Because Kansas doesn't look foolish enough....

[dvandom]

Kansas Board of Education member calls evolution an "age-old fairy tale".

Whee. And in rebuttal to one of her quotes, it's not "anti-God contempt," it's anti-"religious-idiot" contempt.

Comments

[finback.livejournal.com]

Heh, but post-Kansas Monkey Trial, as the recent debacle is known, it's impossible for creationists.. sorry, "intelligent design theorists" to be treated seriously. After the first half dozen "witnesses" claimed that not only did they have no experience in the sciences, but that they had failed to even read the education criteria they were there to trounce, it was pretty much a case of assisted suicide.

Assisted in that we gave them enough rope to hang themselves.

[dvandom.livejournal.com]

Except that they didn't die. They're ID-Zombies.

[slog.livejournal.com]

Last week, Morris and two other board members endorsed proposed science standards that would expose students to more criticism of evolution.

Hey, I don't mind that. There should be more criticism of established theories. THEORIES. That's why they're THEORETICAL. Grr. I do mind that they're focused on Christian mythos versus other forms of religion as their basis of "criticism." But wait, isn't thinking for yourself both terrorism AND heresy?

ahem. sorry, tired. long day. Plus I just spent the last two weeks with a PhD in Chemistry trying to explain to me how the theory of evolution was scientifically inaccurate (and not being able to defend himself when questions were asked) and that God did indeed create the world in seven days.

Anyways, thanks for getting me riled up before bed ;-) I have had a friend in the KC area ask if he could ask for political asylum in my state...then I reminded him about the liquor laws here!

[z-gryphon.livejournal.com]

post-Kansas Monkey Trial, as the recent debacle is known, it's impossible for creationists.. sorry, "intelligent design theorists" to be treated seriously.

Wait, I think I missed the part where they could be taken seriously before that.

[lurkerwithout.livejournal.com]

ahem. sorry, tired. long day. Plus I just spent the last two weeks with a PhD in Chemistry trying to explain to me how the theory of evolution was scientifically inaccurate (and not being able to defend himself when questions were asked) and that God did indeed create the world in seven days.

Six actually. 'Cause on the Seventh he rested. Though why an omnipotent being needs to "rest" is beyond me. Probably my lack of omniscience...

[dvandom.livejournal.com]

Being a scientist does not make you immune to magical thinking. It just gives you better bullshit to pile on top of your religious views to disguise them as science. Once, on a job interview, I ended up talking to a senior faculty member who was convinced that evolution was statistically impossible. "10^30 molecules won't randomly arrange themselves into a whale in less than the age of the universe," was his Big Clever Argument, IIRC.

And that's one of the attractions of stuff like Intelligent Design. It lets scientists and those in science-related fields accept their own specialities as true but still ignore the evidence for evolution.

[foomf.livejournal.com]

On the other hand, there's absolutely nothing in evolution that prohibits intelligent design. The two concepts are mutually independent. Trying to disprove the one with the other is just silly.

[slog.livejournal.com]

On the other hand, there's absolutely nothing in evolution that prohibits intelligent design.

I guess that's my biggest issue with the whole thing.

[slog.livejournal.com]

Being a scientist does not make you immune to magical thinking. It just gives you better bullshit to pile on top of your religious views to disguise them as science.

Indeed.

[dvandom.livejournal.com]

Not exactly. The details don't necessarily contradict, but the fundamental assumptions do.

Evolution, like the rest of science, assumes natural causes for everything. Supernatural causes are not allowed.

In its most generic form, ID doesn't require supernatural causes either. But Raelians aside, most ID proponents have God as the designer (Raelians just shift the whole issue back a step by saying aliens designed up, leaving open the issue of how the aliens came to be).

Once you let a supernatural explanation in, you're no longer doing science, you're doing theology. Which is fine if you SAY you're doing theology, but not if you're still calling it science.

[foomf.livejournal.com]

You're attributing fundamental assumptions to the creators of the theory which were not there.

The assumption that there is always a natural cause, that there is no 'supernatural' cause, is a part of modern scientific dogma, but it was never an underlying principle for Darwin or the majority of his co-developers. It wasn't an underlying principle for Newton, for Einstein, for Hawking (despite people shouting NO NO HOW CAN YOU SAY THAT?) ... to say that it was is an arrogant insertion.

The culture, the zeitgeist, of post-1900 science is predominantly atheistic. Actively seeking to disprove God or any 'supernatural' thing, based on the assertion that there must not be such.

This is not open-minded research. This is not scientific inquiry, even, in my opinion. Science examines what can be determined from evidence and experiment, or in the more etherial realms of higher math, it tries to find better abstractions that are more predictive or accurate, starting from the abstractions of what we know and working on.

In order to avoid being 'taken in' by fraud, there is a strong bias in favor of seeking a natural explanation. There is also 'I/We don't know' as an explanation for some stuff that's still incomprehensible. However, to dogmatically state that science does not permit the supernatural is to turn it into religion.

Darwin was profoundly shaken by what he saw as a possible natural cause for something he'd always believed to be a supernatural thing. However, like his peers and like many people of his time, he felt that his researches were necessary because it was important to understand the world, all of Creation, as he put it.

However. The modern anti-theistic attitude of science has certainly nourished the anti-science attitude of fundamentalist religion.