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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."
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.
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"
Education has never worked particularly well. For example, there was a huge effort in the second half of the 20th century to educate people and wean them off superstitions in the Soviet bloc. Since religions were largely suppressed officially, and high-school education with emphasis on physics and math was compulsory, it should have worked reasonably well. However, public education could not overcome superstitions, and there has been a steady presence of various magicians in public life -- from people who would heal you with magic, to politicians who would solve political problems or build nanotech industry with magic. Currently most if not all ex-Eastern bloc experience some sort of revival of religion, especially as a badge to counter the "Islamic threat".
And I doubt if education has worked very well in the US in the past 50 years as well -- IMHO the advances of science in the US were mostly due to brain drain, when the best brains from all over the world moved there to enjoy the rich life post WWII, and by the bias towards making better killing machinery that gave the said brains a little more money than is customary in the typical human society.
But when the knowledge is so much and so advanced that it is too hard to even grasp the basics without spending 10 years in higher education doing hard work and producing nothing obviously "valuable", it is no surprise that most people will find a simplified model of reality that helps them go on with their lives. It is even less surprising when they choose a model that is, on the face, largely compatible with the world they see every day and their way of thinking is deeply rooted in their past.
Literal bible interpretation is a protestant thing, to varying degrees among the various groups (the American flavours seem to be the most extreme in this regard). The Catholic church interprets many parts of the Bible as metaphors and they don't consider Genesis to be how it really went down (who was there to write that down anyway?). The Catholic church sees evolution as a valid way for God to create the life on Earth and an omniscient and omnipotent deity could easily make sure the universe forms as it did just by configuring the big bang properly, never mind influencing the destinies of individual parts that may need a little prodding to get right.
Justice is the sheep getting arrested while an impartial judge declares the vote void.
I don't know why people see religion class as something problematic. In Germany we have it and it's not like it's about indoctrination. It's about things like how different religions work and how to better understand them or about ethics in the context of what $SCRIPTURE says. You know, things that are actually useful to know if you want to understand where some of the older concepts and values in out society came from.
If you're not of one of the faiths the school offers courses for (or you don't want to deal with what the documents say is your religion) you get what amounts to comparative theology class in that you compare how various faiths deal with the things covered in regular religion class. Again a useful thing to know since you're going to deal with people of various faiths later on even if you're areligious.
Does that mean the steeple has replaced the classroom? No, it just means that we can apply sociology to the Bible. It also means that there's little reason to mention any religious stance on anything in other classes. So it always astounds me that American schools apparently have no space for any studies regarding religion, leading both to idiot lawmakers trying to sneak in the Bible as a textbook elsewhere (hello, Intelligent Design) and to morons who don't even know how Christianity, Judaism and Islam are connected.
Yes, there is Sunday school. But I doubt that it's attended by most people, that each major faith has an equally-popular alternative and that Sunday school will teach comparative theology.
USE HOT GRITS WITH STATUE OF NATALIE PORTMAN (NAKED AND PETRIFIED)
It is true that a central part of protestantism was "Sola scriptura", that the Bible contains all knowledge necessary for salvation and holiness. This was a rebellion against the power of the Pope and the Holy See to interpret and issue doctrine as very many of the practices that gave the Church massive power and wealth were not founded in the Bible, particularly the selling of indulgences. Also that salvation comes through faith alone, while Catholicism required rites performed by the priest - without the Church, there was no salvation. A central part of Protestantism was that all would read the Bible in their local language, back then only the priests and other highborn that learned Latin would even be able to read it. How could a Catholic have a literal interpretation of something he couldn't read? The priests told you the road to salvation and you followed.
To me it sounds like you are placing all of the Protestant groups on the "more literal" side of things. That is really not true at all, we are just far more diverse. That comes from that there is no one supreme commander of the Protestant churches, while if you're Catholic then you either yield to the Pope's authority or you're not a Catholic. And to be honest, the US seems to have far more issues with Catholic beliefs such as regarding contraception and abortion because the Pope is opposed to it while most protestant churches - at least around here - have accepted it. I think I can speak for most of Northern Europe when I say we consider the Bible to be just as much allegories as the Catholic church - perhaps even more so - and that teaching evolution here is not an issue at all. As far as I understand the main issue in the US are Baptists, which make up most of the Bible Belt. But they are something like 100 out of 800 million protestants.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings