Submitted by: Mike Spindell, guest blogger
A topic that probably causes among the most heated discussions on this blog is the attempt to either displace evolution from Public School Curriculum, or to at least give “intelligent design” equal footing to evolution. My own opinion is that “intelligent design”, or “Creationism” as some call it, has no place in our public school system. Those who would force it on our schools would be destroying the Constitutional separation of Church and State. We saw a blog post by Professor Turley a week ago discussing some crazy State Legislator in Missouri introducing a bill to teach “Creationism” as a scientific theory and to teach “Evolution” as a philosophy, almost all who commented were not only outraged, but some disparaged Missouri as a backward state. A few of the comments belittled religion in general. http://jonathanturley.org/2013/02/15/missouri-legislator-introduces-bill-to-teach-creationism-as-a-scientific-theory-and-to-teach-evolution-as-a-philosophy/ . Another blog post by Professor Turley in October 2012, about Missouri Senate Candidate Todd Akin brought a firestorm of angry comments, also disparaging Missouri. http://jonathanturley.org/2012/10/15/akin-disproves-evolution/#comments Interestingly this Conservative State voted for Todd Akin’s opponent when Election Day came around.
Earlier on April 1st, 2012 David Drumm (Nal) did a guest blog titled “The Evolutionary Gorilla in the Room” http://jonathanturley.org/2012/04/01/the-evolutionary-gorilla-in-the-room/ and received almost 240 comments. Now in truth this was an excellent guest blog and certainly drew a lot of discussion. But as I perused the comments, all 238 of them, I noticed something that I think is worth discussing. More than half of the comments were between Gene Howington and Dredd as a continuance of their ongoing argument about Dredd’s microbial theories. I must admit that when it comes to the scientific aspects of biology, I tune out as quickly as Lawrence Rafferty does when Calculus is raised. Another long time regular Bron did have more than a few comments as he tried to insinuate Ayn Rand into the discussion as usual. J Now here is the interesting part, on all three of those blogs there was nary a voice raised in defending “intelligent design.” While here at the blog many of the usual suspects are hostile to organized religion, we do have more than a few “religious” people who drop by and comment. Given the tradition of contentious, yet “civil” discussion here how can that be? I think I have a possible answer to that coming from a study done at MIT, by a renowned Physicist and I must admit I found his answer surprising.
In a Huffington Post article dated 2/12/13 (Darwin’s birthday), Mark Tegmark, MIT Physicist, wrote this to begin his article titled: “Celebrating Darwin: Religion and Science Are closer Than You Think”:
“He looked really uneasy. I’d just finished giving my first lecture of 8.282, MIT’s freshman astronomy course, but this one student stayed behind in my classroom. He nervously explained that although he liked the subject, he worried that my teaching conflicted with his religion. I asked him what his religion was, and when I told him that it had officially declared there to be no conflict with Big Bang cosmology, something amazing happened: his anxiety just melted away right in front of my eyes! Poof!
This gave me the idea to start the MIT Survey on Science, Religion and Origins, which we’re officially publishing today in honor of Charles Darwin’s 204th birthday. We found that only 11 percent of Americans belong to religions openly rejecting evolution or our Big Bang. So if someone you know has the same stressful predicament as my student, chances are that they can relax as well. To find out for sure, check out the infographic below.”
I frankly don’t know how I could present the “infographic” chart from the article because the technology is beyond me so I suggest you follow this link: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/max-tegmark/religion-and-science-distance-between-not-as-far-as-you-think_b_2664657.html and see it for yourself because I think it is of great interest to those, who like myself are nonplussed by the resurgence of religious Fundamentalism, The “infographic” is done as a circular chart that lists all the religions practiced in this country, their percentage of the population and each religious belief’s official view of Evolution. Only about 11% percent of the religious population of this country belong to faiths that are opposed to Evolution, For instance:
Catholics are 23.9% of the population and their official teachings see no conflict with Doctrine.
Methodists represent 6.1% of the population and feel evolution is “not inconsistent with religious doctrine.
Lutherans represent 4.6% of the population and of them only 1.4% (The Missouri Synod) are opposed to the theory of Evolution.
People with no Church affiliation represent 16.4% of the population and see no conflict.
Jews represent merely 1.7% of the population and 1.3% see no conflict with Evolution, while the other .4% have no official position on it.
There are conflicts between the various Baptist and Presbyterian Denominations, with some accepting Evolution and some rejecting it. Again please look at the chart at the link because I guarantee you will find it as absorbing as I did.
