Via Mother Jones:
Late last month, Rick Brattin, a Republican state representative in Missouri, introduced a bill that would require that intelligent design and "destiny" get the same educational treatment and textbook space in Missouri schools as the theory of evolution. Brattin insists that his bill has nothing to do with religion—it's all in the name of science.
"I'm a science enthusiast...I'm a huge science buff," Brattin tells The Riverfront Times. "This [bill] is about testable data in today's world." But Eric Meikle, education project director at theNational Center for Science Education, disagrees. "This bill is very idiosyncratic and strange," he tells Mother Jones. "And there is simply not scientific evidence for intelligence design."A "huge science buff". What is it they say--"You always hurt the ones you love"?
But no, that actually gets worse--
HB 291, the "Missouri Standard Science Act," redefines a few things you thought you already knew about science. For example, a "hypothesis" is redefined as something that reflects a "minority of scientific opinion and is "philosophically unpopular." A scientific theory is "an inferred explanation...whose components are data, logic and faith-based philosophy." And "destiny" is not something that $5 fortune tellers believe in; Instead, it's "the events and processes that define the future of the universe, galaxies, stars, our solar system, earth, plant life, animal life, and the human race."Science is not defined as "that thing of when, if I don't get the answers I like, I change the meanings of words that have been used for a very long time." "Faith-based philosophy" would, if we were using SAT analogies, be to "science" what "pulling things out of my ass" would be to "facts". And "Destiny" is now, and forever, a perfectly fine stripper name, but not a word we'd use to describe the future of anything, except maybe "how I'm feeling about that hook-up who is giving me all the right signs right now."
The only plausible reason for any "science buff" to propose something like this is that one feels terribly betrayed by science for challenging some cherished, long-held belief--what hurt you, Rick? Did science make you temporarily wonder if you were just another carbon-based lifeform clinging to the surface of a spacerock with a fragile ecosystem that required the attention of the dominant species to basic matters of cause and effect to ensure their continued existence on said rock, making all of your existence from birth to the present seem both insignificant and terribly momentous--and then shit got weird?
Because I not only feel that way every day, I embrace it. Because it's the real shit, not made-up fairy tale stuff to make you feel good. And if you want to suffer the little children to swallow a bunch of nonsense because you think they would be better off not thinking they are connected to the multimillion-year span of life on this billions of years old rock and have important decisions to make about how they live on this planet--all supernatural and touchy-feely notions of "destiny" aside?
You're basically full of it. Unless "science buff" is defined as "that thing of when someone reads a Michael Behe book and now thinks they know better than like, more than 90% of people who are professional scientists who actually ever looked into a thing."
Either that, or we've got another knee-jerk conservative who never thinks about the things he thinks about. Another version of "full of it."
2 comments:
Jesus on a dinosaur is a picture that says it all.
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How did I miss this post? I can feel my blood pressure going up... no scientific method, no science!
The problem with these a-holes is that they know that science has won, and they want to jump on the bandwagon, while destroying it.
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