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Evolution Battle Brews In Texas
oxide7 writes "In Texas, a battle is brewing over the teaching of evolutionary theory as the Board of Education considers a new set of instructional materials to be used in science classrooms. [Two sections of the new material] deal with the origin of life. Those sections say the 'null hypothesis' is that there had to be some intelligent agency behind the appearance of living things. It is up to the scientists proposing a naturalistic explanation to prove their case."
that we have to spend time and effort keeping creationism from being taught as "science" in the
21st century.
Do people in this country really understand that the right wing religious nut-cases are out to make this
country a theocracy ? American taliban indeed.
Absolute statements are never true
Someone needs to look up the definition of "burden of proof". It lies with the Creationists, not with the scientists.
The whole debate is based upon a false opposite based logic matrix. Big dinosaurs can intelligently remove a species because they taste nice for example, or they are a pest by biting their necks. I think I've made my point!
The purpose of existence is to make money.
Really? It sounds like someone from the board of education had a sit down with a statistician and thought it would sound cool to throw in the null because, for some reason, ID is the default explanation for the origin of species. I mean, this isn't a bad thing considering the vast amount of evidence in support of natural selection, ultimately suggesting that we can confidently reject the null.
They also may want to take a look at Jacob Cohen's classic paper, 'the world is round, p .05' for more information about the current Fisherian statistical paradigm we currently exist in and what it means to establish a null (and ultimately reject or fail to reject it).
Carl Sagan quotes get you an automatic +5 on all posts.
That... That is a whole lotta derp right there, I tell you what.
If brevity is the soul of wit, then how does one explain Twitter?
We scientifically-minded people have had a perfectly reasonable naturalistic explanation for the origin of life for a long time. No sir, the ball is in YOUR court to show that there is evidence for your intelligent design theory.
Creationists hate and fear anything different from what they were told to believe. They also breed and vote a lot.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
Democracy can only work with good education. The people voting are supposed to be able to make intelligent decisions.
This kind of thing is going to undermine our ability to govern ourselves and I cannot imagine something more insidious than corrupting children toward that end.
This must be stopped.
Really?
I grew up in a religious household and I respect people for their views on creationism (although I do not agree, no matter how long you believe a "day" is), but evolution is just as plausible if not more so, because they have some evidence, not none(well besides an old book re-written a million times and re-worded just as many times).
From the article: "In 2009 the Texas Board of Education said that students should be taught "all sides" of current scientific theories."
but creationism isn't allowed because it's religious. I'm so confused.
Sorry Texas but stop your backwards ideas/views and join the real world
Evolutionary theory has fuck-all to do with abiogenisis.
It is patently absurd to think that an omniscient omnipotent creator could just 'evolve'.
Obviously, it was created by a multi-threaded Flying Spaghetti Monster... and the hypothesis in Null.
Only Null Pointers to the uninitialized FSM can be safely de-referenced, all others are void hypotheses .
Oh, wait... you meant hairless monkeys?
Most of them aren't intelligent enough to realize a self-inconsistent tautology when they see it.
naturalist need to provide proof? hello! pot calling kettle black here. How about one shed of proof for "intelligent" design?
Just because life is complex doesn't mean someone has to be behind it. Numerous evolutionary branches were not successful in creating man.. We are the product of success/failure of our predecessors.
I often wonder if "survival of the fittest" often applies to people some dumb, so ignorant they have to cloud their mind with useless mythology.
Sure, there could be an intelligent presence that shaped the world.. Is it likely? NO!
I can't imagine how this somehow bleed into schools. Especially in countries like usa.
This is dangerous. I wish someone would finish this argument and say, you can't have it both ways. If you don't want us meddling in religion you need to stay the !@#%%^ out of our schools. pure and simple. Spreading this type of ignorance is dangerous and counter productive to a decent, moral society
Funny how this also has a explanation through evolution.
How backwards is it that science's 'theory' is nothing more then that until is with out a doubt proven. Yet Creationism is apparently fact
i remember years back when religious groups were against sex education. when asked how would their kids learn the B/B said they can watch the farm animals.
and i am still amazed religion has so many followers. laughing but amazed.
Always nice to see the American Taliban hard at work...
Hurray, they finally understand that their claims aren't falsifiable. Unfortunately, they still miss the point.
This is why America is dying
... to measure stupidity in general and religion-induced stupidity in particular.
The question remains why Texas seems to have such an unusually high percentage of religion-induced stupid people?
As far back as I can remember, I couldn't wait for the future to arrive and dreamed every night that I would wake up in the 23rd century. So here I am decades later, living in the 19th.
Pain is merely failure leaving the body
Would there be any real loss to our public educational system if we just declined to teach anything about how the universe came to exist? The kids are going to believe whatever their parents tell them to believe for the most part anyway, and any of them that pursue careers where an accurate understanding of this subject is required will undoubtedly find it's covered in their higher education.
I say we refuse to let the public school system be used as a platform for any group's agenda by removing the material entirely.
-Lod
It is a bad thing because in the scientific world we don't use the default of "some magic being created it" if we don't understand it. Science is about study and practise in order to uncover an understanding of the truth. At no stage should any scientific baseline start with the unicorns did it.
What the majority wants eventually wins. When there are no external threats, the majority will create its own scarecrows -- usually from the things they understand least. Modern science is high on that list, especially given the many "evil scientist" representations in what Wikipedia calls "modern culture".
I expect you to vote, Mr. Bond.
Stupid monkeys...
3 ...and now they will cry about the monkey part!
2
1
This issue will remain for as long as it is possible for anyone to dictate to anyone else what their children will be taught in schools. It's not just science versus superstition, it's also history versus propaganda.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
There's a confusion here between the what is being considered, effectively we a pitting the origin of species against the origin of life which it doesn't address, you can't fail a theory because it doesn't attempts to explain beyond its stated bounds:
Evolution is a theory on the 'origin of species'
against
'the default hypothesis for life's origin has to be that there was an intelligent agency involved"
Another problem is that in Science you can't just say that it happened by magic lalalalalalala, you have to attempt to explain the mechanisms that god used to create life otherwise the theory is not scientific because it is not reproducible,
The factual inaccuracies are a problem too, Amino acids have been created in many varying conditions as they have been found on both Meteor's and Jupiters satellites. Evolution is observable however given the time it takes to run the experiments - only in species that have a short life cycle (smaller subjects such as fruit flies or even better bacteria)
I think we have to continue to only teach Scientific theories in science class not 'it happened by magic'.
Why wouldn't the null hypothesis be "people have always been basically the same as they are today"? Surely that was the null hypothesis that both evolution and creationism attempted to supplant?
Yes, it fails because of all the reasons we know life wasn't always here throughout an infinite history and that time is not cyclical over the timescale of human existence. That's why it's the null hypothesis that the theory of evolution disproves and supercedes. Creationism also seeks to supplant it by positing some creative event that put into place the current ecosystem, whose basis comes from, essentially, old books and traditions, with maybe the occasional misunderstanding of probability and the absolutely grand scales of time and space involved.
In a theology class, a respected Reverend said "Religion is simple mans way of explaining what he doesn't understand".
Over the next several sessions, he covered various cultural and religious beliefs by groups from around the world.
I had known him for years, but it wasn't until that day that I realized, he wasn't a leading member of the church to preach the word of god. He was a leading member of the church to help people who couldn't grasp the fact that there are things we don't fully understand yet. He wasn't preaching the "truth" in gospel. He was helping them from being scared of the unknown.
Unfortunately, there are too many people who take these fairy tales that were intended to help them not be scared, and demand everyone understand it as the truth.
Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade.
A null hypothesis must be falsifiable, and therefor "it must be a wizard that did it" cannot be the null hypothesis.
Q.E.D.
there had to be some intelligent agency behind the appearance of living things
Ok, so what intelligent agency created them, and who created them, and who created them, ...
How did the first "intelligent agency" come to be, because there had to be one before them, but there couldn't be because they were the first.
This is a stupid theory that invalidates itself.
Who would win this election: Andrew Weiner vs Andrew Weiner's weiner.
as anything Intelligent wouldn't have allowed Creationists to exist ;-)
More like the Samuel L Jackson version of Dawkins (although, I'll admit I'm not nearly as cool as either.) And yes, I'm just letting of some steam here.
What?!
What the fuck?!
Those sections say the "null hypothesis" is that there had to be some intelligent agency behind the appearance of living things. It is up to the scientists proposing a naturalistic explanation to prove their case.
Since motherfucking when? I'll tell you, motherfucking never. How much more fucking evidence must scientists throw before your motherfucking ugly fucking face before you fucking get it?
Sample says the "null hypothesis" is such because the old experiments that attempted to produce "building blocks" of amino acids failed to do so. In addition later experiments that produced other precursor chemicals, such as DNA and RNA, required very specific conditions in a lab, and aren't he said. Necessarily reflective of what the early Earth was like. Therefore, he said, the odds of making life from non-life seem too small for a naturalistic hypothesis to work.
Well, what the fuck do you call this? And very specific lab conditions? Well, guess what motherfucker, the early Earth have very specific conditions that resemble nothing like what we have today, so yes, those conditions have to be specific in the laboratory. This doesn't even touch the fact that the early Earth was a much bigger fucking laboratory than some fucking room at a university.
Sample says it isn't stealth creationism - he says the intelligent agency might just as well be aliens. But he emphasizes that he wants students to learn to think critically, and that unlike the physical sciences, there aren't any experiments you can do to demonstrate evolutionary theory.
Firstly, observational evidence that can be repeatably confirmed is just as valid as repeatable experiments with observation in a laboratory. And this is yet another case of "What the fuck do you call this?":
While studying the genetics of the evening primrose, Oenothera lamarckiana, de Vries (1905) found an unusual variant among his plants. O. lamarckiana has a chromosome number of 2N = 14. The variant had a chromosome number of 2N = 28. He found that he was unable to breed this variant with O. lamarckiana. He named this new species O. gigas.
Do you see what year is in there? 1905! Speciation was observed in nineteen o'fucking five. That's 23 fucking years after Darwin's death. Can't fucking demonstrate evolution in the lab my ass.
To paraphrase:
Does the idea that there might be knowledge frighten you?
Does the idea that one afternoon on Wiki-fucking-pedia might enlighten you frighten you?
Does the idea that there might not be a supernatural so blow your Christian noodle that you'd rather stand there in the fog of your inability to Google?
Isn’t this enough?
Just this world?
Just this beautiful, complex
Wonderfully unfathomable, NATURAL world?
How does it so fail to hold our attention
That we have to diminish it with the invention
Of cheap, man-made Myths and Monsters?
(Watch the rest, you won't regret it, promise.)
I get the idea that it's scary to think that this is all we have, but that's not an excuse to just start making things up to make yourself feel comfortable. If we truly want immortality, the only thing that can possibly deliver on that is science. And we can't continue to be held back by people whose only goal is to advance their favorite fairy tales in spite of the consequences. And yes, science can answer question
// file: mice.h
#include "frickin_lasers.h"
Teachers will just do a fast, half ass job teaching evolution or intelligent design. The students won't be tested agressively, and the students will ignore it. Nothing will change.
>>"Religion is simple mans way of explaining what he doesn't understand".
Religion is... not that. Primitive religions, maybe, or people primitive in their thinking. (Which, to be fair, includes a lot of fundamentalist Christians.)
Atheists often try to reduce God to the God of the Gaps, which entirely ignores the code-of-ethics, -behavior, and -worship that actually makes up a religion.
Religion is not the empirical study of the world is. That's science.
Science is not the normative study of how the world should be. That's religion.
Confusing the two, on either side, leads to issues. Mengele, or Theocracy.
Even if you were a religious person, why would you want a science teacher to make a half-hearted attempted at explaining it? I would think that this would more poison kids against religion rather than lure them into it.
"I say we refuse to let the public school system be used as a platform for any group's agenda by removing the material entirely."
I don't think a "let's keep them ignorant for now" approach is the way to go here. The one thing creationists would love even more than teaching intelligent design is *not* teaching evolution.
Just one word to disprove Intelligent Design: Platypus.
Go on, explain that god-lovers. You can't can you! As a missing link it makes sense. As a finished product it does not.
Oh and god lovers, next time you have sex with your sister, wonder why your god put the entertainment center and the sewage work next to each other. Intelligent? Well, I suppose it depends on how you define intelligent. Texas probably has other standards. Texas IQ test: If you don't choke while eating the test, you pass.
Whether or not the "intelligent design" argument is true shouldn't even matter, really. God cannot be studied empirically, so the whole thing's technically outside the realm of science. It could fit in theology or philosophy, but science is limited to that which can be observed and studied.
If Evolutionists can't provide sufficient evidence to disprove the null hypothesis then why should should Evolutionism itself not be considered just as much a matter of faith as Intelligent Design? Arguing that the existence of a process proves the non-existence of the process engineer is no better than saying we were all created as we are in an instant. Neither argument carries any logical validity and can only be considered as statements of "faith".
It actually makes sense to label the gods (Zeus, Allah, Shiva, Yaveh etc) as the null hypothesis, or rather the mythology that defines them. From the Renaissance onwards however, Science has successfully rejected that null hypothesis to the point that it no longer makes sense to call the gods the null hypothesis today. So while eg the Christians still believe, serious people have long since moved on.
If some Texans want to call the gods the null hypothesis in schools, they should be forced to call it the discredited null hypothesis in the interest of historical accuracy.
