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So it begins: Kansas school board redefines science


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quote:

Originally posted by Aperson:

I'm 99% certain someone was killed for his findings, I just can't for the life of me remember his name.

You are correct. There is one.

Between the year 1582 and 1592 there was hardly a teacher in Europe who was persistently, openly and actively spreading the news about the "universe which Copernicus had charted, except Giordano Bruno. A little later on another and still more famous character was to take up the work: Galilee.

He is one martyr whose name should lead all the rest. He was not a mere religious sectarian who was caught up in the psychology of some mob hysteria. He was a sensitive, imaginative poet, fired with the enthusiasm of a larger vision of a larger universe ... and he fell into the error of heretical belief. For this poets vision he was kept in a dark dungeon for eight years and then taken out to a blazing market place and roasted to death by fire.

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Let me rephrase that. He is one that stands out. There are plenty more.

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Today, 17th February 2000, is the 400th anniversary of the martyrdom of Giordano Bruno who was burnt alive at the stake in Campo de' Fiori square in Rome. Bruno was one of the most famous victims of
the Inquisition, which was responsible for the death of thousands of heretics.
He was killed by an order of the Holy Office, in the Holy Year of Jubilee under the reign of Clement VIII, pontiff of the Holy Roman church. Late in the 19th century, a statue to the cause of freethought was erected on the site of his martyrdom, where his death is commemorated every year with a public demonstration, which was forbidden only during the period of fascism.

People tend to forget the Inquisition. Nice people eh?

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I've read the link in question, and I'd encourage you to create a separate thread so we don't get busted for off topic stuff. I'd like to read primary texts on this guy if possible, instead of the editorial slant of positiveatheism.org. (I'm not taking issue with their facts mind you, but someone like Pierre Bayle, for instance, was widely and wrongly thought to be a proponent of atheism when he merely suggested that you couldn't rationalise everything about faith; he was in fact a pious Calvinist.)

Also, a note on Bruno. It was a matter of church policy at the time that you wouldn't burn people unless they were actually preaching false doctrine as truth. If Bruno fell afoul of the church, then it's likely because he was making claims of a religious nature and teaching them as church doctrine, though I admit I'll have to follow up on this. Most people's problem with the church during the enlightenment was a problem with Aristotelian scholasticism, not christianity per se.

Let me ask the follow up question here, and that is, would you argue that Bruno's fate was the norm? I ask because I'm watching some people here make sweeping generalities to the effect that religion is anti-science and religious people want to return to the dark ages when in fact science before, during, and after the enlightenment was conducted by people who felt that the nature of that discipline was to uncover the wonders of God.

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quote:

Originally posted by Zane Marlowe:

I've read the link in question, and I'd encourage you to create a separate thread so we don't get busted for off topic stuff. I'd like to read primary texts on this guy if possible, instead of the editorial slant of positiveatheism.org. (I'm not taking issue with their facts mind you, but someone like Pierre Bayle, for instance, was widely and wrongly thought to be a proponent of atheism when he merely suggested that you couldn't rationalise everything about faith; he was in fact a pious Calvinist.)

Also, a note on Bruno. It was a matter of church policy at the time that you wouldn't burn people unless they were actually preaching false doctrine as truth. If Bruno fell afoul of the church, then it's likely because he was making claims of a religious nature and teaching them as church doctrine, though I admit I'll have to follow up on this. Most people's problem with the church during the enlightenment was a problem with Aristotelian scholasticism, not christianity per se.

Let me ask the follow up question here, and that is, would you argue that Bruno's fate was the norm? I ask because I'm watching some people here make sweeping generalities to the effect that religion is anti-science and religious people want to return to the dark ages when in fact science before, during, and after the enlightenment was conducted by people who felt that the nature of that discipline was to uncover the wonders of God.

I don't think this thread will off topic with that. It was just to answer an question. If I see that it is wandering off, I'll make a seperate thread for it.

In response to your last two sentences, that's what's got my head scratching about the whole religious v. Scientist antagonism. Maybe the church feared that popular knowlege of such thoughts and discoveries was a threat to their power. If the church and bible is wrong about this or that, how can we believe anything they or it has to say. That's the only thing I can come up with to answer that.

