Submitted by Elaine Magliaro, Guest Blogger
In late July in Frankfort, Kentucky, supporters and critics of the Next Generation Science Standards clashed during a hearing over proposed changes that could be made to the science curriculum of the state’s public schools. The new science standards were developed with input from officials in Kentucky and twenty-five other states with the hope of making science curricula “more uniform across the country.”
Those who spoke in support of the new education standards said they are “vital if Kentucky is to keep pace with other states and allow students to prepare for college and careers.” Supporters feel the new standards “will help beat back scientific ignorance.” Critics—on the other hand—claimed that the new standards were “fascistic” and “atheistic” and promoted thinking that could lead to “genocide” and “murder.”
According to the Courier-Journal, nearly two dozen parents, teachers, scientists, and advocacy groups commented during the Kentucky Department of Education hearing on the Next Generation Science Standards—which are a broad set of guidelines that were developed in order to revise K-12 science content that would meet the requirements of a 2009 law, which called for educational improvement.
Blaine Ferrell, a representative from the Kentucky Academy of Sciences, said, “Students in the commonwealth both need and deserve 21st-century science education grounded in inquiry, rich in content and internationally benchmarked.” Dave Robinson, who is a biology professor at Bellarmine University, said that neighboring states had been more successful in recruiting biotechnology companies. He added that Kentucky “could get left behind in industrial development if students fail to learn the latest scientific concepts.”
But the majority of comments reportedly came from opponents of adopting the new science standards. The critics “questioned the validity of evolution and climate change and railed against the standards as a threat to religious liberty, at times drawing comparisons to Soviet-style communism.”
Mike Wynn (Courier-Journal):
Matt Singleton, a Baptist minister in Louisville who runs an Internet talk-radio program, called teachings on evolution a lie that has led to drug abuse, suicide and other social afflictions.
“Outsiders are telling public school families that we must follow the rich man’s elitist religion of evolution, that we no longer have what the Kentucky Constitution says is the right to worship almighty God,” Singleton said. “Instead, this fascist method teaches that our children are the property of the state.”
Another critic of the new standards claimed that they would “marginalize students with religious beliefs.” She said they could lead to the ridicule and physiological harm of such students in the classroom and that they could also “create difficulties for students with learning disabilities. The way socialism works is it takes anybody that doesn’t fit the mold and discards them.” She added, “We are even talking genocide and murder here, folks.”
An environmental geologist who spoke in support of adopting the New Generation Science Standards said that he was “offended by comments suggesting that evolution leads to immorality and ‘death camps,’ calling it a horrible misrepresentation of scientists. He said that he—unlike many of the critics who had commented at the hearing—had actually read the standards. “Everything is actually based on evidence — arguments from evidence are actually given priority in the Next Generation Science Standards.”
According to Kevin Brown, Kentucky’s associate education commissioner and general counsel, comments made at the standards hearing “will be reviewed by department staff and summarized into a statement of consideration with formal responses. Board members will then consider the comments and responses in August and decide whether to make changes or advance the standards to legislative committees for approval.”
Robert Bevins, the president of Kentuckians for Science Education, said he expects that the board will send the standards forward without changes. Let’s hope that Bevins is right.
SOURCES & FURTHER READING
School science is hotly debated in Kentucky: New standards are called ‘atheistic,’ ‘fascist’ by some (Courier-Journal)
Next Generation Science Standards In Kentucky Draw Hostility From Religious Groups (Huffington Post)
Kentucky: Next Generation Science Standards (Kentucky Department of Education)
Next Generation Science Standards for Kentucky (National Center for Science Education)
Kentucky’s new science standards draw heated debate (The Spectrum)
Will A Denier Scrub Curriculum That Teaches Climate Science To Kentucky Schoolchildren? (ThinkProgress)
Sen. Mike Wilson | Science standards include troubling assumptions (Courier-Journal)
Science Standards Draw Fire From Ed. Leader in Kentucky Senate (Education Week)
Next Generation Science Standards In Kentucky Draw Hostility From Religious Groups (Cafe Mom)
grathuln,
Eve apple picked; creationists cherry pick.
It’s turtles all the way down, baby! WOOOO!
Evolving Creationism in the Classroom
Creationists cast themselves as proponents of “academic freedom”
By JR Minkel
September 2008
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=evolving-creationism-in-the-classroom
If it’s September, it’s time for creationism in schools. That’s how some would like it, anyway.
Sure, evolution is the linchpin of modern biology, explaining everything from antibiotic resistance in bacteria to the progression of species found in the fossil record.
That didn’t stop Republican vice presidential nominee, Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, from expressing the idea that creationism—the biblical notion that God created Earth and its life forms a few thousand years ago–should get equal footing with evolution in public school science classes. “Teach both,” she said during a 2006 televised gubernatorial debate. “You know, don’t be afraid of information.”
She isn’t the only one who feels that way. In the past, proponents of creationism have tried to sell it as “creation science” or “intelligent design”—the idea that life is too complex to have evolved without divine intervention. But after a landmark legal setback in Pennsylvania (teaching intelligent design in the public schools was found to violate the constitutionally mandated separation of church and state), creationists have retooled their approach. This year’s buzzwords were “academic freedom” and “strengths and weaknesses”.
Lawmakers in several states drew inspiration from a petition published in February by the Discovery Institute, a Seattle-based group promoting intelligent design. The petition argued that teachers should not be penalized for “objectively presenting the scientific strengths and weaknesses of Darwinian theory” and students should be allowed to express their views on those same strengths and weaknesses.
Creationists chalked up a notable win with this approach in Louisiana, where Republican Gov. Bobby Jindal in June signed into law the Louisiana Science Education Act. Similar bills were introduced this year in Florida, Missouri, Michigan, South Carolina and Alabama.
In Texas, the state school board is one vote short of approving new educational standards in March that allow a curriculum that highlights the “strengths and weaknesses” of evolution. It’s all part of a gradual rhetorical shift away from talking about creationism and intelligent design toward casting doubt on evolution, says Joshua Rosenau, spokesperson for the National Center for Science Education in Oakland, Calif.
“They have this idea,” he says, “that it’s a zero-sum game, so anything you can do to knock evolution down actually promotes creationism without having to say the word.”
5 ways fundamentalists are trying to sneak creationism into public schools
Urging teachers to conflate Darwinism with other controversies is just one of their most popular tactics
By Rob Boston
7/7/13
http://www.salon.com/2013/07/07/5_ways_fundamentalists_are_trying_to_sneak_creationism_into_public_schools_partner/
Excerpt:
Evolution is the linchpin of modern biology. Young people who don’t understand it are missing out on an entire range of educational and career opportunities. Certain professional fields can be closed off to them.
Despite this, some public schools in America do all they can to avoid teaching evolution. Thanks to constant pressure from the religious right, many public schools are battlegrounds in a culture war that does great damage to our nation’s scientific credibility as creationists work overtime to slip their ideas into the curriculum.
Federal courts have been clear: Creationism is theology grounded in a literal reading of the Bible, not science. It has no place in public school science classes, and inserting it into the schools is unconstitutional.
But despite a string of courtroom defeats, the creationists will not be stopped. They keep repackaging their ideas and trying again. Ironically, their strategies seem to evolve.
Why Creation ‘Science’ Must Be Kept Out of the Classroom
Richard Young
http://lilt.ilstu.edu/gmklass/foi/fexam/creationcon.htm
Excerpt:
What is Creation ‘Science’?
Creation ‘Science,’ that notorious oxymoron, is a component of Christian fundamentalism which — with the tenacity of a pious, myopic pit-bull — adheres to a doctrine of Biblical inerrancy (i.e. literalism) and growls that Biblical views must be taught in all school subjects, particularly science. So tenaciously do these Creationists hold to their literal interpretation of the Bible that some will assure you that grasshoppers have 4 legs, that the Earth is flat, that all space flight has been hoaxed, that the Sun orbits the stationary Earth, and that rabbits are ruminants, since the Bible describes each of these matters thus, and the Bible is an “all or nothing” document.
The Creationists believe that ‘true’ Christians must hold such things as literal truths lest they run the risk of taking certain other, more critical, Biblical passages metaphorically, leading, ultimately, to the unraveling of their beloved fundamentalism. Figurative interpretation of selected verses does not present a difficulty for most Christians, but, to the Creationist’s way of thinking, non-literal interpretation is the death knell of Faith. It is precisely this loss of Faith, alleged to have been caused by the proliferation of ‘evolutionary thought,’ that the Creationists hold responsible for all of the evils of the world, including “sex education, alcohol, suicide, women’s liberation, terrorism, homosexuality, inflation, socialism, racism and dirty books” [1]. Judge Braswell Dean, a Georgia lobbyist for Creationism, lays an equally comprehensive spectrum of crimes on the doorstep of evolution (and pulls no alliterative punches in doing so):
…this monkey mythology of Darwin is the cause of abortions, permissiveness, promiscuity, perversions, pregnancies, prophylactics, pornotherapy, pollution, poisoning and proliferation of crimes of all types. [2]
Strangely, many of these woes have existed long before Charles Darwin’s 1859 publication of The Origin of Species. Perhaps the Judge might suggest that advance copies of Darwin’s book were somehow presented to pre-nineteenth century wrongdoers by Satan himself.
Creationist institutes exist in several countries including the U.S.A., Canada and Australia….. Many of these institutes devote some time to writing loosely scientific articles for creationist publications. They spend much more time, however, giving presentations at churches, high schools and universities on “the scientific evidence for Creation.” They also carry out ‘research.’ This ‘research’ almost exclusively consists of the scouring of scientific publications for quotes from prominant evolutionists which could be lifted from their original context and then perversely recontextualized in order to serve Creationist purposes…
Creationism: Religion or Science?
Thirty years ago, Creation Scientists called themselves Creation Evangelists and they proudly preached the ‘Creationist Gospel.’ Since then, the Creationists have become much more sophisticated in their approach and have had the word ‘evangelist’ replaced with the word ‘scientist.’ However, just as a rose by any other name would smell as sweet, the stinkweed of Creationism remains rank. This strategic change in nomenclature was necessary in order to sugar-coat the doctrine of Biblical fundamentalism so that it would seem more palatable to those school and government officials who have the power to allow Creationist dogma into a science classroom.
Now, what of the scientific merits of Creation ‘Science’? One must assess this question before deciding whether or not Creationism belongs in science classes. Creation ‘Science’ offers none of the explanatory or predictive capability of the theory of evolution, and provides no new insights into any of the questions which evolution (or any other science) is presently unable to answer. What the Creationists present as science is in fact pseudoscience, much like palmistry, astrology and the alchemy of old…
Thinking about it Elaine M maybe they have a point these Biblical Literalists. We should be teaching our children that the Earth is a disk supported by four pillars and covered by a kind of snow dome over which exists the firmament and heaven. And of course the Earth is the centre of the Universe which was made for us by god so we had something to look at when we looked up. Let’s not forget that eating shellfish is a sin and we should stone to death people who work or shop on the sabbath (which could be Saturday or Sunday), unruly children and wives who grab other men’s testicles in an effort to assist their husbands in a fight. Yes we need to return to the good old days by following all the laws of the Bible and basing our understanding of the world around it.
Even literalists are only literal about some of it, which makes you wonder why they bother with the bits they do. 😉
Just one final point, I was pushed for time with my last post:
DavidM2575 said:
…..These presumptions cause one to assume that “Evolution” only applies to a point in time after the event of abiogenesis. It is nothing more than a cop-out of inquiry analogous to the imaginary creationist saying “god did it” is the explanation. It stops scientific inquiry into how life began and the building of a fully explanatory model of origins.
It is not a cop out of inquiry to say evolutionary theory only covers the origin of species rather than the origin of life, it is the acknowledgement of a fact which leads to necessary inquiry into the origin of life (abiogenesis) and the formation of the Universe (Cosmology) and how the Universe came to being; current theories include string theory and multiverses etc. Inquiry is not stopped by the bounds of the definition of some word.
