Posted on 11/25/2005 8:34:07 AM PST by Exton1
KU prof's e-mail irks fundamentalists
http://www.kansas.com/mld/eagle/living/religion/13252419.htm
Associated Press
LAWRENCE - Critics of a new course that equates creationism and intelligent design with mythology say an e-mail sent by the chairman of the University of Kansas religious studies department proves the course is designed to mock fundamentalist Christians.
In a recent message on a Yahoo listserv, Paul Mirecki said of the course "Special Topics in Religion: Intelligent Design, Creationisms and Other Religious Mythologies":
"The fundies want it all taught in a science class, but this will be a nice slap in their big fat face by teaching it as a religious studies class under the category mythology."
He signed the note "Doing my part (to upset) the religious right, Evil Dr. P."
Kansas Provost David Shulenburger said Wednesday that he regretted the words Mirecki used but that he supported the professor and thought the course would be taught in a professional manner.
"My understanding was that was a private e-mail communication that somehow was moved out of those channels and has become a public document," Shulenburger said.
The course was added to next semester's curriculum after the Kansas State Board of Education adopted new school science standards that question evolution.
The course will explore intelligent design, which contends that life is too complex to have evolved without a "designer." It also will cover the origins of creationism, why creationism is an American phenomenon and creationism's role in politics and education.
State Sen. Karin Brownlee, R-Olathe, said she was concerned by Mirecki's comments in the e-mail.
"His intent to make a mockery of Christian beliefs is inappropriate," she said.
Mirecki said the private e-mail was accessed by an outsider.
"They had been reading my e-mails all along," he said. "Where are the ethics in that, I ask."
When asked about conservative anger directed at him and the new course, Mirecki said: "A lot of people are mad about what's going on in Kansas, and I'm one of them."
Mirecki has been taking criticism since the course was announced.
"This man is a hateful man," said state Sen. Kay O'Connor, R-Olathe. "Are we supposed to be using tax dollars to promote hatred?"
But others support Mirecki.
Tim Miller, a fellow professor in the department of religious studies, said intelligent design proponents are showing that they don't like having their beliefs scrutinized.
"They want their religion taught as fact," Miller said. "That's simply something you can't do in a state university."
Hume Feldman, associate professor of physics and astronomy, said he planned to be a guest lecturer in the course. He said the department of religious studies was a good place for intelligent design.
"I think that is exactly the appropriate place to put these kinds of ideas," he said.
John Altevogt, a conservative columnist and activist in Kansas City, said the latest controversy was sparked by the e-mail.
"He says he's trying to offend us," Altevogt said. "The entire tenor of this thing just reeks of religious bigotry."
Brownlee said she was watching to see how the university responded to the e-mail.
"We have to set a standard that it's not culturally acceptable to mock Christianity in America," she said.
University Senate Executive Committee Governance Office - 33 Strong Hall, 4-5169
Faculty
SenEx Chair
Joe Heppert, jheppert@ku.edu , Chemistry, 864-2270 Ruth Ann Atchley, ratchley@ku.edu , Psychology, 864-9816 Richard Hale, rhale@ku.edu ,Aerospace Engineering, 864-2949 Bob Basow, basow@ku.edu , Journalism, 864-7633 Susan Craig, scraig@ku.edu , Art & Architecture, 864-3020 Margaret Severson, mseverson@Ku.edu , Social Welfare, 864-8952
University Council President Jim Carothers, jbc@ku.edu , English 864-3426 (Ex-officio on SenEx)
Paul Mirecki, Chair The Department of Religious Studies, 1300 Oread Avenue, 102 Smith Hall, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, University of Kansas,Lawrence, KS 66045-7615 (785) 864-4663 Voice (785) 864-5205 FAX rstudies@ku.edu
Eh? Aren't you describing induction? Do you have a formal verification of induction from the axioms of boolean logic in your back pocket?
No, Those were opinions. They don't require proof, just some breathing. P.S. you have a low threshold for odes. My purported one is only 31 words long.
And my reply was only 13 words long. And in neither case do I detect a distinction that makes either offering more or less rhetoric vs. analytical.
What is the exact distinction between "opinions" and "polemics"?
Well good for you, but I didn't call yours an ode.
Mirecki needs to have a well documented criticism placed in his administrative files and if he doesn't have tenure, strongly question his eligibility. This being said, not on the grounds of any one particular viewpoint, but rather within the realm of 'religious studies' there are many different perspectives on the matter which take different perspectives on the human spirit.
If the Director, as it appears, has such a distaste for 'creationism', does he have an equally charged disgust for rationalism or empiricism?
