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Royal Society "Creationist" Resigns
Chris_Keene writes in to let us know that the Prof. Michael Reiss, who recently caused a storm with comments about teaching creationism in schools, has resigned from his post as director of education at the Royal Society in the UK. This news coincides with word out of the Anglican church that it is ready to apologize to Charles Darwin, 150 years after it poured scorn on his theory of evolution by natural selection. "The Church of England will concede in a statement that it was over-defensive and over-emotional in dismissing Darwin's ideas. It will call 'anti-evolutionary fervor' an 'indictment' on the Church."
It seems to me that his comments were that children who believed in creationism should be taught the difference in a way that wouldn't raise their defenses. This is a good thing, and there's no argument about that. When you're an educator, you need to find methods to teach everyone, not just those who are receptive to what you have to say. In effect, he wanted to teach the difference between religious teaching and science, and that's a good thing for everyone since religion and science aren't mutually exclusive.
Of course, this may be the wrong forum to suggest that religion and science can coexist.
1.) This man didn't put religious belief higher than science. He just said it should be taught in school rather than ignored, but still taught in a way that promotes the theory of evolution as a science, and creationism as a religious belief not founded on logic and empirical evidence. He didn't want to waste hours on end talking about creationism--he just wanted to explain WHY its not science. Nor did he want to profess it was right.
2.) Religious persons are fully capable of using the empirical method to logically deduce (and/or prove/discover) and record evidence (i.e. "science"). They shouldn't let their convictions stand in the way of their findings and remain a large part of an empirical system such as the royal society--but they shouldn't be completely disregarded by the society for a misguided attempt at teaching a social science alongside a theory of science. And in the end that's all he wanted to do. Teach a historically valid world view that is being phased out due to vast scientific evidence. Believing and learning about old beliefs and pseudo-sciences are two different things entirely. And refusing to listen to your opponent's argument isn't science: its ignorance.
3.) From another article about him, I already read he also wanted to try to help kids who get picked on in science classes for their religious belief. Science should take precedent in a place of logic and learning over religion (especially in a state that holds a firm belief in religious tolerance). But the school should not be a place that allows religious intolerance to spread, even if it spreads as a result of empiricists ragging on dualists (I'm assuming dualism here as its "god created everything", making a clear separation from reality and the spiritual world).
Ginga no Rekshiya Mata Each page.
While his message was one of tolerance, he was also an ordained priest (or whatever those men in dresses call it). He just showed them why it is not such a good idea to put a religious person at the head of a science organisation. As Richard Dawkins suggested, he could have given up his religious position too, that would have been much more convincing.
This space is intentionally staring blankly at you
Please Please yourself. This had nothing to do with religion. And you are just shooting yourself in the foot. The philosophers used to be in control back in the time or Aristotle and the scientists were ridiculed. Now that scientists are in control they ridicule philosophy. I'm quite tired of the whole thing. Both sides are big babies.
Wrong. I am an irrelevantist. Religion is without value except as a curiosity of human behavioral defects.
Nevermind, posts in this thread already provided it:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/blog/2008/sep/11/michael.reiss.creationism
Seems reasonable to me, but I found it objectionable on couple of points:
1. Don't make creationism a special case. There are plenty other widely-held non-scientific beliefs, and they should be treated the same way in science classes.
2. It would take great care to avoid getting swamped by the debate on the differences in the premises of science and various non-scientific beliefs, and not sure it's wise to dump this on secondary school teaching curriculum.
One can argue it's more important for kids to know the basic premise of science than equations of Newton's mechanics. It might have been a good debate for the scientists and educators to have, but I suspect the politics would have hijacked the discourse - like it appears to have done in this case. Maybe the Brits are afraid of becoming a Kansas.
Enough talking to myself now. :-)
Fuck systemd. Fuck Redhat. Fuck Soylent, too. Wait, scratch the last one.
And apparently, to a biblical literalist, the refractive index of water was once different. Also when it "changed" to its modern value, that made it less likely for the Earth to flood. I guess water used to be a lot less dense, and now occupies less volume?
Genesis 9:13-14:
I do set my bow in the cloud, and it shall be for a token of a covenant between me and the earth.