I think we get it by now. You're anti-organised religion. Your awkward indentation clearly makes you an authority (who else indents?). But I don't think that's the goal of the discourse here.
Science is not the normative study of how the world should be. That's religion.
Nice concept, now seen as we are talking about what should be in a SCIENCE class, prove it!
Last time I checked, public schools were state-run institutions. General subject matter includes: Math, Science, History, Grammar and Literature. Theology is left out for good reason. Matters are just too complicated. As far as I know, Creation isnt a scientific idea; rather it's a theological idea within the Christian community. The issue with theology is that there are far too many angles to cover. If schools were to start teaching it they couldn't solely focus on Christianity, because Judaism, Hinduism and, i'm sure i'm forgetting another major religion, all exist. Hence, separation of church and state.
Wait, im lying....i did learn about religions in 9th grade history. Lessons were fairly straight forward though. Practitioners of $religion worship $deity and read from $sacred_text that preaches $rules_to_live_by. It was little more than stuff we needed to regurgitate for a test and be done with.
except you're wrong because this intelligent agency was intelligent enough to fabricate an entire universe of evidence to test our faith.
I did the math and the result is that the probability of the christian god, the unicorns and the flying spaghetti monster having created this world are all exactly the same. This is probably why the exclusion of other gods is one of the 10 commandments: They're all just as likely, so in the end each one of the gods is very unlikely.
That's what religion was before people in charge realized they could bastardize it to fit their agendas.
Also,
Science is not the normative study of how the world should be. That's religion.
No, that's ethics.
the code-of-ethics, -behavior, and -worship that actually makes up a religion.
Tell that to the large portion of the US citizens that are religious yet have no problem supporting guns, the death penalty, and a war against people, the majority of whom are more or less indifferent to the matters of the states.
Why is it that so many religious people immediately assume atheists are cruel, heartless scumbags? You don't need to believe in a god to know right from wrong.
He keeps using that word. I do not think it means what he thinks it means.
...when you have vast parts of the population living in poverty and uneducated.
Care for the social crcumstances of your people, invest in your country's educational infrastructure and acceptance of and interest for science will increase in the whole society. There are more studies than I can count, putting low educational standards in relation to wacky religious mindsets like those of Christians and Muslims - and vice versa.
One problem is that if you give the religious nuts an inch, they'll take a mile, and say that God told them to do so, and if you call them out on it, they'll quibble over the definition of an inch.
Specifically, this gives them license to present evidence in support of the "null hypothesis." In the classroom of a fundie, there will be a -lot- of "evidence" supporting creationism and next to nothing about the "hypothesis of evolution." It will be extremely easy to preach to the kids that creationism is the one that is proved and that evolution is the one which lacks strong evidence. It will be extremely hard to stop too, they'll make sure to follow the letter of the law.
And the nice thing about ignorant people is that they're VERY easy to control. They'll pretty much just give you money and vote for you without question if you tell them you'll protect them from the boogey men who are out to get them. And they get angry at you if you say anything that conflicts with their version of reality.
The bad thing is they'll drag the rest of us down with them, but if the nation collapses due to their ignorance, another will be happy to take its place. Because one of the things they believe is true is that the USA has some inherent God-Given right to its position in the world, and that is no more true for us than it was for every other fallen empire that has come before.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
How the world *should be* should be based on the way it is.
Codes of Ethics are best based on psychology and empiricism. If you wish to create an ethical construct "You should be monogamous with a member of the opposite sex and faithful for your entire life." Then you should have evidence to support that the outcome of that rule results in the maximum happiness/success/productivity/etc.
Worship is based on an expression again of what elicits the maximum spiritual experience in the believer within the historical/metaphystical claims of the religion. The historical claims are subject to historical sciences and the metaphysical claims are subject to the logical/philosophical fields. Both the logical and philosophical fields also require empirical data to form their assumptions.
At its core Religion is history. It's a claim about the history of the world. Without that history it has no special authority. The authority that religion derives is directly tied to its emperical claims about the world.
If Jesus didn't exist then the words of Christ might be valid but Christianity had to defend their code-of-ethics based on the same criteria everyone else does: empirical studies on the cultural and personal efficacies of those rules. The only reason Religion believes it can circumvent that regular oversight is because it's been ordained by God and God is perfect therefore his commandments require no double checking.
Science is perfectly capable of saying how the world should be. In fact it's better than speculation by bronze age goat herders.
Religion: You should treat women like property and second class citizens.
Science: Women are usually equally capable of making as good of decisions as men and should be equals.
Religion bases its belief on divine ordination. Science performs tests and determines that "God" is a sexist bigot.
Religion: The world should be perfect and some day God will fix it if you sign this metaphysical document here agreeing to agree with everything contained in this book.
Science: The world should be perfect and here are some ways that have a good chance of making it better.
When atheists reduce Religion to God of the Gaps they're being generous. Because Religion not only tries to fill in Gaps, it also tries to fill in things that we're confident about--but are quite different from the religious claims. Atheists try to give the original authors the benefit of the doubt that knowing what we know now they wouldn't have written such foolish things and attributed it to God.
There has to have been divine intervention at some point, how else could people this stupid have not been weeded out of our societies yet?
The only acceptable default position in science is "We don't know", every other position (hypotheses) requires reasonable evidence.
We know that there is a limit to what strictly natural processes can cause, e.g. strictly natural cause will never result in something like the mac on my desk.
There is some interesting work being done in this field by some scientists oa by David L. Abel whom summarizes this limitation as “No non trivial algorithmic/computational utility will ever arise from chance and/or necessity alone”.
"The prebiotic syntheses that have been investigated experimentally almost always lead to the formation of complex mixtures. Proposed polymer replication schemes are unlikely to succeed except with reasonably pure input monomers. No solution of the origin-of-life problem will be possible until the gap between the two kinds of chemistry is closed. Simplification of product mixtures through the self-organization of organic reaction sequences, whether cyclic or not, would help enormously, as would the discovery of very simple replicating polymers. However, solutions offered by supporters of geneticist or metabolist scenarios that are dependent on “if pigs could fly” hypothetical chemistry are unlikely to help." --- Leslie E. Orgel, The Implausibility of Metabolic Cycles on the Prebiotic Earth http://www.plosbiology.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pbio.0060018
See also Self-organization vs. self-ordering events in life-origin models http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.plrev.2006.07.003
Congratulations, you've noticed that I indent my paragraphs. I hope you didn't have to break out a dictionary to figure out how to spell it.
I indent my paragraphs, because it's the way I learned to type, and there has not been a good reason to do otherwise. Formal and information writings can have indented paragraphs. Common business practice is to not indent, but even still I indent those documents.
Oddly enough, no coworker, employer, customer, client, nor readers of any of my works have ever mentioned it, but approximately 3 times on Slashdot people have realized that they had no arguing points, so they preferred to attack my style of writing. There was one troll who was instant that because of the intentions and my online name, that I was Jewish, rich, and for some reason insisted I had a ivy league education.
So, he was wrong on 3 accounts, and you on one.
I never said I am for or against organized religion. I am saying that if any one theology should be taught as factual, all should receive the same treatment. That is never the case in the argument of teaching Christian creationism in school. The argument for it is always that it must be Christian creationism, and it is either to be taught side-by-side with evolution, or specifically excluding evolution.
Why does Christianity get any preferential treatment over facts or other theologies? Just because there is a large number of people who will make noise, and a church can have every member show up to school board meetings. That is a cultist method, trying to force non-believers to follow their dogma.
If it's all fine and dandy to allow Christian theology to be taught as fact, you shouldn't be opposed to ditching the Christian creation myth, and replacing it with the fact that the universes are made by Lord Brahma the Creator, maintained by Lord Vishnu the Preserver and destroyed by Lord Shiva. *THAT* creation myth has been around for much longer than the Christian creation myth. How about the fact that the sons of Bor carried Ymir to the middle of Ginnungagap and made the world from him. From his blood they made the sea and the lakes; from his flesh the earth; from his hair the trees; and from his bones the mountains. They made rocks and pebbles from his teeth and jaws and those bones that were broken. That myth has been around longer than either of the prior.
Those are Hindu and Norse creation myths, respectively.
Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade.
Evolution is not a theory, it's a fact.
How the people should behave is not religion, it is ethics. People can have no religion and be ethical and can have a religion and behave unethically. If you cannot see ethics outside religion you just cannot see ethics outside *your* religion and start to think like a fundamentalist.
Science is not the normative study of how the world should be. That's religion.
No, that would be Philosophy (moral philosophy, for instance), not religion.
Confusing the two, on either side, leads to issues. Mengele, or Theocracy.
Making claims for religion which are simply confused also leads to some serious issues :-)
The problem is that said codes are typically justified by "because god said so", or in some cases "you'll go to hell if you don't do this".
After reading the comments here, I firmly believe that both camps are full of assholes. I therefore abstain from joining either camp.
The Admin and the Engineer
In the face of dogmatic judgements of reason and enlightenment and the hobgoblin of small minds too ruled by fear to seek the light of fact and logic, I always think of these uplifting words.
"The cosmos is full beyond measure of elegant truths, and exquisite interrelationships, of the awesome machinery of Nature." -Dr. Carl Sagan
In fruit flies and bacteria you can do evolutionary experiments in months to a few years. Strict creationism (i.e. species are unique and created by (a) god) has been repeatedly disproven.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
It sounds like you just don't understand the Null Hypothesis.
And surely anything you can't understand must necessarily have been created by an Intelligent Designer, a Higher Power, a "God" if you will, and must therefore be infallible. Well, if that's what you're saying, if that's your argument, then who am I to disagree?
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
I read the title and thought it'd be about some epic micro-brewery beer competition. Religion ... spoiling your fun wherever you go since .. uhm wait yeah there's ongoing discussions about that.
If we're the result of the efforts of some "intelligent agency", that just replaces the origins question with "Where did the intelligent agency come from?"
Of course, their answer is "God", who, unlike everything else, they claim does not require an explanation. You regularly hear creationists argue that God must exist because "everything has to have a cause", but when you ask what caused God they're suddenly willing to make an exception.
But when offered the hypotheses of and uncaused God and an uncaused universe, the uncaused universe is the economic explanation; assuming an uncaused God is a bigger assumption, because you're assuming the existence of something that's more than the universe.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
No. Science might run a bunch of tests and determine that women are equal to men in whatever category it is being studied. *That* is the extent of science. Applying it to normative questions is not science, but something else. Sociology, perhaps, in this example.
I absolutely believe that science can inform the creation of a code of ethics, don't get me wrong. But when someone makes a normative claim like "most animals are not monogamous, therefore I need not be monogamous", it just sets my teeth on edge. It's a false generalization, based on the assumption that humans are no different from the non-human animals being studied (and also ignoring the fact that science *can* in fact distinguish between humans and non-human animals very easily via simple tests).
>>Then you should have evidence to support that the outcome of that rule results in the maximum happiness/success/productivity/etc.
That's why I used Mengele as my example, as it is a very common, and very incorrect reduction that some scientists apply - "humans are animals, therefore humans are no different from other animals". When you use this as the basis for your code of ethics, you see nothing especially wrong in infecting twins with smallpox, as the lessons you learn from your horrible results will result in "maximum happiness" for the human population.
If I were Chinese or Indian, I would be loving this. Imagine, my biggest competitor, ensuring their next generation is superstitious and ignorant. Perfect!
2 equal theories both having equal amounts of independently peer reviewed scientific evidence supporting them may well be treated as being as valid as each other. Unfortunately Creationism/Intelligent design doesn't have any independently peer reviewed scientific evidence supporting it. Yes creationism/Intelligent design should be taught. In the religious/theology department. Science it is not.
The null hypothesis should be comprehensible and it must be completely clear which evidence counts against it. Neither of this is true in case of the null hypothesis they propose. There are no commonly accepted definitions of "intelligence" and "agency."
... very simple.
Science is HOW, religion is WHY.
Both mesh and can coexist peacefully. Neither interferes with the other.
Why can't people see this and stop forcing one on the other?
Theres's always the possibility that we are just artificially intelligent beings in a universe simulation created by some coder in another dimension, where our billions of years are just months and our civilization equal to that of an ant colony.
I say we also include "The Matrix" as one of the scientific theories (way more scientific than creationism anyway), tell the kids they are in a virtual world and that Jesus was Neo.. and that we are waiting for his second coming. That could be fun! :)
Really? It sounds like someone from the board of education had a sit down with a statistician and thought it would sound cool to throw in the null because, for some reason, ID is the default explanation for the origin of species.
What's mind-bogglingly funny about that stance is that in statistics the null hypothesis is "the numbers you got are the result of chance", which must be rejected to conclude that there's some cause for getting the numbers you got.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
If religion is the normative study of how the world should be, I hand in my membership card. Religion is probably the worst method of doing normative study, as it is based on fairy tales of ages old, arguments from authority, and stuff people make up on the spot. Ethics can be approach logically, consistently, and without any reference to a book that supposedly contains the basis of your ethics (or the basis of 20 mutually inconsistent normative approaches). As there's no solid basis for weighing argumentation, a religious normative debate usually ends up with a cabal of people claiming to be right because 'God says so'.
A null hypothesis is falsifiable.
Creationists: Come up with a real, actual experiment and a plausible outcome of it that will disprove the existence of an intelligent creator in your eyes. Sign a binding statement to shut the fuck up about God if that outcome occurs. Then people will stop laughing at you, at least until the experiment shows you wrong and you start whining about interpretations and ineffability.
You could be honest with yourselves and reject the scientific method outright - "don't trust your eyes, trust your faith." It's slightly ridiculous and nobody will take you seriously, but at least you'll be left alone. You want to play at being scientists? Then you'll play by the rules of science.
Religion and science both make claims of how the world works, incompatible claims about the same reality but based on different standards of evidence and modes of argument. There is a clear conflict between demanding good evidence and being satisfied with bad evidence or no evidence at all. The scientific method which hinges on empirical findings and remains subject to falsification, cannot be applied to creationism therefore should not be taught along side science. If creationism were to be taught in school it would fall along the lines of philosophy, not science.
The less scientists there are on the world, the higher my salary. Please go on teaching your students that scientific theories are stories about how it could be, without making any testable predictions.
That strategy and mind-set will be very helpful when doing fault-finding in semiconductors. In case the fault rate goes to high, please don't look for testable reasons, but invent a story how a higher intelligence planned out that a race condition or some glitch on the laptop sold to a specific customer is the will of god. The claim that it is very unlikely that a complex processor exists by coincidence and declare any working processor to be the work of a higher intelligence. Don't forget, you cant loose this argument - you cant be proven wrong, unless the stupid guy who tests one process gas after the other for purity - he is wrong all the time.
The fundamental difference between evolution and ID is that evolution tells me what should happen if i put bacteria in a nutrient and change the nutrient compostion slowly over 100000 generations of bacteria. ID doesn't.
"it is a very common, and very incorrect reduction that some scientists apply - "humans are animals, therefore humans are no different from other animals"."
Who is making false claims here? Of course any person can make mistaken arguments but since they are demonstrably false they won't make their way into science, not for long at least. Since "humans are animals, therefore humans are no different from other animals" is an obvious logical fallacy -the part for the whole, there's no way it will be accepted. As it can't be accepted your argument since it's an obvious logical fallacy too: a strawman proposal.
Oh, and it within science ability to show you why you -and I, feel infecting twins with smallpox to be a bad thing: it's the realm of ethology of great primates so yes, I know why I feel in disgust about somebody infecting twins with smallpox and why somebody will try that so I should impose legal rules to avoid it -everything out of scientific knowledge.
Yes, you don't want to admit it even to yourself but yours is still the god of the gaps.
Dude, logic is only a model for *approximating* descriptions and reasonings about the world around us. It does not, and indeed, *cannot* completely describe existence, as Godel famously proved.
So. You're claiming that your omnipotent ghod's omnipotence is bound within a system which is just a (very limited) tool or game. Fail.
I do feel a little bit bad for those like you who are compelled to believe in a world view which is just so unsupported by evidence... the increasing contortions which one must go through to explain away and argue the extreme inconsistencies in one's world view must be exhausting and unpleasant! Whereas the worldview if an atheist scientist like myself sustains itself effortlessly and, indeed, is actually self-sustaining. :-)
Good luck in your struggle.
>>Religion is probably the worst method of doing normative study, as it is based on fairy tales of ages old, arguments from authority, and stuff people make up on the spot.
Alternatively, you can read it as a set of general moral principles that have been demonstrated over the last two or three thousand years, capable of creating societies that you'd prefer to live in.
When people engage in casuist arguments, they take the set of moral principles handed down from antiquity and apply them to modern problems. As bronze-age shepards never had to worry about The Singularity or nuclear war, there's room for debate, certainly. But there's a remarkable amount of agreement over the big picture of things.
>>Ethics can be approach logically, consistently, and without any reference to a book that supposedly contains the basis of your ethics
Atheists have more trouble building an ethical code, but things like Kant's Categorical Imperative certainly work. Don't think that I believe that all atheists are rudderless, amoral, selfish individuals, though certainly a certain fraction fit this description. But all suffer from the problem of what-man-can-create-man-can-destroy, which is certainly one of the advantages of religion.
>UNKNOWN REASON,
It's not unknown. It's errors. DNA does not copy exactly every time. And sex is merely a way of being able to get more variation in DNA. More variation = more chances to survive (up to a point).
And if you want to get down to the actual reason why DNA copies are not always true, it's because of physics. Physics and probability. Nothing more and nothing less. We've been testing the probability part of the physics for nearly 100 years.
And since your argument fails on its premise - that we don't know where the randomness comes from, all that shit you typed was for naught. The attempt to pull science down to "we just don't know" failed. Indeed, your entire argument is "Argument from incredulity" which isn't an argument at all, but simply a lack of imagination on your part.
Your argument is typical of creationst screeds. It tries to paint scientific arguments as "we just don't know either" when in fact that's not true. Science has done a pretty good job of explaining how the universe operates and we've created some nifty technology based on those rules, which in itself is a test of those rules.
Creationist arguments are not testable. They are not science. Evolution is testable. In fact, we run experiments on evolution all the time with antibiotics. Such experimentation by society nearly killed me with MRSA.
Keep religion out of the classroom unless you want to teach it as a cultural studies course. But then you have to teach other cultures to put things in perspective, and I don't think that the christian taliban behind this bullshit are quite prepared to have the Quran, Mahabharata, Tibetan book of the dead, the writings of Zoroaster, et alia to young minds. They might find their kids might learn something.
--
BMO
No. Science might run a bunch of tests and determine that women are equal to men in whatever category it is being studied. *That* is the extent of science. Applying it to normative questions is not science, but something else. Sociology, perhaps, in this example.
Ummm, Sociology is the scientific study of societies. Sociologists use both qualitative and quantitative analysis like any other science to study societies.
But when someone makes a normative claim like "most animals are not monogamous, therefore I need not be monogamous", it just sets my teeth on edge.
As it should since that's a strawman first off and secondly not very good science. That's like saying "Fish can breath underwater therefore there is no reason to say that you shouldn't be able forbidden from holding your neighbor underwater for hours on end." If however science found that *HUMANS* were actually happier in non-monogamous relationships (and many are) then it would stand to reason that monogamy is not an absolute rule.
When you use this as the basis for your code of ethics, you see nothing especially wrong in infecting twins with smallpox, as the lessons you learn from your horrible results will result in "maximum happiness" for the human population.
Whether or not ends justify means isn't really addressed by any religion either. I don't remember any religion covering "Thou shalt not perform experiments on humans which will harm your subjects."
The closest is the Hippocratic Oath which was largely secular. Furthermore the basis of that is that all human life has value and that we cannot simply take life or injure others without their consent. That's a practical empirically verifiable position since without that basis we open ourselves to tyrannical societies with majority abuse. Our ideal society is not like that and any such society ultimately implodes under corruption and general malaise. You're reducing "science" to essentially saying that happiness is the only standard and if the murder of a hobo makes many happy we are net happier. But I didn't say that. I said maximize Happiness/Success/Productivity/ETC. Etc also includes freedom, independence and value of all sentient life.
This has already been to court and evolution has been proven out. Creationism and ID are just religion in disguise and it can be proven. Call it what you will.. Null Hypothesis.. whatever.. it will have the same approach to life.. life just poofed into existance just because.. and it's already been proven to not be a science but religion.
Interesting documentary about how creationism/intelligent design already lost in court..
http://video.pbs.org/video/980040807
And for these reasons they'll lose again.
didn't we win this battle in Dover Pa? Are we really teaching bronze aged faery tales as reality? We are lagging behind other countries in education because of this religious clap trap. WAKE UP AMERICA ARE EDUCATIONAL SYSTEM WILL CONTINUE TO FAIL IF FEARY TALES ARE TAUGHT AS SCIENCE
>>Who is making false claims here? Of course any person can make mistaken arguments but since they are demonstrably false they won't make their way into science, not for long at least.
Yes, it is obviously a fallacy (a subset of a whole is not equivalent to the whole). And yet pick up a random SciAm or read over the comments on Slashdot, and you'll be able to find this fallacy at work. Homosexuality in animals is often used to inform debate on homosexuality in humans (http://www.news-medical.net/news/2006/10/23/20718.aspx)
>>Oh, and it within science ability to show you why you -and I, feel infecting twins with smallpox to be a bad thing: it's the realm of ethology of great primates so yes, I know why I feel in disgust about somebody infecting twins with smallpox and why somebody will try that so I should impose legal rules to avoid it -everything out of scientific knowledge.
So we're using "feelings of disgust" (which will presumably be measured scientifically) to create ethical laws?
LOL. That'll create a wonderful world to live in.
What irks me so bad about this debate is that people on the fundie side are either simply willfully ignorant (Which is terrible, but at least they're only deceiving themselves) or, much worse, they know the other side's argument, and completely disregard it in favor of spreading misinformation. That is simply unconscionable, and unfortunately, both of these are nearly impossible to convince, because god is on their side.
Sent from my CR-48
Let's take this one step further and teach kids that there are some 10k other gods. And give them equal time.
Bert
This isnt' a good development for sure - why not teach that the world was not only designed, but designed by an elephant-head god or some other mythical figure incompatible with the western traditional? But well, our children are being taught that the world could have been created by a god with a white, caucasian son resembling us. Now, most here can see at least the potential absurdity of that - so why don't you teach that to your f*** children? Why does everybody assume that our destiny is to be indocrinated by the state school and we, citizens, can't educate our children or even the child of others through artistic and cultural production? Educate your child! Go spread the world of science. Write a blog, Recommend others to read Carl Sagan's Demon Haunted World. But stop bitching about Texas - I was raised in full catholic traditional but it took only my mom (who's catholic) showing me Carl Sagan videos in the 80s as an educational option for me to think and abandon religion. This is part of a line of thought that believes that state school is the ultimate medium for education. Kids hate school and most times don't give a damn about what's being taught there. It's the example that we set to our children and to our peers in society that matters the most. While that I'd prefer that Texas took a more objective view of this subject, our children can still learn evolution - in spite of the Texas school board.
>>As it should since that's a strawman first off and secondly not very good science.
It's not very good science, indeed. But it is used *everywhere*. I mean this very seriously - the reduction of man to no better than other animals is used normatively everywhere these days. It's not a strawman, either, as I've had two friends make that exact claim to me (one male, one female). Reading over evolutionary psychology papers tends to set my teeth on edge for the same reason.
>>If however science found that *HUMANS* were actually happier in non-monogamous relationships (and many are) then it would stand to reason that monogamy is not an absolute rule.
Again, science only provides the data on the happiness of non-monogamous couples, or adultery rates, or whatever. Whether or not it is "right" to commit adultery is something science cannot answer.
This is, of course, the problem with all Utilitarian philosophies. They have to special-case any "bad" results, otherwise they'd conclude that two adulterers becoming more happy outweighs the sadness of the partner being cheated on. (Since this is purely a happiness issue, then your "maximize Happiness/Success/Productivity/ETC" equation would conclude adultery is kosher.)
>>I don't remember any religion covering "Thou shalt not perform experiments on humans which will harm your subjects."
You think so? The general principles of Christianity easily apply here: http://www.twopaths.com/greatest.htm
It's when we move away from the concept of the inherent worth of every human being, and move to us just being collections of cells, or just animals, that problems emerge. And the concept of natural rights was based primarily on Christianity.
Every time I read one of these stories I think of my little cousins... They are a full generation younger than I but still my cousins. They have been raised by two wonderful and caring people; An evangelical minister and his wife. Somehow, despite their caring and the love for GOD they have passed on, these three children are for all purposes, ILLITERATE!!!! The eldest, age 12, somehow made it to grade 6 without being capable of reading. They were sent to an evangelical school where the teachings of the Bible trumped basic skills.
Fortunately, they are now in public school. The 12 year old has been brought back 2 grades and the two little ones brought back 1 grade. "This was a concession as the school felt that all three children should be brought back further" They will have to suffer the the stigma of being the "stupid" kids in their classes. They will have to work their butts off just to reach the same level of understanding as their peers.
This anti-evolution movement is part of a much bigger, much scarier problem in The United States. It is actually an anti-intellectualism movement and it scares the crap out of me. Last year in Texas there was a school board trying to remove references of Thomas Jefferson from History texts because of his deist beliefs. They were also trying to refer to the Slave Trade as the "Atlantic Triangular Trade."
Ignorance is alive and well in this country. And it's literally breeding...
seems the Fairy tale myth spreading bible thumping moronic dim whitts are getting out their pink frilly panties yet again .
there is no god there never has been a god never will be a god never can be a god it is like winnie the pooh stories just that a story a bed time read for the kids
Most people have a good grasp these days of the reality of how we came into existence it was certainly Not by some Mythical ( read non existant) being stop wasting money making the churches even richer than they already are put your wallets back in your pockets and wake up this is the year 2011 not a million years or more back in history/time .
There is grave need for a new world order where religion does not exist then maybe we can get on
"And yet pick up a random SciAm or read over the comments on Slashdot, and you'll be able to find this fallacy at work. Homosexuality in animals is often used to inform debate on homosexuality in humans "
Which, again, is a logical fallacy on your side: Presence of property X in a subset of Y allows to make the assumption that property X not only can't be discounted in a different subset X' of Y unless probed that X and X' must be disjointed with regards of property Y but offers a better point of start that any other random Y' property. So, yes, animal homosexuality can be used to throw light to the understandment of human homosexuality. What it won't be is a probatory means of that. And I challenge you to find otherwise. Certainly your citation doesn't do that and it dangerously put you near the "plain troll" position, since the article thesis is "Homosexuality is a social phenomenon and is most widespread among animals with a complex herd life" which for all that we know is hardly either a novel or disputed fact.
