No you didn't. What you did was repeat a story you'd read on a creationist site or been told by another nutty creationist and presented it as your own experience with some flowery additions. You thought that it was proof of a carbon dating error. In other words you told a huge porky pie and got caught.
Now you're telling more lies and everyone can see it. The dishonest tactics haven't worked, why don't you try being honest for a while - you never know, it might work.
I gave the story of the coin dating as a trigger to help the 'scientists' blow their steam off, giving them an opportunity to run me over with a bulldozer full of regular words.
There is no need to manufacturer crap in order to generate criticism. The normal stuff you post already draws that stuff.
When are you going to get around to posting evidence based discussion instead of just spewing nonsense? All I see you doing right now is preaching and mocking the discussion/criticism you get without responding to it. Then you have the gall to cast aspersions when people tell you that your 'contribution' is not welcomed.
Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also in prison. Thoreau: Civil Disobedience (1846)
I have never met a man so ignorant that I couldn't learn something from him. Galileo Galilei
If there is no struggle, there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom, and deprecate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground, they want rain without thunder and lightning. Frederick Douglass
OK, we get the fact that you are anti-science, and you put belief over evidence. You have shown that in a number of different ways.
Without evidence, why should we accept a single thing you have to say? Given that you are literally preaching your belief, rather than presenting evidence, perhaps you should end each post with "Amen!"
And I can just imagine the "scientific" curriculum you would advocate based on your beliefs. You'd probably want to begin each lesson with "Hallelujah!"
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On a slightly different subject:
According to David Barrett et al, editors of the World Christian Encyclopedia: A comparative survey of churches and religions - AD 30 to 2200, there are 19 major world religions which are subdivided into a total of 270 large religious groups, and many smaller ones. 34,000 separate Christian groups have been identified in the world. "Over half of them are independent churches that are not interested in linking with the big denominations." Religions of the world: numbers of adherents; growth rates
Why are there so many different religions, and so many separate branches of Christianity?
It is because, like you, they rely on faith, dogma, scripture, revelation and other squishy sources of information, rather upon verifiable evidence. If two groups disagree on some point there is no reliable way to judge which is correct, so you have schism.
Science is just the opposite. When there are competing hypotheses, it is the evidence, and testing of predictions against the evidence, which determines whether one is more correct than the other. Eventually you end up with a single theory explaining a given set of facts.
Religious belief does not constitute scientific evidence, nor does it convey scientific knowledge.
Belief gets in the way of learning--Robert A. Heinlein
How can I possibly put a new idea into your heads, if I do not first remove your delusions?--Robert A. Heinlein
It's not what we don't know that hurts, it's what we know that ain't so--Will Rogers
If I am entitled to something, someone else is obliged to pay--Jerry Pournelle
If a religion's teachings are true, then it should have nothing to fear from science...--dwise1
"Multiculturalism" demands that the US be tolerant of everything except its own past, culture, traditions, and identity.
You don't know what I know, all you know is your world with its perimeters, everything outside of that is a lie to you. Now that's not the mind of a true thinker or scientist. I gave the story of the coin dating as a trigger to help the 'scientists' blow their steam off, giving them an opportunity to run me over with a bulldozer full of regular words. Seemed necessary to you didn't it? And why is that? Is your world so false and fragile that it needs to run down anything that comes near it?Whatever comes out of their mouth is predictable, like the average text book.
Yeah, you ask 'em what 2 + 2 is and they answer "four", rather than more imaginative answers like "five" or "a million and seven", or "a large fish named Simon".
What's worse, if you go around insisting that the real answer is 'I'm a tiny piglet, oink oink oink", they still say that the answer is four. This may be because, as you speculate, their world is "false and fragile", but is more likely because they aren't insane.
The science world, apart from nature itself, is the m o s t b o r i n g place in the universe, the only way they can get any attention is with rocket science or with celebrity scientists, even so the numbers are right down, and it costs billions.
And why is that? Codependent intellectualism. Passing around the hand downs. Boring. Incredibly boring.
Why is science so boring?
If your reason for hating reality is that you find it boring, then you are free to maintain your present extremely tangential relationship to it.
However, the question is what to teach in schools. Now, in the first place not everyone is bored by the same thing. Some people find reality fascinating.
