Challenged by Creationists, Museums Answer Back

The New York Times ^ | 9/20/2005 | CORNELIA DEAN

[Right Wing Professor]

ITHACA, N.Y. - Lenore Durkee, a retired biology professor, was volunteering as a docent at the Museum of the Earth here when she was confronted by a group of seven or eight people, creationists eager to challenge the museum exhibitions on evolution.

They peppered Dr. Durkee with questions about everything from techniques for dating fossils to the second law of thermodynamics, their queries coming so thick and fast that she found it hard to reply.

After about 45 minutes, "I told them I needed to take a break," she recalled. "My mouth was dry."

That encounter and others like it provided the impetus for a training session here in August. Dr. Durkee and scores of other volunteers and staff members from the museum and elsewhere crowded into a meeting room to hear advice from the museum director, Warren D. Allmon, on ways to deal with visitors who reject settled precepts of science on religious grounds.

[PatrickHenry]

1,000!

[Elsie]

Yea!

1,000!

(In photography; it's known as bracketing your exposures...)

[Right Wing Professor]

M is a prime letter, er number, er...

Well, 1¹⁰⁰⁰ is prime, anyway!

[Elsie]

Yea!

1,000!

(In photography; it's known as bracketing your exposures...)

[Elsie]

AARRRGGHHH!!!!!!!

[Elsie]

Control M is merely a RETURN

[PatrickHenry]

Sorry, LC. Darwin Central knows a trick or two.

[Windsong]

Maybe someone should have told you that this was a Conservative forum.

[Right Wing Professor]

Looks like you got bracketed. This means evolution wins and creationism loses. Game over!

[CarolinaGuitarman]

"And if 'god' was seen on TV, speaking to a TV reporter, you could clamm, "not in a medium that can be simulated on the computer."

What you mean is that He hasn't spoken DIRECTLY to you yet!"

God has not been seen on TV, speaking to a TV reporter, so this is a stupid example. Hypotheticals don't count as evidence. Someone claiming to be God would have to do something extraordinary to distinguish them from the thousands of people who also claim to be God. Most of them are in straight-jackets.

I am sure if God has spoken directly to you you can provide us with a recording or at least a decent transcript? What does His voice sound like? Does He smoke a cigar?

[Right Wing Professor]

Control M is merely a RETURN

The set of those who know that is rapidly diminishing.

[Dimensio]

You're comparing choosing between a particular god out of countless religions and a political candidate on an election ballot. You can't see the very obvious differences that make the two situations totally incomparable? Do I really need to explain why the analogy is completely bogus and not applicable?

[Dimensio]

The set of those who know that is rapidly diminishing.

How many still know the ASCII code for it?

[js1138]

Show me the test that would falsify evolution. At the moment I deny there is such a test. At least not one that would meet the standards you are demanding from ID.

Others have given specific examples. I have been more general. You have to realize that after 150 years of confirming evidence, evolution and natural selection occupy the heights with heliocentrism. An unfossilized dinosaur bone is the wet dream of creationists, and that would certainly cause a commotion, but it is just a dream.

I think most of the scientifically literate ID advocates accept the fact of evolution and are disputing the cause or the process.

I assume you are among these. To dispute the cause and process you must propose an alternative process and demonstrate it at work. Evolution meets this standard. Evey process needed for natural selection to work can be observed in the contemporary world.

[js1138]

Brutal.

[js1138]

The set of those who know that is rapidly diminishing.

As is the set of people who know the difference between LF and CRLF, and when this distinction is important.

[inquest]

Actually it's sub-prime.

[PatrickHenry]

Timing is everything. We try not to let the big ones get away.

[js1138]

That's why you are Sequence Editor to the Big Selector, and we are low frequency alleles.

[donh]

Right! And let's not forget crystal healing, once I had the flu, and my sister dangled a healing crystal over me, and I was eventually cured! If that's not grist for the science mill, I don't know what is.

You are aware that there have been studies in to the impact of prayer and such on health, right? There is also an ongoing controversy about whether the placebo effect is real or not.

Yea, well, these are issues for which there is some examinable evidence. There is no significant controversy that I am aware of about the placebo effect...and placebo effect is a satisfactory explanation of the effect of prayer.

But let's not distract ourselves from the central point: Lot's of things could be science, but aren't, because the fact that a thing is possible is not an adequate reason to consider its investigation a science in the same sense that we consider evolutionary-based biology a science, worthy of being taught as a semester-long high school class. Evolutionary science has numerous peer-reviewed journals reporting on an enormous congerie of potentially refuting experiments and field studies, and it is foundational in several fields of applied industrial science, and is a key tool in the findings of other natural sciences. Trying to rank ID, or prayer fulfillment, or astrology, or crystal healing alongside evolutionary biology, on the basis that these things coulda' been demonstrated, or coulda' been important, in a parallel universe of your own devising, is a silly parlor game.