Thoughts in a Haystack

Valenzano would like the county to offer an elective class that would teach creationism, so that students who want to could learn that theory, too.

Carl Olson, the father of a Simi Valley High School student, also spoke against the book, saying that it contains "factual defects."

Among the examples he presented to the board in a paper, Olson noted that on page 35 the book "has a label ‘electromagnetic radiation' with squiggly lines — which is not what electromagnetic radiation is."

BOISE, IDAHO -- Members of the Idaho Science Teachers Association have approved an official position against teaching intelligent design in Idaho's public schools.

Rick Alm is the president of the ISTA's board and a science teacher at Bonneville High School. He says teachers in public schools are charged with teaching methodology that's been approved by the scientific community.

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He also says the teachers' group isn't taking a position against teaching religion. But he says under the law, religion has its place, and it's not in the science classroom.

Idaho state standards contain no mention of intelligent design. Idaho Superintendent of Public Instruction Tom Luna says he'll leave it up to local school districts to decide whether or not to teach it.

"I did not put it out nor did I know it was going out," Bridges said. "I’m not defending it or taking up for it."

"I gave him a copy of it months ago," said Hall, a retired high school teacher. "I had already written this up as an idea to present to him so he could see what it was and what we were thinking."

Asked about the ADL’s call for an apology, Bridges said: "I regret that these people have been offended, but I didn’t offend them because I didn’t put the memo out." ...

Bridges said the views in the memo belong to Hall, though Bridges said he doesn’t necessarily disagree with them.

"I agree with it more than I would the Big Bang Theory or the Darwin Theory," Bridges said. "I am convinced that rather than risk teaching a lie why teach anything?"

[I]n a measure of their dissatisfaction, a delegation of prominent conservatives at [the Council's meeting in] Amelia Island tried to enlist as a candidate Gov. Mark Sanford of South Carolina, a guest speaker at the event. A charismatic politician with a clear conservative record, Mr. Sanford is almost unknown outside his home state and has done nothing to prepare for a presidential run. He firmly declined the group’s entreaties, people involved in the recruiting effort said.

Mr. Norquist said he remained open to any of the three candidates who spoke to the council or to Mr. Romney. He argued that with the right promises, any of the four could redeem themselves in the eyes of the conservative movement despite their past records, just as some high school students take abstinence pledges even after having had sex.

"It’s called secondary virginity," Mr. Norquist said. "It is a big movement in high school and also available for politicians."

Since Matthew turned over the tapes to school officials, his family and supporters said, he has been the target of harassment and a death threat from fellow students and "retaliation" by school officials who have treated him, not the teacher, as the problem. The retaliation, they say, includes the district's policy banning students from recording what is said in class without a teacher's permission and officials' refusal to punish students who have harassed Matthew.

Matthew and his parents, Paul and Debra LaClair, are demanding an apology to Matthew and public correction of some of Paszkiewicz's statements in class.

"The school created a climate in which the students in the school community held resentment for Matthew," said Deborah Jacobs, executive director of the ACLU in New Jersey. She said Kearny High School had "violated the spirit and the letter of freedom of religion and the First Amendment."

Devils Tower is a mile-high, pure rock mountain in Wyoming with no other mountains nearby. It's flat at the top, and a sheer drop on all sides.

Easy to describe, impossible to explain -- unless the area was once a mile deep in water. Some speculate it was a volcano, and that it's unique columns formed from a cooling process. Water best explains the cooling and erosion, which were (1) enormous and (2) seem to be greater in its middle than at its top. A river still runs nearby.

Locked in their "us v. them" approach, evolutionists seem to instinctively oppose the past existence of enormous floods. How can they oppose the notion of a flood eroding and cooling Devils Tower?

The erosion is plainly from currents, not rainfall. The rapid cooling of the columns is more easily explained by a flood as well.

A massive flood likely carried away all the volcanic remnants and eroded the rock.

Many evolutionists oppose the possibility of an enormous flood at all costs, simply because their adversaries support one.

This thing got blowed out of proportion. I didn't know (the memo) was going to be sent out, nor had I read (the memo). ...

I ain't guilty of anything. I regret the media made what they made out of it.

I guarantee you telling lies and misleading the public has gone out and will catch up with you.

The former county GOP chairwoman said an illegal immigrant with three children came to her office this week asking for free legal help for an abused child.

"I told her the best thing for her to do was to get back to Mexico," Eargle said.

The goal of the Intelligent Design Movement is to achieve an open philosophy of science that permits consideration of any explanations toward which the evidence may be pointing. This is different from the current restrictive philosophy that rules out of consideration the possibility that a creator may be responsible for our existence ...

