Lawsuit Claims NASA Specialist Was Fired Over Intelligent Design Belief 743
New submitter period3 writes "The latest mission of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory is defending itself in a workplace lawsuit filed by a former computer specialist. The man claims he was demoted and then let go for promoting his views on intelligent design, the belief that a higher power must have had a hand in creation because life is too complex to have developed through evolution alone."
Man whose job relies on the scientific method... (Score:4, Insightful)
... is demoted for rejecting the whole basis, or showing that he has a severely flawed understanding?
Who would have thought.
Re:Man whose job relies on the scientific method.. (Score:5, Informative)
Hopefully NASA relies more on physics and mathematics than it does on evolution.
However, he wasn't fired for his flawed understanding of evolution - he was fired for being disruptive in the workplace. He would, hopefully, have been fired if he had been ranting on about how great natural selection was and passing around DVDs of pro-Darwin materials.
Re:Man whose job relies on the scientific method.. (Score:5, Insightful)
It sounds like he was finally fired for not being able to take a hint after being demoted for the above activities.
Definitely not the sort of person you want to spending tax dollars on at NASA.
Re:Man whose job relies on the scientific method.. (Score:5, Interesting)
If he believes in God, Allah, Buddha, or the Flying Spaghetti Monster, or even Scientology, that is his right.
If he insists on pushing that belief on others when they are 'captive' that is not his right. Termination is acceptable, especially of other methods of behavioral modification (written up, demoted, etc.) have not worked.
I once frequented a coffee shop run by a pair of brothers who were Jehovah's Witness. They had literature available, and if you asked they would try to convert you, but they understood that people came to get caffeine, not God, and thus kept it very low key. They ended up closing down for tangentially related reasons (a run-in with the Aryan Brotherhood that went very badly), but they got it, that religion is not barred from the workplace, but must be subordinate to it, in that the focus of a business, or office is to work, whereas the focus of a house of worship is, well, to worship.
-nB
Re:Man whose job relies on the scientific method.. (Score:4, Informative)
As a somewhat informed atheist, I must slightly disagree with this. For (almost) all Christian sects, God is three-in-one: the father, the son, and the holy ghost.
I think you may have missed the point. Christians who speak Arabic do refer to and address their deity as "Allah", and Muslims who speak English do call their deity "God". The same is, incidentally, true of Hindus.
Re:Man whose job relies on the scientific method.. (Score:5, Insightful)
First you give a verbal off the record warning. Then on the record, then written. If none of that makes the point, demotion is the next logical and necessary step. If even that doesn't make the point, termination becomes the only option. Keep in mind that if you do nothing, then you are up for a lawsuit from everyone else for allowing a hostile work environment.
Re:Man whose job relies on the scientific method.. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Man whose job relies on the scientific method.. (Score:5, Insightful)
Hopefully NASA relies more on physics and mathematics than it does on evolution.
However, he wasn't fired for his flawed understanding of evolution - he was fired for being disruptive in the workplace. He would, hopefully, have been fired if he had been ranting on about how great natural selection was and passing around DVDs of pro-Darwin materials.
Indeed... really the only way he would have a case in the first place is if Intelligent Design is admittedly religious belief. I know that the Dover School trial established that it was, but ID proponents keep trying to argue that it has nothing to do with religion, in an effort to get it into the schools.
So, really, creationists are stuck between a rock in a hard place. Either it's not religious so it can get into schools, or it is religious to get protected belief status. (You cannot be fired for being Christian, or expressing belief in Christian dogma. You can be fired for believing that the Loch Ness Monster actually exists.)
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Content has been a license AND a product for ages, depending on what its maker needed it to be, why shouldn't it work with another religion?
Re:Man whose job relies on the scientific method.. (Score:5, Insightful)
You can be fired for believing the Loch Ness Monster exists? That's news to me.
This guy can believe all of the cockamamee(sp?) ideas he wants to, and shouldn't be fired for it. In America, we're pretty much allowed to believe whatever we want, and the only employers that are allowed to discriminate based upon beliefs are religious institutions.
However, the burden of proof is on the plaintiff. He must show that his beliefs rather than his actions were the reason for his demotion and subsequent firing. It will be hard to prove that about the firing, seeing as how they were laying off a lot of guys at the same time. He can believe in the Loch Ness Monster if he wants to, but if he wastes taxpayer resources expounding upon that belief, then he should be first on the chopping block.
Re:Man whose job relies on the scientific method.. (Score:5, Informative)
In America, we're pretty much allowed to believe whatever we want
Yes, we are.
the only employers that are allowed to discriminate based upon beliefs are religious institutions.
The only employers who are allowed to violate the PROTECTED beliefs are religious institutions. Religious beliefs are protected beliefs, but non religious beliefs are not protected beliefs. (The law only protects adverse employment actions against people's "religion", not all beliefs.)
Employers can fire you because you smoke. They can fire you because you're left-handed. They can fire you because you have green eyes. They can fire you for ANY AND ALL REASONS that are not explicitly protected by law.
