Slashdot Mirror
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
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.
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
The fact there's currently no credible evidence for those conjectures isn't what makes them non-scientific, it's that there can't ever be.
Even if the conjectures were true, there's no way to test them. THAT's what makes them non-scientific.
That would imply that all theories, regardless of any evidence or factual basis, should be taught.
Use of a book, commonly referenced to as "The Bible", which there are currently 190 modern versions of that I'm aware of, which all rooted from various oral traditions handed down over years, noted down, translated, re-translated (repeat ad nauseum), to which ever of the 190 modern versions you may have read an ancient fairy tale in.
If it's truly necessary to discuss every unsubstantiated creation theory, all sides of the story should be taught. Not just all 190 versions from the "bible", but all creation legends according to all religions and cultures.
Or we could stick with teaching substantiated facts. Nah, that would make way too much sense.
Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade.
No, omnipotence is entirely illogical. For example, can God create a rock so heavy that even He could not lift it? If He can, then He's not omnipotent because there's a rock He can't lift. If He cannot, then He's not omnipotent because there's a rock He can't create.
What if we define omnipotence as "can do anything that is logically possible"? As in, not bound by physical laws, but still bound by logical laws?
In this case, God cannot create a rock so heavy that even He cannot lift it, because no such rock could logically exist. So God's inability to create such a rock does not diminish His omnipotence. It's as if you asked: "Can God create a white sheet of paper that is also completely black?" Either the sheet is white or it is black. Similarly, either God can lift the rock, or the rock's existence is logically impossible.
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 aren't any experiments you can do to demonstrate evolutionary theory.
Holy crap, of course there are experiments that demonstrate evolutionary theory. FFS just buy in some fruitflies or mice or feeder fish some other fast reproducing species and selectively breed them according to some observable trait. e.g. white and black mice, large & small fish etc. Split the animals into 3 groups - one where you select FOR the trait, one where you select AGAINST the trait, and a control group where you randomly select with no bias. After a few generations observe the results.
Evolution is eminently demonstrable in the lab, and in the wild, and in the fossil and in DNA. Suggesting that some "god/aliens/magic pixies did it" hypothesis is utterly ridiculous.
What if we define omnipotence as "can do anything that is logically possible"? As in, not bound by physical laws, but still bound by logical laws?
In this case, God cannot create a rock so heavy that even He cannot lift it, because no such rock could logically exist. So God's inability to create such a rock does not diminish His omnipotence. It's as if you asked: "Can God create a white sheet of paper that is also completely black?" Either the sheet is white or it is black. Similarly, either God can lift the rock, or the rock's existence is logically impossible.
So, let's cut out the middle man and worship whoever made the rules that God can't break.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
If I were Chinese or Indian, I would be loving this. Imagine, my biggest competitor, ensuring their next generation is superstitious and ignorant. Perfect!
Why not? Because you are not allowed to redefine terms just because the definition doesn't suit your needs.
Definitions of omnipotence on the Web:
* the state of being omnipotent; having unlimited power
wordnetweb.princeton.edu/perl/webwn
Unlimited power. That means anything, there is no limit due to logic. This is fitting because you have to suspend logic to believe a lot of the bible. (Or most if not all religions.)
You are entitled to your own opinions, not your own facts.
>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
I wonder why there's this big issue with creationism in the US. Even the Roman Catholic church (ya know, the guys in old women's dresses with the inquisition and all) have no beef with the idea of a big bang and evolution. I guess they learned from their Gallileo fiasco. And even back then there were voices that said that the Bible only tells you how to get into heaven, not how heaven works, and that's pretty much their stance today: Are there parts in the Bible that seem to contradict how the world works? Yes. Does it matter? No, because it's God's word and if we understand it wrong, it's us that fail, we're mere men, we can't understand the plan and word of God. Ever. Case closed.
Why do Creationists feel the need to push their faith into science? What's the gain? I see mostly a dangerous side effect: That pupils will see that they're being taught bullshit and extrapolate that if you get to hear bull in one class, it won't be much better for the others.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Because it plays well to the yokels and brings comeuppance to those high and mighty professors with their useless book-learning and fancy education. And it makes them liberals mad, which is a bonus.
And one wonders how we've gotten so royally fucked as a nation...
Actually, the serious answer to your question is "Creationists feel the need to push their faith into science because replacing science and reason with magical thinking and superstition is a necessary part of destroying a middle-class and creating a new feudal state. You have to attack all of the empowering institutions to make that happen: science, education, a reliable news media, social security programs etc. and replace them with fear, superstition, divided communities, regionalism, ignorance. And the final step for the entities pushing this agenda, as always, is...Profit!"
You are welcome on my lawn.
You are a creationist trying to appear reasonable, demonstrated by your ignorance about evolution. The hereditary nature of genetics is evolution. Wikipedia, our friend, has a great example of exactly what you are looking for, "documented proof of a reproducible experiment showing the evolution of a species into a new and unique species." The bacteria E. coli cannot metabolize citric acid. Except after 12 generations, this E. coli did.
Space Shuttle was a program that strapped humans to an explosion and tried to stab through the sky with fire and math
Yep, and the ID folks know this. If you point to this fantastically amazing, observable phenomenon, they simply move the goalposts so that 'evolution' is defined as something you can't easily demonstrate in a lab. Speciation, for example, or the development of the eyeball in a complex species.
Even if you somehow figure out how to demonstrate those things, they'll find a way to re-define it into something even harder: like "demonstrate that modern humans can be produced from single-cell bacteria".
Point is, you can't argue with these folks, and you can't expect intellectual honesty out of a school of thought which posits the fundamental existence of some Intelligent Designer but then fails to express the slightest curiosity about who they are or how they operate.
This has actually damaged public discourse. My father recently took a guided tour of a major national park. The ranger pointed our a species of small lizard, and told the group how this species had observably changed its colors and foodsource over the past few decades, in response to some changing environmental condition. One of the group innocently used the term 'evolution' to ask a question about this, and the ranger immediately stopped him and pointed out that this is an example of 'adaptation', not evolution. His correction had an 'I'm only correcting you to cover my ass' wink to it, but it's a shame that we live in a country where Federal employees have to be so careful and explicit.