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College Credits For Trolling the Web?
Jafafa Hots writes "Some undergraduate and masters level courses at the Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary require trolling as part of their requirements.
In William Dembski's classes on Intelligent Design and Christian Apologetics, 20% of the final grades come from having made 10 posts defending Intelligent Design Creationism on 'hostile' websites.
There seems to be no requirement that the posts contain original writing; apparently cut-and-paste jobs are sufficient. Is this the first case of trolling the net being part of course requirements?"
Wait, wait, wait... You're telling me that a Christian, theological seminary actually has a class that involves defending the tenets of the school's beliefs? This is an outrage!
...if they ever get the feeling that they are wasting their time?
FOXTROT UNIFORM CHARLIE KILO
I'm not trolling, I'm _evangilizing_ . Time to wreck my karma with a mess of '-1 Evangilist' mods.
No accredited university should be requiring students to make public statements defending specific ideas under ANY situation, trolling or not. If this seminary is not receiving public funding, them I'm perfectly fine with them requiring any crazy shit they want to, but I don't think the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools (SACS) should be accrediting them as an academic institution (this isn't the first time SACS's rather lax standards have been called into question--over a variety of issues). Students should retain their rights to their own opinions in any respectable academic setting, be they a liberal in a accredited seminary or a conservative at Berkley. If a professors wants to get up in class and rant about their beliefs, that's fine--but they WAY cross the line when they require (or even attempt to coerce) students to affirm those ideas themselves.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
Only if you consider clown college and hamburger school to be real educational institutions
I mean, if you go to a nut job school, trying to learn how to be a real nut job, the fact that they have to turn you into a troll first should come as no surprise.
Superstitious idiots are going to be around as long as there are cockroaches. Those of us with brains will just have to learn how to live with it.
RAID doesn't even work all that well.
Perhaps not, but you'd be fool (and a hypocrite) to not prepare for the possibility.
You know, there is a difference between trolling and pointing out the flaws in your reasoning. Just saying.
I, personally, don't see why the students should have to disclose anything. Their opinions are valid (even if their evidence is... er... patchy), and I don't see how knowing who inspired their comments would do anything but open them up for cheap ad hominem shots.
If they're really so wrong, we should be able to demonstrate it without such disclosures.
You know, there is a difference between trolling and pointing out the flaws in your reasoning. Just saying.
I was ready to give it the benefit of the doubt - after all, religion without ministry is just jerking off your soul - until I read this gem:
Jeepers, you might as well just write "I spent a full 24 hours giving myself paper cuts with the book while chanting the Lord's Prayer, so I felt I'd leveled up and skipped actually writing the 'reflection.'"
And they keep saying the word "critical review". I do not think that means what they think it means. I think they'd find any actual "critical" writing to be... Suppressive.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
By that logic, I should prepare for zombie attacks too, because it's about as likely.
Wishful thinking.
Those of us who have experienced a liberal education know that while professors may have their own preconceived notions, in general, they'll give favorable marks to a well argued contrary position. In fact, these professors are better often positioned to recognize (and reward) a well reasoned critique than even those who hold the contrary positions.
Contrast that to some of the final exam questions for this "teacher's" course:
Shorter: "Please pander to me by knocking down the straw man I've just set up."
This is not education. This is indoctrination. Critical thought, self examination, and probing questions are not welcome. The goal of the trolling requirement is akin to hammering an online poll so that it seems like your view point is more prevalent than it really is.
For the record, I am not of the opinion that a scientific mindset is incompatible with a belief in god.
Ah, no.
Creationism = "god did it."
Intelligent Design = "Something Big (possibly called God) did it."
I have a really, really tough time understanding how these are rather distinct. Even those who first promoted intelligent design see them as the same thing, only removing God from Intelligent design, since that was the major reason why creationism couldn't be taught in schools.
Anyways, Neither creationism or ID have anything to do with young earthers (or at least are only tangentially related). Young Earthers took all the dates/ages in the bible, added them up, and came to 6,000 years, so therefore, the earth must only be 6,000 years old.
