Thoughts in a Haystack

Poor ignorant things, the command to refrain had meant nothing to them, they were but children, and could not understand untried things and verbal abstractions which stood for matters outside of their little world and their narrow experience. Eve reached for an apple! -- oh, farewell, Eden ...

It was pitiful. She was like one who wakens slow and confusedly out of a sleep. She gazed half-vacantly at me, then at Adam, holding her curtaining fleece of golden hair back with her hand, then her wandering glance fell upon her naked person. The red blood mounted to her cheek, and she sprang behind a bush and stood there crying, and saying --

"Oh, my modesty is lost to me - my unoffending form is become a shame to me -- my mind was pure and clean; for the first time it is soiled with a filthy thought!" She moaned and muttered in her pain, and drooped her head, saying, "I am degraded -- I have fallen, oh so low, and I shall never rise again."

Adam's eyes were fixed upon her in a dreamy amazement, he could not understand what had happened, it being outside his world as yet, and her words having no meaning for one void of the Moral Sense. And now his wonder grew: for, unknown to Eve, her hundred years rose upon her, and faded the heaven of her eyes and the tints of her young flesh, and touched her hair with gray, and traced faint sprays of wrinkles about her mouth and eyes, and shrunk her form, and dulled the satin lustre of her skin.

All this the fair boy saw: then loyally and bravely he took the apple and tasted it, saying nothing.

The change came upon him also. Then he gathered boughs for both and clothed their nakedness, and they turned and went their way, hand in hand and bent with age, and so passed from sight.

Ecklund says, "It appears that those from non-religious backgrounds disproportionately self-select into scientific professions. This may reflect the fact that there is tension between the religious tenets of some groups and the theories and methods of particular sciences and it contributes to the large number of non-religious scientists."

Riley issued a proclamation Thursday declaring June 30 through July 7 as "Days of Prayer for Rain" and asked citizens to pray individually and in their houses of worship.

"Throughout our history, Alabamians have turned in prayer to God to humbly ask for His blessings and to hold us steady in times of difficulty. This drought is without question a time of great difficulty for our farmers and for communities across our state," Riley said in a statement.

Ken Ham is the esteemed 2007 recipient of the George Washington Man of the Year Award because we believe him to be an individual whose vision and persevering spirit are noteworthy for giving hope to the next generation and defending the cause of Christ in our nation. Specifically, Ken's uncompromising defense of Genesis, and his long battle to open the Creation Museum, is one of the most singular contributions of our generation," observed [Vision Forum president Doug] Phillips.

Each year, Vision Forum gives the George Washington Man of the Year Award to recognize and honor that man who most clearly demonstrates, through their public courage, the stalwart spirit and mature leadership embodied by General George Washington.

Florida's No. 2 education official is tangled in a cyber-tussle with a tiny Minnesota newspaper and a scientist who blogs about the politics of teaching evolution.

Back in October 2003, the Princeton Union Eagle wrote that Cheri Yecke, then Minnesota's education commissioner, explained in "advance publicity" for a public hearing that "schools could include the concept of 'intelligent design' in teaching how the world came to be."

We the undersigned petition the Prime Minister to prevent the use of creationist and other pseudo-scientific propaganda in Government-funded schools.

The Government remains committed ensuring (sic) that young people have an understanding of the importance of science and the world around them.

Science is a core subject of the National Curriculum throughout every Key Stage. The National Curriculum secures for all pupils, irrespective of background and ability, an entitlement to a range of areas of learning. Its aim is to develop the knowledge, understanding, skills and attitudes necessary for each pupil's self-fulfilment and development as an active and responsible citizen. It makes expectations for learning and attainment explicit to pupils, parents, teachers, governors, employers and the public, and establishes national standards for the performance of all pupils. All materials that support the teaching, learning and assessment of primary and secondary education, can be found on the National Curriculum website.

