Posted on 01/16/2013 4:41:13 PM PST by EveningStar
For Zack Kopplin, it all started back in 2008 with the passing of the Louisiana Science Education Act. The bill made it considerably easier for teachers to introduce creationist textbooks into the classroom. Outraged, he wrote a research paper about it for a high school English class. Nearly five years later, the 19-year-old Kopplin has become one of the fiercest — and most feared — advocates for education reform in Louisiana. We recently spoke to him to learn more about how he's making a difference.
(Excerpt) Read more at io9.com ...
Science is merely the art of observation, of weights, measurements and hypothesis. It is in fact the lowest order of knowledge, metaphysics being of the highest.
Natural science can tell us nothing about anything it cannot see, touch, hear, etc. Nor can it tell us anything about events that occured before life, consciousness and time even existed. If it presumes to say something about these events it has encroached into metaphysics.
The only thing I hear criticized is the ToE.
When genetics is even mentioned, most people’s eyes just glaze over.
We have done this dance before and you and everyone else knows what I mean when I say creationist. I mean they think some things were created SPECIAL. Such a proposition is completely useless in terms of explaining or predicting the natural world. Why, what possible practical application do you suppose it has? Other than selling books and such to the cretarded?
Actually, Hitler strongly believed in evolution and that since in evolution some are perforce more evolved than others, equality of the races is illogical ....which squares entirely with Darwin's evolutionary ideas.
Hopefully your scientific research is more meticulous than your historical research.
True, they never mention genetics by name, but the science they're criticizing because it was wrongly used/abused by NAZIs had ENTIRELY to do with genetics. Darwin's theory of evolution says nothing about recessive genes or hereditary diseases. Reading through "the Origin of Species" wouldn't give you any information about why a baby has blue eyes if both her parents have brown eyes, for example. I think the average person doesn't understand much about genetics. It's stuff like that why OJ Simpson got away with murder when they tried to explain DNA evidence to the jury and show how the DNA results proved a 99.99% likelihood that it was OJ's blood.
One freeper claimed creationists embrace "genetics", then cited an example that had nothing to do with with genetics, either (selective plant and animal breeding to produce better results, which has existed for thousands of years before anyone knew what genes were.) As I noted, it would be akin to blaming the periodic table for people using dynamite.
"cretarded"??
You know, you've just really set a new low for yourself and destroyed whatever little credibility you may have had among people who didn't know you any better.
You continue to exhibit a level of bias and bigotry that demonstrates you are completely incapable of being objective about anything. A real handicap for someone who claims to be a scientist. With that kind of attitude and inability to be more objective, your scientific work would be suspect and certainly anything you say about science is also suspect.
Most people get over calling others retards in 6th grade.
Grow up.
Nothing in evolution has anything to do with one race being “more evolved “ than any other. Your ignorance of science is matched with your ignorance of history.
Well put; while evolutionists can mock creationists, they have no better explanation (that stands up to serious scrutiny).
I don’t mind discussing it with people who don’t agree with me, but the fact is that with current trends evolutionists will follow the dodo to extinction while creationists fill the Earth. Europe, the US, and Japan are probably the most evolved in technology, and all are disappearing secular societies being replaced by immigrants with a very different worldview.
Nothing in evolution has anything to do with one race being “more evolved “ than any other. Your ignorance of science is matched with your ignorance of history.
Zack was “outraged”? A fourteen or fifteen year old doesn’t have brains enough or experience enough to be “outraged” over anything.
Check the Bible, see Genesis and then check your Hebrew.
I think you need to check your work. I’ve been out of college for 30 years, and they were telling us the Bohr model was not the best. Heck, my High School Chemistry teacher told us the Bohr was not right.
From Wikipedia:
The Bohr model is a relatively primitive model of the hydrogen atom, compared to the valence shell atom. ...[The Bohr model is] considered to be an obsolete scientific theory... the Bohr model is still commonly taught to introduce students to quantum mechanics, before moving on to the more accurate, but more complex, valence shell atom.
