I suppose you could describe a large predator messily devouring any and all smaller species that cross its path as an "ecosystem", but I think there are better ways to label it.
Do you want the FBI to have to take several hours to draft and get a warrant signed in a situation such as that?
Um, yeah, I do.
Well, I sure as hell don't. Suppose someone were breaking into my house, and I hear him from my bedroom. I reach over to the phone to call 911. I'm told, "Sorry, but we won't be able to get there for several hours. We need a warrant to enter your house." "I give you permission to enter my house!" I reply. "Nope, sorry. By entering your house, we might be violating the privacy of the burglar. I'm afraid you'll have to wait."
Absurd, right? Substitute "computer" for "house" and you'll have described the situation before the Patriot Act was passed, and the situation you would have liked to see perpetuated. If someone is breaking into my computer and I involve the FBI to track him down, then FUCK the cracker's privacy! There is, or should be, no expectation of privacy whatsoever if you're trespassing electronically.
The only ancient Greeks who did anything like this were the Spartans. Even they didn't throw babies off cliffs, but they did expose them in the wild to die. It's not clear that this actually resulted in a superior Spartan race. Minus poor generalship in the beginning and the unhappy chance of a plague at the end, the Athenians would have won the Peloponnesian War. The former was the result of their radical democracy; generals were elected by the demos rather than selected for their merit. The latter deprived them of a significant amount of manpower and of some of their top leadership -- Pericles himself was a victim.
In any event, modern Greeks are the product of centuries of dysgenics imposed on them by the Turks. Look up the Janissaries some time. By your reasoning, they were even tougher before that. You may well be right, but who can tell from here?
Similarly, without the data from an autopsy of the dead chick -- was one even performed? -- there's no way of knowing whether it was defective or not.
It isn't quite; the parent post misstated the case somewhat. The Islamic nations were for a time arguably the centers of culture, but it's more difficult to put the case for progress. They were transmitters of culture par excellence, with many of the resources of the classical Hellenic and Roman cultures available to them as well as ideas from farther east, India and China, where they had trading contacts. For example, the numerical notation we now use are typically called "Arabic numerals", but the Arabs didn't invent them. They were imported from India.
Similarly, the best of their architecture was from Byzantium and their sciences were an amalgam of Hellenic, Roman, Indian, and Egyptian knowledge. The classical philosophers were not unknown to them, and it was in fact through them that Aristotle was re-introduced to western Europe in texts brought back by the Crusaders.
Although it is also evident that much was lost, as integrators and tradents they were brilliant. But they invented very little of their own.
The rough draft was written on hemp, which was a fiber very commonly used for paper (and rope, and clothing) back then. But not marijuana. The THC content of the variety of hemp that's grown for its fibers is too low for it to merit the name.
Important documents in those days were always "engrossed" on long-lasting parchment once the final version of the text was hammered out.
You beat me to it. Private companies that do their jobs this negligently are open to lawsuits. Maybe that's what it will take to get the USPTO to clean up its act.
Everyone who owns a Mac MUST visit Ambrosia's website, download a couple of their games, and play! The Escape Velocity series (one of which I paid to play) is especially highly regarded, and the third installment of the series is due to be released... um... any time now!
Really, Ambrosia's products are by and large worth the asking price. As shareware companies go, they're a good example.
Geez, don't people read the linked material before posting? Or don't the editors make corrections before sending the thing to the main page? This is not a class action suit. It's Morrison and Foerster suing on their own behalf because of spam sent to users on their own network.
Follow along the wing of the house that takes up the left side of the picture. It ends in what looks like a square tower. The tree is the black blob just to the right of that tower. You can't see the trunk; it's obscured by foliage.
Re:Big "dead" lizard?
on
Megapnosaurus?
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· Score: 3, Informative
Yes, it's really "big breathless lizard", and it's Greek, not Latin as the article states.
But tyrannosaur isn't a "Greek-Latin mush". "Tyrannos" is Greek, although as "tyrannus" it was eventually taken up into Latin. But that was later, it was Greek first, and was famously applied to the absolute rulers of the Archaic period. Perhaps you're thinking of something like "australopithecus", which is Latin "australis", "southern" + Greek "pithekos", "ape.
God has not shown up and demonstrated (his | her | its) presence.
You invalidate your own point in stating it. Christians believe precisely that God has shown up and demonstrated his presence, and to say that he has not is to therefore state a religious doctrine in opposition to Christianity. I do not want your religion to be taught as an "objective truth" in public school any more than you want mine.
