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Are creationists collectively too poor to employ the future Galileo of creationist research?

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Boojatta Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Wed Oct-05-11 12:25 PM
Original message
Are creationists collectively too poor to employ the future Galileo of creationist research?
Edited on Wed Oct-05-11 12:34 PM by Boojatta
Or are they simply too narrow-minded?

Imagine the honor of supporting, and knowing that you supported, scientific research that will in future be recognized as stupendous!

Unfortunately, almost all opponents of evolution are convinced that the only place where original thinking can possibly flourish is in government-funded institutions. According to Ben Stein, those institutions are not willing to have their resources used to nurture an alternative to Darwinism.

There are many scientists, we interviewed, many, who have been expelled from their jobs, who have had their websites shut down, who have been denied grants, who have been denied tenure because they wanted to question the limits, the boundaries of Darwinism and the gaps in Darwinism, and they've been expelled, shut down. That's not how societies progress. Societies progress by asking questions and having freedom of speech and freedom of inquiry.

Source:
See link below for video


Private organizations that are explicitly in favor of creationism seem to have their own religious litmus tests. It would be a lucky coincidence if the future Galileo of creationism or intelligent design passed those tests. After all, as you can see Ben Stein saying in the video below, these are simply scientists. If their thinking drives them in new directions on scientific questions, then why would anyone expect them to be conformists when they think about religion?

You Tube video of Bein Stein being interviewed by Bill O'Reilly
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sakabatou Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Wed Oct-05-11 12:31 PM
Response to Original message
1. Stein was intellectually dishonest to the interviewees.
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Boojatta Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Wed Oct-05-11 01:03 PM
Response to Reply #1
2. Details, please!
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SheilaT Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Wed Oct-05-11 01:05 PM
Response to Original message
3. The claims that there are scientists out there
who are questioning Darwin are greatly overblown.

And show us the proof that websites have been shut down, funding denied. It's not happening on a large scale. Science works in a specific way, generally known as the Scientific method. It involves testing hypotheses, and refining, over time, what science knows.

Creationism starts with a set of "facts" and makes no effort to test them.

So the reality is, there is no Galileo of Creationism, because Creationism is a religious belief, pure and simple.
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Aerows Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Wed Oct-05-11 01:10 PM
Response to Reply #3
4. Exactly - creationism is the exact opposite of science
Science starts with a hypothesis, and then goes about proving that hypothesis.

Creationism starts with assumptions and then attempts to disprove disagreement with those assumptions with more assumptions that haven't been proven.

Interesting to me however, is that as anti-science as many on the religious right can be - anti-climate change, anti-evolution, you name it - they gleefully latch onto a scientific idea when it suits them. Specifically, the idea that life begins when a sperm is united with an ova. They don't doubt science for a moment on that one, since it suits their purposes of discouraging birth control and abortion.
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dmallind Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Wed Oct-05-11 03:40 PM
Response to Reply #3
7. Oh there are plenty
Darwin got a bunch of things wrong and left a number of gaps, as you would imagine from his limited data.

Scientists question the rate, the linearity, the paths and the relationships of change in species, and reasonably so.

But only a tiny fraction of life scientists, almost all of whom were religiously zealous and motivated before, during and after their educations, question the basic idea of natural selection.

And literally handsfull question the 100% rock-solid established fact of evolution itself - properly defined as the change in allele populations over time.

Sure it's easy to find a chemist or physiologist - scientists all - who has maintained the fundamentalist belief in creationism they had as a boy.

It's not even that hard to find a biologist who was motivated by that literalist inculcated faith to pursue his education in a vain attempt to vindicate it (cough..cough ...Behe).

What IS staggeringly difficult is to find someone with a serious postgraduate education in evolutionary biology who was convinced BY his deep study to accept the idea that all creatures were created in their current "kinds" ab nihilo.
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Boojatta Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Wed Oct-05-11 02:08 PM
Response to Original message
5. Kick
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Kurmudgeon Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Wed Oct-05-11 02:45 PM
Response to Original message
6. Evolution is part of God's Creation, so it shouldn't be an issue.
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darkstar3 Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Wed Oct-05-11 06:59 PM
Response to Reply #6
8. So, to be clear, do you believe that man was created in his current form?
Or do you believe that the entire creation story (both of them) from Genesis is a metaphor only?

(I know those are very different positions on the spectrum, but they are two of the most popular, so I started there.)
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cleanhippie Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Wed Oct-05-11 07:16 PM
Response to Reply #6
9. Do you think that making unsubstantiated assertions based on nothing are to be taken seriously?
Edited on Wed Oct-05-11 07:17 PM by cleanhippie
Or do you revel in irrelevancy?
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David Sky Donating Member (586 posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Wed Oct-05-11 10:45 PM
Response to Reply #6
10. I have a different take on comments like yours: such a broad statement
should require those God-believers who make statements like that to aggressively advocate for research to link the concepts of evolution with some scientific, peer-reviewed documentation for such statements.

I and many reasonable, and reasonably scientifically well-educated human beings on this planet would welcome of ANY and ALL proofs for such an assertion, and those who make such assertions should be advocating for the research grants, for the data collections, for the links to uncontested information which verifies such a premise.

To merely STATE that evolution exists is a simple conclusion to be drawn from the evidence readily available to any critical thinker on this planet. But to link that collection of evidence, data, and scientific theory and information to YOUR assertion that "Evolution is part of God's Creation"......without reference to any data or information, well, frankly, that's kind of unscientific, isn't it?
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Boojatta Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Wed Oct-05-11 11:15 PM
Response to Reply #10
11. If somebody calls you an open book ...
... I hope that you don't ask for evidence that paper is sewn into your spine.

If you sneeze and somebody says, "God bless you" ...

By writing so much in response to something so short and so open to interpretation, you might be inviting trolls to bait you.
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