Whether or not there is some sort of god, I'm not supposed to say/god is a word and the argument ends there-Smog
The term "Intelligent Design Creationism" seems to me a little unhelpful.
Intelligent design and (young earth) creationism are in general rather distinct, although the rather large differences are sometimes blurred both by proponents trying to gather support and by opponents who want to simply ridicule both groups instead of trying to reason with them.
No. Creationists who disguise themselves as scientists call themselves "intelligent design proponents", IDers are just dishonest creationists.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Of_Pandas_and_People#Pandas_and_.22cdesign_proponentsists.22
The term "creationists" was changed to "design proponents", but in one case the beginning and end of the original word "creationists" were accidentally retained, so that "creationists" became "cdesign proponentsists".
The basic metabolic pathways (reaction chains) of nearly all organisms are the same. Is this because of descent from a common ancestor, or because only these pathways (and their variations) can sustain life? Evolutionists think the former is correct, cdesign proponentsists accept the latter view.
You can't take the sky from me...
> Besides, we're talking about Science here
No we're not. We're talking about pure fundementalist Christianity trying to
pose as something that it's not in order to gain "legitimacy" and to allow it
better able to be disruptive and invasive.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
I may be the first (and only) poster to defend the professor in the article, but here goes.
It is a course at a Baptist Seminary in Intelligent Design and Christian Apologetics. From Wikipedia:
These people are studying to be ministers in a religion. One of their roles is to defend their faith and its tenets. Given the position of the Internet in the world today, how could anyone say they are qualified to do that without having done work on the internet? And, since the focus is on defense of those tenets, the best place to practice that is on hostile websites. So I believe the assignment is appropriate to the course aims.
Note that I am not a Baptist (RC here), I think ID (except as a philosophical experiment) is creationism in disguise, and trolls irritate me too. But lets face it - who here hasn't trolled in order to tweak someone or start a flamewar? Hell, the folks on Slashdot practically invented some forms of trolling (Goatse, anyone?).
So, instead of excoriating the professor, we should invite his students onto here and "help" them with their studies.
"As God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly." A. Carlson
Somebody moderate the parent insightful... he's absolutely correct. It doesn't really matter if they're posting on the 'net because they have to for class requirements, and all it really does is open them up to attacks on the fact that they're still students, or attacks on their school.
It's up to the person themselves whether they're going to listen to opposing viewpoints. To a large extent that's dependant on their upbringing and their education. If the school isn't teaching them to listen to what their opponents are saying so that they can understand where they're coming from, then no amount of disclosure is going to improve things for anybody. The problem really comes when people decide that listening to what the opposition says is lending credence to their argument, when the reality is simple: I don't have to agree with what you're saying, but you have a right to say it, and I will show you the same courtesy that I'd expect when I'm expressing my opinions.
It doesn't really matter if you don't convince the ID people that they're wrong. Strictly speaking, we can't actually know whether they're wrong or not, that's why it's a non-theory. But it could still be correct. I don't have to believe it to recognize that as a possibility. But there's far too many people, on both sides of the argument, who refuse to accept even the remotest possiblity that the other side might be right, and that their beliefs might be wrong. When that happens, it stops being about expanding our knowledge, and starts being about dogma and fanatical devotion. And quite frankly, the atheists are just as guilty as the ID people.
Going off on a rant, but I think the problem lies in the education system. No, I don't think you should be teaching religion in schools. Actually, I don't think you should be teaching "knowledge" at all in schools, for the first bit. Teach basic maths and literacy, because you need them to function in contemporary society, but leave history, geography, and such out of it at first. Teach the kids how to think critically, and how to examine every viewpoint they're presented with so that they're capable of producing the truth on their own. Then, and only then, should you present them with the facts and historical details, as such materials are *always* written with a bias.
If you believe everything you read, you'd better not read. - Japanese proverb
If you read the article, you'll see that they don't require "discussion" of any kind:
"provide at least 10 posts defending ID that youâ(TM)ve made on âoehostileâ websites, the posts totalling 2,000 words, along with the URLs (i.e., web links) to each post (worth 20% of your grade)."
The only thing this kind of sociopathic requirement causes is hit-and-run troll posts.