Once you bring God into the equation, science and logic break down;
They don't have to, and in fact they don't. This thread is proof of that; it started when I complained about a logical fallacy.
especially if we are speaking of the traditional Judeo-Christian-Islamic god(s). God is supposed to be omnipotent, meaning that ANY phenomenon can be attributed to God's will. Science and reason no longer have a place in mankind's world since any given phenomenon can be attributed to God's will.
Funny that: it was people who believed in God who invented the scientific method in the first place, in an academic atmosphere surrounding universities founded by Christian religious organizations.
Yes, God can do anything, so anything you see might be a direct expression of his will. But Christians are very well aware that the universe generally operates according to a consistent set of laws. Those occasions when it does not are what we call miracles. What would be so special about a miracle if nothing can ever happen without God's direct intervention? We call them miracles precisely because they violate laws we are very well aware of, and so reveal God's hand in the matter.
Yes, I know you don't accept that this ever happens. My purpose is to explain my own point of view. I don't expect you will adopt it, but you seem to have a false idea of how religious people actually think, so I'm trying to make it clear to you. Possibly unsuccessfully; I really should have been in bed several hours ago.
When we speak of religion in science and rationality, we must be agnostic. God, unfortunately, gets in the way of learning. By saying NOTHING about religion, or that there is no evidence that leads us to choose one religion over the other, we as a species continue to advance.
A valid religion is and must be rational, based on data from divine revelation. So please drop "rationality" from the discussion here. In terms of science, I agree fully that it has nothing to say about God.
You're treating two very different statements as if they were equivalent. Since I keep saying it but no one ever acknowledges it, I don't think I'm too far out of line to say that it seems a very strong mental block is preventing you guys from recognizing that I am repeatedly, explicitly, calling for the advocacy of no religion over another in the public schools. This is what I take you to mean by "saying NOTHING about religion" so we are in full agreement there. We obviously cannot do exactly what you say in the schools when teaching history or world culture; religion is a very important part of both, so it must be mentioned. But not advocated.
It's quite another thing to say that there is no evidence to make us choose one over the other. If this were true, I and many others I know would simply have made up our own religion rather than adopting the one we had become convinced was the true one. (I am aware that many people have indeed done this very thing.) This is something agnostics seem to fail to recognize: religious people become that way because they have had some sort of experience that leads them in that direction. It may not be the sort of experience that can readily be shared with others, but that does not make it unreal, or untrue. We don't just pull a set of dogmas out of thin air. The evidence does exist even if it appears subjective in nature. It's not the business of the schools to invalidate this evidence, and by extension any religion that a student may choose or be raised in as a result.
At least with your reformulation of the doctrine we're using the same definition of "true" which is a step in the right direction as far as I'm concerned.
As far as God "getting in the way of learning", you have a lot of history to read if you think that's true. It's just not an idea that can (in general) be supported by the facts.
This may ramble a bit, as I'm posting it in the small hours of the morning. I find that the ideas I had in my head weren't quite what wound up on the screen, but I'm too tired to put it any better.
Well, I've read through the responses to this post and done a bit more reading on the subject from both sides, and I'm left where I was when we started. The scientific creationist side is characterized by a certain lack of rigor and spotty data, both of which are to be expected, I think, in a science as young as it is. I also find a significant lack of peer-reviewed publications, but I also gather that these are unlikely to appear in mainstream publications regardless of their scientific merit. On the orthodox evolutionary side, I see counterarguments that are so laden with personal attacks and a venom that creeps in regardless of how detatched a tone they attempt, that I cannot regard them as unbiased sources. (Incidentally, it seems that many of the counter-arguments are surprisingly weak given evolutionary science's sweeping claims.) I strongly suspect that it's impossible to find an unbiased source on this subject regardless of what degree of disinterest any particular author should claim.
I therefore resume my former attitude on the subject, which is roughly that which Sherlock Holmes expressed on the organization of the Solar System.
Of course the believers of each point of view have the right to think themselves correct. So does the writer of the article, who believes himself to be correct at the expense of Christianity, Islam, and others. He and those of like mind with himself have no more right to impart that belief in the public schools than I have to preach Christianity.