As belief in the Loch Ness Monster is not a religious belief nor is it real or perceived { gender, sex, race, color, disability, age, genetic information } and depending upon the state { sexual orientation, gender identity }, it is not a protected status, and thus is fair game for adverse employment actions.
Re:Man whose job relies on the scientific method.. (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Man whose job relies on the scientific method.. (Score:5, Insightful)
The only question should be how was he doing his job.
Someone who feels the profound need to nail his beliefs into other peoples' heads usually falls into a subclass of folks who are opinionated, stubborn and won't be dissuaded by silly things like proof or physical reality. A person like that in a technological profession will almost certainly find that this particular set of behaviors is antithetical to doing their job and in a position where logic is the foundation for making valid choices and selections a person who puts their beliefs and personal feeling first is going to step on a lot of toes and be a general aggravation to his coworkers.
There is also a certain air of self righteousness and arrogance. These are highly off-putting character traits. If he feels obliged to share his religious views, he should consider working at a place where people believe the same things. Is there a church in his denomination that needs a person with his job skills. In such an environment of closed minds he should be happy as a pig in a wallow, and the rest of society can avoid the imposition of putting up with his uninvited opinions.
Re:Man whose job relies on the scientific method.. (Score:5, Interesting)
Are you willing to use 3.141592653589 in your equations because your employer requires that constant to be used and not 3.00000000? If so, then you may believe Pi == 3 to be true all you want.
If you insist on using 3.00000000000 where your employer wants you to use 3.14... then you may be terminated.
IANAL, but this just seems to be common sense.
-nB
Re:Man whose job relies on the scientific method.. (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Man whose job relies on the scientific method.. (Score:4, Insightful)
My belief in God does not preclude me from wanting to understand how the universe works.
I am fascinated learning how the universe works. ID doesn't however help me understand how the universe works so much as tell me how it was made from a religious perspective. Science and religion don't have to be mutually exclusive BTW. Think about this for a minute...One theory contends that the universe was created by a large (really really big) explosion commonly referred to as the Big Bang theory. Judaism purports that the universe was created when God spoke. It's not hard to imagine an all powerful being's voice commanding such a presence as to be explosive.
ID isn't "an attempt to explain something" it's an attempt to attack evolution because we don't like evolution
And here I was thinking Jesus told us God is perfectly capable of defending Himself.
Re:Man whose job relies on the scientific method.. (Score:4, Insightful)
Insightful? Dude was a computer scientist, not a xenobiologist. Should they fire the rest of us for every tin foil consiracy theory we believe? ID is no less rational than aliens at Wright Pat, but neither should be fireable offenses.
Re:Man whose job relies on the scientific method.. (Score:5, Insightful)
If you are actively promoting your belief at the job, and preventing other from working on their hours, yes, you should definitely be reprimanded and possibly let go. Whichever belief it is.
Re:Man whose job relies on the scientific method.. (Score:5, Insightful)
Also for being enough of a dumbass to try and convert people in a place which mostly hires scientists. Not the brightest bulb on the tree, methinks.
Re:Man whose job relies on the scientific method.. (Score:5, Interesting)
Insightful? Dude was a computer scientist, not a xenobiologist
I'm going to go out on a limb here and guess that Dude was fired for being an idiot, not for his beliefs on biology.
Re:Man whose job relies on the scientific method.. (Score:5, Insightful)
The article says he was laid off because the project was winding down.
Though if they chose him among the first, I wouldn't be surprised if it was because he was, "that annoying asshat that constantly aggravates all of his coworkers."
Re:Man whose job relies on the scientific method.. (Score:5, Informative)
They didn't fire him for his tin foil hat. They fired him because of complaints lodged by his fellow workers about harassment. You hire people to do a job, not to preach about their religious views and generally waste others time with your vapid fairy tales.
Re:Man whose job relies on the scientific method.. (Score:5, Insightful)
Except Shirley Sherrod has been working for the Departmenf of Agriculture for decades, has a long track record of excellent service, and was relaying a story of how she did something positive at a NAACP event on her own time. Cappedge was fired for actually being a disruptive and problematic employee.
Re:Man whose job relies on the scientific method.. (Score:4, Insightful)
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Insightful? Dude was a computer scientist, not a xenobiologist. Should they fire the rest of us for every tin foil consiracy theory we believe? ID is no less rational than aliens at Wright Pat, but neither should be fireable offenses.
Again, you are allowed to believe whatever you want, but you are not allowed to promote personal beliefs (in anything) in the workplace. Inappropriate. Pretty much everywhere in the U.S.
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ID is no less rational than aliens at Wright Pat, but neither should be fireable offenses.
If the believer's behavior is effecting his performance or the productivity of others it sure as hell should be a termination level offense. Assuming they asked the offending party to correct their behavior first.