Also:
"What ID brings to the table is a new reexamination of facts."
This is wrong. Scientists already reexamine facts constantly. ID does not add anything useful to the discussion, because it postulates a "theory" that can neither be proven nor disproven, and doesn't make any kinds of useful predictions. That's like saying "postulating sock gnomes requires you to reexamine the facts of where you left your socks yesterday." It doesn't.
And finally:
"The other problem with ID is also prevalent in fields such as homeopathy and supernatural research. The attempt to address the issues at hand with a completely open mind leads to bad conclusions."
That, again, is wrong. Scientists are required to have a completely open mind when it comes to everything, even homeopathy. This is precisely why we have useful studies in which scientists tested the claims made by homeopathy and other "alternative" medicine. It's also why we know which of these things work, and which don't.
The ones who don't have an open mind are the people who still believe homeopathy works. Their closed-mindedness makes them unable to accept the evidence.
The directive is to make ID arguments in, quote, hostile websites.
Why don't they do something easier, like question President Obama's economic policies or the wisdom of a Governmental takeover of the health care system on a site like Daily Kos? At least then you'd be arguing a position in a hostile environment that may have merit -- there isn't much merit to ID and arguing it is the rough equivalent of the 9/11 truthers or the whackjobs that think Obama isn't a native born American citizen.
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
I hope your post is a joke, even though it's a pretty bad joke. There is no secluded problems with ID, there is only one problem, and it's ID. You cannot defend it. Re-examination of what? Why are clams on top of a mountain? Why, could it be because a bird dropped it there a million years ago, maybe it was because that mountain was at the bottom of the ocean a billion years ago. What the hell does Intelligent Design have to do with real scientists thinking about such things? Science is about questioning everything! Intelligent Design is NOT about questioning, it's about looking at something, then saying "this is god's work" and then that's that. Intelligent Design is anathema to science. And defending it in any way is ridiculous and retarded.
This is nothing to do with theology. The examples quoted make it clear that this is a political issue. One of the most depressing things for people like me, who went to a small university in the English fens before deciding that engineering was more interesting and of more benefit to the human race, is that US fundamentalists completely confuse politics and religion. The madness is spreading to the Anglican Church in the UK, where Nigerian politics is now more important than good relations with the Episcopalians.
US fundamentalism takes the form of assigning religious worth to capitalism - if God loves you, you will be materially rich - and also aligns itself with backward notions about Creationism and ID which are more about trying to prove liberals "wrong" than spreading light. The simple fact is that it requires really determined blinkers to believe either that Bible literalism has very deep roots (certainly St. Augustine would have wondered what these people were on about) or that the enormous body of information about geology and biology built up in the last 200 years admits of a fundamentalist interpretation.
To be blunt, if these seminaries were doing their jobs they would be teaching pastoral care, teaching how the New Testament (rather than some cherry picked collection of political positions) can be made relevant today, and preparing their students to heal wounds in society and reduce polarisation between social groups. Instead, they appear to be giving course credits for less violent versions of the activities that give the Taliban a bad name.
You say that seminaries are schools for training pastors, and I agree they should be. But we should then not defend "seminaries" that are training schools for bigoted ideologues who will seek to stir up division in society and spread ignorance. If this man Dembski cannot see why he is wrong on this, he needs to be hit on the head with the Sermon on the Mount till he gets a clue.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
Their opinions are valid (even if their evidence is... er... patchy)
An argument is valid if and only if the truth of its premises entails the truth of its conclusion.
They may have a right to their opinion, as idiotic as those may be, but that doesn't make them valid.
You can't take the sky from me...
Disclaimer: Christian Electrical Engineering Student
I would like to point out that "RichardDawkins.net" is definitely presenting one side of this story, and anyone who takes a brief look at the site can tell which side that is. This is a philosophy course they're referencing and if you look at the tests you'll notice that the questions are just like any philosophy course. They ask you to explain/argue both sides of an issue (one of the test questions even says argue against ID).