I'm tolerably familiar with Buddhism and have read parts of the Tao Te Ching. I find no contradictory statements in the doctrine of either. Buddhism, particularly the Zen variety, uses seeming contradiction as a pedagogical technique, but that's not doctrine. I can't recall anything self-contradictory in Taoism -- in fact, the Tao sounds very close to the Christian Logos. Perhaps you can cite something specific. Deconstrutcionism I reject as invalid, and I'm certainly not alone in that opinion. Fuzzy logic has more to do with degrees of certainty (which exist whatever the truth might be) than with ontology.
It's a bit easier to describe where each side tend to do a bad job than where they excel. It's shorter, and each side tends to mirror the other.
Creationists do a poor job of reconciling the apparent age of the universe to their ideas, since many of the theories they concoct to explain a young universe are not well supported. This is their main essential weakness, covering everything from the age of distant galaxies to the geological record. They are required to refute many systems of thought that are both self-consistent and consistent (by and large) with external evidence in many different disciplines, a monumental task they have not yet really begun to approach in a meaningful way.
Evolutionary biologists, on the other hand, do a poor job in my opinion of explaining how complexity arises, and irreducible complexity as a special case is especially poorly explained. They tend to ignore data that falls outside their neat schemas, like the iron axe (complete with wooden handle) found embedded in a stratum from the Ordovician, or the gold chains found embedded in coal veins from the Carboniferous. OOPArts are sufficiently rare that their appearance is by nature anecdotal, but they are more common than, say, Archaeopteryx fossils, and ought not be dismissed out of hand.
I should have been clearer. I had in mind a priori predictions, by which I mean predictions that were actually made before the fact. Most predictions in, say, physics or cosmology are of this nature. A theory is propounded and certain consequences of this theory that have not yet been observed are evident; only later on does observation confirm the theory. The prediction I am describing here, that a feathered dinosaur antecedent to Archaeopteryx that used its feathers for some purpose other than flight would someday be discovered, is of this nature.
Some of the predictions in that article seemed to me to be a posteriori, by which I mean that it was only realized that evolutionary biology ought to have predicted them after they had been made but did not in fact do so. I cannot view this as being quite as impressive, although that does not of course render them invalid.
The intellectual honesty of the site cannot be questioned: they have the integrity to link to a creationist's rebuttal. Some of the creationist's points are well taken while others seem like mere arm-waving, but as I said, I think that at the very least creationists raise questions that evolutionary biologists ought to answer. As they are becoming more scientifically spohisticated, they are becoming more effective in this role.
Oh, it's no more off-topic than anything else in this thread, IMO. Unfortunately, you're not correct: an electromagnetic wave such as visible light, radio waves, or gamma radiation, requires nothing more in the way of a medium than empty space. There's no way to explain this without citing a bunch of math, so you might want to do a Google search for Maxwell's Equations which are foundational to this branch of Physics.
It means that I think them not incorrect in pointing out the deficiencies in evolutionary theory. At the very least they keep evolutionary biologists honest by forcing them to answer some of their criticisms and to take a good hard look at some of their assumptions, the data they tend to ignore, and details they tend to gloss over.
Of course, "creationist science" leaves a lot to be desired in and of itself, but to be fair it's a very young discipline. It's only recently that creationists have sought to put their views on a firm scientific footing rather than just pointing at Genesis and screaming, "It's in there, so it must be true!!!" which convinces no one who's not already on their side. They may or may not have something at this point. There are some things they do a much better job of explaining then evolutionary biologists, but there are even more subjects on which they raise more questions than they answer.
Natural selection doesn't predict anything. It's a data point, an observed phenomenon.
If birds evolved from pterosaurs, there is no evidence to show it. The transitional forms that have thus far been found, such as archaeopteryx, are all dinosaurs, theropods such as t. rex. Archaeopteryx is almost indistinguishable from compsognathus except for the feathers. And the numerous anatomical correspondences between theropodia (especially coelurosaurs) and birds are highly suggestive.
OTOH, there is no evidence that pterosaurs have any living descendants. They seem to have died out at the same time most of the dinosaurs did.
Where does Willard ever imply that Islam is "another truth!"? You're imputing that viewpoint to her.
Re-read my quote from the article, and then ask why Willard found it remarkable. I'm sure there was a lot of other material from this website. What was so unusual about this particular quote unless she particularly disapproved of it?
