incorygible
Posts: 374 Joined: Feb. 2006
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Quote (afdave @ May 08 2006,14:06) | Also, this type of thing from Aftershave ...
Quote | Let's use AFDave "logic", shall we?
Those evil Nazis used their knowledge of chemistry to produce high explosives and poisonous gas, so therefore the Atomic Theory of Chemistry must be scientifically wrong!
Worse than that, those evil Nazis used their knowledge of physics and gravity to aim and drop their bombs, so therefore Newtonian physics and the Theory of Gravity must be scientifically wrong!
How can we teach such blasphemy as chemistry and physics to our children???
Let's say someone drops AFDave into the middle of the Pacific with no raft, into a pack of sharks, to see which is "more evolved". Any bets? |
is a sure indicator that this person has nothing left to say that is substantive ...
this does not help the image of evolution promoters ...
the YECs on the other hand thank you for ranting so ...
Could you maybe do some more? Maybe go tell 4 friends to show up and insult me too ... then you would be 5 times as effective :-) |
Ah, for cryin' out loud. I had just replaced my top-of-the-line irony meter after davescot pulled the same trick earlier this week (i.e., breaking Godwin's Law in prominent fashion before invoking it to chastise all who reply). This is getting bloody expensive.
Dave, a few simple questions (I have spent considerable effort trying to answer yours):
Can we agree to define science (as it is taught in schools) most simply as "what scientists do, how they do it, and what they uncover about the world around us as they do it"? You have claimed to be objectively interested in fact and reality, and you seem strong in your faith, so I don't think you should have any trouble recognizing science not as a democracy, but as a meritocracy?
Now, as a YEC, it does not surprise me that you might want to see the Bible taught as the root of understanding that you believe it to be. But can you get it through the front door of that meritocracy honestly?
The (sometimes unlikely) source of many a good idea has preceded it into science class. For example, from my organic chemistry classes, I still smile at Kekule's reported "eureka" moment when he supposed deduced the elusive structure of benzene from a dream of a snake eating its own tail. That's stuck with me, even though I'd be hard-pressed to draw hydrocarbon valences now. There are pleny of other examples, some apocryphal, some not. Why do I have no recollection of something along the lines of:
"Beginning from the idea that Jonah spent three days in the belly of the whale, marine biologists at Bob Jones University predicted that the gross morphology of the cetacean digestive system would accomodate the survival of a full-grown human. Subsequent experiments employing undergraduate volunteers revealed this to be true. Furthermore, a stastically significant proportion reported feeling thoroughly uncomfortable and "forsaken"."
In your previous thread, you learned how the idea that humans and other great apes shared a common ancestor led to the hypothesis that "missing" chromosome in humans likely indicated a fusion event, and how this hypothesis was later confirmed. In the foreseeable future, students will be learning how evolution and common descent predicted a reality in microbiology. Furthermore, if you succeed in your attempts to include "common design" alongside "common descent", they would learn how in this case (and many others), common descent predicted something in much finer detail than could be deduced from the vague concept of common design, and thus emerges as the superior hypothesis. Same goes for the Vitamin C pseudogene -- "common design" didn't give us anything concrete and substantive to work with, but common descent predicted the presence of a "broken" gene. At the moment, when I teach undergrads what scientists do, how they do it, and what we've learned, I don't compare the predictions and tests of descent and design. Do you really want me to start?
No doubt my teaching about common ancestry (especially regarding humans and apes) makes you feel uncomfortable, since you deny the starting premise. So why not put up? Exactly what do you want me to teach, DAve? What would a "science-minded" YEC like yourself have my students learn about the world that was predicted by the Bible and later born out unequivocally through experimentally tested hypotheses and observations? Can you give us one example that is as clear and unambiguous as chromosome 2 or Vitamin C pseudogenes or the whole science of phylogeny or... Can you give me a "snake eating its tail" seed that I can plant in the minds of my students for years to come?
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