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 ...
Ah, a trick question. No one has ever observed macroprojects, Mr. Smart Guy.
Not where I've worked anyway.
I worked on a macroproject once. At the time it was the largest single application development project using VB. I believe its budget, start date and delivery date are the same as the Big Dig.
That's not a macroproject, that's a bunch of people engaging in their own little microprojects, and nobody denies microprojects. Licking stamps, sharpening pencils, arranging the icons on their desktops, finishing TPS reports, making phone calls, et cetera - there's no macroproject there. Get real.
Visual Basic will do that.
I care what you think because...? Oh, wait - I don't.
It's the same argument over and over again, with the same players. Makes me very sad that no headway has been made in all these years. I am also quite uneasy that many seem to feel that evolution of species makes God something less than He really is.
I guess schools are not the only ones dumbing-down America.
You spent a bit of time answering me, so you deserve a reply. I'm not being condescending, but please understand that this sort of argument leaves me exhausted and sick to my Soul, which is why I quit posting to many of these threads.
You are quite correct in that students (across the board) are not learning to think critically, but as far as your assertion that "uncertainty" is not being mentioned, I beg to differ.
My background is in the hard sciences, and "uncertainty" was ever present in lectures and lab. Now that I've embarked upon a new career in the "soft" sciences, I still find "uncertainty" to be a major portion of the curriculum.
Of course, this is at the college level.
It's certainly fair to claim that evolution is the "best guess" of science, but that's not how it's taught.
There are bad apples everywhere, but in the classes I have taught, and in the assertions I have made within these threads, Science is indeed our current "best guess".
General_re has been posting here since 2001, and his commentary has been consistent. I see your account is fairly new. Welcome aboard.
Perhaps English is not your first language. Let me spell it out for you - I d-o-n-t g-i-v-e a d-a-m-n. Nobody asked you for your opinion because nobody cares what you think, newb.
It's to be expected with the regular players, who cannot be explained by mere ignorance. I don't understand the cause of the dysfunction. It's clearly not a lack of information. Whatever intellectual defect produces adult creationism, it is sufficiently persistent to withstand the rational presentation of overwhelming evidence. I'm not aware of a remedy.
As you know, we don't debate them with any hope of effecting a cure; we do it for one another, and to demonstrate to the lurking world that there remains a strong streak of reason within conservatism.
There is no observation without a point of view to make it, and without an observation the nigh-infinite set of quantum state possibilities never resolves to one. So without points of view, the universe stops -- or rather: does naught be.Why are butterflies and flowers beautiful? Why do insects have multiple life-forms -- for in each stage, larval, pupa, adult would not a blunt Darwin-model would have some more adept singular form animal evolve to take that niche? What is beauty?Yet we know there is, there be and was. So by that we know there is a point of view to be had -- and further that there is and was in great, ornately intricate and majestic all at once order -- a order that gives a man each breath by beat of his heart and lungs drawing in the just-so-correct percentage of oxygen. A loving order by that, a creator who sets all points of view before the viewers, and by their breaths so given gives them the mind and arts by which they too can create new views, and even points of view that realize new worlds.
What is reason? Is it beautiful? And if not, why are you so proud of it? What is pride? Is pride beautiful? And if not. why do you preen in it?
You really believe this?
All things dull and ugly,
All creatures short and squat,
All things rude and nasty,
Each little snake that poisons,
Each little wasp that stings,
All things sick and cancerous,
All evil great and small,
All things foul and dangerous,
Each nasty little hornet,
Each beastly little squid--
Who made the spikey urchin?
Who made the sharks?
All things scabbed and ulcerous,
All pox both great and small,
Putrid, foul and gangrenous...
Seems like a rather odd belief to me.
Well, now, by that listing of the ugly, you've also by delineation defined beauty. For what makes one see "ugly or putrid" unless a great desire for beauty?
I just find it odd that you wish to believe in a designer, presumably a psychopathic alien, who deliberately created things that eat the eyes of children and infants.
You've already determined things in that perfection, for you'd have to allow no choices (by that I mean at the quantum mechanical wave-form resolution level) that would upset the candy-apple cart.
Me, I like the current "partnership". Minor partners we are, for sure, but still partners with a reason, and with the ability to have free will, to make mistakes.
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