DISQUS

I think nearly everyone pro-choice/pro-life would agree that abortions are not desirable. In fact, that abortion not happen if at all possible. So why aren't we talking about how to reduce abortions rather than how do we criminalize it?

I think the reason is that the pro-life (anti-Roe v. Wade) movement is really about reducing sex. Therefore birth control is not a useful solution. The reason we keep talking about abortion is because it gets the most traction. But what we really should be talking about is birth control and education.

As a geologist, his answer left a lot to be desired in clarity and specificity. However, he did get the general idea correct. Science is hard, and being a physicist doesn't make you an expert in geology. So I cut the man some slack.

The question did reveal Barton's total lack of understanding though. Not sure if he was going for a global warming angle here? Either way it was totally incoherent. Maybe Chu was just thrown off by the lack of any kind of logic...

I'm not even sure the author of this article would agree to the overall philosophy that evolves from these viewpoints: Let's not go to Mars because it is too hard. Let's dial back our biggest investment in engineering and technology because we can't seem to do anything good with it...

What should be discussed is how to spend our money to do the right things. Manned exploration's greatest strength is that it drives us past the barriers (real and perceived) and creates new opportunity. This is definitely a long term investment, but the payoff could be enormous.

A moon base is perhaps not the best way to go, but not for the reasons outlined by Gregg Easterbrook (who is mostly just scratching the surface). However, manned missions to Near Earth Asteroids have enormous scientific, engineering, and practical benefits.

As a field geologist I can attest to the frustration in watching the rovers inch around the landscape. A properly equipped astronaut could probably far exceed the rover's scientific output in perhaps 2-3 days (6 hours if on Earth). Manned missions provide potential to perform a large variety of tasks such as drilling, sampling, and mobile exploring that would be extraordinarily difficult and complicated with a robot.

I encourage the author to do his research, talk to scientists and engineers who are doing the work. There are folks at Harvard who are funded on NASA grants who could provide much greater depth to this perspective which is now simply splashing around in the puddles of pop culture.

Having read all of this, it would seem the standard is mutual agreement. If an idea is well regarded by enough people then it gains some modicum of truth, more agreement and it gains even more truth. People presumably make this judgement based on their personal feelings.

I started to criticize this standard, but then realized that it is very similar to science. For in the end after all the evidence is gathered and the arguments are made, how are we to know which is right? In the end, it is basically by majority rule -- each of us is an imperfect logical engine because all of our logic is based on emotion -- each scientist weighs different evidence differently based on their predilections and experience. So one piece of evidence may be discounted by some scientists and held as the key to the whole puzzle by others. So the only way to really judge the worthiness of a scientific hypothesis is by what percentage of those people who are well-informed on the topic agree with it. I'm guessing it is likewise with theology.

As the husband of a high school science teacher, I think you would be shocked by the basic pieces of education that a lot of kids don't know -- like algebra, writing skills etc.. A great teacher can help get an otherwise ambivalent student excited and motivated for short periods of time, but it takes parents to actually get their child to make school a priority in their life. Everyone wants to lay this at the feet of the teachers, but there is only so much they can do. I strongly agree that we need more money for education (paying teachers) and we need to make it more of an emphasis in our culture. But I think parents who are too involved (helicopter) are much more preferable to parents who are absent. So homeschoolers are really not part of the problem, but part of the solution IMHO.

As a product of traditional academia -- I know that most people from that side of things cringe at homeschooling. But I'm not familiar with any work that has shown that homeschooling is an inferior choice -- From what I've seen of high schools these days, it would be hard to do worse.

As for credentials, what would you have to be credentialed to do? Elementary school? High school english, science, math? All of it? Seems kind of dumb to me. Our education problem in this country does not lie with homeschoolers, it lies with the lack of parental involvement. That is a difficult problem to fix.

I echo the appreciation of the post -- very interesting. My first reaction to reading this is bent toward the causation point that you bring up. Perhaps it is reversed and socio-economic status causes more conservative religious belief? This might be indicated by the fact that people who were born CP's and people who are apostates both show similar patterns...

To add to what Ann said -- ID does not represent an acceptable scientific explanation because it does not attempt to explain all of the data available. If ID was laid out in a way that explained why kangaroos are in Australia and not in the US, and why the cambrian explosion created so many different body plans which were not carried forward, etc., then it might be considered a valid "hypothesis". But to even be considered it would need to be tested -- And I think everyone knows what would happen, this is why ID remains a fuzzy idea that can be entirely described in a paragraph.

Ok, but I'm looking for an explicit detailed description of how that change occurred. The "Theory" of evolution does just that, that is why it is a "Theory"; because it explains the available evidence the best. It does more than just say:"it... um.... evolved", it provides explicit detail on just how and why.

ID does not to my knowledge propose any kind of specific explanation of the available data.

If you would agree that God created the universe and designed it with specific rules in place so that by their action the Earth evolved and through natural selection humans evolved. Then I don't have anything to say.

However if you call on the action of an intelligent being to do things at particular times outside of these rules then I would challenge you to provide an explanation of what happened with some detail.

Otherwise we are just talking in circles.

I guess I don't really understand the arguments against evolution here. You claim that we will never actually observe life being formed in the lab so we can't claim that is what happened. Science is about finding the best explantion for the evidence at hand. Evolution explains almost all of the evidence quite well -- and since it is such a huge propostion of course you are going to be able to poke holes in it. But please explain the alternative theory -- ID really doesn't exist beyond some fuzzy inclination to believe that someone designed the universe -- If so, then please explain how that happened -- why did it take 4.5 billion years on Earth? How about the fossil record -- why did we start with bacteria and then gradually increase in complexity through the cambrian explosion, then move onto land etc.? Please provide the details here because I haven't seen them anywhere else.

So I'm a newcomer to this blog and have really enjoyed reading some of the entries including one that basically covered the same ground as my comment above (back in November). So I have a PhD (geology) and the whole process taught me that the letters really don't mean much other than the fact that you really like school. The real scientists are the ones publishing on the topics at hand -- publishing peer-reviewed articles is where respect for scientific ideas is gained.

I really liked this argument, and feel that it really boils down the question of the existence of God to its heart. While I don't think the "new athiests" will ever answer this question in a direct manner -- I was recently reading David Hume, and he would seem to argue that goodness is achieved through acclamation by society or approval of one's peers. While no one would really want to admit that their feelings of right and wrong are based on what everyone else thought -- one who was athiestically disposed might argue that it is entirely cultural conditioning and that God never downloads into us a sense of right and wrong. It certainly takes a lot of nobility out of being good, but it would explain why certain practices like slavery were viewed as ok in the past.