The software filtering companies are simply serving their largest markets. I quite agree that it's (in general) unhealthy to filter out websites based on the fact they present a religion other than those on the "approved" list. But that's what the filtering software market wants right now. If it ever becomes mandatory in libraries and schools, I guarantee you that market forces will cause more politically and religiously neutral filters to spring up to fulfull the need. That's how a free market works.
As far as taking a class in Constitutional Law, I'd only consider if it requires me to actually read the Constitution. It's not at all difficult these days even in reputable law schools to fulfull the Constitutional Law requirements without that. But really, the Constitution is written in plain (if slightly archaic by now) English. Banning any form of religious expression on public property is a long way from merely forbidding the establishment of a church, which is what the Constitution actually does. But suppose the wall did exist: the syncretic crap that gets shoved down students' throats these days is every bit as objectionable as outright proselytism of Christianity. It's in direct contradiction to the teachings of my religion, and a great many more besides. Only, the people who shout loudest about the wall of separation deign not to notice it.
I caught the implications of "equally true" in the post in question, but as the author seemed to be saying (as an absolute) that both were false, I chose to regard it as flamebait and left it lying there.
Sometimes the apparent contradiction arises only because of a hidden assumption. The particle/wave duality of light is like that. Saying "light is a wave" and "light is a particle" are both true is only a contradiction if we add "a particle cannot be a wave" and "a wave cannot be a particle" to the mix. In fact, physics tells us that all particles can be described as waves, so there is no real contradiction here.
Religions are most often not like that. There's a clear example from Christianity and Islam as an example. Christianity says, "Jesus is the Son of God." Islam says, "Jesus is not the Son of God." This is simple logical contradiction requiring no hidden assumptions to fully understand. Both statements cannot be true. Logically, either one, or the other, or both are false.
I'm a creationist sympathizer in many ways. But...
One criticism of evolutionary theory has been that, unlike other scientific theories, it offers very little in the way of prediction. Unsurprising since it's devoted to the past, but it's still a weakness. Some years ago, I said privately to anyone who would listen when the topic came up that if it was true that birds evolved from dinosaurs, then it follows that there must first have been dinosaurs that had feathers that were used for some purpose other than flight. The necessary structures to support flight could not have evolved all at once, so feathers must have had some other purpose originally. Probably insulation, which dinosaurs would find as useful as mammals do since they were warm-blooded.
The article did not say whether or not dromaeosaur flew, and as another poster mentioned, the quality of the photos in the article was unsatisfactory. But if it could be shown that it did not fly and needed the feathers for insulation, that would be very interesting indeed.
Hmm. I happen to be a Muslim-American, and I think that tricking schools into blocking Islamic sites by categorizing them as "occult" is inane.
I'd have called you an American who happened to be Muslim, since Islam is not an ethnic group that normally gets a hyphen (a wrong-headed procedure in any event) but a religion. I am not a Christian-American, but an American who is an Orthodox Christian.
But you're right. It's inane, and everything else you said. But that's beside the point of my post, which was that a significant bias was evident in the article. When bias is present, it renders even the factual content of the article suspect, and to me this is especially true when the article claims to be unbiased. That means there is already one lie present.
The point of view that informs the bias is that all religions are equally true. Surely you do not believe that Christianity is as true as Islam, do you?
Let me use a concrete example. We Christians say that Jesus was God incarnate, an idea repugnant to Muslims. Muslims say that Jesus was just a prophet, which is blasphemy to Christians. Are we both right? Are both statements true? How can they be; they contradict! But what is being taught in the schools is the point of view you've seen reflected in the other posts in this thread: that all religions are equally true. This is so obviously false that it's a bit of a wonder anyone believes it, but it's very common. And schoolchildren are being indoctrinated in it. The religion -- or more precisely, the religious doctrine -- is called syncretism. Most religions have something to say about syncretism. In Hinduism, it's the norm. But it's antithetical to Orthodox Christianity, and also Islam. It ought not be taught.
An interesting consequence of the liberal takeover of our institutions of higher learning is the degredation of the language. By any reasonable standard, your definition of "truth" is absurd. Just so you know, I meant it in the ontological sense it always had before people with brains of mush began to muck about with the meaning of the word.
But it's plain your anti-Christian bias prevented you from reading the post you're replying to very carefully. Whatever I actually believe, I did not characterize my own views as the Real Truth. Pay attention next time.
Slashdot Mirror
"Feeding frenzy".
"Killing fields".
"Abattoir".
