That is…really a bad idea. Why bother teaching kids anything at all, if it’s a bad idea to teach them science in science class?
And no, I won’t fuck off.
Agreed’ “Creationism” can be distilled from a multitude of religions into a fairly concise statement that “some people believe that a being (or group of beings) outside observable existence created the Universe, and the Earth, and caused Life to form and evolve. There is little creditable scientific evidence to support these theories in their various incarnations; for further guidance on the subject, please refer to the religious counsel of your choice, or enroll in a Religious Philosophy course.”
As far as I’m concerned, that’s all that really need be said on the matter.
Let’s just say I have the same right to defend my own country as you do yours. Would I have taken umbrage at the same remark made in the same way by an American? Of course I would. It wasn’t just because you’re a Scot that I objected.
There is, but it gets far more attention than it deserves. Compared with the big cities of the Midwest and the Coasts, the places where these school board debates come up are relatively rural and do not reflect on the beliefs of the majority. And even in those areas, as several have remarked in this thread, not everybody toes the line of fundamentalist dogma.
Further, I think it’s safe to say that in every country there are people who are narrowminded, do not read, and have no interest in learning anything new. These people exist everywhere; as a teacher, I’m sure you realize that.
I think Creationism should be left where it belongs, in Sunday school and church, for those denominations that choose to believe it. No, it doesn’t reflect well on my country, but at the same time I don’t want us all to be colored with that brush.
I wasn’t really mad at you, though it might have come across that way. If so, I’m sorry. I was motivated more out of an immediate desire to stand up for the rest of us, the ones who think Creationism is a bunch of hogwash.
One would hope, but I don’t think government or business really cares all that much one way or the other. The people who do research science generally aren’t Creationists, but that’s only a minuscule number of people. On the other hand, I’ve actually met a few engineers and other applied scientists who seem to accept the idea of divine creation. Obviously doing so doesn’t affect their competency, but I’m surprised there would have been any. FTR, one of the people I’m thinking of is a Chinese immigrant, so he obviously came to a belief in Biblical literacy through some other route than would be true of someone who was born and raised in a small Utah town.
I agree that a common set of terms may be helpful in delineating positions. I’m using this definition of theory:
Which is why I don’t seriously advance the position that Creationism get anything more than “passing mention” in a science class, but that it does get a mention, before moving on to more creditable and scientifically verifiable theories.
Look at it this way: the comparison of the two will do well in illustrating the Scientific Principle in action: observation, gathering of evidence, conduct of experiments with verifiable and reproduceable results, etc.
As a biologist who’s spent much of his career studying how thing like bacteria evolve the ability to do things like “eat” pollution, let me register what may be a surprising sentiment: I agree with the underlying premise of mswas (although not his mean-spirited approach). In other words, give both sides air time, but only in the context of critically evaluating each. From the sounds of most of these posts, 95% of us know that any competent biologist can poke more holes in the Biblical Creation saga than you’d find in a ton of Swiss cheese.
The feeling that several of you have - I’ll sum it up as the “we refuse to give equal time to bullshit” argument - is, in my opinion at least, a wrong one. If we were talking about something at the level of the Yeti or alchemy (or holocaust deniers), that would be one thing, since (I hope) VERY few people still believe in any of these. What you’re ignoring is that a very large segment of the American public (almost a majority) do believe the Biblical accounts:
http://www.gallup.com/poll/content/login.aspx?ci=14107
Put it this way - if you try to design an anti-drug education program in a society where 52% (or even 35%) of the population believe the statement “drugs are really cool”, you better be ready to attack this notion head-on, or you’re not going to get very far. The notion that all religions’ creation myths would need to be dealt with is also a straw man. Like it or not, the vast majority of the U.S. is Judeo-Christian; theirs is the only viewpoint with any real traction here as far as creation stories go. As such, it’s the only one that needs to be dealt with.
The sad thing is that there is no reason to view science and God as mutually exclusive; indeed, modern science has pointed out several ways in which an Intelligent Designer could have set the initial conditions for the universe (see Paul Davies’ The Mind of God), or influence its unfolding (including evolution) at the quantum-mechanical level (Kenneth Miller’s Finding Darwin’s God). Unfortunately, until we move beyond “goatherders’ myths” (give 'em a break, people, they were just trying to explain the world based on the knowledge they had at the time), we’ll never be able (at least as a whole) to really get at these questions. The Biblical Creation story, because it flies in the face of so much of what science has proven to be true, is an impediment not only to science, but to a modern understanding of God; THAT is why it needs to be dragged into the light and discredited.
Good post.
I haven’t read those books. Who (or what) did they say **made **the Intelligent Designer?
