Congrats, Tony.
Archives for May 2005
Evolution Vs. Intelligent Design
Bob Novak, on Crossfire:
Why don’t we teach evolution and intelligent design and let students figure it out on their own?
The response from an unknown God-hating scientist:
Fine. Why don’t we teach students the South won the civil war and let them figure it out on their own? Why don’t we teach students that the moon is made of green cheese and let the students figure it out on their own.
Meanwhile, in bizarro land, Terry Jeffrey is advocating that belief in objective truth requires that you believe in intelligent design. This would make a great SNL skit, except you can’t parody these guys.
From the new evolution trials in Kansas:
Charles Thaxton, who lives near Atlanta but is a visiting assistant professor of chemistry at the Charles University in the Czech Republic, also presented another key criticism of evolution. He testified that there’s no evidence that life formed from a primordial soup.
Irigonegaray asked Thaxton whether he accepted the theory that humans and apes had a common ancestor.
“Personally, I do not,” he said. “I’m not an expert on this. I don’t study this.”
Insert your own quip, and then just go here.
At some point, people are going to recognize that faith is not a very useful building block for a logical syllogism or a good foundation for scientific inquiry. A belief in evolution does not preclude faith in God. On the other hand, teaching creationism does do damage to science.
*** Update ***
A great piece on NPR on what is really going on in Kansas.
Also, for the sake of my sanity, please use this glossary before using the terms ‘theory’ or ‘fact’ or ‘law.’ Or read this, most notably this:
A scientific theory or law represents an hypothesis, or a group of related hypotheses, which has been confirmed through repeated experimental tests. Theories in physics are often formulated in terms of a few concepts and equations, which are identified with “laws of nature,” suggesting their universal applicability. Accepted scientific theories and laws become part of our understanding of the universe and the basis for exploring less well-understood areas of knowledge. Theories are not easily discarded; new discoveries are first assumed to fit into the existing theoretical framework. It is only when, after repeated experimental tests, the new phenomenon cannot be accommodated that scientists seriously question the theory and attempt to modify it. The validity that we attach to scientific theories as representing realities of the physical world is to be contrasted with the facile invalidation implied by the expression, “It’s only a theory.” For example, it is unlikely that a person will step off a tall building on the assumption that they will not fall, because “Gravity is only a theory.”
*** Update **
See also this and this (via Have Coffee Will Write.
This isn’t real), but it sums up my opinion of people peddling IT and Creationism:
While that isn’t real, it is important to recognize that Creationists ARE attacking the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics:
Creationism would replace mathematics with metaphors. Metaphors may or may not serve to illustrate a fact, but they are not the fact itself. One thing is certain: metaphors are completely useless when it comes to the thermodynamics of calculating the efficiency of a heat engine, or the entropy change of free expansion of a gas, or the power required to operate a compressor. This can only be done with mathematics, not metaphors. Creationists have created a “voodoo” thermodynamics based solely on metaphors. This in order to convince those not familiar with real thermodynamics that their sectarian religious views have scientific validity.
A Real Winner
Oliver has finally found a Democratic candidate that he thinks will be a winner for 2006.
The candidate, of course, is John Doe.
Which, I guess, when you stop giggling, makes sense, considering an “unnamed Democrat” was running neck and neck with Bush in 2003.
In all seriousness, if Democrats want a path to victory, they should really be looking at people like the Democratic Governor of my state, Joe Manchin, who I will probably vote for again in 2008. I am a little upset about the cave in to the insurance industry, though.
*** Update ***
For those of you who do not know what the insurance cave-in was, our legislature just passed a bill (signed by Manchin) that ended third-party bad-faith lawsuits, which, I agree, are a problem because they lead to additional lawsuits, fraud, increased premiums. At the same time, there has to be some way to address comapnies who do deal in bad faith. A lose/lose all around.
