What it's like to teach evolution at the University of Kentucky

boing
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Not all religious ideas involve having a god. And of those, not all involve having a personal god.

In any case, I’d argue that the best reason for religion is that it helps people to find meaning in the real world. The myths are about how people live and why. Meaning is subjective and can’t be taken away from you. But the potential fallacy is that religious meaning is not a history lesson, it’s about the internal world of experience rather than the external one. When people make the mistake of treating allegory literally, then they miss it’s point and assume a lot of funny things. It’s like sucking the finger instead of looking where it points to.

Everybody is “a scientist”, because they live in and observe the real world. It affects you. So, living in it, there is some incentive to know what’s going on and make the best possible decisions, knowing what you do at the time. There is no final “proof” of anything to strive for. Our best knowledge about the world is a tool which helps us now. It’s no tragedy that this doesn’t help our descendants, because they will have their own tools, and their own decisions to make.

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Also that Jesus himself wrote the King James Bible in english.

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I am open to evidence.

All I have ever seen is eventual frauds by those wishing to prove some
missing link…and demands that I convert (?!?) as if I’m some sort of
heretic for not believing.

The darwinists take a position, the religious take a position. I reserve
judgement until such time as there is a conclusive end to the debate, and I
believe I have a right to that.

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There’s a shit load more to evolution than Darwin.

The Modern Synthesis

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http://www.questiondarwin.com/evolution_fraud_and_deception

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I reserve judgement until such time as there is a conclusive end to the debate, and I believe I have a right to that.

Conclusive end? Evidence supports positions. More evidence is gathered to inform adjustments to positions. Can there be a conclusive end to such a big idea without watching various lifeform families evolve for millions of years? There exists a body of scientific evidence that supports the religious position? Which is a bigger leap of faith to accept?

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Meh. I don’t see any point in trying to convince die hard creationists. Anyone with an ounce of critical reasoning skills can find a hundred faults with Genesis.

It is good to at least try to introduce the concept in college, but if a certain percentage of fundamentalists refuse to accept the possibility even in the face of genetic sequencing, observed speciation and the staggering amount of evidence, then so be it.

Let them believe everything is magic. Like magnets. Or rainbows.

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No scientist should be criticised for honestly advancing an idea which is later discredited, only for refusing to accept when it is proved wrong, or, even worse, for putting something forward as real science KNOWING IT TO BE FALSE AT THE TIME. This is rightly called FRAUD. As well as deliberate fraud, there is sometimes enthusiastic over interpretation of a piece of evidence which verges on deception. Evidence can be examines with bias, evidence and lines of enquiry which may point to unwelcome cnclusions or falsify beleoved theories may be ignored or misinterpreted. Confimation boas and refutation bias exist.

When is there ever conclusive “proof” of anything? Believe it or not, there is not always a magical consensus about scientific theories, evidence, or conclusions. This need not imply anything dishonest or deceptive. Science is a method used by scientists, it is not an institution. Various people have their own opinions and observations.

Such accusations can fairly be applied to Darwin’s original work. Reading Darwin, we can see that he passionately WANTED his theory to be true.

It might not be unreasonable to assume bias here, but this is the work of only one man. Even if Darwin was biased to believe completely in his own theories, this doesn’t account for others finding a useful model there.

The next seventeen paragraphs complain, with some degree of justification, about the difficulty in knowing anything definitive based only upon the evidence of the fossil record of human origins being sporadic and subject to misinterpretation. But what this writing appears to deliberately ignore is that neither Darwin’s work, nor the greater study of biology are centered upon explaining the origins and place of humanity. There has been plenty of evidence with other organisms. Even Christian farmers have used genetics to breed their preferred plants and animals for centuries without controversy.

It seems plain to me that refuting evolution based only upon the origins of humanity results from a clash with people’s dogma. Evolution is not about people, specifically, it is general. Using a cherished specific (humans) to discredit a completely general theory (of all living things) tends to not carry a lot of weight. It basically points out to people that you have reasons for setting humanity apart from all other life on Earth. And this appears to be - despite me not having any proof - a case of precisely the kind of biased thinking you accuse “scientists” of generally.