In the second place, education is about more than entertaining people. It has a practical purpose, and this is obviously better served by teaching facts, even dull ones, than amusing fictions.
Finally, there are ethical considerations. If one is teaching something as a fact, it should also be one. A teacher who (for example) claimed to have carbon-dated a coin might amuse the class, especially those of them who know what carbon-dating is, but s/he would also be a dirty liar.
I gave the story of the coin dating as a trigger to help the 'scientists' blow their steam off....
Be honest. You got caught saying something really stupid. I would personally give you a Cheer if you were big enough to admit it.
Colbard writes:
... giving them an opportunity to run me over with a bulldozer full of regular words. Seemed necessary to you didn't it?
Yes, it did.
Colbard writes:
And why is that?
For the same reason that you'd speak up if somebody said something you knew to be wrong. Maybe they'd learn something from you or maybe somebody else would learn something by overhearing the conversation.
Colbard writes:
Is your world so false and fragile that it needs to run down anything that comes near it?
There's a fair bit of garbage in the world - creationism is a prime example - and it needs to be taken out so it doesn't stink up the place.
I gave the story of the coin dating as a trigger to help the 'scientists' blow their steam off, giving them an opportunity to run me over with a bulldozer full of regular words.
No, you got caught out in a lie. Now nobody trusts your integrity. What ever message you hoped to get across is always going to be tainted with knowledge that you are happy to lie to the people you are talking to.
The above ontological example models the zero premise to BB theory. It does so by applying the relative uniformity assumption that the alleged zero event eventually ontologically progressed from the compressed alleged sub-microscopic chaos to bloom/expand into all of the present observable order, more than it models the Biblical record evidence for the existence of Jehovah, the maximal Biblical god designer. -Attributed to Buzsaw Message 53
The explain to them any scientific investigation that explains the existence of things qualifies as science and as an explanation -Attributed to Dawn Bertot Message 286
Does a query (thats a question Stile) that uses this physical reality, to look for an answer to its existence and properties become theoretical, considering its deductive conclusions are based against objective verifiable realities. -Attributed to Dawn Bertot Message 134
By the way, if you cannot measure love by your extremely short ruler, or put it into a test tube, does that mean it does not exist?
You CAN measure love, you dimwit. Just like you can measure any emotion.
You're selective attention is amazing.
The above ontological example models the zero premise to BB theory. It does so by applying the relative uniformity assumption that the alleged zero event eventually ontologically progressed from the compressed alleged sub-microscopic chaos to bloom/expand into all of the present observable order, more than it models the Biblical record evidence for the existence of Jehovah, the maximal Biblical god designer. -Attributed to Buzsaw Message 53
The explain to them any scientific investigation that explains the existence of things qualifies as science and as an explanation -Attributed to Dawn Bertot Message 286
Does a query (thats a question Stile) that uses this physical reality, to look for an answer to its existence and properties become theoretical, considering its deductive conclusions are based against objective verifiable realities. -Attributed to Dawn Bertot Message 134
Oh, those are not the only lies. And of course there's also his overall extreme dishonesty.
First he claimed to be talking purely scientifically, denying any religious motive, only to finally reveal through his actions that was all a bold-faced lie. You will recall in one of my first replies I mentioned several creationists I have encountered over the decades who have done exactly the same thing, claiming emphatically that they were not creationists -- some of them even claiming to not be Christians -- , only to reveal in their later posts that they were died-in-the-wool fundamentalists and fervent creationists. Colbard committed that same lie, even though the exact nature of his particular form of religious pathology is not yet known; he appears to be some kind of neo-hippie or even a neo-Jesus-Freak (which is what many hippies devolved into circa 1970, which is why we have so many fundamentalists).
Second, he lied about his age. Apparently he tried to claim that he's an 18-year-old girl, but Percy pointed out that he registered as being 30. Either way, he committed a deliberate lie.
Third, there's the question of his gender. I've seen reference to his having claimed to be female. Given the history of his known lies and of his extreme dishonesty, I can see no reason to give that claim any credence at all.
What is it about creationism and about fundamentalism that turns so many of them into pathological liars? Because lying is all that they have?
However, the question is what to teach in schools.