Hitchens and Will
Christopher Hitchens in the Opinion Journal:
At least two important conservative thinkers, Ayn Rand and Leo Strauss, were unbelievers or nonbelievers and in any case contemptuous of Christianity. I have my own differences with both of these savants, but is the Republican Party really prepared to disown such modern intellectuals as it can claim, in favor of a shallow, demagogic and above all sectarian religiosity?
Perhaps one could phrase the same question in two further ways. At the last election, the GOP succeeded in increasing its vote among American Jews by an estimated five percentage points. Does it propose to welcome these new adherents or sympathizers by yelling in the tones of that great Democrat bigmouth William Jennings Bryan? By insisting that evolution is “only a theory”? By demanding biblical literalism and by proclaiming that the Messiah has already shown himself? If so, it will deserve the punishment for hubris that is already coming its way. (The punishment, in other words, that Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson believed had struck America on Sept. 11, 2001. How can it be that such grotesque characters, calling down divine revenge on the workers in the World Trade Center, are allowed a respectful hearing, or a hearing at all, among patriotic Republicans?)
Hitchens nails the sectarian nature of this recent assault on the country from the whacky and out of control religious right. Once more- this is not about religion, per se. This is about people trying to push their religion on everyone else.
George Will, in the Washington Post:
The state of America’s political discourse is such that the president has felt it necessary to declare that unbelievers can be good Americans. In last week’s prime-time news conference, he said: “If you choose not to worship, you’re equally as patriotic as somebody who does worship.”
So Mark Twain, Oliver Wendell Holmes and a long, luminous list of other skeptics can be spared the posthumous ignominy of being stricken from the rolls of exemplary Americans. And almost 30 million living Americans welcomed that presidential benediction…
Some Christians should practice the magnanimity of the strong rather than cultivate the grievances of the weak. But many Christians are joining today’s scramble for the status of victims. There is much lamentation about various “assaults” on “people of faith.” Christians are indeed experiencing some petty insults and indignities concerning things such as restrictions on school Christmas observances. But their persecution complex is unbecoming because it is unrealistic…
Unbelievers should not cavil about this acknowledgment of majority sensibilities. But Republicans should not seem to require, de facto, what the Constitution forbids, de jure: “No religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust.”
Why does George Will hate the baby Jesus? Compare these two pieces with this montage of excuses and claims of victim status for evangelicals.
*** Update ***
Jeebus- Great minds think alike.
Shorter David Brooks
This column by David Brooks is a real clunker:
Abraham Lincoln gathered his cabinet to tell them he was going to issue the Emancipation Proclamation. He said he had made a solemn vow to the Almighty that if God gave him victory at Antietam, Lincoln would issue the decree.
Lincoln’s colleagues were stunned. They were not used to his basing policy on promises made to the Lord. They asked him to repeat what he’d just said. Lincoln conceded that “this might seem strange,” but “God had decided the question in favor of the slaves…”
One lesson we can learn from Lincoln is that there is no one vocabulary we can use to settle great issues. There is the secular vocabulary and the sacred vocabulary. Whether the A.C.L.U. likes it or not, both are legitimate parts of the discussion.
Another is that while the evangelical tradition is deeply consistent with the American creed, sometimes evangelical causes can overflow the banks defined by our founding documents. I believe the social conservatives’ attempt to end the judicial filibuster is one of these cases.
Shorter David Brooks: If you oppose the end of the filibuster in judicial nominations, you probably would have opposed the Emancipation Proclamation.
The debate at hand is not religion, per se. What is being debated is the role of a narrow view of religion in shaping and creating public policy. This is a sectarian battle for primacy and domination over others who believe differently before it is a battle over those who do not believe at all. No one debates that religion has a role in society- it does, and it should. What I oppose is a specific brand of religion flexing its muscles and telling everybody else what to do with the force of law.