As far as the formation of the Universe is concerned we pretty much understand it up to a few thousandths of a second after “the big bang”. What we believe fits the observations so far and those observations made since the theory was postulated were as predicted by the theory.
As far as how life arose we’re getting a better understanding of abiogenesis every day and so far the experiments fit the proposed models, a good indicator science is on the right track.
Part 2 response to DAvid2575:
By the way, I am not a young earth creationist. I just think science should be open to theistic models and interpretations insofar as they are testable empirically. I recognize that I am a heretic in science because I have that simple paradigm. I am willing to live with that. However, children in public schools are losing out on a good education because public schools are forbidden by law from educating our children about any of this. The information is not allowed as science because of the way scientists have defined their field of study, and the knowledge is not allowed as religion because of the current paradigm about church and state separation.
What needs to be taught more in schools is critical thinking, how to think, rather than what to think (although what to think is important too obviously). I digress. This is the “teach the controversy” argument. I could see the argument for teaching what creationists believe and why it is wrong but it would overburden a curriculum already full of useful, demonstrably correct, science.
Creationism has been demonstrated to just not work, despite what creationists want to believe and the evidence is overwhelmingly in favour of Evolution as the best theory explaining the observed diversity of life. Creationism is as defunct as phlogiston theory so there is no logical point to mentioning it in science class other than as a historical aside. Why make creationism a special case in science class why not teach other defunct ideas such as the primary elementals earth, water, fire and air?
The separation of church and state is essential to preserving religious freedom. If a religion is introduced in to the state that religion then becomes the country’s de facto religion. Children of other religions or of no religion (increasingly popular) should not have to suffer being made to conform to christian practices, such as morning and lunchtime prayer, nor should they have to listen to christian based ideas on how the Earth was made and was populated with life.
In regards to you narrowing your definition of Evolution to exclude cosmology, geology, abiogenesis, etc., you have fallen prey to a modern indoctrination that did not exist during all my years at the university working in the field of evolutionary biology. It is a recent invention to help young students skip over the huge improbability and problems of abiogenesis. Rightly speaking, the study of origins is a model of Evolution through natural processes that would include everything from the Big Bang (if that is your conviction) or Steady State theory, all the way to the present. Never assume “Evolution” to be synonymous with “Natural Selection” or synonymous with “biological evolution.” These presumptions cause one to assume that “Evolution” only applies to a point in time after the event of abiogenesis. It is nothing more than a cop-out of inquiry analogous to the imaginary creationist saying “god did it” is the explanation. It stops scientific inquiry into how life began and the building of a fully explanatory model of origins.
If anything screams troll it’s the last paragraph, especially perhaps this sentence: you have fallen prey to a modern indoctrination that did not exist during all my years at the university working in the field of evolutionary biology
You are using a meaningless semantic argument to make no point. I get what you say regarding the broader use of the word evolution but since it has no bearing on the veracity of any theory of cosmology, abiogenesis or evolutionary biology it has no point. We can discuss the merits of all these theories and more without bothering with the semantics of the word “evolution” as long as we all understand from the context what each of us means by that word. I could argue that evolution really does only start after some form of self replicating system arises but as I said it’s a pointless discussion.
grathuln (& Gene),
I dug Part I out of the spam filter this morning, and when I saw a reference to Part Two coming up, I looked for it but it was not there. I went ahead and cleaned out the spam filter when I couldn’t find anything else to rescue, because the filter had several dozen spam messages in it and was getting cluttered.
Thanks, part 2 didn’t get entered when part 1 failed to appear. 🙂 I’ll get around to it later….
grathuln,
Sorry, but your “Part II” was not in the spam filter.
BTW, enjoying your posts.
_____________
RTC,
You’re welcome. You standard deviant you. 😀
Gene H,
Apology accepted
DavidM,
If you’re still following this board…
I think you may be misinterpreting my meaning or I wasn’t being clear. There has been much written about the religious convictions of scientists, particularly by Richard Dawkins, but there is still a clear need for an objective analysis of the data, and to follow it to logical conclusions. Too often, creationists, or creative designers, are attempting to prove that some divine being has a specific interest in a particular outcome; and usually, creative design is used to justify the exploitation of resources.
I believe God don’t give a crap about you any more than he cares about a beetle. He had no intention of bringing us into being, didn’t align anything for our benefit, and more than likely wouldn’t approve of our affect in the ecosystem, if He exists.
Mathematicians probably come the closest to understanding the mind of God.
BTW, Jefferson was a deist: he believed God set the ball in motion and had no control or concern thereafter
nahhh! now is not a good time to talk about noah and his ark. there would have been corpses of all the animals floating everywhere and they found no bones from the big fat sharks, or whales, on the mountains or deserts.
so maybe the natives picked them all up for skinning knives for the dinosaurs, after all that water went back into the oceans.
but not to take the teeth from the discussions, which are impressive…
cause jesus is sniper qualified. and i didn’t want him to make the beasts angry, but he uses a scope, and i use field sights…
to get to the big bang theory, I would ask the pope (who’s names i have on paper?), how did god get all those rocks, to dust, to be rocks again in one boom. out through such a tiny hole and then catch up with himself again to put himself on the earth, and take out all the dinosaurs in one olly-oooops… (???)
none of it is evolution
the peices from the first big bang went all over and no way to walk to get to them, with out pulling them. which took a couple of years to think about, being that tiny and no legs takes a long time to crawl… and perhaps now there is no proof the sharks existed, because jonah got eaten by a big fish with no teeth, emerged daze later and no scuff marks to prove he was there.
soooo, the date of the thei-ro saurus is still debait-able, and ormen are getting blisters, trying to figure out, why a nun teaches to deny that god would become human…
… they say that god would not know his true real age.
this is true. the number of universes that have been wouldn’t even fit on my drivers license…
so i gotta lie about my age. which of course they tell me is illegal. (oh well!)
but, I did hear one of those prophet fellas say that i won’t get old enough to collect social security, and no one would talk to me.
and now you know the rest of the story. (maybe)
the church wants me to take my prophecies and go home and declare them the weiners. it makes them look bad in the days of the trial of the church as they proclaimed the cross will be brought back. so i don’t like to post,
and good luck on that spam thing david.