Oh, and by the way - I’m not strictly “less educated” as has been mentioned in a previous post. In this post-modern world, people think they can make up their own “truth”.
Problem is, that many of those “truths” do not, and cannot be shown to, line up with reality. You weren’t there. I wasn’t there. NEITHER of us knows what reality was. At least “creationists” like me don’t claim we know it, we just believe what God tells us. (HE was there.)
“Check the Bible, see Genesis and then check your Hebrew.”
Been there, done it in seminary, along with extensive translation work from original languages.
As I said, you are promoting a human, false religion/cultic view. It isn’t Jewish - heck it is anti-Jewish. It isn’t Christian, heck, it’s anti-Christian. It isn’t the first time you’ve promoted anti-Christian views on FreeRepublic. It is just the most recent.
Valence shells were proposed by Bohr in 1922. All advancements to more predictive models have been based upon refining the Bohr model.
Hang on, just a minute, I misplaced my phylogenetic tree of the elements.
Dear allmendream, these statements provoke questions. For openers, what do you mean by "my" Christian faith?
There is only One Christian faith, though it is true it gets refracted differently in minor ways by different confessions or denominations of the faith.
But it seems to me what all Christians believe in are the following: (1) There is One God, one utterly world-transcendent, extra-cosmic, eternal, indivisible divine Substance expressing to us as three Persons, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. We believe that God the Father created all that exists, "on earth and in heaven." His act of Creation actualized His holy Word, in the Beginning — the Son of God, divine and eternal Logos Alpha to Omega, from the beginning to the end of created space and time.
The Lord's Act was purposeful, or goal-oriented. That is, there is instantly instantiated into the created universe an aspect of it that is purely teleological, or intended toward the fulfillment of an original divine Purpose that will be consummated at the End of this order of space and time, when humans and the world will be judged.
In such a light, we can understand how universal natural laws came into existence, and why they have such universal application and persistence in the natural world. [How could universal natural laws be rationally regarded as the result of an accidental, evolutionary development? In such a case, such natural laws could never be considered "universal," thus not naturally lawful.]
The Third Person, the Holy Spirit, can be likened to "God with us" (if we let Him), in that He primarily works to restore human souls to their created nature, in the likeness of their Father, through the Spirit, made possible by the Sacrifice of Christ Jesus.
These are basic statements that undergird my understanding of the Genesis account which, because it rings true to me both by reason and experience, is my fundamental cosmological view of the universe at macroscale.
Note that any purpose targeted to an end must involve guiding laws in between sufficient to produce the purposed, intended result. Which, if a result intended by God, cannot be defeased.
Now your scientific materialists and orthodox evolutionary theorists (I count you in that group, dear AMD) have no problem with admitting the existence of universal natural laws. The problem you have is that you cannot explain where such laws came from — which are still admitted as the essential criteria by which the world that we consciously engage in becomes intelligible to our minds.
Indeed, this particular set of thinkers has absolutely zero clue how life could arise in such a relentlessly inert material system, let alone mind. But obviously, such thinkers are alive, and they do have minds, or we wouldn't be hearing from them. How do they account for their own minds?
If they are merely random, evolutionary developments, and the exterior world is likewise a random evolutionary development, then where do we find the common Ground that can bring the human mind and the exterior natural world into sufficient correspondence such that we can say we "know" about the natural world, and can ascribe meaning to it?
In my theistic exposition so far, I have given short shrift to the soteriological significance of the Son of God, Jesus Christ. But understanding this, it seems to me, is the very foundation of a universal moral law, in addition to the merely physical laws of nature that Christ Logos embedded into the world of spatiotemporal Creation, in the Beginning.
In short, my belief is that both the natural and the moral (spiritual) laws find common Source in the Will of God the Father, as expressed and constantly projected into the created world by his Son, His Truth, the instrument of divine Will, via the Holy Spirit.
