People are laughing at Kansas. One out-of-state e-mailer sent a letter to the editor regarding the State Board of Education’s decision to include junk science in our state standards.
It read: “HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA.”
A story reporting the board’s decision has been on the Washington Post’s most e-mailed list for days, and The New York Times even editorialized on the subject in Thursday’s edition, making the point that we have on this blog:
“The standards, which define the material to be covered in statewide science tests, won’t take effect until 2007 at the earliest. That leaves time for the electorate to once again dump the board members responsible for this lunacy.”
Posted by Melissa Cooley
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22 Comments
Nothing new here.Can anyone tell me how the permalink, typepad and blog’s feed work?
The Daisy Cutter
Actually there is something to Intelligent Design as a matter of science, but not the fairy tales of organized religion, which fabricates reasons to suit itself.
I always prefer to use the Hummingbird as an example.
Outside the window where I write is a Hummingbird feeder. I able to watch those birds from just a few feet away.
Such a complicated design indicates involution is following instructions. As a matter of strict science, the chances of Hummingbirds just “happening” is a mathematical improbability { I’m writing a paper entitled: The Universe is a Cauldron of Instruction }.
Even Einstein strongly insisted that the laws of physics needed to have something manage them, in order for them to be the same though-out the universe.
My observation suggests that an electron moves to its next immediate location as a matter of instruction. No other explanation makes sense, as science demands plausible cause.
Organised religion claims to know why, but actually knows little more than how to exploit fear and guilt while collecting money.
Track, A frog jumps from the typepad to the permalink, then to the blog in order to eat a bug.
Frogs like bugs.
Oops Tracy, not Track.
Quit teaching the THEORY of gravity
Evangelical Scientists Refute Gravity With New ‘Intelligent Falling’ TheoryAugust 17, 2005 | Issue 41•33
KANSAS CITY, KS—As the debate over the teaching of evolution in public schools continues, a new controversy over the science curriculum arose Monday in this embattled Midwestern state. Scientists from the Evangelical Center For Faith-Based Reasoning are now asserting that the long-held “theory of gravity” is flawed, and they have responded to it with a new theory of Intelligent Falling.
“Things fall not because they are acted upon by some gravitational force, but because a higher intelligence, ‘God’ if you will, is pushing them down,” said Gabriel Burdett, who holds degrees in education, applied Scripture, and physics from Oral Roberts University.
Burdett added: “Gravity—which is taught to our children as a law—is founded on great gaps in understanding. The laws predict the mutual force between all bodies of mass, but they cannot explain that force. Isaac Newton himself said, ‘I suspect that my theories may all depend upon a force for which philosophers have searched all of nature in vain.’ Of course, he is alluding to a higher power.”
Ed,The IDers like that complexity argument so much, but it always seemed to me that the real mark of intelligence would be something so stunningly simple and elegant as to be undeniably intelligent. Complexity is something that evolves rather than being designed.
It’s a good thing nobody tries to teach string theory in high school. The Republi-Cons would go nuts with that: ten dimensions, a google possible universes . . .
Jed,
Exactly right. Engineers and builders try to design the simplest things to get the job done..they don’t put things together, find parts don’t work, retain those parts, and continue building around them to fix the original problem.
Complexity is the hallmark of an undesigned object..simplicity is the hallmark of intelligent designs.
Right on Brian, I am an engineer and my philosphy is simplify and combine.
Good points. As a ‘not-engineer’ I have been known to tack things together until they work that would make any decent enginner eith cringe or just laugh out loud. Rube Goldberg run amok.
If noone ever questioned scientific findings or theories, we would still be blood letting.
As the saying goes KISS: Keep It Simple Stupid.
For my 2 cents on the complexity thing. Two thousand years ago the sun was thought to be a god and worshiped. Some cultures even sacrificed girls to it (sucked to be a virgin back then!). One thousand years ago that idea was no longer accepted. And less than one hundred years ago it was discovered to be a ball of hydrogen, helium, and a few other elements and the process by which it fuses hydrogen into other was figured out. And now we have a very good idea of the process of how a star forms and how it works. This is used to illustrate how humans thought process and knowledge has changed over a period of time. We didn’t know the answers then, but we looked and found them. Today we don’t know the answers to many questions. That in and of itself is not evidence of a god or an intelligent designer. We don’t have the answer to many things. Some questions are relatively new (string theory) some are very old (evolution). Because we don’t have the answer now doesn’t mean we won’t have it in the future. And to assign answers to these problems by just saying the IDer did it should offend everyone. It should offend non religious because they are having religion forced on them against their choice. And it should offend (any intelligent) religious people because it denies god. If you believe there is an all knowing and infallible god don’t you honestly think there is a reason we are so curious (in general)? Why we want to learn more? If not then you should be in an Amish community and not reading this!
