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Author | Topic: Should we teach both evolution and religion in school? | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Dr Adequate Member (Idle past 285 days) Posts: 16113 Joined: |
"florid screaming twitching lunacy" That's more like it, but belongs in good prose. Again, this gibberish is ... well, it's still gibberish, but it's rather flaccid, rather jejune, it doesn't have the genuine batshit-crazy quality that we've come to associate with you. Try again.
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Dr Adequate Member (Idle past 285 days) Posts: 16113 Joined: |
From what you have demonstrated, teaching evolution involves stomping on anything that contravenes the idea, and airing out your laundry in public. Not good for schools at all. "Now children, today we are going to look at Evolution. Life began by an angry wart turning itself into an eye. Your greatest grandparents swung by their tails and later ate mammoths, but we are so much smarter than all previous species. The sun is going to explode, burn up the earth and turn into a red dwarf, write that down..." Again, I would suggest that since you have no idea what evolution is, you should try to find out something about it.
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Dr Adequate Member (Idle past 285 days) Posts: 16113 Joined:
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Children are not going to relish the long version of things, they'll summarize evolution down fairly quickly, to - "the world was filled with dinosaurs and we are all going to die like them, unless we become fighters" That would pretty much be an argument against trying to teach anything. They're not going to relish the long version of calculus or Spanish verb forms either, but they don't turn everything they hear into stupid nonsense, because they aren't as dumb as you think they are. Also, since dinosaurs were killed by a giant meteorite, the moral an incredibly stupid person would draw from their extinction is that they should wear a hard hat at all times.
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Dr Adequate Member (Idle past 285 days) Posts: 16113 Joined:
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What does history show about individuals who stand out from the majority? It' not a criterion for truth but often the case. No it's not. Most of 'em are loonies. For every Einstein, there's a million idiots and crackpots who think they're the next Einstein. Of course, only Einstein gets mentioned in the books that get written about history, but this is a matter of sampling bias.
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Dr Adequate Member (Idle past 285 days) Posts: 16113 Joined: |
That's a good point, but the rabble includes the crackpots in the end, because they don't want to burn at the stake. I'm beginning to wonder if your posts are randomly generated.
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Dr Adequate Member (Idle past 285 days) Posts: 16113 Joined:
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Mike the Wiz illustrated the point about giving information about nature but not making up a student's mind for them. And yet what Mike the Wiz suggests teaching them is both conclusory and false.
Learning is not an adventure if someone is force feeding. True education should be about training the mind to be free and to think, to discover and to enjoy. Observe and make your own conclusions. But that wouldn't work. Consider chemistry for example. The conclusions we have are the result of enormous effort, of thousands of experiments, and insights of genius. To teach chemistry, we teach the conclusions. We teach the kids about the atomic theory of matter, about the structure of matter, the periodic table, valence electrons, covalent and ionic bonding, and, nowadays, a bit of quantum theory. If we just gave them lots of chemicals and said: go, figure it out, then they wouldn't figure it out. They wouldn't end up discovering chemistry for themselves, they'd each produce a half-assed alchemy. Unless, of course, they went behind their teacher's back, found some books, educated themselves, and learned chemistry.
But to make another person's ideas a a criterion for getting a career is not appropriate. Well, I'd want someone to know the rules of chemistry before giving them a job as a chemist. If instead they told me that there were four elements, earth, air, fire and water, and that they have this great scheme for turning base metals into gold, I'd hire someone else.
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Dr Adequate Member (Idle past 285 days) Posts: 16113 Joined: |
I think that in chemistry for example, we could demonstrate most of it, and I am fairly certain that if the conclusions we have today - accumulated by much time and effort, are correct as I believe, then the students cannot help to make the same conclusions by observing. Well, you'd have to tell them what you were demonstrating: you'd say, here's the theory, now let me show you (a tiny proportion of) the observations that prove it. (And you would only have time to show them a tiny proportion.) But this is just how evolution is taught too. Now in both cases if you just showed them a tiny proportion of the evidence and invited them to figure out the theory, they wouldn't get very far. Here's what happens, you say, when you add zinc to sulfuric acid, here's what happens when you drop sodium in water, then they would not all by themselves replicate the conclusions of Mendeleev or Kerkule or Pauling. After all, very few professional chemists managed to come to those conclusions after a lifetime of study, that's why we call the ones who did geniuses and give them Nobel prizes --- because out of our entire species, after hundreds of years of doing chemistry, only Linus Pauling was able to deduce what he did about the nature of chemical bonds, although when he had done so other people were able to understand it. So we have to supply the students with the theory, and then argue that it's supported by observation.
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Dr Adequate Member (Idle past 285 days) Posts: 16113 Joined: |
What we have in mind affects our conclusions. And if something is repeated for long enough people accept it as truth or whatever. Such has been the progress of science, an accumulated pile which now is moving on its own impetus. And there is no arguing, with this interconnected fur ball, except when it becomes too much, it will finally be hocked up and out of this world. So yes enjoy while it lasts. Alternatively, maybe you don't know much about science, and are unable to foretell the future. I'm just guessing here, but ... is it possible that you're neither a scientist nor a prophet?