I dropped a sentence during C & P:
Then, Evolution will clearly be shown, from a scientific standpoint, to be an emminently more consistent and likely theory than Creation.
That raises the conundrum of Infinite Regression. St. Thomas Aquinas addressed this in the 13th Century. It is a precept of most religious faiths that there is an ultimate “Uncaused Cause,” which they call God (or somehing else).
Science may one day run hard up against that “Uncaused Cause” (whatever it may ultimately turn out to be) and come to a standstill; or it may steamroll right over it and consign it to the trasheap of beliefs.
Future Yet To Be Determined.
Thanks.
Miller, as I recall, doesn’t address the issue. Davies says the following in his Preface:
“Ther remains that old problem about the end of the explanatory chain. However successful our scientific explanations may be, they always have some starting assumptions built in. For example, an explanation of some phenomenon in terms of physics presupposes the validity of the laws of physics, which are taken as given. But one can ask where these laws came from in the first place… Sooner or later we all have to accept something (emphasis mine) as given, whther it is God, or logic, or a set of laws, or some other foundation for existence.”
The current Big Bang Theory (presently as modified by cosmic inflation) has allowed astrophysicists to make a large number of testable predictions, all of which, unless I’m mistaken, have been verified to the limits of precision allowed by our finest instruments.
Name one even testable cosmological hypothesis proposed by ID theorists. There is simply no comparison. Only in the most tortured abuse of the word could ID and, say, Big Bang Nucleosynthesis, be understood as a syncretic world view.
Why is the lack of “absolute truth” something anyone should be remotely worried about? Absolute truth means I know there is a probability of zero with an infinite number of zeros after the decimal point that a thousand pink winged monkeys will not fly out of my ass. Living my life and studying nature with an absurdly high level of confidence that a thousand pink winged monkeys will in fact not fly out of my ass is hardly “tilting at windmills”. It’s living, and exploring, life like a sane human being.
That’s how I originally spelled ‘programme’, ever since I was a child. A boss didn’t like it though, back in the late-1980s, so every time I’ve typed it since, I’ve had to make a conscious effort to omit the ‘me’ on the end. I’ve decided not to think about it anymore. I’ve always put ‘u’ in ‘colour’, and ‘re’ instead of ‘er’ in ‘theatre’. Sometimes (and this is because my first car was an MGB, and I picked it up from the owner’s manual) I’ll let slip ‘tyre’. And for some reason, I have to make a conscious effort not to type ‘gaol’. Maybe it’s because much of what I read as a child was English literature, or because the American writers I read as a child spelled that way. Or maybe it’s because much of what I’m currently reading was published in England. And frequently I forget whether a word takes an ‘s’ or a ‘z’. (No, I don’t say ‘zed’.)
Basically, I’ve decided I’ll no longer make a conscious effort to conform and it will come out how it will.
The Canadian influence is there, too. I see ‘centre’ more often than ‘center’. FWIW, SDMB has made me double-check ‘recommend’ because so many people have spelled it ‘reccomend’.
Where’s the :shrug: smiley?
I am bested by your impeccable logic, sir! I am left with no possible riposte.
This one’s been through the whole ring-around-the-rosey. Airy-fairy types who thought that’s all we needed to do ran up against the very real shoals of the reality that without a certain amount of basic knowledge under one’s belt, critical thinking skills don’t have anything to work on, or with.
And if there’s no way to prove or disprove it, it’s completely outside the domain of science, is it not?
So why would you discuss that in a science class, beyond pointing out that basic fact?
During the high-tech boom of the late 1990s, I was thinking about the folks who’ve been saying, decade in and decade out, that American education sucks. A lot of kids who got most of their K-12 education in the A Nation At Risk era helped drive the boom years in Silicon Valley and all the other high-tech corridors around the country. We must have been doing something right.
Look: a whole lot of people believe in astrology too. Should we teach it in science classes too? Thank goodness they don’t demand that - but why should we reward militant dummies by teaching their dumminess in science classes?
I’m against the dumbing-down of American education.
I’ve done my reading up on evolution, back in previous years when this debate came up here. But it’s hard to be an expert on everything, all the time.
However, I read enough then to be satisfied that evolutionary biology was science and not a big circle-jerk. I may not be a biologist, but I’ve got a Ph.D. in math, and I think I can tell the difference between a field where science is being done, and a pretend field where a bunch of people are pretending to do so, and playing a big joke on the outside world.
Creationism/ID is such a field. Young-earth creationism and old-earth ID clearly clash. Even if evolution were the circle-jerk, and the YECers and IDTers at most one of those two alternatives could be right, and the way to establish their scientific bona fides would be to fight it out in their journals. Is there such a raging debate taking place? Of course not! The evangelicals don’t much care which of YEC or ID is right, and they don’t want to do anything that could discredit either one - having both allows them to try different political approaches at different times under different pseudoscientific cover.
