Thoughts in a Haystack

The problem is what developed in the 19th Century; the widespread idea called scientific materialism became, essentially, the intellectual orthodoxy. It basically says that, to explain anything scientifically, it has to be explained in purely materialistic terms.

To say that secular means irreligious implies that all the arts and sciences are irreligious, and is very like saying that all professions except that of the law are illegal.

It seems perplexing to people that the faculty at Southern Methodist University would object to arguments from science that would confirm some belief they have as Christians. But the truth of the matter is that scientific materialism is so pervasive that it is almost as common in Christian universities as it is at state universities.

The Heroic View of Science was employed by the leaders of the Modern Synthesis at and around the time of the Centenary of the publication of the Origin in 1959. One of the rhetorical moves they made was to use Darwin as the solitary genius, allowing that Wallace was equally so, who changed forever the way science was done.

I’m afraid that people, even elected officials, make decisions they are not qualified to make ... [T]here’s no process requiring a legislator to demonstrate even a basic command of an issue before he or she steps forward to vote on it. Their votes can have far-reaching consequences and they owe it to their constituents to be educated.

By profession, Phillips is a trained wildlife biologist and former civil servant who helped to successfully usher wolves back to the Southeastern U.S. (red wolves) and Yellowstone National Park (gray). He studied grizzlies in the Alaskan Far North, worked under the mentorship of famed wolf biologist L. David Mech, and spent most of his life in the field, on the ground, talking to local residents about the value of wildlife in their lives.

... the legislator who wants to spend $200,000 in taxpayer funds to have Montana help a private group join a lawsuit to hasten the removal of wolves from the protected species list, an action that the Fish and Wildlife Service already is pursuing ...

... the lawmaker whose website starts off "CAUTION: RAMBLINGS OF A CONSERVATIVE COW DOCTOR" (containing perhaps the scariest picture of a vet in the universe) and who says that the idea that carbon dioxide emissions are a cause of global climate warming is "the biggest hoax of the last 30 years" ...

1) Name the four Gospels.
2) Name a sacred Hindu text.
3) Name the holy book of Islam.
4) Name the first five books of the Hebrew Bible, or Old Testament.
5) Name the Four Noble Truths of Buddhism.
6) What is Ramadan and in what religion is it celebrated?
7) What is the Golden Rule?
8) Name the 10 Commandments.
9) What does the First Amendment say about religion?
10) Is the saying "God helps those who help themselves" in the Bible?

We see it played out every day on the killing fields of Iraq and Afghanistan. The inability of the people leading the "war on terror" to figure out the basics of Islam — Shiites? Sunnis? Kurds? Who knows? — only exacerbates the problem, he said.

"We’re surprised that all of a sudden, the Sunnis and Shiites are fighting, but that’s the kind of thing you would learn in high school," Prothero said.

Herve Le Guyader, a University of Paris biology professor who advised the Education Ministry on the Atlas, said high school biology teachers needed more training now to respond to the increasingly open challenges to the theory of evolution.

"It's often taught in a simplistic way," he said. "We have to give them the philosophical arguments they need to respond."

Specifically, the team measured the function of the brachial artery to relax and expand to accommodate increased blood flow (also know as flow mediated dilation, or FMD) in adults with a body mass index (BMI) between 25 and 35 kg/m2. In the randomized, single-blind, placebo-controlled crossover study, 45 subjects recruited from the general population of southwestern Connecticut were randomly assigned to one of the three consumption groups: eight ounces of either cocoa without sugar, cocoa with sugar or placebo. For six weeks, all participants underwent endothelial function testing, assessing FMD of the brachial artery using high frequency ultrasound before and after the daily cocoa or placebo consumption.

While the findings from this study do not suggest that people should start eating more chocolate as part of their daily routine, it does suggest that we pay more attention to how dark chocolate and other flavonoid-rich foods might offer cardiovascular benefits.

The danger of creationism is that, like the pseudo-science of Nazi eugenics, it allows facts to be accepted or discarded according to the dictates of a preordained ideology. Creationism removes the follower from the rational, reality-based world. Signs, miracles and wonders occur not only in the daily life of Christians but in history, science, medicine and logic. The belief system becomes the basis to understand the world. Random facts and data are collected and made to fit into this belief system or discarded. When facts are treated as if they were opinions, when there is no universal standard to determine truth, in law, in science, in scholarship, or in the reporting of the events of the day, the world becomes a place where people can believe what they want to believe, where there is no possibility of reaching any conclusion not predetermined by those who interpret the official, divinely inspired text. This is the goal of creationists.

