Well, I'm well enough self-educated to know about polymorphism and operator overloading. So you can't scare me with your big words. =P

I think the problem goes back further. The problem goes back to the time when the early evolutionary biologists, being rather rampant enlightenment anti-religious establishment folks, decided to declare that their new scientific knowledge superceded and made obsolete all the religion of the rest of the culture - that they, in a sort of neitzichien way, were fascist supermen who had destroyed the Gods and everybody else should grovel before them.

Then they decided that they should preach this in the public schools, and that everybody should be forced to learn that the new modern notions had overthrown the old, that science would replace old fashioned food with modern vitamin pills, that nervous disorders revealed how our chemical makeup was base and animalistic and our lives were meaningless.

Naturally, a good number of people reacted strongly against this take on life, the universe and everything - and they continue to do so. A bunch of evolutionary biology types decided that not being allowed to do what they will constituted unreasonable persecution and tried to cast themselves in the shoes of Galileo and Copernicus - and also tried to conflate the heliocentric model of the solar system with the sort of post-enlightenment french revolution scientific brutalism so as to give themselves an air of nobility and invincibility.

Now this, this horrible cultural story - and the related stories about atheistic cultures throughout recent times, including those led by Stalin, Mao, Hitler, Danton and Robespierre - should give us pause when we seek to idolize the high school science teacher who wants to teach 'science and not myth.' It should cause us to pause because of what has been done in the name of eroding certain 'belief-views' over the past couple hundred years. It should give us pause when we see whether people are actually achieving the supposed liberal or socialist or communist or 'republican' (a la the french) dreams of people treating each other better in places where religion has been replaced with science and capitalism. It should give us great pause to wonder what we are advancing and for what reason.

We shouldn't meddle with truth - truth is something that should be, in itself, beautiful. However, we shouldn't take ignorance and mock up some sort of new clothes of discovery because somehow we think that parading this figure around will help us dispel a noxious 'belief-view' that we consider to be absolutely untestable and therefore somehow indefensible, and ultimately untrue. Just because something can't be tested doesn't mean it can't be true - and we should hesitate before we decided everything must be tested. I would die for my god-son - but should he decide he must test it, he will learn the hard way, by losing a god father.

What should be taught in the schools? What the parents agree should be taught. Within the local community, the teachers are proxy for parents, perhaps doing a better job technically than the parents ever could, and for specialization of labor, but still standing in loco parentis during the daily instructions. We should draw back our hands in horror the moment we contemplate forcibly seizing the children from their parents to teach them scorn and spite. This sort of education, that teaches the mass of children from a certain culture to despise their parents and trains them against the parental wishes, is defined as GENOCIDE under the UN definition of the word.

No, we should draw back, recoil from our very arrogance.

Well I had actually hoped you'd understand the point of polymorphism in mathematics and how teaching it early on does not contribute to a long term understanding. Mind you, if some level of understanding that math is just a made up set of axioms were taught, I suspect a whole bunch of kids wouldn't get alienated by it.

At the same time, those who shoved enlightenment down the throats of the pervasive religious establishment have largely been shown to have been right. That is largely my point about the triumph of secular objectivism. Secular objectivism has won out, not just because of the Kultur Kampf of the early enlightenment, but simply because it has provided a "belief view" that has been more effective for more people than the religious view.

Yes some things have been lost along the way - namely an externally defined sense of life's meaning and the exceptionalist view. But even these losses have required us to learn to reach further with our imagination.

So overall that battle against the majoritarian view based on tangible measures (objectivism) has been right. If anything, the excesses you cite - Mao, The Russian Oligarchs (russia has had the same form of government for 500 years, Stalin was not all that unique) etc. are remnants or echoes of the FAITH based "belief-view".

So while Goedel tells us definitavely that there are things that are true that are not provably true - provable truth does exist. When you have assertions that are completely contrary to observable and tangible measures then you don't have a case of Truth that isn't provable. Instead you have belief masquarading as Truth and wielding the very sword that Stalin and Robespierre wielded.

