Why Are Some Hell-Bent On Teaching Intelligent Design? 1293
Funksaw writes "Here's an op-ed by first-time politician, long-time Slashdotter Brian Boyko, where he talks about his experiences testifying at the Texas Board of Education in favor of having real science in science textbooks. But beyond that, he also tries to examine, philosophically, why there is such hardened resistance to the idea of evolution in Texas. From the article: '[W]hat is true is that evolution tests faith. The fact of evolution is incontrovertible and supported by mounds of empirical evidence. Faith, on the other hand, is fragile. It is supported only by the strength of human will. And this is where it gets tricky. Because to many believers, faith, not works, is the only guarantee that one can pass God's litmus test and gain access to His divine kingdom. To lose one's faith is to literally damn oneself. So tests to that faith must be avoided at all costs. Better to be a philosophical coward than a theological failure.'"
Re:More importantly (Score:5, Informative)
And he put the retinas in backwards too.
Also, what type of idiot wires up the larynx via the heart? I could maybe understand if there was a ganglion down there, but no - it's just a nerve that doubles back on itsself for no good reason.
Re:More importantly (Score:5, Informative)
Backwards in humans, but an improved design in cephalopods [wikipedia.org].
Praise Cthulhu
Re:why do athiests love to hate belivers so much? (Score:5, Informative)
If you believe that you'll believe anything. This model of atomic structure hasn't been valid for almost a century. If you're going to talk about science, at least try to keep up with it.
Re:Threatening The Emotional Crutch of Idiots (Score:5, Informative)
That probably isn't the whole story.
There is some evidence that there is a loose confederation of well-funded lobbyists and influence-mongers [theguardian.com] who have a vested interest in casting doubt on science in general, the so-called "merchants of doubt". The same organisations tend to be behind denial of acid rain, anthropogenic climate change, and the danger of tobacco.
Denying evolution indirectly helps the bottom line of tobacco companies, fossil fuel companies and so on. Why wouldn't they help out the cause?
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Re:I disagree. (Score:2, Informative)
Your third paragraph is quite wrong. Well, maybe some Christians believe that people wouldn't know murder is bad apart from the Bible, but traditionally Christianity teaches otherwise, via the concept of "general revelation". It's clear in the New Testament (e.g. Romans 2:15).
In the fourth and fifth paragraphs I think you vastly overplay your hand. I'm a Christian and was in the USA for 10 years and never met anyone like that, even though I did meet a good number of "creationists".
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Re:Yuk (Score:5, Informative)
Evolution is fact because it has been observed. I suppose there remains a possibility that what has been observed has been totally misunderstood by everyone, but that applies for just about any fact.
The theory of evolution is not a fact. However, if the theory of evolution is proven wrong, that will not invalidate evolution, which remains a fact. As things stand, however, the theory of evolution is looking pretty robust in providing an explanation for evolution. However, like all good science theories, it is always up for being challenged and adapted in the light of observed evidence.
The key issue understanding the difference between "the theory of evolution" and "evolution". They are not the same thing, and if an argument challenging evolution has its basis in misunderstanding that, then it has failed before it has even started.
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Re:If evolution is true... (Score:4, Informative)
The text was written by and for people who lived in a time when most people had lots of kids, both sons and daughters. The author probably assumed that his readers would assume that Adam and Eve had daughters as well as sons.
It also says in Genesis 5:4 that Adam lived for 800 years and had sons and daughters so someone who read the whole text would not be confused, except by the age of the guy I guess.
It's a fringe group (Score:4, Informative)
Ok, I haven't lived in Texas for 2 decades now, but I was also born there, went to college there, etc..
A relatively small group of religious conservatives have somehow taken over the Board of Education. [rationalwiki.org]
Just how this happened, and why people put up with it, is something I cannot explain. Sure, Texas has it's share of religious whack jobs, but really no more than (and possibly fewer than) many other states a bit farther to the north and east.
What's worse is that Texas has also become the state that many other states look to, to set a baseline for what textbooks their schools will use.
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And that they are secret agents.
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Let your water source prove to be blessed, and rejoice with the wife of your youth,a lovable hind and a charming mountain goat. Let her own breasts intoxicate you at all times. With her love may you be in an ecstasy constantly.
That sound like more than just mindless procreation, so the next time some bible thumper insists on ridiculous ideas (such as sex is only for procreation) ask them for scriptural proof because at John 17:17 Jesus said; "... your word is truth," so anyone who speaks truth will have sound scriptural support from God's word; the Bible, to back up their claims (2nd Timothy 2:15).
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Just FYI:
http://www.biblica.com/bibles/faq/11/ [biblica.com]
Quote:
Almost the entire Old Testament was written in Hebrew during the thousand years of its composition. But a few chapters in the prophecies of Ezra and Daniel and one verse in Jeremiah were written in a language called Aramaic. This language became very popular in the ancient world and actually displaced many other languages. Aramaic even became the common language spoken in Israel in Jesus' time, and it was likely the language He spoke day by day. Some Aramaic words were even used by the Gospel writers in the New Testament.
