LOL
For those people who are tired of squinting, there are tools ranging from the simple:
To the complex:
Posted on 04/19/2006 3:57:51 AM PDT by PatrickHenry
A new article in PLoS Biology (April 18, 2006) discusses the state of scientific literacy in the United States, with especial attention to the survey research of Jon D. Miller, who directs the Center for Biomedical Communications at Northwestern University Medical School.
To measure public acceptance of the concept of evolution, Miller has been asking adults if "human beings, as we know them, developed from earlier species of animals" since 1985. He and his colleagues purposefully avoid using the now politically charged word "evolution" in order to determine whether people accept the basics of evolutionary theory. Over the past 20 years, the proportion of Americans who reject this concept has declined (from 48% to 39%), as has the proportion who accept it (45% to 40%). Confusion, on the other hand, has increased considerably, with those expressing uncertainty increasing from 7% in 1985 to 21% in 2005.In international surveys, the article reports, "[n]o other country has so many people who are absolutely committed to rejecting the concept of evolution," quoting Miller as saying, "We are truly out on a limb by ourselves."
The "partisan takeover" of the title refers to the embrace of antievolutionism by what the article describes as "the right-wing fundamentalist faction of the Republican Party," noting, "In the 1990s, the state Republican platforms in Alaska, Iowa, Kansas, Oklahoma, Oregon, Missouri, and Texas all included demands for teaching creation science." NCSE is currently aware of eight state Republican parties that have antievolutionism embedded in their official platforms or policies: those of Alaska, Iowa, Kansas, Minnesota, Missouri, Oklahoma, Oregon, and Texas. Four of them -- those of Alaska, Kansas, Oklahoma, Oregon, and Texas -- call for teaching forms of creationism in addition to evolution; the remaining three call only for referring the decision whether to teach such "alternatives" to local school districts.
A sidebar to the article, entitled "Evolution under Attack," discusses the role of NCSE and its executive director Eugenie C. Scott in defending the teaching of evolution. Scott explained the current spate of antievolution activity as due in part to the rise of state science standards: "for the first time in many states, school districts are faced with the prospect of needing to teach evolution. ... If you don't want evolution to be taught, you need to attack the standards." Commenting on the decision in Kitzmiller v. Dover [Kitzmiller et al. v Dover Area School District et al.], Scott told PLoS Biology, "Intelligent design may be dead as a legal strategy but that does not mean it is dead as a popular social movement," urging and educators to continue to resist to the onslaught of the antievolution movement. "It's got legs," she quipped. "It will evolve."
With one party embracing creationism, and the other embracing surrender and treason, it should be an interesting election cycle we're going to live through.
Sorry you feel that way. Most of the comprehensive posters here are quite scientific and have considerable legitimacy. The problem is that there are people here who quote scientific gibberish from creationist websites and don't like the fact that the gibberish is exposed for what it is. So far, there hasn't been any irreconcilable inconsistencies in evolution. Since it is aprocess that influences different adaptations in different ways, the specific mechanisms around a specific lineage will have vigorous scientif debate, but that does not invalidate the entire body of knowledge. That's the way every field in sceince operates.
I'd love to agree, but as a conservative scientist who has been outspoken for a quarter century, what little abuse I've gotten from fellow scientists has paled in comparison to the crap I've gotten from fundamentalist Christians, on the one hand, and from liberal humanities types, on the other. Often, in fact, the liberal pomos and the fundamentalists are de facto allies.
This is just a lie. A majority of scientists are not atheists, and most scientists are rather conservative. They're just not brain-dead, lock-step fundamentalist zombies.
Blanket and mostly incorrect ad hominem characterization.
When Science is attacked politically, it must defend itself politically. Almost every scientist I know (and that is thousands) would like nothing better than to be left alone to pursue their pet scientific projects.
Hopeful monsterism is a Hollywood fantasy. No biologist since about 1920 has put forward an such thing.
An excellent point. Science is inherently conservative, in the sense that it is cautionary and resists change. By that, I mean that any willy-nilly idea that comes along does not change science until it is thoroughly (though perhaps not perfectly) vetted: "You want change? Fine....prove it". Is it any wonder, then, that one of the most anti-scientific forces on the planet is radical Islam, which attempts to force change without debate, consideration or forethought?
They send one of yours to the hospital, you send one of his to the morgue. That's the Chicago way.
Me too. The dems will destroy the US much faster than the slow death which will surely result from the triumph of unreason.