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quote:

Originally posted by LostInSpace:

In response to your last two sentences, that's what's got my head scratching about the whole religious v. Scientist antagonism. Maybe the church feared that popular knowlege of such thoughts and discoveries was a threat to their power. If the church and bible is wrong about this or that, how can we believe anything they or it has to say. That's the only thing I can come up with to answer that.

I think that's a reasonable assumption.

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Well, now you're speculating.

I've said it before, I'll repeat it now: enlightenment thinkers were far and away more theistic in their leanings because they thought they would learn more about God's creative work in nature by studying it directly than by using the existing mode of reasoning (known as scholasticism back then). It wasn't a matter of dogma at all, and if you read the documents related to Galileo's trial (I have read parts), you'll find that Aristotle's reasoning for why a heliocentric hypothesis wasn't true was in fact not answered by Galileo. (Aristotle argued that we'd see a parallax shift in the positions of stars, and since we didn't, then the earth was stationary; neither Galileo nor his critics imagined that the stars were as far away as they are, which means that while there is a shift, it's not detectable to us.)

What horrifying and draconian sentence did this 17th century Che get? House arrest. In a nice Italian villa where he would continue to read, write, and correspond with other intellectuals to the end of his days. Not that he wouldn't have enjoyed his freedom, but it was a far cry from being burned at the stake (a fate mainly reserved for people who taught formal heresy and who would have had ample warning about matters of doctrine). I won't even start on Newton, who wrote more theology than he ever did science, and dedicated his work to God.

The most radical shift in the intellectual / religious thought of the period was something like Spinoza's view, or Deism if you go a little further. I'm not suggesting that Atheists were absent (they were known even in Ancient Greece), but neither was it the case that history's scientists have been uniformly atheist or even hostile to established religion and religious belief. Quite the opposite in fact, and it was the expectation of an ordered universe created by a rational God that motivated many to seek knowledge of that God's designs in nature.

Seen in that light, ID could be considered to be clearly a part of an established scientific tradition.

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quote:

I'm watching some people here make sweeping generalities to the effect that religion is anti-science and religious people want to return to the dark ages when in fact science before, during, and after the enlightenment was conducted by people who felt that the nature of that discipline was to uncover the wonders of God.


Exactly right.

I know I said I was done with this topic, but I had to back up Zane on that one.

I had no idea you were such a scholar, Marlowe. Most impressive.

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quote:

Originally posted by nomad:

...Historically, the catholic church (like it or not the most influencial christian stream) has fundamentally been anti-science on any subject were science (or anything dissident for that matter) challenged some of its dogmatic concepts.

Historically, I can understand how the Spanish experience with the Catholic church could tend to sour contemporary Europeans on established religion, but the above statement is just simply inaccurate. I'm not claiming that the church has never had problems with science (of course it has), but there is a problem with the statement above.

There is an assumption that the church is a single entity with a single mind, where in fact there are and have been many views on controversial opinions within the church, the various churches, and within Christianity in general. It is a gross oversight to make such blanket statements about an entity composed of so many diverse thinkers. Look to the medieval debates on realism vs. nominalism to see a debate that had genuine theological teeth, but which was conducted with civility by brilliant and diverse minds within the church.

quote:

When I hear sentences like "Galileo got house arrest, and his problem wasn't with religion, it was with the church of his day", I can only laugh. No matter what religious texts convey, religion is ALWAYS the "CURCH OF THE DAY", because the ultimate interpretation of the contents before mass transmission is always done by contemporary individuals.

My earlier comments also apply here: there are always a variety of thinkers within the church, with a variety of interpretations. There are fewer authorities than there are interpretations, but that is the case in any movement, and I don't see why that should make Christianity remarkable.

For clarification on my part however, I want to know: are your remarks directed at the Catholic church of the enlightenment, or at the various churches of contemporary Christianity? Your comments make both kinds of claims and, again I note, seem to regard contemporary Christians as somehow culturally medieval.

quote:

We have come to the point were what was used to be the conservative catholic church now accepts most of what science has to offer, but US evangelists don't.

Would you interact with Jesuites who are by definition the most scientifically-open among the christian official structure, you would see that at least on the grounds of intellectual argumentation, evangelists don't really play in the same league. I wonder how many ppl ignore that there are for example astronomical observatories entirely operated by Jesuites who aren't precisely looking for angels...

