Religion & Law

Barely Armed

Posted on April 13, 2009
Timothy Sandefur is at The Panda's Thumb/Freespace spanking Dr. Michael Egnor for his latest (successful) attempt to make a fool of himself, not least over his continuing habit of outright lies.But his other constant habit is making statements of illogic so truly breathtaking as to leave you gasping...

Found in the Warren

Posted on April 12, 2009
Here's a perfect note for this day of egg-bearing Leporidae.The University of Cambridge's zoology museum has come across a long-forgotten egg that Charles Darwin collected during his famous voyage on the Beagle. The 4.7-centimeter-long egg (left), from a partridge-like bird, is cracked: "The great man put it into too small a box, and hence its unhappy state," according to records found with it...

A Tree Grows in Australia

Posted on April 11, 2009
John Wilkins has a post on the origin of tree diagrams in taxonomy. As John notes:According to the received history, tree diagrams were either entirely new with Darwin or go back to Aristotle, depending on how you define things.John discusses an example by the German naturalist, Peter Simon Pallas, in his Elenchus Zoophytorum (1766)...

Theocratic Marriage

Posted on April 11, 2009
Ed Brayton, at Dispatches From the Culture Wars, takes Maggie Gallagher of National Review to task over her defense of opposition to gay marriage. In particular, Gallagher tries to avoid the comparison between resistance to gay marriage and anti-miscegenation laws:Same-sex marriage is quite different from bans on interracial marriage in one powerful respect: It asks religious Americans to surrender a core belief -- not only Leviticus (disapproval of gay sexual acts), but Genesis (the idea that God himself made man as male and female and commanded men and women to come together in a special way to image the fruitfulness of God)...

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109 Lives

Posted on April 10, 2009
A thought:America has long stood out among developed countries for its religiosity. This has less to do with innate godliness than with the free market created by the First Amendment. Pre-Revolutionary America was not that religious, because the original Puritans were swamped by less wholesome adventurers -- in Salem, Mass...

Right and Righter

Posted on April 09, 2009
Harry Collins, director of the Centre for the Study of Knowledge Expertise Science at Cardiff University, had an essay in Nature decrying post-modernist and social constructivist criticisms of science. Collins himself had "contributed" to that criticism by "demonstrat[ing] that scientists could not always check a result by simply repeating it...

Paper Philosophy

Posted on April 08, 2009
Boy, some people can certainly do more with less!David Brooks wrote an article in the New York Times of a mere 808 words that has certainly triggered a lot more in response. It didn't help that an editor slapped the title "The End of Philosophy" on it...

Say What?

Posted on April 07, 2009
Oklahoma State Representative Todd Thomsen is the ... not to put too fine a point on it ... buffoon who filed a resolution in the House opposing the invitation to Richard Dawkins to speak at the University of Oklahoma. He's followed up that performance with this:Thomsen said he wrote the resolution because he felt he had a responsibility to his constituents to share his opinion as a state representative...

Boogie Insights

Posted on April 06, 2009
Well, well ...I should have known. Atheism is all about sex ... at least according to Dinesh D'Souza:If you really look at the motivations of contemporary atheists, you'll find that they don't even really reject Christian theology. It's not as if the atheist objects to the resurrection or the parting of the sea; rather, it is Christian morality to which atheists object, particularly Christian moral prohibitions in the area of sex...

Coming in Second

Posted on April 06, 2009
Well, Ben Stein has landed a gig for graduation season.You may remember that Stein had been invited to be the commencement speaker at the University of Vermont but backed out (with or without encouragement from the University's president) when the proverbial excrement hit the air movement apparatus...

Go Up Upon the Mountain

Posted on April 05, 2009
Eric Rothschild is a prophet.But before we get to that, let's hear from some people who have become experts in Intelligent Design Creationism about their take on the new Texas science standards:Steve Stough was one of 11 parents who sued the Dover Area School District in 2004 after it required that ID be mentioned in high school biology class as "an explanation of the origin of life that differs from Darwin's view" and recommending the cdesign proponentsists "textbook," Of Pandas and People...

Bulwark

Posted on April 04, 2009
Okay, I'm officially embarrassed.It's one thing to have Massachusetts, California, New Jersey and Connecticut show up New York State's judiciary as backwards and unenlightened on the issue of gay marriage ... but when Iowa does it, I just about have to hide my face...

Give That Man a Star

Posted on April 04, 2009
Brian Warren is a self-described "government employee" in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. He has some pithy things to say about ID in a Letter to the Editor that are worth repeating:ID's only research agenda is to attempt to undermine the teaching of evolutionary theory by distorting both the quantity and substance of the evidence that it explains; it doesn't generate new avenues of research, and in the end the answer to any question is: "We don't know, so stop trying to find out and insert God here...

Not All Oldies Are Goodies

Posted on April 03, 2009
Intelligent Design advocates like to pretend that ID is "cutting edge" science, while "Darwinism" is worn out 19th Century thinking. It doesn't take much digging into ID, however, to realize that it is based, on William Paley's watch analogy, merely dressed up in new clothes, and that even Michael Behe's "irreducible complexity" was already an old idea, argued by Georges Cuvier, when Darwin penned the Origin...

Condemned to Repeat It

Posted on April 02, 2009
The Nation has a reprint of an article By Rollin Lynde Hartt from July 22, 1925, entitled "Scopes Trial: What Lies Beyond Dayton."Nothing about America is more curious than its choice of fears. With the utmost ease any impostor can convince America that Jews are about to control us, though there are hardly three million Jews in the entire country...