Apparently I too am suffering the scourge of the “WordPress Vortex of Doom”. NVM Hopefully the comment will get resurrected (no pun intended) meanwhile I’m off to do something else.
Dinosaurs Were On Noah’s Ark, According To Creation Museum’s New Radio Ad (AUDIO)
The Huffington Post
By Meredith Bennett-Smith
Posted: 08/06/2013
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/08/06/dinosaurs-noahs-ark-creationism-museum_n_3714483.html
Excerpt;
No dinosaurs described in the Bible? No problem, according to creationism proponent Ken Ham, who recently argued that despite popular opinion, dinosaurs and Biblical characters did co-exist — in fact, they traveled together on Noah’s Ark.
Ham, the president/CEO and founder of Answers in Genesis-U.S. and the Creation Museum, made the unconventional claims during a new 60-second radio ad for the museum released this week.
Titled “What Really Happened to the Dinosaurs?” the ad explains that while evolution proponents have used dinosaurs to “indoctrinate children,” the scaly beasts actually back up a more Biblical creation story.
“Evolution has claimed dinosaurs evolved over 200 million years ago, that nobody ever lived with them,” Ham says in the ad. “But the Bible gives a different history. God tells us that he created all land animals the same day he created man, about 6,000 years ago. What’s more, there are even dinosaurs on Noah’s Ark because God told Noah to take pairs of every land animal.”
In this way, “dinosaurs are no mystery at all,” Ham concludes, as long as you believe in a literal interpretation of the Biblical creation story.
David2575 “Either you are ignorant of the empirical work by creationists, or you are not engaging in honest dialogue. You present a cop-out here that has no applicability in real life. I have never seen in real life a creationist look at some data and say, “well, I just don’t understand, I guess God must have done it.” What they do is look at the data and ask what is the best interpretation of it. You mentioned “god of the gaps” in a disparaging way, but it is perfectly reasonable to examine the data and ask what model best supports the data.”
I’m aware of much work done by creationists in various fields and I don’t find it convincing mainly because their interpretations invariably fall down, be it explaining the formation of the Grand Canyon from a deluge to explaining cosmological observations in terms of a steady state “created” Universe not from a big bang. It’s dishonest to presume I dismiss such things without at least a cursory review though I confess I leave a lot up to other experts in other fields because I lack knowledge or time. Nothing so far has stood out as being anything but an attempt to explain things to fit the christian biblical account; to all intents and purposes this is reverse science, starting out with a theory and making the facts fit the theory no matter what.
“God of the gaps”. Of course it’s fine to examine the data and ask what model best supports the data but when there is no data it is not alright to say ah there goes god. Like I said most christians do agree with science (evolution and big bang) and just plug god into the very beginning to kick it all off. What you were saying in your previous comment that claimed to examine the data and come up with god was extrapolating from the data to a point beyond which the data goes and therein postulate god, hence god of the gaps with new window dressing. I’ve nothing against the god of the gaps but it is not science and it does not prove god exists, which can’t be done anyway.
If the fossil record is filled with gaps (and it undeniably is), you can choose to believe that Natural Selection still somehow accounts for it, that maybe we just need to dig more and eventually find the data to support the theory, or you can choose to look for some other mechanism of evolution like Punctuated Equilibrium (Gould and Eldredge), or you might surmise that a creator model whereby organisms had discrete points of origin actually happened. The last option is not allowed by science but it is allowed by religion. You view that option as some kind of cop-out, mocking it as a “god of the gaps” theory, but it is only a cop-out if you operate from the paradigm, from the definition, that a creator model is not allowed.
Of course there are gaps in the fossil record and some creative creationists claim there are more gaps today than there’s ever been, this is because every time an intermediate fossil is found they subdivide the original gap between the earlier and later fossils making two gaps where there was once only one. Never the less the more fossils we find the more it backs up evolution; we now have half wings for instance that were used to incubate eggs by oviraptor and a few other examples that creationist once claimed we’d never find. Further you being a biologist ought to know that the fossil record is only a small part of the evidence for evolution. Before DNA we were aware of vestigial organs, things left over from earlier generations that have fallen out of use. DNA shows we have vestigial DNA too, birds have the DNA sequence for teeth but it is switched off for instance; the more species we map the gene sequences of the more we see the connections we surmised from taxonomy.
But you know all this which is I guess why you say you’re not an creationist.
See part II in a moment…
grathuln wrote: “I’m aware of much work done by creationists in various fields…”
My sense is that you are aware of “much work” from second hand accounts given by anti-creationists. It is kind of like RTC referring me to modern society’s most famous atheist (Richard Dawkins) to gain an understanding of the religious convictions of scientists. For the most part, your reasoning appears to be tautological. You are already inclined to accept a certain conclusion, and you glance at other ideas but then reason back to your starting place. I would direct you to go to original source material for a more reliable understanding. I have offered you one starting point with Gentry’s Creation’s Tiny Mystery, and if you are a sincere pupil of truth, you would follow that lead. If not, then you will just look up what the anti-creationists say about Gentry, copy and paste their response, and then keep on parroting this nonsense that makes you feel smart about yourself. You assure yourself of this methodology by thinking nobody has time to examine everything in detail. Ultimately, you just trust the authority figures.
Part of the problem is that many predictions of data made by creationist models are the same as predictions made by evolutionary models. So when a person like you finds that confirmation, you say, “oh, wow, see how great evolution is.” You have no recognition at all that a creation model also predicts the same pattern of data. It is not your fault because that kind of information is not allowed — “hush, it’s religion and therefore not allowed in the classroom.”
