What am I refusing to acknowledge. Be specific. What do my religious beliefs (if any) have to do with this. Again, be specific. There will be a test. You will fail it by changing the subject, fleeing, mocking, or otherwise not being specific.
Posted on 01/22/2005 7:38:12 AM PST by PatrickHenry
A movement to drag the teaching of science in the United States back into the Dark Ages continues to gain momentum. So far, it's a handful of judges -- "activist judges" in the view of their critics -- who are preventing the spread of Saudi-style religious dogma into more and more of America's public-school classrooms.
The ruling this month in Georgia by Federal District Judge Clarence Cooper ordering the Cobb County School Board to remove stickers it had inserted in biology textbooks questioning Darwin's theory of evolution is being appealed by the suburban Atlanta district. Similar legal battles pitting evolution against biblical creationism are erupting across the country. Judges are conscientiously observing the constitutionally required separation of church and state, and specifically a 1987 Supreme Court ruling forbidding the teaching of creationism, a religious belief, in public schools. But seekers of scientific truth have to be unnerved by a November 2004 CBS News poll in which nearly two-thirds of Americans favored teaching creationism, the notion that God created heaven and earth in six days, alongside evolution in schools.
If this style of "science" ever took hold in U.S. schools, it is safe to say that as a nation we could well be headed for Third World status, along with everything that dire label implies. Much of the Arab world is stuck in a miasma of imam-enforced repression and non-thought. Could it happen here? Our Constitution protects creativity and dissent, but no civilization has lasted forever, and our current national leaders seem happy with the present trends.
It is the creationists, of course, who forecast doom if U.S. schools follow a secularist path. Science, however, by its nature, relies on evidence, and all the fossil and other evidence points toward an evolved human species over millions of years on a planet tens of millions of years old [ooops!] in a universe over two billion years in existence [ooops again!].
Some creationists are promoting an idea they call "intelligent design" as an alternative to Darwinism, eliminating the randomness and survival-of-the-fittest of Darwinian thought. But, again, no evidence exists to support any theory of evolution except Charles Darwin's. Science classes can only teach the scientific method or they become meaningless.
Many creationists say that teaching Darwin is tantamount to teaching atheism, but most science teachers, believers as well as non-believers, scoff at that. The Rev. Warren Eschbach, a professor at Lutheran Theological Seminary in Gettysburg, Pa., believes that "science is figuring out what God has already done" and the book of Genesis was never "meant to be a science textbook for the 21st century." Rev. Eschbach is the father of Robert Eschbach, one of the science teachers in Dover, Pa., who refused to teach a school-board-mandated statement to biology students criticizing the theory of evolution and promoting intelligent design. Last week, the school district gathered students together and the statement was read to them by an assistant superintendent.
Similar pro-creationist initiatives are underway in Texas, Wisconsin and South Carolina. And a newly elected creationist majority on the state board of education in Kansas plans to rewrite the entire state's science curriculum this spring. This means the state's public-school science teachers will have to choose between being scientists or ayatollahs -- or perhaps abandoning their students and fleeing Kansas, like academic truth-seekers in China in the 1980s or Tehran today.
re: Observing "facts" in the wild
(true story)
There is a bird called and Indigo Bunting.
Any book you ever see about birds shows it as blue.
One day a newby birdwatcher came to ask about a black Indigo Bunting sized bird he had just seen.
Nearby scientist asked a few questions, then explained. The black colored bird was an Indigo Bunting.
The apparent "fact" that the bird was black was simply a data point better described as a bird that _apppeared_ black at this time of day and in this location in relation the observer and the sun.
So is the apparent "fact" that the Indigo Bunting is blue.
Scientists don't do "facts", we do "data"
Explanation of bird is left as an exercise for the student. ;->
What am I refusing to acknowledge. Be specific. What do my religious beliefs (if any) have to do with this. Again, be specific. There will be a test. You will fail it by changing the subject, fleeing, mocking, or otherwise not being specific.
"Oh! So you just don't agree with the established definition of a theory in science." - Alacarte
Incorrect. I'm explaining (above) that a directly observed fact in the lab or in the wild is closer to the truth than merely postulating a theory.
Wrong. Fire requires oxygen. The Sun's heat and light is the result of fusion (hydrogen now, helium later, heavier elements toward the end).
It's gone beyond that:
Review of "Nature's Destiny". Michael Denton has become an 'Evolutionist.'
No, that's incorrect. For honest scientists, the evidence shows that some processes are clearly unaided (e.g. volcanoes erupting, waves lapping), whereas other processes are clearly aided by Intelligent Design (e.g. software creation, robot welding).
Observations are simply statistical data points. Nothing is ever absolutely certain.
"The sun HAD to be larger. It's on fire! The fire that creates the heat from our sun is burning something."
You are too much my friend, you have some big nads saying this stuff in public, I have to give you that.
BTW, it's not burning, think of the sun as a permanent nuclear explosion.
Observations are not "facts." They are data. Theories must be consistent with that data and explain it better than anything else.
Theories explain relations among data.
The word "fact" is only used colloquially among scientists doing science.
A scientific paper follows a formula: question, methods, procedures, results, conclusions.
I am becoming tempted to write a paper as follows: Do self-identified creationists use more or fewer ad hominem arguments than self-identified non-creationists when posting to Free Republic?
proposed method: Take three consecutive crevo threads with more than 10 responses. Count ad hominems (using a standard definition) Analyse both per thread and per poster so that one poster will not unduly influence results. In order to maximize objecivtity, have 2 each of self-identified creationists and non-creationsits identify the ad hominems. Results tallied separately.
Also this: Creationists, Hitler and Evolution. Concludes that Hitler was most likely a creationist.
Observe, however, that this means nothing about the actual merits of creationism, and the evolution side of the debate never bothers to mention Hitler -- except when some creationists shows up and claims the opposite.
We're not talking about vulcanism. We're talking biology. What evidence in biology would you consider potential falsification of ID?
It was in the link that I gave in my original post, if you want the math for sequencing.
For sequencing, you have one set of probabilities for such structures forming without intelligent intervention, and a probability of 1 that such sequences could be ordered by an intelligent designer. That math is included in the link that I provided, though it should be intuitively obvious to a computer programmer such as yourself that it takes intelligent intervention to write a program rather than merely leaving a computer on overnight to have it form unaided.
Observations can identify facts. Those particular observations are *always* closer to the truth than merely postulating theories to an audience.
Threads must be at random however!
"Incorrect. I'm explaining (above) that a directly observed fact in the lab or in the wild is closer to the truth than merely postulating a theory."
What do "postulating a theory" and evolution have to do with anything? The term "postulating a theory" implies the common usage of the word, which is contrary to the usage used with evolution. Are you being deliberately dishonest with your wording? Evolution was "postulated" as an hypothesis, then later, after being proven right over and over, the hypothesis attained it's highest standing possible in science, a theory.
Evolution makes predictions. So everytime we find a fossil, or sequence a DNA strand, evolution is tested. Also, if something is so specific to a phenomena that it can be reproduced only in a lab, it would never become a theory, that's a law. A theory is a broad explanatory model, like flight or germ theory.
I like your response to southack better than mine.
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