What are we to make of this data which demonstrates that of the various religious beliefs that make up our country, 89% seemingly have no religious conflict with Evolution? Yet Evolution has become a major issue. Professor Tegmark comments:
“So why is this small fundamentalist minority so influential? How can some politicians and school-board members get reelected even after claiming that our 14 billion-year-old universe might be only about 6,000 years old? “That’s like claiming that my 90-year-old aunt is only 20 minutes old. It’s tantamount to claiming that if you watch this video of a supernova explosion in the Centaurus A Galaxy about 10 million light-years away, you’re seeing something that never happened, because light from the explosion needs 10 million years to reach Earth. Why isn’t making such claims political suicide?
Part of the explanation may be a striking gap between Americans’ personal beliefs and the official views of the faiths to which they belong. Whereas only 11 percent belong to religions openly rejecting evolution, Gallup reports that 46 percent believe that God created humans in their present form less than 10,000 years ago. Why is this “belief gap” so large? Interestingly, this isn’t the only belief gap surrounding a science-religion controversy: whereas 0 percent of Americans belong to religions arguing that the Sun revolves around Earth, Gallup reports that as many as 18 percent nonetheless believe in this theory that used to be popular during the Middle Ages. This suggests that the belief gaps may have less to do with intellectual disputes and more to do with an epic failure of science education.”
Professor Tegmark’s is of the opinion that scientific education in America has been a failure and thus we have the gap between religious belief and science. I think his explanation is a rather middle of the road one and to that extent I disagree with him. The science education I received in elementary and high school was excellent, even if I was too lazy a student to study much. How much I do know scientifically and how much those peers of my age know is quite adequate. There has been a two pronged attack on our educational system that began in the late 60’s. A conscious effort to “dumb down” the people of America has been in effect since then to make them more pliable and easier to fool. The first part has been cutting funding and the second part has been attacking the curriculum. If you add to it the evolving of the Internet and the changes that has wrought, we see that it is not that the scientific education has failed, but the political support for it.
Most of us assume when we are told by someone that they are deeply religious and know their “bible” front to back, that they are truthful. I believe that in their hearts most feel they are being truthful, but their truth falls far short of reality. Many people don’t read their entire holy documents, but instead rely on their religious leaders to guide them as to what is “true” and what is important. We know that some religious leaders focus on what THEY think is important like The Book of Revelations and they don’t “preach” the Jesus who gave The Sermon on the Mount” I think there are many, like Professor Tegmark’s first year student who didn’t know just what his denomination believed about the Cosmos. This is not just true for Christians, but I believe it is true for Jews, Muslims, Hindu’s and Buddhists.
Another problem is our mainstream media plays a role in religious ignorance. I addressed this in July 2011. I was writing about the many TV documentaries being produced on networks like The History Channel and even ABC’s Primetime-Nightline which ran a series titled “Battle With the Devil”, a show that “investigates the belief in satanic will or possession by a demon”. Because the Religious Right in this country is so well funded, they speak with a loud voice. Our media, corporate controlled, fears anything that might hurt the bottom line, so they cater to those with the loud voices and the money behind them. http://jonathanturley.org/2011/07/23/fundamentalist-religion-and-tv-documentaries-a-problem/ What we see then is that a population if 11% in our country, that is working to force their silly, medieval beliefs onto all of us.
Two days ago Professor Tegmark followed up with a second Huffington Post article relating his experiences after he posted his first article. Here are some snippets from it:
“I’d been warned. A friend cautioned me that if we went ahead and posted our MIT Survey on Science, Religion and Origins, I’d get inundated with hate-mail from religious fundamentalists who believe our universe to be less than 10,000 years old. We posted it anyway, and the vitriolic responses poured in as predicted. But to my amazement, most of them didn’t come from religious people, but from angry atheists! I found this particularly remarkable since I’m not religious myself. I have three criticisms of these angry atheists:
1)They help religious fundamentalists:
A key point I wanted to make with our survey is that there are two interesting science-religion controversies: a) Between religion & atheism b) Between religious groups who do & don’t attack science
2)They could use more modesty:
If I’ve learned anything as a physicist, it’s how little we know with certainty. In terms of the ultimate nature of reality, we scientists are ontologically ignorant. For example, many respected physicists believe in the so-called Copenhagen Interpretation of quantum mechanics, according to which a fundamentally random process called “wavefunction collapse” occurs whenever you observe something. This interpretation has been criticized both for being anthropocentric (quantum godfather Niels Bohr famously argued that there’s no reality without observation) and for being vague (there’s no equation specifying when the purported collapse is supposed to happen, and there’s arguably no experimental evidence for it).