"So we're using "feelings of disgust" (which will presumably be measured scientifically) to create ethical laws?"
The devolopment of an ethical sense of existance *is* based on the self feelings of disgust or acceptability. What else did you thing it was?
"LOL. That'll create a wonderful world to live in."
That *has* created the wonderful world you in fact live in.
>>How the people should behave is not religion, it is ethics.
There's a lot of overlap between philosophy, religion, and ethics. That's why ministers are required to study all three in order to get their degrees at most seminaries.
>>People can have no religion and be ethical and can have a religion and behave unethically.
The question of the foundation of a system of ethics is a real one. You can build an atheist code of ethics on the Categorical Imperative (though Kant would disagree). Religious codes of behavior are generally set by a system of moral imperatives delivered by a received text, so they don't have that issue, though if someone rejects the received text, the code obviously doesn't work for them.
Atheists often try to reduce God to the God of the Gaps, which entirely ignores the code-of-ethics, -behavior, and -worship that actually makes up a religion.
I once heard a rabbi explain that theres a time when its important to be an atheist;
Its that time when you see some poor unfortunate person who needs your help. At that time its best to be an atheist; you should help them not because God is standing over you making you help them but because its the right thing to do. God doesn't *make* things 'the right thing to do' they just are.
The code of ethics comes from your humanity not from deity.
In the free world the media isn't government run; the government is media run.
I'm a scientist who opposes the teaching of creationism in science classes. However, in all fairness, creationism is as good a null hypothesis as any. All science beings with a hypothesis, which is then tested for conformation or refutation. Science should not care whether an idea is ultimately confirmed or refuted... it should seek to be as objective as possible. The concept of creationism came first, so why not choose creationism as the null hypothesis?
That having been said, I'm guessing I would disagree with the Board of Education on just how objectively they present this null hypothesis.
>>the article thesis is "Homosexuality is a social phenomenon and is most widespread among animals with a complex herd life" which for all that we know is hardly either a novel or disputed fact.
Did you read it? The point of the study was to construct normative statements for humans from the behavior of the studied animals. I'm not saying it was necessarily wrong, just using it to illustrate this fallacy in our modern world.
>>The devolopment of an ethical sense of existance *is* based on the self feelings of disgust or acceptability. What else did you thing it was?
I'm laughing because you'd set up our moral rules for society as a sort of majority-rules caucus. "All right: Who thinks homosexuality is disgusting? Text your answers to 11023 now!"
>>That *has* created the wonderful world you in fact live in.
In bizzaro-world, maybe. As the above example shows (they could even do the text poll during American Idol!), it is an incomprehensibly stupid basis for moral law. One million Frenchmen can't be wrong, right?
Our system of respect for natural rights of humanity, and humanism in general, is the result of Christian thought. Atheist humanism basically took Christian humanism and threw out the foundation while keeping the results.
How long does it take to teach Intelligent Design anyhow? Would not a lecture lasting more than ten minutes run out of material?
IMO what these people really want is not to teach evolution at all. Darn kids are smart enough see which concept holds water when placed side by side.
SLOWER TRAFFIC KEEP RIGHT
Do you really think the Chinese are going to refuse to educate their enormous population in real science and thus risk jeopardising their almost inevitable domination of the USA in technology? I thought these idiots were patriots, are they really trying to destroy the country?
I'd say it's simply just organised crime. Because it unfolded so recently and the religion thing was not pushed at all until it was clear that dianetics could dodge tax if it pretended to be a religion we do not have to play their game of even considering the possibility. They love to put on the sheeps clothing and get loud fundamentalists that are impossible to distinguish from the merchants in the temple to argue on their side. The scientologists imply that if they can get persecuted for being a criminal scam then so can powerful bottom feeders using Christianity as their scam vehicle, and then possibly some innocents as well.
Once we start talking about Scientology as a cult they have already won a degree of legitimacy they do not deserve because we are grouping them in with fringes of real religions. We've seen this shit grow, there is no mystery and even though they claim otherwise not even the IRS recognises them as a religion.
>>God doesn't *make* things 'the right thing to do' they just are.
That's one of those interesting questions, which Socrates took up in the Euthyphro (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euthyphro).
You're certainly right, that the Bible says that God loves justice and good things (which indicates there are good actions separate from God decreeing them so), but he also makes rather awkward demands from his chosen people (wear a funny hat, don't cut your hair at the corners, don't mix woolens and linens), etc., which have been interpreted several different ways:
1) You should do these arbitrary things because God tells you to do them.
2) Doing these arbitrary things sets the Orthodox Jewish people apart from other peoples, making them easy to identify, so that they can be the example to the world that God wants them to be.
3) They're just customs from an ancient time, and should be mostly ignored unless they also have some moral value. (The Reform Judaism view.)
..shouldn't they at least task the scientist with figuring that one out?
So how's that different from "intelligent design"?
It's just a different religion. Only for global warming we don't really need nor even WANT scientists to prove it.
Against stupidity the Gods themselves contend in vain?
So, let's cut out the middle man and worship whoever made the rules that God can't break.
Precisely. We have no need to believe in a conscious and intelligent being taking charge of everything if logic alone controls the universe.
However, SOME PEOPLE have a need to believer in a superior being, because they cannot handle logic. The problem with logic is that it doesn't always give the answers we want. Some people need an imaginary friend in the sky to give them what's logically impossible.
He can't break his own laws
Breaking his own laws is what's called a "miracle".
But regarding omnipotence there's a question that has been unanswered for so long that there's a special name for it: theodicy. If god is both infinitely powerful *and* infinitely good, then why does he allow suffering to exist?
Ask a women what she will be wearing and you will notice how silly the above is.
Joking aside, why is it so bad to have differences. Not in the "Second class" kind of way, but different. This means different results for different groups of people. Not as easy, I agree, because there will be a lot of gray area and that is hard to explain (on TV). OR/OR is much easier to understand.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
Forget science vs. religion... that's not even how logic and proofs work. How in the world does the burden of proof fall to the status quo that there is not an intellient designer? Person A believes in nothing, person B comes along and says "god did all of this." Person A says "prove it" and person B says, "no, you prove he didnt"!!!
That's not how that works.
Abiogenesis, motherfucker! Do you know what it means?
If you actually read the article, you'll find that this "null hypothesis" business actually refers to the origin of life, which is not the same as evolution. The theory of evolution is about the origin of species, not the origin of life. And yet you have written up a long rant defending speciation and the origin of species, changing the subject completely.
Why did you do this? Are you just ignorant of the difference, or do you prefer to "win" arguments by changing their subject, i.e. cheating?
Does it bother you that there is no verifiable, falsifiable scientific explanation for the origin of life?
"intelligent agency"
duh of course man, NSA was in on it from the beginning, the Be-Ginn-Ing.
How is it then that I've managed to live over 40 years, and the vast majority of non-atheists I know only believe moderately in their religion, and use it solely for life transition ceremonies like marriage, birth, burial, or perhaps the annual Christmas eve mass "before the party"?
Oh, and by the way, I'm not Christian, nor do I believe in any major religion. But your assumption that I have religious beliefs is another data point which shows me that atheists who actively protest against religion tend to be aggressive about it. I admire your ardentness but must point out that not everyone who disagrees with you believes in what you think they believe in.
Just because the fundies are a lot louder than the moderates (see, I can bold stuff also), doesn't make them a majority in many locations, even in the US.
Your assumption that they are silent because they actively support the fundamentalist seems to me to need real statistics for confirmation. I take it that your reasoning is "because the percentage of non-fundamentalist Christians in the set of people actively protesting X is very small, this means that the majority of non-fundamentalist Christians support X". This seems to be erroneous reasoning, it only means that Christians are less likely to actively protest X compared to atheists. There are billions of Chinese atheists who also do not protest against anti-evolution crap, does this mean that they support it? It does, by your reasoning.
I'm sorry, but I refuse to believe that mankind 'evolved' from a tadpole, or whatever it is you bunch of idiots believe in. It is just a theory based on some very old bones and teeth. It is funny how this utter daftness seems to 'prove' that there is a supreme race and I also find it funny how this seems to magically 'prove' that humans in the 'third world' are far less evolved. I'm sorry, but if you've studied history, you will notice that rich biggots have always won feable minds and had their way. In the end, their word has meant nothing but bollocks, but religion continues.. and by God, it will continue to make people fight against the word of a bunch of idiots in a lab. Don't forget, the more our knowledge increases the more our ignorance unfolds.
If you're thinking of replying to say science will win, I hope you understand this: Google 'science + quran.' Make sure you read an authentic and approved translation.
If you're thinking of making jokes, understand that there are many people in this world, Muslims or not, that refuse to believe that we are originally apes/monkeys/tadpoles/fish.
Don't forget, most the advancements made in science originally were from the Arabs. Why? They ceased to believe in the word of biggots, and accepted that there was a creator.
Cheerio old chaps!
This is almost obligatory. Part 30 shows some interesting things, though there are also quite a few of the other parts that are relevant. Get to know the Discovery Institute by video... if you want, feel free to also read about it on Wikipedia
Now, here's the more specifically likely source of this "null hypothesis" stuff, the flawed arguments by Dembski, another one of the former members of Discovery Institute.
Id like to see a study tracing americans religious nuttery to the puritan migrants, would be delicious irony
most logical people, when they see a house, will by default believe that someone designed and created that house. Same thing with a car, a watch, a robot. Why? because the possibility of these things coming about on their own is far fetched. Why would more complex systems have a greater chance of coming to be on their own? If people were more rational and logical - forsaking their own feelings and desires on this subject, it would be obvious to them that highly organized matter does not create itself. Leave a few wafers of silicon, metal and plastic sitting around, and no matter what time, pressure, temperature or other non-intelligent factors interact with it, it will not magically turn into a computer. Add an intelligent being - a human, and you can have your computer.
More important than "what is the default answer?" is "WHY is your default answer $x ?"... for many people, this answer less about evidence and more about faith... and yes, this applies on both sides.
I know theoretically the Church has been cool with evolution since at least the 50's. However that didn't stop me from getting yelled at by a priest because I talked about it during a CCD class when I was a kid in the late 70's and got ratted out by the CCD teacher. (I guess that means at least 2 people working in some capacity for the RCC in my personal experience were creationists. So I have to think it was still quite common at that time to be a creationist even if you were a Roman Catholic. Before anybody asks I didn't get yelled at for simply talking, I got yelled at for bring up evolution which these 2 had a hair across their ass about.)
Did you know 80 to 90% of the moderators on slashdot wouldn't recognize a troll even if one dragged them under a bridge.
>>God doesn't *make* things 'the right thing to do' they just are.
That's one of those interesting questions, which Socrates took up in the Euthyphro (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euthyphro).
I completely lost all faith in Socrates after reading the Protagoras. I came out on the side of the Sophists after that; Socrates didn't even bother listening and made it incredibly obvious as well...
In the free world the media isn't government run; the government is media run.
Your sources are interesting but seem to deal with factual knowledge, not sociological knowledge which is what I was talking about. In my limited experience, vocal atheists tend to look at religion as being a bunch of beliefs held to be factual (and attack the lack of scientific truthfulness of the beliefs), when it seems to me that religion is actually a social phenomenon which for many "believers" is totally disconnected with scientific truth. That is, if someone says to a vocal atheist "I am a Christian", the vocal atheist immediate thinks he knows what that person believes, because he equates "Christianity" to "a set of beliefs" --- when the person actually only meant "I identify with a social group called Christians", and in many cases doesn't believe in "Christian canon" in a particular stereotypical way.
I have no statistics on what the breakdown is between the moderates and the loonies, tho. I am sure that the loonies are a lot more irritating and vocal than the moderates and therefore end up being overestimated as representing religion as a whole.
The Texas Board of Ed. is the LARGEST single customer for textbooks in the US. If they say "we need a creationism section in our science texts" the publishers will put that section in ALL their texts, which means eventually that section will be part of the curriculum across the country.
WTF? Why do the scientists have to prove anything when the religious types don't? ( they cant, its why its called faith )
Teach both as opposing but valid views so the student can decide. Be done with this stupid nonsense.
Or just close the damned schools and let the kids go home, since they are obviously not offering an eduction anyway.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Perhaps the null hypothesis is that there are no intelligent living things (at least in Texas). I propose that we call this 'Unintelligible Design'.
I though you guys in the US were meant to have a constitutionally-enforced separation of church and state.
How long before this issue ends up in the SCOTUS?
Seriously, the support for creationism in the US is making it a laughing stock of the scientific community.
No serious scientist believes in quasi-mystical bullshit about creationism.
Stop abusing your children by teaching it to them as if it were accepted fact.
The theory of evolution is one of the cornerstones of modern biology (and as important in its own field as Newton's theory of Gravity, Einstein's theory of relativity or Maxwell's laws of Electromagentism). There is so much of what can be observed in the world around us that is fully explained by the theory of evolution. Creationism is not a useful explanation of the world around us. As far as I know it makes no predictions or hypotheses that can be proved by experiment.
Does creationism tell us why antibiotic-resistant bacteria have developed? Or do they think that God is punishing us all for some misdeed?