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Actually, ID probably is quite a bit more irrational that aliens at Wright Pat. At least in the case of the aliens, we have a number of eye-witnesses who claim to have seen the aliens or to have seen artifacts or to have seen technology they could not explain in terms of our current technology. That is the same type of proof we would rely on in criminal prosecutions. I don't know of any ID proponents who claim to ha
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I live by Wright Pat and they did a lot of testing on drones and stuff before they were well known and commonly used in the Air Force. At that time, people around here actually had a more logical basis for believing in aliens than anyone has for ID. While I always believed the UFOs were just stuff that Wright Pat was testing I didn't find it shocking when these sightings convinced people of alien life.
ID, unlike UFOs from Wright Pat, has yet to be identified to exist as anything other than a severally flawe
Re:Man whose job relies on the scientific method.. (Score:5, Informative)
I don't think it was firing him for believing in a dead carpenter on a stick.
I think it was firing him for handing out religious literature at work and demanding his coworkers and subordinates read it.
Someone was nice and let him ride out the project before they let whoever couldn't be easily reassigned go; instead of seeing it as a favor to him, he thinks his being let go was "discrimination."
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... is demoted for rejecting the whole basis, or showing that he has a severely flawed understanding?
Who would have thought.
Actually, the real beef here is promoting personal beliefs in the workplace. It would be like pushing a religion on others where you work. Inappropriate. You as an American citizen are allowed to believe whatever you want, but you are not allowed to impress those beliefs on others in the workplace. I have known several people who have been reprimanded and let go from the place I worked for 11 years due to trying to openly promote Christianity in the office. In this case I would have to imagine it was someth
Re:Man whose job relies on the scientific method.. (Score:5, Insightful)
bull. shit.
ID is nothing more than a rephrasing of 'God is real' without actually saying that.
It's wishfullfillment, nothing more.
Any of which shouldn't get you fired btw. Imposing your (misguided) beliefs upon others in your workspace is.
Re:Man whose job relies on the scientific method.. (Score:4, Funny)
I wonder...If scientist ever figure out how to create life, will it be considered Intelligent Design?
It will be called "engineering".
Re:Man whose job relies on the scientific method.. (Score:5, Interesting)
Intelligent design answers more the 'why' than the 'how' that Evolution does.
This is a bit like saying Religion is more about how you conduct yourself than about judging other people or justifying wars. Sure, theoretically that could be true, but it's not actually true. ID proponents in practice focus more on casting FUD against science than they do working scientific findings into a belief system.
Put another way, it's fine to say "Evolution is the how, my religion is they why" but that's not what they're doing. What they're actually doing is saying "Science is wrong because my holy book says so!" Religious people who don't reject science, whose understanding of evolutionary theory doesn't contradict their beliefs about higher powers, they don't call themselves "intelligent design."
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Technically, what ID proponents are saying is more like "Evolution is wrong because I don't understand how it can do what it does". (The predisposition to reject evolution may be religious in origin, and there is certain documentary evidence that the whole thing was dreamt up as a mechanism for promoting religious ideals without being overtly religious, but ID doesn't actually state that evolution is wrong because some ho
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On one side, evolution, you have natural selection leading to the selection of genetic mutations. It's verifiable, testable and the theory fits the available evidence.
On the other side, ID, you have non-natural selection. You have a designer that creates "changes". It is not verifiable, testable, and stands in the face of available evidence.
It is not fair to say ID sits in the realm of abiogenesis. It doesn't. It sits
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Intelligent design answers more the 'why' than the 'how' that Evolution does. It's entirely possible to believe both at the same time, in fact.
No, ID answers nothing, At best It dresses up an opinion to make it look like a reasonable emperical observation. Yes, you can believe in both, but ID adds unusable baggage to the questions it attempts to address. There is a reason philospophy and hard science are usually separate. ID is attempt to not only bridge the science/philo gap, which has been done much more elagantly by others (see Alan Watts & Carl Sagan), but impose a completely un-empirical & subjective notion into the science side. Its
Re:Man whose job relies on the scientific method.. (Score:5, Insightful)
The whole "Intelligent Design" thing is just Christianity in disguise. Please don't pretend it's anything else.
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Intelligent design answers more the 'why' than the 'how' that Evolution does.
It provides an unjustifiable, partisan[*], and almost certainly wrong answer to the "why" question. It would be more accurate to simply admit that we don't know and that we are very far from having enough data to claim any such knowledge.
[*] The Catholics and most other branches of Christianity reject ID (the Catholics learned their science lessons the hard way, and avoid any contradiction of evolutionary theory). So do most branches of Islam and other major religions. So ID is an intrinsically partisan
Re:Man whose job relies on the scientific method.. (Score:5, Interesting)
... is demoted for rejecting the whole basis, or showing that he has a severely flawed understanding?
Who would have thought.
Intelligent design answers more the 'why' than the 'how' that Evolution does. It's entirely possible to believe both at the same time, in fact.
No, it deals with an article of faith, one that specifically goes against a scientific principle. ID rejects evolution and brings for a made-up how concotted to justify their version of 'why'. There are articles of faith in other religious movements that explain the 'why' that neither question nor challenge scientific principles (what people call Theistic Evolution). Most religions (Christian churches, Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, etc) either have an explicit separation faith from science as things that are incomparable, or have syncretic views. Intelligent Design is categorically NOT a form of Theistic Evolution.