I could outline for you a model of creation and contrast it with an evolutionary model to illustrate the differences, but this is not really the forum for that. Let me just say the most credible models of origins that include an Intelligent Designer designate a point in time when biological evolution began, will predict more rapid rates of speciation in the past than in the present, and generally sees genetic information being lost rather than increased through the evolutionary process with biological mechanisms in place to stay that loss off as much as possible. It predicts gaps in the fossil records between classes of organisms and catastrophic events more common for explaining fossil beds than uniformitarian processes. It calls for more research in understanding sedimentary deposits through hydrogeologic models of stratification and more objectivity in dating strata independently instead of from the biological fossil deposits alone. I go through all mainly to say that a model of Intelligent Design incorporates evolutionary processes and therefore shares many predictions, but is also distinct enough to be testable by empirical means.
I’m running out of time here, but you mentioned the phlogiston theory as if that was what ID is. The phlogiston theory was not from religion, but from science. If anything, evolution is more like the phlogiston theory except that evolutionary theory has not been as popular for as long as the phlogiston theory was. You pretend there are not problems with evolutionary theory, but there are, from the cambrian explosion in the fossil record, to long periods of Natural Selection with sudden appearances of most forms of life. There are more problems than you say, but either you have not studied them yet or you just have faith that one day it all will be explained. That’s like the phlogiston theory in science.
The bottomline is that we should never be afraid of information. We should never censor data or ideas. Always be critical, but never abolish an ideology through dogma and the force of government.
DavidM2575 said:
“My sense is that you are aware of “much work” from second hand accounts given by anti-creationists. It is kind of like RTC referring me to modern society’s most famous atheist (Richard Dawkins) to gain an understanding of the religious convictions of scientists. For the most part, your reasoning appears to be tautological. You are already inclined to accept a certain conclusion, and you glance at other ideas but then reason back to your starting place. I would direct you to go to original source material for a more reliable understanding. I have offered you one starting point with Gentry’s Creation’s Tiny Mystery, and if you are a sincere pupil of truth, you would follow that lead. If not, then you will just look up what the anti-creationists say about Gentry, copy and paste their response, and then keep on parroting this nonsense that makes you feel smart about yourself. You assure yourself of this methodology by thinking nobody has time to examine everything in detail. Ultimately, you just trust the authority figures.
I could say the same about you. You certainly use the same arguments. I guess the impression you have of me is from the fact I give the same logical responses to the same arguments that have been used far too often. I can assure you I didn’t copy paste any responses, most are from my own background although as I said earlier I did refer to other sources of expertise to confirm my understanding for somethings.
I don’t doubt you have the time to check the detail but rather than addressing things directly you make reference to your own experts (Gentry et al) and throw in a few inflammatory ad-hominems such as:
My sense is that you are aware of “much work” from second hand accounts given by anti-creationists. which is an attempt to discredit my points by suggesting I don’t know what I am talking about and haven’t studied the source.
if you are a sincere pupil of truth, you would follow that lead. If not, then you will just look up what the anti-creationists say about Gentry, copy and paste their response, and then keep on parroting this nonsense that makes you feel smart about yourself. I guess I’m meant to be insulted by this but thankfully I’m far more confident of my abilities to care what you think.
Ultimately, you just trust the authority figures.Funny because my psych profile says I have problems with authority figures and definitely don’t trust them, which isn’t surprising given my nature.
Okay let’s move on.
Part of the problem is that many predictions of data made by creationist models are the same as predictions made by evolutionary models. So when a person like you finds that confirmation, you say, “oh, wow, see how great evolution is.” You have no recognition at all that a creation model also predicts the same pattern of data. It is not your fault because that kind of information is not allowed — “hush, it’s religion and therefore not allowed in the classroom.”
Okay….although I left the confines of the classroom a long time ago and have exposed myself to a very broad spectrum of information, theories, ideologies, concepts both physical and metaphysical and while my journey still continues the bedrock of my experience and the decisions I’ve made have led me to the conclusion that I trust scientific methodology because it seeks the truth, is inherently self critical, self correcting and always looking to improve itself; religion by contrast seeks to maintain the status quo because its understanding is meant to be divinely inspired and so immutable. I like the quote “religions are fossilised philosophies”. I’ve done the analysis myself and on most things I concur with most things science says, not necessarily atheists mind.
Let me just say the most credible models of origins that include an Intelligent Designer designate a point in time when biological evolution began, will predict more rapid rates of speciation in the past than in the present, and generally sees genetic information being lost rather than increased through the evolutionary process with biological mechanisms in place to stay that loss off as much as possible.
I agree those are the most credible models of origins that include an Intelligent Designer. These are the models that say well okay biological evolution works as said but god kicked started it. So when abiogenesis comes along god gets pushed back to the big bang because that shows that self replicating systems can come about without divine intervention and that those self replicating systems can start to feed on each other, so starting the evolutionary process which ultimately leads up to the simplest form of life as we understand it.
Of course abiogenesis is still being peer reviewed and experiments are still being done to see if it actually works but things are looking good so far. If we just said god did it we’d stop trying to figure things out which would be a shame.
You go on to say however the models you are referring to include a much faster evolution in the past than the present and genetic information being lost rather than increased. This is problematic because even with mechanisms in place to stay that loss off as much as possible life would have to start off more complex and get simpler as a result of genetic loss. This obviously does not fit the observed data nor does it match experimental results which show increasing complexity. You surely know this having a history in biology though.
I understand you do not agree with creation theories but feel they should be taught with equal footing in science classes. Like I said before if you’re going to teach a theory and why it is wrong then creationism isn’t the only theory that is wrong that could be used as an example.
Phlogiston theory is taught in UK schools as an example of a theory that was wrong, which is why I chose it. http://www.tes.co.uk/teaching-resource/The-Phlogiston-Theory-6144331/ (It had nothing to do with religion nor was I saying it was the same as “intelligent design”; I just said “intelligent design” was as defunct as Phlogiston and in that I was being generous.
I’ll go further and say phlogiston theory was a better theory than creationism / intelligent design because while it was ultimately demonstrably wrong it made some useful predictions. As you say intelligent design attempts (and fails) to predict the same things as evolution and it adds in god for no good reason.
Back on track.
