The scary creationist Ken Ham, head of Answers in Genesis and of the Creation Museum in Kentucky, responds to Bill Nye’s (the Science Guy’s) video that extolled evolution and warned against the teaching of creationism. Ham’s response consists of mainly of accusing Nye of having “an agenda to teach children not to believe in God.” […]
The Faraday Institute for Science and Religion resides at Cambridge University in England, and was set up and is sustained by generous grants from the Templeton Foundation. I’ve posted before on the odious “Faraday Schools Project,” which comprises a series of resources designed to teach children that science and God are compatible, while also pushing […]
Last week I posted Bill Nye’s “Big Think” video in which he went after creationism without mincing words. Predictably, the creationist organization “Answers in Genesis” enlisted a video response (below) from two of the self-described “science guys” (better described as “Liars for Jesus”) from Kentucky’s Creation Museum, Dr. David Menton and Dr. Georgia Purdom. The […]
I have to admit that I know virtually nothing about Bill Nye the Science Guy, except that he had a science-oriented television show for kids, and that a lot of people liked him. I’ve never even seen his show. But there seems to be a lot of buzz around his new post on the CNN […]
Three years ago the Kentucky legislature approved a measure to make the state’s high-school standards appropriate to those tested by the countrywide ACT (American College Testing) exams. I guess they didn’t realize that the ACTs, which are used to measure students’ proficiency in four areas and also are used as a criterion for college admission, […]
UPDATE: Malcolm Gladwell has been nice enough to come here and defend his methods in a comment. As always, be polite if you want to respond to that comment. ___________ Over at his eponymous website, writer and corporate consultant Eric Garland takes up an issue which has started to bother me lately: “science-lite” books that […]
My second Ph.D. student, Mohamed Noor—now a professor and assistant chair of biology at Duke—is offering an online course this fall called`”Introduction to genetics and evolution.“ It’s intended for people interested in biology who haven’t had previous courses in the field. (High-school biology is really all you need.) I think this is a fantastic idea […]
One can always count on Robert Wright, a nonbeliever, to defend religion and exculpate it from any evils in the world. Suicide bombers? Mere politics and dispossession. Major Nidal Hassan’s murder spree in Texas? An unfortunate byproduct of America’s own war on terrorism (see Christopher Hitchens’s take on that piece). As Hitchens said, Wright “is […]
After yesterday’s post about the lack of America’s progress in accepting evolution, I heard from reader Steve Bracker, who claimed that one could perhaps find a glint of hope in the data: I think you are being a little too pessimistic about evolution acceptance. I’ve used Excel to replot the God had no part in […]
A new Gallup poll shows that, as in the past thirty years, acceptance of evolution in the U.S. has remained static. In fact, the latest statistics (light green line in figure below), show that 46% of Americans are young-earth creationists, 32% adhere to some form of god-guided or theistic evolution (dark green line), and only […]