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Dr Adequate Member (Idle past 285 days) Posts: 16113 Joined: |
That is the risks students face in education. Different points of view contradicting each other, makes me wonder if we should keep those subjects for entertainment purposes only! Perhaps we should apply the same principle to other subjects. Geography, for example. There are different points of view as to what the capital of Australia is --- most people think it's Sydney, but a sizable minority hold out for Canberra. So what are we to teach?
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Dr Adequate Member (Idle past 285 days) Posts: 16113 Joined:
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It's an odd thing but the earlier scientists were hindered by their false expectations of what the evidence should look like, such as "deposits attributed to the Flood" that turned out to be caused by glaciers. It just didn't occur to them to consider the entire geologic column as evidence for the Flood. What twaddle, Faith. Of course it occurred to them. It occurred to people like Johann Scheuchzer and John Woodward. Here's Woodward, writing in 1702:
At length all the Mass, that was thus born up in the Water, was again precipitated and subsided towards the Bottom [...] the Matter, susiding thus, formed the Strata of Stone, of Marble, of Cole, of Earth, and the rest; of which Strata, lying one upon another, the Terristrial Globe, or at least as much of it as is ever displayed to view, doth mainly consist. That's from Woodward's An Essay toward a Natural History of the Earth; part II of that work appears to contain every single basic doctrine of Floodist piffle. However, observation destroyed his hypotheses. In the end the Floodists were reduced to clinging to the glacial deposits as evidence for the Flood, because it was that or admit that there was no evidence at all. But that's not, as you suppose, how they started out. And then finally even the little they had was taken away from them. Adam Sedgwick, the last famous defender of the Flood, retracted his claim that glacial sediments were diluvial in a speech to the Geological Society of London, of which he was then President:
Our errors were, however, natural, and of the same kind which lead many excellent observers of a former century to refer all the secondary formations of geology to the Noachian deluge. Having been myself a believer, and, to the best of my power, a propagator of what I now regard as a philosophic heresy, and having more than once been quoted for opinions I do not now maintain, I think it right, as one of my last acts before I quit this Chair, thus publicly to read my recantation. We ought, indeed, to have paused before we first adopted the diluvian theory, and referred all our old superficial gravel to the action of the Mosaic flood. The date of the speech, February 1831, may be taken as approximately the last date at which an honest and informed person attributed any geological evidence to the Flood. So, not for the first time, you have ignored the evidence and rewritten history. The doctrines of Floodism were given real thought by serious scientists before they were discarded. Modern Floodists have done no more than fish these discarded ideas out of the waste paper basket of science, and if they had any sense, they'd put them back. Edited by Dr Adequate, : No reason given.
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Dr Adequate Member (Idle past 285 days) Posts: 16113 Joined: |
Woodward is very interesting and I'm glad to know about it, because all I've ever heard is the inadequate ideas, a layer here, a deposit there. Well, as I say, that's what they were reduced to. But it's not how they started out. Did you notice the bit In Sedgwick's speech: "Our errors were, however, natural, and of the same kind which lead many excellent observers of a former century to refer all the secondary formations of geology to the Noachian deluge." (Here "secondary" means lithified sedimentary, fossil-bearing rocks, as opposed to "tertiary" unlithified sediment, and "primary" igneous basement rocks. In short, they were making exactly the same mistakes as modern Floodists, 200 years previous to them. It wasn't just Woodward, it was a whole community of protoscientists. Then science grew up.)
But there is no evidence against the idea and he doesn't give any. We've been through this, Faith. What is more --- this is Coyote's point --- the whole science of geology has been through this. They had dumb Floodist ideas. Then they looked at the evidence and discarded them. Then they were picked up out of the trash by people who were and are entirely ignorant of the evidence.
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Dr Adequate Member (Idle past 285 days) Posts: 16113 Joined: |
But the evidence does not exist. It does, you just don't know about it. Y'know, like you didn't know anything about the history of geology. So you should stop making stuff up about subjects you haven't bothered to study.
ABE: You know the bottom line here is that what the Creator God says is the standard to which science must conform and if it doesn't conform it's in error, Period. There isn't any way to get around that. Great. God just told me that geologists are right and you're wrong. I'm glad we got that cleared up.
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Dr Adequate Member (Idle past 285 days) Posts: 16113 Joined: |
Well, thanks for the Parable Of The Thing That Didn't Happen, but back in the real world scientific achievements are in fact pretty much reserved for people who follow the scientific method. Whereas people who try to substitute faith for it are a bunch of ineffectual loons.
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Dr Adequate Member (Idle past 285 days) Posts: 16113 Joined: |
What God says trumps EVERYTHING else. God says you're wrong about geology. Also some stuff about how people should give me money.
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Dr Adequate Member (Idle past 285 days) Posts: 16113 Joined: |
Sure, just go down to your favorite casino in Vegas and play the Megabucks slot machine, or whatever the modern equivalent is, I haven't been inside a casino in years. If God said it, it will happen. C'mon, you should think more carefully about what you're saying. When they pass the collection plate at your church, do you stand up and shout: "If God really wants you to have money, go to Vegas and put all the church funds on red"? Maybe you should --- but it's hypocritical to use this just as an excuse for not donating to the church of St. Adequate. No, God has told me quite distinctly that he wants people to give me money, rather than me winning it through the sordid sin of gambling. Who are you to say that he's wrong?
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