Free Press

Posted on April 01, 2009
The Associated Baptist Press has a perhaps surprisingly fair article on the recent Texas science standards kerfuffle by its managing editor and Washington bureau chief, Robert Marus, starting off with its (correct) comparison of "literal "young-Earth" creationism and its close relative, intelligent-design theory...

Pedagogical Malpractice

Posted on April 01, 2009
Nouse, the student newspaper of the University of York, has an interview with Steve Fuller who has become, as the article put it, an "apologist for intelligent design theory." Some bits and pieces:Fuller is not motivated by any personal religious beliefs; he is motivated by a desire to improve the teaching of science which he thinks is impossible without a consideration of intelligent design theory...

Turning Blue

Posted on March 31, 2009
Ooh! Ooh!Anika Smith, the tankwoman in pink of the Discovery Institute is all excited that a Harvard professor has criticized evolutionary theory.The fact that it is a professor of government, Harvey Mansfield, who has his own little problems with reality (having greeted Sarah Palin's choice as the anchor tied around John McCain's neck with "modified rapture" and having argued for a "mild affirmative action" for conservative professors at Harvard) doesn't bother her one bit...

The Wages of Stupidity

Posted on March 30, 2009
Ed Brayton has already mentioned that a federal judge has ordered McCreary and Pulaski counties in Kentucky to pay the legal fees to the ACLU, after it won a case that went all the way to the Supreme Court in 2005.The counties have been represented throughout by the ridiculous Matt Staver, founder of Liberty Counsel and dean of the law school of the equally ridiculous Liberty University...

Carnival of the Elitist Bastards XI

Posted on March 30, 2009
The eleventh Carnival of the Elitist Bastards is up and about at It's the Thought that Counts.While the standard for being an elitist bastard has never been what it might sound like to those who do not aspire to the title, it's sad how low the bar has fallen in this country, as shown by this1:A close relative of mine was telling me a story about the place she worked recently...

A Sign of the Times

Posted on March 30, 2009
There is a nice editorial about the recent battle in Texas in the Grey Lady:This was not a straightforward battle over whether to include creationism or its close cousin, intelligent design, in the science curriculum. That battle has been lost by Darwin's opponents in the courts, the schools and most political arenas...

Publishing World Agog

Posted on March 30, 2009
John Wilkins, the relentlessly antipodian philosopher of science and world-famous punster, has his book, Species: A History of the Idea, on the veritable verge of publication.The complex idea of "species" has evolved over time, yet its meaning is far from resolved...

Dumb, Dumber, Dumbest

Posted on March 30, 2009
.Here I was just saying "stupid is as stupid does" and YouTube pokes its head up and suspends the account of the James Randi Educational Foundation!Go here and follow the instructions to protest and help make this video go viral. PZ also has suggestions, namely, maybe it's time to avoid YouTube and look for substitutes...

Why Politicians and Education Don't Mix

Posted on March 29, 2009
Here is Don McLeroy on "stasis" and "sudden appearance" in the fossil record during his "impassioned plea" to keep his amendment to the Texas science standards, which read: "analyze and evaluate the sufficiency or insufficiency of common ancestry to explain the sudden appearance, stasis, and sequential nature of groups in the fossil record":It's so scientific...

Forlorn

Posted on March 29, 2009
In the category of things you never wished for and may not want:In what one might call a biblical move, Christian philanthropist Howard Ahmanson -- one of three major funders of the campaign for California's Proposition 8, which banned same-sex marriages -- has abandoned the GOP for the Democratic Party...

Hamming It Up

Posted on March 28, 2009
I noted before the hypocrisy of Ken Ham complaining about one of his minions being "ambushed" by an expected radio interview supposedly being changed without warning into a debate with a creationism critic. Michael Zimmerman, head of the Clergy Letter Project, recounted Ham participating in just such an ambush of Professor Zimmerman with the added bonus of Zimmerman being told that a minor deception of this sort was acceptable in order to further God's wishes...

Hitchens Your Wagon

Posted on March 28, 2009
Christopher Hitchens is in Newsweek with might be called A Modest Proposal to resolve the "teach the controversy" dispute:I certainly do not want it said that my side denies a hearing to the opposing one. In the spirit of compromise, then, I propose the following...

Understanding Creationists

Posted on March 28, 2009
Jeremy Mohn at stand up for REAL science has an amusing discovery: Don McLeroy admitted yesterday that he didn't read all those books by "Darwinists" that he has been quoting lately, despite having said that that reading books about evolution was one of his hobbies and that he had been checking out three books a week on the topic of evolution from his local public library!So, basically, in the creationist lexicon, checking out books on the topic of evolution amounts to hunting through the library for works by creationists who quote mine snippets from actual books on evolution?Who woudda thunk it? ...

Movin' On

Posted on March 28, 2009
With Texas out of the limelight for a while (there is still that bill in the Texas legislature to restore the "strengths and weaknesses" language to the science standards) our nation turns its lonely eyes, not to Joe DiMaggio, but to Florida for its next dose of dimwittery...

It Could Have Been Worse

Posted on March 27, 2009
Much worse in fact. The "strengths and weaknesses" language is out of the Texas science standards. Moreover, Don McLeroy's amendment from January, which read:... "analyze and evaluate the sufficiency or insufficiency of common ancestry to explain the sudden appearance, stasis, and sequential nature of groups in the fossil record" ...

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