The Government is aware that a number of concerns have been raised in the media and elsewhere as to whether creationism and intelligent design have a place in science lessons. The Government is clear that creationism and intelligent design are not part of the science National Curriculum programmes of study and should not be taught as science. The science programmes of study set out the legal requirements of the science National Curriculum. They focus on the nature of science as a subject discipline, including what constitutes scientific evidence and how this is established. Students learn about scientific theories as established bodies of scientific knowledge with extensive supporting evidence, and how evidence can form the basis for experimentation to test hypotheses. In this context, the Government would expect teachers to answer pupils' questions about creationism, intelligent design, and other religious beliefs within this scientific framework.

We will be publishing guidance for schools, on the way creationism and intelligent design relate to science teaching. It will be possible to ensure that the weight of scientific opinion is properly presented. The guidance will be available on the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority website in due course.

The fierce religious controversies of earlier days were subsiding. By regarding the Bible as an allegorical text filled with spiritual meaning, it became possible for Christian believers to retain their belief in the truth of God's message while also appreciating scientific findings as a different kind of truth. Moreover, the power of the Church itself was on the wane. Many of these changes were retrospectively attributed to the Origin of Species. Honours paid to Darwin at his funeral liberally acknowledged his important role in constructing the modem frame of mind.

His scientific legacy, though, was not nearly as secure. As fresh areas of research opened up in the biological sciences, and new kinds of professionals took up a wider range of problems with more sophisticated techniques, the original thesis of natural selection was modified almost beyond recognition.

The American palaeontologist Theodore Eimer claimed that evolutionary history had not taken the shape of a Darwinian branching tree but proceeded in a straight line. In his eyes, natural selection was powerless except to weed out obviously deleterious trends. A much-discussed example was that of the Irish Elk, which was thought to have become extinct because of the dramatic over-development of its antlers -- the suggestion was that the antlers had acquired a momentum of their own and eventually became a liability not an advantage.

Alpheus Hyatt, another noted fossil expert, similarly argued that adaptive trends almost always carried on beyond their usefulness. Ultimately, he said, a species would be driven to 'racial senility' and extinction.

Such straight-line evolutionary histories, with their subtexts of inbuilt senescence or death from over-specialization, lent authoritative support to increasingly pessimistic views about the human future. Primitive cultures could now be regarded as in the 'infancy' of their development. More advanced societies might be set on lines of development that led them through the heights of civilization to corruption or decay. Those who transgressed society's conventions, such as criminals, homosexuals or the mentally deranged, could be categorized as 'throwbacks' to some racial past. ...

Whereas in Darwin's day eugenics was mainly expressed in fears about the maintenance of biological fitness, in the early twentieth century it expanded through Europe and the Americas into significant political movements seeking to change government policy with public health measures for the masses, birth control and enforced restraint from breeding. At root, the old system of Malthusian checks that Darwin had applied to biology was reapplied to political economies with compelling biological support. The poor, the deranged, the weak and diseased came to be regarded as biological burdens on society. For the good of the nation, it was said, policies should be introduced to prevent them from reproducing their kind. ...

It should be said, however, that racism and genocide predated Darwin. Nor were they solely confined to the West. Nevertheless, [post-Darwin] evolutionary views, and then the new science of genetics, gave powerful biological backing to those who wished to partition society according to ethnic difference or promote white supremacy.

Intelligent Design does not generally refute evolution but suggests that some biological processes are far too complex to have originated in the step-by-step manner proposed by Darwin. ... This is basically the old argument as put forward by William Paley or Asa Gray, brought up to date with new examples.

The new millennium has consequently begun with Westerners as divided as ever over the implications of a natural origin of species. Despite these challenges, the modern synthesis stands firm at the heart of biological science. ... History seldom tells of simple triumphant advances, but it can tell of the extraordinary impact of a single book. While many of the ideas and themes addressed by Darwin in 1859 were not new, and his writing style was mild in the extreme, the Origin of Species was clearly a major publishing event that spectacularly altered the nature of discussion on the question of origins. ... Old texts are frequently remade by new forms of attention, and it appears that Darwin's Origin was both resilient in the survival of its main proposals and malleable in the hands of its devotees. His book can therefore be seen, not as a solitary voice deliberately defying the traditions of the Church or the moral values of society, but as one of the hubs of transformation in Western thought.

