Jerry Coyne made a crucial point about this De Dorian Sci Ed 101 stuff.

…teaching evolution and dispelling creation provides students with a valuable lesson: it teaches them to think scientifically—surely one of the main points of a science class. They learn to weigh evidence and to show how that evidence can be used to discriminate between alternative explanations. It’s of little consequence to me that one alternative explanation comes from a literal interpretation of scripture. Indeed, it’s useful, for this is a real life example—one that’s going on now—of how alternative empirical claims are fighting for primacy in the intellectual marketplace. What better way to engage students in the scientific method?

Exactly. It’s a terribly narrowed and … Read the rest

Michael De Dora is concerned again.

…our government — and thus our public schooling system — is supposed to remain neutral on matters of religion. Federal and state governments cannot aid one religion, aid all religions, prefer one religion over another, or prefer non-religion to religion. This means that while I agree with Myers that the Biblical creation story is a “myth,” the public school classroom doesn’t seem to be the place where our message should be pushed.

Federal and state governments cannot prefer non-religion to religion, therefore, according to De Dora, as long as a mistaken claim is religious, it is against the law for public schools to say the claim is mistaken. That’s interesting. I went … Read the rest

Gita Sahgal states the problem.

The senior leadership of Amnesty International chose to answer the questions I posed about Amnesty International’s relationship with Moazzam Begg by affirming their links with him. Now they have also confirmed that the views of Begg, his associates and his organisation Cageprisoners, do not trouble them. They have stated that the idea of jihad in self defence is not antithetical to human rights; and have explained that they meant only the specific form of violent jihad that Moazzam Begg and others in Cageprisoners assert is the individual obligation of every Muslim…Unfortunately, their stance has laid waste every achievement on women’s equality and made a mockery of the universality of rights. In fact, the leadership

I want to try to figure this out. I could just conclude that I simply don’t know enough about it to figure it out, and I ought to either learn more or leave it to people who do know enough. That’s certainly a possibility, of course. I’ve been thinking when reading Sam Harris’s posts in reply to his critics that he just doesn’t seem to know enough about it, and it’s certainly possible that I don’t know enough about what I’m prattling about, either. But the difference is, it seems to me, that Sam’s critics have made a lot of good arguments, while the arguments I’ve seen so far from the ‘overt atheists are wrong and bad’ faction are not … Read the rest