welcome to the cultural revolution (aka what the FUCK is wrong with the florida legislature?)

BAHAHAHAHA yay bullshit strawman conservative talking point!

prof #1: "Goddammit, Kingfish, you will BELIEVE that carbon nanotubes are the way of the future, and have a Young's modulus such to make a space elevator VIABLE!"

kingfish: "YOU'LL NEVER FORCE ME TO TAKE PART IN YOUR DOGMA!"

prof #2: "You will SWEAR on the name of all that you believe is holy in your so-called 'Christendom' that correctly-sized NMOS transistors can properly bias the input stage of a monolithic-amplifier circuit requiring FAR less surface area than if you were to use actual resistors OR YOU WILL NOT PASS THIS CLASS and you will be BANNED from my classroom!"

kingfish: "NEVER!"

Conceptual Metaphors, Progressive Values, and Reframing in America: the Work of George Lakoff

What place does belief have in an intellectually rigorous education, or discipline? None whatsoever, either back yourself up with evidence and a rigorous argument, or shut up. This doesn't meant that there has to be agreement on what is true or even agreement on what constitutes valid evidence, but something as insubstantial as belief has no place at all in a rigorous education.

i don't consider "relativism" a problem: wrestling fact from the power politics of life is as hard now as it wz yesterday, 100 years ago, or a thousand years ago)

After seeing The Life Of Galileo recently, I did think that at least now that this pope is dying, scientists aren't terrified about the sucession. I know, for Pope read US President + Congress + Senate + Supreme Court in three years time, but that's progress of a sort.

Materialism, Empiralism, Darwinism, or whatever are all beliefs that currently have a large place in education. These are not treated as insubstantial.

or the ones who think that the Sermon on the Mount/"feed the hungry"/"heal the sick"-thing might be onto something?

The Chiristian uses a system of inquiry when they ask the Holy Spirit to guide them.

That sounds like a belief to me.

these terms are meaningless. Define them.

"The Chiristian uses a system of inquiry when they ask the Holy Spirit to guide them"

what if the Holy Spirit is guiding you by presenting indisputable physical evidence, from which you must draw your own conclusions?

"The view that experience, especially of the senses, is the only source of knowledge.
That sounds like a belief to me. "

The totality of human experience is filtered through the senses. If you believe otherwise, please explain.

yes, but what does this tend to mean in practices? also, does holitically involve something akin to, say, contextual analysis? analysis that might neat little bits of info about how the Decalogue share many structural similarities to Hittite laws that were going around at the time.

in other words, please clarify.

(xpost)

catagorically - Looking at single verses only; neglecting to consider the whole bible as God-breathed.

"What if the Holy Spirit is guiding you by presenting indisputable physical evidence, from which you must draw your own conclusions?"

This may be one way, but not the only possible way. It could guide the spirit of a human.

"The totality of human experience is filtered through the senses. If you believe otherwise, please explain."

This is a good question. The Holy Spirit can work on the spirit of a human which is something deeper then senses.

Which gets to another point that mark touched on aptly -- evolution isn't a *theory* -- it's a process that is a central object of *investigation* in the disciplinary domain of biology. To do biology, one must first accept that the object of one's investigation exists. So to the extent that this issue isn't "headed off at the pass" I think it's because we're teaching *what science is* wrong, with a crude sort of empiricism that Zizek manages to dodge quite well. (point of information -- as I understand it the "concrete universal" is actually from Laclau and Zizek picked up on it early in his career only to generally throw it by the wayside or at least scare-quote it in his more recent work. along those lines, Zizek's ontology has always had an objective reality, just as his epistimology has always had an irreconcilable rupture with that reality -- tho a *relative* one rather than absolute).

I never understood the scientific method until I started reading philosophy of science, because the way that it was taught in school was mystical-religious junk! Hypotheses just appear in thin air, and experiments just verify or disprove them. Science is just a huge collection of generally verified atomized facts. ("The world is all that is the case." full stop) This is what I think mark is growling about and against, and rightfully so. If instead of saying we're teaching our kids the TRUTH we said "we're teaching our kids productive methods for generating applicable knowledge of the world" we'd be in much better shape.

But I think mark is also prettifying Nairn's arguments. If the wager of science is on a verifiable reality, then the wager of Narin's version of religion is that verification is *never enough*. Everything is encapsulated in the exchange:

You don't draw a conclusion and then find evidence to support it, you look at the evidence and then draw a conclusion."

where are you getting this process from? What if you were to already know the conclusion as told by GOD?

Both sides are obv. wrong. If you know the conclusion you don't bother with evidence. But if you don't have prior sets of conclusions (not to mention historically developed instruments and technique and method), then you don't know what evidence you feel like gathering, or can gather. And similarly if you don't have tentative conclusions, or at least conclusions as to what possible conclusions one might expect, or etc.

Nairn's position is clearly not "once we discover everything that's true, the sum total of this knowledge will turn out to be the true xtianity." Rather, it is that the only *way* to discover truth is through true xtianity -- which, whether Nairn is consistent in drawing implications or not (he's not), means that the mertonian norms of science are destroyed!

(Sorry, you probably know that, it just drives me nuts. Little copyeditor rage there.)

This is so completely...what's the word...OTMFM. Teaching people how to think rather than what to think -- how to approach the world critically, how to recognize received wisdom and subject it to the same scrutiny as brand-new information, how to deal with "information" period, in all its forms.

For what it's worth, my mom's a middle-school science teacher at a small, mostly progressive private school, and she has one creationist student in her class this year. After some tactful discussions with the parents, sympathizing with their right to believe whatever they want, she told them their daughter was just going to have to deal with discussion of evolution because that was a core part of the subject matter. Mom even kind of pushed it with a multiple choice test in which students had to select the right definition of "evolution." The girl circled the right answer, and then wrote next to it in big letters, "STUPID!" But at least she got it right.

http://www.badmovies.org/movies/plannine/plannine7.jpg

"Y'see?! Y'see?! STUPID!"