Doing the Lord's work is a thread that's run through our politics since the very beginning. And it puts the lie to the notion that the separation of church and state in America -- a principle we all must uphold and that I have embraced as a constitutional lawyer and most importantly as a Christian -- means faith should have no role in public life.

Somehow, somewhere along the way, faith stopped being used to bring us together and faith started being used to drive us apart.

Faith got hijacked, partly because of the so-called leaders of the Christian Right, all too eager to exploit what divides us.

At every opportunity, they've told evangelical Christians that Democrats disrespect their values and dislike their church, while suggesting to the rest of the country that religious Americans care only about issues like abortion and gay marriage, school prayer and intelligent design.

I have made a solemn pledge that I will sign a universal health-care bill into law by the end of my first term as president of the United States.

Obama offered a list of alternative "matters of conscience," including raising the minimum wage, adopting universal health care, stopping genocide in Darfur, Sudan, ending the Iraq war and embracing immigration reform.

Steven Small, a UCC member from West Boylston, Mass., said the meeting was nothing but a "Democratic pep rally."

"I don't think it's an appropriate role for such an inclusive church to showcase a candidate for the Left," said Small, a registered Republican. "What does that say to the rest of us who happen to be part of this church?"

The UCC has long been in the forefront of progressive social justice issues. Many renowned political activists are members of the UCC, including the man who nearly single-handedly revived the Democratic Party, Howard Dean.

Perhaps most tellingly, the Rev. Barry Lynn, director of Americans United for Separation of Church and State, is a member. The UCC believes that religious faith should play a part in American society but not impose its will on governance.

[The UCC] seeks to be Multiracial, Multicultural, Open and Affirming, and Accessible to All—A Church where everyone is welcome!

More Americans believe in angels than in evolution. Whether you're an atheist or a fundamentalist, ignoring the role of religion in American society, and how that shapes our political discourse, is wishful -- if not delusional -- thinking.

Imagine if the American government had voted to censure the Wright brothers and to outlaw the internal combustion engine at the turn of the last century ...

[U]ltra-Darwinian versions of natural selection, which ascribe a good deal of causal agency to "selfish" genes ... have done little to disturb, and indeed much to encourage, what is at root a technological vision of the living world. Natural selection is seen as mixing and matching genes in the spirit of a genetic engineer who uses a computer to model what [Daniel] Dennett calls "searches through design space." Dobzhansky's famous remark that "nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution" is well taken. But in recent decades, Dobzhansky's maxim has been given a twist. Rather than appealing to the contingencies of the evolutionary process as a constraint on Promethean ambitions -- eugenics in Dobzhansky's day, "designer babies" in ours -- evolution is now being asked by those who have construed natural selection as a designing biotechnician to bless the transition to the coming age of biotechnology. In the resulting biotechnological vision, the inherently complex relationships among genes, traits, fitness, and diverse environments is displaced by the homogenizing, standardizing, "quality control" tendencies on which genetic engineering depends, and which it is explicitly aimed at producing and reproducing. It is no doubt true that we are entering into an era in which genetic medicine can be expected to do a great deal of good. But genetic medicine will not, we suspect, be able to achieve its promise so long as it is seen as licensed by a simplistic, utopian (or, depending on your point of view, dystopian) view of organisms as technological objects ...

[A black hole is] a point in space where gravity grows infinitely strong. At a particular distance from the center of the hole -- called the event horizon -- gravity is already so strong not even light can escape. So material falls in never to be seen again. ...

In 1974, theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking showed that thanks to quantum mechanics matter can escape black holes in a tricky way. By random chance, a particle-antiparticle pair can flit into existence straddling the event horizon. One partner falls into the hole, while the other just barely makes it free. Because of this effect, dubbed Hawking radiation, a black hole slowly evaporates, so that anything that enters is eventually released over billions or even trillions of years.

