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Creationism Conference at Michigan State University Stirs Unease
sciencehabit writes "A creationist conference set for a major research campus — Michigan State University (MSU) in East Lansing — is creating unease among some of the school's students and faculty, which includes several prominent evolutionary biologists. The event, called the Origins Summit, is sponsored by Creation Summit, an Oklahoma-based nonprofit Christian group that believes in a literal interpretation of the Bible and was founded to "challenge evolution and all such theories predicated on chance." The one-day conference will include eight workshops, according the event's website, including discussion of how evolutionary theory influenced Adolf Hitler's worldview, why "the Big Bang is fake," and why "natural selection is NOT evolution." News of the event caught MSU's scientific community largely by surprise. Creation Summit secured a room at the university's business school through a student religious group, but the student group did not learn about the details of the program—or the sometimes provocative talk titles — until later.
So don't go. Let them wallow in their beliefs.
I'm all for it if it comes with a free bucket of tomatoes for the spectators.
Sounds like a good grounds to reconsider and reject them to me. Give them a refund and tell them to go book a venue elsewhere.
There is. It's called a Church.
/snark
(Sorry, non-idiot Christians.)
I for one welcome an opposing opinion.
I think that if we've learned anything form the Ham vs Nye debate, it is that belief and science are two different things. One will be changed with arguments, the other can't.
In other words: religion is not an opinion.
I'm not a complete idiot... Some parts are missing.
You nailed it
REASONED debate
Creationists admit they can NEVER be convinced
There went reason and debate
Creation Summit secured a room at the university's business school through a student religious group
So this has nothing to do with science, critical thinking, debate, or academic discussion. This is an 8-topic 1-day masturbation session technically located at a college that can later be rolled into propaganda and touted as a hallmark of the legitimacy of "creation science" despite an overwhelmingly scientific concensus to the contrary. Its sole purpose is to re-enforce validity for communities of homeschooled kids, backwoods churches, and easily exploited students around campus.
This isnt being held in a student center because that would invite public opinion and attract unwelcome and highly critical dissent. Its not being held in a lecture hall because the topic of discussion isnt academic. and it sure as shit doesnt get time in the biosciences buildings because the hardware store would run out of pitchforks before the presenters could ever get approval.
Good people go to bed earlier.
Calling a proposition "ridiculous" in no way refutes it. It sounds like you're emoting frustration at not knowing how to engage in a debate on the topic.
Now I think you're starting to zero in on a proper focus of the debate. And if it's debatable, a university may be a reasonable place for the discussion.
You're doing nothing to refute my conjecture that the university community is incapable of rationally debating the creationists' claims.
Simply calling the other party "irrational" in no way invalidates their claims. Remember, the main purpose of a public debate is to convince the audience, not the other debater, that your position is right. If you think the other party holds an irrational view, that should help you, not hurt you, in convincing the audience that you're position is the correct one.
You're going to have a hard time making a concrete case that the creationists are doing that. Every belief system has axioms, including yours. During a debate, you can try to show that a creationists' axioms are unreasonable, or his reasoning from them is flawed, but that kind of discussion is totally appropriate to a university setting.
You're painting with a very broad brush. If I didn't know better, I might conclude that you're incapable of engaging in the debate properly, which absolutely reinforces my main point in my earlier post.
Scientists aren't picking sides. That is the whole point. You develop a theory for how things happen based on collected evidence and derivations. If your hypothesis doesn't fit the data, it isn't valid.
It doesn't matter how much contrary evidence you provide against creationists. By their own definitions, they can never be falsified. How do you debate that?
It's a very dangerous and slippery slope to stop allowing rented space on university campuses just because some people don't like the discussion. The moment it violates campus policy it gets pulled, but otherwise it's as good a spot as any for this sort of event. If you don't like it, don't go, or hold your own event in the conference room next door.
www.clarke.ca
Science does not believe.
Religion does not prove.
There is no Venn diagram overlapping the two.
Never answer an anonymous letter. - Yogi Berra
University students are not children and should have the right to have penises down their throats if they want them. Both actually and metaphorically.
And your argument still sounds like its an excuse to call speech something other than speech so it can be restricted because someone doesn't like it.
We get it, Creationism isn't even science and it's crap. I believe that too. It is speech, however, and it is not a position that was simply created to annoy you or the faculty of a university. People do take it seriously, and although I don't expect you to, you should take seriously the fact that denying them the ability to discuss their views in public is probably worse than their ideas.
Frankly, I think Hitler's religious views, indeed the religious views of all the leading Nazis, is irrelevant. Few of them ever got their hands directly bloody murdering Jews, Gypsies and the like. It was all their God-fearing Lutheran and Catholic subordinates who did the dirty work. The underlying motivations of Hitler, Goebbels, Himmler and the other leading figures are interesting in certain perspectives, but to me, the most horrifying part of the Holocaust isn't that the leadership possessed some "out there" beliefs, but that ordinary men and women, who under other circumstances would have been considered your average citizens, no better and no worse than anyone anywhere else in the world, could be so easily manipulated into viewing people that they had lived side by side with for generations as vermin who needed exterminating.
I have two observations to make on that topic; one factual and one anecdotal.
The factual observation is that the Holocaust, while engineered by Hitler and his inner circle, was in fact the product of centuries of anti-Semitism to be found throughout Christendom. The chief difference between the Nazis and Isabella and Ferdinand was the latter did not have Zyklon B at their disposal, and thus had to use more mundane methods to get rid of the Jewish populations within the borders they ruled. The number of pogroms dating back to the earliest days of Christian dominance of Europe suggest that the Holocaust wasn't some outlier, but rather the culmination of anti-Semitic beliefs and sentiment.
The second observation is anecdotal. When was a teenager, my best friend's family had originated in Germany. Only one of his father's siblings; his youngest aunt, was born in North America. The rest had all been born in Germany before and during World War II. One day I was visiting my friend, when his grandfather, a very nice man, came up to us and told us "Whatever you hear from other people from Germany about what went on before and during the war, don't believe anyone who says they did not know. We all knew what was happening. We knew whole families were disappearing, that people who were outspoken were gone in the morning. Anyone who tells you they were ignorant of what was happening is lying."
It has stuck with me for many years, and it is chilling, because it suggests to me that many people I know personally, in the same circumstances, might turn their back on such conduct, and indeed, might allow their prejudices of any group to be built up to the point where that group is dehumanized. At that point, you don't even care what happens to them, and can bury your head in the sand with ease.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
When is the last time that a politician has tried to get history books rewritten to take City on The Edge of Forever into account? When's the last time that a school board voted to allow for the teaching that light speed could be bypassed using dilithium crystals in a warp drive? I doubt even the most hard-core Trek fan has seriously tried doing this. (And even if they did, I doubt they got any traction on it.)
I have no problem with people's religious beliefs. I even have my own religious beliefs. But the second that you try to set policy based solely on your religious beliefs, you are foisting them on other people who might have different religious beliefs (or no religious beliefs at all). This gets even worse when the religious belief-backed policy is favoring religious belief over science and even worse still when it tries to push science out of the science classroom because it challenges someone's religious beliefs.
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.