Well, I sure as hell don't. Suppose someone were breaking into my house, and I hear him from my bedroom. I reach over to the phone to call 911. I'm told, "Sorry, but we won't be able to get there for several hours. We need a warrant to enter your house." "I give you permission to enter my house!" I reply. "Nope, sorry. By entering your house, we might be violating the privacy of the burglar. I'm afraid you'll have to wait."
Absurd, right? Substitute "computer" for "house" and you'll have described the situation before the Patriot Act was passed, and the situation you would have liked to see perpetuated. If someone is breaking into my computer and I involve the FBI to track him down, then FUCK the cracker's privacy! There is, or should be, no expectation of privacy whatsoever if you're trespassing electronically.
In any event, modern Greeks are the product of centuries of dysgenics imposed on them by the Turks. Look up the Janissaries some time. By your reasoning, they were even tougher before that. You may well be right, but who can tell from here?
Similarly, without the data from an autopsy of the dead chick -- was one even performed? -- there's no way of knowing whether it was defective or not.
Similarly, the best of their architecture was from Byzantium and their sciences were an amalgam of Hellenic, Roman, Indian, and Egyptian knowledge. The classical philosophers were not unknown to them, and it was in fact through them that Aristotle was re-introduced to western Europe in texts brought back by the Crusaders.
Although it is also evident that much was lost, as integrators and tradents they were brilliant. But they invented very little of their own.
Important documents in those days were always "engrossed" on long-lasting parchment once the final version of the text was hammered out.
DUCK!!!
You beat me to it. Private companies that do their jobs this negligently are open to lawsuits. Maybe that's what it will take to get the USPTO to clean up its act.
Really, Ambrosia's products are by and large worth the asking price. As shareware companies go, they're a good example.
Geez, don't people read the linked material before posting? Or don't the editors make corrections before sending the thing to the main page? This is not a class action suit. It's Morrison and Foerster suing on their own behalf because of spam sent to users on their own network.
Yeah, true. But at least it's two words, and not a Greek and a Latin element squeezed together into a single word.
Follow along the wing of the house that takes up the left side of the picture. It ends in what looks like a square tower. The tree is the black blob just to the right of that tower. You can't see the trunk; it's obscured by foliage.
But tyrannosaur isn't a "Greek-Latin mush". "Tyrannos" is Greek, although as "tyrannus" it was eventually taken up into Latin. But that was later, it was Greek first, and was famously applied to the absolute rulers of the Archaic period. Perhaps you're thinking of something like "australopithecus", which is Latin "australis", "southern" + Greek "pithekos", "ape.
You invalidate your own point in stating it. Christians believe precisely that God has shown up and demonstrated his presence, and to say that he has not is to therefore state a religious doctrine in opposition to Christianity. I do not want your religion to be taught as an "objective truth" in public school any more than you want mine.
Once you bring God into the equation, science and logic break down;
They don't have to, and in fact they don't. This thread is proof of that; it started when I complained about a logical fallacy.
especially if we are speaking of the traditional Judeo-Christian-Islamic god(s). God is supposed to be omnipotent, meaning that ANY phenomenon can be attributed to God's will. Science and reason no longer have a place in mankind's world since any given phenomenon can be attributed to God's will.
Funny that: it was people who believed in God who invented the scientific method in the first place, in an academic atmosphere surrounding universities founded by Christian religious organizations.
Yes, God can do anything, so anything you see might be a direct expression of his will. But Christians are very well aware that the universe generally operates according to a consistent set of laws. Those occasions when it does not are what we call miracles. What would be so special about a miracle if nothing can ever happen without God's direct intervention? We call them miracles precisely because they violate laws we are very well aware of, and so reveal God's hand in the matter.
Yes, I know you don't accept that this ever happens. My purpose is to explain my own point of view. I don't expect you will adopt it, but you seem to have a false idea of how religious people actually think, so I'm trying to make it clear to you. Possibly unsuccessfully; I really should have been in bed several hours ago.
When we speak of religion in science and rationality, we must be agnostic. God, unfortunately, gets in the way of learning. By saying NOTHING about religion, or that there is no evidence that leads us to choose one religion over the other, we as a species continue to advance.
A valid religion is and must be rational, based on data from divine revelation. So please drop "rationality" from the discussion here. In terms of science, I agree fully that it has nothing to say about God.