I have met Jesuits, and I have discussed theology, culture, science, and history with them. I find them fascinating and among the best educated people in the world. That said, I've also met a number of superbly educated Evangelical Christians (an "evangelist" is someone who actively proselytizes) who are just as educated. To your point about not looking for angels through a telescope, I very much doubt that either my Evangelical and Jesuit, or my less-educated friends (Catholic and Evangelical) would attempt this.

This seems like hyperbole on your part, but let me answer the underlying point about these "educated ones" whom you respect being hard-headed about science. When they relinquish Theism and any notion of divine providence in the unfolding of human history, biological or otherwise, I'll be happy to admit that you can count them for your side. However, I think it would be more worrisome to you to mention such people because the obvious fact is that in light of their excellent education, they remain believers in a supreme God whose divine will is expressed in the ordering of the world.

The rest of your comments are directed at ID as though it were offering an alternative theory of some kind to Darwinian evolution. If you read my previous posts, you will see that natural selection is not at issue with ID. Rather, what is at issue is the ability of Natural Selection to produce living creatures from non-life. In essence, it is a challenge to materialism, not a challenge to the clearly observable phenomena of natural adaptation over time.

Let me suggest that the simplicity of your solution has a problem. The problem with the provided definition of life you suggested earlier is that it already includes the notion of organic matter. To include the thing explained in the definition is not an explanation. The question is how you distinguish organic from non-organic matter in the first place, and my first point was that no amount of natural selection could change the one into the other, and that denying the distintion between the two was impossible to maintain. I was not attempting to sketch out a definition of life per se since that's beyond my expertise.

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We are all made of basic inorganic compounds, it is not enough to say organic or inorganic, because if you break down our bodies into their component parts, we are ALL inorganic matter, that is animate.

And it is VERY easy for life to come from inorganic matter. OK, maybe not easy, but when you have Billions of toms of chemicals mixing and reacting together in millions of cubic miles of ocean water, sooner or later, life WILL result.

Chemicals react and mix in certain ways, NOT random ways.

These mixes etc are verifiable, and follow certain laws.

If you take all of these chemicals, put them into a HUGE ocean, add energy, the sun, and heat, volcanic activity, and stir them around, tides etc, sooner or later, a billion years or so, life will result.

We are ALL the result of verifiable chemical reactions, it is not that life was an accident, won the lottery or whatever.

Chemicals mix in certain ways, life HAS to result from such mixing, there is no other choice, because chemical do what they do.

Again, it has NOTHING to do with evolution, evolution doesn't care if god did it, chemicals mixing did it, or little men from mars did it, it doesn't care, evolution deals with how the first replicating cell duplicated with mistakes in it RNA and DNA structure, thereby creating diversity.

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I agree with Jaguar on his point.

Anyway, the bottom line is by adding creationism to this specific scientific study where will it end? What's next? Forcing on a geology class the concept that their measurements are wrong and that the Earth and the Universe is still only 5-9 thousand years old.

You and I know the push for religion onto this one particular science will not end there.

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http://www.livescience.com/othernews/05081...ntists_god.html

Admittedly, this article does not specifically address whether that belief in God extends to the acceptance of Creationism.

Excerpt:

" About two-thirds of scientists believe in God, according to a new survey that uncovered stark differences based on the type of research they do.

The study, along with another one released in June, would appear to debunk the oft-held notion that science is incompatible with religion."

Darn. I got sucked back into the debate again. CURSE YOU, Lost and Jag!

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quote:

Let me stress that faith is for the majority of people a cultural implanted concept. That's why me or Prez, if born in Algeria, would probably be muslims, and Zane, in Japan, shintoist, etc... Except for individuals convinced they have gone through endogen revelation, it is a local culturally bound factor. So much for the inherent validity of the conveyed concepts and their supposed universality...

Fundamentally, I think you are correct here. But if you boil down what Muslims believe, Jews believe, Christians believe, to the absolute basics, you'll find that there are many glaring similarities.

The difference lies in the cultural interpretation of divine providence in my opinion.

quote:

Religion is about teaching & convictions, science is about experimenting & doubts. Both have their place. Their separate place.

Again, I believe you are correct. Where ID actually falls, I'm a little unsure, but about that fundamental principle, I do concur.

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Well, you guys certainly manage to write volumes on this stuff before I have a chance to respond, so instead of trying to hit everything, let me pick a few things and work from there.

