Brad DeLong's Semi-Daily Journal (2004)

Gnostics! Cool!

It's funny that Creationists have a better argument than ID proponents.

The Creationists can blame all the bad design choices in human anatomy on The Fall of Adam and Eve, and the resulting curse of being subject to illness and death, theorizing that Adam and Eve, before the Fall, lacked all the harmful or suboptimal anatomical details.

ID proponents can't easily fall back on that, so they'd have to explain why an intelligent designer would make such poor design choices. Which, of course, is the point of the linked site.

What's the difference between the random mutation and really stupid design change?

David Hume is famous for making a similar point in his "Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion" (I quote from Project Gutenberg):

In a word, CLEANTHES, a man who follows your hypothesis is able perhaps to assert, or conjecture, that the universe, sometime, arose from something like design: but beyond that position he cannot ascertain one single circumstance; and is left afterwards to fix every point of his theology by the utmost license of fancy and hypothesis.

This world, for aught he knows, is very faulty and imperfect, compared to a superior standard; and was only the first rude essay of some infant deity, who afterwards abandoned it, ashamed of his lame performance: it is the work only of some dependent, inferior deity; and is the object of derision to his superiors: it is the production of old age and dotage in some superannuated deity; and ever since his death, has run on at adventures, from the first impulse and active force which it received from him.

You justly give signs of horror, DEMEA, at these strange suppositions; but these, and a thousand more of the same kind, are CLEANTHES's suppositions, not mine. From the moment the attributes of the Deity are supposed finite, all these have place. And I cannot, for my part, think that so wild and unsettled a system of theology is, in any respect, preferable to none at all.

"We merely want to ensure that the new standards are appropriate for all citizens in our state."

Do I get to play too? I have some really cool stories I read in Bullfinch....

Does that mean that if we teach economics, we have to give fair time to physiocracy or mercantilism or Marxism, or to astrology? I'm amazed at how otherwise bright and reasonable people (such as Ohio generally contains) get hung up on pseudoscience. I guess the real stuff is too hard since skepticism doesn't come naturally. As someone who plans to teach, is there any advice out there as to how to teach it? Preaching it is one thing; I imagine that teaching is another.

Mark Twain speculated that the creator must have forgotten to put in a broom closet somewhere, requiring him to kill thousands of people with a Mississippi valley earthquake on the way to fixing the problem.

Robert Frost marvelled at the foresight of a Creator who provided such beautiful moths for spiders to suck the life from.

Steven J. Gould said something really gross about a certain kind of lethal human parasite. I'll spare you the details.

Perhaps they should be linked to the Church of the Subgenius, which properly identified that the universe doesn't have enough slack.

Every time the topic of school treatment of evolution and creationism comes up on a radio talk show or elsewhere, the kneejerk reaction is to debate evolution and creationism. I almost never hear anybody raise this point: why should the government be in a position to decide what children should be taught about origins theories - or anythig else for that matter? Whatever happened to "the customer is always right?"

As long as they exist, public schools should be flexible enough to offer a sufficient range of curriculum choices so that nobody is forced into an ideological box by the State.

Alan writes: Whatever happened to "the customer is always right?"

The education is for kids. They do not choose the program. By teaching creation instead of evolution what colledge do you want to prepare them for - the school of hard knocks?

I must also disagree with Alan. The purpose of public education appears to be the furtherence of societal goals. I think it _should_ be the furtherence of individual happiness, satisfaction, creativity, etc, but so be it.

I assert that belief in creationism is the evidence of either ignorance, or mental illness, and neither of those furthers societal or individual goals.

Alas, this ailment spreads everywhere. Folks are trying to start teaching astrology in Indian universities using the same 'objectivity' argument.

So all those outsourced jobs might eventually head back to us as the Indians start stargazing. But did our creators intend to have us write code?