I am so sad to hear this. I can't afford private school for my kids and work too much to homeschool, but I'd still rather see all funding cut from the education system and see the schools close down before much more of this sh*t spreads.
Mod me down as troll, if you must, but it had to be said. People elsewhere are stupid too but to want to discuss creationism in the context of science is a quantum leap of stupidity above the norm.
"I'm laughing because you'd set up our moral rules for society as a sort of majority-rules caucus."
Do you really thing it is anything else but that?
Do you really think the feeling that killing some 1200 people by throwing a plane to a skyscrapper is good but killing some 12000 people by starting a war to liberate a country is bad while at the same time, some few thousands miles away from that place the conversely is the accepted truth is nothing but the expression of ethics by means of a sort of positively feedbacked majority-rules caucus?
"Did you read it [the article about homosexuality predominance among species]? The point of the study was to construct normative statements for humans from the behavior of the studied animals."
I did it. It wasn't.
"[The development of an ethical sense of existance *is* based on the self feelings of disgust or acceptabilit] it is an incomprehensibly stupid basis for moral law. "
No one said otherwise. I didn't speculated about the value of that but I stated the fact that that's the way ethics arise.
"In bizzaro-world, maybe"
Please first define what "bizzaro-world" means and then show me the one we live in is not such a "bizzaro-world".
"One million Frenchmen can't be wrong, right?"
You can bet they are not wrong from the point of view of such million Frenchmen. Which happens to be what ethics is about.
"Our system of respect for natural rights of humanity, and humanism in general, is the result of Christian thought."
I claim bullshit on that. In fact, the conversely is nearer the truth. The Greek/Roman system of natural rights of humanity is what modelled the Christian thought to be what it happened to be.
On the other hand, that kind of basic assumptions about proper social ordering has happened to appear with minor variations in societies and philosophers all around the world obviously non connected to Christian tradition. Ockham would tell you that the "Christian" part of the equation is the one that should be taken out unless strong evidences for it can be brought to the table (evidences that AFAIK are not produced).
How the world *should be* should be based on the way it is.
That's absolutely false. You're employing a formal bit of rhetoric known as the "is/ought fallacy" here. The way the world "ought to be" has nothing at all to do with "the way it is." The world is unjust and imperfect and even a little bit insane. It doesn't have to be, and so it shouldn't be that way.
Codes of Ethics are best based on psychology and empiricism. If you wish to create an ethical construct "You should be monogamous with a member of the opposite sex and faithful for your entire life." Then you should have evidence to support that the outcome of that rule results in the maximum happiness/success/productivity/etc.
Only if you're a staunch rule utilitarian. I, on the other hand, am a deontologist. The outcomes of a moral maxim are irrelevant to its ethical standing. I believe 100% that we should follow moral maxims in spite of their consequences, whether we like them or not. In the words of Kant, "Let the whole world suffer, should justice be done." Giving up a moral maxim simply because it will make you unhappy is not a reasonable thing to do. Asking people to do what makes others happy simply because of the vague and arbitrary notion that "happiness is good" does not constitute a sound ethical theory.
Stuff about religion.
I agree with this. Religion does not deserve a free pass. They're making claims that fall into the realm of other fields which need to be addressed by the tools in that field.
This kind of thinking is pervasive. Here's an example of the kind of reasoning evolution is up against:
Evolution: A Religion?
If evolution is just another religion, people (mostly Christians) reason, why not let other religions compete against evolution in the classroom? Absent a clear understanding of the distinction between the "scientific method" and "religious belief" we're going to see many more battles like this latest one in Texas.
If you wish to create an ethical construct "You should be monogamous with a member of the opposite sex and faithful for your entire life." Then you should have evidence to support that the outcome of that rule results in the maximum happiness/success/productivity/etc.
The trouble there is in deciding what to maximize/minimize. I suspect it would be fairly easy to show heterosexual monogamy minimizes inheritance battles (assuming patriarchal inheritance) while maximizing baby production and genetic diversity. And I think a few people still genuinely believe these are the sole/primary goals of marriage, but most don't.
Both the logical and philosophical fields also require empirical data to form their assumptions.
I don't think that's how assumptions work.
Empiricism is great, and there are some values everyone's pretty much agreed on (e.g. stealing is a dick move if you have other means of providing for yourself, and don't kill anyone unless you have a really good reason), and I believe in an objective reality. But values can't be empirically determined; empiricism only shows which behaviors maximize values determined by some other means.
Indeed, I'm rather heavy into meditation these days and the things which come with it, but it's never clear precisely where the line between metaphor and reality lies in terms of instruction. And that's really pretty common outside of science, and really in it as well. One is never really sure when it comes to the Heisenberg uncertainty principle if you really can't know both location and speed or if the knowledge requires something which we haven't yet determined. Hypothetically there are all sorts of scenarios in which we could know both, it's just that nobody has managed to find one that is scientifically defensible and as such the reality at present is that it's one or the other.
First of all, not believing in Evolution does NOT mean you don't believe in science. I'm a Creationist and I'm also an Engineer by trade. I used to study black holes and quantum physics for fun. The two are not mutually exclusive.
Second, the number of biology teachers that believe/teach ONLY evolution is less than 50% nation wide. About 1 in 8 agree that there was some intelligence behind creation, and roughly 60% don't care. (http://onfaith.washingtonpost.com/onfaith/undergod/2011/02/1_out_of_8_biology_teachers_reject_evolution.html)
"Sample says it isn't stealth creationism - he says the intelligent agency might just as well be aliens."
http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/disingenuous
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
Evolution does not address the divine. God may well have deliberately created evolution and for all we know God, Himself might have evolved from a lesser state or continue to evolve today. It is only a few oddball church groups that have a problem with evolution. Creationism has a place in world religions course but should not be mentioned anywhere near a science class. Hopefully students might be able to tell when they are actually in a science class.
"The godma/dogma affected will never reason effective." They are fyking delusional megalomaniacs like hitler, stalin, napoleon, popes, mullah ... all godma-wars prove insanity lurks within the "soul" of many humans.
Another sign of politician/clergy...sheep is their fervent belief that godma/dogma is a prerequisite for moral/ethical nature/behavior. From decades of experience and observation, I do expect, regular folks and atheist will protect and never (weasel-rules) break any 10 Constitutional Rights, commandments.... Politician/clergy and their sheep are mental/emotional cripples that are still willing to murder (men, women, children) all infidels for a global dogma/godma-republic on earth.
US/EU... Democracy is we rule with reason. We are responsible.
US/EU... Republic is godma/dogma values. We ain't responsible.
Unaccountable leaders are masters, and unrepresented people are slaves. How do US and EU fare?
I find it curious that for all the backwards stuff the Catholic Church does, evolution doesn't seem to bother them in the slightest.
FWIW, the vatican observatory does real academic research: Planetary Sciences, Stellar Astronomy, Extragalactic Astronomy, Cosmology.
"With support from the Vatican government, the scientists at the Vatican Observatory have a freedom to choose research topics not constrained by three-year proposal cycles or passing scientific fashions. As a result, our research topics, reflecting the wide range of interests in our staff, can focus on long-term survey programs and sometimes risky cutting-edge topics."
http://www.vaticanobservatory.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=category&id=38&Itemid=145
Also, the current theory for the origin of the universe, the big bang theory, was developed by a priest and it was rejected by the "open minded" eminent scientists of the day because it was developed by a priest and "smelled of creationism". The term "big bang" was used by these eminent scientists as a pejorative.
"Monsignor Georges Lemaître, a priest from the Catholic University of Louvain, proposed what became known as the Big Bang theory of the origin of the universe, he called it his "hypothesis of the primeval atom". The framework for the model relies on Albert Einstein's general relativity and on simplifying assumptions (such as homogeneity and isotropy of space). The governing equations had been formulated by Alexander Friedmann. In 1929, Edwin Hubble discovered that the distances to far away galaxies were generally proportional to their redshifts — an idea originally suggested by Lemaître in 1927. Hubble's observation was taken to indicate that all very distant galaxies and clusters have an apparent velocity directly away from our vantage point: the farther away, the higher the apparent velocity."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Bang_Theory
It's a bit tricky. See if you can find anything by Ilya Prigogine on the subject. IIRC he stated that complex systems (you really mean living systems, don't you?) can come into being if you maintain a steady-state equilibrium of a system that's far out of normal thermodynamic equilibrium. The easiest example that comes to mind is the hexagonal Bénard cells if you boil water. There is nothing in the water that makes it hexagonal; it's because you boil it.
:-)
This is also why living systems die when they lose the constant influx of their energy source for too long a period: it reverts to thermodynamic equilibrium (i.e. rots).
I think he stated also somewhere (sorry can't remember exactly) that some difficult problems in embryology (i.e. which side of the embryo becomes up if it starts from a completely symmetric ovum) can be solved if it is assumed that the chemical processes that steer the differentiation are chaotic like the Belousov-Zhabotinsky reaction. Living systems can create other living systems out of chaos and basic materials and energy. Pregnant women do need to eat more than normal, though, to build the baby inside them. Living and reproducing costs energy, it is not an equilibrium state but a steady-state.
Also, Maturana and Varela have shown that living systems (with humans possibly as an exception.. hopefully not!) can have a recurring loop with their environment where they shape their environment to be more amenable to them living in it, and their environment shapes them to fit it better. E.g. rainworms eat up the soil, but by doing that, they also make the soil easier to eat (better aerated) for future generations of rainworms.
I hope that this answers your questions somewhat. These things are not often discussed because they are (A) multi-disciplinary and (B) difficult. But don't fall into the trap that because you don't see documentaries on TV about it, it is not a topic of conversation. It just means you have to watch a better class of documentaries or read better books
But start with Prigogine (e.g. Order out of Chaos is highly readable). He was not just a physical chemist but also a philosopher. *AND* he taught in Texas for a while, what a coincidence!
To be, or not to be: isn't that quite logical, Slashdot Beta?
Really? It sounds like someone from the board of education had a sit down with a statistician and thought it would sound cool to throw in the null because, for some reason, ID is the default explanation for the origin of species.
Certainly plausible, or perhaps some ed board jerk has a "degree" in "education" or "management" which included some basics stats.
The real problem is that a null hypothesis implies the default case of inaction. In other words, a valid null hypothesis for the origin of species would be that it "just happened"; that there was no external causative agency. It is therefore up to the proponents of ID or any other theory to show their proof.
(In any case, natural selection is wasteful in the extreme, and can be taken as evidence of the absence of any intelligence at work.)
Really? If I disprove it, will they accept the logic and the fallacy of their own unproven beliefs? Or, are they going to go ape shit, stamp their feet and rattle their sabers? Let's see....
Let's begin at the beginning.... The account of creation, Genesis....
"""In the beginning God created the heavens and the Earth. The Earth was empty, a formless mass cloaked in darkness. And the Spirit of God was hovering over its surface. Then God said, "Let there be light," and there was light. And God saw that it was good. Then he separated the light from the darkness. God called the light "day" and the darkness "night." Together these made up one day. And God said, "Let there be space between the waters, to separate water from water." And so it was. God made this space to separate the waters above from the waters below. And God called the space "sky." This happened on the second day. And God said, "Let the waters beneath the sky be gathered into one place so dry ground may appear." And so it was. God named the dry ground "land" and the water "seas." And God saw that it was good. Then God said, "Let the land burst forth with every sort of grass and seed-bearing plant. And let there be trees that grow seed-bearing fruit. The seeds will then produce the kinds of plants and trees from which they came." And so it was. The land was filled with seed-bearing plants and trees, and their seeds produced plants and trees of like kind. And God saw that it was good. This all happened on the third day. And God said, "Let bright lights appear in the sky to separate the day from the night. They will be signs to mark off the seasons, the days and the years. Let their light shine down upon the Earth." And so it was on the fourth day."""
God declares day and night, a process that exists because of relation of the Earth to the Sun, on the first day. He creates light without any existence of stars, which occurs on fourth day. Proof that whoever wrote the bible did not comprehend the significance of stars or that our Sun, that brings us this light, is also a star.
I haven't even cross the first page, let alone the fourth paragraph. Should we even bother to address the next page, where God having created man AND WOMAN (however, Eve is created after Adam gets lonely, long after the Seventh day is over) on the Sixth day and says to them behold the seed-bearing plants I've created for you. Then just one paragraph later states that God brought water and plants *after* he created man. And, God created birds and animals on the fifth day, however he later creates them after Adam is already wandering in the garden of Eden, saying, "It is not good for him to be alone."
If I continue, their sense of right and wrong will no longer be upheld by fear of a deity and I'll probably be killed for simply pointing out the obvious. One of these days try it, tell a Muslim, Jew and/or Christian that they are brothers and sisters because everyone is descended from Noah, due to all the other inhabitants of the Earth being destroyed by their God. Then, see them foam at the mouth and discuss having you tied to a tree and hung to death. I have experienced this, for nothing more than stating the obvious "truth", provided to me by their own 100% accurate and holy book of God that has not been altered by anyone but God forever and ever, Amen.
The real truth is, people read between the lines, and those lines they deem acceptable to themselves are the ones they hold dear. That is their Gospel and everlasting truth, regardless what any deity may think or say or do.