You and I disagree as to what should be taught in schools. Schools should offer the best knowledge the society as a whole has to offer. Not what the local parents want to filter.

Do parents have the right to withhold their children from those teachings? Well that's open to debate. After all, if Parents with their natural neuro-biological advantages cannot present a competing view in a compelling fashion, then perhaps the human right of the child to learn and think for themselves deserves to be honored and protected. Even the Amish understand this - requiring their adolescents to spend a year living integrated with society before making a concscious commitment to the community.

Uh, yes, I got the idea that teaching the kids about operator overloading might not get them to long division. It is, after all, very similar to teaching them about deconstructionism and wondering why they don't like to read anymore.

I keep trying to figure out the boundaries of where you and I disagree - they seem deeply crenulated and not always obvious. For instance, I value diversity (and freedom), particularly diversity at the local community level - I believe that any attempt to make universal individual freedoms the overarching outcome of all processes will actually end up suppressing the most meaningful freedoms by crushing this diversity and freedom at the next level. For this reason, I want to see local liberty to educate children, which is one of the most important liberties at the family and local community level. My guess is that you value liberty and diversity but can't see past the rampant individualism in the present culture to the next stage of the fight between tyrannical moralism and diversity, as people realize what they have lost in terms of community - a wave of the fight, a swing of the pendulum that I already see coming.

I also see the triumph in your eyes as you survey the field and see that logical positivism has apparently won the hearts and minds of most people, even religious people - but perhaps you don't see how the 'professional' thought is already two steps beyond that, such that postmodern has begun to trickle down and work its way out in practical ways - and its successor - I think it is termed critical realism - is already coming down the road.
So while you trumpet your triumph, it is already passing you by. Not that enlightenment positivism didn't contribute anything important; not that the technology and scientific advances won't continue to play a huge part in society - but that the deepest understanding of reality may not be the one based on repeatable experimentation and a statistic model with infinite tails. It more likely involves temporal mirror breaking, irreversibility, uniqueness, and quite possibly the resuscitation of that dreaded exceptionalism that you have already dismissed.

I would suggest that there is plenty of time for children to learn the best society has to offer - to seek it out themselves, as the Amish allow them to do. However, while they are still in grade school, it is appropriate for their parents to offer them what they believe is the best society has to offer - and not for the state to use its monopoly on dictatorial force and taxation to overrule this.

Hello Fourmi: Dr. John Baumgardner is currently with Los Alamos National Laboratories and is renowned for his work on catastrophic plate tectonics. His education consists of a B.S., Texas Tech University, Lubbock, 1968; M.S., Electrical Engineering, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ, 1970; M.S., Geophysics and Space Physics, University of California, Los Angeles, 1981; Ph.D., Geophysics and Space Physics, University of California, Los Angeles, 1983. Why don't you go to <link> and read his (he worked with a team on this research) paper on the rate of Helium Diffusion in Radioactive Zircons. You can "peer" review it (or if you are not a physicist get a physicist friend to help you) and post your critique at the ARJ website. I don't think your statements about "the trappings of real science", "with Ph.D.'s (in any subject area)", "creating a peer-reviewed journal." and "this journal exists to provide bogus credentials to information" are based upon any direct objective consideration of what they do and have done.

Baumgartner's area of expertise is fluid dynamics and magma flow.

His paper reads like something you would see in Scientific American not what you'd expect in an actual peer reviewed Geology journal

posting average reader's critiques at ARJ only creates a set of strawmen for ARJ to pretend to address and thereby increase the creadibility of ARJ.

Given the quality of the paper you linked to, the lack of access to the underlying data (that's how peer review occurs) if necessary, and the desire to create an aura of review pretty much confirms what I said about the

"trappings of science" and PhDs operating outside their area of knowledge".

Thank you for proving my point.