The New Testament, however, was written in Greek. This seems strange, since you might think it would be either Hebrew or Aramaic. However, Greek was the language of scholarship during the years of the composition of the New Testament from 50 to 100 AD.
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And of course, the new testament isn't part of Judaism. Per that faith jesus was a false messiah.
Their position on the new testament is too complex for me to summarize.
http://www.jewishencyclopedia.com/articles/11498-new-testament [jewishencyclopedia.com]
Re:But I don't know the real answer! (Score:4, Informative)
You've got a lot of factual oversights and selective omissions here. I'm not a physicist, so I can't comment on the astronomy matters, but I do know about the rest. I have a feeling you're a troll and you don't actually believe any of this, but let's see if we can set the record straight at least a little.
The known mutations in the human genome divided by the mutation rate shows that humans were mutation free...6000 years ago and that all women on earth share the same mother.
The human genome is nothing but mutations, all 3.1 billion bases of it. We can compare the human genome to the Chimpanzee genome and meticulously reconstruct all of the differences and indeed the whole history of changes between the two. Mitochondrial Eve only affects a very small part of the human genome, the mitochondrion, which we also share with all other animals on the planet (as well as plants, fungi, and protists), and dates back to at least 140,000 years ago, not 6,000 years ago. I would be more than happy to devastate you with further discussions about evolutionary history.
Everything on earth still has Carbon-14 in it. Instead of explaining this as "background carbon", the Occam's Razor answer is that everything is less than 10,000 years old.
The background noise in radiocarbon dating is caused by nuclear testing, cosmic radiation, and spontaneous decay. This can be demonstrated under controlled conditions. Occam's Razor requires that all evidence be accounted for. (Do you propose we just pretend nuclear testing didn't happen, or that nuclei don't emit neutrons when they decay?) Keep in mind that C-14 is very rare, only accounting for a trillionth of all carbon on the planet. It's not as if there's a whole bunch of the stuff that came out of nowhere. It's stochastically normal for spontaneous decay to occur at that frequency. Even with the background levels, radiocarbon dating is useful up to about 60,000 years ago, six times longer than you suggest.
Every culture talks about dragons as if they are real, but we have mythologized them. Why? Creationists believe the simpler answer is that dinosaurs are dragons.
All dragon myths have been traced to regions that have crocodiles. Crocodiles are scary.
No intermediate forms, almost at all. Virtually every fossil is a modern-day creature as is.
This is just clear misinformation; there are relatively few living fossils [wikipedia.org]. Almost all fossils are of extinct species—like the ground sloth [wikipedia.org], the Hallucigenia spiny worm [wikipedia.org], and seventeen thousand species of trilobite [wikipedia.org]. Also, doesn't that conflict with your obsession with dinosaurs?
Every culture talks about a flood, almost always one in which a guy often named something akin to "Noah" saves some combination of himself, his wife, his family and a bunch of animals with the help of his god. How do they all get this story when they didn't talk to each other.
But they did talk to each other; there were trade routes from Greece to Ireland in the 8th century BC. The legend of Noah is clearly derived from the Epic of Gilgamesh. Doesn't that mean you should worship the Sumerian pantheon?
So to me, the better question is why censor creationism? If it's so wrong, won't that be easily seen by everyone?
Creationism was rejected by mainstream Christianity precisely because it depends on heaps of factually inaccurate statements. Neither the Anglican Church nor the Catholic Church believes any of the bullshit you're spinning. It is dangerous precisely for the reasons outlined in the news article on which we're commenting: because it claims to offer cowards a better chance of avoiding Hel
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I'm not the OP but the logic is pretty straightforward. By definition, in any universe where omniscience exists, free will cannot also exist.
If anyone can know with absolute certainty that I will do something, I therefore cannot choose to do anything else.
But that logic falls apart when we examine the act of choice closer. Why did you make a particular choice? If determinism holds - if your actions are somehow preordained, for example by following logically from a complete description of some former or latter moment of time, such as "the beginning", or the combination of your personality and history, or anything else - and this means determinism coerces your will, then surely the alternative - that you simply choose randomly - means that the metaphorical dice coerces you just as much.
What's actually happening here is that reality has been reduced [wikipedia.org] to the point where free will lies in peaces, and since none of these pieces is will by itself it can't be found. But of course in reality people are highly predictable; sure. they can choose something else than what someone who knows them very well predicts, they just don't want to. In a 100% deterministic system, this predictability tops at 100% certainty, while in a system with a random dice added to process it's that dice, not the person, who is "free" to take unexpected pics (because if the dice is the person or his "will", we've just pushed the problem one step back and recurse right back to it).
tl;dr If you compare a philosophical and juridical concept with a concept in physics, you'll get "sounds like purple" as an answer.