Posted on 03/17/2013 12:11:01 PM PDT by eagleye85
Intelligent design is just another form of creationism, creationism is profoundly unscientific, and such unscientific views do not belong in public classrooms. This, in a nutshell, is the argument of activist Zack Kopplin, a student at Rice University who began his battle against a Louisiana academic freedom law (the Louisiana Science Education Act) while in high school. He is the 2012 winner of the “Troublemaker of the Year Award.”
“Well, this law allows supplemental materials into our school biology classrooms to ‘critique controversial theories like evolution and climate change,’” said Kopplin in a March interview on the Bill Moyers show. “Now, evolution and climate change aren’t scientifically controversial, but they are controversial to Louisiana legislators, and, basically, everyone who looked at this law knew it was just a back door to sneak creationism into public school science classes,” he continues (emphasis added).
As discussed in a previous blog entry, the media likes to condemn as right-wing and fundamentalist the crowd that prefers creationism to evolution. Through the course of an article by the UK’s The Guardian we learn that such laws as those proposed in Colorado, Missouri, Montana, and Oklahoma are the product of a religious lobby, further the creationist agenda, and would be a feather in the caps of these two interest groups if these laws were to pass. Readers also learn that these states could be boycotted for their creationist educational laws. Kopplin, of course, is cited in the article for his opposition to the Louisiana law mentioned above. “It can be embarrassing to be from a state which has become a laughing stock in this area,” asserted Kopplin to the UK Guardian this January.
This month the media celebrates Kopplin’s “anti-creationism” activism with a full interview on the Bill Moyers show and an interview for the Washington Post. “Today’s fundamentalists, with political support from the Right-wing, are more aggressive than ever in crusading to challenge evolution with the dogma of creationism,” asserted Moyers in his introduction. “But they didn’t reckon on Zack Kopplin.”
“Going to college is tough enough without leading a campaign to stop creationism from being taught in school as an alternative to evolution, but that’s what Zach Kopplin, 19, has been doing for several years,” praises Valerie Strauss in her March 17 article.
“Evolution is, of course, the central principle around which all of the biological sciences revolve, and creationism is not a scientific alternative,” writes Strauss. “But religious fundamentalists continue to push for creationism to be taught in schools,” she continues (emphasis added.)
In the interview with Moyers, Kopplin rejects several forms of creationism, saying that “Intelligent design specifically rejects evolution, especially on a large scale.”
“Creationists like to break it up into micro/macro evolution. That’s not a legitimate thing,” he asserts. As for creationism, “Essentially, it’s a denial of evolution mainly based off a literal interpretation of Genesis.” Kopplin’s latest vendetta? Voucher programs. ““And so it’s become pretty clear: if you create a voucher program, you’re just going to be funding creationism through the back door,” he said to Moyers. You can real the CATO Institute’s Neal McCluskey’s response to Kopplin here.
“No, potentially serious, negative, unintended consequences could accompany freezing people out of religiously based education,” writes McCluskey. “For instance, traditional Christian morality calls for married, two-parent families, and one of the few things in social science that one would call pretty firmly established is that coming from such a family gives a child a significant leg up. Religious people also tend to have much greater stocks of social capital than the nonreligious, also generally a plus.”
“In light of those things, would it be worth undermining religion because you think creationism is nonsense?”
The average biologist who has bought Darwinism has almost no ability in mathematics. He can, at best, make irrelevant statements about likelihoods in hope that enough of his colleagues will agree and that consensus becomes the basis for the dissemination of the agreed-upon ignorance.
really/ do they teach science in art class? literature class only uses 100% true stories?
If you classify birds as dinosaurs...:^)
Most of the bones are fossilized, but some are not.
I think that when one finds a dinosaur bone that is not fossilized one should test it to see if it is younger than 60,000 years instead of assuming it is not based on the accepted dating methods of fossil records. After all fossil records did indicate the coelecanth had been extinct for 65 million years...however it turned out that they are not actually extinct. Now if that is because the methods of dating the fossils were no good, or because it just happened to have survived under the radar without us finding and dating any fossils for the last 65 million years...I don't know. But I do know, that one can't safely assume that a species is extinct based on such an approach, because it was wrong in this case.