Speaking as a student, this is actually a brilliant form of instruction. What better way to make you understand and can use the material you've been taught then to have you defend it against people who will purposely be attacking it vehemently. This course is titled Intelligent Design so I would expect students to learn enough about it to defend it on some level. Why take the course if you're not going to learn the reasoning behind the subject matter.
Also, to everyone who has said that students shouldn't be given an assignment that makes them present/defend a viewpoint outside of their own. Try taking an english class sometime with a christian viewpoint. The stuff they require you to read and write about definitely does NOT fall within my viewpoint most of the time.
> especially one as hostile to religion as Slashdot
We're not hostile to religion, we're hostile to bullshit.
> ID scientists
There's no such thing, since ID isn't science. Even your buddy Michael Behe admits that in order for ID to be science, Astrology, Alchemy, New Age, Wicca, etc must also be science.
It's funny how you ID'ers can't stop contradicting yourselves:
> ID brushes away the dogma of science and brings the scientific method back to it.
> The attempt to address the issues at hand with a completely open mind leads to bad conclusions.
People like you need to understand that there is no point refuting Evolution. Evolution is the glue that holds Biology together, and without it we wouldn't have: Paleontology, Micro-biology, Medicine, Genetics, among other fields.
Here's a simple thought experiment: If Evolution is false, what created swine flu? The only other possible explanation is that God is a dick, and I don't believe that.
Adventure, Romance, MAD SCIENCE!
You would after you let others examine it and attempt to determine how it worked.
But, since that will never happen, you won't ever get a "fair hearing" (WTF, you think science is a court?) in your eyes.
If you had any brains and not just blind dogmatic stupidity, you would review the laws of thermodynamics and understand them before making your claim. "Devices" don't unseat stuff like that, "new theories" do.
Yes, in a science fashion. Sure, you would be ridiculed by the vast majority of scientists because you were claiming to have contradicted our understanding of the universe (complete with supporting evidence against your claim). Eventually though, you'd eventually get someone pissed off enough (or hopelessly optimistic enough) to want to duplicate your experiment to show how stupid and wrong you are. Thus, you will receive a "fair" hearing by having someone else examine your process and either disprove or support your hypothesis.
Contrast that with "Intelligent Design" which offers neither real evidence or theory, nor any opportunity for falsifiability. So as ridiculous as your claimed invention might be, it's still more scientific than ID.
Is there any difference between the blind dogmatic stupidity of ID, and the blind dogmatic intelligence of darwinism?
Yes, one is blind and dogmatic, the other is supported by evidence.
You can't take the sky from me...
Exactly, getting a civil response is not the goal.
This seems to be less about ID and more about not getting civil responses. The professors don't give two shits about convincing anybody in the forums of anything.
Getting the students to do this, takes a retarded worldview and forces them to plop it down where it really wasn't invited with the inevitable hostile responses.
Which in turn, indoctrinates or say... brainwashes the students into viewing the outside, thinking world as a hostile place to their kind.
And, thus insures the students stick to their kind and stop looking at the outside world (especially the Internet) as a place to get good information.
This is simply brainwashing. A clever way to do it granted, but that doesn't change the affect on the student. They still come out suspicious and feeling attacked by the internet and non-whack people, the effect desired by the school administrators.
Bullshit.
The theory of evolution says no such thing. That's a strawman invented by the creationists themselves.
Yes, there is a "social darwinism" piece of bullshit, but it has about as much to do with the real darwinism, as JavaScript has to do with Java. I.e., except for piggy-backing on its name, not much whatsoever.
And, anyway, the real darwinism doesn't actually say "only the strong survive", and it certainly doesn't say "if you are too weak to survive we shouldn't help you."
Social species and social adaptations are in fact cases where a species survives precisely _because_ individual members who are too weak to survive on their own, are helped by other members. Ants or bees are cases where no individual member could survive and reproduce on their own at all. The workers are asexuate, and the queen pretty much can't forrage and feed on its own. The species survives precisely _because_ there is a high degree of cooperation between the individual members.
Heck, even wolves or lions (predators seem to be a favourite of proponents of "might makes right") actually have a group hunting and group survival strategy built in. Wolves couldn't reliably bag the kind of bigger game they normally feed upon, if they didn't act as a group. So, yes, a weaker member which might not survive on his own, nevertheless can survive in a group that cooperates.
