I am Abe Lincoln

I always think it's funny when people post their personality, by what kind of Christmas tree you are, or Hollywood celebrity, or maybe what kind of Irish paraphernalia you are. It amuses me, but then I want to know what kind of St. Patrick's Day paraphernalia I am too (I believe I am the green bowler hat), or who I was in High school... So, I take the tests too, but I don't like to let anyone else know. So, I'll admit I have also checked my personality on the basis of what kind of crappy Christmas gift I am, the type of food I am, and what kind of jack-o-lantern face I would have.

Well, just took a test that I actually liked, and agreed with the results. I took the "What Famous Leader are you?" test. I like the outcome, except the "assassination victim" part. I don't think I am famous enough to worry about something like that. (I am glad the personality test didn't deem me Adolph Hitler, Bill Clinton or Saddam Hussein)


What Famous Leader Are You?
personality tests by similarminds.com

One last thing

I'm working on a project for my evolution lab, and I stumbled across a creationist's website and I found this little bit on "Creation Science" funny.

"Creationism, also known as creation science, is the study of scientific evidence for the creation of life on earth by God. The courts have ruled that creationism cannot be taught in the public schools because creationism is religion and religion cannot be taught in the public schools. However, this conclusion depends on how creationism is taught. If creationism is taught in the proper way, it is not religious in nature." (emphasis added) This guy goes on to explain why it is not religious, but I think he's kind of digging himself in a hole here.


I don't know, to me teaching evidence of creation by a God seems religious to me, and I don't think you can ever get away from that being religious. My problem with teaching about the creation in the public classroom mostly stems from the fact that I wouldn't want to put my kids in a public classroom and have someone teach them religious ideas that do not concide with my own religious beliefs. I don't know who is making up all the drafts for creation science in the classroom, but I do know I don't go to their church. I don't know what kind of stuff their going to be putting in my kids heads. To top it all off, I have no problem with the way science is done today, I approve of teachers teaching science according to modern science's current views (which also happen to include the view that ID is not science).

Anyway, I hope I'm not burning you out, but I just think this is important, and people tend to treat this as if it's not a big deal when it really is.

I've been thinking about why Intelligent Design is so appealing to people. As we all know religion has been a target in the public schools for a long time. My brothers and sisters now have a "winter break" whereas when I was in grade school it was "Christmas break". They can't celebrate most holidays in school. There's no prayer, no pledge of allegiance, nothing to do with religion. So, the general Christian public is concerned, they want religion back in the school and for some ID looks like a good way to do it (and degrade evolution at the same time, 2-for-1).

Obviously the problem here is putting religion in the public school is unconstitutional. The only way I see to fix this problem is to put MORALITY back in the public schools. Teach students to have higher moral standards. Teach them to have respect, charity, humility, determination, tradition, etc.

Does anyone else have a solution? Or perhaps a way to implement putting morality back in the schools. Maybe the parents should be taught to have higher moral standards, or taught how to get their kids to have higher standards. Now I'm just rambling... what do you think?

Matt and I went to the Tulip Festival at the Thanksgiving Point Gardens a few weekends ago. I thought I'd put up a few photos. Matt took tons of photos (111 total), it was beautiful and sunny and warmy.


I'm a tulip! Oh I mean I'm hiding behind the tulips. (and don't I look amazing in those shades)


Here's Mattie and me with some more tulips and an old lady too.

Well after a 4-week hiatus, I'm back and back with more fascinating evolution and religion information! Yay! So, let's dive in then.

I want to talk about my feelings on why I disagree with Intelligent Design, and do not want it taught in the public classroom. I have a lot of things I want to say though, and I'm not really good at organizing my thoughts into a cohesive unit (unless I'm getting graded on it) so bare with me (unless you don't want to, in which case you are going to be missing out).

Intelligent Design formerly known as Scientific Creationism (they cleverly left out the word creationism so that people won't know they're trying to put creationism in the schools) is something that has been around since Darwin first published his The Origin of Species. In the US, in 1925, Creationists won their first battle in Tennessee, where a law was passed that outlawed the teaching of evolution in public schools. Since then states throughout the US have been trying to pass similar laws, and now we are seeing several states bringing the "new" idea of Intelligent Design to their legislature.

According to Sir Francis Bacon their are preconceived ideas that man must fight off in order to accurately interpret observations; he called these ideas idols. The Idols of the Marketplace are the semantic problems that occur when people try to communicate and use words differently. This is largely the case with evolutionists and Creationists. For a scientist the Theory of Evolution is irrefutable fact, while a Creationist would say "it's just a theory". The problem is in the scientific world the word theory has a different meaning than in every day language. A Creationist will argue that the theory of evolution shouldn't be in the classroom because it is just a theory and scientists argue about its factuality. To a scientist the word theory is structures of ideas that explain and interpret fact. So the process of evolution is fact (something that scientists do not argue about) the mechanism for the process of evolution is not set in stone (it is this that scientists are trying to figure out and are "arguing" about). This is much like Newton's gravity and Einstein's theory of gravitation, Einstein didn't argue that Newton's idea of gravity was wrong (because it is a fact that gravity is real and occurs) he simply found a possible mechanism for how gravity occurred. Anyway the point of this was to say that when a Creationist says that evolution is not agreed upon by scientists and it is just a theory, now you know what's really going on in the scientific world. There is no reason to throw a scientific fact out of the classroom, if you want to throw out the Theory of evolution as just a theory then you'll have to throw out all the rest of science with it.

All right secondly, Intelligent Design is not science. Creationists are trying to get Intelligent Design into the public school under the guise that it is a science. Science is something that can be tested, it is something that can be made falsifiable. Intelligent Design states that science can't explain the supernatural and so there has to be a Designer who created these things that science can't explain. The Creationist Duane Gish says it best. "We do not know how the Creator created, what processes He used, for He used processes which are now not operating anywhere in the natural universe. This is why we refer to creation as special creation. We cannot discover by scientific investigations anything about the creative processes used by the Creator." So Intelligent Designers also known as Creationists admit that there are no possible tests that can be done to confirm Intelligent Design as a science. I really can't see why that would be allowed in a classroom of any kind. It's basically a Creationist's doctrine that their trying to force on unsuspecting students. Let the Creationists spread their doctrine in their own churches to their own congregations.

(I would call myself a creationist, but I don't like the connotation that goes along with it. So I can simply say that I believe their is a God and that through His own means (yes, it could be evolution, some other scientific possibility yet to be discovered, or something else entirely) He organized this earth and the beings on it. I don't believe God is trying to confuse us, if something is scientifically proven to be true I believe that it was intended that way because of the laws that rule the universe and the laws that govern our existence.)


(I had help from my good friends John A. Moore in Science as a Way of Knowing: the foundations of modern biology, and Stephen J. Gould in Science and Its Ways of Knowing: Evolution as Fact and Thoery.)


 

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