And comparisons between the lunatics who represent their narrow brand of Christianity through Dobson, Terry, Robertson and Falwell and the broad ecumenical message and non-sectarian forces who struggled to end slavery and segregation just pisses me off. Trying to pretend that the message advanced by liberal Quakers and Jews and Martin Luther King and others is the same as the bitter, exclusionary, and bigoted sectarian nonsense being advanced by Focus on the Family just infuriates me and defies logic and history.
A Home Run
This op-ed piece in the NY Times is a home run about who is actually to blame for the steroid scandal:
The obvious villains in this whole mess would seem to be those players who are believed to have taken steroids. Mark McGwire and Barry Bonds have become household names of disrepute, and some baseball fans are suggesting that any home run records they have should also carry an asterisk as simple as it is humiliating:
*Steroid Aided.
But the true villains are baseball’s owners, greedy and feckless throughout the game’s history, and in the case of this latest mess, guilty of cynically jettisoning the game’s subtlety and complexity to turn it into a slugfest circus – home-run madness passed off as baseball. Regardless of who knew what when, steroids helped to advance that master plan.
In comments made in the shadow of the Congressional hearings last March on steroid use in baseball, Mr. Selig insisted that owners did not look the other way during the past 10 years. “It’s easy to look back and rewrite history,” he said. “People can say that we knew, but I’d like to know on what basis. There certainly is no medical evidence. There was no testing.”
It’s a pathetic argument. There was no testing because, well, contrary to other pro sports, there was no testing. The National Football League began testing for steroids in 1987. The National Basketball Association started testing in 1998. But up until 2003, Major League Baseball had no testing.
But the see-no-evil defense just doesn’t wash. It doesn’t wash given the owners’ lack of vigilance when it has come to other substances that have harmed the game – alcohol, cocaine and amphetamines. It doesn’t wash when as far back as 1988, the name of Jose Canseco came up in connection with steroid use on national television before Game 1 of the World Series.
It doesn’t wash given that the longest-running manager in baseball, the St. Louis Cardinals’ Tony La Russa, has recently said that steroids were prevalent in the game in the 1990’s. It doesn’t wash given that any owner, even from the padded plush of his luxury box, could look onto the field and see an increasing number of players in the 1990’s so bloated they’d explode if pricked with a pin. Most telling, it doesn’t wash given the aberrational increase in home runs over the past decade.
Owners can attribute the lack of testing to the admittedly difficult players’ union. Or they can cling to ignorance, the de facto policy they adopted of “don’t ask, don’t tell, don’t test.” But far from being unsettled by possible steroid use, because they clearly weren’t, baseball’s kings may instead have privately celebrated performance-enhancing drugs, seeing the bulking up of players as an essential component of their effort to rekindle public enthusiasm for the game that they feared had been lost.
The players who used steroids may have broken laws regarding the use of steroids, but they DID NOT CHEAT. It simply was not against the rules of baseball to use steroids, and that is because the owners needed the long ball to sell tickets. I wish people would shut up about McGwire and Bonds. Bud Selig and his gang of misfits are to blame. They created the situation, they rewarded the behavior (with lucrative contracts), and they refused to set standards and test. They are to blame.
Thg British Elections
The Instapundit today revisits ann old prediction of his:
If Blair loses or does badly, the press will say that the election was a referendum on the Iraq war and Bush. If Blair does better than expected, the press will say that the election was about local issues of no greater significance. (Either way, resentment of the Blair government’s position on the EU and immigration will be largely ignored.)
Maybe. But two quick things:
1.) The outcome is a win-win for Bush. If Blair wins, the opposition will finally put to bed the Iraq war as a weapon, and Bush retains his strongest ally in Iraq. If Blair loses, Bush has an ally in the Tories on virtually every other issue.
2>) To date, despite all the rancor in the media about opposition to the war, in the big three, no one has paid a price, at least not at the election booth. Bush was re-elected and increased his margin of victory. John Howard, who is really Bush’s soulmate, was elected in Australia. And I see nothing that tells me Blair will not be re-elected today.