... have constructed a lengthy mathematical formula that shows, in effect, black holes can't form at all. The key involves the relativistic effect of time, Krauss explains. As Einstein demonstrated in his Theory of General Relativity, a passenger inside a spaceship traveling toward a black hole would feel the ship accelerating, while an outside observer would see the ship slow down. When the ship reached the event horizon, it would appear to stop, staying there forever and never falling in toward oblivion. In effect, Krauss says, time effectively stops at that point, meaning time is infinite for black holes. If black holes radiate away their mass over time, as Hawking showed, then they should evaporate before they even form, Krauss says. It would be like pouring water into a glass that has no bottom.

Krauss replies, "How do you know they're black holes?" No one has actually seen a black hole, he says, and anything with a tremendous amount of gravity--such as the supermassive remnants of stars--could exert effects similar to those researchers have blamed on black holes. ...

Not so fast, says astronomer Kimberly Weaver of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. ... [T]he problem is "we have never observed any events that would back this up." At the site of the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way, for example, she says astronomers routinely observe what looks like interstellar material disappearing without a trace. Also, no one has yet detected Hawking radiation, which would be prerequisite evidence for black hole evaporation, Weaver says.

Even those who say they believe in evolution may be confused about what that means exactly. The poll found 42 per cent of Canadians agree that dinosaurs and humans co-existed on earth - but evolutionary theory says non-avian dinosaurs died out about 60 million years before humans evolved in their current form.

"Wow. Oh boy," responded Pam Willoughby, an anthropology professor at the University of Alberta. "We're obviously not getting our message across."

... Pandas went through many drafts, several of which were completed prior to and some after the Supreme Court's decision in Edwards, which held that the Constitution forbids teaching creationism as science. By comparing the pre and post Edwards drafts of Pandas, three astonishing points emerge: (1) the definition for creation science in early drafts is identical to the definition of ID; (2) cognates of the word creation (creationism and creationist), which appeared approximately 150 times were deliberately and systematically replaced with the phrase ID; and (3) the changes occurred shortly after the Supreme Court held that creation science is religious and cannot be taught in public school science classes in Edwards. This word substitution is telling, significant, and reveals that a purposeful change of words was effected without any corresponding change in content ...

... its basis in the idea that human minds are the product of evolution is not atheistic theology. It is unassailable fact.

The theory of intelligent design oscillates between two poles that I will call the "weak" and "strong" forms. The weak form is how advocates of ID present their views in court, and the strong form is what most IDers really believe and admit to religious audiences ... The weak form of ID is untestable and tautological, while the strong form is testable in part and false. Both forms criticize neo-Darwinism for supposed flaws, but these criticisms have been shown to be misguided.

The weak form of ID consists of four assertions: First, some features of organisms don't just appear designed but were designed by an intelligent agent. Second, these features are "irreducibly complex" -- that is, they could not have evolved in a stepwise fashion with each step conferring an adaptive advantage, so they cannot be the result of natural selection. Third, other features did evolve by natural selection; organisms are mixtures of some traits that were produced by intelligent design and others that evolved by natural selection. And fourth, nothing is known or can be known about the nature of the designer or the designer's goals and methods.

Consider first the evidence. If any truly "irreducibly complex" adaptations exist, then any adaptations that could not have evolved just by natural selection are obvious candidates for design. Using this strategy, IDers can then point to any adaptation whose evolution we do not yet understand and deem this to be "proof' of design. (This is what Richard Dawkins, elsewhere ... calls "the argument from personal incredulity.") But many structures that creationists once thought irreducibly complex -- the vertebrate eye; the mammalian jaw; even that superannuated poster child of ID, the bacterial flagellum -- now have a scientific explanation. The argument from irreducible complexity boils down to the obvious fact that such features are always unexplained until they have been explained.

Weak ID asserts that organisms contain a mixture of traits, some designed and some evolved. The designer is not limited to irreducibly complex traits; he, she, or they could have created any trait, even those that look as if they had evolved. Add to that the further declaration that the designer's motives and methods (and, indeed, even attitude and mental capacities) are unknown, and anything goes!

[It] shares the first three assertions of weak ID but reverses the fourth and makes some additional claims. According to strong ID, the identity of the designer is not a mystery. ... He is very definitely identified as the Christian God. Moreover we do know something about the designer's characteristics and methods. He is intelligent, naturally, and being the Christian God, also wise and benevolent, generally bestowing on organisms the best possible features. ...