I know theoretically the Church has been cool with evolution since at least the 50's. However that didn't stop me from getting yelled at by a priest because I talked about it during a CCD class when I was a kid in the late 70's and got ratted out by the CCD teacher. (I guess that means at least 2 people working in some capacity for the RCC in my personal experience were creationists. So I have to think it was still quite common at that time to be a creationist even if you were a Roman Catholic. Before anybody asks I didn't get yelled at for simply talking, I got yelled at for bring up evolution which these 2 had a hair across their ass about.)
I did the sunday school thing in the same time frame but I had a different experience. "Days" in genesis were metaphors. Evolution was fine as long as the "guiding hand" behind its direction was acknowledged. Of course the local parish priest had a PhD in Chemistry and supplemented the small parish's income by teaching chemistry at the local state university. I believe he was the dean for a few years.
I don't doubt your rouge priest story, but science has its own rogues. The eminent scientists of the day rejected the big bang theory of the origin of the universe because it "smelled of creationism" and had been developed by a priest.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Bang_Theory
Doesn't atheist bigotry pisses you off? I mean really! The nerve of those people stepping on religion's territory.
Atheists can be bigots too. The eminent scientists of the day rejected a theory for the origin of the universe because it was developed by a priest and "smelled of creationism". The priest called his theory the "hypothesis of the primeval atom", the eminent scientists coined a pejorative name for the theory: "the big bang".
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Bang_Theory
So explain to me what is so intelligent about having the sewer system outflow in the middle of the play ground.
Undetectable Steganography? Yep, there's an app fo
Intelligent Design requires me to believe that a deity deceives my senses. That leads straight to Jesus dying on the cross to save me personally (an you too if your are interested, but specifically me) as also being a deception. Just as 1 +1 = 2 leads to trig and calculus the idea that our senses are confounded by a supernatural deceiver invalidates salvation.
And, as my brother the physicist rejects faster than light travel because he simply refuses to live in a universe with out causality, I refuse to live in a universe without salvation, so I reject out of hand ID.
The real issue is that bad men want to use the Old Testament to control women and make them into compliant robot wive-servants. From my position, which is in Texas and at the tip of the spear, it Is time to call "Bullshit!" on them on both of those points.
Scopes redux. Where is Clarence Darrow when we need him?
Literal bible interpretation is a protestant thing
Ever heard of Galileo? The Catholic church might not have a problem with evolution now but they used to have a problem with the earth orbiting the sun.
The reason evolution is such a threat to many (not all) religious people (I'm an atheist, so you can figure out my bias :)), is that they believe in life after death, that is, that they will live forever. To actually "die" when you die scares them out of their minds. Literally. To their way of thinking (and I've discussed this with a lot of believers), if "evolution" is true, then religion must be false. It is an either/or thing for them. I heard one Christian tell me that if evolution were proved true, he would have to stop believing in God. Which means he would also not have eternal life, he would die like a bug. This makes the theory of evolution a mortal issue, and one that must be fought to the death! Fear of final death, which most Christians deny, is the prime motivator behind creationism, intelligent design and all other "stealth" methods of trying to insert magic into science. It is interesting that most religious people are not even aware of this deep seated fear in themselves. But it is always there. That is the power of religion - you do not have to die. The real solution to this is to encourage people to accept that they will die in reality, and anything else is only wishful thinking, but it is enormously difficult. Religions have thousands of years of experience and huge institutions which effectively persuade and convince people they will live forever, if they just don't "think". And so they don't. Think.
There is no evolution in Texas.
Sorry, but gray text on gray background is making my eyes bleed.
It'll all be decided on May 21, 2011 anyway. If those Texans had any faith, they'd quit bitching, sit back and be prepared to laugh at all us non-believers.
Have gnu, will travel.
The decline of a commonly agreed objective reality (based on facts and logical reasoning) in United States at least, appears to be concurrent with the rising popularity of home schooling in the past 25 or 30 years. It's not clear that government is the problem. Certainly it doesn't appear to be the only problem.
If you mod me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine.
Ok, so as a school district you want to teach about creationism alongside evolution. To some that may be fine. The issue I have is who's version of creationism? Why do all these nut jobs always insist on teaching Judeo-Christian creationism stories? What about all the other creationist accounts in other religions? Shouldn't we teach ALL creation stories to be fair and balanced?
Then there is the issue of who should be qualified to teach Judeo-Christian creationism. We're forcing this teaching onto science teachers. Regardless of whether or not they want to teach, they simply are not qualified. In my opinion, the only person really qualified to teach the Judeo-Christian creation story is someone from the religion that created the story. We need a rabbi. Christians just inherited the story from the Jews. Funny part is, most of the rabbis I have spoken to do not take the 7 day creation story literally.
Actually, the moment a religious fact is deemed a scientific hypothesis, it becomes very easy to disprove -- or prove... In fact, I am pretty certain that this move is ultimately self-defeating: it is saying that humans tend to believe in the intervention of the supernatural (which is true -- humans are like that) and that observation showed that the supernatural was a rather weak explanation (they'll get to it).
We should see this as the first steps towards Enlightenment: start to express beliefs in the form of expected observations. This is how science (the modern kind) was born the first time. It might well happen again.
In fact, if you need the treat of some Hell to act ethically, you are clearly a scumbag at heart. Atheists behave the way they behave because they hold some system of value to be worth acting upon for its own sake.
Such systems typically contain no taboo other than the Golden Rule (don't do onto others what you don't want done onto you). BTW, this is not such an easy rule to follow, because you must think deeply about what you wish, what other people wish and about consequences. I expect people prefer arbitrary rituals and interdicts because they are _easy_.
Let these ignorant idiots do what they like, they most certainly will NOT control the rest of the US.
We are ready to accept any suggestion of godlike entities, divine intervention, fate, luck, or anything related with intelligent design. But surely the next step in our evolution will be able to get rid of that concepts.
My understanding is that the null hypothesis implies that there is no relationship between a given cause and effect. So in terms of the evolution/creation business, it would have to be formulated in way to make that possible. For evolution, the null hypothesis would be something along the lines of genetics and environmental conditions have no effect on the emergence of life. Then one would simply need to find a statistical evidence to the contrary (which has been done extensively). A separate null hypothesis would need to be generated for creationism - that there is no relationship between god and the creation of life.
I wish these people wouldn't continually re-purpose well defined terms for their own use. It makes them look stupid to people who are educated, and more dangerously, makes them look smart to people who maybe aren't as educated.
It's a much more enlightened comment than the rest of the ad hominem that fills the comments sections when this topic comes up.
The brains of a chicken, coupled with the claws of two eagles, may well hatch the eggs of our destruction.
This type of tactic has been used before, in Pennsylvania, where the religious idiots (as compared to normal religious people) try to use "intelligent design" as a way to get their religious ideas inserted into the public clssroom. The judge in that case completely trashed the group trying to shove this religious ideology onto the public system, clearly stating that "intelligent design" is nothing more than a cover for religion.
The effort in Texas will fail, too. What's really funny is that these same religious zealots are also the people who are always bowing down to the constitution and also arguing that we should torture terrorists. That's how stupid they are.
> It's belief that's the issue.
So how exactly do you interact with other humans normally? Considering that you have practically no scientific evidence as to what they actually think and believe given their outward appearance?
You actually create tens if not hundreds of practically unsupported hypotheses every day, and make decisions based on them. If that's not a form of belief, I don't know what is.
> That you think some of it is a parable just means you're egotistical enough to judge what you believe to be divinely inspired.
How ironic that this comment just means that you're egotistical enough to judge others' moderate religious beliefs egotistical.
It is an amazingly sad state of affairs, that the majority of the population have become so complacent in following the lies, that they no longer think for themselves.
It's much worse than that. The principal lesson of religious indoctrination is something they call faith. What is faith? Faith is the ability to believe things that don't make sense, or things that fly in the face of evidence and common sense. Faith is supposed to be a virtue. The stronger your faith (in other words the more ridiculous thing that you can convince yourself of) the more virtuous you are. People who can believe genuinely silly things like the world is about 7,000 years old, are considered to be the most impressively virtuous.
It doesn't take much effort to see just how dangerous this is. Once you have indoctrinated people with this mental poison they are vulnerable to all sorts of manipulation. It's like putting a rootkit in people's minds that allows infection by other absurd ideas. Sure most religions are mostly benign, god is love, don't covet, golden rule, etc., but once the mental rootkit is installed malignant viruses have a perfect way in. Crusades, jihads, bigotry, intolerance, fear, and ignorance find fertile ground to grow in a mind that has been compromised by the faith rootkit.
Most of the world's biggest problems require the presence of this mental rootkit to truly take hold. Global warming is a myth. Terrorism. Bigotry. Capitalism.
There is a way to immunize people against the faith rootkit. It's called education. In particular a thorough education in the scientific method and formal logic. Religions know this. They know that science and reason are their mortal enemy. They know that evolutionary biology is particularly effective at showing that the Bible is more myth than history. They will fight to the very bitter end to undermine real education and replace it with indoctrination.
-- QED
unfortunately most creationists counter that while evolution is true _within_ species, it can't _create_ a new one...and of course pointing out evolutionary diversion doesn't penetrate their closed minds:-(
if by democracy u mean tyranny of the majority, then please remember that the u.s. has a constitution designed to prevent it...but it takes determination.
The /. crowd regulary throws a collective hissy fit whenever this comes up (and it does come up with some regularity), but I am wondering - why exactly? Basically, they're presenting pupils with an alternative theory that (I'll assume they're not completely stupid) is much like God - not really disprovable, and fits in nicely with "our" naturalistic explanations. Essentially this means we are acting like metaphysicists - arguing about the Ultimate Cause to 42. Now, I'm pretty sure most of you wouldn't think of this as a compliment. And it's really no wonder it's a losing battle - it always has been. Think of the Enlightenment period - trying to delete God lead them to trying to install other things as God. It's an nearly impossible sell to do otherwise - say there's no benevolent guy with a white beard and offer nothing more than vague theories in return. And one more thing. Why is it assumed that the kids are going to buy the intelligent design hypothesis? My biology class was evolution-only, but that still didn't dissuade some students from believing in God-as-creator-of-all-life-in-Universe. Because it can be (retro-)fitted. I feel like I'm rambling, so I'll try to be concise: The religious students aren't going to stop believing, nor should that be the goal of science education. Why assume the non-religious ones will suddenly accept all that they're being told? Especially if we assume (in good faith, heh) that this isn't being beaten into them.
I'm from Texas, and I'm a religious person, and I really am tired of this crap. These people give Texans and religious people a bad name, all in one fell swoop. For the last time: the creation story in the Bible is NOT meant to teach science. It's a theology of creation meant to convey two things: God did it and it's good. The "how" is left out entirely and for good reason: it doesn't matter theologically. Trying to pawn off Creationism to students makes me sick, not only because God should not be taught in the science class, but because Creationism isn't even an accurate interpretation of the Bible! Arg!
So it is hard to gauge if it's truely common or not with a couple pieces of data. However I'd like to think I'm not that unusual and my life is probably typical so given the 2 options are either A:It's not that uncommon or B:You're really unlucky to find one of the very few nut job priests I'm going to go with A until I have more data.(But like they say, an anecdote is a starting place to come up with a hypothesis or 2.) Admittedly I could just be unlucky.(Hell, I'm the guy who had a teacher in first grade that hated smart kids.)
Did you know 80 to 90% of the moderators on slashdot wouldn't recognize a troll even if one dragged them under a bridge.
I think it would really help if we had required classes that started teaching kids about all major world religions they may encounter. Start with their creation stories and move on to beliefs practices history. Sadly, people would be up in arms about even a fraction of that here but seriously, it may eventually help stop this nonsense and make us a little less afraid of each other.
This touches on something that is very consistent with the conservative fundamentalists that are pushing ID. By introducing even the slightest bit of doubt into the tenets scientific thought, they will then paint the entire spectrum of scientific discovery as questionable. It is their hallmark to amplify the slightest doubt or inconsistency in a subject, to support the position they want on that subject.
Facts, truth, and scientific progress do not matter to these people and never have. What's ironic about this is, they're more than happy to make a buck off of scientific progress (see Defense industry supporters), yet want the general public to be as scientifically dumb as possible.
There's much more to it than that; all human activity including science tends to devolve into widespread jingoism (or simple dogma) when group numbers become high enough. Those jingoisms and dogma (of "science" in this case) are easily subverted as in the given example or in for example a claim that Occam's razor slices up "evolutionary theory" in favor of "God did it!".
And for your benefit there's no shortage of "nuts" anywhere, ever, if you're focusing primarily on the religious ones or Americans you're simply unable to focus on or even notice all the other ones :)
I believe, as an atheist, that someone who requires a set of arbitrary rules to behave ethically -- or worse, the threat of eternal damnation -- is a scumbag at heart. Although I believe actions speak louder than words, I also believe doing the right thing for the wrong reason is not sustainable.
Thus I believe that ethical systems based on figuring out which individual behaviour leads to more desirable collective outcomes are better ethical systems than those prescribing the same individual behaviours for arbitrary reasons.
Also, as an individual, ethics are not hard to build: one but needs to think about the consequences of one's actions, and prefer those actions which are better for the greater number of people, as well as those actions which have no more negative outcomes when duplicated by a large fractions of the population. And this is fundamentally consistent with the belief that there is no afterlife and no second chances: your deeds live after you, as well as the memories people have of you. “Heaven”, is therefore when these are maximised.