OK now it gets hard. I'm an amateur at best in the discussion of formal philosophy. I learned my limits this past fall in trying to engage my son who is starting to major in philosophy, on what his arguements in the Ethics Bowl were. And I quickly learned how much I've let this part of my mind get ossified from disuse.

So I'm not sure I can have a "clean" discussion with you on the relative strengths and weaknesses of critical realism. One of the things that makes it hard, is that when you invoke the "inactivated mechanism" aspect of critical realism, you potentially open the door for all sorts of magical thinking. This is especially true in a medium like this one where you get Young Earthers showing up with loony papers about 14C "anomolies".

So the line of reasoning I am going to take in a forum like this one is going to be slightly different than one I would take during a living room discussion with informed and well thought companions. And yes, this is part of what reduces the communication capabilities of this medium.

I think where you and I disagree most is on the role and mechanisms that The Government or the collective society may or may not invoke. I think we agree on the role of community, but we differ on the mechanisms a community may use to realize its various beliefs.

So I see no problem in parents having the right to teach their children what they personally believe. I also do not believe they have a right to restrict their children's human rights to grow their minds as best they can. Thus there is a balancing act between a parent teaching their child about their particular spirituality, and shutting them off from the reasoning of science. For example, the treatment of a newly identified tulku borders on child abuse (removal from the family, strict and narrow education etc.) and yet some level of faith and practice of faith ought be allowed.

I don't think there is an easy answer on this, but in general I tend to lean away from imposed hierarchical order. And that is what the Creationsists seek to do - impose their hierarchical order (and I know that can be seen as possibly obverse as well), which is why I resist them.

And sadly no, in many cases, there is not that much time to learn different patterns of thinking once the core pattern is set. We see this most clearly with language, but the magical thinking that gets imposed early on in life results exactly in the kind of magical thinking in adult life that those starting the AiG journal engage in.

Well, I'd hardly claim to be a master, let alone a professor, of philosophy. So, we would likely get all tangled up in each other's blindspots and areas of ignorance while we each charged ahead in the sectors we knew something about - likely corresponding to places the other knew nothing.

I never suggested that parents should cut their children off from the reasoning of science, nor frankly do I believe that they wholly could. At the same time, I feel that parents have the unique right and duty to educate their children in the manner they feel is best until the child is independent of them.

And no, I don't think that a spartan system in which children become communal property immediately is wise or excellent. It isn't what hitchens would recommend either. Hitchens and his fellows actually recommends that parents become puppets of the majority (or perhaps the elite, when the majority doesn't agree with Hitchens; or of Hitchens, when all else fails...) such that the parents are forced to support and care for their children but are also barred from caring for their children as they feel is best in the areas of education, particularly religious education.

I don't think it could be made more clear that there is a vein of oppression hitting the surface in Hitchens, and that he is taking an already dangerous slippery slope (the steady expansion of the definition of child abuse) over the top and around the bend to territory that would horrify any of the early pioneers in liberalism.

Here you are enabling that by suggesting that some sort of indelible harm is done a child when parents are able to teach religion.

I can see the consistency in your mind - and I have no doubt that you have taught your children as you saw fit. As much as I feel they may have been given an excellent and incredible education in some areas, I can't help but think that there are other areas I might have hoped would be instructed differently - and you probably feel that I should have been educated differently. Oh well. It only becomes tyranny when I force you to educate in a way you feel is harmful.

Finally - the ultimate topic that perhaps causes all the trouble? I view it as a problem of scale. Science has found 'magic' at all sorts of scales. Strange things happen over long periods of time, at very small spatial scales, in blinks of an eye, and at the level of the universe. Every time we think we have something fixed, some unbreakable rule - that works for organisms, say - we find that an emerging property sorta violates it at the scale of the community, or seemingly contradicts it at the level of the gene.

I teach my students all the time - scale matters!

Even if statistics is reasonably predictive for this or that, it may not hold as a good model for everything. Uniformitarianism also only means that as far as the eye can see, the same rules seem to apply.