Yes, that is the primary question. And in particular, as per this topic, the primary question is whether religion should be taught in science class. And far more particularly, since this entire "controversy" has been created out of whole cloth and is being forced upon us by creationists, whether fundamentalist Christian beliefs should be taught in science class. And since this "controversy" primarily operates in the USA, questions about the First Amendment also come into play, mainly over whether a government agency and government agents (ie, the public schools and their teachers) may provide religious instruction while operating within their official government capacity.
The answers are obvious:
The materials taught in every class should pertain to the subject matter of the class. Hence, in German class, we should not expect half the class to be devoted to Russian, any more than having half of trig class being devoted to analyzing poetry (a consequence of teaching love as the basic principle of everything). The subject matter of a science class is science and that is what should be taught in science classes. Non-science materials can and should be taught in the classes that cover those materials' subjects.
It is a violation of the First Amendment for government agents and/or agencies operating in their official capacities to provide religious instruction and indoctrination; that is clearly unconstitutional and hence forbidden.
While teaching religion cannot be allowed, teaching about religion not only is allowed, but should be done. Comparative religion classes should be the norm, as well as classes on the history of religions. When John Cleese was on Bill Mahr recently, he mentioned how in "public school" (the UK version of private school) they were taught all about the history of the conflicts between Catholics and Protestants, but never what the difference was supposed to be between Catholics and Protestants. As our societies become more religiously diverse, it is both to our personal benefit and to the benefit of society as a whole to not be ignorant about each other. However, the place for such instruction is clearly in the social sciences classes (eg, history, geography, cultural anthropology) and not in science class (eg, biology, geology, astronomy, physics).
But while this topic is primarily concerned with the content of science class, we've been ignoring another question that is just as important if not more so:
How should we be teaching science?
Basically, I've seen two ways in which science is taught. One way works and the other way doesn't. The first way produces students who understand science and how it works and more often than not end up liking science having found it interesting. The second way produces students who do not understand science, have practically no idea how it works, and end up hating the entire experience and even hating , students like Colbard.
In both ways, we are presented with the conclusions of science. In the second way, that is about as far as it goes: you are presented with scientific ideas that are presented as arbitrary facts that you must learn to repeat, but of which you never gain any understanding, nor do you learn how any of those facts tie in with the others. This creates the situation described by Theodosius Dobzhansky in his article, "Nothing in Biology Makes Sense Except in the Light of Evolution" (American Biology Teacher 35:125-129 (March 1973), p. 129):
quote:Seen in the light of evolution, biology is, perhaps, intellectually the most satisfying and inspiring science. Without that light, it becomes a pile of sundry facts -- some of them interesting or curious, but making no meaningful picture as a whole.
The first way goes far beyond mere presentation of the conclusions of science. The class also covers the history and development of the major ideas of science, as well as learning and working with the scientific process and how it works. That includes many experiments, both as reconstructions of classic experiments and as demonstrations. These experiments are not only performed by the teacher (or in a film, which is necessary when the experiment is impractical, prohibitively expensive, or too dangerous to perform in a classroom setting), but also by the students as hands-on lab assignments. And in the process, the students not only learn how to analyze everyday events scientifically, but they also learn how those separate scientific ideas are actually interrelated -- eg, one of the most fascinating science lectures I attended was a basic "physical science" class in which we were taught not only how to interpret physics algebraic equations (eg, direct and inverse proportional), but also how to use them to derive other relationships, mainly through substitution of terms; instead of simply memorizing a lot of arbitrary formulae, we learned how they were derived and what they were telling us.
It wasn't until later in life that I even learned of the existence of the second way of teaching. Like Slartibartfast, I have always been a big fan of science. My earliest memories include a fascination with living things, astronomy, and discovering how things work. My ex-wife was much the same way though less so, at least to the point where we both enjoyed the science shows on PBS and she was able to reason her way through scientific questions and be able ask the right kinds of questions. Both my sons grew up loving science, my younger son especially as he followed in my footsteps of overturning rocks to see what was living under there.
I was shocked when my adult nephew told me that science was the class that he hated the most. He described his experience in those classes in a similar manner that Colbard now describes his misconceptions of science, misconceptions that other creationists seem to share and on which they base a number of their anti-science arguments. He found it very boring. All they did was to memorize a lot of unrelated facts with hardly any explanation of what they meant nor where they came from. He came out of that experience hating science.