That's easy. Evolution is science. ID is creationism pretending to be science and demanding equal time. Do you actually expect scientists to ignore such a fraud? ID has no research, no methodology, and no discoveries. It is simply creationism lite, another (failed) attempt to get religion taught in science classes. But it pretends to be science, and tries to "wedge" its way into the scientific arena.
Science is greatly limited regarding evidence for either position, and science is not the last word because science does not have all the evidence and can never attain it. What evidence they have, should be presented with no preconceived theory, or opinion of where the evidence they possess leads.
There is a huge amount of evidence for evolution, but no evidence for ID. And you want facts taught with "no preconceived theory, or opinion of where the evidence they possess leads?" That's lunacy. Science is facts and theories. Heinlein said it best:
For scientists to teach facts and omit theories, as you request, would be to censor science for religious reasons. That would be a sad thing to see.Piling up facts is not science--science is facts-and-theories. Facts alone have limited use and lack meaning: a valid theory organizes them into far greater usefulness.
A powerful theory not only embraces old facts and new but also discloses unsuspected facts [Heinlein 1980:480-481].
Christians and believers having read in Genesis that the world was created already old, that the chicken came first with the egg inside it, that the fruit tree was created mature with the fruit on the limbs and the seed inside the fruit, see scientists as two dimensional creatures blindly feeling their way around attempting to understand a three dimensional world.
Scientists see a small number of believers as using their particular religious belief to censor scientific research. Most Christians do not reject science; its only a small percentage with a particular belief.
It doesn't help when science says that when the earth was young, long before man arrived, that the earth was watered by a mist that rose from the ground, when Genesis says that from the time of Adam to the time of Noah, it had never rained, but the earth was watered by a mist that rose from the ground.
Mist that rose from the ground? I don't remember that from my science classes. Do you have a citation (from a reliable source, not a creationist website--they tend to distort the evidence to make it fit their preconceived beliefs)?
It does no good to point out that man and cockroaches have a common enzyme therefore it should indicate some branching off from each other during some period of evolution, when it would be ridiculous for an Intelligent Designer not to use the same needed chemicals in more than one creature to make that creature function as the designer wants it to. Why would an Intelligent Designer need to keep reinventing the wheel, when He already has on hand what He needs to plug in to make a creation tick?
That is the problem. How would you know what an intelligent designer does? You have no evidence, and no practical method to get any evidence (you have no instruments to measure the supernatural). All you can observe is the natural world, and that is readily explained by the scientific method. Your alternative would be to rely on your belief, and to force science to be silent where there is a conflict.
I think science has come to a point where it becomes purely political to take a position either way. They can no longer simply write off Intelligent Design and only support the Theory of Evolution. Let science present what it does know and then let the individual study the evidence and make up his own mind without agenda creeping into it.
Science follows where the data leads. There is a huge amount of data supporting the theory of evolution and no data supporting ID. So, science is presenting what it does know.
It is belief which is trying to censor science, and that is certain to cause a reaction from scientists. You should not be surprised at this.
One word: fundies.
Historically, fundamentalist Christians have not generally either been particuarly conservative or particularly Republican. They began to associate with the GOP in droves in the 1970s, after the Dems thought they now had large enough coalition to shed their embarrassing Southern Rump. Problem is, unlike in the seventies, when the Dems had huge majorities in the House and Senate, and thought they could afford to lose the fundamentalists, the GOP's majority is wafer thin, so they've got to kow-tow to fundamentalists and hope they won't alienate secular conservatives, libertarians and moderates. I think the upcoming election is going to prove this a miscalculation.
LOL
For those people who are tired of squinting, there are tools ranging from the simple:
To the complex:
One doesn't need an "agenda", one only needs "pre-conceived notions" set in stone.
See what you make of these items:
Towers Online - The News Service of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary
April 13, 2006 By Jeff Robinson
Excerpts:
"Trustees at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary on April 11 unanimously approved the creation of two new theological study centersthe Center for Theology and the Arts, and the Center for Theology and Law, during the board's annual spring meeting.
Seminary President R. Albert Mohler Jr. said the new study centers aim at equipping pastors and church leaders to think biblically about pivotal issues which dominate contemporary culture.
"One of the ways we want to lead Southern Baptists is through helping evangelicals and Southern Baptists in particular to engage some of the most critical issues of our day," Mohler said.-
"This is not a time for Christians to be out-thought by the world, but in general that is what happens. We find the church behind the times in thinking about some of the most crucial issues of our day."
Mohler also announced the appointment of two new faculty members to lead the centers. [snip] ...