Intelligent design is neither one of these, and it is predominant in fundamentalist (Christian and otherwise) views, which thank God are not universal. Intelligent Design (in particular the type found in the States and among Islamic Fundamentalists) purposely states that Evolution as incompatible with their 'why' articles of faith.
I don't believe Intelligent Design, but calling people who do 'stupid' or saying they 'reject the scientific method' is juvenile
Might be juvenile in the delivery, but the essence is true. When you have all major religious denominations a)accepting or being agnostic to Evolution as a scientific fact, and b) condemning the forceful entry of Intelligent Design into the classroom as an article of science (as opposed to as an article of religious teaching), then it is stupid.
We can argue that intelligent people can do stupid things, or that stupid people do stupid things. But in the end, Intelligent Design, in particular as pursued in this country, it is stupid. Almost like believing that the world is flat and that the Ptolemaic system is an accurate description of the Universe.
and really serves the exact opposite of convincing the 'other side' that they're wrong...
For the most part, you can't convince them. And it is fine and dandy (and certainly their right) when they want to believe that (or whatever they want to believe). But when they forcefully try to replace Evolution in the classroom with their religious beliefs, then they cross the line into idiocy. Call a spade a spade. Sometimes shame brings a change, at least for the honestly misguided. For the utterly stupid, there is no hope.
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The reason I belittle ID isn't that I cannot prove it wrong and want to feel superior. I belittle it because it's sold as a "scientific theory" while lacking everything a scientific theory is about. Most of all, it comes from the wrong direction.
Science is about observing, pondering how what you observed could happen, why it could happen and what it needs to happen, then formulate a theory based on those observations. It's not "proven", but at least it's consistent with your observation. If you happen to st
Re:Man whose job relies on the scientific method.. (Score:4, Insightful)
If you say something preposterous, expect people to mock you. If you say Obama is a secret Muslim, or not a US citizen, your ideas should be mocked!
If you think the Earth is flat, or 6000 years old, your ideas should be mocked!
In general, if you do/say something ridiculous, it should be mocked. Because this is how you'll know how absurd that thing is. And of, course, it depends on the circumstances. Mocking a child for making a mistake at school is cruel. Mocking an adult who should know better is a public service. It is somehow deemed acceptable to be ignorant, and have opinions. Because all opinions should be respected.
Fuck that.
Ignorance is not a valid point of view, and never was. Your wrong and silly ideas (as opposed to you) should be mocked.
Re:Man whose job relies on the scientific method.. (Score:5, Interesting)
Problem is, mockery simply exacerbates the problem: it makes the person being mocked dig their heels in, and gives them a "victimized minority" status to cling to in their irrationality and ignorance.
If your goal is eliminating ignorance, the only way to do that is by engaging in calm, rational discourse. If your goal is to make yourself feel smugly superior to anybody who holds a view you consider "silly," without actually changing anything about the situation, then yeah, keep mocking.
My parents are both fairly conservative catholics, I'd consider myself an agnostic - I consider my parents' set of beliefs to be well-meaning, but pretty irrational, and I don't share them. But we still manage to have discussions about religion and belief without me shouting at them, rolling my eyes, and calling them names, and they pay me the same courtesy. And honestly? Those discussion are far more satisfying and interesting than "LOL U LOVE UR SKY DADDY YOU IDIOT SHEEPLES LOL".
Mockery does nothing to eliminate ignorance, so any argument in support of mockery is simply an argument in favor of divisiveness. As somebody else noted above: STOP. BEING. DICKS.
Re:Man whose job relies on the scientific method.. (Score:4, Insightful)
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I'd say that any diagnostic and troubleshooting is going to use the scientific method.
Based on the data, you formulate a hypothesis as to the underlying cause, and then attempt to remediate it. Then you determine if your hypothesis was correct, and you're either done, or you need to keep looking for another plausible hypothesis.
I'm sorry, but anybody who has to work with reality and arrive at logical conclusions based on reality is
Re:Man whose job relies on the scientific method.. (Score:4, Informative)
Hell even Einstein believed in it.
No he didn't. He used the word "God" a lot but he really meant "Nature".
The quote should really be: 'Nature does not play dice'.
Re:Man whose job relies on the scientific method.. (Score:5, Insightful)
I've _personally_ seen amazing things that scientific research has made possible.
I've also _personally_ seen how religion can destroy families by privileging a 3,000 year old text over reality.
I hear this standpoint all the time, that subjective truth is just as valid as objective truth. It's rubbish.
Subjective truth predicts nothing. What does assuming your sky wizard exists or not enable me to do? Absolutely nothing except hate myself because god hates fags like me.
What does assuming dark matter exists enable me to do? Nothing except provide a possible explanation for why there's gravitational lensing in a picture of distant stars where there really shouldn't be.