It predicts gaps in the fossil records between classes of organisms and catastrophic events more common for explaining fossil beds than uniformitarian processes.
The ones I have read predict gaps in the fossil record by saying god created some species later than others and those were not related to anything that came before. Except DNA shows the relationship all life has with each other without the need for fossil records. I’ve already covered why there are gaps and why there are more gaps today than ever before.
One could argue god used the same recipe book in some kind of cut and paste way to create new species out of code he’d used before (as someone with IT experience you surely understand this practice) but if god did then he did a poor job of it.
More advanced species have loads of DNA that has been inherited (or copy pasted) that is simply deactivated; remember I said birds have the DNA for teeth even though they don’t have teeth because it has been deactivated. Birds have a lot of DNA in common with reptiles indicating a common ancestor.
Then there are the many examples of stupid design that evolution allows for but intelligent design doesn’t. The human eye is the classic chestnut, it was irreducibly complex until it was demonstrated scientifically that it was not. The human eye is terribly designed. It not only has a blind spot but the light sensing receptors are masked in part by the blood vessels that supply them to name two; you should know this with your history of biology and know that this is just one of many examples of poor design both in the human eye and elsewhere in life.
You could say god’s idea of optimal design is not ours but then why are other models of the eye found in other animals, animals that evolved eyes independently of humans, better than ours when we are meant to be god’s supreme being. It makes no sense and to dismiss this as us not being able to understand the mind of god is a cop out. As someone with a history in biology and your other experience you really ought to know no natural eye is optimal, a human could design better. Biological evolution explains such imperfections far better than intelligent design.
It calls for more research in understanding sedimentary deposits through hydrogeologic models of stratification and more objectivity in dating strata independently instead of from the biological fossil deposits alone.
Nothing against more research but stratification is very well understood by geologists. Geology theories can explain why the strata is uneven around the world, why some strata is cut off by other strata and so on. Such things as plate tectonics are very well understood.
The biggest issue with the intelligent design theory is its prediction of a uniform strata layer formed around 5000 years ago from the Noah flood, it doesn’t exist. Then there’s the Grand Canyon formation, simply doesn’t gel with the evidence. Many rocks can be radiometrically dated, some cannot due to well understood contamination processes. In many cases fossil bearing rocks can be radiometrically dated.
You pretend there are not problems with evolutionary theory, but there are, from the cambrian explosion in the fossil record, to long periods of Natural Selection with sudden appearances of most forms of life.
I agree the cambrian explosion is still in debate and equally are a couple of other “explosions” when in biological evolution seemed to accelerate. Yes, I do have faith that one day science will explain it fully through our process of continuous enquiry. I do not however see this as a reason to insert god and have done with it, I’d rather science keep trying to figure it out because it has a very good track record of doing so.
It does seem that life seems to evolve quickly to take up environmental niches when the planet is rich in available niches however slows when the niches are all taken up; this fits evolution in so much as a species already adapted to a niche has an advantage over a would be usurper. We also already have examples of life evolving rapidly taking advantages of new niches. We also see speciation happen fairly quickly.
The bottomline is that we should never be afraid of information. We should never censor data or ideas. Always be critical, but never abolish an ideology through dogma and the force of government.
The bottom line is school science classes are places where the best scientific theories should be taught so children have the most recent understanding to equip themselves to compete with children from other countries. Yes, I agree some examples of theories that are wrong should be taught along with an explanation as to why they are wrong. I also say something should be done to improve critical thinking.
As to ideology being abolished through dogma and the force of government. Science doesn’t deal in ideology, it deals in data, facts and theories. If Hitler hadn’t been so ideologically against “Jewish” physics it’s just possible the Nazi’s would have developed the atom bomb first, as it was they were way behind Oppenheimer and his group. OK so in that case it was useful that ideology got in the way of science but it won’t be when generations of US children are lost to quality science thanks to ideology so putting the US behind the rest of the world.
Hang on I’m in the UK now, no you carry on and teach “the controversy” we need an economic advantage.
And finally: I’m running out of time here. I really hope you just meant for that last post and not your time on this board.
grathuln wrote: “I don’t doubt you have the time to check the detail but rather than addressing things directly you make reference to your own experts (Gentry et al) and throw in a few inflammatory ad-hominems…”
I do not consider this the proper forum to have a detailed debate concerning creation vs anti-creation models of origins. I also know nothing about your academic background in order to know at what level of scientific data you are able to understand. Thus far you skirt things I say with superficial concepts each of which would require much explanation to correct. If there was a light at the end of the tunnel such that I think you would suddenly awaken and get on the same page as me, it might be worth the effort. Thus far, I am not that optimistic. It would take a full length book, a work similar to Darwin’s Origin of the Species, to help you start to look at this issue from a different angle. That will not happen in this forum.
I’m sorry you took my comments as inflammatory. I simply meant to point something out which I think you know is true, and that is that you have read more second hand accounts about creationist models than you have read them directly yourself. Your critique is based upon reading other critics. Have you even read a creationist science journal from front to back? Just take Gentry’s papers published in Science and Nature and other scientific journals. Have you even read them directly? Have you considered them as a group in a series of studies to falsify various natural explanations for polonium halos? Have you even gotten out a microscope and looked at these halos for yourself? I sincerely do not think you have, and my comment was not meant to be inflammatory. I’m not trying to win an argument. I am hoping that you are honest enough to realize that you have done none of these things, but rather you have just taken someone else’s word for it.
I did not mean to insult you by saying that if you were a sincere pupil of truth, you would take a look at his book for yourself rather than trust what others say. Incidentally, I did not send you there for the creationist argument, but simply to have you look at the way that publications in science discriminate against a creation view. He shows a paper in there where he added one sentence at the end that stopped it from publication, then he removes that sentence and it gets published. He discusses notes and comments of the reviewer and his reaction. There is interesting material there even if you are not interested in the science aspect that supports a creationist model of origins. As I said before, if you are sincerely interested in the truth of this subject, you would take the time to look and let me know what you think. If otherwise, you will content yourself with consulting trusted atheist authorities who have taken it upon themselves to criticize his work.
grathlun wrote: “I trust scientific methodology because it seeks the truth, is inherently self critical, self correcting and always looking to improve itself;”
And I like scientific methodology too, but that is not the same thing as trusting scientists! Scientists are human.
grathlun wrote: “religion by contrast seeks to maintain the status quo because its understanding is meant to be divinely inspired and so immutable.”