One of the strengths of science is that it does not require that scientists be unbiased, only that different scientists have different biases.

There is an immense gap between the creative feats that Darwin’s mechanism is supposed to have accomplished in taking life from a unicellular starting point up to the highly complex plants and animals of today, including humans, and the modest temporary variations that it has actually been observed to produce in nature.

Although naturalistic dogma has dominated public education for a half century, its mandarins have failed to convince the American public to embrace the dogma, and I see many signs that dissatisfaction with evolutionary naturalism is spreading throughout the world.

For now, the influential scientific organizations are passionately committed to explanations that consider only material causes, so they reject out of hand any suggestion that intelligent cause may also have played some role. It seems that supporting materialism, rather than following the evidence to whatever conclusion it leads is their prime commitment.

[W]hat if every time you had sex you couldn't get dead chickens out of your mind?

The United States abides by the laws of war. Its Armed Forces, in dealing with all other peoples, are expected to comply with the laws of war, in the spirit and the letter. In waging war, we do not terrorize helpless non-combatants, if it is within our power to avoid so doing. Wanton killing, torture, cruelty, or the working of unusual hardship on enemy prisoners or populations is not justified under any circumstance. Likewise respect for the reign of law, as that term is understood in the United States, is expected to follow the flag wherever it goes….

It is not about them. It is about us.

It's apparent, then, that Ross's personal beliefs really are the issue here. And, let's be honest, the personal beliefs of many important scientists throughout history can charitably be described as wacko. They include Pythagoras, who is arguably the most influential figure in the history of western thought and who was also a member of a cult that subscribed to bizarre beliefs; Nobel Laureate transistor inventor William Shockley, who abandoned physics for psychology and then promoted eugenics and the sterilization of the mentally handicapped, and Nobel Laureate, LSD enthusiast and AIDS denier Kary Mullis.

Indeed, that groundbreaking scientists harbour some odd beliefs seems more the rule than the exception. Yet the world would be immeasurably impoverished if such scientists were prevented from doing their work because of those personal beliefs.

... Ross's views present an even greater challenge to religion than to academic institutions. After all, there are only two ways to explain how Ross can simultaneously subscribe to two incompatible belief systems, and neither way is particularly palatable: Either Ross is dishonest, with little interest in witnessing what he believes to be the truth, or he is a relativist, with no belief in truth at all.

... [P]aradigms are conceptual frameworks, since they define the way in which scientists view their subject and assess their theories ... Truth therefore becomes relative to paradigms, which means there is no objective way to determine which of two competing paradigms has a stronger claim to truth.

This opened Kuhn to charges of relativism ... he maintained until his death that science wasn't necessarily about getting closer to the truth. This provided a tremendous boost to postmodernists, who have used Kuhn's theory to deny the existence of objective truth.

In accepting that Scripture merely presents one paradigm among many, and that the claims in the Bible are therefore no more or less true than the claims made in any other paradigm, Ross must abandon the belief that the Bible speaks the Truth -- not just the truth relative to a specific conceptual framework, but the truth that exists always and everywhere.

Consequently, while Ross might use his credentials to attack evolutionary theory, much to the consternation of science faculties, his philosophy represents a much greater threat to his own religion.

A slightly higher proportion of American adults qualify as scientifically literate than European or Japanese adults ...

We should take no pride in a finding that 70 percent of Americans cannot read and understand the science section of the New York Times.

A slightly higher proportion of American adults qualify as scientifically literate than European or Japanese adults, but the truth is that no major industrial nation in the world today has a sufficient number of scientifically literate adults ...

Although university science faculties have often viewed general education requirements with disdain, analyses indicate that the courses promote civic scientific literacy among U.S. adults despite the disappointing performance of American high school students in international testing.

"What does astrology speak to? Love relationships," Losh said, noting that belief in horoscopes is much higher among women than men.

Raymond Eve of the University of Texas at Arlington had mixed news in surveys of students at an unnamed Midwestern university.

The share that believed aliens had visited Earth fell from 25 percent in 1983 to 15 percent in 2006. There was also a decline in belief in "Bigfoot" and in whether psychics can predict the future.

But there also has been a drop in the number of people who believe evolution correctly explains the development of life on Earth and an increase in those who believe mankind was created about 10,000 years ago.

Over recent decades, the number of public policy controversies that require some scientific or technical knowledge for effective participation has been increasing. Any number of issues, including the siting of nuclear power plants, nuclear waste disposal facilities, and the use of embryonic stem cells in biomedical research point to the need for an informed citizenry in the formulation of public policy.