What does assuming that different materials have different properties and assuming that mathematics is sound enable me to do? Build bridges, skyscrapers, better farming tools, more fuel-efficient cars, better looking video games, etc.
Well, I suppose, unless you believe that suspension bridges are something that your sky wizard just shits out on occasion. If you do, that's your choice. However, I sure as hell wouldn't hire you to design a new suspension bridge.
Comment removed (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Too stupid for work for NASA (Score:4, Funny)
Since when has NASA required social skills?
It's just a precaution, in case we meet the aliens. You don't want to alienate the aliens at your first alien encounter.
Not because he believed, but because he recruited. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Not because he believed, but because he recruit (Score:5, Insightful)
Exactly. Pushing your religious beliefs at work is bad enough, but doing it as a manager is something else entirely. Sounds to me like the dude crossed several lines.
I've worked with a few oddballs, like a Young Earth'er who'd fill your ear with great flood stories (the Grand Canyon is proof positive of the great flood!), but they all knew what lines not to cross and I had no problem with them professionally. One is still a good friend. You can talk about this stuff at a peer level, outside of work within reason (i.e. respect folks desire to change the subject when they are clearly getting uncomfortable). You can't create a situation where employees can reasonably be afraid that their review/raise/promotion can affected by agreeing or disagreeing with them on decidedly non-work topics.
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Here are some interesting answers to the interesting questions you did not pose:
The Colorado Plateau slopes north to south, so a rush of water appearing in north east Arizona that might have formed the Grand Canyon would rush south into Mexico and not west to the Gulf of California.
If the speed of the water was enough to carry it west to cut the Grand Canyon, the canyon would be straight since momentum carries water in a straight line, but the Grand Canyon is sinuous like a normal river canyon.
The Grand Can
Re:Not because he believed, but because he recruit (Score:5, Insightful)
Agreed. I'm pretty religious (Jewish), but I don't make it a habit to discuss my religion at work. If asked about a certain aspect of Judaism, I'll answer. If I need to take a day off due to a Jewish holiday, I'll talk with my boss about it. Otherwise, my religion and my work are two completely different things.
If one of my co-workers started telling giving me DVDs and pamphlets telling me that I needed to accept Jesus or fry in hell, I'd complain to HR and would expect that this employee would be warned to stop and fired if he/she didn't.
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And most likely that's what happened. People began complaining to HR about the guy handing out DVDs and harassing them on Intelligent Design. At some point the workplace situation will become untenable, and the employer's job is to make sure that does not happen.
If you want to hang out on the street outside before and after work handing out DVDs, well, that's your right, but when you walk into the building, you're an employee, and you don't proselytize.
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I'm a creationist and a Christian and I agree. At work, I do not hide my beliefs. Heck, I have a framed image of a C.S. Lewis quote on my desk. Sometime I come to work wearing a shirt that says "Prays well with others" and has a quote from James on it. And if someone wants to engage me in a conversation on philosophy or religion, I'm game. But I don't go around passing DVDs and trying to convert my non-believing coworkers to believe in creationism. It's about the same as me trying to convince them tha
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This is one of the many things that ticks me off about Christianity. What transgression does a newborn have other than being born? Unless I'm mistaken, everyone is screwed from birth and to find salvation has to accept God (or Jesus) to be saved.
Saved from what? The kid was just born! What possible transgression can they have?! Or are you saying God screwed things up so badly that he had to put
Hmmm (Score:5, Funny)
I hope he wins. I'm not sure that my efforts to convert colleagues to satanism have been making a good impression at work and I could use the precedent.
Re:Hmmm (Score:4)
Just a thought... (Score:5, Insightful)
A thought:
If life were to be too complex to arise by evolution, and needed an intelligent designer, then surely the intelligent designer would also be too complex to arise naturally.
Who or what created the creator?
Re:Just a thought... (Score:5, Funny)
And, can that creator make a sandwich so big that even the creator can't eat it?
Re:Just a thought... (Score:4, Funny)
Yes. He can also eat it.
Re:Just a thought... (Score:4, Funny)
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Don't bother (Score:3, Insightful)
People don't accept ID because it is rational and well-supported by scientific evidence. People accept ID because it abates their fears about their place in the universe, and because it is consistent with the stories they were told when they were impressionable children.
Rare indeed is a person who can be made, by purely rational means, to reject a belief system to which he has plenty of irrational attachments.
Posting challenges like yours are tantamount to mud wrestling with a pig (you get nowhere, and the
Re:Just a thought... (Score:5, Interesting)
FWIW, I am a Christian and thusly believe in a Creator. But I don't care for that logic of proving a Creator. I don't think complexity is at all relevant. However, if I were to play devil's advocate, I assume the theory is that a Creator exists outside our known limitations.
Similarly you can ask if an omnipotent God can create a rock so heavy that he cannot himself lift it. Either answer suggests that omnipotence is impossible in and of itself, but it assumes limitations that may not apply. If a Creator can create the Cosmos, are they bound by the laws of physics, or are the laws of physics also simply part of their creation?
