Utterly Meaningless

[throwing pillow at Nance] “Thanks” for the rabbit hole: evcfor...m.net/ ;>

All my good intentions to buckle down this morning and catch up on my backlog of news reports are out the window as I stroll around that site, gawking like a tourist.

I don’t need to be a scientist to believe it or prove it. I just KNOW it.

You don’t KNOW it. You believe it and hope that it’s true. But, as you yourself said, you’re not a scientist and don’t pretend that your beliefs are scientific. That’s fine. Lots of folks reject science. My problem is with the creationists who try to argue that their BELIEFS are scientific. A few fundie scientists do not a consensus make.

The author, Dr. Jay L. Wile, holds an earned Ph.D. in nuclear chemistry from the University of Rochester in Rochester, NY. He has held assistant professorships at two major universities and was also a part of the team that designed Indiana’s residential high school for gifted and talented students. He has published more than 30 articles in the peer-reviewed journals of his field, and has lectured extensively on the Creation / Evolution debate, Christian apologetics, and home schooling.

Big deal. I hold an earned Ph.D. from the University of Utah in Physical/Analytical chemistry and am a Senior Chemist with DuPont. My CV also includes ~30 articles. It ain’t that impressive. And, Christine, in order to back the comment at the very top of this thread, you only need to find 1,999 more.

And, I’ve read Wile’s Biology and Chemistry (homeschooling) texts. They’re really bad.

Have you seen the faithinamerica.com ads in Fayetteville yet? The sponsor of that group lives in my area, and the newspapers here have been a hotbed of discussion. I’ve seen articles from as far away as Indianapolis.

No, but I only read the Observer online. What’s controversial about them?

OK, I just visited their website. Good stuff. Not that the folks who need to hear this message are likely to listen (nor get past the first Flash movie).

Nance,

I have to strongly disagree with your last statement. When it comes to aggravating blood pressure problems, golf is about the WORST game one could want to play. Now watching it on TV is, of course, coma-inducing. 🙂

Tami, You wrote:

One question I have for those who do not believe in the YEC is, “why are we not still evolving?” If we had a tail and lost it and regrew it and lost it again, when is it coming back?

This is silly. We might be still evolving. (Evolutionary processes occur over tens or hundreds of thousands of years. (Not 6,000) You won’t observe it in a multi-cellular organism in your lifetime.) Our little toes and appendixes (appendices?) serve no function now. If having ever smaller small toes or shrunken appendixes (appendices?) gives some kind of reproductive advantage, then we would lose them over time. But we’re intelligent and are capable of performing artificial selection, too. If humans decided en masse that smaller (or no) little toes was

Strange– the last sentence got truncated. It should have read:

If humans decided en masse that smaller (or no) little toes was

Christians = creationists is off-base.

Not all Christians are creationists, and not all homeschoolers who belong to a denomination within the range of Christian belief teach creationism. Even people within one denomination can have a range of opinion on whether the Bible is literally factual or is a compilation of a people’s history of their religious development and relationship with the Diety, allegorical stories, legends and wisdom.

And as for evolution being a “theory, not a fact” please read about scientific theory.

—————————————–
When consistency is obtained the hypothesis becomes a theory and provides a coherent set of propositions which explain a class of phenomena. A theory is then a framework within which observations are explained and predictions are made.
—————————————–

The question isn’t whether what “Christians” teach is brainwashing, but whether the materials being sold are accurate in relation to what is observable and has been tested to the best of our ability at the time.

Daryl, I think you forgot to mention that IN YOUR OPINION, Dr. Wile’s book is really bad. What was so bad about it?

Of course it was my opinion. This is, after all, my blog. 🙂

I’m not trained in biology, so I couldn’t comment on the science but the book didn’t seem to hang together well. (Then again, Wile isn’t a biologist, either. I would never attempt to write a biology text.) I am a chemist. And it was a BAD chemistry text– bad science and lots of fundamental errors. I was teaching a high-school course at a homeschooling co-op. The leaders recommended I use Wile’s book. After reviewing it, I HAD to find something else.

Chemistry and biology are science. If you reject the fundamental principles that underlie those scineces (i.e., an old universe and evolution) any text book you get will be weak at best or counter-productive at worst.

Do you realize that most people who believe in creation were raised in the religion of the public schools and were spoon-fed evolution? Does it occur to anyone that possibly people have really, really done their homework to change to a creationist point of view? Or do you just discount them as too stupid?

No, I’d call them bad scientists who are putting their hopes and faith in an afterlife ahead of the facts on the ground.

I’d venture a guess that even if you checked every single scientist’s credentials and journey from an evolutionist belief to a creationist belief, you’d discount every one of them based on your criteria that they are “dumb or chasing mythology or someone has drummed their version of reality firmly enough into their heads that it isn’t really a matter of choice for them?”

I don’t need to check their credentials. If a scientist who managed to get through grad school can still believe in a 6,000 year-old Earth, despite all of the evidence to the contrary, I’d say that they are either suffering some kind of mental incapacitance or are being wilfully ignorant.

A couple of questions for those who think Tami (or any Christian) should be afraid that her children will walk away from the Christian faith:

1) Are you afraid that your children will walk away from your religion?