And it shall come to pass, when I bring a cloud over the earth, that the bow shall be seen in the cloud:
And I will remember my covenant, which is between me and you and every living creature of all flesh; and the waters shall no more become a flood to destroy all flesh.
"They were pure niggers." – Noam Chomsky
I read the article for the first time after reading parts of the replies here on Slashdot. I have the feeling after reading the article, although I can't know going about this in the wrong order, that I would have been incline to misinterpret the article.
This being said, I think he chickened out. How can he been chased out of office in 6 days of which only 4 was working days. He could have stand fast and made a difference in the debate.
His main point is that it's not a science teachers job to change the world view of his pupils, but it could be part of his job to reconcile conflicting ones.
The human brain doesn't seem to have any problem with this, living in one reality different from another depending on occasion.
Nothing in this world is more annoying than an American atheist .
The only reason you even know there are atheists in America is because the Christians are even more annoying than they are. In the US, there is literally no escape from religious influence in public life, and it's getting worse by the day.
So you can expect atheists and other advocates of rationalism to become even more "annoying," to use your word.
And religion can't explain why God created birth defects.
You are welcome on my lawn.
I could post my own opinion here, but I think The Panda's Thumb does a much better job of covering this fiasco.
Thanks for linking that. This puts the whole debacle in perspective.
I don't really agree with him anyway---not because I think he's wrong, but because I think he's naive. Perhaps his statements are in the context of a more laid-back British attitude toward religion. I don't know how it is over there. What I do know is how things work over here in the States, and I am quite certain that any loophole that can be exploited in order to teach creationism in schools over here, will be. If you can talk about it, you can critique it, if you can critique it, you can advocate it, if you advocate it, that's effectively the lesson plan. It's a poor choice to make.
But it's nothing to be forced to resign over.
I don't believe in time. It's a grand conspiracy designed to sell watches.
Actually science still can't explain where DNA came from or for that matter science cannot explain matter.
...and religion still can't explain where god came from.
I never understood how the big bang is laughed at by creationists as a ridiculous theory when the counter argument means that an all powerful all knowing being just happened to always exist, and created the entire universe. Yet for some reason this all powerful all knowing being feels he should spend all his time and energy with one insignificant little species on one insignificant little planet floating around in an insignificant little solar system.
Yeah the evolutionists are the crazy ones...
Wrong answer to wrong question. The important question is from where did the information in DNA come? Encoding medium composition is of secondary interest.
This stems from a confusion of what information is. Creationists define information as something intelligent beings make and therefore evolution is wrong as DNA contains information. This is a crappy circular argument. The information in DNA comes from the environment - evolution (described as a information process) can be described as the transfer of information from the environment to DNA. Natural selection ensures that those creatures whose DNA closely match the environment are allowed to continue into the next generation. Hence over time the DNA has more and more information about the environment.
No matter how stupid this question is, creationists still think it somehow stumps evolutionary biologists!
For more information: http://www.skeptics.com.au/articles/dawkins.htm
Control is an illusion, order our comforting lie. From chaos, through chaos, into chaos we fly
This is not flamebait; maybe it's troll, if you want to misjudge my intent.
I think that for a lot of people, biblical literalism seems to only govern "occult" (meaning hidden) things, or at least grand-sounding things which perhaps Man ought not claim even partial knowledge of. Big things: origins of matter; life at the beginning of the earth (an amazing 5000 years ago!); evolution; &c, and that this makes it easier to accept.
Now, even though it shouldn't be, it is still to me an entirely different thing to take water, the stuff of life, tangible and indisputably understood as two H, one O, bond angle ~104 degrees, and imagine how it could possibly have been different. It appeals to a primal "need to know" in a way that the more myth-entrenched concepts of "origin" don't. It's harder to say things like "god put the fossil record there to deceive us"; it's water, you're touching it right now and you need it to live. Yet, 4500 years ago, if you had put a stick into the water and looked at it from the side, it would have not appeared broken.
Since literalists stake their fervor on a complete acceptance of the Bible (not just vis-a-vis evolution but against all science and even all other truth), I want one of these religious apologists to construct an explanation of how god did this. How did God cause water to start refracting while leaving every other fact about the world unchanged?
