The Darwin lobby earns its keep pestering ID friendly US prez hopeful Rick Perry

_{Denyse O'Leary

August 17, 2011

Culture, Darwinism}

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It’s begun here, at Dispatches from the Creation Wars (August 17, 2011 ), Ed Brayton advises:

Now that Rick Perry has officially announced he’s running for the Republican nomination for president, the Texas Freedom Network looks at his long history of promoting creationism in public school science classrooms. …

You can count on the fine toothed comb.

In case you wondered,

Evolution is one of the strongest theories of science. For the past 150 years it has been enormously successful at predicting the nature of new evidence and has shown enormous explanatory power over a dozen fields of science. Intelligent Design explains nothing and relies on misleading arguments and “god of the gaps” reasoning. They are not equivalent in any way.

See also: “Dominionist” follies: Wholly fictional cult ties dog ID-friendly US prez candidates

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PS: Phil of sci primer at NWE. An inadvertently revealing clip from Amherst College philosopher Alexander George:
…the intelligibility of that [demarcation] task depends on the possibility of drawing a line between science and non-science. The prospects for this are dim. Twentieth-century philosophy of science is littered with the smoldering remains of attempts to do just that. . . . Science employs the scientific method. No, there's no such method: Doing science is not like baking a cake. Science can be proved on the basis of observable data. No, general theories about the natural world can't be proved at all. Our theories make claims that go beyond the finite amount of data that we've collected. There's no way such extrapolations from the evidence can be proved to be correct. Science can be disproved, or falsified, on the basis of observable data. No, for it's always possible to protect a theory from an apparently confuting observation. Theories are never tested in isolation but only in conjunction with many other extra-theoretical assumptions (about the equipment being used, about ambient conditions, about experimenter error, etc.). It's always possible to lay the blame for the confutation at the door of one of these assumptions, thereby leaving one's theory in the clear. And so forth. . . . Let's abandon this struggle to demarcate and instead let's liberally apply the label 'science' to any collection of assertions about the workings of the natural world. …what has a claim to being taught in the science classroom isn't all science, but rather the best science, the claims about reality that we have strongest reason to believe are true.... Science versus non-science seems like a much sharper dichotomy than better versus worse science. The first holds out the prospect of an 'objective' test, while the second calls for 'subjective' judgment. But there is no such test, and our reliance on judgment is inescapable. We should be less proprietorial about the unhelpful moniker 'science' but insist that only the best science be taught in our schools.
Of course, along his way to trying to privilege his favoured theories in education [no prizes for guessing what hose probably are . . . ], he lets the cat out of the bag. The only safe solution is to insist that the limitations of scientific methods and attempts to wall off and privilege certain claims as "science," should be taught. Then, people should be equipped to think for themselves through inference to best explanation across factual adequacy, coherence, and explanatory power.kairosfocus_{August 18, 2011
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News I hear your point, but even their favourite reference source warns them that you can "really" believe something you want to believe and end up being willfully deceitful because you refused to do your duty of care to accuracy and fairness, here via continuing slanderous misrepresentation. There is that which you acknowledge that you know, and there is that which you SHOULD acknowledge that you know. For excellent reason. When it comes to science and sci edu, if you are unwilling to acknowledge the truth about the limitations of scientific knowledge, especially on origins science, that is telling me that you are concerned to cover an ideology in the august lab coat and preach it as though it were practically certain, when in fact ESPECIALLY on origins science, scientific claims are inherently provisional and subject to correction and caveats. Just ask the REAL experts on that, the philosophers and historians of science. GEM of TKIkairosfocus_{August 18, 2011
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Well, k-f, the odd thing is that most of these people really do believe it. UD News freelanced for a Christian paper in the mid-90s and this story (it was then called Reconstructionism) rolled through. A blip and then gone in the Christian press, but a huge hoo-haw for decades in the leftist and atheist press. hat, of course, is the exact opposite pattern from the one you'd get if there were something in it for Christians. After a while the leftists and atheists talked it into existence - in their own minds.News_{August 18, 2011
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News When one sees the sort of willful distortion Mr Brayton indulges in defiance of duties of care to fairness and accuracy, one is reminded of Wiki's testimony against interest:
To lie is to state something with disregard to the truth with the intention that people will accept the statement as truth . . . . even a true statement can be used to deceive. In this situation, it is the intent of being overall untruthful rather than the truthfulness of any individual statement that is considered the lie . . . . One can state part of the truth out of context, knowing that without complete information, it gives a false impression. Likewise, one can actually state accurate facts, yet deceive with them . . . . One lies by omission when omitting an important fact, deliberately leaving another person with a misconception. Lying by omission includes failures to correct pre-existing misconceptions. Also known as a continuing misrepresentation . . . . A misleading statement is one where there is no outright lie, but still retains the purpose of getting someone to believe in an untruth . . .
That it is branded "creationism" to insist that in sci edu, theories in science should face their strengths and limitations [and FYI Mr Brayton, the unobserved, unobservable origins of life and cosmos in the deep past are simply not to be equated with the direct observation that dropped apples fall at a certain rate and this is connected to how the Moon orbits the Earth . . . ], is maybe an inadvertent testimony as to the underlying ill-founded nature of the dominant origins science schools of thought of our day. But at least we know of whose household we are dealing with. GEM of TKIkairosfocus_{August 18, 2011
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