First of all, religion is defined in various ways, and I would counter-argue that the fairest definition that makes the most sense of it as a phenomenon is that religion is the human response to what is thought to be holy. That captures the notion that there is a human component to religion (rites, rituals, and the other cultural aspects mentioned above), but that there is also a metaphysical component to the world's religions, without which these religions would be dead things. If that's the case where you are in Spain, Nomad, then I'm sorry, but your convictions are not shared by the Buddhists in Tibet, the Muslims in Arabia, the Baptists in Oklahoma, or the Hindus in Bombay. For those groups of people, this isn't a cultural mask for some scientific or natural phenomenon, it is the broader order of being in which the natural world itself is enclosed. Note that I do not deny the cultural component, but without the metaphysical component, it's not "religion" as the world's religions understand the term (which, by the way, accounts for a great majority of how all of humanity understands the term if you start looking at population stats). To answer one of Nomad's statements in this context properly now, religion answers existential questions by by pointing to the metaphysical realities they claim, expressly included among them the origins of humanity and the natural order.

Regarding the intellectual posture of science and religion. Science and religion both have doubts and convictions. If you read Thomas Kuhn's work on paradigms in science, you'll read about how science has convictions that only change with great reluctance. If science were an inherently skeptical discipline, we wouldn't consider scientists to be people who expand our knowledge; but in fact we do think of them that way. Religion likewise has its skeptical components, and our discussion here is an example of scientific convictions dueling with religious skeptics since ID is a skeptical claim about materialist readings of Darwinism. The realm of evidence, doubt, skepticism, belief, etc., is the defined and discussed within realm of Philosophy, and that's why science, philosophy, and religion need to be properly understood both in themselves and in their relation to one another. I've said before that the discussion on ID is a discussion within Philosophy of Science, not science. As such, it is unfortunate that so few scientists trained in the Philosophy of science are weighing in on ID with comments that show they are not trained in that discipline.

With regards to the Miller-Urey experiment. Contemporary exo-biologists do not currently hold that the planet's atmospheric chemistry resembled the carefully chosen chemistry in the Miller-Urey experiment. Miller's experimental chemicals were chosen not for any geologic evidence of their presence in the early atmosphere, but expressly because he thought they might produce life under certain conditions. I found an interesting article on this here, and while I accept that the source is obviously friendly to ID, I'd recommend your attention to his footnotes, since they are not.

For Nomad, I included the distinction between "evangelist" and "Evangelical" because one is a largely American protestant church movement, and one is descriptive of a kind of person. Your comments are describe the type of person, not the church movement. My earlier comments about Evangelicals refer to the church movement, not to missionaries per se (although I've known a fair number of well-educated missionaries too). As regards your comments on the Jesuits, I am still waiting for you to produce an argument to prove that these well-educated Catholic monks are materialists who deny the hand of divine providence in human origins.

Well, that's probably sufficient for now, I shall again await your replies. Cheers friends.

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My 2nd cousin is a Jesuit Priest, and he has said the following, the church does not care about how the human body came about, via evolution or whatever, they don't care about abiogenesis either, this is all material science and has NOTHING to do with religion.

The Soul, which is what god made in his own image is what the church is worried about, god gave us our soul, and that is what must be saved, or whatever you want to say about it.

So however the human body came about, or all the creatures in the sea etc, etc, ad nauseum, god started it, then when it was time gave us our souls.

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Nicely put Jaguar. Of course that's not a claim that Jesuits are materialists, which Nomad would have had to show in order to substantiate his suggestion that (paraphrasing here) "educated religious people now support the notion of chance origins for human life as described by materialist paleobiologists."

What you've just said is compatible with ID since your comment includes "god started it." That's the simplest expression of the conclusion drawn by ID proponents, and that's what's being missed in the cultural discussion right now.

I'm going to bet that Nomad will not share your view however.

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quote:

Originally posted by Zane Marlowe:

Nicely put Jaguar. Of course that's not a claim that Jesuits are materialists, which Nomad would have had to show in order to substantiate his suggestion that (paraphrasing here) "educated religious people now support the notion of chance origins for human life as described by materialist paleobiologists."

What you've just said is compatible with ID since your comment includes "god started it." That's the simplest expression of the conclusion drawn by ID proponents, and that's what's being missed in the cultural discussion right now.

I'm going to bet that Nomad will not share your view however.