While personally I'm a Christian, I have to admire the intelligence of the design of the Flying Spaghetti Monster. He's just the right size for His Noodley Appendages to get into all the nook and crannies of the Evolution In Schools debate, and cross over into the rest of Deliberately Bad Science (e.g.. the global warming "controversy", which is why the Republicans' Corporate Sponsors are supporting the "evolution controversy".) And the FSM is starting to acquire some antiquity - the Pirate meme is kind of fading, but still useful.
And of course "intelligent design" is entirely the wrong Null Hypothesis. The correct one is "Everything has always been exactly the same as it is today", and Evolution and the Big Bang and Continuous Creation and religious origin myths are attempts at explaining how and why that might or might not be true.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Take a big wall, stand clear from that wall, blindfold yourself, and throw a dart towards that wall. Now create a small circle where that dart landed on the wall. Now you can claim that there must have been some intelligent throwing going on, because the probability of actually hitting that exact spot in the wall while being blindfolded is extremely damn small. Food for thought.
The appropriate Null Hypothesis is that "everything has always been like it is now", and Darwinian Evolution and Intelligent Design and Pastafarianism and various creation myths and the Big Bang and Continuous Creation are all attempts at looking at the world to explain why that might or might not be true. "Why are we here?" is a Philosophy question; "Why is everything really complex? That seems surprising" is more of a science question. Religious hypotheses are more appropriate in a philosophy class, where the problem is not just about the physical world, but about the mystery of consciousness. In a science class, they provide you a hypothesis that says "Evolution happened, all in one week in 4004BC, and it was able to work that fast because there was an Intelligent Designer pulling the strings", which is somewhat testable.
And I suspect that the legislature really, really does not want to go there.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
One often hears cranks of one sort or another insisting that their view should be the "null" hypothesis.
This reflects a widespread misunderstanding of what the "null hypothesis" actually is.
Cranks imagine that the null hypothesis is somehow a privileged hypothesis that doesn't require evidence--it is just assumed be true until proven false--which is why they want their own particular notion to be considered "null."
In reality, the "null hypothesis" has a very specialized meaning, which is not general to science, but rather limited to statistics.
Basically, when you are asking if two things are different, or if something has changed, one does this by exclusion--by showing that the evidence does not support the assumption that there is no difference. That's what the "null" means--"no difference." This does not mean that one starts by assuming that "no change" is correct, or even that the null hypothesis is more likely to be true.
Of course, a creation myth, like the theory of evolution, is an account of change, so it cannot possibly be a null hypothesis. A null hypothesis of the history of life--that nothing has changed--is not going to be very appealing to those who look to nature to justify their religious beliefs, because a universe that has always existed, unchanging, does not have much need for Gods. Scientists are more open to the notion; at one time, a steady-state theory of cosmology was popular. It's just that the evidence, both cosmological and earthly, does not support the null hypothesis of an unchanging universe.
It's like living in an insane asylum. Only without the access to good drugs.
You can't get good drugs? That sucks man... maybe try hanging around your local college campus?
Knowledge != Intelligence
That was one of the ancient Greek arguments about whether the gods were really omnipotent or not, but if that's all that you did with it, your professor did you a disservice by leading you up to a beach, mentioning that there's sand on it, and then leading you off somewhere else without suggesting that you could jump in the ocean a few feet away or that there were lots of giants whose shoulders you could stand on while looking at it.
The standard response is that evil is the result of human free will, and that free will is enough more important than even the obvious evils in the world that there's still justice. But that's just one place to jump into the ocean; if you'd like to jump in the same ocean twice, another is to look at questions of what you mean by "evil" and "justice" and "omniscience" and "omnipotence" and talk about whether they're simple enough concepts for syllogisms to apply to, because obviously they're not.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Religion is an unmeasurable crime against humanity. Period. All those who impose this on their children are not human and should not be treated that way.
Intelligent design is what happens when Creationism evolves to deal with an environment that's placing stresses on it and new predators that want to eat it.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Yes, undermining education undermines our ability to govern ourselves and corrupts children into not thinking about what they're told. Are you suggesting that that's NOT their objective?
The right-wing takeover of the Republican party has been well-designed, and while it's mostly about getting people to vote Republican and getting voters to support wars when they want wars, but occasionally their Corporate Sponsors have other messages, like "Drill Baby Drill" and "There's No Global Warming" (so leave our oil companies alone.)
The Anti-Evolution parts are there to tell religious conservatives that the political conservatives are the party that they agree with and that supports their objectives and to get them to emotionally identify themselves as Right-Wing Republicans. The Rove/Bush/Norquist/Limbaugh/Fox folks mostly don't actually believe in Creationism themselves, but they don't care. They care about pushing the buttons of potential supporters. Religious conservatives aren't any dumber than liberals, and if you don't think liberals don't have buttons to push, try telling feminists how early fetuses have heartbeats and brain activity and that abortion kills them. What's useful about religious conservatives is that their buttons are big and well-marked and lots of people have lots of practice pushing on them. Occasionally the right-wingers get caught pushing religious people's buttons - there was a lot of press in the mid-late 00's about how evangelicals were getting disillusioned about how the Bush Administration was using them and not giving them anything in return, and this is part of that - but so is the creation of the Tea Party, which suddenly discovered that there was a horrible budget deficit now that Bush wasn't going to be in office.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
...We're sitting in a celestial dish of yogurt, that's been in God's fridge for far too many eons. We're mold. I doubt anybody cares about the warranty on their moldy yogurt.
Oh, the talking to us and giving us crazy people thing. Yeah, well, God's a bit eccentric. I mean, the dude's omniscent and living alone. And has been. For all eternity. So he talks to his moldy yogurt, so what. You would, too!
The null hypothesis in Science is "I don't know", not "A Wizard did it."
Frink: "Yes, over here, [...] in Episode BF12, you were battling barbarians while riding a winged Appaloosa, yet in the very next scene, my dear, you're clearly atop a winged Arabian! Please do explain it!
Lucy Lawless: Uh, yeah, well, whenever you notice something like that... a wizard did it.
Frink: Yes, alright, yes, in episode AG04-"
Lucy Lawless: Wizard!
—The Simpsons, "Treehouse of Horror X"
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/AWizardDidIt
Texas = baby Jeebus in an army camo onesie.
...jurisdictions like Texas that are gradually invalidating the teaching of evolution find that national centers of excellence like the Ivy League colleges will not accept the credentials of kids graduating from high schools that fail to teach legitimate science. When George Bush finds his grandkids can't get into Yale because their science preparation is simply unacceptable to Yale, not matter how big a 'legacy' they are, things will change.
But where do you stop? Religions are, in some respect or another, mutually contradictory. It follows that they can't all be right - and it's not a big step from there to concluding that none of them are.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Philosophy and Logic are intertwined.
At its most basic philosophy says:
"If we are _____ then logically one must conclude ____ is also true and we should therefore ____."
All philosophy makes a list of "If we are ____" assumptions. If you don't base those assumptions on empirical values then no philosophical statement has any authority--it's just wild speculation.
Philosophy and math are both based on proofs. Theorems are built on other theorems and those theorems built on other theorems. Ultimately though you can never have apriori mathematical theorems and you have to rely on postulates.
A theorem is only true of the postulates its uses to prove itself are themselves true. Since no theorem ultimately is based on a theorem you could say that every theorem is an "assumption". And every assumption is ultimately based on empirical study.
If you assume that addition works in such a away that A + A = 3A instead of A + A = 2A you would reach very different conclusions. Neither is intrinsically more correct than the other. You could have a universe in which addition isn't linear. It's ultimately thanks to empirical observation that we can say that A + A = 2A.
Philosophy is exactly the same. Like mathematics you can create arbitrary equations but ultimately it's empiricism which determines which equations actually represent the real world.
Totally agree. A proper null hypothesis would be that all life on Earth has existed unchanging forever.
We know where leadership by an anti-intellectual "strongman" who scapegoats minorities and likes boisterous rallies goes
That's about as logical as that time a state legislature proposed that Pi would henceforth be equal to exactly 3. (Which did in fact happen, but only as an April Fool's joke.)
The existence of God (or divine creation, for that matter) cannot be an honest Null Hypothesis, because it is not falsifiable. So the morons who took this stance obviously do not even understand how science works.
This always annoys me: The theory of evolution only deals with how life evolved after it got here, not how it originated. That's abiogenesis. People seem to always get the two confused.
It's not a strawman, either, as I've had two friends make that exact claim to me
How does that mean it's not a straw man?
Filthy, filthy copyrapists!
Exactly. That's why, when someone tells me they believe in the "biblical" definition of marriage, I remind them that King David had eight wives (and a dozen or so concubines).
Now, you can argue that the rules were different for him back then, but since they are referred to in scripture as "wives," it puts the lie to the claim that the Bible defines a marriage as "one man, one woman."
This is one reason why there are more behavioral problems within schools. In the past, children were told to respect their teachers or the parents would smack them/ground them. Now we have parents saying, "dont believe what your teacher says in regards to evolution, its not true." This undermines the respect children should have for their teachers, and results in acting out etc.
He fails to mention that when he seals a sterilized beaker and waits for Yog-Sothoth to create life within it, the life also didn't appear. So even if you believe that scientists must take a belief other than "I don't know" by default, creationism seems to have nothing to recommend it.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
These folks are really interested in making sure kids get exposed to alternate "theories"? Great, let's make sure they are exposed to a variety of intelligent designers. We could do it in science class. Which religion do *you* think has the most persuasive origin story? Wait. wait! Don't decide until we've considered them all. This is science class, after all.
Even Galileo knew, science and relgion not actually in contradiction, except where one oversteps it's bounds.
After logging in slashdot still does not take you back to the page you were on. It's been that way for 20 years.
Imagine how great this would have been as a student. You could ace all your tests just by writing "God did it" as every answer. Another A+, Johnny? Way to go! Way to fill in those blanks with "God Did It."
Of course, our kids won't actually be learning anything, but isn't school just a complicated babysitting service?
(Sadly, those two views above, while expressed sarcastically by me, are the real views of all too many people.)
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
What's mind-bogglingly funny about that stance is that in statistics the null hypothesis is "the numbers you got are the result of chance", which must be rejected to conclude that there's some cause for getting the numbers you got.
Indeed. Maybe what we should do is tell them that the only "null" hypothesis in this case is "There was no intelligence at all in the creation of the universe". The hypothesis that there was exactly one intelligent creator should be called the "one hypothesis"; having two cooperating (or opposing) creators would be the "two hypothesis"; and so on.
That should confuse them enough. After all, what does "null" mean? In common speech, it just means that there is/was nothing there. So assuming that there's something there can't be a "null hypothesis".
The actual statistical definition of a "null hypothesis" is probably beyond the mental capacity of these idiots. Rejecting a null hypothesis amounts to a double negative. Double negatives might be common in scientific reasoning, but to most non-scientists, they are generally incomprehensible and not distinguished from single negatives. (This is a fairly standard topic in linguistics circles; there's even a standard linguistics jokes on the topic. ;-)
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
Strawman is a misrepresentation of someone's position, to make it easy to attack.
The fact that a lot of people believe in a fallacy doesn't make it a strawman. People believe in fallacious things all the time.
>>I remind them that King David had eight wives (and a dozen or so concubines).
>>Now, you can argue that the rules were different for him back then
Why would I argue that? Polygamy is perfectly acceptable by scripture, though in practice having multiple wives is probably not advisable.
"Everything is legal, but not everything is profitable." Getting eight times the nagging would be like a living nightmare.
Not even one person who spits out that " some intelligent agency behind the appearance of living things. It is up to the scientists proposing a naturalistic explanation to prove their case" crap has ever sat through a university level evolutionary biology class.
Know it all's without ever studying shit from those boards.
I only see them as rock stupid.
Something that bothers me about comments here on slashdot is that many people here can see no possible reason to believe in any sort of religion; therefore, they sometimes say things that to a religious person would be deeply insulting.
This might be okay here, where people generally agree about this sort of thing (and the comments are anonymous). But it will never fly in the "real world." People have to learn to be polite when talking to others. Even if you can't understand someone else's opinions, you have to respect that they think that way. And many people ARE religious - to some extent, it's human nature (although it's clearly not universal.)
Also, the current theory for the origin of the universe, the big bang theory, was developed by a priest and it was rejected by the "open minded" eminent scientists of the day because it was developed by a priest and "smelled of creationism". The term "big bang" was used by these eminent scientists as a pejorative.
The article you quote explicitly refutes that myth two paragraphs later and more in depth in linked resources.
1) Lamaitre was an important contributor, but he was not solely responsible for the theory. He too stood on the shoulders of giants such as Einstein, who noticed that our Universe must be either shrinking or expanding. Science is never a solo effort.
2) The theory had been in the works for decades and new developments were quickly supported.
3) Fred Hoyle coined the term "Big Bang" and he was indeed an outspoken critic, but it was not used with any disrespect. It was just an illustrative term for general audiences. Besides, he came to support the theory relatively quickly anyway.
I removed a few paragraphs from that before I posted, because I thought it to be irrelevant to the conversation.. But since you brought it up, I'll oblige you. :)
When I was a younger teenager (say 13 or 14), I started seriously questioning my religion (Catholic). I was Catholic because my parents took me to church on Sundays. I learned the rituals, the words, and the meaning that we were told was behind the words. I had friends who were of other Christian faiths, and would accompany them to their respective churches on occasion. Weekend sleep-over would sometimes include Sunday church services of the host families faith. Big deal, they're all Christian, they all read the bible, right? Nope, there are different bibles, and different interpretations of even the bible.