Conversely you could ask what existed before the beginning of time, or where did all mass in the universe come from originally, or what exists beyond the boundary of finite space. Ultimately, you realize that these are utterly unanswerable questions. Any answer we accept is one of faith and we should not judge others for their conclusions to unanswerable questions without clear answers.
Re:Just a thought... (Score:5, Informative)
Aquinas answered that in the 13th century. Try to keep up.
For what it's worth the specific form of the ontological argument he was responding to defined complexity in terms of the number of parts and their internal interactions. Given that God -- as understood by Aquinas -- is not material, he has no parts at all and no internal interactions, and so is trivially simple in that sense. Alvin Plantinga recently restated that argument in response to Dawkins. It doesn't mean the ontological argument is necessarily a good one -- it has a problem with the principle of sufficient reason -- but it does mean that that objection isn't a particularly good one.
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Sounds like Aquinas answered the question poorly. Why should complexity only have to do with moving physical parts? Clearly that is a poor measure for things with no physical component. He just came up with a definition of complexity that intentionally excluded God, thus handwaving the problem away.
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The day that Muslims will allow intellectual freedom to make fun of their own god and religious icons, is the day we can start giving religious zealots the respect they deserve (you should note the irony in that statement).
Some Muslims do. They don't tend to get into the headlines, though, or head up maniacal regimes.
Yeah right... (Score:5, Insightful)
David Coppedge, who worked as a "team lead" on the Cassini mission exploring Saturn and its many moons, alleges that he was discriminated against because he engaged his co-workers in conversations about intelligent design and handed out DVDs on the idea while at work. Coppedge lost his "team lead" title in 2009 and was let go last year after 15 years on the mission.
And...
Coppedge had a reputation around JPL as an evangelical Christian and other interactions with co-workers led some to label him as a Christian conservative, Becker said.
[he] says he believes other things also led to his demotion, including his support for a state ballot measure that sought to define marriage as limited to heterosexual couples and his request to rename the annual holiday party a "Christmas party."
First, don't shove it in everyone's faces and it won't be an issue. Difficult for an evangelical, I know.
Second...
It looks like a pretty straightforward case. The mission that he was working on was winding down and he was laid off.
Good luck getting around that. Sounds kinda... normal and uninteresting.
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Computer specialist? (Score:5, Insightful)
The man claims he was demoted and then let go for promoting his views
Since one's beliefs on the origins of life have absolutely zero do do with the work of a "computer specialist," I'd hope he was fired if he was proselytizing at work.
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Work is not the place for proselytising (Score:5, Insightful)
From the TFA:
He [...] handed out DVDs on the idea [intelligent design] while at work
The question is whether the plaintiff was fired simply because he was wasting people's time and bothering them in ways that would have led him to being fired regardless of whether it was about religion or whether he was treated worse based on the religiosity of his beliefs.
The former.
time, place, manner (Score:5, Insightful)
There's a difference between firing someone for their religious beliefs and firing someone for promoting those beliefs at work, especially if the person is in some position of authority over those he's passing the DVDs out to. There's a trend lately with Christians complaining that their religious freedom is being infringed, when what's really happening is that they simply aren't being allowed to impose (to some degree or another) their religion on someone else. Whether it's a teacher lecturing to her students about her religious beliefs, an employer specifying which legal medical treatment an employee's health insurance covers, or a supervisor trying to persuade his team of his religious beliefs, those are all examples of religious "freedom" going far enough to step on others' right to believe differently. Like the old saying that "your freedom to swing your arm ends where my nose begins", your right to proselytize ends at the office door.
Re: (Score:3)
Indeed. And it's getting exported abroad, in particular in Britain where various American-based Christian groups are pushing ridiculous cases into the courts where they know they'll inevitably get a pounding so they can claim "You see, there's a war on Christianity!"
Serious Contradiction (Score:3)
...alleges that he was discriminated against because he engaged his co-workers in conversations about intelligent design and handed out DVDs on the idea while at work.
and
He did not go around evangelizing or proselytizing.
So which is it? The belief itself shouldn't matter, but the proselytizing at work does. And it sounds like he and his lawyer haven't decided what actually occurred yet.
Promoting (Score:5, Informative)
"The man claims he was demoted and then let go for promoting his views on intelligent design,"
"alleges that he was discriminated against because he engaged his co-workers in conversations about intelligent design and handed out DVDs on the idea while at work."
Notice that he doesn't claim he was fired for having the belief. He claims he was fired for promoting it. His version of 'promoting' might be everyone else's version of 'harassment'.
"In the lawsuit, Coppedge says he believes other things also led to his demotion, including his support for a state ballot measure that sought to define marriage as limited to heterosexual couples and his request to rename the annual holiday party a "Christmas party."" ... So it wasn't just ID. He also spouted hate and political correctness.
""The question is whether the plaintiff was fired simply because he was wasting people's time and bothering them in ways that would have led him to being fired regardless of whether it was about religion or whether he was treated worse based on the religiosity of his beliefs," said Volokh." ... And wasting people's time at work.