3)They should practice what they preach:
Most atheists advocate for replacing fundamentalism, superstition and intolerance by careful and thoughtful scientific discourse. Yet after we posted our survey report, ad hominem attacks abounded, and most of the caustic comments I got (including one from a fellow physics professor) revealed that their authors hadn’t even bothered reading the report they were criticizing. Just as it would be unfair to blame all religious people for what some fundamentalists do, I’m obviously not implying that all anti-religious people are mean-spirited or intolerant. However, I can’t help being struck by how some people on both the religious and anti-religious extremes of the spectrum share disturbing similarities in debating style.
Having watched the religious debates that go on here continually, I do think that Professor Tegmark has a valid point. Although I am a Deist, I have no affection for either organized religion, or for the “holy books” that make up their various canons. However, I have in my life experienced what I would call the ineffable, so I personally won’t preclude the fact that there is a “Creative Force” of some kind that drives this Universe. Please understand me in this, because as Tegmark saw even his peers criticized him far too quickly: Because I don’t preclude doesn’t mean I think there is one, I just won’t rule it out. From what I know of modern physics in its current fashion there is the belief that the Universe is a lot “weirder” than science at the beginning of the 20th Century imagined it to be.
While I understand that most of us are angry and fed up with those 11% who believe in something like Genesis, perhaps we should aim our fire directly at that group of benighted fools and accept that others might be more approachable. What do you think? As I finish this I have a vision in my head of having to duck, where do you think that comes from?
Submitted by: Mike Spindell, guest blogger
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Eric Berne once wrote: (paraphrased from memory). Each day you know a friend the more you know about him, and how to say hello to him.
You will get closer to knowing him over time, but never completely.
Want more old friends? Get some new ones, and they will become old ones.
=============
Now LottaKatz is not a friend, nor even a good prospect for becoming one. Posts are made, mostlt cryptic. Not revealing private issues very much and often. Helpful when inclined and not irritated. Dissing when such is felt necessary.
So why mention LottaKatz?
In my relatively short time here, this is an open, deeply personal LottaKatz who speaks to us today. I welcome that for my sake, LottaKatz’ sake, and for the sake of others here, who would at times wish to speak on personal matters, which relate to the bigger world we live in.
What comments, what a blog this has become, where to begin?
I’ll take in brief separate posts.
Where have the old days gone when “serious” blogs were devoted to judicial matters (possible, but there has always been MikeS). The comments generated were, if not citing arcania, were cryptic, expressed in code only known the longtimers here, and seldom more than two lines long.
Compare these old days, with today’s blog, although this one is by MikeS, who as usual brings up deep subjects. MikeS may notice the number of comments generated. I would suggest that the numbers in great part are due to the import of the words in his title: Religion, Evolution, and Science.
Those simple, almost all encompassing words is open sesame to almost all commenters here. Only bots excepted. (Snark?)
At any rate, the numbers increase (generally over all blogs?).
The true from the heart content has increased. Comments are more personal.
Fewer commenters shout for “proof”, evidence, etc. in challenging these personal excerpts from the lives of others. Self-referential posts were as a rule condemned as unworthy of posting when I arrived. I have as you noticed have self-referencïal parts in most of my posts. Many if not most follow suit today.
Are most of you glad that you are now free to be humans in the first hand, and secondarily debaters dedicated to the “logical”?
Even “numinance” may be expounded upon in the blog NOW. So far have we come.
It pleases me. And that is sufficient reason to post this.
Mike Spindell:
Since you are a legend in my mind, I cannot let your prognostication of philosophical primacy go begging. So I am posting the following and it is actually germane:
“PLAYBOY: Has no religion, in your estimation, ever offered anything of constructive value to human life?
RAND: Qua religion, no—in the sense of blind belief, belief unsupported by, or contrary to, the facts of reality and the conclusions of reason. Faith, as such, is extremely detrimental to human life: it is the negation of reason. But you must remember that religion is an early form of philosophy, that the first attempts to explain the universe, to give a coherent frame of reference to man’s life and a code of moral values, were made by religion, before men graduated or developed enough to have philosophy. And, as philosophies, some religions have very valuable moral points. They may have a good influence or proper principles to inculcate, but in a very contradictory context and, on a very—how should I say it?—dangerous or malevolent base: on the ground of faith.