On this point, a contrast with Deism might be helpful. Deism, like Judaism, is a monotheistic religion. Its proponents believe that God created the universe. But they also believe that His creation consisted of a one-time implementation of one, single, perpetual-motion celestial "Machine" designed to infallibly run forever by its own internal resources. God built it; He wrote its program. Meanwhile, evidently He would have had to have created space and time in order to give His celestial machine scope within which to "run." Thereafter God, according to the Deist, declared His creation "good"; and stepped away from it forever more, never to engage with it again.
It is conventional to classify in this particular set of "celeste magnifique" or "machine model" thinkers as Baron Simon Laplace, Sir Isaac Newton, and Benjamin Franklin.
I gather Laplace had perfect confidence in "the scientific method" as the tool by which man can reliably learn anything and everything about the universe in which he lives. If Laplace is correct in his view, however, this relegates humans to the status of parts of a machine — while at the same time telling humans that they can envision the entire machine of which they are parts as if they stood completely outside of it, "looking down," as it were, from some "celestial" perspective that human beings simply cannot ever gain from the perspective of the viewpoint reduced to observations of physical nature alone.
As to Newton, he was very likely a monotheist, believing as he evidently did in a Creator God. He evidently thought the Christian conception of Three Persons as constituting the indivisible Substance of the Godhead was a totally unnecessary complication, on "Occam's Razor" grounds.
But then he did something really interesting: He suggested that given the machine-like qualities of the features of nature that his magnificent theory so well describes at all scales, sooner or later it is the very machine-like nature of existents that will generate errors over time. The accumulation of errors would be fatal given enough time, lest the Creator God step back into the picture to set things aright again. And Newton said that God actually does this. That He is "mediated" into human life and natural experience via what Newton called the sensorium Dei. Some folks of my acquaintance have associated this idea with the idea of a biological vacuum field.
Anyhoot, I'm just trying to ascertain whether we stand, you and I dear allmenmdream, on common ground.
In the past, you have tended to excoriate me as a "creationist," when all I really am is a humble Christian, a/k/a, an unrepented and unrepentable theist. I stand before the Glory of God, made so manifest to me, or I imagine to any other person with the eyes to see it (thanks be to the Holy Spirit!), so to marvel before the Beauty, Truth, and Goodness of what the Lord has wrought in His Creation, while being dumbfounded that He should give such special attention to a certain class of biological beings that He has made — that is, Man, created for divine Sonship from the Beginning.
Al Glory be to God!!! for you and me and everyone and everything else in His justly created order!
Thanks so much for sharing your views, dear AMD.
Ready to read post 10 and admit you were wrong yet? Can your friends you cowardly ping to your posts expect the same admonishment when they refer to evilution or evolosers? Somehow I wouldn’t expect such consistancy from you. You have yet to surprise me favorably, maybe you should go back to bashing Catholics and claiming the Pope isn’t a Christian. Stick with what you are good at! ;)
I think the main objection to genetics is using it to produce genetically modified foods and to use genetics to justify abortions.
Because genetics is so closely tied to stuff that’s controversial, it gets the blame rather than the people misusing it.
My concern with genetics is that we know so much, enough to be dangerous and don’t understand the full implications of all the genetic manipulation that scientists are doing.
Our technology has far outstripped our ability to wisely use the knowledge we have.
ki2 only said that science geeks espoused much of what Nazism brought to the fore, not equating them as you did.
Can your friends you cowardly ping to your posts expect the same admonishment when they refer to evilution or evolosers?
Cowardly ping? When I did it so anyone could see it?
If I had done it cowardly, I would have private messaged them.
Fail......
Calling someone a loser does not fall to the level of calling someone a retard. Nice try at deflection but that fails as well. No matter who called someone what before, does that justify, in your non-objective thinking, that you can then call others names? How old are you? Twelve?
You have yet to surprise me favorably, maybe you should go back to bashing Catholics and claiming the Pope isn’t a Christian. Stick with what you are good at! ;)
Where did I ever claim the pope wasn't a Christian? Provide the link. Or can we just presume that you're lying, demonstrating YOUR consistency?
Is the Pope a christian? Can you say that he is? Somehow I think you will be unable to make that simple admission of reality.
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