Flat Earthers Make A Boo-Boo
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Book thrown at proponents of Intelligent Design
“Devastating” early drafts of a controversial book recommended as reading at a US high school reveal how the word creationism had been later swapped for intelligent design , a landmark US trial scrutinising the teaching of ID heard on Wednesday.
The early drafts of the book Of Pandas and People, was used as evidence to link the book to creationism, which it is illegal to teach in US schools.
ID proponents have said for years that they are not creationists, says Nick Matzke of the National Center for Science Education in Oakland, California, which is advising 11 parents who are suing the school board of Dover High School in Pennsylvania for incorporating ID into the science curriculum. This proves beyond a doubt that this is simply a new name for creationism.
Fake pseudoscience has no place in science class, we’re already far enough behind the rest of the world on these subjects as is.
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If anyone is interested in following the trial, you can check out The Panda’s Thumb.
I’m with you there. But this debate is about what should be taught in science class.
I’ve never understood why evolution is meant to be at odds with religion.
Is it not conceivable that the “Intelligent Designer” designed evolution itself, knowing that some 10 billion years later, nutcases would demean His/Her work by implying that He/She was not, er, intelligent enough to have done so in the first place?
One thing that’s always struck me about this debate is that it needn’t take place.
Evolution doesn’t conflict with religion. I can’t see it. Evolution doesn’t address the creation of life in the first place, it just states that things evolve. What Darwinism never addressed was how life got started, something we probably will never know.
The faithful believe that God started it all, some also believe that everything was created as it is today, but that’s utter nonsense. There’s evidence of evolution all around us, yet some continue to believe that it’s not true.
I myself am a faithful evolutionist. Science and religion need not be at odds.
One of Anne Rice’s “Vampire” books posited the interesting theory that God created the universe because he wanted to watch Himself evolve.
The rest of it was gothic gobbledygook, but that stuck with me.
The flat-earthers are just in denial. They are fighting against modernism, which, ironically, is over 100 years old now. Seriously, they are fighting against Joyce, Einstein, Picasso. And in this they are very much like the Taliban or the Iranian Mullahs.
The world we live in today is too confusing and complex for our 30-million-year-old domesticated primate brains to handle. And so the chimps howl and yell and hurl feces in response.
That’s all that’s going on. We have 21st century brains and technology run by paleolithic limbic systems. The two do *not* coexist well. Flat-eartherism is a teenage-style petulant rebellion against the adult responsiblilties and challenges of a complex, chaotic, interconnected world.
It’s so much simpler with a Big Strong Alpha Male In the Sky, running everything. When Shrub himself said, “It’d be a lot easier if it was a dictatorship, as long as I was the dictator”, he revealed a lot. His politics is just like his religion: autocratic and simple-minded.
That’s not the way into the future, folks.
Big Gay Al,
The debate isn’t whether faith and evolution are incompatible, as you show in your example they aren’t. The debate is science vs religion all over again. Pushing ‘ID’ as science degrades the definition of science and weakens its authority as factual.
This is only a first step in a campaign against science. Science and religion are at odds with each other. Not to suggest that one cannot have faith and be scientific, but that one cannot exchange faith for science or vice versa.
Religion cannot dictate factual information about the age of the earth, or creation unless it is coincidentally factually correct. I cannot cure a man of a broken leg with faith, only medical science will allow for that. Similarly I cannot use science to make a moral or spiritual judgment.
The scientific process and mystic ‘enlightenment’ are not interchangeable.
Creationist and ID folks want the mystic understanding to prevail over the scientific understanding of the world. That’s what this is really about.
I wonder when the Japanese, the Chinese, the Indians, the Canadians, the Europeans, or anyone else besides Americans are going to start teaching Intelligent Design in their schools? Don’t they realize that they’re conceding critical research ground!?! We’re definitely going to dominate the first critical decades of ID Nobel Prize awards!
The idea of an “intelligent designer” allows people of faith to feel comfortable in the 21st century. Great. Knock yourselves, out. I’m all for faith. But how exactly does the idea of an “intelligent designer” advance scientific knowledge in any way? If you buy the idea of intelligent design where does it get you? How does it help you know more about the world? All it seems to do is cast a veil of mysticism over knowledge: Somethings we can’t know because we’ll never know as much as the “intelligent designer.” That, in my book, is a formula for impeding scientific knowledge not expanding on it.
It’s not that faith and science are incompatible. Most moderate Christians take the Deist view: God created the universe through the agencies of the Big Bang and evolution and there is no shame in trying to understand it. Genesis in the Bible is written off as “dumb humans copied it down wrong when God told them”. But the faith remains.
The problem is that the more fundamentalist brands of Christians don’t actually worship God. They worship the Bible as the literal word of God. And the Bible says it all happened about 6000-10000 years ago, in direct contravention of actual observable evidence. Being exposed to evolution in schools causes their tiny minds to explode trying to reconcile the contradiction. If it the Bible or Truth, they’ll pick the Bible.
I will give the ID folks some credit though. As an Orwellian meme, it is very clever. In summary form, it sounds like the Deist hypothesis, but the details are anything but. So some moderate Christians are falling for it. Let’s hope the courts see through the nonsense and say “The Scopes Monkey Trial already dealt with this – get lost!”.
For another way of proving that “intelligent design” = creationism, see this post.
Also, note that just yesterday, the “prestigious” New York Times was doing its best to promote “Young Earth creationism” as a “theory” worthy of discussion.
true. And no part of religion belongs in a science class. The questions of creation of life are too complex for high school students, anyway, IMHO. They are best addressed in a college-level philosophy class.
Intelligent design or self-organizing systems?
Discuss.
I must admit I am not sure I know what “fake pseudoscience” is.
Intelligent design or ignorance by design?
the funny thing is, that Jesus was a Liberal…it was the Romans who were the conservatives of that era.
if He were to come back today and repeat the actions of His life, He would no doubt be persecuted by most of the very people who claim to be His most ardent followers!
now, if only He would come back and chase the money lenders out of Congress…