Playboy Interview: Ayn Rand
Playboy, March 1964
Christ, in terms of the Christian philosophy, is the human ideal. He personifies that which men should strive to emulate. Yet, according to the Christian mythology, he died on the cross not for his own sins but for the sins of the nonideal people. In other words, a man of perfect virtue was sacrificed for men who are vicious and who are expected or supposed to accept that sacrifice. If I were a Christian, nothing could make me more indignant than that: the notion of sacrificing the ideal to the nonideal, or virtue to vice. And it is in the name of that symbol that men are asked to sacrifice themselves for their inferiors. That is precisely how the symbolism is used.
Playboy Interview: Ayn Rand
Playboy, March 1964
Unable to resolve a lethal contradiction, the conflict between individualism and altruism, the West is giving up. When men give up reason and freedom, the vacuum is filled by faith and force.
“Requiem for Man,”
It has often been noted that a proof of God would be fatal to religion: a God susceptible of proof would have to be finite and limited; He would be one entity among others within the universe, not a mystic omnipotence transcending science and reality. What nourishes the spirit of religion is not proof, but faith, i.e., the undercutting of man’s mind.
Leonard Peikoff, “‘Maybe You’re Wrong,’”
The Objectivist Forum, April 1981, 12
I hope I havent let you down, Mike. But as I said, the post is germane to religion. 🙂
Gene (and Bron sort-of and even Dredd),
I looked for Season two episode Five of a TV series “Through the Wormhole” on YouTube but Discovery channel had them take it down. It was titled “Is There a Sixth Sense”. It speaks to your reply Gene and probably the mechanism that Dredd is looking for (My impression only Dredd-not a slight or fault, just an impression.) and what most people mean by “spiritual”. You summed it up very well Gene with the statement “The sense of the numinous serves some purpose. I think that purpose is to make us feel connected to the universe”.
I have long thought that the transcendent feeling one gets when seeing a particularly breathtaking natural phenomena is basically the shock of the new. 90% of our population is urban, we are starved of nature. I can recount every time I was in a position to actually see the Milky Way or another perfectly mundane aspect of nature that was new and transcendental to me. It was the lack of such things that made them extraordinary in the main. Even so, something more was going on than just lack of familiarity.
My belief is that the connectivity you speak of is absolutely real, functional and comes to us over the entire length and breath of our evolutionary history. This must be the case because birds migrate and I have developed an entirely circular theory (The ‘we are all just migrating birds theory’) to explain it. Don’t be dogmatic about the science Gene, just go with the allusion, consider it a matter of art, not science. 🙂
Why do birds migrate over thousands of miles and the width of oceans? Because they always have migrated as the fossilized footprints of dinosaurs demonstrate and because feathered dinos became birds. Because seasons have changed since the great continent started to break apart and freed the ocean to invent a new kind of weather pattern. The dinos retained the impulse/need and mechanisms to migrate to a seasonal food source (sensitivity to magnetic fields and celestial navigation) but the continents changed more and faster than the dinos. A small inland sea that could be skirted became an ocean when its rift valley was torn apart to the great ocean. The big dinos died (for various and sundry reasons) and the smaller feathered ones gave rise to true birds. Birds migrate across the ocean because they have to, just turning south at the coast and settling where it’s warmer isn’t an option for some of them. It’s in their bones after millions of years of exquisite, evolutionary fine-tuning, if you can’t complete the migration you die and the species is better off for it.
So is it with us all but we have no longer recognize it or use it. We still know when we are being watched, we still think of something or someone and tomorrow they call or the event plays out and we laugh it off and call it a happy coincidence, we still look at someone and think ‘that person is trouble’ and avoid them without ever having seen them before.
I don’t go beyond the physical in my philosophy but that covers a lot of territory. It encompasses that those microbes (we are each a self contained universe of and for our billions of passengers) influence us in ways we have not yet begun to imagine to the likelihood (IMO) that somewhere on the electromagnetic spectrum we pick up signals from tomorrow and as well the past. And why not, at the quantum level such terms are just an expression of viewpoint I’ve read. Like birds we were built that way so we would fit into a perfectly integrated, planet wide system of mutually supportive biomes. LOL, Gaia is my deity of choice. Maybe when we look at a sight Darren so beautifully described at 4:40 what is happening is the electromagnetic interference pattern normally present due to all of those electric lights is lifted just long enough for a tiny, sleeping cluster of microbes to be stimulated by a different bit of radiation from the starlight and it kicks them in their tiny, collective butt and tells them wake up and get to work, whatever work that may be, work so old and obscure we no longer even need it.