I do science, I understand science - and perhaps some day science will be able to deal with the full range of extant phenomena, but ... that day isn't now. We can't even figure out migraines and other kinds of headaches... as much as we figure out neurons.

Even if 'secular objectivism' were to triumph at the moment and temporarily in our culture, that doesn't say much more about what 'is truth' than the rise of Zeus in BC 6000 or so, when a prior pantheon was replaced by the olympians, partly because science is always changing in what it says we should believe.

As for this thread, it too is too cumbersome =/ See you on another one, I'm sure.

BenK and you other guys here, aren't you a researcher? Shouldn't you do research or applying for grants? Just a thought ....

It is a technical paper complete with citations and calculations-but I am sure you can obtain access to any needed additional details if you ask for them. Baumgardner is a member of the American Geophysical Union-You can look @ http://www.agu.org/ to see what company (of Peers) he keeps. So your "average readers critiques" assertion isn't accurate. He is also a member of the Mineralogical Society of America. Baumgardner's extensive publications are listed @ <link> and he has had very extensive peer review his entire career (both by Uniformitarians as well as Christians). He is working in the area of his expertise so your "trappings of science" and PhDs operating outside their area of knowledge" statements are also inaccurate.

Natural Selection and Mutation do not support evolution in that they always either decrease genetic material in the offspring or they are neutral (typically they actually decrease genetic material)-they have never increased genetic material in the offspring which is what must occur (this is called Macroevolution as opposed to Microevolution) for evolution to have occurred. Speciation or Natural Selection are nothing new-Farmers have been using them for millennia to make better cattle and dogs.

“ Natural Selection and Mutation do not support evolution in that they always either decrease genetic material in the offspring or they are neutral (typically they actually decrease genetic material)-they have never increased genetic material in the offspring which is what must occur (this is called Macroevolution as opposed to Microevolution) for evolution to have occurred.”

>>This isn’t true, I’m afraid. Natural mechanisms which act to increase genetic material have been identified and have been observed to occur (for example, gene duplication and insertion mutations.) These aren’t always neutral and have been directly observed to increase fitness. For example, flavobacterium K172 acquired the ability to digest nylon oligomers as the result of an insertion mutation—a thymidine at position 99 of the NylB gene.

The definition of macroevolution is actually “evolution on a species level (speciation and extinction) and at higher taxonomic classifications” (Biotech Life Sciences Dictionary again). As we’ve directly observed both speciation and extinctions occurring, we have directly observed macroevolution.

“Speciation or Natural Selection are nothing new-Farmers have been using them for millennia to make better cattle and dogs.”

>>What farmers have been doing is artificial, not natural, selection to achieve a preferred outcome.

Equations and citations do not make a paper "technical". Being a member of an organization does not make you an expert in all things science, nor does "extensive publications". In fact the breadth of Baumgartners publications indicates that his expretise is precisely outside the field in which this paper resides. All of his other papers are in the field of the geodynamics of the earth, not chemical diffusion of gas in crystal lattices.

So you have not address the basic criticisms:

1. This is a very simplistic paper lacking in the level of citation and structure you would expect to see in a paper making the assertions it does
2. It is outside the area of expertise of the author
3. It has not been peer reviewed by experts in the field.

Thus it is not a credible paper.

BenK:

...For instance, I value diversity (and freedom), particularly diversity at the local community level - I believe that any attempt to make universal individual freedoms the overarching outcome of all processes will actually end up suppressing the most meaningful freedoms by crushing this diversity and freedom at the next level. For this reason, I want to see local liberty to educate children, which is one of the most important liberties at the family and local community level....

I think you ignore the often true paradox that "education" from a backdrop of religion is really "anti-education."

Fair enough about publishing anomalously but since they are trying to gain "scientific" recognition I'm betting the citation will read something like "author 1, PhD".

I would say good science also depends on the reasonableness/accuracy of the assumptions. What you describe has little potential for either.