- Tell that to Mr. Bush.
Since when do public officials read the Constitution? They will do whatever they feel is politically expedient.
Posted on 09/20/2005 7:02:45 AM PDT by 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.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
I meant to ask you about this when you mentioned it in another thread. I understand how a coral reef from an ancient ocean could be located in New Mexico, but how did it get to be 15,000 feet below the surface of the earth?
I'm guessing millions of years of sediment?
Abusing? Asking questions is abuse? The article didn't even indicate that anyone raised their voice.
throwing intellectual crap of the worst odor.
Ah, so you find their ideas offensive, so they should be prevented from asking questions or expressing ideas that profane your temple. NO ONE WHO DOESN'T AGREE AND UNDERSTAND IS ALLOWED TO ASK QUESTIONS! IT'S OFFENSIVE!
And you continue to compare asking questions to throwing actual crap.
Get a grip.
It meets my standard of 'beyond reasonable doubt'. On the other hand, OJ is playing golf , so what do I know?
Name?
Nice phrase. I will remember to use it in the future.
Well, let's look at the average docent's job. There is a number of exhibits that the docent is to walk people through and provide a basic intro about what the exhibit addresses. There's time for two or three questions at each exhibit, then she must move to the next one. The purpose is to provide an overview of what the museum has to offer. From the article, this is what occurred:
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.if you don't see that behavior as "nasty, disruptive, MOB"-like, then you I have little to discuss. However, you need to know that if you are part of a group that does this, and I happen to be on the same tour in the same museum, I will speak up against your harrassment of the docent.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.
There is no evidence to back up your hyperbole and fantasy
So you use the same tactics you accuse me of. Good going - bub. :)
"I agree, with the reservation that much of what we have today in Scripture concerning Creation is allegory."
Some clearly is, but not as much as you would think.
A literal reading --- without agenda --- is fairly harmounious with current science, and rapidly becoming harmoniuous as people learn more about the world.
Since when do public officials read the Constitution? They will do whatever they feel is politically expedient.
I'm a longtime lurker on the evo ping list. This particular article really outraged me - enough to bring me out of my shell for a bit!
That is supposition on your part, and not provable. (C'mon, scientists, you can do better than this.......you're using your emotions and not your brains here....).
The docent should have been prepared to answer the questions. There is not enough data in the story to draw any conclusions about the questioners since the article is biased toward the museum.......as is expected from the leftist Times.
Scratch a bit here and I bet we find a rejection of most of science.
If Behe, Denton, and Dembski have been forced by the evidence to accept common descent, those still rejecting it are rejecting science itself.
It's not your fault. Most academics today who write the textbooks, autobiographies etc actively and consciously avoid anything which might lead credence to Christianity and the belief in God. They've dramatically revised the textbooks from 40 years ago.
They'd have you believe Thomas Jefferson was an atheist (he was a Christian unitarian (not a trinitarian)), you've probably never heard of John Leland who used to be considered one of the 5 greatest founding fathers (with Madison, jefferson, etc etc). He was responsble for the Bill of Rights being included in the US Constitution (he forced Madison to adopt them). The problem is that he was a bible-thumping evangelical Baptist Preacher and his motivations for religious liberty could not be hidden behind some invented secular idealism.
“Immediately you would like to know where this number [ α (alpha)] for a coupling comes from: is it related to pi, or perhaps to the base of natural logarithms? Nobody knows. It’s one of the greatest da-- mysteries in physics: a magic number that comes to us with no understanding by man. You might say the “hand of God” wrote the number, and ‘we don’t know how He pushed His pencil’.”" -- Richard Feynman, Nobel Laurette Physics, QED The Strange Theory of Light and Matter, Page 129., Princeton University Press, 1985.
143 is a very good post.
Honestly, if you limited your questioning so that the docent could move on to the next exhibit in a timely manner, and so not cheat other people on the tour from getting what they came for, then of course, there's no problem. But what this article describes is people going to a museum for the expressed purpose of monopolizing the docent's time to challenge the very basis of the museum's exhibits itself. That is a whole different matter.
It applies to chemical reactions in general, including those that are involved in biological processes. The reactions that cover life proceed, for the most part, for exactly the same reason my pen falls to the floor - the resulting state is a lower energy state than what you started with.
This is basic freshman chemistry - there's nothing magic about biochemistry that makes it operate by a different set of rules than any other sort of chemistry. You might as well ask what force "compels" a match to burn when struck or a piece of iron to rust when exposed to oxygen.
Only those specific reactions utilizing the 4 amino acids in DNA seem compelled to reporduce and create ever more complex and ever more energy dependnent constellations of reactivity.
DNA is composed of nucleotides, which code for twenty different amino acids. Personally, I think it's remarkable that only silicon atoms seem compelled to make silicon dioxide. Carbon, on the other hand, is capable of forming concatenated chains - making complex molecules out of nothing more than methane and a few odds and ends is not particularly difficult. How boring.
Gravity fits the description of a "spirit", it cannot be seen, heard, felt, tasted etc ...it cannot be measured directly. We can only measure the force it applies to things that we can then measure directly.
That doesn't even remotely make sense - gravity is not some invisible elf that somehow exerts a force upon you, it is a force, in and of itself. What difference do you think you're measuring if you take a known mass and weigh it here on earth, and then weigh it on the moon? Not the mass - that's constant. You're measuring gravity, and quite directly too.
Gravity, as I said, but.... " Gravitation is not responsible for people falling in love. " --- Einstein
I guess I would not be fit to be a museum docent. 45 minutes?? After about 45 seconds on the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics my next reply would probably begin with: "Listen here, you simpering little twit." =)
Thanks.
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