Srsly, I don’t know what’s going on with the spiritual thing but I’m sure it’s chemical/biological, it’s pro-survival, it’s old, very, very old and its been perverted to serve an un-natural agenda.
[This long, nowhere near on-point (Sorry Mike) posting is all Darren’s fault- his posting (24th/4:40) above put me in a reflective mood as I thought about the last time I had one of those ‘…it’s filled with stars’ moments] 🙂
Blouise,
I disagree with your disagreement, but not with what you wrote. 😀
I don’t think I missed the sense of Bron’s comment as I did not dismiss man’s sense of the numinous, but rather placed it the context of rationality and the greater scope of psychology simply as a clarification. I said I didn’t disagree with what Bron said for content, but rather precision. As an observation of human nature, what he said was true but the underlying mechanism applies beyond the sense of the numinous. Previously I’ve stated that personally I’m a waffler on the whole atheist/agnostic thing which ought to be an indication that I think there is something to the numinous. I tend to think in terms of frames of reference. If a God exists, by definition of being beyond the constraints of this universe (or all multiverses), then it is not within our frames of reference which are inexorably bound to this one universe. We would have zero chance of understanding a god. A god is like a singularity – the known rules do not apply because we have to frame of reference to understand beyond the Schwarzschild radius because quantum mechanics forbids wavelike particles entering a space smaller than their wavelength. If you accept Kant’s view, I don’t think this conflicts with it (Bob would know better as the resident Kantian) because the antithesis of Kant’s Fourth Antimony comes within striking distance of what Einstein would later address in relativity (namely that observations of reality can be different for the same event based on frame of reference). Numinosity is not confined to the religious although it is often associated with feelings of religiousity. Being overwhelmed by a vision of natural beauty has no requisite of being tied to a particular dogma though yet it still inspires the same “transcendent” sensation. In fact, looking at the sense of the numinous only in religious terms I think cheapens the experience by displacing it with abstraction. But I digress.
Even though scientists have demonstrated they can actually create some numinous sensations (like sensing a presence in an empty room) by manipulating magnetic fields around the brain, I don’t think that sensory input is an necessarily an evolutionary fluke. The sense of the numinous serves some purpose. I think that purpose is to make us feel connected to the universe and curious about ourselves and our role in it. If you buy the idea that we are not so much in the universe as the universe is in us – that sapient life is the universe trying to understand itself, the sense of the numinous is a driver behind our desire to understand. It’s mystery. Curiosity loves a mystery and we are a curious species. Whether you call mystery “God” or simply an appreciation of the beauty or wonderment of the universe is not really relevant. Will this sense of the numinous continue to cause some to create fantasies about what drives the universe we seek to understand from within? Probably so. As long as we posses that sense, some will seek to interrogate nature to understand the underlying reality rationally while some will make up stories. We aren’t just a curious species, but a creative one as well.
Some like Coke, some like Pepsi.
I’m more of an RC man myself.
Something is going on here. What? We’ll never completely know. Is there direction or is the universe a watch without a maker? We’ll never know for sure. But that’s beside the point if you recognize incompleteness isn’t a barrier to understanding, but rather a barrier to certainty. An answer that is probably correct but ultimately unprovable is the best we’ll ever do.
And we are back to our desire to have completion and our propensity to fill in patterns.
RWL: ” For example, when I was coming up in high school, African-American & Native American history was only 2-3 pages in a 500 pg. American History book.”
*
LOL. you are probably younger than I then because the history books I was taught from didn’t lavish so much as 2 or 3 pages, but George Washing Carver did merit a couple of sentences as did Elizabeth Cady Stanton. Mary Harris Jones was nowhere to be found though.
My point was that schools need a fact-based curriculum, ‘teaching the controversy’ or subjecting the prospect of a fact-based or non fact-based curriculum to a popular vote is absurd. It does a disservice to the kids and the the state.
Math is math and science is science, reading comprehension is reading comprehension, and history has always been the most suspect and agenda driven of subjects IMO. Which is totally consistent with my view of the states purpose for educating its young. Even as a child reading my lily-white history texts I knew they were incomplete. I knew that from my home training and my other reading. There were vast gaps. I am comfortable with a wider view of history being taught because it is fact-based. What we grew up with was not insofar as the gaps favored a particular world view and discouraged or ignored everything else. Art/drama/etc is cool because it teaches or fosters creativity and a certain plasticity of mind that is personally and/or professionally rewarding.
BTW I live in Missouri and I know the book/curriculum battles we have from reading about them only- all of my children are hypothetical. I can agree that we have some very special troglodytes as elected officials at every level of state and municipal government. No offense to troglodytes.