Sexual selection and sexual dimorphism are also cases where evolution favours cooperation and specialization. E.g., the male lion is too big and heavy to be a good hunter on his own, while the females aren't as adapted to fight other predators. (That mane is battle armour, for example. A predator going for the male lion's neck will most often just get a mouthful of hair.) A pride survives by the _combination_ of the two specializations. And sometimes they even find more innovative ways to use that dimorphism: e.g., against bigger game, the male lion lies in ambush while the females chase the prey towards him, effectively allowing him to use his greater mass and strength without the handicap of his poorer sprint performance.
Nature and evolution are full of stuff like that. Resemblance to the "if you are too weak to survive we shouldn't help you" canard: zero.
Second, darwinism doesn't judge "fit" as "strong" or anything else. The only criterion that matters is: fit to make more offspring. Period.
For different species that can mean radically different things. For example for rabbits, the criterion isn't strength, it's just being fast and affraid enough to run away fast enough, and making lots of baby rabbits faster than the foxes can eat them.
But even that doesn't even scratch the surface of how many things can mean "the fittest." E.g., being bitter and bright coloured works just fine for ladybugs. (See, aposematism) There is no strength or speed or anything else involved. You just have to be bitter so the first bird that tries to eat you spits you back, and recognizably coloured so it learns not to try again in the future.
For some species, they don't even go the whole way with that. They don't actually have any defense of their own against a predator, but just mimick the colours of a species that does. The "being fitter" there just means the most resemblance to the real aposematic species you're immitating. That's it. That's the whole survival of the fittest in that aspect.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
>> What ID brings to the table is a new reexamination of facts.
Okay, I'll bite.
>> Why are clam fossils at the top of very young mountains?
Because the "age" of a mountain refers to when the plate material was pushed up, not when the plate material was created. A 10M year old mountain can be made out of 1B year old granite.
>> What is the evolutionary progression of DNA?
I think I speak for the entire board when I say, "huh?"
>> Why are there still discrepancies in the geologic and biologic record where we would expect certain types of data but find none?
Ask a non-specific question, get a non-specific answer. When the IDers complain about "missing data", they usually mean missing links in the fossil record. They often go through great contortions to assert that there is no "intermediate" for a given stage. For example, they'll say "there is no transitional fossil between bird and reptile." When confronted with Archaeopteryx, they'll point to certain features and claim that it's clearly a bird. Or they'll point to other features and claim that it's essentially a reptile.
If an ID'er decides that the form really is an intermediate, he'll simply move the goalposts again and say, "okay, where are the transitional fossils between X and Y, and between Y and Z.
This has zero to do with the scientific method.
>> ID brushes away the dogma of science and brings the scientific method back to it.
ID rejects the scientific method, by posting no testable hypotheses. They simply try to cast aspersions on evolution, in the hopes that if they poke enough holes, evolution will crumble, and "God did it" (an untestable and therefore a-scientific hypothesis) will be the only thing left standing.
To the extent that it forces evolutionary theorists to push forward, ID could be argued to serve a useful purpose. But most of the ID movement involves pushing scientific falsehoods in non-scientific forums, causing people to doubt the basics of science and the honesty of its practitioners without good cause.
You want the truthiness? You can't handle the truthiness!
...This is not about preaching, this is about setting up an Us vs. Them attitude in the students, to make it easier to accept the irrational. After all, the other side is evil, they wouldn't have been so mean to them if they weren't, they must be wrong...
Exactly!
And we see that illustrated beautifully in the grandparent's post - "If you take the act of posting on a message board, especially one as hostile to religion as Slashdot..."
Slashdot is not intolerant of religion, per se. However, it can be brutally intolerant of badly reasoned arguments, articles of faith presented as proof, and other forms of stupidity. Only the most disingenuous tool would suggest that such a metaphorical "bringing a knife to a gun fight" as cut-and-pasting some lame intelligent design screed into a forum populated by those well-equipped to refute it's every point, is anything other than some form of "Martyrdom Light". Having seen the same pathetic arguments put forth time and again, often verbatim (cut-and-paste counts, remember), the forum regulars can be expected to pounce hard and fast. That's pretty much the definition of trolling, and it has nothing to do with intelligent discourse.