...Mohler also named Kurt Wise as the new director for Southern's Center for Theology and Science, and professor of theology and science. Wise currently serves on the faculty of Bryan College in Dayton, Tenn., where he is also director of the Center for Origins Research.
Wise earned both a doctor of philosophy and master of arts in paleontology from Harvard University. He and his wife Marie have two daughters.
Wise replaces William Dembski, who is leaving Southern Seminary to join the faculty at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary so he can be closer to his family.
"With the addition of Kurt Wise, we are recognizing that creation is a ground zero theological crisis point right now in American culture and even in our churches," Moore said. [snip] ..
In other business, trustees: .... Heard a report from President Mohler that Southern's enrollment has topped 4,000 students for the first time in the seminary's history."
*
Here are a couple of interesting items I found on the web regarding Kurt Wise: [1] 7/3/2003 "Ok, I just got a email from Dr. Wise. This is what he said:
"I am a young-age creationist because the Bible indicates the universe is young. Given what we currently think we understand about the world, the majority of the scientific evidence favors an old earth and universe, not a young one. I would therefore say that anyone who claims that the earth is young for scientific evidence alone is scientifically ignorant. Thus I would suggest that the challenge you are trying to meet is unmeetable." ~ Kurt Wise
[2] December 19th 2004 Theologyweb.com
Post # 7:
"...there is new breed of YEC out there, of which Kurt Wise is an example, who recognize that there are scientific problems with their Weltanschauung. I knew Kurt was exceptional, but there are more of his stripe. Affectionately, I'd like to refer to them as neo-YECs, as opposed to the Wieland-Ham-Morris-Safarti-Jorge YECs for which I would propose the oxymoronic moniker paleo-YECs."
The above reality has prompted this commentary from well-known rabid atheist, Richard Dawkins:
Sadly, an Honest Creationist by Richard Dawkins
The following article is from Free Inquiry magazine, Volume 21, Number 4.
Creation “scientists” have more need than most of us to parade their degrees and qualifications, but it pays to look closely at the institutions that awarded them and the subjects in which they were taken. Those vaunted Ph.D.s tend to be in subjects such as marine engineering or gas kinetics rather than in relevant disciplines like zoology or geology. And often they are earned not at real universities, but at little-known Bible colleges deep in Bush country.
There are, however, a few shining exceptions. Kurt Wise now makes his living at Bryan College (motto “Christ Above All”) located in Dayton, Tennessee, home of the famed Scopes trial. And yet, he originally obtained an authentic degree in geophysics from the University of Chicago, followed by a Ph.D. in geology from Harvard, no less, where he studied under (the name is milked for all it is worth in creationist propaganda) Stephen Jay Gould.
Kurt Wise is a contributor to , a compendium edited by John F. Ashton (Ph.D., of course). I recommend this book. It is a revelation. I would not have believed such wishful thinking and self-deception possible. At least some of the authors seem to be sincere, and they don’t water down their beliefs. Much of their fire is aimed at weaker brethren who think God works through evolution, or who clutch at the feeble hope that one “day” in Genesis might mean not twenty-four hours but a hundred million years. These are hard-core “young earth creationists” who believe that the universe and all of life came into existence within one week, less than 10,000 years ago. And Wiseflying valiantly in the face of reason, evidence, and educationis among them. If there were a prize for Virtuoso Believing (it is surely only a matter of time before the Templeton Foundation awards one) Kurt Wise, B.A. (Chicago), Ph.D. (Harvard), would have to be a prime candidate.
Wise stands out among young earth creationists not only for his impeccable education, but because he displays a modicum of scientific honesty and integrity. I have seen a published letter in which he comments on alleged “human bones” in Carboniferous coal deposits. If authenticated as human, these “bones” would blow the theory of evolution out of the water (incidentally giving lie to the canard that evolution is unfalsifiable and therefore unscientific: J. B. S. Haldane, asked by an overzealous Popperian what empirical finding might falsify evolution, famously growled, “Fossil rabbits in the Precambrian!”).
Most creationists would not go out of their way to debunk a promising story of human remains in the Pennsylvanian Coal Measures. Yet Wise patiently and seriously examined the specimens as a trained paleontologist, and concluded unequivocally that they were “inorganically precipitated iron siderite nodules and not fossil material at all.”
Unusually among the motley denizens of the “big tent” of creationism and intelligent design, he seems to accept that God needs no help from false witness.