Before Adam and Eve were expelled from paradise, museum visitors are told, all of the dinosaurs were peaceable plant-eaters. The evidence is found in Genesis 1:30, where God gives "green herb" to every creature to eat. There were no predators. T-Rex had such big teeth, the museum explains, so it could open coconuts.

Although SMU makes its facilities available as a community service, and in support of the free marketplace of ideas, providing facilities for those programs does not imply SMU's endorsement of the presenters' views.

Supporters of the decision to starve her to death have hailed this finding as bolstering their argument that withdrawal of her feeding tube was ethical.

Their reasoning is hard to follow.

[Tom] DeLay has put his deepest thoughts into print.

Because there is a God who has spoken, issues like marriage, abortion, homosexuality and the death penalty are not matters of opinion. They are matters of revelation. There are moral absolutes and public policy should be built upon them.

Politeness is wasted on the dishonest, who will always take advantage of any well-intended concession, and the leaders of the so-called "Intelligent Design" movement, as we shall see, are so incredibly dishonest that they could cause a veteran heroin addict to blush -- not out of any moral objection on the part of the addict, but rather out of embarrassment that anyone could be so darned bad at lying.

[D]oes this mean that ID is (to use Dumbski's logic) a "ground-clearing operation" for Raelianism?
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Among those practices were that PAOs should listen to interviews as they’re being conducted, that superiors can do interviews in someone’s stead (known as the 'right of first refusal'), and that NASA employees should report interview requests to the Public Affairs office. In fact, one of my duties was to send out a daily email to senior NASA Public Affairs personnel known as 'On The Record,' in which I detailed the day’s media requests.

In my more than three decades in government, I have never seen anything approaching the degree to which information flow from scientists to the public has been screened and controlled as it has now. Review and editing of scientific testimony by the White House OMB (Office of Management and Budget) seems to now be an accepted practice.

There is little doubt that the Administration’s downplaying of evidence about global warming has had some effect on public perception of the climate change issue. The impact is to confuse the public about the reality of global warming, and about whether that warming can be reliably attributed to human-made greenhouse gases.

Since then, a WHO official said Tuesday, the organization's international network of collaborating laboratories at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta and three other cities has not been able to obtain samples of the virus from Indonesia, the country hardest hit by bird flu, with 81 laboratory-confirmed cases and 63 deaths.

The entire world manufacturing capacity for influenza vaccine is sufficient to immunize only 500 million people, and perhaps only half that if more than one dose is required.

Most vaccine for H5N1 has been sold to developed countries before it is produced - or even completes clinical trials - to be stockpiled in case of a pandemic.

Indonesian Health Minister Siti Fadilah Supari has been quoted in press accounts as saying her government wants to "create a balance between developed and developing countries in facing catastrophe."

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"The WHO has been siding with capital owners, which sometimes forget the good of the people," she said. "We want to change that."

In a fair world, Indonesia would send its virus to the best labs and share in any vaccine made from it. In our world, Indonesia sends off its virus, companies make vaccine from it and sell it to countries that can pay. Indonesia is not one of them, and neither are the other countries suffering badly from H5N1.

Without the samples, flu experts are unable to track changes that are building up in the genes of H5N1, the influenza virus health experts fear could evolve into a human strain and cause a pandemic.

Maurice Middleberg(cq), a vice president of the Global Health Council, a group that advocates efforts to improve the health of people in developing countries, said the practice of sharing virus is essential to confronting the influenza threat - but the needs of developing countries must be considered also.

"The exchange of scientific information is essential to preventing the emergence of a global pandemic, but a way also must be found so that countries that cannot afford vaccine at commercial rates will be able to get it," Middleberg said.

I certainly support open discussion in the classroom of the evidence for and against evolution or creation. I do not believe that the problems with macro evolution (ex. lack of transition skeletons and the complexity of DNA which negates Darwin’s spontaneous generation of life) are allowed to be freely discussed in the classroom.

