Nathan Bond's TART Remarks

Creationism has raised its mendacious head yet again – and in the Royal Society!

Science and technology editor of The Observer, Robin McKie, reported in Creationism call divides Royal Society (September 14, 2008) that two Nobel prize winners – Sir Harry Kroto and Sir Richard Roberts – have demanded that the Royal Society sack its education director, Professor Michael Reiss. The call, backed by other senior Royal Society fellows, follows Reiss’s controversial claim last week that creationism be taught in schools’ science classes.

Reiss, an ordained Church of England minister, has since alleged he was misquoted. Nevertheless, several Royal Society fellows say his religious views make him an inappropriate choice for the post.

Believers in God have no place in science institutions!

Zoologist Richard Dawkins, a Royal Society fellow, said: ‘A clergyman in charge of education for the country’s leading scientific organisation – it’s a Monty Python sketch.’

Would not our world be a much improved place if people who believe the nonsense of gods and devils would confine their idiotic statements to mosques, synagogues and churches!

Creationism is absolute bloody nonsense and children should never be encouraged to take it seriously. Nice story though! About a friendly god making things by speaking and using clay to make people. Then the amicable god gets pissed at the people for stealing his precious fruit and we have the panoptic world view of a “God” who allows the most horrible things to happen to his children he loves soooo much. Do tell the story in kindergarten, along with the great stories of Egyptian and Norse and Greek and Roman and other mythology. But don’t teach kids that they should take this drivel, this folderol, seriously!

Related articles: Science & Religion; Science & Religion – a debate; Suffer little children; Yes, do teach creationism in school!; Evolusie kelder teologie.

Online comments: Our scientists must nail the creationists

Like “post-modernism”, “scientism” eludes me. I’s not brite enuff, I gesses.

Scientism is what believers call scientific success when they lie bleeding in the last trench against overwhelming progress – stories, opinions, hypotheses and beliefs battered and broken about the carnage wreathed to their fabrication by fact, evidence, theory and reason.

It has been claimed that there no atheists in foxholes. It appears to be true for lack of space among the vanquished theists.

Science is rooted in theories – meticulously constructed from fact. The rigour of the scientific method notwithstanding, the scientific approach is simple: the outcome of predictions based on theories are peer reviewed to either confirm or collapse the original. Progress in science, Karl Popper famously declared, is only ever made when a theory collapses, not when it is confirmed.

Belief is precariously perched upon quivering hypotheses – untested and untestable – loosely knocked up from the flotsam of ideas, convictions, impressions, assumptions, dreams and views. Progress in belief is only ever made, nobody ever infamously conceded, when the status quo is confirmed by divine machination.

It is difficult not to deride belief. It is impossible to respect pie in the sky when you die by and by.

Catholicism is a mere notch above the most pathetic religion ever to embrown humanity – Islam.

Yet the ridiculous doctrine of Catholicism trumps even the troglodytic stupidity that is Islam: Transubstantiation, the Perpetual Virginity of Mary, Limbo – it “remains a possible theological opinion”… the list of idiotic piffle is neverending.

Now we have the leader of Roman Catholics in England and Wales, the Archbishop of Westminster Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O’Connor poking his stupid theological nose into the current major scientific endeavour – stem cell research.

He’s got it against hybrid embryos. And – in all reasonableness (yeah, right) – he merely wants PM Gordon Brown to allow Labour MPs to follow their faith – rather than their party – on the use of hybrid embryos.

Faith – something devoid of all knowledge and evidence – must guide decisions on scientific endeavour. Maintains Cormac. I think I am going to be sick!

Cormac’s objection of course ultimately has to do with the timing of the introduction of “the soul” in the formation of a diploid cell through the union of a haploid spermatozoon and an ovum.

What unbelievable stupidity!

Religion, Catholisism at the forefront, has opposed Copernicus, Kepler, Bruno, Galileo, Descartes, Newton and Darwin. Religion has opposed cosmology, evolution, geography, astronomy, geology, anthropology, ethnology, meteorology, chemistry, physics, medicine, hygiene and the theory of illness, psychology, philology and political economy in one way or another at some time or the other. Nowadays religion rejects the biology of homosexuality and stem cell research. How many more chances does religion want?

How long before people realise the rank idiocy of religious tenets?

Can we not simply rid our world of religion? Of this abject stupidity?

The US National Academy of Sciences recently issued a spirited defence of evolution as the bedrock principle of modern biology, arguing that it, not creationism, must be taught in public school science classes. (See Evolution ‘must be taught’.)

This sound advice comes at a time when the current occupant of the White House favours American students to be instructed about “intelligent design” alongside evolution as competing theories. “Part of education is to expose people to different schools of thought,” President Bush said in 2005. At a time when Presidential candidate and Republican winner in Iowa (the Churches, Corn and Conservatives state) recently progressed his campaign on the turkey wings of “I do not believe in evolution”.

Teaching children that the supernatural is responsible for the natural, teaching children that “God” originated or created and manages the universe and life is the single most anti-intellectual malefic act imaginable. It dumbs down entire generations. (See Suffer little children.)

There is as much “evidence” for “God” and its creation as there can be mustered for the stupefying idea that Gordon the Garden Gnome spake everything into existence some 15 minutes ago – complete with memories and historical records – before positioning itself in the south western corner of my humble garden, near the fish pond mind, turning itself into a plaster likeness of its former glory.

Yet the NAST report stated that the idea of evolution can be fully compatible with religious faith: “Science and religion are different ways of understanding the world. Needlessly placing them in opposition reduces the potential of each to contribute to a better future.”

What utter booboisie pap! What extraordinary bunk! NASTy! How, for crying in a bucket, does “religion assist in understanding (the world)?” (See The things we do know.) I heartily concede that religion is a perfectly acceptable and undoubtedly accurate explanation for agnosy. Much like narcotics is a just explanation for substance addiction. (See Science and Religion.)

I am sick and tired of this sucking up to the religious. I am embarrassed by sceptics and scientists fuelling the Religious Wrong‘s Bronze Age tarradiddles cloaked in Dark Age fear and ignorance dressed up as a legitimate alterative for scientific explanation.

“Science and religion are different ways of understanding the world”? Good God! What, in the name of Zeus, is next, by Vishnu? Chemistry and alchemy different ways of understanding? Astronomy and astrology? Neurology and phrenology? Cosmology and the Flat Earth Theory? Anti-retroviral treatment and the South African Health Ministry’s sweet potato diet?

In my home country, South Africa, a senior clergyman recently declared that he believes in the creator god. Like one Mr Huckabee in the Yoonighted States. When good people say well intended things that are entirely devoid of fact and evidence the very future of humanity is compromised. It is as critically important as that. Period. No “accommodation” of ignorance can be tolerated. (See Tolerance.)

Evolution must, of necessity, be taught in schools. For many more reasons than the simple fact that it is the basis of biology. (See Suffer little children.) Creationism too, must, of necessity, be taught in schools. For reasons similar of teaching myth and fairy tales as human endeavours of the imagination.

Creationism is bunk. Period. The cheap tuxedo is in tatters*.

* Spokesperson for the National Center for Science Education in the USA, Nick Matzke, called Intelligent Design “creationism in a cheap tuxedo”.

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