And I distrust religion for these same reasons. The bulk of religion is filled with charlatans, IMO. However, when we talk about science testing between an evolutionary model and a creationist model of origins, it is not the same thing. It involves constructing a hypothesis that might be falsified by empirical data. It causes more scrutiny and testing. For example, if an empirical clock is something that can distinguish between the models, we look closely at whether the clock we agree upon can be trusted. Radiometric dating? Okay, what are our assumptions in using this clock. Are these assumptions reasonable. Are there other empirical clocks that might confirm this one? Contrary to your imaginary way that creation science works, it actually fosters greater skepticism and leads to more empirical study.
Let me give you a specific example of the way a creation model might differ from an anti-creation model. Some creation models propose following Genesis 1 as a scientific account of the chronology of creation. Without getting into the theological wranglings about it, some of these models view the days as 24 hour days, while others argue that there is no reason to construct the days as 24 hours, but rather they may represent much longer time periods. In either case, the models that see the account as chronological make an interesting prediction of the empirical data that will differ significantly from the anti-creation models. It predicts that both birds and whales are created BEFORE reptiles and terrestrial mammals. There is no way around this. So how does this affect the science?
The anti-creation theory is generally that birds evolved from reptiles, and that all cetaceans evolved from terrestrial mammals. Researchers open to a creationist model will do more extended research to test empirically which of these are true. You may consider the matter settled based upon Fallon’s discovery of switched off genes for teeth in birds, or other data, but the point is that contrasting models promote and encourage more research, not less. Less research is a result of limiting study to only one model. Yes, that may have happened when the church as responsible for the educational institutions, but now that secular governments are in charge, limiting study to only anti-creationist models also will stifle research. Even if the creationist models are falsified by the data, the amount of empirical study it would have inspired only contributes to our overall wealth of knowledge and our understanding of origins will have been enhanced by allowing multiple models.
grathlun wrote: ” As you say intelligent design attempts (and fails) to predict the same things as evolution and it adds in god for no good reason.”
Your misunderstood me or just misunderstand creation models. They do not add god in for no good reason, nor do the “fail” in predicting the same evidence. Many creation models incorporate evolution because it is inherent in their originating theology, that all of creation was thrown into a state of evolution by the fall of man. There is theology based in Genesis on this, as well as in the book of Romans of the New Testament. The reason for the origination is not of concern for science, but the empirical predictions made make them subject to empirical testing and investigation.
grathlun wrote: “Nothing against more research but stratification is very well understood by geologists.”
I disagree. The textbooks taught me one thing, but what I found in the field was something else. I expected to see a geologic column first time I went into the field. There was nothing of the sort. Fossils are not found the way the textbooks describe them. They are usually all jumbled together, and no geologist ever explains why. There are polystrate fossils, and again, it is ignored. People have published finding man made tools, a human tooth, and other such things in strata with dinosaurs, but such data is always thrown out or ignored because it does not fit the anti-creation model. It is all too easy to just say that it must have fallen in there secondarily, etc.
I’m out of time now again. Sorry, but other responsibilities are calling me. I hope you understand.
grathuln wrote: “You go on to say however the models you are referring to include a much faster evolution in the past than the present and genetic information being lost rather than increased. This is problematic because even with mechanisms in place to stay that loss off as much as possible life would have to start off more complex and get simpler as a result of genetic loss. This obviously does not fit the observed data nor does it match experimental results which show increasing complexity. You surely know this having a history in biology though.”
Actually, you say something here that is a common mistake of advocates of solely the anti-creation models of origins. You argue from the popular paradigm to discredit the competing concept of the creation model. You assume that the “observed data” and “experimental results” show increasing complexity because that is how you have been taught. It is the way your textbooks and studies all arrange the data for your assimilation, but does the data actually show what you say? No, it doesn’t. It is an artifact of how others have arranged the data and presented an interesting story.
It is like when the textbooks would show the Coelacanth as an extinct primitive fish, first known from the Devonian period and thought to have gone extinct in the late Cretaceous period. This fish could nicely contribute to the anti-creation models by placing it in the evolutionary path to terrestrial vertebrates. Prior to the 20th century, the fossil evidence could be looked at as “proof” of an evolutionary link, or at least as evidence of an evolutionary path, but after a fisherman caught one off South Africa and later other specimens were found in substantially the same form, this fossil evidence is less convincing than it was before.
So be careful not to use the model itself and the way data has been arranged and presented as evidence that supports the model. Such thinking is tautological. While it might appear confirmatory superficially, it is really just meaningless circular reasoning.
Information theory is a branch of mathematics that must be used to consider the question posed between the creation and anti-creation models of evolution in regards to the question of increased or decreased genetic information. The math is a bit complicated to present here, but there is quite a bit of support from it for the creation models. At this stage it does not prove or disprove any particular model, but it certainly is suggestive that additional study and research is warranted.
A couple of things to consider along this vein.
First, mutations are a significant way that genetic information is changed. We know through observation that mutations are almost always deleterious, so the force from mutations usually is toward a loss of useful genetic information with only sometimes being a source of new beneficial genetic information. Fortunately, genetic information is copied in duplicate and mutations usually are recessive and do not get expressed immediately when they happen. These mutations accumulate and become more problematic over time. Therefore, incestual reproduction would cause these mutations to be expressed in deformities and other undesirable traits. The anti-creation models predicts mechanisms that work toward fixing this kind of problem long term, perhaps even reversing it. On the other hand, creation models predict higher and purer genetic information in earlier generations with more difficulties in reproduction caused in later generations.