Gene,
I disagree … not with what you wrote, for all of it is true, but it missed the “sense” of Bron’s statement, “humans have a spiritual component, they will fill it with something else if isnt God”.
You went for the rational but the statement addresses the mystical … that which is neither apparent to the senses nor to the intelligence.
It is that component that will always be introducing new religions or reworking the old ones. I think Kant got it better than most.
Dredd: “All stars will destroy life on planets near them.
This is following eons and eons of supporting life on those planets near them … those at the right distances that is.
What does that mean to you as a believer in God?”
1. Given my religion, nothing — it teaches an end of days followed by some ineffable bliss for the true believers; I believe other religions may as well. My only concern is with those folks who resist action on climate change because Jesus is coming back to right everything.
2. At the rate we are proceeding, I doubt there will be any intelligent life to notice. What matters is how life is lived here and now for we all will be dead and gone long before this beautiful world is turned into a lava ball by the sun.
3. So for me it’s all about the here and now, and it’s all about love — not the huggy-poo, kissy-face pure emotional type of thing, but the conscious act of the will – a freely made decision – to meet others’ needs.
4. How? – well, why not feed the hungry, give drink to the thirsty, welcome the stranger, clothe the naked, tend the sick, give hope to the imprisoned, and for those blessed with the wherewithal, to loose the chains of injustice and break the yoke of oppression? And walk humbly and upon meeting a stranger, be kind for he has had a tough day.
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Dredd: “Or is it true what Ernst Mayr says, that homo sapiens are the least fit to survive because human intelligence is a fatal mutation?”
However you want to slice it, the problem appears to be a 21st century intelligence paired with emotions and instincts that are at least 15,000 years old. The rapid advance in intelligence was not due solely to natural evolutionary processes, but was also culturally driven. I guess the question is, can’t we make a concerted effort to do the same with emotions?
BTW, the following is a Washington Post review of a book I am presently studying:
http://articles.washingtonpost.com/2012-04-13/entertainment/35452968_1_social-conquest-crafoord-prize-selection
Absent drastic change in mankind — way beyond what is contained in any book of faith — I kinda think that the glory days of humankind may mostly be in our past. Indeed, maybe most of the days of man are in our past.
Oro Lee,
I followed your link to Edward O. Wilson’s book, read the review and just bought it for my kindle. It looks fascinating and I’m excited to read it. It’s quite pertinent to the entirety of this threads discussion.
Lottakatz,
Your comment: “Because public schooling does not exist to cater to the whims or traditions of children and their parents, that’s what private schools, churches and fraternal organizations are for.”
· This is not true. Are you up-to-date on the curriculum of the public schools, in particular public high schools? The public high school curriculum has changed due to parents and their children’s demands. For example, when I was coming up in high school, African-American & Native American history was only 2-3 pages in a 500 pg. American History book. Today, most public high schools offer African-American & Native American History classes (some even teach Women History in America as a course, too). In Missouri, it is so easy to change almost anything; all you have to do is get a few people to sign a petition, and then it can be put up to vote by the people (most states can overturn the voters’ amendments or ballot measures with a 2/3 majority, or judges can rule the proposed amendment as unconstitutional…. but you get the point).
Your comment: “Public schools are there to provide children with enough knowledge- facts strung together in an understandable fashion- to prevent them, through their gross ignorance, from being a lifelong burden on society. As well public education is to provide the society with a compliment of potentially productive, creative and innovative citizens to maintain and advance the nation and its culture. Public schooling exists at it’s core for the benefit of the nation/culture and re-inventing the wheel every generation does not advance the nation or its culture.”
· Really? Have you seen the state of America’s Public Educational System? Or are you stating this as what the public educational system’s purpose or suppose to do? The private, religious schools were doing the same function or purpose-even before public schools were formally established-that you stated. Most of America’s public school systems are performing horrendously. This leads me into the next discussion with Mike S.
Mike S,
After reading all of the comments (I just came from Church, running errands, and noticed that I had received over 85 emails since the 11:45 service!), I started to agree with Bob Kauten’s statement: “Mike had other plans for this thread.” Then, I read your explanation that you were trying to make: “Religious Fervor opposed to science, with the thought that some of the ire from the non religious (including myself), was being wasted on religion in general when it was a specific subset of religion that was the real target.”
As long as Harvard University, Washington University in St. Louis, and John Hopkins University maintain their billion dollar endowments, then the ‘specific subset of religion’ will not hinder the advancement of science (or research and development: R&D). It is truly amazing that the same ‘subset of religious groups’ who are opposed to R&D, are the same groups donating millions of dollars to these above mentioned universities.