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Stick with those parts that are deployed in mainstream technology. You won’t be fundamentally wrong with anything there; the worst you can expect is getting better theories that make things more accurate around the edges. If it already works and works well, it cannot be really that much wrong.

The cutting-edge stuff and related theories/hypotheses are not so reliable.

(In other words, I’ll swear on most theories related to chemical bonds, or optics, and won’t go too close to string theory or other cosmological areas.)

There is also a good deal of strength on being able to gauge what do you know with which level of certainty, and not being too cocky in the less reliable areas.

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Yup. And, turns out, Sentients are really prone to malware :slight_smile: It doesn’t bode well for AI research, does it?

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Only, the debate ended some time ago, and everybody else went home. The horse, it is dead.

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And the proof for anything in the Bible is. . . what?

Saying evolutionists are “dogmatic” is like saying chemists are dogmatic because they won’t entertain the “phlogiston” theory-- in the long history of science there have been plenty of theories that were later discredited, but none were discredited by pointing at the Bible and saying “because God”, and ultimately that’s all creationists have. If you want me to believe the literal interpretation of the creation myth in Genesis, then you would first have to prove to me the physics and biology behind Noah’s Ark without also involving multiple unprovable, untestable acts of god in there to get it to work exactly the way the Bible describes it.

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you had a so called student who would not take even one minute to check out what you said about the Pope!

“There are none so blind as those who will not see.”

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Just - no. I read just the topic of Fossils and it is so full of either out right lies or blissfully ignorant statements it is embarrassing if you are trying to genuinely use it to back up your point. If you want me to rebuttal it, I will.

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“the only way he would believe me is if then–Pope John Paul II came to my class to confirm these quotes face-to-face”

Funny, that’s exactly my criteria for believing God exists.

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[quote]All I have ever seen is eventual frauds by those wishing to prove some
missing link…and demands that I convert (?!?) as if I’m some sort of
heretic for not believing.[/quote]

Of course you’re being abused. You’re making claims in self-evident bad faith. And if you are religious, this is tantamount to lying in the service of God, not something He’s supposed to appreciate.

If you are truly open to evidence, tell us what evidence would make you accept evolution as real. If belief in evolution deviates from your religious tenets, I’ll say it’s interesting that you are admitting that evidence could exist that would make you abandon this particular precept.

If you are saying no such evidence could exist, then you were lying, as you can’t be open to that which doesn’t exist. Such lies diminish you in the eyes of God, and certainly explains a fairly frosty reception here…

The reality here is that macro evolution is settled science. You don’t have to accept it, but then pretending that you have any relationship with science at all is a lie. Saying you believe in science, but exempting certain topics that are long settled is lying. It’s like saying you are certain the USA is real, except you don’t believe in Nebraska. The whole concept of the USA doesn’t make any sense without all its constituent parts.

Again, you might have my respect if you said that you don’t believe in science because it contradicts certain aspects of your religious beliefs, but this pretending that you give credence to science, but evolution is different, is transparent garbage that embarrasses you and annoys everyone else.

It’s about as respectful as someone claiming to be a Christian, but that he doesn’t accept a belief in God.

And personally, you have my condolences. A God that requires you to deny what pretty much every single person who uses their God-given eyes and reason to study the evidence comes to understand is a cruel God indeed. Certainly not worthy of worship in my book. But then, I don’t think I personally know any Christians who don’t accept evolution.

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One of the odd things about the arguments of those who deny the theory of evolution is that they’ll refer to arguments that were thoroughly debunked in the 19th century. They’ll bring up the human eye as inexplicable – despite the fact that Darwin used the development of the human eye as an example. They’ll insist that we’ve never found “the missing link” – despite the fact that the entire field of paleontology was invented to address that question, and we have finely detailed maps of the evolution of the various species of primates, and of many other species as well.

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Another odd thing is the strong polarization! There are many theories I don’t know much about, which I simply don’t have much of an opinion about. I just never feel a compulsion to accept or deny any theory for its own sake.

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You must be counting on us uncritically accepting whatever you say. Otherwise you wouldn’t be as intellectually dishonest as Dick Cheney and George W. Bush.

None of your cites are relevant.

Way to spam. Try saying something true next time.

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