As for those cases of poor design, they can be attributed to the biblical fall of man. It's hard to believe that IDers think features like our appendix can be traced back to the misdemeanors of Adam and Eve, but it's true. ...

As for the designer's methods-why, miracles, of course! In strong ID, the mechanism for producing designed features is explicitly supernatural. ... But how are these miracles supposed to take place? Without an answer, ID lacks any mechanistic basis comparable to neo-Darwinism's natural selection. In any case, neither this tenet nor the previous three are scientific claims; they are theological suppositions that cannot be tested.

Intelligent design (ID) is one of a wide range of theories of origin currently taught as part of the Religious, Moral and Philosophy Studies (RMPS) SQA course, but could be moved elsewhere as part of the review. A spokesman for the SQA said: "It happens to sit in RMPS just now. If and when it does becomes part of the curriculum for science, which it may well do as part of this review, then that's where it could sit."

Alastair Noble is an educational consultant who has been invited by both denominational and non- denominational secondary schools to present ID on a scientific basis. He said: "I gauge a growing level of interest from pupils and teachers. My guess is that the (TiS) DVDs are being used by a small but significant number of teachers."

"It deserves formal consideration. It presents a scientific challenge to the construct that the world is the result of blind and purposeless forces."

Ian Fraser, director of education for Inverclyde, is not in favour of prohibiting Truth in Science material and accepts teachers are free to present ID informally. He said: "I have no objection to intelligent design being advanced as one theory, but most teachers don't have time. I trust head teachers to make their own decisions about what is appropriate." ...

An education spokeswoman for the Scottish Executive said: "We're not prescriptive as to books or materials. We provide guidelines, and within those guidelines it's up to schools to decide."

Michael McGrath, director of the Scottish Catholic Education Service, made it clear intelligent design was not part of science teaching in Catholic schools. He said: "There is a distinction between what is appropriate for religious education and what is appropriate for science. We wouldn't confuse one with the other."

That calling, he told a Fort Dodge audience, propelled him to go beyond Sunday worship and to do what he believes is God's work for the poor, the sick and those being released from prison.

"Somehow, somewhere along the way faith stopped being used to bring us together and started being used to drive us apart," he said. "It got hijacked. Part of it's because of the so-called leaders of the Christian right, who've been all too eager to exploit what divides us. At every opportunity, they've told evangelical Christians that Democrats disrespect their values and dislike their church while suggesting to the rest of the country that religious Americans care only about issues like abortion and gay marriage, school prayer and intelligent design."

Obama said the Christian Coalition once identified "tax cuts for the rich" as its No. 1 legislative priority.

"I don't know what Bible they're reading," he said. "It doesn't jive [sic] with my version."

A Gallup survey in May on values and beliefs found that 64 percent of Americans believe "medical research using stem cell obtained from human embryos" is morally acceptable, while 30 percent said it is morally wrong.

[M]illions of European missionaries traveled to other continents to spread their faith by establishing schools and churches. Now, with European church attendance at all-time lows and a dearth of preachers in the pulpits, thousands of "reverse missionaries" are flocking back, migrating from poor countries to rich ones to preach the Gospel where it has fallen out of fashion.

The phenomenon signals a fundamental shift in the power, style and geography of the world's largest religion. Most of Christianity's more than 2 billion adherents now live in the developing world. And as vast numbers of them migrate to Europe, they are filling pews and changing worship styles.

Thousands of missionaries from countries such as Nigeria, Ghana, South Korea and the Philippines have come to Europe to set up churches in homes, office buildings and storefronts.

"The Danish church is boring," said Johansen, 45, who left the state-run Danish Evangelical Lutheran Church three years ago and joined this high-octane interdenominational church run by a missionary pastor from Singapore. "I feel energized when I leave one of these services." ...

"As kids, we were not allowed to make any noise on Sundays," he said. The church seemed to him to place a higher value on order and ancient traditions than on tending to the concerns of parishioners. "The church didn't add any value to me. It gave me nothing I could use in my day-to-day life."

