Andy’s whereIstand Blog

What Adam says is true - scientists have better things to do than apply their method to religions, but religionists should probably also have better things to do than mess with the scientists, as the latest fossil evidence reported in the NYT suggests:

Scientists have discovered fossils of a 375-million-year-old fish, a large scaly creature not seen before, that they say is a long-sought missing link in the evolution of some fishes from water to a life walking on four limbs on land.

The skeletons have the fins, scales and other attributes of a giant fish, four to nine feet long. But on closer examination, the scientists found telling anatomical traits of a transitional creature, a fish that is still a fish but has changes that anticipate the emergence of land animals — and is thus a predecessor of amphibians, reptiles and dinosaurs, mammals and eventually humans.

In the fishes’ forward fins, the scientists found evidence of limbs in the making. There are the beginnings of digits, proto-wrists, elbows and shoulders. The fish also had a flat skull resembling a crocodile’s, a neck, ribs and other parts that were similar to four-legged land animals known as tetrapods.

Other scientists said that in addition to confirming elements of a major transition in evolution, the fossils were a powerful rebuttal to religious creationists, who have long argued that the absence of such transitional creatures are a serious weakness in Darwin’s theory.

The discovery team called the fossils the most compelling examples yet of an animal that was at the cusp of the fish-tetrapod transition.

Transitional creatures are all over the place; we’re all in transition, mutations are the only thing that keep life happening. Creationism is a story from literature, evolution is one from empirical evidence and theory - why these two should have any dialogue, I don’t know. Evolution doesn’t try to appear as literature nor scripture, neither should Creationism try to appear as science in the form of ID.

This has been Andy D.

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• adamelijah
• Does a belief in evolution necessarily contradict a belief in Creation?
• [Open Thread]

Getting beat up for Darwin - hot damn! I think if the Academic factory has anything boss going for it, besides over-charging students for increasingly under-valued educations, it’s that at least it remains one environment that ideas -however unpopular - should be able to flourish and fierce debate should find a safehaven. So when a teacher is censured and then subsequently physically attacked, I worry for the future just a little bit more:

A college professor who drew sharp criticism for comments deriding Christian fundamentalists over "intelligent design" said he was forced out as chairman of the university’s religious studies department.

Paul Mirecki, who remains a professor at the University of Kansas, said he had no choice when he signed the resignation letter, typed on stationary from the dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences.

"The University penalized me and denied me my Constitutionally protected right to speak and express my mind," he said in a written statement Friday for the Lawrence Journal-World. He said his career had been ruined and his speaking engagements canceled.

On Monday, Mirecki was treated at a Lawrence hospital for head injuries after he said he was beaten by two men on a country road. He said the men referred to the creationism course. Law enforcement officials were investigating.

Damn - you’d think he was insulting Scientology or something. I didn’t know ID commanded such thuggery. Let’s hope those black eyes don’t keep Mirecki talking sense.

This has been Andy D.

whereIstand Tags

• Does a belief in evolution necessarily contradict a belief in Creation?

I guess even Jesus needs a day off. Funny that "Megachurches" around the country would choose a Christmas that falls on a Sunday to tell people to stay home from their Jesusday festivities:

It is almost unheard of for a Christian church to cancel services on a Sunday, and opponents of the closures are accusing these congregations of bowing to secular culture.

"This is a consumer mentality at work: ‘Let’s not impose the church on people. Let’s not make church in any way inconvenient,’ " said David Wells, professor of history and systematic theology at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary, a leading evangelical school in Hamilton, Massachusetts.

"I think what this does is feed into the individualism that is found throughout American culture, where everyone does their own thing."

 

 

Everyone does their own thing. Ah yes - that explains the electoral process.

This has been Andy D. Melikalikimaka.

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• [Open Thread]

I really wish I had the wherewithal to do this when I was in school.

Bravo to the Atheist Agenda for at least stirring shit up. Respect for that. After all, what is Democracy without thorns?

This has been Andy D.

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• [Open Thread]

I wonder where the Vatican even gets the notion of the equivocation of homosexuality and pedophilia. They are two totally different creatures, two totally different manifestations of desire. From the NYT article "U.S. Catholics Are Divided Over New Directive on Gays:"

Grappling with the implications of a Vatican directive issued last week that would bar most gay men from seminaries, Roman Catholics at several parishes around the country yesterday offered sharply contrasting interpretations of its impact on the priesthood, on the potential for sex abuse by clergy members and on the church itself.

More than three dozen interviews at churches in Los Angeles and around Boston, Washington and Austin, Tex., underscored that Catholics were as divided as the rest of the country in their attitudes about gay men and lesbians. Roughly half the Catholics interviewed praised the Vatican document as upholding church teachings, which consider homosexuality "objectively disordered." But just as many parishioners criticized it as unfair to gay men, saying that a priest’s commitment to celibacy should be the issue, not his sexual orientation.

Similarly, some Catholics said that because the majority of victims in the scandals involving sexually abusive priests were boys, barring gay men from the priesthood would reduce the likelihood of such abuse in the future. But others said there was no link between homosexuality and pedophilia, especially many parishioners in Boston, an archdiocese profoundly affected by the sexual abuse scandal.

I mean both Freud and Foucault have tons to say about desire and repression of it - something about which Catholicism has a thing or two to say as well. Of course I don’t expect Catholicism to listen to modern philosophers or psychoanalysis (hell I don’t even listen to psychoanalysis), but I wonder what the progress was that lead to the conflation of homosexuality and pedophilia.

This has been Andy D.