With this being said, the title of this article or subject matter would have been more informative (and less demeaning to our religious followers) if it went along as follows: By introducing Creationism and/or Evolution in Missouri’s K-12’s Public Education System, will this improve it’s overall quality? Will this curriculum change improve high school graduation rates? Will it improve the scores on college entrance exams? Will this curriculum change increase the college attendance and completion rates? Will this change increase the students’ desire to explore the sciences? Will the change improve the numerous disciplinary and behavioral issues impeding the educational development of children in Missouri’s public schools?
Or even better: Why are America’s private religious, k-12 schools (particularly, the Catholics/Jesuit schools) outperforming our public schools in every category (including what I mention above), even in the math & sciences? Is it because they are praying during and before every class? Or is it because they are objectively teaching evolution (meaning evolutionary theory is not replacing the book of Genesis) or not teaching evolution at all? Although we have historically modeled our public educational system after the private religious educational system, why are the private, religious students outperforming the students in most public education schools? Is it as one pastor stated: ‘historically, the more we take God out of the classroom, the worst our public school system has become?’
But I also want to add that Religion (i.e. Christianity, for sake of discussion) does this country a great service: It provides another means of socially controlling the ‘bewildered masses.” We need Religion in America (since you can do almost anything, and only get a slap on the wrist for it: speaking about America’s criminal justice system). Think about how many potential murders, serial rapists or god knows what other crimes some people may do or continue to do if Religion wasn’t controlling them (and yes, I know that there are people who claim to be religious, and commit worse crimes, but it could be much worse without Religion). Yes, I do believe in the overarching theme of Joseph Conrad’s novel “Heart of Darkness” about people: ‘darkness potentially inherent in all human hearts’ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heart_of_Darkness
Question for religious folk, creationists or otherwise:
I suppose the same question would perplex those who think homo sapiens are the hightest evolved and most fit to survive:
(Could Humans Go Extinct?, Slate, Feb. 2013). Or is it true what Ernst Mayr says, that homo sapiens are the least fit to survive because human intelligence is a fatal mutation:
(What Kind of Intelligence).
Stem cells, the big rage of not so long ago, are turned on and off by the use of genes from viruses.
In other words, genetic material placed in a host organism’s DNA by viruses can change cells back and forth from cells that can become any other cell to restricted cells:
(link up-thread, see also this). This was reported less than a year ago in July of 2012.
Bron,
I’ve been thinking about your statement “humans have a spiritual component, they will fill it with something else if isnt God”.
I don’t think that’s necessarily true. Not wrong, but imprecise. That there is a psychological need but I don’t think it rests in spirituality precisely, but rather in our propensity to both desire completion (purely emotive response to uncertainty or ambiguity) and the ability extrapolate to complete patterns based on partial information (a much broader adaptation that affects a larger swath of human behavior than spirituality, ranging from hunting strategies to the fundamentals of perception). A psychological hole can be rooted in many sources other than spirituality or a lack thereof but it is that desire for completion and seeking complete patterns that often drives filling the hole no matter the source. We like neat and tidy but the universe persists in being (as Alan Watts said) “all wiggly”. It’s naturally going to cause some tension.
Mike/Darren/Oro,
I’ll have to admit I’m a bit jealous of the Montana comet view. Urbanization and the consequent light pollution has ruined the night sky for large segments of our population. Many people go through their entire lives without seeing the backbone of the night in anything other than a picture and forget seeing all but the biggest comets.
Dredd,
“No, Dredd. Not at all. I’m saying if you (in the generic sense) expect absolutes you are going to be disappointed.
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You have proven that with your erroneous shadowy “absolutes.”
Absolute BS.”
Really. Perhaps you should understand the basics of quantum mechanics before you say something so ridiculous. The wavefunction represents the probability amplitude for finding a particle at a given point in space at a given time and particles exist only as a probability until the wavefunction collapses upon observation. Everything beyond the instant now is a matrix of probability. Everything in the past is collapsed wavefunctions.
“Where was Einstein wrong?”
In rejecting the implications of quantum mechanics for one thing. And I won’t go so far as to say “wrong” but the whole marrying his cousin thing is a bit creepy. Einstein was just as wrong when he said “God does not play dice with the universe” as Bohr was right when he admonished Einstein to “stop telling God what to do with his dice”. If you have a problem with that, take it up with the Young’s interference experiment (better known as the two-slit experiment). However, I’m really not surprised your knowledge of QM and physics is as pitifully superficial as your understanding of biology. Half-knowledge is practically your trademark.
