[CobaltBlue]

Ping?

[ahayes]

Ping to self.

[mlc9852]

A lot to think about.

[VadeRetro]

What unites these advocates is not religion but the belief that supernatural forces are active in everyday life.

That's backwards from what I think. Supernatural forces are what is not acting. Religion, a set of beliefs that supernatural forces control reality, does act, often leading people to do bad things.

[VadeRetro]

Before the class, Crocker had told me that she was going to teach "the strengths and weaknesses of evolution." Afterward, I asked her whether she was going to discuss the evidence for evolution in another class. She said no.

The gimmick here is she "sincerely" in her nutcase way thinks there aren't any strenghts of evolution. Still, she feels allowed to bait and switch the reporter who does not know up front what she intends.

They're allowed to lie as needed. The Lord understands.

[nothingnew]

...Crocker, who wore a light brown sweater and slacks,...

This is key to the entire story.........isn't it?

FMCDH(BITS)

[narby]

When Lowe finally spoke, it seemed as if the lecture had lifted a load from her shoulders. "I believe in creationism, I believe in intelligent design," she declared to the class. Humans have souls, which make them different from other animals, she told me later. To believe in evolution meant that "after you are dead, you are done."

The close association of her belief that evolution nullifies her God means that she has a hopeless conflict of interest on the science. There's no way she could be trusted to be open minded on the facts.

[Ken H]

Hopefully this won't violate any coyright rules, but I've selected two partial sentences to quote.

"Nazi Germany had taken Darwin's ideas..." [snip] "What happened in Germany in World War II was based on science,"

___________________________________

Would Ms. Crocker be as willing to link Hitler and the death camps to Christianity? I'd like to see her response to this:

"My feelings as a Christian points me to my Lord and Savior as a fighter. It points me to the man who once in loneliness, surrounded by a few followers, recognized these Jews for what they were and summoned men to fight against them and who, God's truth! was greatest not as a sufferer but as a fighter."

-Adolf Hitler, in a speech on 12 April 1922 (Norman H. Baynes, ed. The Speeches of Adolf Hitler, April 1922-August 1939, Vol. 1 of 2, pp. 19-20, Oxford University Press, 1942)

http://www.nobeliefs.com/hitler.htm

(for the record, I think it's downright nonsense, if not deliberate deceit, to link Hitler's crimes to either Darwin or Christianity. )

[balrog666]

No one has ever seen a dog turn into a cat in a laboratory.

What an incredibly ignorant Liar-for-the-Lord - I hope this fool is already fired by now (again).

[From many - one.]

Check back to see if thread evolves.

[EarlyBird]

And evolutionary science has a great deal to say about ethics and morality, Dawkins said. Being "pro-life in debates on abortion or stem cell research always means pro-human life, for no sensibly articulated reason," he once wrote. The fact that humans think of themselves as altogether distinct from other animals -- and the biblical notion that humans have dominion over other animals -- is a sort of racism, Dawkins said. Evolution shows that fox hunters and bullfighters are tormenting their own distant cousins, which is why the biologist sends money to anti-bullfighting groups in Spain, and why he notes with pride that fox hunting was banned on the family farm. "The melancholy fact," Dawkins wrote in an essay called "Gaps in the Mind," "is that, at present, society's moral attitudes rest almost entirely on the . . . speciesist imperative."

I think one can reasonably infer from this exposition that Dawkins is pro-abortion. The "Gap in the Mind" in his head is that tormenting "distant cousins" (bulls, foxes) is much more repugnant that murdering your own, direct offspring.

[Blzbba]

From the article:

"No one has ever seen a dog turn into a cat in a laboratory."
...
"Humans have souls, which make them different from other animals, she told me later."


And when has anyone ever seen, or conclusively proven the evidence of the soul?


This woman is not fit to be teaching science. She should be teaching Sunday School at her local church.

[spinestein]

I have never had to read so many words to end up with absolutely nothing to show for it.

[Mamzelle]

bump

[Question_Assumptions]

Being "pro-life in debates on abortion or stem cell research always means pro-human life, for no sensibly articulated reason," he once wrote.

Trying a person for murder or rape always means murdering or raping a human, for no sensibly articulated reason. Should we consider the killing of rats to be murder or the killing of humans to be something less than murder and more like the killing of rats?

[DeweyCA]

Interesting that this guy wrote such along article that seemed to reflect both sides. He was so even-handed that I couldn't tell for sure which side he believed, ID or evolution. I will guess evolution, but he was understanding of the ID view, which is highly unusual.

[RobbyS]

Intelligent design's argument that evolution cannot explain the origin of astoundingly complex biological systems such as the flagellum of bacteria -- the microscopic, whiplike propulsion system with multiple interdependent parts -- is indistinguishable, Leshner said, from the bland assertion that science has not explained everything. Unexplained, however, is not the same as unexplainable. When ID advocates see something unexplained, they point to the supernatural. But science, by definition, looks only for natural explanations, Leshner said.

His comparison with gravity is false, unless he is talking about the microevolution, the local effects of each can be observed. He is begging the question of macroevolution. It no more exists than a general theory of gravitation. As for his notion of the supernatural, he is confusing it with the notion of a god of the gaps. The supernatural is precisely that which holds together the natural world, and is more analogous to Plato's forms. These are, in turn, like mathematical models which are either the creations of the human mind ,or some other mind if they exist independently of our minds. In any case, the main argument for the supernatural is the existence of the human mind. Rather than talks about natural and supernatural, he needs to use philsophical lanuage and say that science only deals with secondary causes, not final ones, and iD often sounds like a claim to know final causes.

[jalisco555]

Ping for when I have more time.

[BorisTheBulletDodger]

"Why was the experiment still in the textbook? Crocker said the authors' answer was, "because it makes the point . . . The problem with evolution is that it is all supposition -- this evolved into this -- but there is no evidence.""

...whereas the evidence that there is a God is so abundant...
I'll all for keeping God in schools but I believe in fairness towards both schools of thought.
You're never going to find the fossil of a worm with half an eyeball or a fish with one leg, and you're never going to find the skeleton of an angel.