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• [Open Thread]

Making fun of people who practically make fun of themselves is not fun, it’s just too easy. So that’s not what I’m doing with Pat Robertson; I’m just wondering how influential the 700 Club President really is and how reflective of the religious communities he supposedly represents are statements he makes not just about ID:

"I’d like to say to the good citizens of Dover: if there is a disaster in your area, don’t turn to God, you just rejected Him from your city"

but also all of these nuggets of Christian thought:

"Feminism encourages women to leave their husbands, kill their children, practice witchcraft, destroy capitalism and become lesbians." - 1992 GOP Convention

"I know this is painful for the ladies to hear, but if you get married, you have accepted the headship of a man, your husband. Christ is the head of the household and the husband is the head of the wife, and that’s the way it is, period."

"I think ‘one man, one vote,’ just unrestricted democracy, would not be wise. There needs to be some kind of protection for the minority which the white people represent now, a minority, and they need and have a right to demand a protection of their rights." (talking about apartheid in South Africa)

"New Orleans asked for this tragedy [Hurricane Katrina] by advertising itself as a destination for jazz music. As every Christian knows, jazz music is sinful and lures people into eternal damnation."

Now, I’m not a fan of jazz either, but come on! Maybe it’s this sentiment that reflects Donovan’s warning of alienating the religious right of this country, keeping all those other magical quotes overlooked:

"Just like what Nazi Germany did to the Jews, so liberal America is now doing to the evangelical Christians. It’s no different. It is the same thing. It is happening all over again. It is the Democratic Congress, the liberal-based media and the homosexuals who want to destroy the Christians. Wholesale abuse and discrimination and the worst bigotry directed toward any group in America today. More terrible than anything suffered by any minority in history."

Is this the statement that keeps the Club going? Maybe this guy is gone out of favor with the Christian Right, but he still keeps himself in the news.

This has been Andy D.

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• infocats1
• andrea
• JoeC
• nick
• Amir
• Lar
• Publius
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• Gab
• Donovan
• Does acceptance of evolution deny a belief in God?
• Should government funds be used for religious purposes?
• Should morality and religion play a role in the making of public policy?
• Are Democrats unfairly blocking President Bush’s nominations?
• What legal rights to a relationship of consenting adults should be available for same-sex couples?
• Should a woman in the first trimester have unrestricted legal access without exceptions to terminate her pregnancy?

There is nothing inherently wrong with teaching ID, but it is the placement of this theory that is the problem, that is political. It’s all about context.

I’m heartened by the magic of elections in Dover Pennsylvania. Never has anyone been so stoked about a small town’s school board - forget about Kansas, just look at the doods in the picture - they are sooo happy.

This has been Andy D.

whereIstand Tags

• Are there legitimate, scientific, and peer-reviewed “alternatives” to evolution?

So as I understand the ID reasoning now, as that dood on Tavis Smiley explains it:

The idea is that just as all things we see are designed, and designed proportional to their complexity, then so must the more advanced forms of life.

What I have yet to hear about is an accounting for the Darwinian principle of mutation-the generative force of change in evolution and the flaw of creationism. The experimental fact remains that mutation happens all the time, and its high incidence (99.9%) of being either negative or of negligible effect remains inexplicable - either, like all design, the only progress is made through trial and error (which natural selection then accounts for) but then this means that the design is flawed in its conceptualizing - not fitting for a god, maybe for an alien, but then who designed them? OR, they are indeed random.

Someone tell me how ID gets around this.

I also find Donovan reporting on this trial quite incredible.

This has been Andy D.

whereIstand Tags

• Donovan
• Does belief in Creationism or Intelligent Design (ID) contradict the acceptance of evolution?
• Should theories that no conceivable experiment can confirm be rejected outright?

What Nick says here:

One of my problems with religion is that it’s just too damned convenient. Every single civilization or even group of humans that has ever inhabited any part of the Earth has had a myth that explains how life came to be the way it was for them.

reflects something I’ve been formulating for some time now, since my days as a Anthro scholar. In studying other people we really learn more about ourselves, and if there is one characteristic of all humans it is that the last thing a person wants is to be ignorant. People use the word ignorant all the time. But what they usually mean is differentially informed, and what I am usually accused of after saying this is playing with semantics. Okay yes it may be semantics, but it is fairly true. I can’t believe I just used the T word.

But what I mean is that the first thing people do when they see something they don’t understand is try to understand it. This becomes their culture. A child asks their parent where people came from and the parents says, well long ago there was this garden…. or there was a god that crafted men from mud…. or well 4 billion years ago life began on earth as self-reproducing carbon compounds called proteins. Science is part of this. We sometimes forget that Science didn’t come from nowhere - it is a culturally specific invention, supporting a culturally-specific world view - decidedly modern and Western.

So yes, religion seems convenient, but so can Science. I mean in Science, a hypothesis is taken as true and becomes truer the more it is tested, but it starts as truth. Religion has only gained it’s legitimacy through years and years of believers saying it is true - a process that seems infinitely more difficult than starting with a truth. I mean Ancient Israelites had to fight the Assyrians and Babylonians for their little strip of land and for their little god Yahweh (later unnamed) besieged at all times by Marduk and Ishtar, not to mention the Egyptians. The religions of the book, have fought for their authority, and their claims are soaked with blood and history. This is why they deserve respect, but this is also why they will never convince me of their truth, and why I will continue to believe my very convenient Science - even if I don’t buy String Theory or even Black holes.

This has been Andy D.

whereIstand Tags

• nick
• Does a belief in evolution necessarily contradict a belief in Creation?

Of course not. All it denies is that sacred texts are to be taken literally, instead of literarily.

This has been Andy D.

whereIstand Tags

• Does acceptance of evolution deny a belief in God?