Uncommon Descent Serving The Intelligent Design Community
Category

Academic Freedom

The Reasonableness of God as World-root Being, the IS that grounds OUGHT and Cosmos-Architect

The core challenge being addressed (as we respond to abuse of a critical thinking curriculum)  is the notion that belief in the reality of God is a culturally induced, poorly grounded commonplace notion. An easily dismissed cultural myth or prejudice, in short. Let us remind ourselves of the curriculum content used by teachers in a district in Texas until protest led to removal of the focal question: Having: shown that such belief is deeply rooted in key, serious thought (also note vids 1: Kreeft, 2: Zacharias, 3: Craig, also 4: Stroebel on Jesus), (exposing the flying spaghetti monster parody as strawman fallacy) and noting (cf here in op and here as a comment)  how it underpins the moral fabric of Read More ›

FYI-FTR: The self-falsification of evolutionary materialist scientism

In further addressing the curriculum abuse that sought to induce twelve year olds to imagine that belief in God is little more than a culturally induced ill-supported notion, it is critical to address the favoured ideology, evolutionary materialist scientism and/or its fellow travellers. For, never mind the lab coat clad magisterium, evolutionism is self-referentially incoherent and self falsifying. Advocates or adherents and fellow travellers of such materialistic scientism will typically try to dismiss, distract from or refuse to face this, but it is absolutely pivotal and utterly decisive. So, let us inform ourselves and our children for record. Craig, as a first point of reference, presents a useful talk: [youtube byN38dyZb-k] An excellent recent summary of this comes from Nancy Read More ›

FYI-FTR: Addressing the Flying Spaghetti Monster (FSM) parody on the Idea of God in Philosophy of Religion and Systematic Theology

As just noted, a discussion thread on responding to abuse of the privilege of developing and implementing curriculum has been trollishly hijacked in what looks like an escalation of the tactics coming from a circle of objector sites. At the end, on a topic dealing with 12 year olds, sexually tinged vulgarity has been injected by word plays on a participant’s handle in an attempt to trigger a spiral to the gutter. That is the sort of ruthless nihilistic amorality and domineering disrespect we have been seeing in answer to exposure and correction of patent education abuse — of 12 year olds in Critical Thinking class . . . as in: pretending and trying to enforce under colour of education Read More ›

Is the view that there is a God little more than a poorly supported, culturally induced commonplace notion?

Yesterday, I highlighted a case in Texas in which a School-level Critical Thinking Curriculum has been manipulated to set an assignment (in a section for 20 points) gives a question requiring the answer that “There is a God” is not fact or credible view but a cultural commonplace, poorly supported and dubious assertion that apparently students felt was effectively equivalent to “myth.” Documents: Today, we need to begin to address this attempt to discredit ethical theism under colours of education. At first level, ethical theism is foundational to the charter of modern Constitutional Democracy, the US Declaration of Independence, 1776. Something that can and should be memorised by school students (and which it would be difficult indeed for educators or Read More ›

Irreducible Complexity: the primordial condition of biology

In 1996, Lehigh University professor of biochemistry, Michael Behe, published his first book Darwin’s Black Box, which famously advanced the concept of irreducible complexity (IC) to prominent status in the conversation of design in biology. In his book, Professor Behe described irreducible complexity as: A single system which is composed of several interacting parts that contribute to the basic function, and where the removal of any one of the parts causes the system to effectively cease functioning. In illustrating his point, Behe used the idea of a simple mousetrap — with its base and spring and holding bar — as an example of an IC system, where the removal of any of these parts would render the mousetrap incapable of its Read More ›

Grade VII classroom, TX: Is God real — fact, opinion, myth, common (but questionable ) view

Here (make sure to watch the embedded Fox26 video which I doubt I can embed at UD). Is it reasonable to be putting such a question to 12 year old students in class? (And if you think this was just one teacher, note how it came up the next day in other classes and in multiple classes on the day in question; somebody with responsibility wrote this into a curriculum with intent to create the view that per critical thinking, belief in God is little more than a widely believed, religiously backed [itself a loaded issue] questionable opinion with little warrant.) Is the view that God is real merely a religious belief with no serious weight of evidence or argument? Read More ›

Physicist Brian Cox targeted over free speech?

Readers recall Brit physicist/TV presenter Brian Cox? You know, ”multiverse/“many worlds” makes sense“ and all that? Rumour has it that he became something of a target this year. A reader sends: Laughably, Prof. Brian Cox – a household name in Britain in science-communication – was attacked for having the ‘wrong’ wife. Not so laughable at all though was the large-scale harassment directed against him by flamers. They also mounted a major campaign of harassment against another person who is also a household name in Britain for science-communication, Prof. Mary Beard. The personal attacks upon Cox about his wife were in the course of Cox’ having tweeted in mild, polite support of an open letter in favour of free-speech. Though Brian Read More ›