And now Colbard's anti-science rantings sound a lot like the attitude that my nephew had expressed in that one conversation (we live in different states and have very little contact), only not as extreme and rabidly neo-hippie as Colbard's. That indicates to me that Colbard had suffered a similar experience that my nephew had. And in creationist rhetorics, we also see similar attitudes. They treat science as a collection of arbitrary "facts" that have no basis in reality (at least not in their "reality") and are therefore being taught and held dogmatically. They have no concept of the interrelatedness scientific facts and so cannot understand that they cannot eliminate a collection of ideas they don't like without unraveling the whole of science.
We do need to also look at how science is being taught. Even back in 1984, when I heard a presentation by Fred Edwords on the radio, he described one of the problems in science education as being the tendency to simply present the conclusions of science as facts, take them or leave them. He described that approach as leaving the students with no understanding of science and that it fuels creationist rhetorics.
One reason for that approach is the lack of qualified teachers with backgrounds in science. Infamous creationist teacher John Peloza taught high school biology whereas his own educational background was in PE; he had started teaching biology in a small school district apparently because no one else was available to teach the class -- that is a frequent and recurring problem in all subjects for small and isolated schools, most commonly in rural communities. Even in mega-metropolitan regions; eg, my younger son's first intermediate-school science teacher was the home-ec teacher -- the other students kept coming to my son with their questions because he could give them better answers.
The textbooks are another problem. After the passing of the "monkey laws" in the 1920's, anti-evolution groups maintained pressure on local school boards and on textbook publishers. As a result, the publishers self-censored themselves to include no "objectionable" subject matter. Also, primary and secondary science textbooks were not and still are not written by scientists, but rather by professional textbook writers. As a result, the textbooks contain many inaccuracies and perpetuate many misconceptions.
In the late 1980's when California was considering new high-school biology textbooks, William J. Bennetta of The Textbook League, which appears to have been inactive for over a decade, enlisted the help of a panel of scientists to review the textbooks under consideration. They found all the textbooks to be filled with inaccuracies and misconceptions. They submitted their long list to the State School Board who passed them on to the publishers. The publishers made some corrections, but even the leading choice was still full of errors. This time the State Board went behind the scientists' backs and approved that textbook, inaccuracies, misconceptions, and all.
I don't know what the situation is now, but I doubt that it has changed much. I think that some scientists have become more involved in writing textbooks; I think that Dr. Kenneth Miller has written one. Ironically, it was scientists getting involved in writing high-school textbooks that brought down the "monkey laws" and led to the creation of the "creation science" deception. The anti-evolution movement succeeded in keeping any mention of evolution out of the public schools for four decades, but they didn't hold any sway in the universities where evolution continued to be taught. Then after the launch of Sputnik in 1957 caught us unprepared, the USA launched into efforts to close the "science gap" by pushing for massive improvements in science and math education, including in biology, which included new and better textbooks. A result was the formation of the Biological Sciences Curriculum Study (BSCS) in 1958 and the writing of new curricula by actual biologists. Since these biologists knew that evolution is the cornerstone of biology, these new curricula included evolution throughout and emphasized it. The Little Rock, AR, school district adopted the BSCS materials, requiring its biology teachers to use them. However, the Arkansas "monkey law" strictly forbade a teacher even mentioning the word, "evolution", in class upon pain of having your teaching credentials revoked for life. Caught between a rock and a hard place, teacher Susan Epperson sued the state which led to the US Supreme Court decision, Epperson v. Arkansas (1968), that struck down the Arkansas "monkey law", leading to the complete dismantling of the anti-evolution movement's legal tools. That led to their repackaging their attempts to bar the teaching of evolution into the pack of lies and deceptions we currently know as "creation science", since rebranded as "intelligent design".
Bottom line is that we need to do a much better job of teaching science.
What is it about creationism and about fundamentalism that turns so many of them into pathological liars?
Add in Biblical Christianity.
There is absolutely no concept of honesty in Biblical Christianity, fundamentalism or creationism and there is a basic dishonesty inherent in all three.
The problem is that they are taught to trust the Source instead of testing the Content. The are educated by platitudes, through "truths".
"If you don't stand for something you will fall for anything."