Really, it's the least they could do, right? I'll accept that "God did it," along with everything else in your storybook, if you can just tell me an acceptable story of what the physical world was like before rainbows existed, and just how such a fundamental change in matter could have happened while leaving the rest of the world more-or-less the same. Did he change the valence of oxygen? Try drinking some hydronium and tell me how you like it. Were there not electrons before the Flood? If that's the case, how did stuff stay together back then? I would love to read your explanation - it would be the greatest work of hard sci-fi ever to grace the earth and well worth my conversion just to read it! But I am not holding my breath...
"They were pure niggers." – Noam Chomsky
Original Sin?
Ooh, ooh, wait, no, I know this one: because, from His infallible point of view it was a Good thing to have done!
Or better, if he didn't do crazy shit like birth defects sometimes He wouldn't really work in mysterious ways, which those who believe both in Him an in their own religous infallibility say He does, thus He must.
Oh wait, I've got another one, this time based on science! Omnipotent God realized that a world without chaos would be a world without entropy, which would be a bit boring, even given His infinite patience, so He created chaos while he was creating everyting else... 6000 years ago.
Or even, shut up, clearly you don't get the idea of this whole faith thing. (author's note: I get this one a lot.)
Which came first the chicken or the egg? Evolutionists should answer egg. Creationists, who take the Bible literally, should say chicken. I have always been amazed at the number of people who did not realize what this riddle was about. Tim S
Evolution is not put forth as an explanation for the origins of matter or life. It is put forth as an explanation for how life, once begun, spread, adapted, and led to more complex organisms.
I hear people make this argument all the time, but it never comes from a biologist. Do you know why? Because biologists realize that "life" is hard to define.
In reality, there was no paramount "moment of conception". Life evolved out of simple molecules, just as animals evolved out of simple organisms. The method of selection was different, in that there were not yet 'genes' per say, but there was still selection. When one grouping of molecules failed to produce a self-replicating grouping, it would eventually be broken into quasi random parts. Those parts would then have another chance to form a self-replicating grouping.
Eventually, a grouping came about (most likely RNA) that could replicate and store information. This grouping may have been formed inside of a 'bubble' of polymer that protected the grouping from the outside world - and the first 'virus' was born.
I could go on, but I think you get the idea. Natural selection can be seen all around you - not just with 'genes'. Every system has states that are favorable for the continuation of said system.
Information is not a conserved quantity. Have you ever heard of the Mandelbrot set? A very complicated object that encodes an infinite amount of information in the equation z = z^2 + c.
Evolution is a fact
It is? You mean that creature evolve over time due to environmental factors etc?
OR do you subscribe to the Universe Evolving from nothing, that the perfect order that the world and universe exists in (Without mans intervention) happened by mere chance?
Where did everything come from? Science cannot answer this.
Religion (Not a crackpot religion) can answer this but you don't believe what Religion believes to be plausible.
I myself reject what scientists say is the beginning of all things, something does not just form from nothing, it doesn't happen science itself says it doesn't happen. So why do you believe thats what happened with the Universe?
This is the problem - If God can do everything then he can do anything!, no matter how illogical or apparently impossible - which means that we cannot discover anything because God can just change the rules anytime he likes ...
God could have created the universe in 4004 BC and made it look like it was created several billion years ago ... or he could have done it last tuesday ... we could never tell unless he wanted us to
I like to think that if God exists that he wants us to work out what is going on and so has left just enough clues to find out ...
Puteulanus fenestra mortis
They're a minority in the US, yes.
You should come to northern Europe, atheists are clearly in the majority here, and the result is that religion is not a big deal. There's a really low tolerance for religious extremism, or mixing religion and politics, but I would say that it's probably a lot easier to be religious over here, than an atheist in the US.
That is interesting, considering that Dawkins has repeatedly stated that he is open to the existence of God, as long as someone can provide him with evidence. If Dawkins is a good representative of "fundamentalist atheists", the author of that text has bigger problems than anyone can imagine.
Dawkins, a man who says that he's open to anything as long as there is evidence for it, is a threat to science? Good one.