You're treating two very different statements as if they were equivalent. Since I keep saying it but no one ever acknowledges it, I don't think I'm too far out of line to say that it seems a very strong mental block is preventing you guys from recognizing that I am repeatedly, explicitly, calling for the advocacy of no religion over another in the public schools. This is what I take you to mean by "saying NOTHING about religion" so we are in full agreement there. We obviously cannot do exactly what you say in the schools when teaching history or world culture; religion is a very important part of both, so it must be mentioned. But not advocated.
It's quite another thing to say that there is no evidence to make us choose one over the other. If this were true, I and many others I know would simply have made up our own religion rather than adopting the one we had become convinced was the true one. (I am aware that many people have indeed done this very thing.) This is something agnostics seem to fail to recognize: religious people become that way because they have had some sort of experience that leads them in that direction. It may not be the sort of experience that can readily be shared with others, but that does not make it unreal, or untrue. We don't just pull a set of dogmas out of thin air. The evidence does exist even if it appears subjective in nature. It's not the business of the schools to invalidate this evidence, and by extension any religion that a student may choose or be raised in as a result.
At least with your reformulation of the doctrine we're using the same definition of "true" which is a step in the right direction as far as I'm concerned.
As far as God "getting in the way of learning", you have a lot of history to read if you think that's true. It's just not an idea that can (in general) be supported by the facts.
This may ramble a bit, as I'm posting it in the small hours of the morning. I find that the ideas I had in my head weren't quite what wound up on the screen, but I'm too tired to put it any better.
I therefore resume my former attitude on the subject, which is roughly that which Sherlock Holmes expressed on the organization of the Solar System.
I'm tolerably familiar with Buddhism and have read parts of the Tao Te Ching. I find no contradictory statements in the doctrine of either. Buddhism, particularly the Zen variety, uses seeming contradiction as a pedagogical technique, but that's not doctrine. I can't recall anything self-contradictory in Taoism -- in fact, the Tao sounds very close to the Christian Logos. Perhaps you can cite something specific. Deconstrutcionism I reject as invalid, and I'm certainly not alone in that opinion. Fuzzy logic has more to do with degrees of certainty (which exist whatever the truth might be) than with ontology.
It's a bit easier to describe where each side tend to do a bad job than where they excel. It's shorter, and each side tends to mirror the other.
Creationists do a poor job of reconciling the apparent age of the universe to their ideas, since many of the theories they concoct to explain a young universe are not well supported. This is their main essential weakness, covering everything from the age of distant galaxies to the geological record. They are required to refute many systems of thought that are both self-consistent and consistent (by and large) with external evidence in many different disciplines, a monumental task they have not yet really begun to approach in a meaningful way.
Evolutionary biologists, on the other hand, do a poor job in my opinion of explaining how complexity arises, and irreducible complexity as a special case is especially poorly explained. They tend to ignore data that falls outside their neat schemas, like the iron axe (complete with wooden handle) found embedded in a stratum from the Ordovician, or the gold chains found embedded in coal veins from the Carboniferous. OOPArts are sufficiently rare that their appearance is by nature anecdotal, but they are more common than, say, Archaeopteryx fossils, and ought not be dismissed out of hand.
Some of the predictions in that article seemed to me to be a posteriori, by which I mean that it was only realized that evolutionary biology ought to have predicted them after they had been made but did not in fact do so. I cannot view this as being quite as impressive, although that does not of course render them invalid.
The intellectual honesty of the site cannot be questioned: they have the integrity to link to a creationist's rebuttal. Some of the creationist's points are well taken while others seem like mere arm-waving, but as I said, I think that at the very least creationists raise questions that evolutionary biologists ought to answer. As they are becoming more scientifically spohisticated, they are becoming more effective in this role.
Oh, it's no more off-topic than anything else in this thread, IMO. Unfortunately, you're not correct: an electromagnetic wave such as visible light, radio waves, or gamma radiation, requires nothing more in the way of a medium than empty space. There's no way to explain this without citing a bunch of math, so you might want to do a Google search for Maxwell's Equations which are foundational to this branch of Physics.
Of course, "creationist science" leaves a lot to be desired in and of itself, but to be fair it's a very young discipline. It's only recently that creationists have sought to put their views on a firm scientific footing rather than just pointing at Genesis and screaming, "It's in there, so it must be true!!!" which convinces no one who's not already on their side. They may or may not have something at this point. There are some things they do a much better job of explaining then evolutionary biologists, but there are even more subjects on which they raise more questions than they answer.