Second, consider the rates of extinction versus rates of speciation. Many creation models predict higher rates of extinction. In contrast, anti-creation models generally predict the opposite. Extinction results in a loss of genetic information. If rates of extinction exceeded rates of speciation, the diversity of species would always be decreasing and its use as a mechanism for creating species diversity is thereby nullified.
grathuln wrote: “I understand you do not agree with creation theories but feel they should be taught with equal footing in science classes.”
Woe, hold on. Two wrong assumptions here.
First, I expressed disagreement with YOUNG earth creation theories, not creation theories in general. I told you that I am a theist, so you should assume that I believe a creation model of origins will ultimately win out when we accumulate enough knowledge and our understanding of origins is more mature.
Second, I never have expressed that they should have EQUAL footing in science classes. I just don’t think the information should be censored from public schools.
I actually don’t mind the creation models, along with the science aspect of them, being taught under the banner of religion. The problem is that when science as a discipline of study has by majority vote decided not to allow any creation models, and the courts have moved to forbid the teaching of religion in public schools, a situation is created whereby all this knowledge is lost from our public educational system. All this does is perpetuate a system where people are in ignorance of the facts and everybody will perpetually argue of this matter because that’s what happens when people are ignorant, especially when they are ignorant but think they are knowledgeable. It is frustrating for scientists to believe as they do and yet find half the country still is not onboard with them. We can’t understand it. We keep thinking that the problem is that the teachers are not being educated in science properly, and while that is certainly part of the problem, it is not the whole problem. The biggest problem from my perspective is censorship within public education. People can tell when they are having certain information forced upon them in public education and other information kept from them. It makes them suspicious. They look for more information through other sources, and they homeschool their children or send them to private schools if they can afford it. In the end, the children are not all receiving the same education, and the problem will continue to be perpetuated until we realize that censorship is not the way to force people to accept the authority of science blindly.
It is sad to me that science has become an authority that operates by dogma and backed up by the authority of the judiciary rather than as a method of empirical inquiry that can be used by everybody regardless of their religious sentiments.
The biggest challenge to the anti-creation models is the fossil record. Fossils are not found in nature in the way predicted by their model, and speciation is the exception rather than the rule in attempting to establish the hypothetical geologic column.
The biggest challenge to creation models is radiometric dating. If the assumptions used and the published dates are accurate, I don’t see how the creation models that are not models of theistic evolution hold up. Of course, the advocates of creation models question the assumptions used in radiometric methodology. I’ve seen published dates for rocks in Hawaii known to be like only 150 years old give radiometric dates on the order of 3 billion years. Certainly there is the question of whether researchers publishing dates just throw out the dates that do not fit their paradigm. Also, many geologists are consulted on dates, and they give them based upon the fossils found in them rather than using radiometric dating. This results in circular logic based upon the theory rather than independent inquiry. Gentry actually studied a phenomena he dubbed “Spectacle Halos.” There were halos formed secondarily in the Colorado plateau. The interesting thing is that these rocks were compressed over time as sediment above it was laid down. This caused the halos to be compressed to form what looked like spectacles. Gentry published pictures of these. From the half-life of the halos, he concluded that the sedimentary rock had to have formed within a 20 year time period. This conflicted with other published dates for the rocks as being millions of years apart. So while radiometric dating is an empirical clock that poses some problems, there remain questions, especially in regards to the integrity of how much we can trust a research system that possible throws out data that does not fit the generally accepted paradigm. This is the problem with peer review publishing. Unpopular ideas are very hard, if not impossible, to publish.
grathuln wrote: “It makes no sense and to dismiss this as us not being able to understand the mind of god is a cop out. As someone with a history in biology and your other experience you really ought to know no natural eye is optimal, a human could design better. Biological evolution explains such imperfections far better than intelligent design.”
The mentality of a creationist is not, “we are not able to understand the mind of god.” The mentality is, “here are the facts, how do we understand this, and how can we understand the creator from this?” If couched in regards to theism, there are numerous possible areas of research, such as does the blind spot have an advantage we are not recognizing, or perhaps the creator is not as perfect are you seem to want to assume that he his, or that a mutational change happened early in human evolution that changed the original design in some way, etc. The point is that contrary to hindering research like you claim, a creation model simply provides incentive to open up more areas of research to those who are interested in the questions. It seems like you automatically assume that creationists are stupid and uninterested in scientific research.
gathuln wrote: ” I do not however see this as a reason to insert god and have done with it, I’d rather science keep trying to figure it out because it has a very good track record of doing so.”
Again, the mentality of a theistic scientist is not to “insert god and be done.” That is the disparaging language of anti-creationists. Creationists want to do more research. Perhaps we need a paradigm revolution along the lines of Thomas Kuhn’s perspective. I’m talking about a drastic overhaul on our basic understanding of sedimentary rocks that came from Lyell just 150 years ago. Maybe the geologic column with all the fixes and adjustments for various processes like uplifts and erosion is not the way to understand it at all. Maybe most fossil beds are better understood from a catastrophic model of origins rather than uniformitarian mindset. Whether that involves the so-called Noah’s flood would remain to be seen, but what is wrong with considering all ideas and all the empirical data that either disproves or supports them? As long as the other models are not allowed in science, the empirical part of the investigation is going to be slow and difficult.
grathuln wrote: ” I also say something should be done to improve critical thinking.”
Exactly. Certainly ignoring the tremendous empirical studies being done is not the way to do that. Students leave the science classroom and read a good creationist book, and then they wonder why the science classroom ignores all the information being presented and declares it not to be science. Students need to be taught how to question ideas, not just creationist models either, but evolutionary models that include only Natural Selection, which clearly does not explain the fossil record.
Hmmm! therosarus defintion?
I will have to look that one up…, Hmmm
Mike A.,
🙂
Of course, the first therosaurus couldn’t have been published more than 6,000 years ago.
Elaine:
When creationists need to update their science, and a thesaurus isn’t available, they just grab a therosaurus.
david,
I just retrieved one of your recent comments from the SPAM filter.
David,
Maybe it god talkin to you…… Hmmmmm…..if I was a believer…..I’d believe…..