You’ll have to do better than that. Apes quote microbiologists, Otto, they just don’t understand it. Considering it has been pointed out numerous times that you don’t understand the basics of biology let alone natural selection, I think I’ll stick with actually being educated and able to think for myself instead of just “taking your word” on the subject.
Mike
I too had similar experiences with the night sky
During the 1987 Haley’s comet return two friends of mine and I went up to t he top of Badger Mountain near Wenatchee to try and see it. (what little there was) as we travelled up the mountain the fog became so thick we could only drive about 10 miles per hour. One friend wanted to turn back, but I suggested we continue in the event it lifted with elevation. To all of our great astonishment and gasps the fog lifted instantly to reveal the most star filled night sky I had seen in my lifetime; one extreme to another.
When we arrived at the plateau and walked out. The sky was moonless, yet the starlight was so illuminous you could read by it. Perfectly clear sky with the milky way showing various facets and was nearly white in some areas. It was the only star filled sky I could asnwer the question “how many stars did you see?” answering “all of them”
THe next was out in the middle of nowhere in Montana around March of 1996. THe sky was almost as brilliant and included the Hyakutake Comet, which seemed to take up a quarter of the length of the horizon looking all around. It was one of the highlights of the year.
Mike Spindell 1, February 24, 2013 at 3:43 pm
“Then write some more good blogs on something else.
Like why your people’s book was right about the Hittites and the scientists were wrong.”
Dredd,
“My people”, as you so quaintly put it, were right about the Hittites. It is often lost on many that the biblical story of the “Exodus” may well be tied to the Hittites having conquered Egypt at one point for around two centuries. The Pharoah Joseph worked for may have been a Hittite, which would explain the later maltreatment of the Hebrews. Since my avocation is the intertwining of mythology with ancient history, there are many stories I could write, because I believe there is more “fact” in some mythology than is given credit for by Archaeologists, who I think in some ways are the least scientific of scientists,
In the end though, I write about what tickles my fancy and arouses my passion, that makes the process easier and more fun.
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Me too, but I quote authority.
Which clashes with the authority figures here.
Very telling.
Gene H. 1, February 24, 2013 at 3:55 pm
No, Dredd. Not at all. I’m saying if you (in the generic sense) expect absolutes you are going to be disappointed.
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You have proven that with your erroneous shadowy “absolutes.”
Absolute BS.
Reality isn’t composed of absolutes at the sub-atomic level. Feel free to argue against physics all you like. The uncertainty that comes with recognizing the universe is a probabilistic place instead of a deterministic place based on scientific evidence presented by quantum mechanics is only crippling if you let it, but it is the way of things.
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I noticed you disagreed with one of history’s great evolutionists upthread.
Where was Einstein wrong? No links necessary Mr. Authority.
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Denial is a psychological mechanism, but no amount of denial changes the laws of physics. What is and was is the collapse of the wave function, what will be is the probability of those collapsing waves, but there is always the random to interfere with expectations.
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I never knew you were a surfer on De Nile river til now.
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Way cool Gene H.
Gene H. 1, February 24, 2013 at 3:57 pm
Dredd,
“You would have been a lot better off if you had.”
So I could what? Misinterpret and misrepresent materials to spread nonsense theories like you? I’ll pass. Thanks.
But it’s nice to know you think highly of willful ignorance.
It certainly explains a lot.
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It explains evolution.
What you think you know because of what they thought they knew is myth.
You are religiously into myth and proud of it.
The creationists must be in awe.
Not that they would belive you, but that they are saying “we are not worthy” to unlatch his sandals he is such a good bullshitter.
My meal is eaten. I am mellowing now.
So what got into me today with all my posts?
Following a healthy regime helps give me energy. And the comments here were so good that they deserved to be picked at.
Original contributions are beyond my capability. But spot a blemish is my specialty since 7 years of age. My principal did not tell me so then, but I realized it the last year. Therapy is helpful.
Enuf me. Will get back later to read the rest. No more comments now, if I need to say it again.
PS
I get ECG’d on Tuesday and electro-converted on Wednesday. Flutter is tiring. Only MikeS knows, perhaps more persons here. Cryo or heat treated on March 21. So it is for real. They even have offered me to participate in a study üsing cryo technique. I am studying that now. It came Friday.
BFN
“We attack your ideas, not the messenger.”
Quite simply: Bullshit.