean "God willed it to happen." It just means we don't know for now.
We can explain many properties of gravity, but we do not know WHAT it is, exactly. This is not a sign that God, excuse me, "The Designer" simply said "let's have mass attract each other at a rate proportional to the product of their masses and inversely proportional to the distance between them." All it means is... we don't know.
This is why ID is not a science. You cannot, under any circumstances, simply declare something "too complex" to occur naturally (which in and of itself is a bit of a joke. Anything that occurs in nature is, by definition, natural, regardless of means.). The only "evidence" we have that suggests God--pardon me, "designer" (and certainly not a thinly-veiled cover for the Judeo-Christian God), created all life is that we don't know for certain what did.
Intelligent Design by its very fundamental nature is not, cannot, and will not ever be a science. It's a debasement of all that is science. It's the lazy man's way out. "Oh, it's too complex for me to understand. It's much easier to just say God did it." If you want to believe that, fine. But keep that thinking, or lack thereof, out of our science classes and don't you dare expect those who actually KNOW what the Scientific Method is to just sit back and ignore the attempts to get rid of it.
It's fine to take your assertion as a starting point, but then you need a number of positive falsifiable experiments to test your hypothesis. That is science. What you have now is a philosophical theory. It has not become a scientific hypothesis yet, and this is why it must not be taught in science classes as an equal to evolutionary theory, which does have many falsifiable experiments that have supported it. Even for evolution theory's so-called Achilles' Heel, the fossil records are at least an observational test of organisms of the past, for which people have a reasonable repeatable measure of their age(whether it is ultimately the right measure is not the issue). You cannot create such a falsifiable test for a theory that has an extra-systemic creator as its basis.
All you can do ever with ID theory is try to falsify evolution theory, and then propose ID as the alternative. You can never go further than that. It can never be "science", because you can't repeatably and reliably test a being that exists and acts outside the system of the universe. ID theory is only philosophy. I'm not saying ID is right or wrong. I actually believe in an old Earth ID theory, but that's part of my religious belief. What I'm just saying is that if you have a philosophical theory, then it should be taught in a philosophy class, along with string theory.
Knowledge is just opinion that you trust enough to act upon. -Orson Scott Card
Personally, I think the whole thing is a giant, millennia-long intelligence test. God purposely set us up with ZERO evidence of his existence, got some flunkies to write a few Good Books and seed them around the planet, and then waited to see who would take the bait. Anyone that falls for a religion (any religion) is immediately sent to Hell because obviously they are mental defectives who are too stupid to go by the facts. It's the Atheists, the ones who saw through the scam all along, and suffered horribly down the ages at the hands of the True Believers (remember, if you want to go to the Good Place you have to suffer while you're on Earth) who will (to their great and everlasting surprise) be admitted to Heaven. At which point, the Atheists will be believers because, well ... now they'll have some evidence, and they'll be able to believe in God without having to take it on "faith". Yeah, it'll suck that the zealots were right all along, but at least they'll have the satisfaction of having used their brains.
Besides, if were all supposed to be companions to God after we're dead, why the hell would he want to surround himself with stupid people?
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
Probably because the differentiation between "macro-evolution" ("speciation") and "micro-evolution" is an ID foil. *ALL* evolution is microevolution. There's nowhere in evolutionary theory that says a frog must give birth to a mouse for evolution to occur. Micro-evolutionary changes are sufficient to explain speciation over a long enough time frame.
One of the recurring problems in these kinds of discussion is the definition of speciation. If you nail down an ID'er with evidence of speciation, they change the definition ("Oh, well, it's still a bacterium, isn't it?" ) and start talking about an amorphous concept called "kinds". Then you show the feathered dinosaur fossils, and they yell "hoax" (in spite of the fact that there have been many more species of feathered dinos than archeopteryx discovered), and when that doesn't pan out, they say it's not really a transitional species, it's a distinct, god-created animal that is now extinct. This is clearly the avoidance behavior we all sometimes engage in, designed to protect a comfortable delusion.
You can't 'win' this kind of argument. The BEST we can hope for is that it will fall 'out of fashion' over time.
Thinking outside my Head
Believing in micro-evolution but not believing in macro-evolution makes about as much sense as believing in centimetres but not believing in kilometres.
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!
As for your statement "their god is only the Old Testament God when dealing with homosexuals", I don't completely understand where you got this from considering the main part of the bible that discusses homosexuals is the New Testament.
Actually, most Biblical arguments against homosexuality all come from the old Testament (most often cited are Genesis 1, Genesis 19, various other Genesis passages, Leviticus 18:22, Leviticus 20:13, and various passages from Deuteronomy, Judges, and Kings). And the hypocrisy is that books like Leviticus are also the ones that admonish, for example, wearing wool and cotton at the same time. If a Christian is not going to keep a completely kosher house and lifestyle, it is pretty hypocritical to attack homosexuality from that same reference.
Some references in the New Testament include Romans 1, 1 Corinthians 6, and 1 Timothy 1. Jesus, however, was notably silent on the issue, despite having a great deal to say about all sorts of other practices in his day. (In fact, Jesus doesn't really have much to say about any of the major "Christian right" hot topics, from homosexuality to abortion, whereas he has a great deal to say about welfare, health care, and the evils of money.)
E pluribus unum