If birds evolved from pterosaurs, there is no evidence to show it. The transitional forms that have thus far been found, such as archaeopteryx, are all dinosaurs, theropods such as t. rex. Archaeopteryx is almost indistinguishable from compsognathus except for the feathers. And the numerous anatomical correspondences between theropodia (especially coelurosaurs) and birds are highly suggestive.
OTOH, there is no evidence that pterosaurs have any living descendants. They seem to have died out at the same time most of the dinosaurs did.
Re-read my quote from the article, and then ask why Willard found it remarkable. I'm sure there was a lot of other material from this website. What was so unusual about this particular quote unless she particularly disapproved of it?
The software filtering companies are simply serving their largest markets. I quite agree that it's (in general) unhealthy to filter out websites based on the fact they present a religion other than those on the "approved" list. But that's what the filtering software market wants right now. If it ever becomes mandatory in libraries and schools, I guarantee you that market forces will cause more politically and religiously neutral filters to spring up to fulfull the need. That's how a free market works.
As far as taking a class in Constitutional Law, I'd only consider if it requires me to actually read the Constitution. It's not at all difficult these days even in reputable law schools to fulfull the Constitutional Law requirements without that. But really, the Constitution is written in plain (if slightly archaic by now) English. Banning any form of religious expression on public property is a long way from merely forbidding the establishment of a church, which is what the Constitution actually does. But suppose the wall did exist: the syncretic crap that gets shoved down students' throats these days is every bit as objectionable as outright proselytism of Christianity. It's in direct contradiction to the teachings of my religion, and a great many more besides. Only, the people who shout loudest about the wall of separation deign not to notice it.
Sometimes the apparent contradiction arises only because of a hidden assumption. The particle/wave duality of light is like that. Saying "light is a wave" and "light is a particle" are both true is only a contradiction if we add "a particle cannot be a wave" and "a wave cannot be a particle" to the mix. In fact, physics tells us that all particles can be described as waves, so there is no real contradiction here.
Religions are most often not like that. There's a clear example from Christianity and Islam as an example. Christianity says, "Jesus is the Son of God." Islam says, "Jesus is not the Son of God." This is simple logical contradiction requiring no hidden assumptions to fully understand. Both statements cannot be true. Logically, either one, or the other, or both are false.
One criticism of evolutionary theory has been that, unlike other scientific theories, it offers very little in the way of prediction. Unsurprising since it's devoted to the past, but it's still a weakness. Some years ago, I said privately to anyone who would listen when the topic came up that if it was true that birds evolved from dinosaurs, then it follows that there must first have been dinosaurs that had feathers that were used for some purpose other than flight. The necessary structures to support flight could not have evolved all at once, so feathers must have had some other purpose originally. Probably insulation, which dinosaurs would find as useful as mammals do since they were warm-blooded.
The article did not say whether or not dromaeosaur flew, and as another poster mentioned, the quality of the photos in the article was unsatisfactory. But if it could be shown that it did not fly and needed the feathers for insulation, that would be very interesting indeed.
I'd have called you an American who happened to be Muslim, since Islam is not an ethnic group that normally gets a hyphen (a wrong-headed procedure in any event) but a religion. I am not a Christian-American, but an American who is an Orthodox Christian.
But you're right. It's inane, and everything else you said. But that's beside the point of my post, which was that a significant bias was evident in the article. When bias is present, it renders even the factual content of the article suspect, and to me this is especially true when the article claims to be unbiased. That means there is already one lie present.
The point of view that informs the bias is that all religions are equally true. Surely you do not believe that Christianity is as true as Islam, do you?
Let me use a concrete example. We Christians say that Jesus was God incarnate, an idea repugnant to Muslims. Muslims say that Jesus was just a prophet, which is blasphemy to Christians. Are we both right? Are both statements true? How can they be; they contradict! But what is being taught in the schools is the point of view you've seen reflected in the other posts in this thread: that all religions are equally true. This is so obviously false that it's a bit of a wonder anyone believes it, but it's very common. And schoolchildren are being indoctrinated in it. The religion -- or more precisely, the religious doctrine -- is called syncretism. Most religions have something to say about syncretism. In Hinduism, it's the norm. But it's antithetical to Orthodox Christianity, and also Islam. It ought not be taught.
But it's plain your anti-Christian bias prevented you from reading the post you're replying to very carefully. Whatever I actually believe, I did not characterize my own views as the Real Truth. Pay attention next time.