American Conservatives And Science: A Memoir

Gordon Gauchat, a Health Services researcher at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, publishes in The Sociological Review (77:2, 167–187) an article entitled “Politicization of Science in the Public Sphere: A Study of Public Trust in the United States, 1974 to 2010.”

Briefly, his article demonstrates (or rather reinforces previous studies demonstrating) that North American conservatives have become less trustful of science since 1974, in contrast to the rest of the population, whose trust in science has remained more or less stable.

Trust in science of course requires faith that somebody knows what he or she is talking about in some area of specialization.  It’s common for religious and political conservatives these days to talk about science as a form of faith, but I think that it’s worth examining the causes of this belief in science as seen from within the conservative mindset to emphasize the ways in which it is and isn’t like religious faith….

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Speciation: Is It Observable?

From the Mailbag:

I’ve been reading your posts on evolution.  How do you respond when people tell you that there is no observable evidence that species can be created by evolution?

This claim is put forward in various forms by the likes of Answers in Genesis and Ben Stein.

But it’s patently false, and anybody who tries it on should simply be called a liar or ignorant.

Speciation has been observed many, many times… 

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Visualizing Evolution: History of This Place In One Day

Nenad Stevanović shared on G+ this amazing and educational timeline of evolution by Ethan Hein.

Fantastic work, beautifully rendered and understandable.

Best use of Wikipedia of the month.

Bedroom Doors

Way down deep in our evolutionary wiring is the certain knowledge that we’ll be murdered in our sleep or our offspring will die if we don’t sleep the right way, attentive to the environment or secure against it.

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Intelligent Design: Myers Reacts to Richard Land

Intelligent design exists because of a lack of knowledge, a positive bewilderment.   There's no real "knowledge" there: the "proof" that the flagellum could not evolve through natural processes amounts to some complicated mathematics that we might call the mathematics of wonder, a numeric description of incredulity.

But of course science always ought to begin with wonder: it should never end there. 

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You Shall Know The Lie, and the Lie Shall Set You Free

When Christianity feels it depends on the most shallow, unreflective view of the world, when it feels that no argument is too silly to use so long as it helps prop up its "biblical" (?) world-view, it is the enemy of the truth.

Vision Forum has aggressively committed itself to such a faith, and it has to be opposed.

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Creation & Healing In The New Theocracy

 Until both religious people and conservatives purge themselves of their anti-intellectualism, they will condemn those whom science can help.  And they will continue to condemn those who really want truth as they force their young to choose between spiritual and intellectual suicide.

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A Bicycle Trip Through Dating Rocks...

In which the Otter addresses a Christian unpersuaded by the evidence against a young earth.

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Ancestors

Homo Habilis: Hello Mother, Hello Father.

Homo Habilis, Noah's Ark was your skull.  

How the waters chased you 

and the desert absorbed your desiccated children

as you made your way across history

millions of years ago,

your brain growing fertile on meat and marrow,

your fingers nimble as Michelangelo's, until you stood

in the great arc of the valley's northern ridge, 

and sucked the bones of your sacrifice,

and marched toward the North

and your future, you wily child splashed in survivors' covenants,

you father and mother standing upright before God,

sly as the escaping snake, and watching the valley die

with the raven and crow only to sing it to sleep.

Review: Volume 1: Jonathan Park: The Adventure Begins: 3. Adventure on the Aucilla River: Part 1

The Jonathan Park CDs are produced by Vision Forum Ministries.  Through these CDs, VF hope to ‘provide children and adults with scientific evidence that is in harmony with the Word of God’.  [Which raises the questions, ‘What does “in harmony” mean?’ and ‘What do they do with scientific evidence that is not in harmony with the Word of God?’]

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