At the very least, dinosaur bones that appear remarkably well preserved and not fossilized for being 70 million plus years old might be seen as a great opportunity to test the limits of how far back carbon dating can go on bones, by serving as an example of what no C14 other than what one might find due to error in measurement or ambient contamination...but somehow, those that perform such tests are ridiculed as anti-science by those who claim to be scientists.
Thus, I don't know for sure if any dinosaurs really lived as recently as mere thousands of years ago, but I am sure that it would embarrass a lot of "scientists" if they were, and they seem to use ridicule as a defense. And that is disgusting and hypocritical and cowardly and very much anti-scientific itself, and it undermines my faith in the integrity of all the related fields.
People love to use the coelecanth as an example of a “living fossil”. While it is true that this family of fishes have not changes much over a long period of time, it is untrue that they were unknown. There live in areas that have been dominated by native fisheries and because they are inedible, they were thrown back.
There have been claims that soft tissues have been extracted from dino fossils, although confirmatory evidence is scarce. Mary Schweitzer is the primary researcher and despite her discovery and her adherence to Christianity, she has no doubt that the samples in question are in the range of 65 million years.
And again, C14 testing is such that items that may be substantially older than 60,000 years hit the at about that time frame. Happily there are other radiometric techniques that provide accurate data.
As far as some scientist hiding information that would place dinos in recent time, it is laughable. Scientists are extremely competitive and given the chance to show everyone wrong, would jump at the opportunity.
The Qur’an doesn’t filter much on either side. It’s pretty vague on the subject of origins.
All dinosaur bones found have been fossilized. Tiny fragments of not-fully-fossilized soft tissue have been found inside dinosaur bones, but the surrounding bone is fossilized.
Solution: Abolish our nation's system of socialist-entitlement, single-payer, compulsory-use, police-threat funded, and GODLESS price -fixed monopoly cartel schools!
Simple! Problem solved. You teach your kids what you want. I teach mine what I want and all this controversy swirling around macro-evolution completely disappears.
Privatize K-12 schooling and the **only** people left fighting about it are the **HANDFUL** of scientists actually working in this very NARROW field. All other citizens ( including all the other scientists in every other field of science) don't give two twits about macro-evolution.
And yet, Mo hammadan Creationists than Christian ones.
Evolutionists are the biggest bullies on the educational block.
Evolutionist tend to be the biggest supporters of compulsory-funded, compulsory-use, socialist-entitlment K-12 schooling. Gee! I wonder why?
They want to force feed other people's children on a religiously NON-neutral worldview and FORCE taxpayers to pay for it.
If nothing in science is proven? Then what value does it have?
Has Science ever "observed" evolution?
They certainly have had plenty of hypothesis's.
Is then therefore science an exercise of a materialistic certainty?
That's all they have, since it is their foundation.
They can evoke the Oort cloud, and Dark Matter and Energy to explain a paradox.
But they still have no understanding of what gives particles mass.
The Higgs, the "God particle" the empty space that keeps you from slipping though your chair.
I know, lets create a multi-verse, that will show them.
Prove it.
It seems we have gone full circle.
"For the scientist who has lived by his faith in the power of reason, the story ends like a bad dream. He has scaled the mountain of ignorance; he is about to conquer the highest peak; as he pulls himself over the final rock, he is greeted by a band of theologians who have been sitting there for centuries."
Robert Jastrow (September 7, 1925 – February 8, 2008) was an American astronomer, physicist and cosmologist. He was a leading NASA scientist, populist author and futurist.
What do you own ?
What is it that you can say is real?
“And yet, Mo hammadan Creationists than Christian ones.”
I don’t think that’s true, although I don’t know the numbers. Creationists are a small minority in Islam.
Those aren’t cherry-picking. They are whole cherry tree issues. (If the theory is as well-established as you say, it certainly shouldn’t have cherries that big lying around.)
“What data would not fit the creation framework? No matter what you observed, you could always say “God made it that way.” “
It’s not a complete bank check. The main factors are a six-day creation period (not ongoing), the fall (no death prior to sin), and the flood.
The ToE is at least as flexible. How many times do we see data that surprised scientists, but rather than question the theory, they come up with a new just-so story to explain how it must have evolved.
“But what’s the predictive ability of the creation framework?”
Here’s something that comes to mind. http://creation.com/mercurys-magnetic-field-is-young
Tell me about evolution’s.
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