The pastor, brother, bishop, preacher prances across the stage and presents them with "truths".
Therein lies the problem. Once they accept that they are given "truths" there is no hope of ever finding truth.
They are not taught to test and challenge and criticize the "truths". They are told "There are no contradictions in the Bible and it is the inerrant word of God" but they don't put their hands up and tell the pastor, preacher, brother, bishop "Woah there. Just a cotton picking moment. Are two fowl and seven fowl the same number of fowl?"
They are not taught to test whether what they are being sold is actually based on reality or is it just a con job? They listen to sermons; they do not question sermons.
If God says it is right then it is right. If Satan says it then it is wrong. They never look at the actual content to see which is right and which is wrong.
Anyone so limited that they can only spell a word one way is severely handicapped!
"If you don't stand for something you will fall for anything."
Yes, I remember that fundamentalist sound-bite from their early-70's proselytizing propaganda. Though none of them ever presented it to me in person, so I was never able to offer my response:
"If you don't question anything, you'll believe anything."
My understanding is also that, since their beliefs are contradicted by reality, they must lie to themselves constantly. A friend at church used to be a staunch fundamentalist. He described how, while a fundamentalist, he had to turn a blind eye to the every-day things that contradicted his beliefs and had to maintain a constant state of self-delusion. Finally one day it became too much for him to keep up, so he examined his religion, especially in the light of the Matthew 7:20 test. Some things were good fruit, but too much was wicked fruit. So he hewed down his religion and threw it into the fire (as Jesus commanded in that test). He became a "complete atheist and thorough humanist" and ever since then he has felt so much more spiritually fulfilled than he ever had as a fundamentalist.
Also, we have Faith's guidance in the discussion about biblical support for Trinitarianism that what's important is not what the Bible actually says, but rather what you can infer it to mean. We have long criticized creationists for how they grossly mishandle the sources that they cite as they go about quote-mining, but it appears that they truly know no other way. That's exactly how they treat the Bible as they quote-mine it to make it infer whatever they want it to.
"To question is the answer." (UU catch-phrase)
"Believe those who are seeking the truth; doubt those who find it." (Andre Gide)
"{When you search for God, y}ou can't go to the people who believe already. They've made up their minds and want to convince you of their own personal heresy." ("The Jehovah Contract", AKA "Der Jehova-Vertrag", by Viktor Koman, 1984)
"It is a well-known fact that reality has a definite liberal bias." Robert Colbert on NPR
But it does not matter if the whole scientific community supports those theories, and that your dating methods confirm those ideas. ...
So you don't actually want to discuss evidence of dating methods being wrong, you just want to dance around the issue and pretend that you know something vital without ever putting out a speck of effort to show it.
Sounds like cognitive dissonance to me. This is the post you are replying to:
Plenty of opportunity to open a discussion in any way you care to do so, on your terms.
The simple fact is that you do • not • want to discuss age at all ... you want to pretend that the world is young ... impossibly young ... and the only way you can do that, is to pretend to yourself that you know why dating methods are wrong ... but that you cannot discuss your "evidence" because it doesn't exist ...
You don't fool us, you don't fool reality. The earth remains very very old regardless of your comical dancing around the issue. The universe does not care about your belief nor your opinion, and it is not in love with you.
... I am saying that they are wrong, yes the whole lot, including the dating methods. ...
Says the person who claimed a 14C date was obtained for a metal coin.
Curiously, while I would love for you to go into greater detail on why you think they are wrong, I know you won't actually discuss them, nor discuss why they produce the same results, consistently, test after test after test ...
... These so called facts prevent you from listening to anything else ...
And while I would love to hear something other than vague claims, you continue to provide nothing else to "listen" to -- you just make repeated claims with absolutely no foundation. Like your silly story about radiocarbon dating a coin.
... You are stuck in a rut.
Says the one who repeats themself with no additional information. You won't look at Age Correlations and An Old Earth, Version 2 No 1 because it is full of facts that you cannot challenge, and because you don't want to put yourself to the trouble of having to deal with the information ... information regarding objective empirical evidence that challenges your beliefs ... when you can sit in your rut and babble about how "love" makes the universe go around.
I'll choose my rut over yours any day of the year and twice on sunday.
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