One would think that a professor of Religious Studies would welcome an opportunity to teach all the different perspectives on the issue which have been strongly believed over the years. The jump to label creationism as a myth is just as ignorant of religious study as favoring rationalism over empiricism. His quotes indicate the thinkings of a very shallow mind that has allowed itself to become preoccupied with himself rather than his profession.
This raises a second question regarding the Provost. With such a glaring example of academic fraud in the thinking of a Director of a department, why would a Provost fool himself into thinking the course could be planned, let alone taught with any semblance of professionalism.
I wouldn't be surprised if the word gets around the campus that there will be no prerequisites and anybody who signs up, basically gets an A, while the academic administration ignores their 'profession'.
Easy, my opinion should not be arguable, similar to the statement, "I like broccoli".(All the preceeding in itself is an opinion) The "Shhesh." which you posted indicated an argument.(ditto) I did not argue about the correctness of your sharpened rock opinion(you can grasp that tightly and wave it around ostentatiously for all I care), I merely pointed out that you had entered into polemics. And since this is now polemics, as I pointed out in post 344, I will no longer participate in the polemic. You, however, can continue to give great examples and pleasure your socks off.
Since I consider this my field of expertise, I should give a more thorough answer:
For the purposes of drawing analogies to formal math, bugs come in three important flavors: your coding errors, system errors, and specification errors. You could conceivably lump the later two together, by the argument that failing to completely understand the idiosycracies of your environment was a failure of specification. Only coding errors are subject to being flushed out by making your programming environment formally provable, and nobody gets excited about coding errors--they are easy to catch and correct, with tools that are several orders of magnetude cheaper than employing formally provable programming systems.
Trying to put this in terms of formal math: proofs really only demonstrate that mathematical systems are self-consistent, and the derived theorems agree with the axioms, and each other. Some other, non-analytical process verifies that they are usefully true in the real world. Mathematical proofs are only interesting in the real world to the extent that the idealized fields of discourse to which the mathematics applies map to real fields of discourse. The processes by which we come to have confidence in this mapping are not primarily analytically tractable--they are matters of faith and trust, established by induction, or analogy, to the extent that they even loosely resemble analytics.
No, it doesn't. It indicates a quarrel, which you started by denigrating my contribution, and which you continue with your usual air of faintly patronizing rhetoric.
Yeah, but he didn't.
"Yeah, but he didn't."
You're supposed to be a "professor" and you don't know a thought experiment when you see one?
Go somewhere and learn to think.
Agreed. However, to only work on science with immediate applications is rather short-sighted, I think. Sometimes one can't forsee uses of cutting edge discoveries - Heinrich Hertz didn't believe his discovery of how to produce radio waves would be of any practical use, for instance; back then it was just a curious fulfillment of a theoretical prediction of Maxwell's equations. Does the search for new elementary particles have immediate applications? No. In a hundred years, who knows? If we have, someone in thr future will be glad that the groundwork has already been laid.
The dude is a troll.
This tendency is unique to the phenomenon of secular humanist philosophy. Officially, no scientific theory takes any position on the influence of God, positive or negative - people are incorrect to assum otherwise. Whether or not science is inadequate to deal with certain phenomena remains to be seen - it's inappropriate to assume that specific items are explainable by God's direct intervention only - we may have a scientific explanation of such items ten, a hundred or a thousand years from now (or maybe not). Even if we never explain a phenemonon scientifically, that doesn't conclusively prove it is unexplainable - science has limited power pertaining to such questions.
I don't see how naturalistic evolution disproves God's involvement in our creation any more than plate tectonics disproves God was responsible for the earthquake at Jericho, though. Naturalistic causation and attribution of causation to God are one in the same, in my book - only the former is subject to empirical study, though.
Still fun, either way, though (sometimes). One can only hope there's rational-minded lurkers out there. (Thanks for the compliment, BTW)
But that means theoretical scientists and mathematicians have a so-called burden of genius. We have a higher hurdle. We can't just write down guesses or special cases or nonproofs and expect that to be enough. And for those of us who don't have enough genius, well, we'll have to trudge along as best we can.
The Hertz analogy is nice, but again I have personal experience with this sort of thing. A 30-year old number theory theorem used for a graph-based biology application.
Oh, I don't think so, but your area might be in that of algebra/logic. I focus on combinatorics/number theory. Computers are used to find certain structures and whether they exist but they can't be used in any way when there are an infinite number of postulates (Fermat's last, for example).
Funny. At least I know something about FR etiquette.
I frequently have a problem that I overestimate people's intelligence. I will not repeat that mistake with you.
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