Coffee House Musings on Creationist Topic Proposals

Well, it stopped a group of religious fanatics from trying to indoctrinate other people's children. Nothing would surprise me as the U.S. is corrupted and turned into a shithole country, but as far as i know there are no appeals of the decision working their way through the court system at this time. This is probably correct. What truth are you talking about, and if it's be suppressed how do you know about it?

You have no idea how courts work in the US do you.

1.
Believe it or not, I am not a scientist, but it's my understanding that there's is a big difference between
(a) a scientist claiming to "know" how such-and-such works, and
(b) a scientist proposing a theory for how such-and-such works.(a) carries the burden of truth. I imagine that if a scientist publicly claims to "know" something, he is expected to prove to his peers that his claimed knowledge is in fact, true ... lest he be accused of intellectual fraud.
(b) on the other hand, does not carry the burden of truth. If a scientist proposes a theory, he is not expected to prove to his peers that it's true.2.
If a scientist claims to "know" how evolution works, he must prove that he knows how evolution works in
(a) real-time (the present), and
(b) the past (the history of life as revealed by the fossil record).You admit that "scientifically we can't prove" that scientists know what process produced the changes evident in the fossil record. It follows therefore that since no scientist can satisfy (b), no scientist can claim to "know" how evolution works. That being so, how can a scientist claim to "know" how evolution works even in real-time if he can't prove anything?

Like I said, a miscarriage of justice.A sad day for truth, to be sure.

What truth?

​ Tell me, good sir, is it(a) the genetic similarties between humans and other animals that have proven useful in medicine, or is it(b) the explanation for why those similarities exist (universal common ancestry)that has proven useful in medicine?It is my fervent hope that, upon reflection, you will come to the conclusion that it is (a) that has proven useful in medicine, and that that utility is indepedent of (b), which is actually useless and irrelevant. I completely agree. It does ... but against all odds, I 've somehow managed to survive all these years.

The truth of divine creation.

It's possible that your assessment contains an element of truth.

There's no truth without supporting evidence.

It's the genetic similarities due to universal common ancestry between humans and other animals that have proven useful in medicine.

If you take "due to universal common ancestry" out of that sentence, you are left with ..."It's the genetic similarities between humans and other animals that have proven useful in medicine."The "due to universal common ancestry" is irrelevant. Medicine doesn't need to know what produced the genetic similarities to make use of them.

Well, medicine DOES know about universal common ancestry and the more you know the more likely you will be able to find models for human health issues.You can pray for miracles all you want but I will go with medical science every time. Knowledge keeps increasing, but ignorance and stupidity lead nowhere good.

Edited by Tanypteryx, .

That is not true. And history is filled with examples of where ignorance and stupidity do lead. The short list includes famine and death.For example, Lysenkoism:

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Lysenkoism was a political campaign led by Soviet biologist Trofim Lysenko against genetics and science-based agriculture in the mid-20th century, rejecting natural selection in favour of a form of Lamarckism, as well as expanding upon the techniques of vernalization and grafting. In time, the term has come to be identified as any deliberate distortion of scientific facts or theories for purposes that are deemed politically, religiously or socially desirable.

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More than 3,000 mainstream biologists were dismissed or imprisoned, and numerous scientists were executed in the Soviet campaign to suppress scientific opponents. The president of the Soviet Agriculture Academy, Nikolai Vavilov, who had been Lysenko's mentor, but later denounced him, was sent to prison and died there, while Soviet genetics research was effectively destroyed. Research and teaching in the fields of neurophysiology, cell biology, and many other biological disciplines were harmed or banned.

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The government of the Soviet Union (USSR) supported the campaign, and Joseph Stalin personally edited a speech by Lysenko in a way that reflected his support for what would come to be known as Lysenkoism, despite his skepticism toward Lysenko's assertion that all science is class-oriented in nature. Lysenko served as the director of the USSR's Lenin All-Union Academy of Agricultural Sciences. Other countries of the Eastern Bloc including the People's Republic of Poland, the Republic of Czechoslovakia, and the German Democratic Republic accepted Lysenkoism as the official "new biology", to varying degrees, as did the People's Republic of China for some years.

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In 1928, rejecting natural selection and Mendelian genetics, Trofim Lysenko claimed to have developed agricultural techniques which could radically increase crop yields. These included vernalization, species transformation, inheritance of acquired characteristics, and vegetative hybridization.

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Effects

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From 1934 to 1940, under Lysenko's admonitions and with Stalin's approval, many geneticists were executed (including Izrail Agol, Solomon Levit, Grigorii Levitskii, Georgii Karpechenko and Georgii Nadson) or sent to labor camps. The famous Soviet geneticist and president of the Agriculture Academy, Nikolai Vavilov, was arrested in 1940 and died in prison in 1943.

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In 1936, the American geneticist Hermann Joseph Muller, who had moved to the Leningrad Institute of Genetics with his Drosophila fruit flies, was criticized as a bourgeois, capitalist, imperialist, and promoter of fascism, so he left the USSR, returning to America via Republican Spain. In 1948, genetics was officially declared "a bourgeois pseudoscience". Over 3,000 biologists were imprisoned, fired, or executed for attempting to oppose Lysenkoism and genetics research was effectively destroyed until the death of Stalin in 1953. Due to Lysenkoism, crop yields in the USSR actually declined {my emphasis}.

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Most other treatments have referred to crop failures and famine due to Lysenkoism.Add to that medical examples, like a national authority advising that, since bleach kills the COVID virus, we should inject bleach into our bodies. And ignorance and stupidity related to vaccination leading to the reemergence of very serious diseases that had been eradicated (eg, polio showing up in New York City wastewater, meaning that it is circulating within the population).

Yeah, I should have said "but ignorance and stupidity lead nowhere good.
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My creation/evolution website includes two quotes regarding creationists, the first one being Sun Tzu's "Know your enemy and know yourself ... ".The other is from my memory of an NPR interview with a Mississippi governor in the 80's or 90's. In support of his efforts at educational reform, he said (quoting from memory):

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We know that ignorance doesn't work, because we've tried it already.

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And yet they keep trying ignorance, over and over again.