While modest in scope, ID advocates hope it will have a large effect by getting into public school science classes and reversing the supposed "stifling dominance of the materialist worldview, and to replace it with a science consonant with Christian and theistic convictions." (Wedge Strategy" available [here])

As the philosopher Pierre Duhem (1954) emphasized, physical theories, on their own, do not make testable predictions. One needs to add "auxiliary propositions" to the theories one wishes to test. (See the entry on the Duhem–Quine thesis at Wikipedia)

On Tuesday, [Republican House Appropriations Chairman Warren Chisum] distributed a memo written by Georgia GOP Rep. Ben Bridges to Texas House members' mailboxes. The memo advocated that schools stop teaching evolution and contained links to a Web site that warns of international Jewish conspiracies. It also directed readers to the group that created the Web site – the Atlanta-area Fair Education Foundation. ...

The memo points to "indisputable evidence" that "evolution science has a very specific religious agenda" and refers readers to a Web site that asserts the universe revolves around the earth. It also suggests that Jewish physicists are part of the force behind a "centuries-old conspiracy" to destroy the Christian teachings of Earth's origins.

Mr. Chisum said he hadn't looked at the Web site and didn't realize that he was distributing that type of material. He expressed chagrin that he didn't vet the material more carefully.

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He said he believes creation and evolution should both be taught in schools, and he separated himself from what he called "goofy stuff" on the Web site.

There are some of the "design" advocates who offer reasons for these similarities, such as "this shows that we share the same designer", or "this shows that there is a common purpose or a common material". This should be shocking to anyone who doesn't like being related to monkeys. It says that the designer either wanted us to be monkeys, or that the designer didn't care enough about us to make us markedly different, or that the designer had little choice. ...

[T]he arguments of ID are meant as "feel good" arguments. It makes people feel as if they are arguments against being related to monkeys. They have the superficial appearance of being "scientific", and against something or other uncomfortable. But they are not arguments against what is uncomfortable about evolutionary biology. If the entirety of the ID arguments were accepted, it wouldn't change a thing about being related to monkeys.

William Dembski

... who absolutely destroyed any remaining credibility Intelligent Design may have had, when he responded to Judge John E. Jones' powerful ruling of December 2005, not by defending ID in science journals, nor in courts of law, but by parodying the judge's decision with an Internet video that featured animated farting sounds. The Awards Committee had the most trouble with this award, as several members wanted to name it the "Not So Noble Gas" Award. However, all members were agreed that Dembski edged out [Jonathan] Wells and [Ann] Coulter, and did the most damage to ID this year.

Many Kansans are concerned that proposed changes to Kansas Science Standards will cause Kansas Public Education to indoctrinate young children in Materialism, the philosophy that dominates Russian culture. ...

Kansans are concerned because Materialism is the origins story that is the foundation for a variety of non-theistic religions and religious beliefs. Atheism and Humanism depend on a purposeless self-existing universe with life being the product of unguided evolutionary change.

1. If, and only if, you get tagged, write a post with links to 5 blogs that make you think,
2. Link to this post so that people can easily find the exact origin of the meme,
3. Optional: Proudly display the 'Thinking Blogger Award' with a link to the post that you wrote.

That was that! Please, remember to tag blogs with real merits, i.e. relative content, and above all - blogs that really get you thinking!

1. Red State Rabble
2. Darwinian Conservatism
3. Jurisdynamics
4. Stranger Fruit
5. Beautiful Biology

[Reporter Cornelia] Corny Dean, from my experience, decides on her own what terms--and science standards--mean. For example, "creationism" in the Dean Lexicon is a totally flexible term that embraces without distinction people who support intelligent design and those who support a Young Earth. Dean knows the difference in common usage, but she isn't about to let the readers in on it. For her the pejorative terminology carries too much ideological advantage to let mere accuracy, let alone nuance, intervene.

Under the canopy of design as an empirical possibility, however, any number of particular theories may also be possible, including traditional creationism, progressive (or “old-earth”) creationism, and theistic evolution. Both scientific and scriptural evidence will have to decide the competition between these theories. The “big tent” of ID provides a setting in which that struggle after truth can occur, and from which the secular culture may be influenced.

The board's plan [is] to whitewash the history of science ... Especially disturbing is the board's proposal--during Black History month no less--to eliminate any mention of the infamous Tuskegee syphilis experiment from the state curriculum, as well as any reference to the eugenics movement that targeted the disabled.