I share the view that god got it all started, but it ain't science, and anyone that claims their "scientific" theory states that, doesn't know what science is.

God did it, is an excuse, not science....

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quote:

Originally posted by Aperson:

And in any event, ID in its current incarnation is trying to replace evolution. However, how life started is an excellent way to beat each other over the head as there are very few facts so far.

ID cannot replace evolution, and won't, the school boards that try it will be voted out, just as they ALL have been.

Religion has no place within a science class, and changing the definition of science to make ID fit, also makes ASTROLOGY science.

Sorry, NOT to my kids you won't teach that garbage.

And evolution does not ask ANY questions about origins, so if anyone tries to beat evolution over the head for that, has already lost the battle.

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Id is Religion, trying to disguise itself as science.

It is religion, no matter how you look at it, because there is NO scientific evidence of an intelligent designer.

Until that is done, which is HIGHLY doubtful, then it cannot be and will not be considered scientific.

Let the discovery institute try and scientifically prove the existence of god, in the meantime, science will never answer the question.

ID is a religious doctrine, NOT a scientific one, so yes, a disclaimer like that SHOULD be unconstitutional.

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You know, I can say I'm an elf until I'm blue in the face and that won't make it so. Prove that ID is religion Jag. So far I just keep hearing you say so, and I don't see any reasoning about the definition of religion or how ID meets that definition. The fact that ID implies a supernatural entity as a conclusion does not mean you get to just dismiss it unargued because it doesn't fit people's contemporary notions of science as an exclusively materialist enterprise.

Simple Theism is not religion, and ID is not trying to disguise itself as anything but what it is. The reason it's got people so animated is because it's not being offered 1) as an alternative theory to Darwinism (however much some religious people wish it were) 2) by people who spend their Sunday mornings delivering homilies. ID is being offered by Ph.D-bearing scientists who have had all the education of their critics, and they are publishing papers that neither cite nor require adherence to any particular religous tradition. In so doing, it avoids the thorny issues of the first amendment separation clause because it cannot designate the nature of the designing intelligence(explicitly, it need not even be supernatural as we think of the term). ID accommodates Christianity, Judaism, and Islam, but also fits within some traditions of Hinduism, and perhaps even some forms of Buddhism (admittedly Buddhism's a reach).

If you're going to contend with ID as an idea, then do so, but the content of my posts to this point is been an attempt to show that 1) science need not be materialist in its orientation, and that it historically has not been, that 2) religion (and Christianity in particular) does not require one to forfeit one's rationalistic or scientific knowledge unless and until one is required to adopt materialism (ask the Jesuits), and that 3) ID is a theory that challenges materialist construals of Darwinism that include claims on the origin of life, not Darwin's theory of natural selection per se.

Now in your (plural persons here) various responses, I've seen much talk about science, religion, the alleged sins of the church, rationality, evidence, convictions, beliefs, and lots of other categories that belong to philosophy, and which represent (most often) gross generalizations based on stereotypes based on urban legends based on...ad nauseum, with little in the way of substantive references to actual scholarship in those fields (positiveatheism.org is not a good source, and the one link I've posted was for the footnotes, not the main content). You want to debate what counts as knowledge? Great, let's do that, but recognize that there's an entire field of Epistemology that is devoted to discussing this question and it contains finer distinctions than are here being produced. You want to debate history? Wonderful! By all means, but let's actually cite some primary texts and get our facts straight. Maybe we can go for the big one: Philosophy of Science! Excellent! Now let's read Stephen Jay Gould, Ian Barbour, Thomas Kuhn, and Karl Popper just to warm up.

Or not. What I'm not seeing is anyone actually telling me what claim or claims within ID are false. Instead people are confusing the message with the messenger, and that means it's just politics, not rational debate. If that's the case, then the critics offering that kind of criticism are simply asking us to substitute one dogma for another without argument. If that's the case, then recommend your views accordingly, but do not pretend that you've just taken any rational high ground.

If you (anyone really) would be so kind as to tell me what's wrong with the idea besides "it's not science" (which I answered in my first response to the effect that it has no bearing on whether it is teachable alongside science as part of the philosophy that underlies science since a materialist philosophy of science is being presently taught with it now) by actually producing some version of an accepted argument for it and showing the rest of us "non-rational poorly-educated over-zealous militant religious types" where it goes wrong, then maybe we could discuss this more intelligently.

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