"He sued in April 2010 alleging religious discrimination, retaliation and harassment and amended his suit to include wrongful termination after losing his job last year."
And he was already suing before he was fired, so this is an on-going thing. I think with a lawsuit in progress, they'd have to be pretty ballsy to fire him over the thing he was suing about, unless they had really, really good reason for it. A court will have to make that determination, though, as we don't have all the evidence. What evidence I've seen isn't pointing in a direction he'd like, though.
It was God's Will. (Score:3, Insightful)
Tell him it was God's will that he was fired, and if he pursues the lawsuit he's doubting God's plan.
Down-modded (Score:4, Insightful)
I've always had Excellent karma on Slashdot for years until I made a post that the believe that evolution occurs is not in direct opposition to the belief that there is a Creator/God.
I was down-modded like crazy and people came out of the woodwork to make personal attacks.
My wife tells me of how she was harassed while working at a Jesuit university for believing in God, because she was in a lab. Fellow Jesuit employees spoke of how only absolute idiots would believe in God, and how it is an absolute accepted fact amongst intellectuals that God cannot exist.
I still maintain that if it is a great offense to believe in the existence of God (which cannot be tested), then it is equally a great offense to believe definitely in the inverse of something that cannot be tested.
I think most intellectuals who believe in God hide their beliefs out of fear and shame that they will be judged and ostracized for that belief. I would assume that intellectuals would easily spot the logical fallacy that judging a belief solely on the merits of the stupidest people who believe in it doesn't hold water.
http://www.nizkor.org/features/fallacies/guilt-by-association.html [nizkor.org]
Re: (Score:3)
Re:Down-modded (Score:4, Interesting)
I didn't make such statements at the time. I merely stated that I simultaneously believe in a Creator and that evolution occurs. I said the two weren't necessary in direct opposition and then was attacked repeatedly.
In fact, any time I've ever admitted to believing in God on /, I've been down-modded. I personally really like the democratic moderation system of /., but it shows that many people incorrectly use down-modding to disagree with something rather than offering a counter-point. There is no -1 disagree.
In the end, I state what I believe. I don't cater to moderation.
Re:Down-modded (Score:4, Insightful)
Consider that /. is largely populated by analytical thinkers (computer people tend to be that way or else they'd do something else for a living) and that religion, regardless of what flavor, is predicated on the abandonment of analytical thought at least where one particular idea is concerned.
Just like the guy this article is about, in a group of analytical thinkers, anti-analytical thinking is bound to be suspect.
Re:Down-modded (Score:5, Interesting)
Without a doubt, there are some common sentiments amongst most /. readers. Making a statement that goes against those common beliefs will be unpopular. If I argued that Bill Gates was a better human that Steve Jobs because Gates is giving to charity where as Jobs rarely/never did, I'd probably be down-modded by those who disagree. Apple is popular on Slashdot, where as Microsoft is hated.
But that's my point. People should offer counter points rather than use the moderation system.
Work is no place for politics or religion (Score:3, Insightful)
He was laid off due to budget cuts. End of Story. (Score:3)
From the article;
"Caltech lawyers contend Coppedge was one of two Cassini technicians and among 246 JPL employees let go last year due to planned budget cuts."
The interesting thing is he is pretty much admitting that he shoved his views in others faces, otherwise why would it be a reason to let him go?
It's About the Establishment Clause (Score:3)
Not fired because of intelligent design (Score:3)
Help! Help! I'm being oppressed!!! (Score:5, Interesting)
1. If Intelligent Design does not fit under the definition of "science", then it is obviously time to expand the definition. -- This seems to be the result of ignorance and the fact that both science and religeon use the same words for subtly different purposes. The first example that comes to mind is the word "evidence", which has a very scrict definition under the scientific method. Religeous folks hear that science requires evidence, and become frustrated when their "evidences" for the existence of God are brushed off as incomplete or incorrect. We can probably blame a poor education system for this misunderstanding, though the condition does seem to be self-reinforcing at this point. Not good.
2. The one sister I have who actually has a decent understanding of the scientific method thinks that perhaps I.D. should not be tought in science classes (Thank God!!), but believes that the recent push by religeous folks to influence scientific discourse is the natural reaction to the "war on faith" that religeous leaders have been talking about for as long as there have been religeous leaders. If us un-enlightened would only see the light and conform to their supersticious beliefs, this entire dispute would go away. -- This is the more troubling problem, because the solution requires that we train people to think more critically, both about scientific and spiritual issues. There is room for God and science to co-exist, but very little room for the litteral interpretation of scriptures or the blind acceptance of religeous dogma when one learns to think critically. Unfortunately, I don't think people are generally smart enough to make this leap. Religeon is to comfortable, and offers easy answers to the complex questions that life presents.
Hitchens was right, religeon poisons everything.