Organized religion is trying to hijack science. The evolutionary process is science and certainly doesn’t need organized religion to tell it why this process is taking place.
Organized religion is gibberish and nonsense. And those people think they can give themselves some credibility with truthfulness by becoming a parasite to something which does make sense.
The design may be in my hummingbirds, but religion doesn’t have a clue about why that happened or anything else, for that matter.
Religion just wants on the bandwagon, as usual.
k,Just because the sun is a ball of hydrogen etc. doesn’t mean we can’t appreciate how good it feels on our faces in November, and after all, that’s the sincerest form of worship! The sun doesn’t need to be intelligent to give us warmth, so why does God have to be? Can’t God be that first law of nature, of which all the other laws are corrollary, and understanding that law being the highest form of religious quest?
Jed, I believe according to the christian faith god is omniscient, omnipotent, sent his son to earth, acts in an intelligent manner, and he is generally assumed to be intelligent (by every christian I have ever met anyway). By no means does acting intelligent mean you are, look at most republicans. You make an interesting point though. That is similar to the Wicca religion if I remember correctly.
But the point I was trying to make is not that we can’t appreciate something because it is or isn’t simple (the sun isn’t btw) or intelligent. The point I was trying to make was that not understanding something in the universe around us is not a reason to say there is a definitely a god and he/she/it created that object and the universe simply because it is too complex for us to understand or recreate. And we should stop studying and learning about whatever it is and accept that jc and big daddy did it and live happily ever after.
I believe Stephen Hawking has some intelligent input on this subject k.He says something about what if we could figure out the nature of the universe, would God cease to exist?Would we still need him (her/it) if we can fill in the blanks ourselves? I think we’ll never understand everything, and I believe in theistic evolution.Hawking’s lectures are available at his website. (very interesting stuff)
k, Tracy,Ambrose Bierce said something to the effect that the mind’s ability to know itself is limited by the fact that it has nothing but itself to know itself with.Our chances of knowing it all are severely limited by the sheer volume and complexity of all there is to know. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t learn all we can, but we need to accept that there will always be something unknown. If you wish to look for God, then look there, or just appreciate the mystery, and contemplate how boring it would be to know it all!
Jed,
Yes, very true, profound, and interesting. Have you ever heard of Godel’s incompleteness theorems? While they apply only to specific mathematical situations, the results and implications sure seem to be true in general. Godel proved
1) For any consistent formal theory including basic arithmetical truths, it is possible to construct an arithmetical statement that is true but not included in the theory.
2)For any formal theory including basic arithmetical truths and also certain truths about formal provability, the theory includes a statement of its own consistency if and only if the theory is inconsistent.
Statement 1) says that the mathematical system will contain statements that are neither provably true or provably false. In general what he showed was that in most cases you can never discover a complete list of axioms. Each time you add a statement as an axiom, there will always be another statement out of reach.
Life and God are kind of like that. There may indeed be a God but the existence of the divine is an unprovable hypothesis..beyond the realm of our reason. God lies in the realm of intuition and paradox and maybe he can even be found in statements like:
There is a barber in a small town who shaves all those and only those who do not shave themselves, and can neither shave himself nor avoid doing so.
Brian,No, I haven’t. Got one of his books here, but haven’t had the chance to read it, and anyway, I’m an artist, not a mathematician. Way too many books on way too many subjects…….!I have wondered if we might be well advised to abandon our concepts of both infinity and nothing, since they seem to get us in a lot of trouble.
Math. and science are arts too!! :-((
Yes, they are, but we each have our own specialties to look after, and the others get left to the rest of you. I’d love to be more knowledgable in math and history and philosophy and philology and a bunch of other stuff, but I’m stuck with only one lifetime, so………..!Artists have an advantage in that we get to express a lot of things from other disciplines, so we tend to read widely, and I try to, but with 70,000 books published a year, it gets a bit hairy!
Just to let you know, the jokes are spreading. Here’s one of the latest, from Ironic Times: 1,400 Pound MeteoriteFound in KansasKansas scientists estimate it landed about the time Satan was cast out of Heaven.