Around 1988, I started looking for which one was "right". Hello technology. BBS's were gaining widespread acceptance. You can safely ask (under the guise of your online alias) about anything. You wouldn't be caught checking out a copy of the Quran from the local library. Well, deep in god loving Southern Baptist country who barely tolerated the Catholics, there wouldn't even be a Quran at the library, and asking could result in a rather sudden death sentence.
I met some interesting people of various faiths through the local BBS's. Beyond the "traditional" faiths (Christian, Judaism, Hindu, Islamic), I met "neo-pagans" (Wiccan and Neo-Druidism), and some self-styled "pagans", who attempted to follow what they could find of the shreds of their respective religions that survived the test of time and various political and theological conquests (Never forget the Crusades!) I learned that while very respectable, the neo-pagans didn't have much of anything that survived from the earlier periods (pre-Christianity), so they winged it based on what they could find and figure out on their own.
In the next few years, over various networks, like FidoNet, WWIVnet, VirtualNet, (since there was no "Internet" out in the boondocks yet), you could talk to people of various faiths around the world. Of course, as a teenage boy, downloading porn was far more interesting, but it was interesting to fill the gaps in masturbation sessions.
And finally in the early 90's, we had that fledgling Internet thing, and the wonders of Usenet! Now I can talk to people around the world slightly more efficiently, and get more porn. (aw, come on, the only thing more important than porn to a teenage boy is getting laid, which I was doing a pretty good job of too.) I talked to people around the world about their religions, their beliefs, and the history of their theology.
Into my 20's I was still on the quest. I knew there had to be a truth out there. Something from the early times when God or the gods spoke to man, and guided us from simple tribes to our full fledged cultures. I learned about more theologies, such as old European, Native American, Eastern (i.e., middle east through China), and African traditions. There is a vast world of amazing stories. It's an amazing trip (and probably as mind bending as a good LSD trip, if I did such things). Still, I failed to find the "truth".
In my late 20's, I classified myself as non-denominational pagan with agnostic tendencies. That is, I believed that there may be god or gods who may or may not have created the universe, and there is a possibility that there may be multiple planes of existence which are beyond our perception. We can't see radio waves, but I can prove they exist. I can't see magnetism, but I can build something that creates a magnetic field, and move things with it (I made my first electromagnet with a coil of winding wires and a 9v battery when I was about 15). I can't prove that hydrogen or oxygen are floating around us, but I can break water down into two containers, and observe their expected interactions (a plastic 2 liter bottle ful
Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade.
C.S. Lewis? Seriously? Jebus H. Pogosticking Chrisp. If you want to destroy your own position bring up C.S. Lewis. Only his co-religionists think well of his theology. Opponents think he ought to have stuck with writing children's books, not to knock on The Chronicles of Narnia which really ain't bad. The Screwtape Letters he should have shot himself over the shame of it all, and that's the highest praise possible on his apologetics...and there the bar is not high since the entire field is an apology for not having a decent fucking argument.
The original "theory" of evolution was that the fossil record of bones in the ground "proved" that evolution had taken place. This original naive and unsophisticated theory, which predated all knowledge of genetics, has been completely discredited. Put the skeleton of a chihuaua next to that of a beagle, then a labrador, then a great dane. Look - a fossil record "proving" evolution has taken place. Except that it hasn't - they're all the same species. Ergo the original premise for evolution, that changes in bone shape prove evolution has taken place, has clearly and fully been disproven Q.E.D. Currently there are only bits and pieces of examples that support the theory a little. SOME day there will be a real theory of evolution, and when there is, it will look like this: We will start with the genome of two species, say protochimp species A, then compare it to protochimp species B. We will identify the changed genes. We will develop an hypothesis as to what changed those genes (i.e. radiation, mutagenic chemicals, random chance), then we will construct a gene sequence, simulate the action of that evolutionary change agent, and prove that it caused those changes. Then we move on to the next set of species. Over a period of MANY years, we will end up with a series of interlocking theories and experiments that prove both that evolution occurred, and definitively explain how. We may uncover unexpected complexities. Maybe conditions were never right on earth for life to originate here, and primitive life arrived on a meteor. Maybe genes only evolve when small populations of individuals from a species become isolated and inter-breed too much. Maybe most of recent evolution is the action of a genetic survival mechanism that itself had to evolve, and that's why there are so few species for the first couple hundred million years. We don't know yet, because we have only glimmerings of understanding as to how evolution actually worked. Right now evolution is for most adherents really only a philosophy and a pseudo-science, the proof of which consists mostly of mocking anyone who disagrees as a right-wing numbskull. Allowing evolutionary proponents to get away with this incredibly sleazy behavior is destroying public respect for science, and is causing other pseudo-scientific beliefs to flourish. If we accept that any phenomenon is "proof" of any old hypothesis for its cause, without requiring an explanation of the mechanism and repeatable experiments demonstrating the truth of the theory, then what do we end up with: Oh look - lights in the sky - that "proves" that alien UFOs are visiting us. Oh look - a furry shape in the forest - that "proves" that bigfoot exists. Oh look, I guessed what card you were holding - that "proves" I have psychic powers.
And as for the fundamentalist Christians - they need to accept that the story of Adam and Eve is a morality tale, it's an ALLEGORY, like the story of the good samaritan. It is meant to illustrate moral concepts about the relationship between God and man. It doesn't need to be a literal account to be valid. And that way even if Evolution is some day actually proved scientifically, the moral validity of the allegory will not then be compromised, and it will not call God's existence into doubt.
Let's face it, If the atheists no longer feel that they can prove God doesn't exist by beating people up till they acknowledge a belief in evolution, then all the fun will go out of taunting Christians. And if the Christians don't feel like they have to defend the literal truth of a morality tale in order to defend God's existence, they'll stop sabotaging science textbooks.
Basically both sides of the debate need to eat a big slice of humble pie and stop harassing other people. And we need to start valuing civility more than winning an argument.
It's been oft-cited that higher evolution is as likely as a fully intact 747 airliner resulting from a tornado going through a junk yard. That is, of course, utter nonsense. For that would be the EASY part. That aircraft cannot fly without the millions of lines of code programmed into it to run every system and subsystem, most of which are inter-related, and some of which, for safety purposes, must be completely independent.
does there have to be some intelligent agency behind the appearance of living things, as there clearly isn't any behind religious zealots.
> He wasn't preaching the "truth" in gospel. He was helping them from being scared of the unknown.
Ah! Children usually aren't too scared of the unknown, yet they are brain-washed by catechism and other religious classes before they're able to think critically..
Spreading questionables beliefs (which are usually sexist and homophobic) and for which people have killed (and will kill in the future), just in order to help them from being "scared of the unknown" is an incredibly poor justification..
Then maybe he should stop scaring children with tales of inescapable judgment and hellfire?
Being a preacher of whatever level isn't only about indoctrinating the young before they learn to think for themselves. It helps those who have "lost their way" have something to believe in.
As much as I hate to say it, organizations like AA and NA work because they make people believe in something, where they've lost sight of believing anything more than getting their next fix (alcohol or drugs). It's moving the focus. They could do the same thing by teaching someone to paint rather than drink or take drugs. But the religious zealots get 'em where ever they can find 'em. Homeless shelters. Substance abuse groups. Even the grieving. I lost my step son a few years ago. I'm very analytical. I recognize what happened (he stopped breathing and died during a seizure). My ex (we were still married at the time) can't understand why something like that will "just happen", and now has been happily adopted into the ranks of the raving religious zealots.
Some religious people, such as the reverend I mentioned, are there just to help without pushing their agenda on anyone. Unfortunately, they are the minority.
When I was in school, a student died in an accident. He was one of those who offered to help the grieving. We talked to him, and he listened. He didn't even use the "well, it was God's will" line once with me or anyone that I heard him talking to. As I recall, he said that there are things that we don't understand, and have to learn to accept and move on. He was playing the role of a good psychiatrist. He listened and reflected, and pretty much let the individual give themselves advice, as long as it was safe.
Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade.
>>Thus I believe that ethical systems based on figuring out which individual behaviour leads to more desirable collective outcomes are better ethical systems than those prescribing the same individual behaviours for arbitrary reasons.
I've never seen a Utilitarian system that would work in practice, except by special casing out all the Utilitarianism.
>>I believe, as an atheist, that someone who requires a set of arbitrary rules to behave ethically -- or worse, the threat of eternal damnation -- is a scumbag at heart.
Flip it around. I believe that people that have a love for God (and a love for a living, loving God in particular) will naturally tend to love other humans more, and treat them better. Ethical systems by atheists suffer from spiritual aridness, not really doing much to inspire its adherents to go forth and make a positive difference in the world.
Atheists focus far to much on the Old Testament God-as-executioner, whereas the message of the Bible (well, the New Testament) is God-the-loving-father.
How about this for a “null hypothesis”: Nobody actually knows.
Now, let BOTH sided do research. Evolutionary scientists continue to scour the earth and the universe beyond it for evidence of evolutionary change. And the creationists and intelligent design “ists” do the same – search the earth and the universe beyond for evidence of a higher being.
Both sides MUST do original, verifiable, research, including peer review, including by adherents to the opposing view. Theories must be challenged by and from both sides with verifiable work.
Neither side should rely on any writings prior to the development of the scientific method. That means that the Bible, the Koran and the Bagadvad Gita are all off-limits, along with the writings of Plato, Pliny and the great Arabic philosophers.
Butt here’s a problem (based on what I’ve observed) – the non-evolutionist side will neither set aside religious writings (as they are the Word of God/Yahweh/Allah and therefore correct on all counts) nor stick to the rules where the rules work against them (as opposed to finding ways to achieve their goals within the rules).
That is essentially the message of Christianity. "We are scumbags at heart, therefore we need rules/rewards/punishment to behave ethically."
Recently, I've been made aware of a few of the similarity of the folks that believe in the literal version (or version of their choice) of the Bible and those that believe in the literal version of the Koran. Has anyone made a serious comparison of the two religious source authorities? I suspect that they are much closer than most know. Wonder if they could ever put down their egos and know-it-all attitudes to talk to each other? Instead of burning Korans in front of mosques and Bibles in front of churches; they could join forces and burn copies of "The origin of Species" in front of the National Institutes of Health (or a similar science oriented institution.)
This is a serious question, I'd like to know just how aligned their beliefs are.
Want to take an appropriate step to stop al this nonsense? Make it a law that NEWS sources, whichever media form you support, must be objective and provide both sides of a story. Any news outlet which started giving opinions, editorials, views on the news would need to be labelled as entertainment and not news. They could be bunched with entertainment weekly.
Stop giving all these morons an opinion, make them do some work if they wanted to have an opinion on something. It's very easy to regurgitate Jeff Beck, but I guarantee 99% of americans have no clue what he is on about. But all their friends vomit out his opinions every day so he must be right.
And it's not just americans, the canadian election proves that most people are not able to draw a logical conclusion if it should itself right up their butt. A prime minister that only talked about improving the economy, but has racked up the highest deficit in canadian history. When I asked any of the con voters about this, their answer, well he said he will take of the economy, he must be the best man for the job. When asked about the discrepancy, their answer was always, well the last guys had a big deficit as well, not as big but what do you expect?
People are too lazy and generally stupid to form an opinion on their own, like George Carlin said
“Just think of how stupid the average person is, and then realize half of them are even stupider!”
If brevity is the soul of wit, then how does one explain Twitter [twitter.com]? wit is the soul of twitter, at least in a crossword sense, therefore brevity=soul(soul(twitter))
Jedis are stupid. If they were so powerful, why couldn't they handle counseling for a kid who missed his mom?
Progressives are as more to blame than anyone. They have made anti-Constitutional ideas standard, e.g. that the government is the solution, that people must be improved by government control, that Freedom is not the highest value.
Schools have pushed Progressive ideas forever.
Once the Constitution is eliminated, constraints on religious leaders are gone. There are no Lysander Spooners in modern theology.
"The Constitution, the WHOLE Constitution, and nothing but the CONSTITUTION."
"Everything has always been like this" is a great null hypothesis, not only because it's neutral, but because the evidence doesn't support it. It lets the teacher go talk about what kind of evidence there is, and how you figure out what evidence is meaningful, and what the evidence might mean, and how it relates to other evidence. So you've got astronomical evidence telling you about change and the age of the universe, and biological and geographical evidence telling you about them, and genetics. And you get to compare different alternative hypothesis, like Lamarckianism and Darwin's ideas and the folks who think the evolution all happened during one week in 4004BC and then came to a crashing halt, and also some of the Hindu concepts.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Well played, sir, well played!
If brevity is the soul of wit, then how does one explain Twitter?
Can we just loose Texas, somehow?
go on and while you're at it replace science with religion. I would love to see a god-powered car, computer, house, town, state and economy. Meanwhile I'll laugh at your backward asses.
As an animal rights activist (living in Europe), I was captivated by the very last paragraph of TFA:
The problem with evolution, says Robert Luhn, director of Communications at the NCSE, is that it touches on something close to people. "You don't get this kind of thing when talking about gravity," he said.
Maybe it's so hard for the Christians to embrace the idea that animals are our brothers and sisters, not only because it contradicts the Bible, but also because accepting that would force them to start treat the animals as such.