What he was actually fired for (Score:3)
The NASA administrators stated his problem wasn't "believing" in ID, but refusing to stop proselytizing his coworkers. Since this is an objective claim that, if true, can be corroborated by witnesses, it's fairly likely.
It turns out that personal belief systems do not entitle you to bother your colleagues with stuff that has nothing to do with work, and when they ask you to please tone it down and do your bloody job, that's not discrimination.
It's not about beliefs being right, unfalsifiable, or provably wrong. Wherever I end up working, I would make no secret of my atheism, and be glad to discuss it at lunch if someone brings it up in a personal conversation. I would not treat my workplace as a personal ministry to preach at.
Re:I guess they would never have hired (Score:5, Informative)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Really? How do you square that with:
Comment removed (Score:4, Informative)
Re: (Score:3)
Because Einstein was a deist as he proclaimed when he stated he believed in the god of Spinoza. Otherwise known as "Don't use Einstein to promote your theist views".
I believe in Spinoza's God who reveals himself in the orderly harmony of what exists, not in a God who concerns himself with the fates and actions of human beings.
For me the Jewish religion like all others is an incarnation of the most childish superstitions. And the Jewish people to whom I gladly belong and with whose mentality I have a deep affinity have no different quality for me than all other people. As far as my experience goes, they are no better than other human groups, although they are protected from the worst cancers by a lack of power. Otherwise I cannot see anything "chosen" about them.
I cannot imagine a God who rewards and punishes the objects of his creation, whose purposes are modeled after our own -- a God, in short, who is but a reflection of human frailty. Neither can I believe that the individual survives the death of his body, although feeble souls harbor such thoughts through fear or ridiculous egotisms.
I do not believe in immortality of the individual, and I consider ethics to be an exclusively human concern with no superhuman authority behind it.
It seems to me that the idea of a personal God is an anthropological concept which I cannot take seriously. I also cannot imagine some will or goal outside the human sphere.... Science has been charged with undermining morality, but the charge is unjust. A man's ethical behavior should be based effectually on sympathy, education, and social ties and needs; no religious basis is necessary. Man would indeed be in a poor way if he had to be restrained by fear of punishment and hope of reward after death.
Re: (Score:3)
"The further the spiritual evolution of mankind advances, the more certain it seems to me that the path to genuine religiosity does not lie through the fear of life, and the fear of death, and blind faith, but through striving after rational knowledge."
-Albert Einstein
Oh that kidder. We all know he wasn't a fan of evidence or anything so banal as that.
Re:I guess they would never have hired (Score:5, Insightful)
religion without science is blind
That would be your Intelligent Design right there. You may not realize this depending on where you get your science information but there is quite literally ZERO evidence in favor of ID. Not a little. Or some weak evidence that needs more study to flesh it out. ZERO. Not a little bit vs. evolution through natural selection's large piles. I mean zero. Nothing. Intelligent design is blind religion at it's finest.
Re:I guess they would never have hired (Score:5, Informative)
Actually ID is more insidious than even that. The core argument is so vacuous and devoid of anything approaching a prediction or explanation that it can't even really be disproven. Yes, guys like Behe and Dembski will come up with some example, like say, the vertebrate immune system, but really, they're not in fact invoking any particular of aspect of ID to make the claim, they're just saying "ooh, it's too complex!". Worst of all is Behe, who is a molecular biologist, so should know the literature enough to know there are decades worth of studies showing how things like "irreducible complexity" can in fact evolve, and that the very examples he so often invokes were long before his time demonstrated to be evidence FOR biological evolution.
Of course the leaders of the ID movement are a very shifty lot. If they're talking to a crowd of people who tend towards accepting evolution, ID is all about that missing link needed to create life from non-life. If they're giving a speech in a church basement, they basically turn into all-out Creationists.
But I remember many years ago someone on talk,origins summed up ID best when he said ID says nothing more than "somehow something somewhere is wrong with evolution." That's about as much meat as you'll ever got on the beast. It's nothing more than an appeal to incredulity, built up with lots of pseudo-scientific (in particular irreducible complexity) and pseudo-mathematical (Dembski's information filter) fluff. You'll get more content from a 30 second detergent advertisement.
Re:I guess they would never have hired (Score:5, Insightful)
Einstein was by no means a religious person - in fact, the great physicist saw religion as no more than a "childish superstition". "The word god is for me nothing more than the expression and product of human weaknesses, the Bible a collection of honorable, but still primitive legends which are nevertheless pretty childish. No interpretation no matter how subtle can (for me) change this".
Re:I guess they would never have hired (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3)
Re:Isac Newton anyone? (Score:5, Informative)
the idea of GOD is not scientifically ridiculous
No, it's just irrelevant since it's non-testable, non-replicable, and non-falsifiable.
Re: (Score:3)
He probably thought you could turn lead into gold with the proper application of liquefied horse dung, too.
Well, if by "liquefied horse dung" you mean "hydrogen atoms produced from horse dung by chemical breakdown, then flung at incredible speeds through a cyclotron towards a small quantity of lead", you might get a little bit of gold. Maybe. ;)