The issue with intelligent design is it isn't science! There is nothing falsifiable about intelligent design, it makes no predictions, it's not useful to anyone outside of spreading dogma, and has no potential to be useful for any other purpose.
There is no research done on intelligent design, you can't design an experiment to prove or disprove it, in a biology classroom you can't teach anything about it outside of saying "there are some holes in evolutionary theory that we can't explain yet, so some people think a magic man in the sky waved his hand to create these things."
The only leg Intelligent Design has to stand on is that proponents pretend there are only two possible explanations for the origin of life, Evolution and Intelligent Design. They claim that if Evolution is in any way false, then Intelligent Design must be true.
This is absolutely ridiculous.
Yes, Jews exist. And Mithraists do not (they were killed off by the Christians, as it happens). So what exactly is your point? That some groups of people have vanished over the course of the years, wbhile some others have not? And that proves that universe was created... how, exactly?
And what about DNA? Yes, it's complex. So what? Are you saying that something so complex could not happen through evolution? Why not? The odds against it are too great? Well, evolution has been at it on countless planets through billions of years. So even if the odds for complex life appearing on some particular are miniscule, the odds of life taking shape somewhere are pretty damn good. So the fact that complex life exists does NOT prove creator in any shape or form.
"A planet in our solar system supports life complex enough for people to actually debate on the internet whether this post was made by a random chemical reaction reacting obscurely to photons, or a conscious human being."
And there are several planets in our solar system that do not. And there are zillions of planets in the universe where is no life. So how exactly does the existence of life on this particular planet somehow "prove" the existence of a creator?
Like I said, if we look at the universe, we are talking about countless planets. Probability of life forming on some specific planet might be tiny, but when we talk about billions of planets of billions of years, there will be life on some of them.
"Perhaps none of these qualify as "proof", but they are evidence; which is all you asked for."
They are neither proof or evidence.
Lesbian Nazi Hookers Abducted by UFOs and Forced Into Weight Loss Programs - -all next week on Town Talk.
Nonsense, there is overwhelming evidence that the earth is over 6,000 years old. If by "proof", you mean "There isn't 100% prove, we could be brains in a vat or maybe God/the FSM made it look that way", then by that logic we can't prove anything. Should nothing be taught in schools then?
there is evidence that can suggest a much shorter time too
Such as?
I would say that you are a thinking person who uses faith to fill in the knowledge gaps in the scientific view of the world.
There is a lot of knowledge about specific ways of evolving (eg, point mutations, trans-locations, recombination, etc.) that explain how genetic diversity can be created, and there is widespread evidence of how the process of natural selection sorts through this genetic diversity. At the same time, no scientist worth their salt would claim that the full picture of step-by-step evolution from simple organic molecules into Cindy Lauper is fully understood. The fossil record incomplete and will always be incomplete.
So, we hit a question of faith and logic. In light of the scientific evidence, it is a reasonable extrapolation to believe in the mechanism of evolution and to believe that this is the way by which life changes.
Currently, though, science has nothing very satisfying to say about why, in a random world, some things happen and some things don't. Yes, we can describe very well the probabilities of this and that, etc., and if I flip a fair coin 100 times, you expect that I will get about 50 heads and about 50 tails. At the same time, we can't say why I get a sequence of four heads followed by 3 tails and two heads. Yes, we can make statements about subtle air currents, minor differences in flipping forces, etc. but as the systems get more complex and the sizes get smaller and smaller, we eventually hit molecular events which behave truly randomly.
Now, for a truly random system (like is the case for many the molecular interactions that make up life), you can choose to believe that God or some such force is driving the specifics of these random events, which is fine, especially if you recognize that this is a religious belief and not a scientific one.
It sounds like you realize this distinction.
The trouble with ID, is that when confronted with any hole in the evolutionary theory, they immediately jump to the conclusion of a God, which is absurd and is much different from using faith to explain things that are (currently?) outside of the scientific understanding of the universe.