Millions of children eat in school cafeterias that don't get the twice-yearly health inspections required by Congress ...

Inspections are meant to ensure cafeteria workers wash their hands properly and that they keep lunchtime staples like pizza hot or milk cold to prevent germs from growing.

... only Dr. Maureen Stanton, professor and chairwoman of the UC Davis Department of Evolution and Ecology, will "debat[e]" intelligent design vs. evolution. Apparently that’s the meaning of debate to some Darwinists.

It appears that some of Georgia's religious conservatives in the Legislature may have unwittingly outsmarted themselves. In their attempt to take a swipe at Charles Darwin and his theory of evolution, these legislators now find themselves in the awkward position of doing one thing and saying another.

On the one hand, they have sponsored Resolution 247 expressing the Senate's profound regret for Georgia's participation in the eugenics movement and the injustices done under eugenics laws, including the forced sterilization of Georgia citizens.

On the other hand, some of these same legislators say they are opposed to the passage of a resolution expressing "profound regret" for the injustices of slavery, claiming that neither they nor any Georgians alive today ever owned slaves, and therefore the state should not apologize for something current Georgians did not do.

I admit that I was puzzled when I first heard of Senate Resolution 247. It struck me as somewhat odd that a group of conservative legislators had suddenly become "bleeding hearts" who wanted the state to apologize for a past injustice. But after hearing more about the eugenics movement, I actually thought that the resolution might be worth passing, because the actions of the state truly were cruel and a violation of basic human rights. Then I looked up the bill on the General Assembly Web site, and the pieces fell into place. In the first three paragraphs of the legislation, "Charles Darwin," "Darwinian evolutionary theory" and "Darwinian principles" are mentioned as often as eugenics.

Although Darwin and his theory of evolution are no more to blame for eugenics than Christianity is for the Ku Klux Klan, the resolution's authors seem as interested in building a case that eugenics was "an outgrowth of Darwinian evolutionary theory" as in sincerely apologizing for the sterilizations the state committed.

How can these legislators say with a straight face that the state should express "profound regret" for what it did to several thousand citizens (mostly convicted criminals and the mentally disabled) while at the same time claim that there is no reason for the state to express "profound regret" for what it did to millions of citizens who were held in slavery or lived under segregation laws.

So, here's a hint for any group that wants an apology from the state for a past injustice. Find some way to tie Charles Darwin and his theory of evolution to the injustice and you can be pretty sure that your measure will find several willing sponsors in Georgia's General Assembly.

Finney lives about 60 miles from Dayton, home of the 1925 Tennessee "Monkey Trial" that pitted evolution against the biblical creation story and resulted in the conviction of biology teacher John T. Scopes for teaching evolution.

When I have students coming into my class with those kinds of concerns, I always say, I appreciate your perspective, but you need to be aware of the scientific perspective. ... Of course their religious beliefs are their beliefs and we're not going to be discussing religious beliefs in science class.

"I probably made a mistake in approaching it from a creation aspect, which raises red flags," Finney said Tuesday. "People get so sensitive about whether children might be exposed to any sort of religious thing."

House Minority Leader Jeff Harris, D-Columbia, warned the amendment would have involved the state in "the discussion of what can and cannot be taught in our classes - specifically, encompassing the teaching of intelligent design."

Rep. Brian Baker denied that he was trying to use his amendment to open the door to teaching intelligent design or creationism in public schools and asked that it be removed from the bill. ...

"The honest intent was to give the teachers some freedom to say these are some varying viewpoints that you can look at without being penalized for that," he said.

For instance, Fischer brought up the (late) famous paleontologist Stephen J. Gould, who published a paper in the late 1970s admitting that the absence of transitional fossils in the record was the "trade secret" of paleontology. Walczak’s incredibly intelligent response included interrupting Fischer to snidely proclaim "He’s dead! (no … really!?), and then dismiss the whole thing as just more "creationist chestnuts."

... the nodes and tips of the evolutionary tree are supported by fossils, but not the branches in between ...

... beyond any doubt that the followers of Darwinism are themselves very religious, and very dogmatically opposed to any view other than their own. If it were conceded that ID is indeed religious, based on last Wednesday night no satisfactory argument could be offered that would demonstrate that evolutionists are any less so.