They’re free human beings and will decide to believe what they decide to believe. Why should I worry?

2) What if they do?

Nothing.

3) Do you actively expose them to the Bible and creation and teach them why they shouldn’t believe in it?

Yes and no. Those are two very different topics. The Bible is the foundation of Christianity. Creationism, especially YEC, is a literalist interpretation of the same. As such, I point out to my kids that despite lots of people beliving in a young Earth, it’s just not so. They know that the evidence points to a 4+ billion-year-old Earth and that the universe is significantly older than that. They know of the Big Bang. And the evolution of stars. And of common descent through natural selection.

Or do you just insult those that do and know your kids will go along with it, and don’t back your beliefs up with solid facts? “Well, see, Discovery Channel says so, so it must be!”

Solid facts? Let’s see– which side of this debate has solid facts on its side? I think it’s my side. Your side has a book, written 2000 years ago, and some folks who accept it literally and twist the evidence to fit their religious predilections. So, yes, I make fun of YECers AND I teach my kids why they’re wrong on the science.

4) Do you “drum your version of reality firmly enough into their heads that it isn’t really a matter of choice for them?” just like the public schools do with evolution?

My version of reality is the scientific one. Since I’m the only scientist here, it’s my opinion we’ll be taking. (BONUS: Allusion in light of Talk Like a Pirate references elsewhere.)

5) When Nance says, “The thing — one of many things — that I like about science and scientists is that when new evidence is presented, it is acknowledged, incorporated, tested, etc.” Have any of you really looked at the evidence, how it’s actually acknowledged, incorporated or tested? Does anyone know that evolution is just a THEORY, NOT A FACT!

This is incorrect. Or, more precisely, it’s an incorrect use of the word “theory.” In science, a theory is not just a good idea. A theory is an idea that has been tested and verified so many times that it is PROMOTED to the level of theory. The only higher category in science is “Law” and there are only a couple of those. So, scientists talk of gravitational theory or quantum mechanical theory. I’m pretty sure that gravity is a fact. You are free to dispute that fact by jumping off the roof to prove to yourself that gravity really does suck. It won’t change a thing. So gravity and quantum mechanics and evolution are theories, but they are also FACTS, as the broken leg you’ll get from jumping off the roof will prove.

I realize that we will most likely never come to any agreements about this issue on this blog, nor am I even trying to convince you that my beliefs are right.

Good. ‘Cause they’re most likely not.

The point I’m trying to make in all of this is that you have your religion and worldview and Christian’s have theirs.

Science is not a religion.

You make it clear that you can teach your children what the schools teach theirs and that Christians shouldn’t have the right to teach what they believe.

No, YECers can teach their kids that the world is flat, for all I care. Just don’t expect me to hire one of them for a science or technology job.

If a Christian tells their child something, it is “brainwashing.” If a non-Christian tells their child something, it is a “fact.” Does make a lot of sense, and the “facts” don’t even support it, if you are serious about looking into them.

I don’t like the word “brainwashing” and didn’t use it (until this sentence). That being said, teaching your kids stuff that is not supported by the scientific facts is just plain putting them at a disadvantage. As I wrote a minute ago, I wouldn’t hire a YECer for a science position. Discriminatory? No. Someone who claims to be a scientist and STILL professes a belief in a young Earth has proven that they are incapable of looking at data (i.e., the evidence) and drawing a rational conculsion. That, to me, is the very defintion of a bad scientist.

Blessings,
Christine

“To suppose that the eye with all its inimitable contrivances for adjusting the focus to different distances, for admitting different amounts of light, and for the correction of spherical and chromatic aberration, could have been formed by natural selection, seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest degree. When it was first said that the sun stood still and the world turned round, the common sense of mankind declared the doctrine false; but the old saying of Vox populi, vox Dei, as every philosopher knows, cannot be trusted in science. Reason tells me, that if numerous gradations from a simple and imperfect eye to one complex and perfect can be shown to exist, each grade being useful to its possessor, as is certainly the case; if further, the eye ever varies and the variations be inherited, as is likewise certainly the case; and if such variations should be useful to any animal under changing conditions of life, then the difficulty of believing that a perfect and complex eye could be formed by natural selection, though insuperable by our imagination, should not be considered as subversive of the theory.” (Darwin, C.R., “The Origin of Species By Means of Natural Selection,” 1872, Sixth Edition, Senate: London, 1994, pp.143-144).

You know that this quote undermines your position, right?

I’ve had to edit a bunch of comments. Not for content (I NEVER do that!) but to fix the formatting problems. Long URLs do wicked things to the formatting. For future reference, if you want to include a link in your comment, the best way to do that is to use the html. Example

Say I want to link to cobranchi.com. I could type out the full URL like this

cobran...hi.com

Or I could create a link.

The format for creating the link is–

< a href="INSERT URL HERE">INSERT TEXT HERE

NOTE: I have intentionally included a space before the first “a.” You’ll want to delete the space, so that you end up with this–

INSERT TEXT HERE

This is a test of the link truncator provided by Chris.

cobran...mments

Excellent!