Off topic and unbelievable: A U prez who is NOT running a daycare

From Dr. Everett Piper, President, Oklahoma Wesleyan University: This past week, I actually had a student come forward after a university chapel service and complain because he felt “victimized” by a sermon on the topic of 1 Corinthians 13. It appears that this young scholar felt offended because a homily on love made him feel bad for not showing love! In his mind, the speaker was wrong for making him, and his peers, feel uncomfortable. I’m not making this up. Our culture has actually taught our kids to be this self-absorbed and narcissistic! Any time their feelings are hurt, they are the victims! Anyone who dares challenge them and, thus, makes them “feel bad” about themselves, is a “hater,” a Read More ›

More light shed on why Darwinism hard to dislodge

Over at The Best Schools, James Barham introduces an updated preface by Pierre van den Berghe, author of an older classsic on the ways academic life subverts honest enquiry: 1. Perhaps the most glaring change facing job-seeking PhD holders is a sharp deterioration in career opportunities and employment conditions. A glut of PhDs in many fields produced a shift from a seller’s to a buyer’s market. When AG appeared in 1970, US academia was approaching the end of its enormous expansion, becoming the juggernaut of world higher education. PhD production continued unabated, but job numbers stagnated or even contracted. Colleges and universities began to restrict tenure-track positions, and created a rapidly growing, semi-nomadic proletariat of instructors and lecturers on one-year, Read More ›

Dawkins and Maher on intellectual freedom

Here: Dawkins worries about the way US university campuses are becoming places for unlearning liberty. Well yes, but neither Dawkins nor Maher seems able or willing to understand that progressivism is not about liberty; it is about control of an increasingly subject and dependent population. They congratulate themselves on being “liberals,” but might find out the hard way that progressives are not liberals in any classical sense. Note:  I was originally alerted to this item by a friend who noted, in what may have been an earlier version of the clip (I saw it), that they started by focusing on how wrong the idea of design in nature is.  Can’t currently find that version at Mediaite.  

Group thought, aka sheep on steroids

From the National Association of Scholars: The Pressure of Group Thought Academic “consensus” is in the news. Stetson University professor of psychology Christopher Ferguson, writing in the Chronicle of Higher Education, recently gave a run-down on how the American Psychological Association supposedly compromised itself by manipulating a task force into endorsing harsh interrogations of prisoners. Ferguson says the APA “crafted a corrupted ‘consensus’ by excluding those who might disagree.” Ahem. Never mind “disagree.” What if most of the evidence fails to support a politically crafted “consensus,” often enforced from the bench? Cf Darwin in the schools. The left today is infatuated with “consensus” as a tool that can be used to ostracize views it would rather not have to debate. Read More ›

Roll dice twice, see what turns up

Interesting new approach to evolution studies: Rolling the Dice Twice: Evolving Reconstructed Ancient Proteins in Extant Organisms (Betul Kacar) Scientists have access to artifacts of evolutionary history (namely, the fossil record and genomic sequences of living organisms) but they have limited means with which to infer the exact evolutionary events that occurred to produce today s living world. An intriguing question to arise from this historical limitation is whether the evolutionary paths of organisms are dominated by internal or external controlled processes (i.e., Life as a factory) or whether they are inherently random and subject to completely different outcomes if repeated under identical conditions (i.e., Life as a casino parlor). Two experimental approaches, ancestral sequence reconstruction and experimental evolution with microorganisms, Read More ›

Prof opposes “infantizing” college students, but…

… it turns out that he mainly means the ones from religious families: TPP’s basic philosophy was that while you are entitled to your beliefs you are not entitled to avoid discomforting or contradictory ideas, you are not entitled to a free-pass when it comes to a critical analysis of beliefs like yours (individuals were never picked on). After all this is about education. These days parents and students still want the higher education passport, a degree, to jobs and careers, but the current attitude is that when parents present you with a narrow-minded, anti-science, parochial, self-satisified, entitled little twerp, the twerp is to be returned in the same condition, which seems totally antithetic to higher education. Apparently though business Read More ›

How trigger warnings are hurting mental health on campus

From the Atlantic: The Coddling of the American Mind In the name of emotional well-being, college students are increasingly demanding protection from words and ideas they don’t like. Here’s why that’s disastrous for education—and mental health. … Some recent campus actions border on the surreal. In April, at Brandeis University, the Asian American student association sought to raise awareness of microaggressions against Asians through an installation on the steps of an academic hall. The installation gave examples of microaggressions such as “Aren’t you supposed to be good at math?” and “I’m colorblind! I don’t see race.” But a backlash arose among other Asian American students, who felt that the display itself was a microaggression. The association removed the installation, and Read More ›

Carpathian and ilk vs. the First Amendment to the US Constitution

Carpathian, sadly but predictably, in the face of remonstrance has continued his attempts to support ghettoising, stigmatising and silencing the voice of the Christian in public; making himself a poster-child of a clear and present danger to liberty in our time. For example: >>Religious activities should all be private. Any prospects for religious conversion should be invited to listen to the message from that faith but the message itself should be a private affair. There are parents who may not want their children exposed to certain religions or religious teachings and that barrier to religion should be considered a fundamental right and honored by all faiths.>> Of course, conveniently (by redefining faith into an imagined projected blind fideism) such implicitly Read More ›