Gauging the threats
The Senate's King of Pork, Alaska's Ted Stevens, says he'll resign if money from his appropriations bill is re-directed to the Mississippi Gulf Coast. What's the downside here? The tragedy is that 82 of his fellow Senators voted in his favor.Where are the Democratic leaders on pork spending? Waste should be a bipartisan issue.
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Senator Stevens will have to secure spending for a thousand more bridges when large chunks of his state are underwater. Here's the latest on our inevitable destruction.
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This is very possibly the most disturbing poll I've ever seen.
It doesn't say much for the future of this country, as we continue the pursuit for the best and brightest minds in science. It's not the rejection of Darwin's theory, in itself, that's most alarming. It's the rejection of scientific expertise and its method, replaced with pseudoscience and anti-intellectualism. Fact has been reduced to a polling sample.
It's time for the secularists to push back. The scientific facts will be safe, regardless, but our nation's future in innovation and rational decision-making will suffer if we turn our backs on our natural scientific curiosity. Don't just complain. If the flat-earth gang demands equal time for theology in science class, demand equal time in Sunday School.
posted by CM @ 11:21 PM
3 Comments:
I doubt there are many scientists giving up their pursuits because most people in America believe in creationism. As a devout Christian, the most alarming thing to me about this poll is that ONLY 51% of the people believe in creationism.
I don't ever remember being taught evolution in high school. I couldn't list the links in the chain between single-cell ocean creature and human (but I know Democratic-Man is somewhere in the middle). BTW, theology is getting no time in science class - all the lawsuits and debates going on now are to determine if we can simply push evolution as undisputed fact on children.
I am happy to say my child will go to a Christian school at least through 8th grade (as did others who author and post to this blog) and will be taught about God. Then she can go into high school with knowledge of an alternative "theory" about where we came from.
I have only had one person in my life call me "unintelligent" because I did not believe in evolution. All I can do is weap for that person's soul.
My problem with evolution is its explanation of life's journey from "primordial soup" to the human being. I can buy natural selection and survival of the fittest to explain why cheetahs are so fast or zebras have stripes, but this theory is completely lacking on a larger scale.
Chris, correct me if I'm wrong, but evolutionary theory says that earth went from "primordial soup" to the human being purely as a result of random chemical interactions and later random genetic mutations. Consider the complexity of the human body and then try to tell me how much sense this makes. Is this really what you believe?
I say its nothing but Secularist dogma on a par with the book of Genesis. Its like putting monkeys at typewriters and expecting them to produce Shakespeare if you just wait long enough. Fundamentally both sides are waving their hands and saying that it was magic. TA
I've never understood why a person who purports to have "faith" needs scientific evidence to back their case, anyway, but regardless...
The popular idea of monkees at typewriters illustrates the larger problem we have here. The human mind is not conditioned to comprehend such vast increments of time.
When we can't wrap our minds around such creations, we develop easy-to-comprehend myths to explain them. Is it easier to accept the evolutionary development of baseball, and all the complex variables of inspiration and theft, or to believe that a popular Civil War general developed it from scratch on the battlefield? This is a more recent example of how such Biblical-type myths can gain early footing.
We do the same thing with human growth in the abortion debate. Only in recent years have social conservatives pinpointed fertilization as the key moment of life's origin, but in centuries past, it was focused on the first movement in the womb, or the quickening. Who's to say the beginning of life isn't even earlier? The Pope, for one, it seems. He believes masturbation to be a sin for this reason. But if it is a sin, then why not menstruation? It takes two to tango.
That's why the debate comes down to more than what's right or what isn't, what you believe or what I believe. It's about what we KNOW, and the proven effectiveness of the scientific method.
Evolution is not merely a "theory," as it is often lazily or manipulatively labeled. It is a "SCIENTIFIC theory," which is a very different-- a considerably higher-- classification. Aspects of it can be, and have been, proven. But more importantly, aspects of it can, and have been, DIS-proven.
This is the gigantic fraud behind the so-called "intelligent design." Not only can ID not be proven or dis-proven, it doesn't even attempt to answer the questions. It simply gives up. By its very nature, it's the end of exploration on the entire topic.
We don't know all the facts. We never will, considering the relatively limited amount of time humans have left on the planet. But what we knew two hundred years ago is just a drop in the bucket compared with what we know now. If we abandon exploration, we're left with indoctrination.
I don't give a shit if you put your kid in parochial school or not. I found rewards in it myself, especially in terms of developing a child's self-esteem and work ethic, but religion was- and is- best left to catechism and religion class-- in the parochial setting!
Do I think my (our) high school biology teacher has something to answer for because he presented biological evolution as a theory, rather than a SCIENTIFIC theory? Yes, I do. You're free to walk down the street, earn a living, and bear children as a strict creationist, but you're dangerous with a beaker in your hand.
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