... since the 18th-Century Enlightenment, which stressed reason and science as means of understanding the divine, European religious teaching has focused more on the intellectual than on the spiritual.

"We have a country where the churches are talking to the mind, but we've forgotten that spirituality is about the heart as well," she said. "Our population is looking for churches that are more alive. We need these immigrant churches because they are bringing a message that we have forgotten."

Karsten Nissen, one of the country's 10 Lutheran bishops, said that a quarter to a third of all people in church in Copenhagen any given Sunday morning are attending a foreign-run service. "These churches are a gift to our Danish Lutheran Church," Nissen said. "They open our eyes to a more human way of being Christians. It's the way we were Christians 100 years ago — a very simple way, a good way, a more pious way, and a more open and happy way of worship."

U.S. Ambassador James Cain said that shortly after he and his family arrived in Denmark in 2005, they went to a scheduled Sunday service at a Danish Lutheran church and they found the door padlocked. ...

Cain said Denmark's lack of religious culture was partly to blame for last year's Muhammad cartoons controversy, in which a Danish paper published unflattering caricatures of Islam's most revered prophet, touching off Muslim fury worldwide.

"That, for the first time in a generation, caused the Danes to realize that their loss of faith and their increasing secularism made it very difficult for them to understand, or even feel empathy for, people who felt offended by caricatures of religious images," Cain said.

In June 1958, two residents of Virginia, Mildred Jeter, a Negro woman, and Richard Loving, a white man, were married in the District of Columbia pursuant to its laws. Shortly after their marriage, the Lovings returned to Virginia and established their marital abode in Caroline County. At the October Term, 1958, of the Circuit Court of Caroline County, a grand jury issued an indictment charging the Lovings with violating Virginia's ban on interracial marriages. On January 6, 1959, the Lovings pleaded guilty to the charge and were sentenced to one year in jail; however, the trial judge suspended the sentence for a period of 25 years on the condition that the Lovings leave the State and not return to Virginia together for 25 years.

Almighty God created the races white, black, yellow, malay and red, and he placed them on separate continents. And but for the interference with his arrangement there would be no cause for such marriages. The fact that he separated the races shows that he did not intend for the races to mix.

Marriage is one of the "basic civil rights of man," fundamental to our very existence and survival. To deny this fundamental freedom on so unsupportable a basis as the racial classifications embodied in these statutes, classifications so directly subversive of the principle of equality at the heart of the Fourteenth Amendment, is surely to deprive all the State's citizens of liberty without due process of law. The Fourteenth Amendment requires that the freedom of choice to marry not be restricted by invidious racial discriminations. Under our Constitution, the freedom to marry, or not marry, a person of another race resides with the individual and cannot be infringed by the State. (Citations omitted)

Bill Harbaugh at the University of Oregon in Eugene, US, and colleagues gave 19 female university students $100, and told them some of this money would have to go towards taxes.

. . . brains were scanned using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). Surprisingly, whenever the students read the taxation scenarios, scientists saw a spike in activity within two of the brain's reward centres – the nucleus accumbens and caudate nucleus.

Harbaugh says that people probably like paying taxes more than they admit. He believes the results of his new study help explain the widespread compliance with tax laws. "We like to complain about it, but based on what we do, we are not as opposed to it as we like to say," Harbaugh says.

The 10 subjects who showed the greatest brain activity in response to hypothetical taxes in the first part of the study later chose to donate money twice as often as the other nine subjects.

At the end of the experiment, those whose brains responded more positively to tax-paying generally gave about $17 to charity, while the other nine subjects gave $10, on average.

[W]e're not talking about making Darwin's Black Box or Darwin on Trial part of the required curriculum. We're simply talking about donating books to a library so students can have access to information about a controversial scientific and social issue over how life began.

1) They must support the curriculum;
2) They must receive favorable reviews from professional journals; and
3) They must be age-appropriate.

At the time, we didn’t realize that the motive behind the parent’s book donations was to include intelligent design in the science curriculum.

Yes, after years – decades, in some cases – of hard work, battling many well-funded enemies who have repeatedly tried to hide the truth, we have finally been able to reveal to one and all what THEY were so desperate to keep hidden.