Comments on: Creationism in the UK education system

By: yurtdisi egitim fuari

yurtdisi egitim fuari — Mon, 20 Oct 2008 07:37:53 +0000

Why this web site do not have other languages support?

By: Velcro City Tourist Board » Blog Archive » Sf

Velcro City Tourist Board » Blog Archive » Sf — Wed, 23 Aug 2006 15:53:11 +0000

[...] As much as I would love to believe otherwise, a similar situation appears to be arising here in the UK also

By: apotheon

apotheon — Fri, 18 Aug 2006 07:21:51 +0000

When you build your rocket, aim it at Mars — not the asteroid belt. There’s more gravity and more water there. That is, unless you have some kind of plan to launch asteroids at Mars’ south polar ice cap to jump-start a pressure-building and heating atmospheric terraforming process, then follow them to Mars to finally set up shop. Oh, yeah, and give it another seat: I want a ride. Seriously. I want out of here (being a USian, that is).

By: Armchair Anarchist

Armchair Anarchist — Thu, 17 Aug 2006 13:40:23 +0000

Good call, Rosie. This is something I’ve heard of before – there are a lot of mutterings of this sort over the pond, where the latest weapon of the creationist/ID movement is to deploy postmodern deconstruction upon science and its works, trying to discredit it as ‘historical knowledge fascism’, or some such rubbish.

I’ll admit to not having a full understanding of postmodernism (but then again, can anyone have it, by definition?), but it seems to me that the entire core of the idea is that of ‘suspicion towards metanarratives’. That premise may well be used to attack science as ‘an equally (in)valid epistemology’, but surely by logical extension the same reasoning must be applied to almost any religious doctrine, which as you point out should suffer far more heavily through having no empirical evidence to back it up.

A part of me wonders if this isn’t simply a manifestation of the traditional intellectual rebellion of persons in their late teens and early twenties – you know, that whole ‘flirting with ideologies that are certain to upset the mainstream’ gig. Then again, maybe I’m just trying to kid myself that things aren’t getting nasty.

By: rosie

rosie — Thu, 17 Aug 2006 13:30:45 +0000

As a student at university this doesn’t exactly surprise me and it doesn’t stop at the students. My research skills and methods tutor (a Canadian) came out in one seminar with “the whole creationism / evolution debate is ridiculous, they’re both just theories and neither one is better than the other” to which there were murmurs of agreement from several students around the room (one of which was Swedish, one Hungarian and a couple of Brits)
When I tried to point out that, yes they are both theories, but there’s a massive difference between them because while evolution is backed up by over a century’s worth of painstakingly collected and corellated evidence, creationism has no evidence whatsoever in its support I was greeted with snorts of derision and a debate about different epistemology’s having equal validity.
Bollocks, to be blunt. A theory of knowledge that rejects all evidence and uses as its only text a myth-mash of highly edited codswallop like the old testament is not an epistemology, it’s a type of blindness brought upon by brainwashing as a child.
Admittedly this incident took place in a Politics seminar, but it was a political science course where the aim was to teach students reasearch skills, y’know, how to evaluate evidence. Scary stuff.