All the more interesting, then, to read his personal testimony in In. It is actually quite moving, in a pathetic kind of way. He begins with his childhood ambition. Where other boys wanted to be astronauts or firemen, the young Kurt touchingly dreamed of getting a Ph.D. from Harvard and teaching science at a major university. He achieved the first part of his goal, but became increasingly uneasy as his scientific learning conflicted with his religious faith. When he could bear the strain no longer, he clinched the matter with a Bible and a pair of scissors. He went right through from Genesis 1 to Revelations 22, literally cutting out every verse that would have to go if the scientific worldview were true. At the end of this exercise, there was so little left of his Bible that '. . . try as I might, and even with the benefit of intact margins throughout the pages of Scripture, I found it impossible to pick up the Bible without it being rent in two. I had to make a decision between evolution and Scripture. Either the Scripture was true and evolution was wrong or evolution was true and I must toss out the Bible. . . . It was there that night that I accepted the Word of God and rejected all that would ever counter it, including evolution. With that, in great sorrow, I tossed into the fire all my dreams and hopes in science.'
See what I mean about pathetic? Most revealing of all is Wise’s concluding paragraph:
Although there are scientific reasons for accepting a young earth, I am a young-age creationist because that is my understanding of the Scripture. As I shared with my professors years ago when I was in college, if all the evidence in the universe turns against creationism, I would be the first to admit it, but I would still be a creationist because that is what the Word of God seems to indicate. Here I must stand.
See what I mean about honest? Understandably enough, creationists who aspire to be taken seriously as scientists don’t go out of their way to admit that Scripturea local origin myth of a tribe of Middle-Eastern camel-herderstrumps evidence.
The great evolutionist John Maynard Smith, who once publicly wiped the floor with Duane P. Gish (up until then a highly regarded creationist debater), did it by going on the offensive right from the outset and challenging him directly: “Do you seriously mean to tell me you believe that all life was created within one week?”
Kurt Wise doesn’t need the challenge; he volunteers that, even if all the evidence in the universe flatly contradicted Scripture, and even if he had reached the point of admitting this to himself, he would still take his stand on Scripture and deny the evidence.
This leaves me, as a scientist, speechless. I cannot imagine what it must be like to have a mind capable of such doublethink.
It reminds me of Winston Smith in struggling to believe that two plus two equals five if Big Brother said so. But that was fiction and, anyway, Winston was tortured into submission. Kurt Wiseand presumably others like him who are less candidhas suffered no such physical coercion. But, as I hinted at the end of my previous column, I do wonder whether childhood indoctrination could wreak a sufficiently powerful brainwashing effect to account for this bizarre phenomenon.
Whatever the underlying explanation, this example suggests a fascinating, if pessimistic, conclusion about human psychology. It implies that there is no sensible limit to what the human mind is capable of believing, against any amount of contrary evidence.
Depending upon how many Kurt Wises are out there, it could mean that we are completely wasting our time arguing the case and presenting the evidence for evolution.
We have it on the authority of a man who may well be creationism’s most highly qualified and most intelligent scientist that no evidence, no matter how overwhelming, no matter how all-embracing, no matter how devastatingly convincing, can ever make any difference.
Can you imagine believing that and at the same time accepting a salary, month after month, to teach science?
Even at Bryan College in Dayton, Tennessee? I’m not sure that I could live with myself. And I think I would curse my God for leading me to such a pass." ~ Richard Dawkins
"Conflicts between Science and the Bible arise from either a lack of scientific knowledge or a defective understanding of the Bible." ~ Moses Maimonides
Click my screen name and scroll down to read these two items at the hot links provided:
[1] What were Galileo's scientific and biblical conflicts with the Church?
[2] "..In many ways, the historic controversy of creation vs. evolution has been similar to Galileo's conflict, only with a reversal of roles..."
Since the experiments you describe have the potential of disproving aspects of evolutionary theory, why does not the Discovery Institute fund the research?
Please refer to Genesis 1:11 And God said, Let the earth bring forth grass, the herb yielding seed, and the fruit tree yielding fruit after his kind, whose seed is in itself, upon the earth, and it was so.
So the Chicken came first, is my point. Everything created mature and ready to bear fruit after it's own kind. The herb created already yielding seed, the first fruit trees, already yielding fruit, with it's seed in itself. The Earth mature and ready to provide the soil and nutrients needed.
Many people make the same mistake as you, of just skimming over the scriptures rather than acutally taking in what is being taught.
This is the purpose of the purveyors of unknowledge. They hope that if they spread enough fear, uncertainty, and doubt about science, that people will come around to their particular theological position. That this has come to be associated with conservative politics fills the left with glee, but has people like Barry Goldwater rolling over in his grave.
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