And I would recommend a little bit of logic to you.
The measure of a scientific theory to stand on its own, however, is not only a matter of producing testable hypotheses, but also whether it can explain everything within its purview. Davies’ contention, which I found compelling, is that the Big Bang taken by itself leaves a lot of unanswered questions.
One of the ones that struck me most - as a biologist - concerned the existence of carbon (without which life as we know it is impossible). Apparently, stellar fusion produces carbon through the collision of three helium nuclei, which will stick together only under a VERY restrictive set of conditions. As it happens, these conditions are exactly those found inside large stars (and, one might infer, nowhere else). He quotes the astrophysicist who first discovered this in the 60’s as saying that it was “as if the laws of nuclear physics have been deliberately designed with regard to the consequences they produce inside the stars.”
By the way, my dictionary defines “syncretize” as “to reconcile or bring together” - this doesn’t seem to imply an “equal footing” per se - merely that there may be ways to integrate the two into one coherent whole…
What, within the purview of the Big Bang theory, do you consider a troubling omission? Why it happened? That’s not part of that theory. What caused inflation? There are testable hypotheses to be found in the scalar fields models. It’s a tractable issue. ID is not.
So what? The Moon and the Sun have vastly different sizes. The Moon once orbited the Earth much nearer than it does today, such that it’s apparent diameter in the sky was much larger than that of the sun. But now, during the humans epoch, in all the billions of years those two heavenly bodies have existed, the Moon is just far enough from the Earth that its disk has almost exactly the apparent diameter of the Sun’s, such that we see the spectacular coronal display of a total eclipse, which, in aeons past, would have appeared as nothing more than a boring obstruction of all solar phenomenon. A coincidence? Is there a good reason to suggest otherwise? Ever heard of the anthropic principle? Or even dumb luck?
I never said that. In what rational way have ID and Big Bang cosmology been reconciled or brought together?
If the rules of the Universe were different, and it was a different element, let’s call it squeedlilidilium, that was forged under exactly the right conditions inside of stars and could combine readily with other widely-avaialble elements, then squeedlilidilium-based organisms would be sitting around talking about how eerie it is that the Universe seems designed to produce squeedlilidilium.
Or if the rules of the Universe were different, and life were impossible then . . . nobody’d be sitting around complaining about how the Universe was inhospitable to life, now, would they?
The fact that we are the result of the particular physical laws of the Universe doesn’t mean that the Universe was designed with the specific intent of producing us. That’s kind of like saying, “Oh my god, that hole in the ground is exactly the same shape as the puddle that fills it!”
[sub]This post brought to you by the Weak Anthropic Principle. When the Strong Anthropic Principle is too harsh and abrasive, turn to the Weak Anthropic Principle: Explains the Inexplicable without an Unpleasant Mediciney Aftertaste.[/sub]
I can’t speak for PhDMetalhead, but I think what he may be getting at is this: The Deity intelligently designed the universe, and implimented Its design by putting into place those physical laws that we understand today. So ID people can be satisfied that a Deity created everything, and scientists can be satisfied that things conform to known laws.
“Big Bang? Goddidit.” That’s what passes for syncretism these days?
To Loopydude and Podkayne - Yes, I do understand the Anthropic Principle; I just don’t buy it. For example, I’ve read arguments that address the fact that an infinite number of initial conditions (physical laws, etc) can be conceived - most of which will not support life - by postulating that an infinte (or near-infinite) number of universes may have come and gone (or currently exist “elsewhere”) in order to get to the one which we inhabit and are able to report on.
I see two problems with this:
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It would, to me, seem to be about as far from a testable hypothesis as you can possibly get.
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It craps all over Occam’s Razor - if a dart hits the bullseye of a dart board, which do you assume: that the dart has hit every other point in the universe previously, or that the dart was aimed?
By the way, I don’t assume that the universe was set in motion to yield **“us” **specifically (I frankly think that would be pretty depressing considering humanity’s track record), but rather life in general.
Hear! Hear! We’ve always room for a true Scotsman! And a fellow teacher at that.
So no offense to either guinnog or my countryman Spectre is intended. But ridiculing all of America for what took place in one state makes just as much sense as the rest of the United States blaming all of Kansas for the stupidity of some members of the State Board of Education.
Can’t any of you scientists go from the general to the specific?
(Aside to guinnog – Is goldarn a Scottish word? We say goldurn in my part of the country which had Scottish settlers 200-250 years ago.) [/hijack]